TRAVEL FACES: VALE TANNY POLSTER

I met Tanny (Nathaniel) Polster in 1986 in Washington DC. I was on the way to Nicaragua to spend a year or so covering Central America for The Age and other publications.

My friend and colleague, Mike Steketee, had given me his number, saying he was a remarkable older journalist, really worth looking up. We kept in touch through my time in Central America and later New York and then when I returned home to Australia, becoming great friends, pen pals in many ways, writing letters in the early days and emails later. He encouraged me with my writing, sending me books and other interesting and unusual presents. Whenever I could when I was in the US I visited him.

Tanny was born on December 30, 1921 and died at the age of 93 this year.

According to the very brief death notice I found he was a World War Two veteran, anti-poverty program worker, lobbyist for the National Cancer Institute, and publisher of specialised medical newsletters of heart, lung and blood and adolescent medicine.

From what he’s told me over the years he grew up in Columbus, Ohio. His father had come to the US as a teenager from then Austria-Hungary, while his mother’s family was from Russia.

Tanny was a political animal. Being a Jewish man and a humanitarian , he was horrified by what he saw in Europe during his time in a US Air Force squadron but even more horrified by the later treatment of refugees by the US.

“The military never told home folks we bombed Switzerland during WW II,” he wrote in an email. “Minor mistake by navigator of bombing crew.”

He told how he met a mixed race couple at a party in Chicago, who had been living in Switzerland, and how the “white wife said her mother was in the town bombed by U.S. planes. Her mother had her in her arms as she ran away from the explosions”.

“I detested telling her that my bomber group dropped those bombs.  My automatic cameras in the planes verified the town bombed.

"That day, a Brooklyn G.I. warned me to insist on flight pay in the few flights I took.  His plane exploded on take-off a few minutes later. No survivors. Futile memories. We got rid of Hitler while committing genocide of German civilians.”

Back home, he worked as a journalist at the Washington Post and in the Deep South including Savannah and Charleston, Georgia. He was deeply involved in supporting the Civil Rights movement.

It was during this time that he met John Tiller, a Black former college basketballer from Philadelphia, who later became an adviser to Alexander Haig and George Bush Senior, particularly in the areas of health care reform.

“He and I became friends when that was extremely rare, white and black,” Tanny said, almost surprised that they were able to overlook their different political views for all those years.

He considered John the best man he ever knew.

Tanny and I were having lunch in a Washington restaurant one day I think in 1987 when I glanced out the window to see a tall, striking man glide past. And then he came inside, pulling a chair out and sitting at our table.

“I’ve invited John because I know he can show you all the best dance clubs and bars in DC,” Tanny announced.

John and I stayed friends until his death from lung cancer in May, 2012. And some of the best times of my life were spent with those two.

In the 2000s, Tanny met his second wife, Janet Schirn, a well-known interior designer - past President of the American Society of Interior Designers as well as a Fellow of the Society -and moved to Chicago. She was a wonderful, artistic, inspiring woman, who told me once Arnold Schwarzenegger was among her clients.

I visited them when she was very ill in 2008 and she told me Tanny was the love of her life.

But after she died he had to move out of the apartment, finding one closer to the lake, where we went swimming together the last time I visited him in 2011.

Tanny was still working, lobbying to make changes to a society he felt was not just economically bankrupt but in many ways morally as well.

While ostensibly a Democrat, he was no fan of the Clintons and more an admirer of Michelle Obama than Barack. He believed change had to come from way above the president.


This is from one of his later emails to me: “My great nephew (age 40 or 50) moans that we are a 3rd world nation. China owns us via U.S. government bond purchases. France, Spain, Japan, and other dinky nations have faster trains.  Our bridges are falling down. Our roads are pitted. Obama, the social worker, told the Wall Street crooks to stay out of jail and put taxpayers into eternal debt with not a community person, not a layman, not a non-crook in on the talks. Now he doesn't know how to pretty-up the $6 to $11 million a year that the crooks are paying themselves. Rubin is God's gift to anti-Semitism. He re-appoints the government officials who presided over the chaos.  Manufacturing is down.  Automobile makers and airlines are bankrupt. The daily newspaper industry is dying.”

