Apple Indian E-Book

Karl Th. Paschke

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1227

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Keanu Whiteriver grows up as an Assiniboin Indian on a reservation in Montana. He and his mother experience discrimination, but try to overcome it. Keanu is smart, active, a good student and a talented jazz musician. After high school and college in Havre, he gets a scholarship at Tulane University in New Orleans. Later, he becomes a lawyer in his home State and a legal adviser to the American Indian Movement.

Leseprobe

Karl Th. Paschke

Apple Indian

the story of a young Redman

in America today

Copyright (C) 2017 Karl Th. Paschke

English Version of the German novel 'Apfelindianer' which was published 1915 by Public book media Verlag, Frankfurt.

Verlag: tredition GmbH, Halenreihe 42, 22359 Hamburg, printed on demand in many countries

978-3-7439-5674-2

978-3-7439-5703-9

978-3-7439 5675-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the publisher.

I.

Keanu was born in the early summer of 1954 in Harlem, Montana, a small town near the reservation of the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Indians, close to the administrative center of the reservation, Fort Belknap Agency. Harlem had a little hospital. Keanu’s mother, Rose Whiteriver, had planned to deliver her baby at home like most Assiniboine women. She went to the hospital only at the advice of her midwife, because the expected child weighed more than eight pounds. And indeed Keanu turned out to be a big, strong boy. Rose had lost a lot of blood. She received decent medical help but was told she could not have any more children. Keanu grew up as a single child, a child Rose’ had wanted. And as the only child she ever expected to have. He brought the warmth, the tenderness and the laughter she had long missed back into her life. Rose gave him plenty of attention. She often bent over into his crib and was happy when he grabbed at her nose with his tiny fingers or pulled her long black hair and made joyful little noises. Keanu had dark, slanted eyes over high cheekbones like his mother’s. He grew fast.

His father, Thomas Whiteriver, didn’t seem to take much notice of his son. Thomas was a silent man. On the reservation, people called him “The Mute.” Nobody ever heard him speak more than two sentences at a time. He seemed to be rather melancholic, not much interested in others. But his eyes were friendly and his mouth indicated a faint smile. But when he drank whisky, as he often did, the expression of his face became gloomy. His dark eyes glazed over. Rose hated that look. Keanu was her consolation.

Thomas didn’t have a regular job, like many of his fellow Assiniboine tribesmen. Once athletic and strong he had grown tall and heavy even before middle age. He found farm labor too strenuous and he neither had the natural skills nor any relevant training for a handyman job. Sometimes he delivered goods for a household store in Harlem with his pickup truck. Apart from that, the budget of the little family came from the monthly support payments which Indians in the reservations were entitled to in return for the land that their tribes had ceded to the United States long before they were born. Like most reservation Indians, the Whiterivers lived on the brink of poverty. Their biggest expense was the Bourbon whisky and the Miller High Life beer for Thomas’ drinking spells. Their diet revolved around white flour and potatoes and cheap cuts of fatty meat.

This dull, dismal life was not easy for Rose to put up with. She had been brought up in an Assiniboine family where friendliness and harmony reigned and drinking was well under control. Rose had enjoyed a good education and enjoyed adequate schooling. After high school graduation, she had worked for a few years in the administration of the reservation, before she met Thomas.

Her husband was exciting at first – he had a sort of dangerous streak – but he only sank in the following years as jobs became few and far between and he put on weight, got depressed and lazy and began to drink too much. Keanu’s birth saved Rose from a life without any prospects at all. Keanu might actually be good for something.

The Whiterivers lived in a shabby wooden cabin in the middle of a scattered settlement on the reservation, about 15 miles south of Fort Belknap Agency in a little village named Hayes. They had a middle-sized living room, a kitchen, a double bedroom with a shower and a tiny room for Keanu.

The reservation of the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes was a strip of flat, drab, infertile land, about 35 miles long and 20 miles wide, in the northern part of the central Montana plain. At the upper end of the reservation, near Fort Belknap Agency, ran the so-called Hi-Line, U.S. Highway No. 2, and the tracks of the Northern Railway Company, less than 20 miles from the Canadian border. Brown and gray were the predominant colors in the flat plains landscape surrounding the scattered collection of houses that looked as if they had been strewn by some sort of flood. Vegetation was scarce, just a few miserable bushes and knotty trees. Brown was also the color of most of the cabins and huts and of the ground around them. Green, well-kept lawns, so typical of white rural America, were completely absent here. It was as if the Indians consciously abstained from green, the status color of the white settlers and of their money, so they also abstained from the weekend ritual of the lawn mower. Giving crew cuts to grass was a waste of time and effort. The Indians preferred the naked earth, which turned into gray mud when it rained. But it didn’t rain frequently in Northern Montana. More often, a strong wind blew in from Canada, cool in the summer, ice cold in the winter, a wind which dried out everything. And the big Montana sky looked down on it all.

In front of the houses and cabins in the settlement was the inevitable pick-up truck, often more than one pickup truck, most of them old and battered, some others spanking new, parked as in earlier times the horses were tied on in front of the Indian tipis. The number and shape of the horses had given notice of the tribal rank of the owner. The pick-up trucks did the same thing today.

There were no streets or marked footpaths, no fences or gutters. This was really not a formal settlement, just an accidental accumulation of houses and huts, united only by hopelessness and visible neglect. Nobody seemed to bother about the many empty beer cans and plastic bottles which were blown back and forth by gusty winds or about the heaps of scrap and garbage.

The Whiteriver’s estate was one of the cleaner-looking sites. There was something special. Behind the cabin, Rose had created a modest planting bed, at least a green spot in the brown and gray picture where she planted sweet potatoes, carrots, and a few kitchen herbs. As a toddler, Keanu crawled between the young plants. Later his mother showed him how to plant the seeds and gave him a small bed on the side to do his own planting. During the hot, dry summer months Keanu had to water the plants regularly – this was the first duty he had to take care of, although Rose had to remind him off and on with her soft voice.

