The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (27 page)

But there are cynics and skeptics in both groups. In their 1990 election-year platform, South Dakota Democrats criticized Mr. Mickelson, a Republican who is running for a second term, saying he had a “shallow, hypocritical commitment” to reconciliation. They offered no race-relations program of their own. Many whites in the state simply do not like Indians.

“I see a lot of prejudice,” said Duane Brewer, a member of the Oglala Tribal Council on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “People really hate the Indian…. When an Indian applies for a job, they look at your resume, and the first thing they ask you is, ‘Do you have a drinking problem?'”

Mr. Brewer said many Indians think that the governor committed political suicide with the proclamation. But, he said, “There are a lot of Indians who have been waiting for this, for an attitude change on the part of the non-Indians…. Our Sioux religion teaches that you don't carry hatred in your heart, that you treat other people with respect.”

Ironically, it was religion that precipitated the Wounded Knee tragedy. In 1889 in Nevada, a Paiute Indian named Wovoka declared himself the Messiah. He had come to the Indians this time, he said, because the whites had rejected and killed him. If the Indians would constantly dance a ritual that he called the “Ghost Dance,” he soon would make whites disappear from the earth, resurrect the Indians who had died, restore the vast buffalo herds and remake the world into an Indian paradise.

The new religion won an enthusiastic following on the Sioux reservations and the approval of the most famous Sioux leader, Sitting Bull. The Ghost Dance inspired a hysterical fear among the Indian agents and white settlers, who mistakenly thought the Sioux were preparing for an uprising. The Army was sent to stop the dancing, and one military blunder led to another until Sitting Bull had been murdered in his home and the Wounded Knee massacre had been committed.

When the shooting stopped, the bodies of 146 Indians lay near Wounded Knee Creek. Of them, 44 were women and 18 were children. Most of the 84 dead Indian men were unarmed. An unknown number of Indians who tried to escape were wounded and died elsewhere. Twenty-five soldiers died, too, some of them victims of their own comrades' fire.

The soldiers herded the survivors to the Indian agency at Pine Ridge. That night, a blizzard struck, preventing the return of a burial party to Wounded Knee for four days.

When they returned, the troopers dug a long trench on the hill where the artillery had been and unceremoniously dumped the Indian bodies into it, along with the corpses of several horses and mules.

“The massacre was a planned thing,” said Verlene Ice, Severt Young Bear's cousin, who lives a few hundred yards from the massacre site. “The soldiers wanted to kill us to get revenge for Custer.”

Ms. Ice and Mr. Young Bear are among those at Pine Ridge who remain suspicious of whites claiming to be friends of the Indian. “It's just words,” Mr. Young Bear said of the governor's Year of Reconciliation. “He has gone around the state smoking the pipe with all the chiefs. The pipe is sacred to us…. It isn't something you do lightly. But I think the governor is doing it lightly, for politics.”

Mr. Young Bear acknowledges that his views sometimes are considered controversial, even on the reservation. “They call me a militant and a troublemaker,” he said.

It was he who invited the militant American Indian Movement to Pine Ridge in 1973 to protest the murder of Mr. Young Bear's uncle, Yellow Thunder, just across the Nebraska line from the reservation, and the alleged reluctance of Nebraska officials to investigate the killing.

AIM turned the protest into a general denunciation of federal Indian policy.

Members of AIM and some local Indians, including Mr. Young Bear, invaded and took over the community of Wounded Knee and held off an army of U.S. marshals and FBI agents for 70 days before agreeing to a cease-fire. By the end of the siege, a number of Wounded Knee homes had been vandalized, a store and a church had been burned, two Indians had been killed, an FBI agent had been paralyzed and the tribe was deeply divided.

Mr. Brewer, the tribal councilman, was a lieutenant in the Indian police at the time. “I was hated,” he said. “The AIM people called us ‘goons.' We said ‘goon' stood for ‘Guardians of Our Oglala Nation.' I didn't think I would ever be accepted by my people again.”

Many Indians say the AIM occupation and the attention that it received in the news media did more harm than good for the Indians.

