“It looks like about forty,” Mr. M answered. “That’s quite a lot, with the driving so bad. Hill City is one hundred and fifteen miles from here, and it’s not very big. About the same as Lodge Grass—maybe eight hundred people.”
“Is their team good?”
“We beat them sixty-three to forty the last time we played them. We were kind of embarrassed. We don’t like to run up the score that much, but they had a bad second half and our reserves played really good. We play a lot of basketball on the reservation. Everybody or their neighbor has a backboard and basket. Our kids start when they’re little, and even guys my age play. Even I do.” He patted his considerable abdomen.
The officials came onto the court, two of them Caucasians. The teams went to their benches, the starters stripping off their warmups. The Broncs got the tip, but one of the Indians snatched the ball and drove for a layup, to a roar of cheering.
At halftime the score was 38 to 17. Lee hadn’t eaten since she’d had a sandwich at the airport in Billings; there hadn’t been time. So Mr. M took her down the street to a cafe, almost empty except for the cook and a waitress. Lee, who ordinarily avoided fatty foods, ordered a burger and french fries.
“Do you have chocolate peanut-butter pie?” M asked.
“We have two slices left,” the waitress said.
“I’ll take one.” He looked at Lee. “You better take the other one. Calories don’t count when you’re traveling.”
She laughed. “I can gain weight just looking at chocolate peanut-butter pie, so I might as well eat it.”
The cook brought their coffee and left them to themselves. “I don’t know much about the reservation,” Lee said. “I asked before I left, and they said I’d do better without a lot of preconceived ideas. So I didn’t even look it up in the WebWorld. Just the atlas. It’s almost as big as Connecticut, the state I lived in a year ago, but obviously it has a lot fewer people.”
“Thirteen thousand,” said Mr. M.
“They sent me to get a feel for the people, they said, and to learn what effects Iiúoo has had. What effects has it had?”
“The real effect,” he said, “is on individuals. The effect on the tribe, the Crow people, grows out of that.” He paused, considering. “I suppose you know something about the history of the native people since Anglos came here,” he went on. “In the old days the Crow people had no money, no houses—nothing like that. But we were rich in horses, and had lodges—tepees—that we took with us when we moved. And we had the use of the land, and the buffalo. We knew how to live with them. No one suffered from hunger very often, but when one did, everyone did. The people felt good about themselves. The downside was, we fought with other tribes a lot.”
It struck Lee that when he spoke, he didn’t gesture. It gave him a sense of dignity and personal power—power that went well beyond his big shoulders and thick hands.
“Then white people came. They killed the buffalo—all the buffalo around here—and the people were often hungry. Sometimes they starved. The government had drawn lines on a map, and called it the Apsáalooke Country. It was to be ours forever. But prospectors came, and ranchers, and homesteaders, and the government took back more than ninety percent of it and gave it to them. Or just kept it. The people felt robbed, betrayed, bitter, but we had no power to do anything about it. It was a little like Kosovo, not so many years ago, but worse. There was no honor in what was done to the people, but it was inevitable.”
His calm amazed Lee. He’d said what he’d said with no evidence of anger or bitterness. At the same time she noticed a long scar above one eye, others on cheekbone and upper lip, and his nose had been broken.
“After they took the land,” he continued, “and the people were starving, the government and the churches decided they’d better turn the Crows into white people. But they didn’t know how to do it, and neither did we. They tried to shame us into being white. They took our children away and tried to force them to be white. None of it worked. We remained Crows, Crows with broken wings. Some of us became kind of white, but even for them it didn’t work very well.