2003-01-17 : Ogala Sioux named Braveheart
After meeting a friend at the Green Room last night and having some pretty funny and intense conversations and consuming a couple of malibu rum/pineapple juices (we decided that the drink should be named a Jamaican Train Wreck..isn't that perfect? I take full copyright on that name!) I headed up to 3rd ave and had to wait there for about 25 minutes for my bus. I ended up talking to a beautifully tragic (and inebriated) Ogala Sioux woman named Braveheart. I couldn't understand some of what she said cuz she slurred and spoke in a low, soft voice, but this much I gathered about her life: She is from South Dakota, has 7 kids, has married 3 times and buried ALL her husbands (this made me sad!) She started crying a little when she told me about how her latest husband had just died about 4 days earlier (in her arms, nonetheless)...She says she doesn't really know why he died because he wasn't terminally ill. Possibly his heart? I figured from the state she was in, that he was probably a major alcoholic as well and died from heart failure, cirrohsis of the liver, etc. Obviously she's had a hard life but she was still able to smile and look me in the eye when we started discussing Elvis, whom she says she loves. She thanked me several times for even talking to her and this took be aback because I wonder if most people treat her as an invisible, or a leper of some sort. I thought she was great, though she made me cry later because I felt so much for her pain. Anyways, fucking white people (Ok, not me personally, but you all know what I mean) and what they did to the natives when they came here (alcohol and smallpox)...just makes my blood boil. I hear that some Indian Nations are slowly rising more steadily out of their poverty and the other problems that plague them (mostly from casinos and the arts) but they still have a long way to come to rise up to the potential that The White Man destroyed for them a long time ago. Ok, that is my political rant for the day..thanks very much:)