In the other houses of the settlement lived about a dozen boys and girls about same age as Keanu. The children didn’t much care about the sad, dusty surroundings or the lack of any playground equipment. They played outside, day in and day out. The boys and girls chased each other, played hide and seek, they quarreled and made friends again, they wandered around making noise, sometimes they formed little groups and made whispering agreements and plans. The boys also tested their strengths in foot races and wrestling matches. Rose Whiteriver and other mothers kept an eye on the group from the distance. They only intervened if the noise got out of hand, even when squabbling, pushing and loud crying was heard. Roughhousing and risks were taken for granted.

Even as a three- or four-year old boy, Keanu was tall and strong. He had no baby fat and his movements were never clumsy or hasty. He could run very fast, when the playing called for it, but otherwise his gestures were not hectic at all, rather patient, even measured. This made him visibly different from the other children. The same was true about his language skills. Keanu had learned speaking from his mother very early and without any baby talk. He spoke vividly, distinctively and with a vocabulary which went far beyond his playmates. Rose was amused, but also a bit proud that her son had an undisputed leading role among the neighborhood children which he had not gained through bullying or bodily dominance, but because of his natural, friendly superiority. However, Keanu could also become angry and aggressive if something ran against his intentions. All in all, he was a typical single child.

When Keanu’s father Thomas was at home -- which was the rule rather than the exception -- the old black and white TV set with an antenna on top was always on at the Whiterivers’ house. The reception was poor, the picture was coarse-grained, but Thomas didn’t mind. He sat there for hours and hours, a beer can in hand, the Jim Beam bottle on the floor. Nobody knew for sure to what extent he followed the programs, play shows, quiz shows, news, and sports.

Rose didn’t allow Keanu to spend much time in front of the TV. His father never thought about switching the channels for a children’s program. Sometimes, on weekend mornings his mother saw to it that Keanu could watch Sesame Street or cartoons like Popeye or Roadrunner for an hour.

Saturday morning was the only time when Thomas was sometimes sober. He pushed himself to going fishing in the little river which was close to the settlement. Keanu, who normally felt an undefined shyness, even fear, when his father was drunk followed him one day to the riverside. Keanu watched from a certain distance how Thomas handled his self-made rod. But when the first fish wriggled on the hook, Keanu was so excited that he ran down and joyfully clapped his hands.

“See, I caught one!” Thomas said. He even managed a smile. From that day on, Keanu sensed a common bond with his father. His shyness faded away. Thomas, too, saw this little boy he had considered as a nuisance and a burden with new eyes.

One week later Thomas and Keanu walked together to the river. Keanu proudly carried a small rod which his father had

made for him out of a birch branch with a nylon cord, a cork float and a hook.

“That’s for you,” Thomas said as he handed it to his son with a dry smile.

At the river bank, Thomas taught Keanu how to fix tied flies on the hook and how to throw the cord with a swing into the clear, fast-flowing water. Thomas did this silently, with no lengthy explanations. But Keanu was enthusiastic and understood directly what he had to do. For a five-year old kid, he had extraordinary patience and concentration; he held the rod and the cord without haste and allowed it to swim steadily in the water. Suddenly his little hands felt the twitching and pulling which every fisherman considers as the sensation of sheer luck: a fish has bitten on. Thomas, who watched his son from the side, reached over to Keanu’s rod to show him what he had to do not to lose the fish from the hook but gradually bring it in. His big fingers took a firm but cautious grip of Keanu’s small hand. Together they fought for a minute with a fat, blue trout until Keanu’s catch lay between them thrashing about in the grass. Thomas took the hook out of the fish’s mouth. He killed the struggling trout with a slap of his knife handle.

“Your first fish, Keanu. We’ll enjoy eating it,” Thomas said quietly, but with an undertone of appreciation.

Thomas, and Keanu too, caught a few more fish as the morning went on. Later at home, full of excitement Keanu told his mother about this big event. Rose was proud and happy with her fishing son. Keanu sensed the happiness and pride in his entire body. He still felt this sensation when he went to bed that evening. He also felt the touch of his father’s large hand as they had jointly tamed the fish. He never forgot this feeling, even years later when he remembered that very important day.

Obviously, most children’s recollections are created by very simple sensory impressions. Keanu always felt the tender touches by his mother’s hands. He also recalled the warmth of her upper body, the softness of her cheeks from the time when she carried him on her arm or on her back. Only now he had also registered the feeling for the hands of his father, he also associated the permanent smell of beer and whisky with him which was mixed with the scent of wood and lemon balm: Rose hung up several dried bushels of this plant to fight flies and gnats in the house during summer. Among the sounds and noises which Keanu already internalized as a child was the almost constant murmur and frequent whistling of the north wind which encountered little resistance in the plain around the settlement, the crackling of single beams and planks of the house when stronger gusts rattled it, the rhythmic clatter of the long freight trains which carried coal and other bulk goods in the distance on the High Line from the Great Lakes region towards the Pacific coast, accompanied by the long, melancholic toot of the engines. At night, Keanu occasionally heard the whining siren of the patrol car of the reservation police when they chased drunken Indian pickup drivers on Highway 66 between Fort Belknap Agency and Hayes. If Keanu woke up to the police siren, he could hear the heavy snoring of his father through the wall between his little chamber and the bedroom of his parents. Once or twice he had not heard the snoring, but recurrent muffled noises of his parents’ bed and his mother’s muted groaning. He had been worried, even afraid, but that feeling had disappeared the next morning.