“I've heard tourists in stores and restaurants ask for directions to the reservation, and the local people would tell them: ‘Hey, don't go over there. They'll strip your car. They'll steal all your belongings. They'll kill you.'” Mr. Brewer said, “That's the reputation that we're going to have to overcome.”

He believes that the tribe has some reconciling of its own to do, as well.

“There's a lot of tension between the full-bloods and the half-breeds. The full-bloods think the half-breeds are nothing,” said Mr. Brewer, who is part white.

Frank Means, the head of a mineral studies program aimed at developing the tribe's mineral resources on the Pine Ridge reservation, believes that the Indians are partly to blame for white people's negative image of them.

“Our problem is that we've isolated ourselves. We've segregated ourselves out here on the reservation. We need to integrate, educate ourselves and find out about all these new technologies,” he said. “But a lot of people say we would lose our customs and traditions if we did that. When I talk about these things, people think I'm nuts.”

Among those who want to stay clear of the white man's way is Alex White Plume, a member of the tribe's executive committee, who called Mr. Mickelson's Year of Reconciliation “just plain silly.”

“For 100 years the whites tried to terminate our tribes,” he said. “They tried to assimilate us into mainstream society. But at the same time, they wouldn't allow us into their society because of racism…so we had to come back here and stay with our own people. As a result of that, our language has survived and our religion has survived. Our culture is coming back in leaps and bounds now.”

Mr. White Plume said he was “on the road to assimilation” until AIM occupied Wounded Knee in 1973.

“When I was a kid and I went to see a John Wayne movie with other Indian kids, we cheered for John Wayne, against the Indians,” he said. “But the occupation of Wounded Knee changed all that. The young people are proud to be Indian now.”

Mr. White Plume suspects that the Year of Reconciliation is a scheme to trick the Indian tribes into giving up their sovereignty and their fight to regain ownership of the Black Hills.

If there is to be reconciliation between the races, he said, it must be done on the Indians' terms, not those of white society, and not the governor's. “If the governor wants to reconcile with the tribes, he's got to go all the way, not just part of the way. There have to be apologies made for all the massacres that were done to us, for all the awful things that were done to us over the last 100 years because of racism,” he said.

But, Mr. Mickelson said, it is not in his power to “go all the way.” Many of the problems and disputes that the Indians want solved—ownership of the Black Hills, hunting and fishing rights, gambling on reservations—are the federal government's responsibilities.

“I can't change the federal law,” he said. “I can't solve problems that Congress is too gutless to deal with. But I can be an advocate for economic development. I can be an advocate for education. I can be an advocate for health care. And I can do what I can to change attitudes.

“I didn't grow up on or near an Indian reservation,” he said. “And I came to this job fully believing…that I could solve all these problems in four months. I was totally naive. I didn't realize what a century of distrust had done. But we can start trying to put things right, and we ought to do it together.”

July 1990

OLD FRIENDS

How many high school classes would attempt a 50th anniversary reunion? But the North Dallas High School Class of 1941 - the last class to graduate before World War II changed the world -always has considered itself special. After hanging around with its members all weekend, I did, too. I had as much fun as they did, listening to their memories of the way they were
.

A
RROW
SHIRTS
WERE
ON
SALE
AT
S
ANGER
B
ROS,
FOR
$2
APIECE
. S
IRLOIN
steak was 27 cents a pound at Safeway. Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell were starring in
Blood and Sand
at the Majestic and William Powell and Myrna Loy in
Love Crazy
at the Palace.
The Dallas Morning News
was promoting an upcoming series by Ernest Hemingway, who was “hobnobbing with Chinese, Japs, Britons, Russians…getting inside information on the ticklish Oriental situation.” Royal Air Force fliers were training at Love Field.

Elsewhere, German bombs were falling on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, German U-boats were torpedoing American merchant ships in the North Atlantic, Nazi saboteurs reportedly were awaiting word from Hitler to destroy the Panama Canal, and while Mrs. W.P. Zumwalt of the school board was handing out diplomas to the graduating seniors of North Dallas High School, the Royal Navy was sinking the battleship
Bismarck
.

