Mail On Sunday / September 2000

Riding High On Reservation Spirit

By Alice De Smith

At Pine Ridge Lakota Indian reservation, I sat bareback on an Appaloosa pony. 'He's called Wichapa,' said Alex, owner of the ranch. 'That means Traveling Star. He was born under Haley's Comet.' As I basked in the sweet South Dakota sunshine, I thought I'd found heaven on earth.

On the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) reservation, Alex is something of a success story. College-educated in Rapid City, he served four years in the US Army, and now breeds buffalo and horses, and runs a residential riding school on his ancestral land.

On Pine Ridge, the Lakota people are struggling to preserve their language and tradition. I met Wilmer Stampede Mesteth, a tribal elder of the Oglala Lakota, in the ramshackle wooden house his father built. 'The important thing is to teach the Lakota language to our children,' he said. 'Our language dies, our people die.' Two years ago, Wilmer traveled to London to accompany the body of Long Wolf, a 19th Century Lakota chief, back to the reservation. Long Wolf had been starring in a Wild West show with Buffalo Bill when he died in 1892, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery.

My visit to Pine Ridge reservation was part of a 4,000-mile tour of Indian country. My guide was Serle Chapman, who has written seven books. Serle's tours could be entitled How The West Was Lost. With his encyclopedic knowledge he tells the story from an Indian, rather than a white, perspective.

We began our journey at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, where the first treaty between the Lakota and the Americans was signed in 1851. Here Chief Conquering Bear and 27 US cavalrymen were killed in battle a few years later when the Americans had already reneged on the treaty.  Next morning we had reached South Dakota and the sacred Black Hills. The Lakota call the hills 'The Heart Of Everything That Is', and indeed, when astronauts took a photograph of the Black Hills from space, they looked exactly like a map of the human heart. Mount Rushmore, that most famous of American monuments to democracy, is carved in these hills. We edged towards the peak where Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt stare out, pale and disembodied. This is where white and Indian legends collide. In Rapid City they celebrate Calamity Jane (sadly a Plain Jane rather than the winsome sharpshooter portrayed by Doris Day).

Back towards Wyoming, bright Sioux prayer cloths are tied to the lower branches of trees on the sacred Bear Butte site near where Chief Crazy Horse was born.  Across the state border is the Devils Tower, a great red serrated, flat-topped mountain sacred to many Indian tribes, who call it Bear's Lodge. The Lakota have a legend about the handing-down of wisdom which says that the White Buffalo Calf Woman came from here bringing the sacred pipe to Chief Buffalo Standing Upright. The mountain has also entered Hollywood mythology - it was the aliens' landing site in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

We stayed that night in Sheridan, a typical little town straight out of Far Side cartoons and road movies - a place of tall, blond, obese giants who had dead deer strapped to the bonnets of their pick-ups. The women had big hair and tight jeans. This was the first time I'd been to America and lost weight. Each mealtime there was the tricky choice between McDonald's, Burger King, or micro waved, service-station burritos.

'Have you got anything vegetarian?' I asked Marlene behind the counter at Taco Bell. 'Not at the moment,' she replied, 'but I can give you an application.'

It was easier to sympathize with the Indians . . . the Nez Perce tribe who showed American explorers Lewis and Clark how to get to the Pacific and were then exiled to Oklahoma and Canada when gold was found on their California homelands; the Cheyenne who responded to massacres with brave but ultimately hopeless uprisings; the Blackfeet, once great horsemen and hunters across most of Montana and Alberta, now living on a squalid reservation. I drove round the Blackfeet reservation in Glacier National  Park with Curley and Lila Reevis, parents of Steve Reevis, the Hollywood actor.

They live in Browning, the main Blackfeet town, a place ridden with alcoholism and drugs, but gloriously set in the rolling Montana Mountains. The Reevises can't imagine living anywhere else.

The Crow tribe is a little better off being able to mine the vast coal reserves under spectacular Yellowstone Park where I saw wild buffalo roam, a solitary moose and herds of elk. The culmination of my tour was Little Big Horn, the site of Custer's Last Stand -- itself a 20ft square patch of hill in the four-square mile battlefield where Custer's 7th Cavalry were wiped out by Crazy Horse's braves.

After a week of passing through grim reservations and the sites of battles fought long ago, I felt the pain and hopelessness of modern Indian history. They've lost their land and their livelihood, and their language and religion may soon follow. What future could these people have?

But finally, I did see some hope . . . in Rapid City, at a basketball stadium surrounded by ganglands and makeshift housing. There, tribal representatives led by veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, met for the last Powwow of the season. Thousands of  people in elaborate costumes singing, dancing and stepping in unison to the beat of the drum. The magnificence of it all brought tears to my eyes. The Indians may have lost the West, but their people, and their spirit, refuse to die.

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