At age four, Keanu was to start kindergarten at the settlement. Before that, Rose had to go with him to Fort Belknap for a mandatory doctor’s appointment. The social administration of the reservation employed a white official physician, Dr. Frank Taylor, who ran a private practice in Chinook, a small neighboring town but saw patients on two afternoons every week in a small office in the administrative center of the reservation. Dr. Taylor had become an institution for the Indians; they had loved him for decades and he loved them. He had white hair and a reddish face, and sometimes called himself “a Redskin” with a smile. His eyes behind his dark-rimmed glasses were friendly and youthful. He was very tall and always wore a white lab coat, white jeans, and white linen shoes. When Rose and Keanu entered his office, he turned in his chair from the desk to his visitors, looked at them with a smile and spoke with a voice which Keanu found to be deep and soft at the same time.

“Hello Rose. It’s good to see you again. And that’s your son. Already four years old. Time really flies!”

Then he turned to Keanu, shook his hand, quite unusual for the little boy, looked him firmly in the eyes, grabbed both his shoulders, turned him back and forth and said: “Okay, son, let’s look at you”.

He then addressed Rose again: “Your son is well built and in good shape,” Dr. Taylor said. “Thank God he’s not as fat as so many other Indian children. You obviously feed him intelligently.”

Keanu had to take off his shirt and pants and had to lay down on a white-covered flat bed. Dr. Taylor touched him from head to toe, squeezed him, lifted and bent Keanu’s arms and legs, listened to his lungs with a wooden device, inspected his throat and pushed his tongue down with a flat spoon. He tested his ears; then Keanu was weighed and measured.

“This is it, my friend, you are well prepared for your kindergarden,” Dr. Taylor said. “And you’ll be well prepared for school,”

Dr. Taylor sat down at his desk and wrote something on a paper. He handed it to Rose with a friendly nod. Keanu recalled every detail of the exam, but particularly that the white doctor had been so satisfied with him.

Next morning, Keanu went with his mother to the kindergarden, only ten minutes from their house in a simple, barrack-like wooden building, with an open sandy square in front and a flag pole. Keanu knew that a big flag usually flapped in the wind on this pole and he wondered why it was not flapping today.

A number of other four-year old kids had been accepted with Keanu. Some of them came from his immediate neighborhood and he knew them as playmates.

A new phase of his life began now, a new community, a new order, a new day plan which he had to follow. First of all, there was regularity: every morning at 8.30, Keanu had to arrive with the others at the kindergarden. The children all had to participate in a planned program, organized playing and soft exercises, or to sit at small round tables inside and paint, do handicraft or cut-outs, learn songs and sing together and listen to stories.

At noon, there was soup or a stew for lunch. The plate and spoon had to be placed on a table near the kitchen. Keanu fulfilled all these little obligations from the start dutifully and was praised by the two kindergarten teachers who had to advise and steer the other newcomers more than once before the children understood the routine.

When Keanu came home on that first day in the afternoon, he immediately told Rose about a new experience. After all the children had arrived in the morning, the two teachers had assembled them in front of the house in a row. Every child had to place his right hand on the left side of his chest. Then the flag was raised on the pole. The children had to speak after the two teachers: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”

Keanu had not completely understood the words and their meaning. He had never heard a few of the words before. He asked his mother what this poem with the United States was about.

His mother answered him thoughtfully. He felt at the beginning that she was depressed and hesitant, but then she spoke with a clear voice and firm opinions.

“The United States, that’s the land where we live. We Indians have lived here much longer than all the others. In the old days, before you and I were born, this whole big country belonged to the Indian tribes. But we didn’t call it America. Then the white people came across the Ocean and they took over more and more land. Finally they took over the whole country. They gave it the name America. When they wanted to build their houses somewhere and changed grazing lands to farm land, they just chased the Indians away or even shot them dead. Our people, the Assiniboine, used to live further East in the Dakotas before the white people pushed us out onto the Montana plains. Our ancestors were hunters. There were a lot of buffalo still existing here. We needed them ford for food and skins. About a hundred years ago, the white people came here, too, and soon there were no more buffalo left. The Whites were better organized and better armed than we were. They already had a government and an army. Sometimes they negotiated with individual tribes, but when the Indians wouldn’t accept their demands, they sent troops and fought us. Finally, they stuck the Indians on barren pieces of land while they gave the fertile land to the whites. They forced the Indians to stay on reservations.

The Sioux gave them a lot of trouble, and the whites treated all the tribes as if they were Sioux. My father and my mother were forbidden to use their own Assiniboine language and forbidden to do their traditional dances and customs. This terrible time is less than sixty years behind us. I remember them talking about it. Nowadays some white Americans seem to understand the injustice they did to us. Now they want us to feel like regular Americans. Now they want us to manage the reservations ourselves. But they also make us do a lot of things the way they do them. That’s why in each kindergarten and elementary school in America the pledge of allegiance is repeated every morning”.

Keanu had thought about his mother’s explanation for a while. He had never seen her this serious before. Every morning when he had to repeat the pledge in the kindergarten, he recalled her words and the sadness in her voice.

He took a new look at the two teachers, Meti and Janet, who took care of the kids. He really liked them. Meti was a distant relative of his mother. She had a round Indian face, the same straight shiny black hair, only she was a bit taller and heavier than Rose. Janet was young and blond. She was petite and skinny with white skin and pearly white teeth. She didn’t live on the reservation but drove there every day from Chinook in her red Ford Pinto. Keanu understood that she was not an Indian, but white, like Dr. Taylor. Did her grandparents help force Indians to live on a reservation? He couldn’t imagine that, because Janet was so nice to all the children. She told exciting stories, sang beautifully and taught Keanu and the other kids many cheerful songs while she accompanied herself on the guitar. Meti and Jane were a delightful team. They harmonized perfectly in their work and their harmony spread to the kids. Keanu always felt good in their presence. He felt sad when he thought that one year later, he would have to say farewell to Meti and Jane since he now had to transfer to the pre-school year in another building and in another atmosphere. There, the children were already gently prepared for elementary school.

