Lakota Healing
INTRO
25.04.18 Friday. Pleasant Dale. In an early version of what you are reading, I opened with a poem about how my first sweat lodge experiences reinvigorated my soul. I have moved on to a serial essay about my experiences. As is natural, over time, I have discovered that many experiences are interrelated in ways I would not have imagined.
I just got home from the funeral of Emery Little Thunder on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Like too many on reservations, Emery committed suicide. He was 28. Emery was the only son of Ron Little Thunder and his wife Rosalie Red Elk. Emery was buried next to his parents' graves. I helped bury Ron, who died of pneumonia in January, a few weeks after my sister kicked the shit out of cancer until it let her free of life. I don’t know if these experiences are cosmically connected, but they speak together to me, enough to make me wonder.
ONE
24.10.14 Monday, Pine Ridge Reservation. Ron Little Thunder was waiting for me in his silver 2023 Chevy truck on the south side of Highway 44, about fifteen miles east of Wanblee, South Dakota. As I neared the turnoff to his home, the steep sand-white Badlands blurred into the northern horizon beyond the driver-side-window of my white Ford pickup. I hoped to explore them for the first time the next day. Ron’s truck was stopped on the highway side of an auto gate on a dirt road that led off into the amber mixed-grass hillsides to the southwest.
Ron met me at the highway because numeric address markings on the reservation are largely indiscoverable, which renders GPS useless—a rattlesnake without fangs. The highways and roads are relatively well-marked, but finding a location, the beating heart of your journey, is a different matter. After spotting Ron’s pickup there on the south side of the highway, I blinked, slowed, turned, pulled my Ford pickup alongside his Chevy, and rolled down the passenger window.
“Hi. I’m Andy Pollock.”
“Hau. I’m Ron.”
Ron and I had connected a few weeks before to arrange our meeting.
Before that, over lunch at The Most Unlikely Place in Lewellen, a good friend had firmly suggested I talk with Ron Little Thunder about a Lakota history novel I have been working on. My friend, her brother, and I were talking about Lakota history, unexplainable experiences, and other things.
“You mean to get his permission?” I asked my friend, not altogether surprised by the idea of getting the blessing of an elder Lakota, just wanting clarity. She had put the suggestion out there as though she had been struck by the notion. A message given to deliver.
My friend paused for a moment before tilting her head slightly, looking somewhere beyond me, and replied, “Something like that.”
Ron Little Thunder and I climbed out of our pickups and met in the middle. We looked each other in the eyes, smiled, and shook hands. Ron turned his head toward the sky as though something had caught his eye. His attention had been summoned. “That’s who brought you?” he said.
“A hawk,” I said.
“Red-tailed hawk.”
“Yes,” I said, honestly. I recognized the red-tailed hawk. I know the bird relatively well. It is an archetype critical to the novel I am working on. That, and the narrator of the novel is an ornithologist. I am trying to be a more curious and educated birdwatcher. I know a red-tailed hawk when I see one, whether it is in flight or sitting on top of a wooden utility pole. I had seen two just outside of Martin, South Dakota, on the way to Ron’s. A few miles down the road, as I had turned north onto Highway 73 from Highway 1, I came upon more trumpeter swans than I had ever seen together, standing in a stubble field. There were a few flocks. I’d say over 100 of the regal beasts.
Ron told me to follow him along the road to his house. It was about a mile, he said. Before we returned to our vehicles, Ron looked at my truck and said, “I don’t know. The road likes my Chevy. Dodges do okay. That Ford, I don’t know.” He looked at me, smiled again, and laughed. Ron Little Thunder had made his countenance clear. I was welcome. Grateful, I followed him to his house, lagging a comfortable distance to escape the bulk of the dust his Chevy kicked up on the trail road - two tracks of bare dirt where motor vehicles had worn through the blue grama, little bluestem, buffalograss, and weeds. The earth was dry – too dry. The grasses had long lost their summer colors. The razed vegetation between the tire tracks was browner than the dirt.
