Tuesday, June 14, 2005

"Viet Cong at Wounded Knee" by Woody Kipp

“Viet Cong at Wounded Knee: The Trail of a Blackfeet Activist” by Woody Kipp (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 68588-0255. Copyright 2004. ISBN 0-8032-2760-4) is another in the American Indian Lives series. Woody grew up a little farther along the High Line, west of Sid Larson, in Cut Bank, an oil town like Shelby. Maybe the most salient difference between the two is that Sid went to law school and Woody went to journalism school. Sid writes cool; Woody writes hot. Of course, they’re different tribes -- their families had different styles -- and yet they both ended up college professors. Both were avid readers as kids and as adults.

The title of Woody’s autobiography is clear: that he became a Marine, was proud of it, then gradually “went native” as his commanding officer said, and ended up radicalized with tracer bullets zipping over his head at Wounded Knee, that iconic example of American insurgency. He sticks close to his theme, like a man with a hand on a rope during a blinding blizzard.

When I asked someone about Woody, they said, "Well... I don't know what to tell you, but there sure are a lot of women mad at him." Clearly, reading the dance card presented here, he hasn't forgotten many or maybe ANY of them, including a woman in Vietnam and his Blackfeet daughters who are babies in this book. Neither has he forgotten what he was drinking during each incident, nor the make and year of his rez bomb at the time.

Woody is six years younger than me, and if he hadn't gone to high school in Cut Bank instead of Browning, I'd have been his English teacher. Most of the other Blackfeet "Viet Cong" his age were in my classes. Because of being the informal bailiff when drunks were tried the “morning after” by Bob Scriver, who was City Magistrate and JP in the Fifties and Sixties in Browning, I knew most of the older drinkers he mentions and I knew both Louis Plenty Treaty and Joe Eagle Child because of sitting in their Thunder Pipe Bundle Circle. Though I'm a Napi-yah-kee -- white woman -- and pretty much a non-drinker, I agree with his descriptions of that time. I knew those Browning bars from the outside. They're gone now. Alcohol is easy compared to meth. That "’Nam" and empowerment generation was easy compared to their children and grandchildren.

All that out of the way, this book is free of theory and lecturing, quite simple and straightforward, one story after another, the way information is transmitted in the old Blackfeet world. Sure ‘nuff, it begins with his birth and ends with Wounded Knee II, but without chest-pounding or even TOO much rolling around in the pathos and deprivation of it all -- which was quite real. The stories I liked best, of course, were about being out on the ranch with his older brother. The stories that Woody tells are on the lean side, but if you know the times and the characters, they are pretty eloquent. They mark a clear set of stepping stones for a baby born to a Blackfeet woman named "Shanghai Monroe" but raised by Joe and Isabell Kipp, then in their fifties, in the white corner of Glacier County. It's pretty clear how he ended up being shot at by artillery he had been taught to operate in Vietnam. What's less clear is why he went on back to Missoula to finish up college. But that's the next book maybe.

The great usefulness of this book, I think, is that it is clear, short, and accessible enough for anyone to read. No need to be a fancy literati. Maybe there's a little too much about booze and women (after a while it sounds like bragging) but that would keep those readers interested. It has no tricky humor like Sherman Alexie nor is there anything kinky. Strangely, there's a kind of "Kipp-ness" to it. Since the second-to-the-original Kipp adopted a lot of survivors of Heavy Runner's band after the Baker Massacre, a lot of Kipps are really Heavy Runners. What everyone forgets is that Heavy Runner was a PEACE chief. It was Mountain Chief who was brilliantly resistant. Heavy Runner was thoughtful and conciliatory. It's a kind of sweetness. Which got him killed.

But part of Kipp-ness is getting out there and participating in whatever comes along. This is different from the writing done by Jim Welch, who grew up on a different reservation anyway (Fort Belknap near Havre). Welch, like Kipp, learned to write in Missoula, but he learned as an academic and a poet. Woody learned as a journalist though he did take a course from Richard Hugo. (Sid Larson began his college years at Eastern in Billings -- very different from hippie Missoula.)

The dust jacket does one of my favorite tricks -- Sherman Alexie did it earlier. On the front is Woody in his dance costume with his dance roach and his face painted. On the back cover is Woody in a three piece suit, braids and spectacles. What you learn from reading the book is that when he's in costume, without his glasses, he can't see beyond his formerly broken nose. In his suit, with his glasses, he can see you very well and he's smiling.

Sid claims that when he was born, his ears were pierced, a sign of having been an old wise person in a former life. Woody’s claim is that the family got snowed in and ran out of canned evaporated milk, so for six days he was fed chewed-up bull elk meat and did well on it.

When I last saw Woody, this just-past Christmas Day, he had grown a rather remarkable Yosemite Sam mustache and was in love again. He says he’ll finish the second book soon, a book that is really a continuation of the first book (which was about war) but leads into the spiritual growth that redeems the first book (peace). I look forward to it.

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