Keanu’s longest-lasting memory of the kindergarten was Janet’s music lessons. He had always been enthusiastic when she sang and played new songs to the children. The children had to learn the words by heart and sing along. Keanu had enjoyed it even more when she distributed little drums, rattles, and other rhythm instruments made by an Indian craftsman. Keanu played along attentively, with perfect ear and exact rhythm. He was happy when Janet gave him a nod and remarked “really good, Keanu!”

Even at home, Keanu demonstrated his skills to Rose. “Just you wait, one day you will be a great musician!” Rose said with a gentle laugh.

During the pre-school year, Keanu was lucky to have a teacher like Jane who saw music as a particularly suitable means to teach the children many things which could be useful for them later at elementary school. Rufus Hogan looked like a serious 18-year old high school student. In reality, he was already 35 years old. He had long, dark blond hair, a slim earnest face dominated by round nickel glasses, and a gawky figure. His arms seemed too long. When Rufus walked across the school yard, he appeared to row with them as if he was fighting a strong wind. But when he played the guitar, piano, or several percussion instruments, his arms and hands were so steady, concentrated, relaxed and flexible that Keanu watched him full of fascination. He listened attentively and, when Rufus called for it, sang along loud and clear. Rufus had detected quickly that Keanu was an extraordinarily talented kid, so he gave him a lot of attention. Rufus hailed from the east of the country, from Maine, and he had studied ethnology at Yale University where he had developed a specific interest for Indian culture and music. After graduation Rufus had moved to the West in order to help preserve and to document traditions, customs, tales and songs of several tribes. Rufus was an idealist, good-natured, who was touched by the tragedy of the Native Americans.

He considered it his calling as a white man to offer personal compensation. In order to stay afloat financially and also to win access to and trust of the Indians, Rufus worked as an educator in Keanu’s pre-school. On summer weekends, he always took his tape recorder to Pow Wows, the Indian gatherings where song and dance took place, topical issues were discussed and traditional music was performed on wooden flutes and drums. Sometimes during the following week he would present samples of his recordings to the children. But the authentic music didn’t catch the interest of most of them. Keanu, however, was again and again fascinated by the wailing songs, the round and dreamy sound of the flutes and the stomping rhythm of the drums. He believed he might have heard these sounds sometimes in bed at night, sleeping or half awake, he did not know.

One afternoon Rufus knocked at the front door of the Whiteriver house. When Rose opened, he said: “I am Rufus Hogan and I teach Keanu at the pre-school. May I come in for a moment?”

. “I have heard a lot about you from my son,” Rose smiled.

“Almost every day he tells me about you and particularly about the wonderful music you make with the children”.

“Well, that’s exactly the reason why I am coming by,” Rufus said. “Your son is unusually talented in music. He’s very young, but I believe a musical talent like his should be fostered as early as possible. I would like to work with Keanu twice a week after the end of the pre-school program for one hour, give him beginner’s recorder lessons and find out whether he has enough talent and stamina so that at elementary school he can continue his musical education.”

Rose shook her head sadly. “Mr. Hogan, I’m glad you find our son so talented,” she said. “But I can’t accept your offer. We don’t have enough money to pay for supplementary education like that.”

Rufus waved her off with a smile and a friendly gesture of his long arms.

“I don’t want any payment,” he said. “I just have a soft spot in my heart for Keanu. I’d simply consider it great fun to teach him some more”.

Rose hesitated for a moment.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Hogan,” she said. “You are really very nice. Let me just talk to my husband. I’ll let you know then. I’m sure Keanu would be delighted if he could learn more from you.”

Thomas came back from a delivery to Harlem about an hour later. As usual, he had consumed a couple of cans of beer there and his mood was gloomy.

"What's the use of that?” he asked. “So Keanu can perform at Pow Wows or ask for money from tourists as a street musician in Havre?”

Rose was furious.

“I don’t give any thought to the question what Keanu might do with it later,” she said. “I only see that music makes him happy now. And that I find important!”

The expression in Thomas’ face turned even gloomier.

“Happy, you said,” Thomas asked. “Happiness? Indians can never be happy. We have no chance for a better life, no chance for success or satisfaction. Not me, not you, and not Keanu.”

Rose had tears in her eyes. She glared at her husband with something close to hate in her eyes.

“Have you ever thought about the example you give to your son?” she asked. “He’s still small, but he’ll grow up fast. And his progress will depend on what he learns and whatever attitude he has. I don’t want him to fall into hopelessness and self-pity like his father. I want him to become strong and successful. He’s made for that, I clearly sense it”.

“Okay then. Keanu can learn to play the flute from this Hogan guy. If it’s not useful, it can’t be harmful either.”

And so Rose could surprise her son when he came home in the evening from playing outside with the news that Mr. Hogan had come to see her and offered to give Keanu special music lessons. Keanu beamed with joy and anticipation.

Keanu’s following months were completely dominated Rufus Hogan’s instruction and by their recorder playing. Keanu practiced with a dedication and perseverance quite unusual for a boy his age. If an exercise did not immediately work out, he became terribly angry and yelled at himself, doubled his efforts until he mastered it. He made excellent progress and Rufus was astounded by the fast development of his “master pupil”. At the end of the pre-school year, Rufus gave Keanu the recorder which he had loaned him and also sent Rose a letter of recommendation for the headmaster of the elementary school at Fort Belknap where Keanu would be enrolled for the next four years.

Rufus and Keanu continued to be friends. Once Keanu was already a pupil at the elementary school, he still went frequently to the pre-school in the afternoon and they played together. Sometimes Rufus talked about his recent recordings. He was always touched by the never-fading interest of his little friend for the melodies and wordings he had registered. Rufus promised that he would someday take Keanu to a Pow Wow.

