The Unforgotten

Only the earth and the mountains

White Antelope

At the edge of Wounded Knee, overlooking a grassy stretch of prairie in South Dakota, stands a stout granite memorial. By its edge red ribbons and upturned flags on graves twist gently in

the wind, a witness to the American Indian Movement's previously militant incarnation. The inverted flag is still used by the US military as a sign that

one of its own is in distress. A wire fence corrals a mass grave where massacred Indians now lie, their contorted faces frozen since the day the killing ended. The memorial is inscribed simply: ''This monument is erected by

surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in memory of the Chief Big Foot massacre.''

A few feet away, set in the sun-thrashed earth and against the enormous sky,

an

old woman, Claudia Iron Hawk, stands silently with her grand-daughter, giving

some sense of scale to the tragedy. More than 200 Lakota men, women and children were killed at the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 and many others fell

victim to pursuing soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry and a snow storm.

Claudia Iron Hawk, 69, lives in a small, paint-flaked house at the bottom and to the left of the Wounded Knee site. Her grandfather was Iron Hawk who fought

with Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn against General George Armstrong Custer

in

1876. Claudia's grandmother, Comes Crawling, lost her mother, uncle and

cousin

at Wounded Knee. She is bitter about the massacre and her quiet anger

ruptures

the dialogue between us. ''We still have our culture, our religion, our language. Even when they kill us we have it.''

On the ground beside us there is fruit, cigarettes, food and coloured cloth. Offerings, she says, by those who believe in the Lakota ways and not Church, nor religion. A clash of symbols, but symbols have their own life. ''I feel

sad

standing here. But that's why I live here. To be near them.''

Next week, a group of council officials from Glasgow and members of the

Wounded

Knee Survivors Association will attend a short, but dignified spiritual ceremony at Wounded Knee and Eagle Butte in memory of Lost Bird, White

Buffalo,

Black Elk, Long Bull, Mr High Hawk, Black Coyote and all the others who died there. The city delegation will return a historic Ghost Dance shirt which belonged to one of the victims, and which has been behind glass at the Kelvingrove Gallery and Museum in Glasgow for more than a century. The return of the shirt, a creased and tattered calico garment, decorated with tassels

and

feathers, punctured by bullet holes and stained with blood, ends five years

of

protracted negotiations between the council and the Lakota people who have fought to win it back. After the ceremonies, the Ghost Dance Shirt will be taken to the Cultural Heritage Centre, in Pierre, the capital

of South Dakota, where it will remain until a more intimate home is found closer to the reservations. The fight for the Ghost Dance Shirt has been won. But the legacy of Wounded Knee remains. For most in the Native American Indian

nation, a greater battle lies ahead.

It is Wednesday morning and Chief of Police Stanley Star Comes Out, of the Ogallala Sioux Tribal Officers, is having a torrid time. On the day we arrange

to meet, Bill Clinton, the President of the United States of America, is scheduled to visit the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, a few miles west of Wounded Knee. The problems over security are multiplying by the minute, and they are writ large across his brow. It's also very hot - 95o and rising. And,

as if to compound all his worries, the local High School kids are on their summer holidays, so he knows he'll face an increase in the soaring drug and alcohol-related crimes and misdemeanours on the reservations. He allows

himself

a wry smile. ''The President's coming.''

Stanley Star Comes Out is worried that with Clinton's imminent arrival he and his officers won't have enough time to cope with his regular duties: enforcing

the curfew for kids - 9pm during term time and 10pm during the holidays (later

while driving through the reservation at night we see countless young kids breaking their curfew); dealing with the drunks (alcohol has been banned from Pine Ridge for over a century, but at least 100 people die from

alcohol-related

illnesses per year) and the increasing problems with gangs. But most worryingly for Stanley is the spiralling drug problem. His greatest challenge is making sure that a drug called crank - cheaper and more powerful than cocaine - doesn't get a complete grip on the kids growing up on the reservation. Privately, however, he fears there will be nothing to prevent the

reservation from becoming swamped.

