Good Girls, Badlands

Grab a coffee, this might be a long one. I'm in Vermillion now, in the south-eastern corner of South Dakota, close to Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota state lines, and about 600 kms from where I wrote the last blog. We've just been been treated to a lovely sunset after our long drive, and it's wine o'clock again (again). In just two days we've been to the Badlands and Wounded Knee. And we've driven down highway 18, its crazy 50-mile long straights, and through the Rosebud and Yankton reservations.

Above: A section of the Missouri River, at Fort Randall, just before we crossed into Yankton reservation. Gorgeous looking on a hot day like today, and sooo tempting to jump in, but I reckon the water is still cold because it was still snowing just three weeks ago. Might find out for sure tomorrow.

We stopped at a place called Winner, where I inadvertently went to the white's only supermarket and connected with the racial hostility of one of the checkout operators. I asked for the wharepaku (or restroom in American) and she (a) wouldn't look me in the eye and looked at Miranda instead who wasn't even standing that close to me and (b) gave the most venomous response she could. So I told her she was ugly and her mother dresses her funny, and walked off. Nah, I didn't do that. She wasn't worth it. And we still had a lot of fun in their store, and their town, which was all dressed up in red white and blue for Memorial Day tomorrow (roughly the equivalent of our Anzac Day). But it wasn't a place we wanted to stop at, so we grabbed what we wanted for lunch and hightailed it out of there. We were going to stay at Yankton, especially since they had a sign up for me on the way in: 'Inactive Catholic Welcome Home'. But we decided to head to Vermillion instead. The University of South Dakota is here, and I'll spend some of Tuesday at their oral history center which includes more than 2000 interviews with American Indians gathered between 1967 and 1973. We're not sure what we'll get up to tomorrow, but swimming looks good 'cause it's hot here. And if it's cool tomorrow, then I think the new Indiana Jones movie might be the go. We're free agents with wheels, we've got options.

The Badlands, 24 May

In Treaty terms, the Badlands belong to the Oglala Lakota nation, and they do operate one of the information centres. But from what I can gather from the maps and publicity, the Badlands are in effect a National Park, run by the National Park Service, a division of the Department of the Interior (incidentally the parent department of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I think I’ve mentioned that before). The native Americans have known the Badlands or Mako Sica for thousands of years. The landscape, though, took millions of years to form into canyons and gullies, cliffs, spires, pinnacles and buttes, carved out by wind and water. Early humans hunted mammoths here about 11,000 years ago, and the earliest bones found here date back 33 million years. Cousin Lu I think you could’ve fossicked here all day long and into the next. Me, I did a couple of short walks (although one included scrambling up a crazy ladder), took a couple of pics, and drove the Badlands Loop Road.

This is the view from the end of a trail called the Door. It's hard to capture the vast distance to the horizon, and just as hard to describe it in words. It's kind of like some giant scalped the earth and left her insides exposed.

The landscape is how I imagine the moon might be. I'm not sure that the images capture that, or the extent of the area, how cratered it looks, and how high and deep and broad it is. Up close, the rock formations are carefully striped in different shades of red and pink and yellow and grey, that change with the light. There’s not much animal life, but we were lucky to see a couple of chipmunk looking things and some vultures circling overhead (possibly looking for rabbits). I was pleased to see no snakes, and the park ranger said it’s too early in the year for rattle snakes anyway. It’s an eerie landscape in some ways, especially when you get into some of the quiet, windless spots at the bottom of a canyon. But I also kept thinking of cowboy movies and couldn’t stop whistling the theme music for The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

There’s something cliché about the tourism publicity for the area, which constantly portrays the natives as extinct – confined to their reservations and displaced by European pioneers, their ways and their technologies. According to the National Park Service, ‘only the Lakota paintings, drawings and artistic crafts remain’. It’s as if the people aren’t still here to keep those things going. And I guess that’s why the cowboy movie comes up for me. It’s a genre I can admit to enjoying a whole lot, but the Indians always lose. The white cowboys always win. And it’s a motif that seems to have carried into the banter for tourists, like in the way that the reservation roads don’t appear on any of the maps. And nor do many of the Lakota tourism initiatives. Interesting, but not in a good way.