He felt so strongly about the newspaper devastation that he spent a year working on a plan for the Chicago Tribune that he thought would “1) expand circulation and 2) wake up America's sleeping electorate.  I tried selling it twice, but fumbled the ball.  I have taken months to improve the selling of it. Just finished tonight”.

He wept at the inefficiency of American public transport, noting he could only get a midnight train to visit his sister in Pittsburgh.

“Inter-city travel in the U.S is now a crushing bore: Full body X-rays to learn if you have a tooth capped or a bomb in your bowel.  Rules, I.D. cards, delays, long lines, mistakes,” he said in an email to me in 2011.

He was also very funny, with a wicked sense of humour that many did not understand or appreciate.

Once her ordered me a martini in Chicago and told the waitress to “cut the vegetables” – ie the garnish!

“Down the street there is an institution where girls in mid-thigh skirts and spike heels attend,” he emailed once.  “It is named Detention (no joke).  I've never been inside, but I had my pocket picked nearby. On weekends 2 or 3 police cruisers monitor the folks.  It's not in South Dakota, but you could write about it.”

Until his later years Tanny was pretty fit. He’d take an inflatable boat in his car boot to one of the Chicago rivers, blow it up and row for miles. He took me once on a freezing, winter day.

He was a ladies’ man, always admiring good looks and intelligence – he liked to have a woman companion.

There is a lot I don’t know about Tanny – about his first marriage and daughter although he did tell me a little. And forgive me if there is information I have left out.

“My first wife, Iris, was sitting at a lunch counter in Savannah, demonstrating against segregation.  A white man came in and stuck a foot-long dagger into the back and lungs of a man (demonstrator?) two seats from Iris,” he said once explaining what it was like in the South during the Civil Rights period.

In later years he become involved in a movement called the Villages for older people -  voluntary non-government groups  where members seek help from one another.

“These new units area all called Village something or other and are therapeutic for usually abrasive city living in U.S.A   A club of journalists inside the Village are engaged in writing memoirs and trading them.”

Tanny was a trailblazing journalist, activist and lobbyist who never received the recognition he deserved (not that he would have cared one hoot) and an incredible friend.

He wrote to me after a phone conversation with John not long before our darling friend died.

“He makes me realize what a boon it is, knowing you and him during my lifetime.”

No, Tanny, the pleasure was all mine.

 # Travel #USA #Politics #Media

Travelling to the Promised Land

As tourists criss-cross the skies in crammed aeroplanes refugees are walking across Europe, searching for the Promised Land.

We’re driving past the park next to Belgrade’s main railway station and Boban points to a crowd of people camping out under the trees.

“Refugees, from Syria. They walk here,”  he says in broken English.

 “Yes, the Serbs, the people here, they bring them food and clothes, help them a little bit. But they don’t want to stay here. They are moving on …to Germany.”

In England I am with my friend in the Kent town of Folkestone, close to where the ferries come from Calais and the tunnel emerges from France.

“See that hotel over there,” she points to an ugly building overlooking the long jetty where soldiers boarded boats taking them to the trenches of World War One. “They say they’ve put them up in rooms out the back there.”

The refugees have been told not to go into the breakfast room when the tourists are there, it might upset them, according to the local newspaper.

Europe is flooded with refugees, in numbers similar to the end of World War Two. Tragic stories emerge daily. And here we are just wandering around, sight-seeing and trying to find ways to get out of the heat.

It seems almost wrong to be here, an Australian passport safe in my handbag.

“They don’t know what to do, they just don’t know what to do,” my friend says of the authorities and that includes the UN, the EU, the UK government and everybody else.

When I get home I read of fighting breaking out on the border of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, and remember much happier days in the 90s spent there and where we lived in Kos, now overrun with refugees coming via Turkey.

And then I hear more news of drownings and more than 70 people dying in the back of a truck.

Could we just open up all the borders and let people go wherever they bloody well want to? You know like most tourists do?

Well, it’s just one idea.

And perhaps sorting out the problems back home. Oh yeah, we’ve tried that, haven’t we?

FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

It’s pouring with rain as we sit in our vehicles across the road from the Wounded Knee memorial on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

It’s the site of the mass grave of around 300 Lakota men, women and children, who were killed on December 29, 1890 by the US 7^th Cavalry Regiment.

Our guide, Warren (Gus) Yellowhair, climbs into the seat next to me and closes the door to stop the rain filling the car. It’s unseasonably cold – in one day the temperature has dropped from 26 to 4 degrees.

I’m parked next to a big red sign which tells the history of the site but Yellowhair says there’s mixed feelings in the reservation as to how to properly commemorate this history.

If it was good weather today you would have people here selling you arts and crafts, he says.

 “Some would like to see this kept as a sacred site,” he says, such as that of the small but significant mountain, Bear Butte further north near Sturgis, where prayer cloths can be found tied to trees and Native Americans come regularly to pray.

                                                          Warren (Gus) Yellowhair

I hear that on that cold December morning the Sioux chief, Big Foot, and around 350 of his followers were camped at Wounded Knee creek. The proud people had been decimated, forced to live on reservations with cultural and religious practices forbidden and their precious buffalo almost wiped out.

Many had been drawn to a new cult, known as the Ghost Dance, preached by a Paiute shaman called Wovoka, who prophesised that the dead and the living would soon live once more in the old way – with no more white people. They were told to perform the Ghost Dance and wear brightly-coloured shirts with images of eagles and buffaloes, which would protect them from the army’s bullets.

These wild dances had spread fear through the white community, even making headlines in the eastern states. On December 15, another Native American chief, Sitting Bull, was killed while being arrested, and Big Foot led his people south to seek protection on the Pine Ridge reservation.

According to eyewitnesses, the massacre began when a shot was fired, and chaos broke out, with men, women and children running for their lives. Twenty-five soldiers also died that day.

Photographers “embedded” with the army later took photos of the bodies of Big Foot and others frozen in the snow, and other photos were doctored and sold for extravagant prices. Scattered fighting continued for several days afterwards, but this was the end of the Ghost Dance movement and the Indian wars.

 

 

The memorial at Wounded Knee.

Photo: Chad Coppess
South Dakota Department of Tourism

 That morning at the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, I had met Tribal Historic Preservation Officer / Director Mike CatchesEnemy, who gave me an impromptu history lesson at my request: on June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7^th Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer had been defeated in Montana at the famous Battle of the Little Big Horn – also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or Custer’s Last Stand. What happened at Wounded Knee some 14 years later in 1890 could only be revenge by those same soldiers of that unit, he says.

He told me that in his cultural resource management archaeology thesis he initially compared the trauma his people suffered after Wounded Knee as a premeditated crime scene similar to that of 9/11. His graduate advisor advised him to leave out the comment that these military acts were considered terrorist killings, that the general public would not be so readily acceptant of that correlation.

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation (Oglala Sioux Tribe), covers around 29,000 square km, bordering the Nebraska state line to the south and Badlands National Park to the north and was originally part of the Great Sioux Reservation established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but which was later ignored when the US government opened millions of acres of the Black Hills to homesteaders and private interests.

I had driven in from the Badlands side, having done the loop from Sturgis in the west via Wall and its tourist trap, the Wall Drug Store, where a group of concerned citizens run the Wounded Knee Museum.

I travelled south through the tiny town of Interior and onto rolling pine-covered hills and ridges, dotted with farms and settlements.  Unlike Australian Aboriginal reserves I did not need a permit. Every few kilometres you come across trailers surrounded by piles of old cars and farm machinery.  This is pickup country.

After the small town of Kyle I found my motel, the Lakota Prairie Ranch, where dinner was a delicious fried chicken and dessert of mixed fruits pie.

Yellowhair takes us to the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, where archivist Tawa Ducheneaux tells us about how they are collecting and archiving Lakota historic resources, including a “few thousand boxes” of artefacts of the tribe’s records and that of the college, which was started in the early 1970s.

Ducheneaux’s name shows her French heritage – French fur traders were the first non-Native Americans to come through this country.

“We have a long history of our cultural history leaving the Badlands,” she says.

The college itself has about 1500 students. Each of the reservation’s nine districts has a centre and there’s also a satellite college and library at Rapid City.  Now nearly 60 per cent of the nurses on the reservation are graduates of the college and 70 per cent of the teachers are locals.