Bombs wouldn't fall on Pearl Harbor for six months yet, but the seniors of June 1941 already knew they were stepping into an extraordinary time. “We knew we were going to war,” says Archie Hunter. “Some of the guys had skipped their senior year and had gone on and enlisted. Some of us went in right after Pearl Harbor. Some went to college for a year or two first, but nearly all of us got into it eventually.”

Mr. Hunter is a member of the committee planning the 50th anniversary reunion of his class. He's sitting at a table at El Fenix restaurant in downtown Dallas on a sunny day in May, talking over plans with two other members of the committee, Erwin Hearne, an artist, and Alfred Martinez, the owner of the restaurant. They and Maurine Martin McAlister, who keeps track of the addresses and doings of their classmates, are the core of the group that has kept the spirit of the 1941 North Dallas Bulldogs lively.

They've remained more closely knit than most high school classes, they say. Their first reunion was in 1966 in the Crystal Ballroom at the Baker Hotel, 25 years after graduation. Every five years since then, class members have traveled from all over Texas and both coasts and the Midwest to gather for a weekend of reminiscence and revelry.

“I happen to mention to people that we're having a high school reunion,” says Mr. Hearne, “and they say, ‘You're having a
what?
You've got to be kidding!' They just don't understand. Heck, we were so glad to see one another after the war. I mean, that was a
big
war, and a
tough
war on many of us. A lot of our class members were lost. Just the fact that we had survived…that had a lot to do with it.”

It's to remember those first of their number to die, and all those who have died since, that they still get together, and to laugh again at themselves the way they were half a century ago, and the world they knew then, which has disappeared.

“Back then, most of us lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same grade schools together,” Mr. Hunter says. “Back then, people stayed in place more than they do now. Some of us went all the way through kindergarten and grade school and high school together.”

“In those days, they didn't have organized sports for grade school kids like they do now,” says Mr. Hearne. “We made up our sand lot teams and played each other in the neighborhood.”

“It was the Depression,” Mr. Martinez says. “We didn't have a lot of money and didn't go many places. Everybody was in the same category.”

Dallas was a city of 235,000 the year they graduated. Cotton fields rimmed Northwest Highway. Fort Worth was a long way off. Collin County was in another universe. And the corner of Cole and Haskell avenues, just beyond Oak Lawn, where the school has stood since 1921, was in North Dallas.

“It was a different place then,” says Marylynn Newcom Wilhite. “Even as a child, you could go all over Dallas on the streetcar, and nobody would worry about you. I remember when I was nine years old, going downtown on the streetcar and shopping for my aunt at the old Titche-Goettinger.”

Mrs. Wilhite and her husband are among almost 200 North Dallas Bulldogs—members of the class of ‘41, and smaller numbers of the classes of ‘40, ‘42 and ‘43—roaming the lobby of the Colony Parke Hotel, drinks in hand, during the May 31 Friday night mixer, the reunion's opening event. She says she started going steady with John Connie Wilhite when he was a junior and she a freshman.

“And we're still going steady,” he says.

“He left me and went into the Air Force, and I was stuck by myself here for the last year and a half of high school,” she says.

When Connie got his pilot's wings in 1944, they got married, and the bridegroom went off to join the D-Day invasion. He liked the Air Force so much he stayed in for two more wars and retired a few years ago as a lieutenant colonel.

“I volunteered for Desert Shield,” he says. “I called them, and they said they had recalled a few who had retired very recently, but no 67-year-olds yet. The war was over before they got to me.”

Jody Lander, who graduated a semester behind Col. Wilhite, in January 1942, was president of his class and a football player. “Our team was kind of a joke,” he says. “In the 1940 season, my last year, we won only one game. We beat Sunset, 7-6. They then went on to the state finals. I don't know how we managed to beat them.”

“North Dallas never was strong in sports,” says Nancy Hunter Gilmore. “We liked to say we were academically oriented.” Mrs. Gilmore was so studious that she was double-promoted and graduated within half a year of her older brother Archie. “He didn't speak to me the whole time I was in high school,” she says. “He was the meanest son of a gun in the world. But now he's just a doll.”