Te Haerenga ki Dakota ki te Tonga

I’m writing this from the Lakota Praire Ranch Motel, a little west of Kyle on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. Miranda and I have driven about 890 miles (1430 kilometres) to get here. That’s further than Auckland to Wellington return. Coming to Pine Ridge is a diversion from our original plan to head to Yellowstone Park, but we thought this way we could be more leisurely and stop to explore places rather than just drive straight past. Anyway, here we are on the reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota and Wounded Knee. We’re handy (in American terms) to the Badlands National Park, Black Hills National Forest, Mt Rushmore and Rapid City. We’re going to flag the tourist hotspots in favour of a walk in the Badlands and checking out some of the local arts and cultural heritage on Pine Ridge itself. Personally, I was keen on checking out Wall, a cheesey western theme park/mall/adventure place where they do shootout re-enactments. I was hoping I'd land the role of the sniper on the saloon roof. As it turns out, in South Dakota you can find western cheese just by taking a random exit off the interstate and spending a night amongst the locals of Chamberlain. I’ll get to that later. I should really rewind four or five days to when we first hitched our wagon and left Chicago.

Chicago, Illinois to Madison, Wisconson
Miranda drove us from Chicago to Madison on Tuesday. That’s 146 miles (235 kilometres). This is a big country, and Chicago is a big city located on a humungous plain or series of plains (I have no idea what the right terminology is). North of Chicago, there were parts of the interstate that were very much like New Zealand, especially where the embankments were planted, and where there was a bit of contour to the land (like a rise or a sweeping corner). One major difference, though, was the road kill - huge, like everything else in the States. I'd hate to hit a deer or a cougar or something, they leave a big mess on the road and I guess cars must get damaged too.
Mostly, to get to Madison, there is a lot of long straight concrete driving through a vast flat land that seems to go on and on and on. I was so relieved just south of Madison to see some bush-clad hills on the horizon. I must’ve wanted something to break up the landscape, like mountains or the sea. I like the sky out on the open road. It’s enormous, uninterrupted, the biggest sky I’ve ever seen and I don’t really have the words to describe it. But it feels like the sky is curved to wrap around the land, which is broad and flat.

Madison is a lot greener than the parts of Chicago I’ve been hanging out in. It's a pretty town or mid-sized city as it likes to be known. It’s a university town too, and my impression after less than twenty-four hours was that it is predominantly white. We lunched with some of the native scholars based at the University of Wisconson, and they gave us some tips on things to do while in the west, and some contacts for a couple of Canadian Indian historians for when I get to Vancouver. So, it was a short stop in Madison, but it was pretty and sunny and the food and company was great.

La Crosse and Albert Lea
After our lunch we drove for about 140 miles to La Crosse, which is just on the western border of Wisconson, alongside the Mississippi River. Lacrosse is a game that originated with the north-eastern Native American iwi in the 17th century. The guys we met in Madison said Indians used it as a means to settle inter-tribal disputes, a last attempt at resolution before resorting to war. No one we met in La Crosse talked to us about that, although we only met two people, in a Tea House run by a couple of hippies, including a former navy seal who ended up in La Crosse after his Cadillac was stolen in some complicated story he was trying to tell us about driving to Washington. Anyway, apparently when you’re a navy seal in trouble you head straight to the nearest navigable waterway and that’s what he did. And he’s still there because Wisconson has a really good Veteran’s benefit programme and you only have to live there for a year to qualify. As soon as the dude stopped for a breath we excused ourselves, crossed the river and state line into Minnesota, and drove the next 125 miles which got us to Albert Lea. Whew.

Albert Lea looked like another pretty town, tucked around a little lake. It looked like a town with money – large homes on the lake front, that kind of thing. But it was also a non-descript place to me, with not much going on. The bottle store was already closed (at 8 pm). But on the drive out I had seen cows for the first time in more than six weeks and, consequently smelt cow crap too. I don’t think there’s anything to say about Albert Lea. It’s where we slept one night, and there was a Harley shop next door. (See the pics in the previous post).

Sioux Falls and Chamberlain, South Dakota
We did another 300 or so miles on Thursday, which got us into South Dakota, where rodeo is the official sport. Apparently hunting and fishing is big in these here parts as well. I like Sioux Falls, another university town just inside South Dakota’s eastern boundary. We really only stopped for lunch but ended up shopping as well, and getting some advice from a couple of locals about places to go. Funnily enough they recommended Wall the cheesy American attraction and said ‘don’t go to Pine Ridge’. They obviously didn’t realise who they were talking to, but nor did they recommend we stop at Corn Palace, Mitchell. According to the billboard hype all along the interstate, Corn Palace is a feat of A-maize-ing Ear-chitecture and corn-ceptual art. I am not kidding. There was billboard after bill board of corny one-liners, but none good enough to encourage us to call in. No, it was onwards to Chamberlain for Miranda and me.