On the first day of the school change, Rose had taken Keanu in Thomas’ pickup truck to Fort Belknap Agency. But from then on, Keanu had to wait every morning at 8 o’clock at State Highway 66 for the school bus which took the elementary school children to their classes and brought them back in the afternoon. The 30-minute ride went by fast. The children always had a lot to talk about with each other. Keanu soon became become friends with Jimmy, the bus driver, an old Indian who wore his gray hair in a pigtail with a baseball hat with a Black & Decker logo on top. Jimmy was a skinny as a stick. Oddly enough, he belonged to the Gros Ventre tribe, the Fat Tummy Indians. During the summer he wore a colored T-shirt and jeans. Then you could admire his tattooed arms. In winter he carried a fleece jacket. On the dashboard of his old yellow school bus a he kept a sign that said “talking to the driver during the ride is prohibited.” But Jimmy didn’t bother about the sign. He was a masterful storyteller and knew more about Indians than anybody Keanu had listened to so far. When Keanu was lucky to catch a seat right behind Jimmy -- and often he managed to get into a convenient position already before boarding the bus - he only had to mention a cue word and Jimmy started talking.

One day Keanu asked him about the meaning of “Gros Ventre”.

“We got this name from the French settlers who came to Montana from the East about a hundred years ago. They were the first whites here, but they didn’t bother us, and we didn’t bother them. A lot of them married women from our tribe and that’s why we have a lot of half-bloods today. By the way, the French preserved their mother tongue for quite a while. And they gave Havre, a town not far from here, its name. The French also gave us the name of the biggest Plains nation, the Sioux. The Assiniboine actually speak something like Lakota and the Gros Ventre speak something like Arapaho. Earlier we were enemies, but the French called us all Sioux and so we learned to live peacefully together on the reservations. After all, we had no other choice”.

In the course of the next years and during the many bus rides Keanu learned more and more from Jimmy about the life and the suffering of his ancestors and grandparents. Jimmy also talked about the other tribes which had existed and still lived on the territory which is now called Montana: the Blackfeet, the Crow, the Yanktonai, the Cheyenne, Chippewa, Cree, and the Flathead Indians who lived on a fairly wide reservation in the Western part at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Keanu understood that these many tribes were different from each other, although they were all Indians, and Jimmy thought that they might have been able to resist the Whites more effectively if they had been more united among themselves.

Once Jimmy told Keanu about the battle of the Little Bighorn River. He reported the action as if he had been in it himself. Keanu listened intensely and recalled every detail. For a while, he even dreamed about the massacre at night -- he heard the banging of the guns and the clatter of the horses. Jimmy had begun his dramatic tale like this: “On 25 June 1876 the Sioux handed to the Whites a huge defeat. At that time, the whites had already forced most of us onto reservations. To the south from here, beyond the Yellowstone River, a Crow, a Cheyenne, and a Sioux reservation existed where many thousands of us were herded together. The buffalos were almost exterminated, so there was not enough food. Gradually, a number of Sioux began to sneak away although the white troops guarded the reservations and chased many of them back in. In the spring of 1876, the government decided to start a larger search action to either kill all the Indians who had fled or force them back into the reservations. They deployed several battalions, infantry and cavalry, among them the 7th horse regiment under the command of General George Armstrong Custer.

Custer had learned from his scouts that a fairly large group of Sioux and Cheyenne had assembled in a tent camp at the Little Bighorn River. He really hated the Indians and had shown his disdain for them already in many fights with our brothers. And he wanted to gain even more acclaim. In the night from 24 to 25 June, he divided his soldiers into three units and ordered them to ride upriver on different tracks through the valley or on the side of it in the dark and attack the Indian camp from three directions. He did not even know the exact location of the camp and the number of our warriors assembled there. At daybreak, one of his officers approached the forward line of the Indians with his troop and ordered a gunfire attack from a safe distance. But we had already spotted the soldiers as they came nearer. Our warriors had covered themselves well, even though the territory was relatively flat. When the soldiers started shooting they were surprised by massive counter fire and quickly noticed that they were hopelessly inferior. After we had shot many of them, the others fled like buffalo. We chased them across the river which carried a lot of wild water there. We could shoot some of the soldiers in the river, others drowned. The remaining troops ran on to a bluff above the other side of the river where about one hundred of our warriors surrounded them and kept them at bay. In the meantime, Custer and his battalion regiment of about 200 cavalrymen approached through the river valley, not knowing that our chief Sitting Bull had some 600 warriors, well-armed and equipped with fast horses. Since we had already beaten and weakened the other detail of the soldiers, we were now able to attack Custer’s regiment with full force. In less than half an hour we shot all the soldiers from their horses or killed them with arrows or crushed their skulls with clubs. We took the guns and the pistols from the dead so that at the end we had more fire power than at the beginning. Custer had been able to escape with a small number of his men to a hill on this side of the river where they formed a circle and defended themselves kneeing with guns and pistols. But it was in vain. Sitting Bull ordered a concentrated rider attack and we simply rode down Custer and his last contingent. Not one of them escaped. The second detail of the soldiers on the other side of the river saw and heard from a distance what was going on, but they couldn’t interfere because they were surrounded themselves. The third cavalry battalion arrived later in the morning and was able to free the second one from our encirclement, but no real battle was fought with them. They withdrew and the Indian village at the Little Bighorn River also was dissolved soon after that”.

Keanu read every word from Jimmy’s lips and could not get enough from his tale. Jimmy himself had talked himself into ecstasy. Fortunately, he did not forget to watch the road and the traffic on the highway.

“So what happened then?”

“Well, you know, my boy, the news about the big victory at Little Bighorn River naturally traveled fast, like a brush fire, and made all the Indians very proud. But it didn’t help us. The Whites simply sent more soldiers and in a few weeks they killed almost all Sioux and Cheyenne warriors or forced them back into the reservations. Sitting Bull himself was able to save himself and his people and flee to Canada. A couple of years later the resistance of the Indians against the whites was broken”.