The prairie grasslands have their own history. Even though I’ve said they’re unrelenting, what remains today compared to what used to be are just ‘patchwork remnants’. I found out why they have so few trees around here: it’s because prairies are too dry to support trees, and too wet to be a desert. But they support more animal life than the canyons – buffalo, prairie dogs (cute), deer, antelope, coyotes and bighorn sheep. Miranda and I took a gravelled back road and got treated to an up close and personal view of a couple of buffalo. Very cool.

Buffalo, just beyond reach through the car window.

And I guess this pic tells you what the buffalo thought of us and our excitement to see them.

Big news of the day though, is the effect of the Badlands on Piki. We did one walk, called the Notch, and she was quite happy to pose (see below). But while we were on the second walk, called the Door, she up and went native on me. She got a complete native makeover and now wants to be known as Hiki Cries For Freedom.

Piki as she we all came to know and love her, at the start of the Notch trail...

...and Piki reborn, now known as Hiki Cries For Freedom (i.e. from the antique store in Chamberlain), but we can call her Hiki.

The first walk we did was the Notch. This pic is taken from near the beginning, when the walking was nice and flat and easy.

Eventually, the Notch trail went upwards. And once we were up, we also had to go down. There's Miranda, almost at the bottom of ladder-type stair we climbed, not as easy as she makes it look, especially on the descent.

Here's another view of the ladder, this time from nearer the end of the trail. You might be able to make out a couple of people at the top waiting for their turn, and a guy in a red top on his way down.

The second walk was an easy boardwalk number. Yay. It opened out into acres and acres of this kind of landscape, where tourists are known to flock in numbers close to a million a year. They speak in tongues and while away the hours taking photos of each other with which to bore their friends and family when they get home - unlike myself, who prefers to bore friends and family as I travel.

Wounded Knee, 25 May
We called in at Wounded Knee before we left Pine Ridge. In December 1890 the US Army's seventh cavalry killed nearly 300 Indian men, women and children who had, in fact, already surrendered under the leadership of Chief Big Foot. They lie in a mass grave at the site and their people, including descendants of the survivors, still live nearby. It's a tragedy that has pretty much been written into the coloniser's history as the beginning of the end of Indian resistance. Officially described as the Battle of Wounded Knee, the Lakota Oglala locals refer to it as the Massacre of Wounded Knee. The site was also occupied in 1973 in a dispute that pitted the American Indian Movement and reservation members against a 'corrupt' reservation government.

Locals have stalls at the site and sell bead-, porcupine- and leather-work, t-shirts etc. to the people who stop by. For most of them it's their only way of making a living, and the whole whanau gets involved. Unemployment on Pine Ridge is at eighty percent according to a woman who sells at a trading post up the road. And this weekend was the warmest for a while so there were quite a few visitors. The Rez is just coming out of winter, and the locals are looking forward to the summer months to earn some cash, although they have to fork out to buy their traders' licenses from the tribal council. I found it a tough spot to visit, even with the resonances with our own histories back home, and I was crying within moments of the first of the locals coming over to say 'Welcome to Wounded Knee'. So I was even more tangitangi by the time I climbed up the hill to the wahi tapu to touch the headstone.

It's mostly women at the stalls, and they each have their korero to give you: their interpretations of what happened, who lives there now, what life is like on the Rez (much like Once Were Warriors according to one of them). The ones that were there this morning knew about Maori people, although one of them also said I could pass for native. Apparently someone - 'a princess' - had been to a sweat lodge there some time before and taught them to rub noses. I nearly said, "really, one of our princesses came here, well, I'm her Queen". They also give good korero about the meanings of the symbols in their artworks and who of their kids and mokos help them. I'm loving their mana wahine symbols, like the tipi which is a strong woman symbol because the tipi is put up by the woman and everything in it is her property - I guess that includes her husband. Yep, heard some good yarns at Wounded Knee and overall the experience at Pine Ridge couldn't be further removed from what I've received at places like Chamberlain and Winner (Loser more like). And FYI, we've only seen one African American for four days, or two if you count the pictures of (Obama) Barack Black Eagle. (Thanks for the heads-up, Margie).