Clinton is visiting Pine Ridge, home of the Ogallala Sioux Nation, as part of his New Markets trip which will emphasise investment in Native American Communities. Pine Ridge is the

second largest reservation in the US and has a population of

38,000. Located in the south-western region of South Dakota and established by

an 1889 Act of Congress, the reservation lies on the well-known Badlands National Park and is inhabited by the Ogallala Sioux of the Lakotas, the largest of the seven bands that make up the Teton Lakota Nation.

The reservation is poor. There are no late-model Cadillacs in car parks, no manicured lawns or neat houses. Most homes are shacks and are in desperate

need

of repair. Pine Ridge doesn't boast the monumental cowboy scenery and skies

of

Montana. Instead, its history is vivid, bloody and short.

News of jobs and housing programs is on offer - a federal government response to decades of poverty that have mired this reservation among the poorest areas

in the nation. The promises are part of a sweeping domestic economic program that Clinton has been announcing during his New Markets tour, a four-day trip to six of the nation's poorest areas.

The President will sign a declaration creating an enterprise zone on the reservation, the first such designation on tribal land in the the United States. As an enterprise zone, the reservation will receive $20m over the next

10 years to assist with local economic development efforts. The plan calls for

creating 1000 jobs and providing affordable housing to 90% of the residents. Tax credits are also aimed at encouraging private companies to invest on the reservation. Total investment, including other public and private funds, could

top $100m over the next 10 years.

For Stanley Star Comes Out all this may be a little too late. Stanley, a Vietnam veteran, knows about crank, he knows what it is capable of, how fast

it

can spread, how easily the methamphetamine hydrochloride can be injected, smoked, snorted or swallowed.

He is aware that the drug, first manufactured in Japan almost a century ago, can last up to 12 hours per hit. Crank increases heart-rate, causes sexual arousal, euphoria, loss of appetite, paranoia and insomnia. The long-term effects include damage to the heart, liver and brain, as well as depression

and

malnutrition.

He believes that the drug, which is spreading across the American heartland like a tornado, will become the latest legacy of the white man to decimate his

Indian people. ''It will get much worse before it gets better.''

According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency, crank is the most lethal drug to have hit mainstream America during the last three decades. In America, crank

is

making rapid in-roads among the country's poorest people. In Pine Ridge

no-one

is poorer than the Native Indians who live there. It is here, amidst the broken bottles, the dirt poor roads, the underfunded schools and the bored youngsters, that crank in 1999 is threatening to become the new crack, the scourge of the inner cities of America in the 1980s.

''Alcohol was a behaviour that our people didn't know anything about,'' says Stanley, ''and the exact same thing is happening now with drugs. The drugs are

attracting young people who have very little hope for their future. There is nothing here for them. When the drug dealers come looking, offering some cheap

alternative, poor man's coke, it's hard for these kids to say no. We call the future generations the unborn. If we don't win this war we're going to lose

all

the unborn. The survival of our young is at stake.''

The unemployment rate for Native Americans living on or near reservations is 50% and, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for the Ogallala Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge it is 73%. Half of the total Native American workforce is unemployed, while 29% of Native Americans are homeless, and 59% are in substandard housing.

On Pine Ridge, 63% of the population lives below the poverty line. 38% of Indians aged six to 11 live below the poverty level, more than twice the

number

for all races in the US. The most up-to-date figures show that over 63% of young Native Americans graduated from high school, compared to 77% for the total US population. Latest figures show

that almost 20% of American households on reservations

did not have a sink with piped water, a stove and a refrigerator, compared to just 1% for US households. The majority of American Indian households on reservations do not have

a telephone.

Directly across from the Building of Public Safety, where Stanley and his officers are housed, is Big Bats Texaco petrol station and restaurant, where the Pine Ridge residents meet up socially. On one wall there is a freshly-written sign which says: ''Welcome President Clinton. Remember our treaties. Alcohol treatment is needed for the Lakotas.'' This is also where

the

young Indians hang out. After-school facilities and centres are inadequate, there is a serious lack of resources to address social issues and no half-way houses, detox or treatment centres for alcohol and drugs. Those with problems have to be treated outwith the reservation and these places are limited. There

is a backlog here of people who are wanting help. There are no jobs when the kids graduate High School.

