Lame Deer Told It Like It Was

In 1972, John (Fire) Lame Deer told his feelings and recollections to Richard Erdoes, who helped him make it into a book: Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. It is the life of a full-blood Lakota man who became, after various hilarious failures, one of the respected medicine men in his tribe. He lived on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and he saw it all. He told Erdoes, and Erdoes wrote down, exactly what he thought about the past and ongoing oppression of Native Americans by whites, especially in South Dakota where there is very little intermixing of the cultures and races.

Lame Deer cried out that there was no justice for Natives. He said that white sheriff’s officers arrested young women for being drunk, whether they were drunk or not, put them in prison, and raped them. (Even today, young Native women vanish.) Indians get executed for killing whites, but a white might be able to kill an Indian without even doing jail time. To Lame Deer, the era of genocide did not end with the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.

Lame Deer was particularly incensed that a white man could come into the Black Hills and start carving up a mountain into a gigantic statue. The fact that the statue, the incomplete form of which you can still see from the main highway, is of Crazy Horse, means that the white man can claim that he is doing it for the benefit of the Indians. All his gift shop earnings are tax-free. (This man has since died, as has Lame Deer.) The man’s vision includes a university free to all Indians, somewhere on the grounds of the monument. Where will it be, wondered Lame Deer—perhaps in Crazy Horse’s big toe or the horse’s hoof? But what he disliked most was the fact of building a big monument. Throughout white history, most monuments have been celebrations of killing, such as a pharaoh building a monument that tells how many cities he burned and how many people he impaled.

This photo shows me at the head of Crazy Horse.

Sometimes I think Lame Deer was just trying to shake us up. He openly wished for the old days in which the Lakota ate raw buffalo guts.

The chapter titles are irresistible. “That Gun in the New York Museum Belongs to Me,” “The Green Frog Skin” (referring to greenback dollars), “Sitting on Top of Teddy Roosevelt’s Head” (about Mt. Rushmore), “Don’t Hurt the Trees,” “The Upside-Down, Forward-Backward, Icy-Hot Contrary,” and “Blood Turned into Stone,” are just a few of them.

Lame Deer was quite resentful of white religion, but mainly because of hypocrisy. White actions bore little resemblance to white Christianity. He wrote, “I respect other religions, but I don’t like to see them denatured... You’ve made a blondie out of Jesus. I don’t care for those blond, blue-eyed pictures of a sanitized, Cloroxed, Ajaxed Christ. How would you like it if I put braids on Jesus and stuck a feather in his hair? ... Jesus was a Jew. He wasn’t a yellow-haired Anglo. I’m sure he had black hair and dark skin like an Indian. The white ranchers around here [South Dakota] wouldn’t have let him step out with their daughters... His religion came out of the desert in which he lived, out of his kind of mountains, his kind of animals, his kind of plants. You’ve tried to make him into...a long-haired Billy Graham...and that’s why he doesn’t work for you anymore. He was a good medicine man, I guess. As you read it in the Bible, he sure had the power, the healing touch.”

Jesus did not have desires for physical wealth, the way most of his followers do. But, “if this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification, by greed for the green frog skin, by people who are mindful only of their own self, forgetting about the wants of others.” Elsewhere, Lame Deer wrote, “White man makes himself something more than God.”

Lame Deer ends his account by saying that you could learn from him, “if you want to be taught by an old man living in a dilapidated shack, a man who went to third grade for eight years...”

Erdoes also has some things to say about the false religion of American Christians. “Christians who no longer believe that they could bump into Christ at the next street corner, what are they? Jews who no longer think they could find God in a pillar of fire, why would they go on being Jews?”

When you read this book, you can feel something of the rage that still burns in the Plains tribes, and that erupted a few years ago in protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline [ref]. This rage can seldom be found anymore in tribes, such as my Cherokee tribe, who were conquered long ago and who have intermixed extensively with the whites. Native Americans are the forgotten minority, and are to a great extent the victims of the white perversion of Christianity.