James Giago Davies
Fighting the good Lakota fight
By James Giago Davies Last year was my first New Year’s without both parents. I figured I would incrementally miss them less as time went by, but it must take more than one year for that to happen. The generation born in the 1920’s -1930’s is leaving us, only a few remain. In my family, that generation was born and raised on Pine Ridge, attended Holy Rosary Mission, most eventually making their home in North Rapid. New Years is a time that gets me thinking of the two great Lakota clans who make up my family, the Giago’s and the Tapio’s. There is a 19th Century photo my cousin Patty showed me, of a mustachioed Pueblo Indio standing beside his horse on the Nebraska panhandle. Demetrio Tapia was his name, and he looks hard as nails, expertly equipped to work cattle. The U.S. Government thought so, and he and many other Indios married into the Oglala Lakota Tribe. The government clerks were ignorant of Spanish, and most of the Indios were illiterate, so the surnames were inadvertently altered; Gallego became Giago, Tapia became Tapio, and then these Indios were mostly settled down around Kyle, and the hard life they had lead drifting up north from the desert Southwest was mostly lost to history. They became Lakota, although their Indio blood doesn’t appear to have been counted (understandable, why would 19th Century Washington want more Indian blood—the whole idea was to assimilate the aboriginal), and by the time my generation came along that rich Southwest heritage was seldom spoken about. Family branch away, sometimes it just takes a generation, and you do not even know who your relatives are anymore. I almost got in a fight with an older Tapio boy at North Junior High, until he realized who I was, and that we were cousins. But the strangest situation occurred on a drive through the Black Hills. Wasicu friends were visiting and they had a great big van and needed a guide so I went along, and at one stop, with lots of cars on either side of the road, a young Lakota guy was sitting glum-faced on the hood of his car. “Nobody wants to help,” he told me when we got talking. That is why I roll my eyes when people assert there is no more racism in this country. There were thirty cars there, filled with Wasicu, who could have helped him with his situation. He asked many of them, none were willing. The people I was with were very devout Christians, and they eagerly volunteered to help the young man anyway they could. This does not surprise me, because I am not a Christian, but they still valued my fellowship. We drove the young man back to his fiancé, who had an extra set of keys, and as it turns out the young man was the son of Russell Means, and the fiancé was a Giago from Kyle, another cousin I had never met. There has been a bit of acrimony between those two Pine Ridge clans, so it seemed fitting love would find a way to bridge that gap. He was very handsome and she was very pretty, so that always helps. But this story is really about the Wasicu people in the van, and their role in helping two young Lakota people in need they didn’t even know. Had I not been in that van, they would have helped, in fact, they were the ones who first noticed help might be needed. My grandfather told my mother, Ethel Giago, when she was small, that this was a Whiteman’s world, and that she needed to prepare herself to live in that world. He did not mean forsake your Lakota or Indio heritage, he meant much more than that. I speculate now, because I never met my grandfather Tim Giago, Sr., (father of the Native Sun News publisher) but he was an intelligent man, who clerked for the Gildersleeves at Wounded Knee Trading Post. He was well read, self-educated, autodidactic is the technical term, and so over the years I have pondered the exact advise he was passing on to my mother. It would have to be based on a dichotomy—an intelligent man raised in a Wasicu dominated world where he was looked down on as an aboriginal inferior, but a man who took the time to painstakingly explore the Wasicu world so he knew its rhythms and nuances, and what had value, and what did not. His first language was Lakota and he was fluent in the language. Two generations removed from his world, I now see the arc of history, the telltale truth that somehow never gets brought up enough when Lakota people struggle to defend their land and heritage. We cannot do it alone. Had we that power, we would have never been bottled up on Pine Ridge in the first place. Tashunka Witco (Crazy Horse) would have defeated every Wasicu army sent against us. Blacks were once slaves and a war was fought to free them. Even then, racism was so imbedded in the American psyche it took another 100 years to end segregation. Blacks fought for justice, but the critical difference was the White people of conscience who fought and died so this injustice could be corrected. Without these historic White people of conscience what would have stopped the government from totally annihilating all aboriginal people? Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related, and only by working with White people of conscience can we stop Keystone XL, can we protect BIA funding, can we finally get a just settlement for the theft of the Black Hills. You can see this column as schmaltzy filler for NSN, or you can put aside the petty clannishness, both on the rez and between the Lakota and Wasicu. Just like the elder Tim Giago (born in 1894) we can recognize the rhythm and nuance of Wasicu culture, work together with them to make a better country, without surrendering what it is that makes us Lakota. (James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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