Kyle Juvenile Detention Centre, about 80 miles from the reservation, is where the Lakota youngsters who offend repeatedly are taken. The kids who are sent here are generally victims of their own parents' substance abuse. They come from broken homes, where violence, alcohol and poverty is rife. According to one teenager hanging out at Big Bats, crank arrives on the reservations from Mexico via the nearest cities: Sioux Falls and Rapid City. He tells me that he

wouldn't touch it but he knows young Indians who do. ''That stuff's crazy,

man.

Crazy.'' He drinks heavily, he says, and smokes marijuana. ''Nothing else to do round here. Me and my buddies don't got nothing to do.'' Life on the reservation is a diet of boredom. Staying off drugs, he says, listlessly, is impossible. ''If he does it,'' talking about no-one in particular, ''we all do

it.'' One of his friends is currently on a drug treatment

programme, and they both know that when he gets out he will go straight back

to

his dealer.

Steven Eagle Bull, 15, a pupil at Red Cloud High School, has heard about

crank.

He thinks some of the biker gangs sell it in the border towns of Nebraska and

South Dakota. ''It's supposed to be real mean.''

He spends most of his time playing basketball or attending the Su-Anne

Cultural

Centre for the youth of Pine Ridge, which is really no more than a burger bar

and a pool table. The nearest movie theatre for him and his friends is almost two hours' drive away. Many of his friends go to Whiteclay, Nebraska, where they can buy beer. ''There are so many families where the parents have got serious alcohol problems. If the parents are in a bad way, what are the kids

to

do?''

Dealers are turning to crank and abandoning other drugs like heroin and

cocaine

because the profit margins are exceptional. It is also proving easier to produce larger quantities using easily-acquired ingredients, which in turn makes it simpler to distribute.

Sharon Mosseau, Principal at Pine Ridge High School, believes that reactions

to

the spiralling drug problems on the reservation and, in particular, the

threat

of crank, from both a national and local level, have been lacklustre. She cites the Comprehensive Methamphetamine Control Act, which was signed by President Clinton three years ago, restricting the possession of equipment for

making the drug and the use of the ingredient chemicals. So far the Republican

Congress has allocated as little as $10m to combat the deluge of crank.

''We had a girl who died of alcohol poisoning this last year,'' says Mosseau. ''We had another boy who committed suicide. We've had students who have been shot. Some of them shooting themselves through depression and hopelessness. Kids as young as nine and ten huff [inhale] gas. We have problems with gangs

on

the reservations. Drug dealing at the school is getting worse but we can't

get

the dealers. We've had drug dogs come through recently but they found nothing.

''We're now issuing car permits for seniors only because students were

bringing

drugs in the cars and dealing from there.'' The police regularly speak to the

teachers about crack, heroin and cocaine abuse. According to the South Dakota US Attorney's office in 1998 there were over 260 arrests across the state for crank-related offences, either for possession or distribution. The year previous there were 206.

By mid-afternoon the President is in full swing. Earlier he had toured the Igloo housing area, a block of units that are former military housing. Roughly

58 people live on the block, two-thirds of whom are children. He greeted the locals and listened to the challenges they face in their community.

At Pine Ridge High School, he delivered a speech to more than 300 tribal leaders and a crowd of around 5000. ''This is a good place to invest, a good place to live in Indian country,'' Clinton said. ''I have seen today not only poverty but promise, and I have seen enormous courage.'' He told his audience that the United States has a unique opportunity to address the lingering problems of life on the reservations. ''If we can't do this now we will never get around to doing it. So let us give ourselves a gift for the 21st century, an America where nobody gets left behind and everyone has a chance.''

It was the first time that a sitting president had visited Indian country

since

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Only Calvin Coolidge had been to Pine Ridge, and that was part of a vacation to the neighbouring Black Hills.

