The Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota is windswept and beautiful. I had arrived at the homeland of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Black Elk to research background for The Backward Time Traveler. A car park overlooked the fields at Wounded Knee where, in 1890, the US Army slaughtered up to 300 Lakota men, women and children with cannon and rifle fire.
The government awarded twenty soldiers the Medal of Honor. The dead and wounded Indians were left lying in the snow. In 1990, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed a resolution formally expressing “deep regret” for the massacre.
Well, that balances things up. No matter that the Rez now sits in the second poorest county in the USA. A place where three in ten adults have a job. Homes where over a dozen people will share three bedrooms. The future looks dark, and the good old days aren’t coming back; they weren’t that cushy anyway.
An Oglala girl, about 20 years old, approached me hesitantly and held up a dream catcher to sell. It was simple: beads in Lakota colors of red, white black and yellow encased in a hoop of wood.
‘It’s real,’ she said. ‘Not made in China. The wood comes from the cherry trees along the creek over there. $20?’ Her partner, holding a three-month-old baby, sat in a car watching.
I automatically haggled, beat her down to $15. I was a hundred miles away when I realized she needed every buck she could get. That extra $5 would have helped her little family a lot. I’ve cursed that unthinking piece of insensitivity ever since. My head was stuck in the past when it should have been rooted in the present.