Keanu’s childlike fantasy translated this and Jimmy’s other tales into colorful moving pictures. He watched the dry savannah landscape they were driving through and saw Indian warriors riding quick mustangs and hunting buffalo with bow and arrow, he heard guns banging, he smelled the smoke of powder, and then again he imagined soldiers in blue coats with broad black hats who closed in on a row of tipis, he saw Indian women and children running away. Sometimes he felt so much sadness, rage, and anxiety that he found it difficult to concentrate on the school lesson.

In Fort Belknap Keanu was also confronted with the current reality of Indian life. The town was almost as poor as the hamlet where the Whiteriver family lived. Only a few houses were well kept. Even the buildings for self-administration of the reservation looked quite shabby. The elementary school had some gray, flat houses with classrooms, a teacher’s room, small offices for the administration and a cafeteria with worn furniture, surrounded by free space with just a fenced-in baseball and basketball court and a parking lot for the school busses.

Keanu’s class included twenty-one boys and girls, almost all Indians. There were also two white or, more exactly, light brown twin boys whose parents owned the hardware store in Harlem where Thomas Whiteriver sometimes did deliveries. The family whose name was Rashir came from Pakistan.

The two boys were named Samir and Omar, but at school they were called Sam and Mark. Both were intelligent and friendly. Keanu liked them. In general, he got on okay in his class. Most of the pupils were rather quiet during lessons. They answered the teacher’s questions if they could, but they didn’t actively participate. In the basic learning subjects, some boys were visibly not interested or found it difficult to catch or remember the substance; they were the headache of the teachers and would have needed specific attention. But most teachers considered those extra efforts as unreasonable or at least not very promising.

Most of the teachers were white, female and middle-aged. They had been working at the elementary school in Fort Belknap for many years and had become used to doing their jobs with the least possible effort. This was obvious even to the children. Keanu who was one of the few students who paid attention regularly and gave thought to what he had learned. He often felt that the lessons were long and boring.

But that did not apply to the music instruction. Mrs. Booth was a gray-haired spinster with spectacles, who had learned immediately of Keanu’s strong interest in music. She had asked him to play something for her on the recorder. She began to use him as her preferred counterpart in her class. She taught the children to write music. She explained all the instruments of an orchestra to them. She made them listen to records of the different musical styles, and sang songs from old, very used songbooks with them. Mrs. Booth had even strengthened Keanu’s dedication by promising him that in due time she would manage to get him a clarinet on loan. She had decided that this would be the right way to help this obviously talented boy change from the limited wooden recorder to a real orchestral instrument. Keanu had asked himself almost every day what Mrs. Booth meant by ‘in due time’.

One day he finally dared to ask her directly.,: “First of all you will still have to grow a bit, your rib cage and your lungs must widen some more to enable you inhale enough breath,” she had said with a smile. “I believe that when you are ten years old that will be the moment. Secondly I want you to learn to read sheet music fluently and you can practice that music on the recorder. And thirdly, I must convince the school administration that it makes sense to buy a few instruments for the school.

“We should eventually create an orchestra or at least a brass band here,” she said. “Every school in Montana has one.”

At first Keanu was angry that Mrs. Booth had put him off. But he started dreaming about sitting in an orchestra in front of a large audience, playing a swinging march on his clarinet. He saw himself standing up at a certain moment and blowing a solo as the listeners applauded.

Along with the music lessons, Keanu loved sports with an instructor by the name of John Feather, a young, very friendly Assiniboine with a sharp profile, medium-length black hair and a fantastic physique. John was only responsible for sports with the boys. He had the intention to motivate his students for physical training early in life, awaken their sense for competition and convey joy for power and mobility to them. Not a sports lesson went by during which John did not design a new game or a new challenge and the boys loved him. He proceeded with so much skill himself that even those students who were weak, obese, slow or generally immobile experienced some successes. To achieve optimistic feelings, he either formed teams for the competitions accordingly, or he intentionally brought stronger and weaker partners together for certain joint exercises to encourage helpfulness and motivation. He acted vividly and with a sense of humor. You could hear him from far away as he cheered up his pupils in their efforts. John also established a team of the more competitive pupils and gave them some extra training lessons in track and field sports once a week in the early afternoon. Needless to say that Keanu was one of the participants.

In the summer of 1963, when Keanu was nine, his friend Rufus Hogan made good on his promise to take him to a Pow Wow in Hayes. On a warm Saturday afternoon in July Rufus picked up Keanu in his aged, beat-up Chevy and promised Rose he would always keep an eye on her son and not bring him back too late. Keanu was excited as never before. He asked Rufus many questions while they were driving to Hayes. What would happen there? Would there be dances and music? How many people would be coming to the event? Who were the organizers…?

“You’ll see,” Rufus answered with a smile. “There’ll be lots of people, not only Indians, ‘cause nowadays many white tourists come to watch these Pow Wows. So what used to be just a traditional gathering now has gained a commercial dimension”.

They arrived at the large field outside of Hayes which first only looked like a huge mass of parked pickup trucks and other vehicles, mostly four-wheelers. Behind that the festival ground opened up, with a number of white tipis pointing up to the blue summer sky. Then a few sun roofs on metal stands giving shade to tables on which a variety of fake Indian jewelry, wooden tomahawks, extremely colorful feather headgear, dream catchers, hand drums and wooden Indian flutes were offered.

There were also a few stands where barbecue was grilled and beer in cans sold. In the center of the square an open circle was marked with some long wooden benches, to the right was a wooden platform with five chairs, flanked by two large loudspeakers.

It was hot and dusty in Hayes. Not all the visitors were assembled at the festival ground as yet. A sizable crowd was still gathered on the parking field, hanging out in small groups around cars or sitting on tailgates, mostly busy munching sandwiches and sipping from beer cans. The entire scene was wrapped in a cloud of intense noise from human voices, occasionally topped by loud screaming, calls and laughter. Rufus found a parking space for the Chevy. He and Keanu got out and went to check out the festival ground and the program of the Pow Wow. As always, Rufus carried his tape recorder. He asked Keanu to carry a bag with some audio equipment which made Keanu feel mighty proud. He felt he was Rufus’ assistant and had an important task.