And what can I say about Chamberlain, South Dakota? That’s a hard one. I can say I knew we were in the West. The rural poverty was easy to see in the closed businesses, the housing and the vehicles, and it had that undercurrent of racial division. Before we left, Miranda went for a walk and discovered that the richer Chamberlain folks lived on the other side of the river. Ain’t that always the way in towns divided by rivers or railway tracks? They haven’t introduced smoke-free legislation in South Dakota so the Chamberlain bars were smoky and people were even smoking in the liquor store. And if you took away the tarseal and the modern cars, parts of the main street would look like a made-for-the-movies olde western town. It was quiet (apart from the occasional Harley or boy-racer). It was mostly closed when we got there about five, and I half-expected to see tumble-weed blow past me at any moment. Shop hours included a notes like 'please forgive us if we're not here' or '9.15-ish to 5.00-ish'. Hardcase.

I guess at the place we stayed they don’t get many NZers calling in. The poor young woman on the desk probably only understood half of what either Miranda or I said, and could barely contain her laughter about it. Miranda asked for an ethernet cable and she offered shampoo. But it was a fun town. Authentic American cheese, and without getting milked for our tourists dollars like I expect we would at places like Wall and Corn Palace. They had an incredibly cool antique and taxidermy shop that I could’ve stayed in for hours.

Below: the Chamberlain City Hall, a very cool building but it looked abandoned inside.

Chamberlain was surreal on some levels. It’s on the banks of the Missouri River. It’s one of the stop-off places for the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) which was basically a search for passage to the Pacific. It’s Dances With Wolves territory – a home where the buffalo once roamed – not to mention elk, antelope, and deer. According to one of the shopkeepers – who informed me that I look like a native ‘from here’ except my tattoos are different – Chamberlain still attracts hunters and fishers, though the prized prey these days is pheasant. There’s an Indian School there – St Joseph’s – just out of town and tucked away, and we only saw a few Indians in town in the grocery store. So Chamberlain looked and felt like a pioneering frontier town to me, with a history of violence and settler colonialism that gets glossed over somehow. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, and maybe I shouldn't judge after such a short stop, but let’s just say that my so-called looking like a native didn’t make me feel confident or safe. Despite the stereotypes, it didn’t feel like a look that would attract benefits – not in that neck of the woods, anyway.

Below: Camp Pleasant on the Lewis and Clark trail, above Chamberlain, with the Missouri River in the background. It wasn't very pleasant - cold gale force winds and a thick murky sky.

Kyle, Pine Ridge, is not Chamberlain, and Chamberlain is not Sioux Falls. But all three places are South Dakota. To get to Kyle you have to do some interesting driving – through hundreds of miles of unrelenting monotony, straight roads and grassy plains and blue-grey sky with no beginning and no end. When you're on the interstate, grassy plains have few trees, and fewer creeks and swampy marshes and ponds. When we turned off the interstate to head towards Kyle it was a nice relief to get onto a country road and see some of the rocky spires that feature in the canyons and flood plains in this part of South Dakota. We had a kai in Kyle – an Indian Taco which is a fry bread the size of a plate with mince, beans, lettuce, tomato, cheese, hot sauce and sour cream. Hard work to eat it all.

I was told I looked native within hours of arriving, by the young native brotha on the desk, but again the kiri ta was a bit of a give away. I said I am native but of New Zealand not here. It was nice to meet someone who had not only heard of NZ but knows where it is. The dude at the Harley shop back in Albert Lea had no clue. Mind you the old fulla at the Chamberlain antique store said NZ is on his list of places he wants to visit. Anyway, by the end of our first night the young fulla on the desk asked us to take him back to New Zealand with us, he needs to get away from the Rez. That boy is sure earning his tip. They had fresh fish on the menu for dinner so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try it despite the giant taco lunch. It was a walleye – the state fish. It’s a much sought-after game fish caught in the Missouri and some of the lakes, and very nice – nothing like trout which is kind of what I was expecting. I’m not sure how to describe it, had the texture of a snapper maybe, and was cooked like the chef had borrowed my mum’s recipe for pan-fried fish. And fresh, just like the waitress said it was. Mmm.

The Praire Ranch Motel is opposite the Oglala Lakota College. That's the main building in the photo below. The college featured in some of my research at the Newberry. Their historical centre isn’t open yet – many things in these parts only open for the summer months, and we’re a week too early. But we roamed around the grounds and said hello to a couple of people who were up there. Someone had put flyers for Obama on people’s windscreens. It’s the South Dakota primary here in a couple of weeks and it looks like the Indian vote counts.

Well it’s time for breakfast at the ranch, and after that we’re off for a bit of a kotiti haere to the Badlands and various other parts. Read all about it in the next blog.