On the road. Bear's Rock, WY. July 5, 2004.

It is nighttime here at the campground at the foot of Bear’s Rock, or Devils Tower as we know it, Bear’s Rock as it has been referred to for far longer than 1906 when this strange rock protrusion became the first US National Monument. Brandon wanders the prairie off to my left, the sun not a shadow in the grey & foggy night. There are 2 deer that edge the perimeter of our campground, just close enough to be curious but safe. There are also a number of tipis set-up here, on this long-held sacred spot of ancient and todays native’s land.



I am writing to overcome my complacency, to capture some memories before they become a final & swift blur & because I feel artsy & cramped & need to commune with myself.


The west has done some kind of # on my head. Left me far more perplexed than anything else—all while in such deep admiration of this country—literally: of the great & beautiful, exploited or rescued, gawked at instead of honored LAND. The question, nagging, ripping me up with its insinuations. American. What does it mean?

Back east we have the legacy of slavery that still smacks its physical presence, a generally unacknowledged & quiet pain all around the small towns still segregated. I claim open-hearted and mindedness but can’t, on some days, walk own the street in Chestertown without tromping along my own self part of the sludge of the violent & belittling white mans past. It is what happens to my mind without my consciousness—on days when I am unable to see and instead note the color of a person’s skin or the unchecked assumption of where they live. I, immobile in the vestiges of a history that continues to blind and bind our present day, terrorized by the truth of people still subordinate, suffering, deprived & most of all, unheard or seemingly unrecognized.


In utter disbelief of me of who I am I try unsuccessfully to break out of the sludge I challenge myself what is it like to be in the heart to have the blood of someone here who doesn’t have white skin.


Ahhhh, then to come west. First, the effigy mounds after crossing the Mississippi out of the charming pleasant Galena, Illinois original home of Ulysses S. Grant. An effigy mound, Ancient mounds built for honor and ritual by long ago native peoples, these relics some of which dating back to BC time and destroyed, many, by the settlers who thought A) Indians to be too primitive & savage to be capable of such construction & B) felt land to be much more measured by its profitability that its juncture of Still=Sacred. On the Big River scenic drive in Iowa there is history, some mounds still in tact, and me, this is me, part of My History. And all this, all this after the long drive across Route 3 in southern Canada, the truck stops every 5 to 10 miles Oh Ontario and your oldskool Americana your 50’s diner food, all this after the strange majesty of Niagra turned so cheaply in to plastic-replica amusements, cardboard-packaged preservatives expensive tourist toys and plasiticine goods. These mounds, my Americanism, I American Witness, American Aggressor of the cruel destruction, cultural obliteration, ohhh plastic-sided homogenization my Free Heritage, my all powerful all-American Hands.


From Michigan through the heavy traffic outside Chicago & the touching urban sprawl of a melting pot in procession on 83 & finally onto 22 where we stopped for a small time farmland carnival in the middle of the fields of Illinois. Onward across Iowa.


And camping in Crystal Lake off Route 9 & the gorgeous headwaters of Iowa’s great rivers against the fertile green rolling grounds. Effigies: beer can empties, candy wrappers, diapers and paper towels. Little lost wishes all about the campgrounds, at the far end a group of farm boys in jacked-up pick-ups, blared music, drinking beers, leaving their trash on the ground all through the night still there in the day times telling light.


We got in to South Dakota, Siox City that evening on 52. I treated us to Mexican in celebration of being out of Iowa. Out of Mitchell next day and now we switched to 90 highwaying it over the prairie & private ranches and now we were West. Grand sky & rolling country far as the eye could see. Rolling land, rolling America rolling American me. South on 83 to lesser known 44 W across the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Small badlands, yellow & brown now began to replace all the vibrant & rolling green.


And to know the land? TO KNOW the LAND is to be a true Native. True American, I take my nativity by the hand.


Paha Sapa the following day & late in the afternoon in awe tears on the faces of Brandon & I, a herd of Buffalo grazing Buffalo National Grassland, at one time this country was home to 60 million bison, lifelines of all native peoples, today as we witnessed they occupy national parks in the west at numbers of about 160, 000, national parks in some cases which were established primarily to have sanctioned land on which to slaughter buffalo, Grant when he was president leading the task force to disparage the native peoples of their source of worship and food. Onto the Black Hills, sacred land to the natives until gold camps like in Deadwood were set up in the late 1890s to tear apart the inside of these sacred hills dark with ponderosa pines, with coyotes & bison & pronghorns & deer on the outside, whole cherished ecologies living on blood, whole American footprints of God, the Voice of all the lives made to be brought up from the land, us people only ones with consciousness to be her Voice, oh~ America~! American…Land…General Custer park with your namesake, here in the state with more racial profiling on its indian peoples than back east on its blacks.


And last night, me, we, us Americans so blessed—watched a privately funded fireworks display illuminate the rocks of Rushmore in celebration of our National Heritage, our Independence Day, Day of Religious Freedom We Finally Won From England. The fireworks display ignited not just the sky but the hills, the black ponderosa’d hills beneath Rushmore above Herney Peak where Black Elk saw his vision Everywhere is the center of the Universe, the hills of this America set on fire from the fireworks, smoke and fire burning the land on the fourth of July.


I am here, center of the Universe foot of Bear’s Rock, Wyoming. Tents, deers, tipis and me. My land, my people, my American night, my America dream…?