Indian Givers

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     If my reservation heart could open up and tell me what it was that finally broke it, it
     would reply, "It was the waiting and the expectation for some beautiful moment that
                                                                      never came."

        It's a hot, dry, reservation July when my buddy Wes and I get back from firefighting. It's only been three days since we've been back on the rez and already we want to explode. So, with our pockets fat with open doors, we fill up the gas tank and hit the Montana powwow trail. Wes wants to find himself a woman; I just wanna leave, hit the road and hang my arm out the passenger side window, watching the earth speed by beneath me because it's beautiful not having to move yet moving fast like this all at once. Maybe we'll go to a few 49ers, see old friends we haven't seen in ages, trade reservation war party stories with relatives. Even though neither of us mentioned it, the one thing we want to do, what we need to do and what we will do, is to look for some kind of release, search for an outlet that can expel all of the polluted years that this recycled reservation lifestyle has amassed.

     We dream of breathing our own air instead of the same old sad, haze that hangs over                                                                    almost every rez.

        Our reservation has a new kind of pollution. It's a combination of dreams always being just beyond our reach, a feeling of being shortchanged by an America that was never ours, feeling like a little kid lost in Wal-Mart crying and looking for his mom, and the sad realization that we have become statistics instead of tribal members. This new kind of pollution has grown thick like a fog impairing visions, making it too damn difficult to navigate through reservation life. So we stray from our powwow odyssey ending up bloodied and bruised in a reservation boxing ring also known as the Horseshoe bar(or any rez bar for that matter) Somewhere between a punch being thrown and a punch being landed we realize this isn't enough. In the past, fighting eased tensions from the weight of worlds that made their home on our backs. Fighting let us compact every bit of pain, everything reservation into a fist and thrust it into some other life. And although this release was only temporary we were content because it was us letting go. This was us kicking civilized behavior in the ass and out the door and those moments quickly became a favorite quilt just out of the dryer, all warm and inviting. But lately, after fighting, all of our internal war parties still crowd our chests.

          Sometimes it's too hard trying to survive what the grasses grew to be.

        We need something different. We need release for fists that have become frustrated. We want something bigger than our greatest dream; we want something like retro-active pay or retributive justice; something like cutting out Christopher Columbus' tongue and carving maps of our hearts onto his chest so he'll get it right this time; something like gift wrapping Custer in small pox blankets; like busting Leonard Peltier and our past out of prison; like blowing up the White House because it's too fuckin' white; like gathering every American flag, cutting them to pieces and giving them to every Indian grandma on every rez so they can make one giant, beautiful quilt to cover every cold and lonely Indian in the world because it owes us at least that much.

            We want moments that are untouched, unseen and unheard of;
                                                    We kidnap a skinhead.

        We show the skinhead to our buddy, Colan, a.k.a. Congo (depending if you party with him) and his bloodshot eyes well up, brimming with thick, break-your-heart-tears that would make even Iron Eyes Cody feel envious and says in a shaky, cracking voice like he was about to cry,

        "How did you know?" like it was the gift Santa always forgot to bring him.

        We tell Congo we could've had a set of three, one for each of us, but two got away and it was a bitch just to get this squirmy skinhead's ass in the car so,

        "Go get your own!"

        Congo laughs and laughs even harder when we tell him how the three skinheads decided to change their lives by yelling,

        "Hey amigos, go sneak back into your own country!"

        In a 1950's black and white television monotone Indian voice where Italians play the Indians, Wes says,

        "We wish we could, damn we wish we could! But since we hocked our time machine and can't time travel back a few hundred years to our own country, I think opening up a commodity can of rez whoop ass will hafta do."

        In the blink of an eye we're transformed into savages with hungry smiles like war paint, the kinds of Indians white people used to say we were, and we proceed to get all hostile on their trailer park asses. Right away two of them booked it breaking Hitler's fat black heart by showing just how much heart they put into their beliefs by abandoning their buddy with us. Once in the car he kicks at the windows, trying to break free. So I knock him out and we deck him out in hippie clothes, make him look just like Billy Jack.

     We tell Billy Jack we're going to go shake some trees tonight, set some minds on fire.                                                 We're gonna go start some war parties.

        Late that night when all the streets were asleep we took him all around the rez, instructing him to rename all of the white owned bars and taverns in red spray paint; Dachau, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Wounded Knee, Trail of Tears, my reservation. We take Billy Jack to all the schools on the rez and make him rip out the pages of history books but leave the four or five pages that cover natives. We make him write fifty times on every blackboard, "Why Sacagawea, why?"

We tell Billy Jack we want to do the impossible; we want to walk on water, be the maker
                                                 of miracles but it all depends on him.

        We let our blue-eyed native hippie hero, Billy Jack, wear his casual Friday's garb; jeans, black boots, a swastika t-shirt and an Adolph smirk. Picture this: two rez skins and one skinhead between them in the front seat of a rez-mobile sharing a coke and a cigarette. We look like Jerry Springer guests or some lame joke that came to life. We tell the skinhead we're gonna scalp him and that I want to use that scalp like a good luck charm, like a rabbits foot on my key ring, or maybe I'll even hang it from my rearview alongside a dream catcher. Wesley muffles a laugh because we can't scalp him, he's a skinhead, but he is oblivious to the obvious so right away his Adolph smirk falls off and replaced by terror and panic. All bald-headed and bony, he looks like he's on his way to take a concentration camp shower. Even his chin starts to quiver. We tell him that since gambling is in our native blood and almost a ceremony we'll let him run, even give him a twenty-second head start but before I can finish the sentence he's out the car door and we bust out laughing.

        We watch the skinhead run across his sad past and some lonely street screaming at the top of his tripe (or the top of his lungs, if you're Caucasian) and up to the first man he sees: his savior. He drops to his knees and begs the man to help him, save him,

        "Please!", because, "there's Indians after me and they're gonna scalp me!"

        The man gives the skinhead a no-fuckin'-way-get-outta-town kind of glance but then looks a little alarmed when he catches sight of the swastika t-shirt. He jerks away and quickly takes off walking but the skinhead manages to catch up, falls to his knees and grabs the man's leg, accidentally tripping him. The man scrambles to his feet and starts to take off running but notices his yarmulke has been knocked off and it's resting on the sobbing skinheads heaving chest, covering the swastika on his t-shirt. As he reaches for it he glances at the skinhead and sees the thick, pitiful tears. The man stops and his defenses drop. Slowly he helps the skinhead to his feet, putting a tattooed arm around his neck for support and together they walk to someplace new, someplace better.

  Watching this scene wrap itself up, we begin to feel different; we're more at ease in our    skin; jagged edges of our lives have become soft and bearable. We don't feel crowded     anymore; our lives suddenly have elbow room. We can breathe now and hold dreams      tight against our chests and believe. Visions are restored because me and Wes, we're                                                                       walking on water.