Many people greeted Rufus as an old friend, with a loud call, a nod or even a hand shake. His little companion was recognized with friendly interest. Keanu was particularly pleased to also see and greet a long-standing acquaintance: Jimmy the school bus driver. So they mingled with the crowd, which was in a lazy and yet cheerful weekend mood because of the heat. A stringent schedule obviously didn’t exist. Meeting friends and neighbors and enjoying the company and togetherness seemed to be the main aim of a Pow Wow.

After half an hour most of the visitors moved without haste or pushing into the center of the festival square. The loudspeakers were switched on and tested with whistling feedback noises, then the mayor of Hayes, a tall, robust Gros Ventre Indian, took the microphone. In recognition of the important event, he had embellished his jeans and white T-shirt outfit with a few traditional insignia, he wore some colorful beads around his neck and a very long, broad, multi-colored ribbon down to his knees. He had put a blue headband with two gray feathers around his head. With his deep, resonant voice he won the attention of the crowd immediately and went into a lengthy speech which Keanu did not find very interesting. Anyway, even without catching much of the substance of the discussion topics, Keanu understood the rationale behind a Pow Wow. He felt proud to be an Indian and to belong with this crowd.

But now his attention was caught by something different. From three of the tipis a group of men, clad in splendid, colorful and feather-decorated robes appeared in the light of the dimming and less heating sun. Their faces were painted red and black. Because of their huge headgear they seemed taller than life.

With measured steps they approached the round space in the center of the square. They positioned themselves in front of the flashing cameras of the many tourists. Then two drums started with a dark, muffled, slow and monotonous rhythm and the men began to dance. Their bare feet followed the beat of the drums. Their upper bodies moved forward and backward, at times also sideways. They kept their arms mostly close to the body, only shook their shoulders every once in a while which rattled the metal and wood ornaments hanging on their robes. The formation of the dancers looked disciplined. Once they all moved in the same direction. Once they formed two rows and danced towards each other and then back again. Other than the drums no music was heard. The dancers themselves made some soft sounds. They made no eye contact with one another. Each of them was so concentrated on himself that he didn’t even recognize the others. Keanu had never seen such an act before. He was speechless, moved by the solemn dignity of this performance. The costumes and the mask-like faces made him a little apprehensive. But the steady drum beat fascinated him. The obvious seriousness of the dancers made him understand that their dance had a deeper meaning than just simple movement. He found the monotony of the drum accompaniment a bit disappointing. He would have preferred to listen to an additional melody of an Indian flute. But he also realized that the music he played on his recorder did not match with this type of dance.

The first dance lasted about fifteen minutes. The slow thumping beat obviously had a contagious effect on the watching Indians: most of them moved their heads and upper bodies accordingly. The white spectators were more fixed on the visible happening. Cameras hummed and camera lights flickered. When the drums stopped, applause and a few yahoo cries were heard. Then the announcer said that this had been the rain dance.

Second was the war dance, a bit faster, but with a similar choreography, which had been performed in the old days before a tribe went on the war path.

Keanu’s fascination for the performance weakened after a while and Rufus understood this. He admitted that he also had more interest in the music and in the tales of the Indians than in their dances. He suggested that they should wander around and see whether they might catch an opportunity for an attractive tape recording.

Keanu was the first to hear the typically soft and yet powerful sound of an Indian flute. Then Rufus heard it and said to Keanu: “This must be Dakota Red. No other flutist has this wonderful tone.”

They followed the sound and soon saw the famous old musician at the edge of the festival ground sitting under a tree with a small community of fans listening to him in quiet admiration. Dakota Red was clad in a linen poncho of sorts, his feet were in linen slippers and on his head he wore a broad straw hat. The front brim was bent upward so that his tanned and wrinkled face was not shaded, but clearly visible in the setting sun. When he played, his Indian face conveyed the impression of complete absorption. His eyes were closed. He seemed as if he listened to his melodies and to his inner self. But after he ended, he looked around attentively, communicated with individual listeners and explained to them the title and the theme of the next piece: “River in the moonlight” or “Canyon mood” or “For our dead brothers.”

When Rufus and Keanu approached, he greeted them with a nod and a smile. He also motioned that he had no objection to the tape recorder. Rufus and Keanu could set up and switch on their microphone and then listened with the same fascination as the others to the master. Keanu who had been playing the recorder and the Indian flute for a number of years and, given his young age, had achieved a certain degree of dexterity, gained a completely new understanding of his instrument: during the next hour to play the flute was not a challenge only for his fingers, but a chance to express himself through the instrument, his own senses, his thoughts and his feelings.

Dakota Red used his breathing technique to give his tones different shades, change their intensity, give particular weight to one specific tone and let other tones just fade away. Slow melody sequences were followed by ecstatic octave intervals, small tongue switches and trills set accents, but there were also quiet passages with long soft notes. His pieces conveyed small but complete musical tales, colorful pictures, almost all of them displayed a melancholic serenity and produced a smiling thoughtfulness with the audience.

On this evening, the nine-year old Keanu felt happiness and pride for having had the chance to listen to this flute-player and he sincerely planned to emulate him. When Dakota Red ended his performance and the listeners dissolved, Rufus and his young friend packed up their equipment. Rufus bought a Coke and a hot dog for each of them at a stand. “Red sausage for Redskins,” he remarked about the reddish color of the sausage. Then they drove homewards

When he got home Keanu told his mother of all the adventures and particularly of the deep impression which Dakota Red had made on him. He also reported his first Pow Wow experience to his sports coach John Feather. But John seemed to have a critical view of such happenings; he called them phony shows for white tourists and useless tribal chats. Anyway he recognized that the meeting with Dakota Red must have been a good thing.

