All the Tears
behind the dams, the head trips, and the loss of our tranquility
“According to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, the territorial lands of the Three Tribes was an area of more than 12 million acres, extending from east of the Missouri River into Montana. In the following years, to justify taking more land, the federal government, through several allotment acts and the 1910 Homestead Act, reduced the reservation to less than three million acres. The flooding of the prime river bottomland was yet another assault on the autonomy and cultures of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara/Sahnish.”
~ The History and Culture of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sahnish
When Lewis and Clark, the early American explorers, wintered with the Three Tribes in 1804, they were awestruck by the variety and quality of their crops. The tribes cultivated special seed stocks selected for the short growing seasons, heavy rains, and early frosts of the Northern Plains. In the early 1900s, the non‑Indian farmers adopted the Three Tribes’ strains of corn and beans and began industrial production and distribution of their seeds.
The federal government built a dam in 1956 that flooded their rich and fertile river valley. The Garrison Dam was part of the Pick-Sloan plan to control flooding of the Missouri River. The Three Tribes lost about 155,000 acres, including 94 percent of their best agricultural land to the Garrison Dam project, according to historian Michael Lawson in his book, Dammed Indians. Lawson calls the series of dams “the single most destructive act perpetrated against an Indian tribe by the United States.”
Early on in the voyage, during the first winter of the expedition in 1804–05, Lewis and Clark built Fort Mandan near the Mandan villages in what is now Bismarck, N.D. Historians agree that the expedition would not have survived this bitterly cold winter if not for the Mandan Nation. Roy Appleman of the National Park Service wrote “it was Mandan corn that got the expedition through the winter. Had the Mandan not been there, or had they had no corn to spare, or had they been hostile, the expedition would not have survived the winter.”
The neighbors of the Mandans, the Hidatsa Nation, also provided assistance. They traded food with Lewis and Clark, but their greatest gift was to provide information about the route ahead, the Great Falls of the Missouri, and in advising Lewis and Clark that they had to find the Shoshone Tribe and buy horses to be able to cross the Rockies.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1973) Jung describes his encounter with Native Americans he met in New Mexico in 1925. This event, though brief, had a profound effect on Jung, and he referred to it many times in his writings. He commented that his experience in New Mexico
made him aware of his imprisonment “in the cultural consciousness of the white man.”
To Jung, the Indians he met appeared to be tranquil and dignified. At the Taos pueblo, Jung spoke for the first time with a non-white, a Hopi elder named Antonio Mirabal (also known as Ochwiay Biano and Mountain Lake), who said that whites were always uneasy and restless: “We do not understand them. We think that they are mad.” Jung asked him why he thought the whites were mad, and the reply was “ ‘They say that they think with their heads . . . . We think here,’ he said, indicating his heart.” Impressed, Jung said he realized that Mountain Lake had unveiled a significant truth about whites.
No matter how far down the wrong road you have traveled, turn back. — a folk proverb
We can’t simply turn back time. There must be another way.
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To find it, perhaps we need first of all to stop thinking with our heads, at least now and then, and to release all the tears behind the dams in our hearts.
This takes conscious effort when we have even forgotten how to mourn.
The Powwow at the End of the World
By Sherman Alexie
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.
For more in the dammed up series, see The Big Dam and How to Live