But not everyone shared the President's optimism. Some at the speech held up signs urging the return of land taken from the Sioux more than a century ago. Another referred to unsolved murders on the reservation. Babe Poor Bear held

up

a sign urging Clinton to follow the terms of treaties that had given Sioux most of the western South Dakota. Those treaties were broken more than a century ago and the tribes were restricted to smaller reservations.

Pete Fills Pipe, 88, has seen both presidential visits to Pine Ridge, but says

the times on the reservation are as different as the men themselves. Fills

Pipe

was 16 when Coolidge visited in 1927. He admits to liking Coolidge but says that Clinton is a liar. ''If I could have time with him myself,'' he booms, ''I'd tell him they aren't showing you the real poverty. Go out in the country

where the old people live. Go see the real suffering of the Native American Indian. Young people don't want to live here. They got nothing to do, why should they care?''

In the old days, he says, almost cryptically, people had gardens. They kept them neat. ''Nobody's got gardens anymore.'' Robert Red Owl, a tribal chief with the Ogallala Sioux Nation and a Vietnam veteran who served two tours

under

the flag of the United States, added: ''I went to a war not only for the people of South Dakota, but so that grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, daughters, children and the unborn and others all across America could sleep

at

night in peace. At the same time this country was taking land from my family.

Will President Clinton change all this? I am not so sure.''

Despite their unresolved land issues with the federal government, according to

President Harold Salway, of the Ogallala Nation, they will continue to pursue that land. The land, he says, has taught his people to be a strong and persevering nation. He says that he is humbled by the leaders who have come before him - Crazy Horse, American Horse, Little Wound, Afraid Of His Horse, Red Cloud, Red Shirt and all the other leaders who have fought for their land.

''All these men have set a direction for the Ogallala leaders of today,'' he points out, ''and I think these men would agree that this

historic meeting with the United States President on our hallowed land will have a lasting impact for our people. This is a great opportunity to remind

the

rest of America that Indian people walk in both worlds. We hold our culture, our tradition and our land sacred, but we continue to adapt and grow as part

of

the American community.''

But Salway is all too aware that Pine Ridge faces many challenges. Life expectancy for the Ogallala man is the lowest in the US. The community has

more

than 4000 families waiting for homes and their current housing stock is in serious disrepair. Unemployment is recorded as high as 73%-plus, but they have

seen this rate soar higher and higher. The federal empowerment zone designated

will attempt to pave the way for economic development. It is a model,

President

Clinton hopes, for other tribes to learn from.

Lucien Knis, 19, Leonard Fisherman, 20, Daniel Titus, 21, and Mike Ten Fingers, 21, are all cousins from Pine Ridge. President Clinton, they chorus, is wasting his time. ''He's just another white man telling us how to live our lives,'' says Knis, an amateur boxer and member of the gang Tre Tre Gangster Cryp. ''He's got nothing to say that I want to hear. What you see here is what

you get. Violence, drink and drugs.'' I ask him about crank. ''It comes to the

res' once in a while, but I wouldn't touch it. I do everything else but not that stuff.'' The young Lakota stand against the wall, not once catching my eye. ''When it catches on, everyone's goin' to get real high.''

We head to Eagle Butte, driving through roads built as migration routes for determinedly mobile people, still bearing the stamp of an era just left

behind.

Roads full of possibility and history. We drive through the Badlands,

littered

with either the ancient or the ephemeral. Driving on these roads you get the feeling of the dustbowl refugees of the 1920s or the chrome and PVC diners of the 1950s. The roads selling a melancholy confirmation of past glories - the opposite, in fact, of the feelings you get driving through the reservations where a ghastly attrition is evident.

Grainfields spill their colour across a downward twist of South Dakota,

rolling

to an abrupt end as we enter Eagle Butte, home of Marcella Le Beau. Rough and

remote spaces rule the breaks deviating occasionally at rimrocks where a horseman rides slowly, seeming as small as an insect on a dirt road. In the rear-view mirror we can almost see a haunted town behind us, where broken bottles and garbage litter the dusty, pot-holed streets. Not surprisingly, there are no arrogant skyscrapers, with hostile reflecting walls. We park in front of the Dairy Queen fast-food outlet. Inside Marcella is sitting in a booth nibbling on lunch. She is 75, with snow white hair, but looks years younger. Only her hands give away her age. Tanned and withered, they are as fragile as last year's leaves.