The training hours with John were always the highlight of the week for Keanu. When the boys of the competitive team had really worked out and, after taking a shower, sat together for a while, it happened that Keanu missed the departure of his school bus and had to think of another ride home. Sometimes he went with his Pakistani classmates to their father’s shop, caught his dad there with a delivery and could ride home with him. If this didn’t work out, he had simply wandered along the highway towards the hamlet hoping that some passing neighbor would stop and offer him a ride home; and his optimism had so far never failed him. Always a friendly pickup truck driver had stopped and had invited him to hop in. This time again, in the early summer of 1964. Keanu had just passed the last houses of Fort Belknap Agency and was trotting along with his sports bag when an old Dodge pickup with the sign ‘Craig Repairs Everything’ stopped. The driver bent over and opened the right door: “Come on, boy, I’ll take you towards Hayes”. Keanu was relieved. He jumped onto the front bench, shut the door and thanked the man for the offer. The truck rolled fast and only now Keanu looked at the driver who had invited him. He didn’t know this guy, a big fat white man in a dirty overall. The driver also examined his new companion with a broad grin and a blurred look of his pale eyes which reminded Keanu of a huskie dog.

“So, where do you live, boy? Coming from school?”

“Yes, I missed the school bus. We live in the settlement about ten, eleven miles from here to the right of the highway. Thanks again for taking me along”.

Keanu felt that it would have been better not to go in the truck with this man who seemed to be half drunk and pressed his knee against the steering wheel while he lit up a cigarette with both hands. The front seat of the truck was worn and dirty. On Keanu’s side lay a few tools. A beer can and a wrinkled newspaper lay on the floor. Did this man live in Hayes or run a repair shop there? Keanu didn’t ask, he hoped the ride would be over soon. After about half of the way between Fort Belknap and the hamlet the guy suddenly slowed down and turned into a side lane which led to an open field. He stopped after about a hundred yards, shut the motor off and slid away from the steering wheel to the center of the bench.

Keanu became terribly scared. His throat was blocked, he could not utter a word when the man bent over to him and said with a raw, whisky-stinking voice: “No reason to be afraid. We’ll go on in just a minute. But meantime I want to fuck your little red Indian ass.”

With his left hand the man opened his fly and produced a huge, standing, white prick. Keanu was shocked and terrified. With his right hand, the man grabbed Keanu and tried to pull him nearer. But Keanu lashed out with his hands and feet. He screamed loud. The man used his right arm to pull Keanu’s head and upper body towards his chest and almost suffocated him. He breathed heavily and continued to rub his penis. Keanu was getting sick from the fear and from straining to get rid out of the strangling grip. He instinctively grabbed a screw driver on which he had been sitting. He rammed the straight blade with full force against the stinking body partly on top of him. He bit the man in one finger of the right hand near his screaming mouth.

The screw driver hit the man’s side through his shirt into the white wobbly meat below the shoulder blade. The tip penetrated deeply. The man roared, loosened the grip of Keanu and touched the wound. Blood oozed out red behind his fingers. Keanu trembled. He struggled as fast he could to the right door, pushed it open, grabbed his sports bag, jumped out and began to run. He ran across the field, through high prairie grass and low shrubs, his breathing was hectic and he sobbed, blood hummed in his ears. Keanu couldn’t hear whether the engine of the truck was started behind him. He ran faster than he had ever run on the track, he ran and ran until he had to stop and was certain the man did not come after him.

Slowly Keanu caught his breath again. His heartbeat calmed down a bit and he asked himself how far he was from the highway and from his home. He instinctively felt that he had run more or less parallel to the highway and toward the hamlet. If he turned left in a right angle from his running path, he would eventually reach the highway again. Keanu was right. After a short walk he saw the highway before him and continued his walk about 100 yards to the side of the highway, because he wanted to avoid a situation where again a car would stop and offer him a ride. On this late afternoon there was not much traffic. But perhaps the awful man was searching for him to take revenge. Keanu alternated between fast walking to moderate jogging because he realized that at that hour he would normally be at home and his mother would be worried already. After about one and a half hourshe reached the hamlet and ran the last yards to the front door. Rose was waiting for him. She asked him angrily where he had been so long. His father also came over from the living room and listened with a grim face while Keanu hesitated as he spoke about his traumatic experience of this afternoon. Rose covered her face with her hands. Then she embraced her son with a sob.

“This is gruesome what you went through,” she said. “Thank God you were able to escape from this monster!”

She turned to Thomas: “Can’t we report this criminal to the police? He should be arrested.”

But Thomas shook his head in resignation.

“Rose, you obviously don’t have a clue how the white authorities would handle a case like this. Keanu is an Indian boy. He doesn’t have a witness for what happened. The police in Havre would interrogate Keanu. They’d ask him disgusting questions. They’d embarrass him. At the end they’d conclude that there’s not enough proof to take steps. It’s useless to think about whether we can get even with this white pig. We Indians don’t have a chance. You know as well as I do that when an Indian women gets raped, the police always try to make it look like it’s her own fault. Sometimes the cops themselves rape girls if they pick them up drunk and think they won’t remember who did it. Keanu will just have to forget this. But he’ll never take a ride with a white stranger again.”

Keanu did not sleep well that night. He woke up again and again and lived through the fight with the man. He saw the face, smelled the stinking breath, felt the brutal grip around his neck, the screw driver in his hand, the punch, the bite with which he had freed himself from the hold of the man. He felt strong when he remembered stabbing the man and seeing the blood. He sensed the painful breathlessness of his flight and the long run home. He also thought about the reaction of his parents, the sadness and despair of his father. Was it a fact that Indians were second class citizens who could not expect any help from the white people, were not taken seriously and could not get police protection?