Ron Little Thunder was born of the Sicangu Oyate Lakota (Brule Sioux) tribe. His mother was Sicangu. He comes from the lineage of a Lakota leader named Little Thunder. The leader's village along the banks of the creek known as the Blue Water was attacked on a late summer morning (September 3, 1855) by the youthful, reckless, and ruthless Army of the United States of America. The place of the attack was in what was then claimed as the Nebraska Territory by the federal government. The Blue Water flows into the North Platte River about a mile west of present-day Lewellen in Garden County, Nebraska.
Later in life, Ron enrolled as an Oglala, another Lakota (Sioux) tribe. His father was Oglala. The two tribes might be described as cousins. All children become part of the tribe of their mother at birth, but can change enrollment. Most members of both tribes live on reservations in southern South Dakota, bordering Nebraska. That’s where I come from.
You’ve seen films, read, or at least heard about life on the Lakota reservations. Most delicately scratch the surface - you miss the sensation of being there, the vibe, the smells, the dust and the mud, things you are not used to. Life there is brutal. Trailer homes with their doors bolted back on. “Government homes” - rectangular units of cheap construction that flaps and tears away with the trash and dust in the steady high plains’ winds. Wild-looking dogs wandering at large. Wakes and funerals at the run-down community center feed the people. They have had trouble keeping up. So many dying.
The Sicangu are the tribe of leaders like Conquering Bear, Little Thunder, and the great warrior Spotted Tail. Roughly, 21,200 Sicangu live on the Rosebud Reservation, encompassing the same geographic area as Todd County, South Dakota.
Based upon estimates that are all over the place, I would guess approximately 16,000 Oglala live on the Pine Ridge Reservation, adjacent west of the Rosebud. The Oglala are the people of Red Cloud and the great shaman warrior Crazy Horse. Parts of the rugged, dry, and unearthly Badlands National Park lie within the Oglala reservation. The Pine Ridge Reservation has a blood history. It doesn’t take spirits to conjure shocking memories of the slaughter along the snowy banks of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 and the occupations and firefights more than 80 years later. Now, 50 years hence, you hear echoes of the battles in the news of Leonard Peltier, whose double life sentence was commuted by President Biden during his final days in office.
Yes, the place is rough, but within the barrel cactus outside my family home on Lake McConaughy is a beautiful bloom each summer. You look deeper, you touch your fingers carefully through the needles of the cactus, caressing it, not touching the flower. You have learned to retrieve paper and plastic from the yucca without lacerating a finger or the flesh of your arm. You have cleared out the old, dead yucca without encountering a rattlesnake. In the rough life of the Badlands, you find good souls.
With a well-practiced sweeping maneuver, Ron Little Thunder backed up his Chevy in front of his small house with a new reddish roof. My Ford held up well over the mile-long road of dry earth. I parked behind him. We got out of our trucks and met again in the center.
Ron has a broad but not jowled, brown, smiling face, and short gray hair, not much of it apparent below his baseball hat. He is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt I forgot the color of. The front and bill of his ball cap are grey camo. Stitched on the front is a large rectangle cut by a diagonal line running from the top right to the bottom left. The top half is the top half of the United States flag. The bottom half bears the eagle, globe, and anchor of the Marine Corps. During his service, Ron was injured when his parachute did not open properly and was permanently disabled. He walks with a hobble but moves around well for a guy who is 67 and fell out of the sky.
We stood in his yard and spoke for a while. Ron pointed to a coffee cup and bowl of food sitting in the grass near an old wooden house that was beginning to collapse. He told me he had left food and coffee out for Crazy Horse’s spirit that night. Ron then nodded toward the old wooden house and told me he was born there. He told me he had left food out for Crazy Horse’s spirit that night. Ron talked about the red-tailed hawk we had seen. He told me that a Crazy Horse star blanket would be out for me that night. I had no idea what he was talking about or what to say, so I just kept my mouth shut and nodded. He invited me into his home for a cup of coffee.