Eagle Butte, home to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe is, like Pine Ridge, one

of

the poorest reservations in America where unemployment runs at 80%. Stepping outside the Dairy Queen, the reservation looks vast and desolate, interrupted only by sunshine and the landscape of a few battered Fords, rusting now with the vague promise of a better destination. Only recently, has the town opened

a

Super 8 Motel, providing accommodation to the itinerant preacher, the passing

aluminium salesman and elderly couples touring the country. No-one from the town can afford to stay there.

Marcella is the secretary of the Wounded Knee Survivors Association. For more than four years she has been at the forefront of the campaign to repatriate

the

Ghost Dance Shirt from Glasgow. When she finishes her lunch she invites us around to her house at East Frontier Street, a few minutes' drive from the Dairy Queen.

The house is small and cosy, but suffocatingly warm in the afternoon heat

which

is in the high 90s. She switches on a standing fan (very few of the houses on

the reservation have air-conditioning). The walls are covered in photographs

of

her children and grandchildren and a Native American painting by her daughter

Diane. There is also a photograph of her great-grandfather Joseph Fourbear (Mato Topa is his Indian name), on a wall by the fireplace. Marcella is also a

descendent of Rain In The Face, the warrior who killed General George

Armstrong

Custer at the battle of the Little Big Horn.

Fourbear was one of the leaders who signed an 1868 treaty with the US Government, promising ''to give up the Indian ways and live like a white

man'',

in payment for his people having education, churches and healthcare among other things. From that day on, ''he didn't so much as dance Indian''. She calls it cultural genocide. ''There was no amount of reading that would make

me

believe my grandfather was dirty and uneducated, as they tried to teach us in

schools.'' Marcella's father, Joseph Ryan, was an Irishman who was disowned by

his family for marrying an Indian.

Her mother died when she was about 10. After her death, her father encouraged her to remain true to her Indian ways because, she says proudly: ''My father loved the Lakota people, he thought they were the greatest people he had ever met. Honest and good and he would say that he couldn't say the same for his

own

people. He repeatedly told us what a wonderful mother we had. He told us that

if she had been alive she would have continued the Native American tradition with us.'' Ryan, a Catholic, gave up his faith and joined the Episcopal Church

of which Marcella's mother was a member. The young Marcella trained as a nurse

during the Second World War and joined the Army Reserves Nursing Corps before travelling to London, Paris and Belgium, where she was in charge of her own ward. In December, 1944, she was near the front lines during the Battle of the

Bulge. She continued nursing for 31 years

and was director of nursing at the Indian Health Service when she retired in 1990. She still serves on the Tribal Council. She is happy the Ghost Dance Shirt is being returned, but says the Native American Indians are still fighting the social problems that exist on the reservations. ''The young Indians on the reservations are caught up in this new war,'' she says, shaking

her head, ''our new Wounded Knee''. On the Cheyenne River reservation

incidents

of alcohol abuse have reached epidemic proportions.

The problems with drugs among the younger generation, says Marcella, are just part of a long-standing genocide against her people. The US Government will help foreign areas in disasters, she says, yet her people receive little in

the

way of help. The descendants of Stone Horse, Crazy Horse, Rain In The Face, Lean Bear and Big Tree are once more being massacred. ''We are proud of who we

are, we are proud of where we came from, but still our children are being

taken

away from us.''

The US Government disgraced itself when more than 200 Lakota Sioux men, women and children perished at the Wounded Knee massacre. The Ghost Dance shirt was stripped from one of the warriors. But controversy over the shirt did not surface until a few years ago.

