Flapping thin wind, disco-yellow bikini briefs fly the Rand McNally flagpole one sunny Sunday just as church let’s out in the morning. Leopard-spotted in the crotch, seventies silk sings in the sunlight, so brightly loud they could only belong to a porno beef-cake hooked to the gills on purple-shagged cargo vans, racked in the back with waterbeds rolling in their wake.
With a little imagination, that’s what the map of the new Republic of the Lakota looks like- obnoxious sex undies flying across the horizon of the United States of America. The Lakota have seceded from the Union free and legal, thanks to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a free independent nation. Its map looks as if the spirit of Mo-nah-se-tah slipped out from under Custer’s drunk, passed-out body, and strung his bikini G-string up the flagpole. The slick stains of the Yellow Haired rapist flap across the map for the whole world to see.
Treaties promised sovereignty as long as the river flows and the eagle flies, but the water was damned, every bird shot dead by the white man, murdered in the river to drench the gold in a bloody-red American sunset. The generals slaughtered the buffalo to “destroy the Indians commissary,” and when the Lakota starved, they told them to eat the grass, eat shit.
When the Lakota defended themselves, they called it a massacre. When the Lakota were massacred, they called it Indian Affairs. Sitting Bull may have scalped Custer’s Yellow Hair, but the grandsons of Yellow Hairs banished him to a freak act carnival ride as Buffalo Bill rewrote the history of time.
But still Wild Bill remembers: “Every Indian outbreak I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government.”
Surrender surrounds serenity; serenity bleeds from broken promises. When the Lakota Ghost Dancers surrendered, serenity flowed like a river all over Wounded Knee. Men, women, children murdered in the snow like Buffalo, like Eagles, like beautiful elemental animals, rising into fog, whispering their names in our dreams.
Four days after the Massacre of Wounded Knee, the Wizard of Oz spelled history: “…our only safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”
The yellow brick road is paved with gold and washed in blood, meandering through the heart of the American Indian. The white man tried to wipe Indians from the face of their own minds, boarding schools obliterating languages, dances, grandmothers. Babies sold as vegetables. Reservation starvation in a country made of millionaires.
Lakota men die at 44, the lowest life expectancy on earth. Lakota infants die at 200 times the national average. Extermination through litigation, water rights sapped, property stolen right off the map. Untamable refugees shot in the back, stuffed in the trunk of the white man’s Cadillac.
The same white man who owned blues musicians like cattle, whipped them and raped them and fed them to sharks. Sold their families. Stole their names.
Yet blues music bleeds identity, gushing like veins. Listen as Jazz Blues Bebop believes I am me, Black is beautiful, what a wonderful (sad) world.
Because the greatest blow to oppression is to be. Exist. Existential becomes elemental when the Small Pox Holocaust says you should be dead. Simply being alive honors grandfathers’ great grandfathers. Alive to remember the headless buffalo, the frozen bodies at Wounded Knee, the ancient burial grounds flattened by Wal-Marts and golf T’s.
Against all odds- Calvary bullets, smallpox for tots, brainwashing school farms, FBI hit goons, major league cartoons- the Republic of the Lakota lives. The Lakota exist, and so does the wind. North and South Dakota harvest the finest winds on continental America, enough to power every city in America. The Lakota will plant fields of windmills, like corn, and sell wind to the world like barrels of oil. May all the tribes gather in a circle and renounce their US citizenship, grow wind and become elemental again.
And flapping in that wind across the new map of the US shine Custer’s jungle spotted porno panties, American history with stains in the crotch. America may ignore it, pretend its undies mean nothing in the breeze, but the whole world can see. Let all the world salute the sad, tattered BVDs of American history, loud like booty music, glistening shit in the sun.