It began with a copperplate letter from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Company on December 17, 1891, while it was performing in Dennistoun, Glasgow. The letter from George Crager, was to the curator of ''Calvin Grove Museum,'' and it stated: ''Hearing that you are empowered to purchase relics for your museum I would respectfully inform you that I have a collection of Indian relics which

I

will dispose of before we sail for America.'' The Plains Indian Wars that followed the American Civil War were largely characterised by defeat, exile

and

subjugation for the Indians. The Sioux, during that era, were so desperate they began to put faith in a religion known as the Ghost Dance, which originated with the Paiute Indians of Nevada in the late 1860s.

The Ghost Dance religion found its prophet in a holy man named Wovoka who, in 1889, claimed to have talked to

God in a vision. Wovoka preached a strict moral code and abstinence from war making. He foretold the coming of a great flood that would wash the white man away and restore the Indian people to their traditional way of life. To hasten

that coming, Wovoka called for Indians to perform rituals of chanting and dancing in ceremonial costumes that invoked the spirit of this faith.

To the US Government, the Ghost Dance movement represented a threat and challenge to its authority, and a policy of suppression was adopted. As part

of

that suppression, Indian police on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation attempted to arrest Chief Sitting Bull on December 14, 1890, and ended up shooting him dead.

Alarmed by the slaying and fearing being killed by soldiers if they remained,

a

group of several hundred Minniconjou Sioux from the Cheyenne River reservation, led by the elderly and ailing Chief Big Foot, fled south in

bitter

winter weather to seek refuge at the Pine Ridge reservation. At Wounded Knee Creek, the band of 106 warriors and more than twice that number in women, children and elderly were intercepted by 470 troops of the Seventh Cavalry, armed with cannon.

The Indians were placed under arrest and an attempt was made to disarm them. According to Sioux accounts, a deaf Indian named Black Coyote didn't

understand

the order to surrender his rifle and struggled to keep it, accidentally

firing

into the air. Immediately the Cavalry opened fire in general. Big Foot, who had pneumonia and couldn't stand, was shot to death where he lay. The US Government awarded 17 soldiers the Medal of Honour for their actions at

Wounded

Knee.

Marcella tells me it is only when those spirits are at rest that the Indian people will stop grieving. It is their past that tells them who they are. They

cannot move on until they know where they came from, and how things ended. And

how life is reborn. She asks us to follow her in her car and drive to the

Harry

Johnston Cultural Centre, Eagle Butte (which doubles as a bingo hall most nights), where we'll meet Goldie Iron Hawk, whose great-grandfather Ghost

Horse

died at Wounded Knee.

Goldie, who is 71, talks for an hour about her ancestors, how proud she is of them, how she wishes she were young again and how she fears for the future of all Indians on the reservations. She is delighted that Glasgow has decided to return the Ghost Dance Shirt.

''It's very important for it to return,'' she says solemnly. ''Everything belonging to us should be returned. But I'm getting old now, very old, and I want to see it. I want my children and their children to see it. I tell my children and grandchildren that we didn't do no wrong. We didn't deserve what happened to us. I have fears for all the Indian kids in the future. I feel bad

because the drugs and the alcohol is taking away our culture again. When my young ones are around me you know, I feel like crying. I tell them don't do this and don't do that, have a good life. I worry for them. I hug them a lot. They had no business taking the Ghost Shirt. It belongs to nobody but the Indians. My people should decide what to do with it. The earth is our monument.''

Marcella Le Beau and Goldie Iron Hawk are hopeful that the facts will ultimately accommodate history. They cannot be given back their lives, or

their

lands and hunting grounds, or their way of living that endured for centuries before the coming of the white man. Secretly they know this. They know there

is

no epiphanic resolution packed with all the promises they had been given before all the broken treaties. But they want to be treated with a little dignity.

During our conversation I think of the words I have read from one of the survivors, a man called Black Elk. ''I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered. A people's dream died

there.'' As I rise to leave, and as we shake hands, Goldie looks at me and says: ''People come here, for what I don't know. To look, to stare. They see themselves in the massacre, the massacre of their own creation. And they are not taken with the sight.''