Wanda Reddy, direct mail clerk, tells me when we visit the Historical Centre, after playing us  an audio tape and a video telling the story of Wounded Knee, that she studied Business at the college.

What if there hadn’t been that opportunity, I ask.

“I would have worked in a grocery store,” she says shyly.

 

                                                                   Wanda Reddy

Tourists are welcome at the centre, particularly when there’s artists in residence in late June to early September. Graduation pow wows are also open to the public.

Driving off, Yellowhair tells me to tune my car radio to KILI (90.1FM) to catch what’s happening on the “rez” – staffed by college journalism graduates, who also work at the local cable TV station.

He tells me private ceremonies are still held where people are given Lakota names.

He was named Tasunka Najin by his uncle which means His Horse is Standing. At your puberty ceremony your name will be changed, only the first in several changes during the course of one’s life.

“Having a Lakota name means when I pass on my ancestors will know me,” he says.

At the small town of Pine Ridge, we find the cosy café, Higher Ground Coffee House, owned by Belva Matthews and chef husband Leon, who bases the unusually exotic food on recipes his mother gave him.

Leon, who writes a blog for the Lakota Country Times – one of two Native American newspapers covering the area - proudly poses for a photo against the red stone walls of the café in his matching Russell Means T-shirt.

Means, who died in 2012, was one of the leaders in 1973 of around 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement, who held a 72-day stand-off against corruption and racism at the Wounded Knee site.  An actor, his films include The Last of the Mohicans, and the Disney cartoon, Pocahontas, where he spoke the part of Pocahontas’s father.

                                          Belva Matthews, her sister and fellow chef

                                                              Leon Matthews

Our last stop is the Red Cloud Indian School, where Community Relations associate and former student Rilda Means shows us around what was started by the Oglala chief, Red Cloud, and Jesuits of the Holy Rosary Mission in 1888.

On a reservation which has a high number of social problems, the school is remarkable in that 98 per cent of the senior year graduate and their names can be found carved into the bricks in the old building, Drexell Hall.

Kids travel “1000 miles a day in 18 buses” to come to a school where Lakota culture and basketball is “a big deal”.

 “Every day we teach them you have a chance,” says Means, whose father was an alcoholic but mother was a teacher here, and who went on to graduate from the Black Hills State University with a Master in Lakota Leadership and Management.

The school has a renowned Heritage Centre, museum and gift shop, displaying Native American art, including beadwork and porcupine quillwork.

                                                Rilda Means

We leave the reservation via a quick look at the Lakota-run Prairie Wind Casino, which like the rest of the reservation, is “dry” but where you can still sip “pop or coffee” while you gamble.

Speeding north-west into the misty shapes of the Badlands along the Red Shirt road, I wish I had more time at Pine Ridge, a place I’d wanted to visit since reading the classic history by Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

A shorter travel story was published in this week's The Saturday Paper:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2015/05/30/the-pine-ridge-reservation-south-dakota/14329080001924#.VWkoGWPGP4g
 

#Travel #SouthDakota

 

WHISTLING DOWN THE WIND

                                                             Photo by: Greg Gorman

Whistle Down the Wind starring Hayley Mills and Alan Bates is one of my favourite films from the 1960s.

But it wasn’t until I did some research before a press conference for Hayley and Juliet Mills here to tour a play, Legends, that I realised that it was their mother, Mary Hayley Bell (Lady Mary Mills), who wrote the novel which the 1961 film was based on.

The story is about a young girl who finds a fugitive hiding in the family’s barn and thinks he is Jesus Christ.

“Blakey” is wanted for murder and the police are searching for him, but Kathy and the other children are determined to protect him.

There are many references to stories from the Bible in the film. In one scene, a child is mocked and beaten into denying he had seen Jesus. After the boy's third denial, a train whistle is heard.

According to Wikipedia (I make no apologies):  “The strains of 'We three kings' can be discerned in the score as Kathy, her brother and sister march with the food 'gifts' they have acquired for the man in the 'stable'. They are spotted and followed by a group of country children (shepherds). The early core of children who are in on the secret number a dozen and are specifically called The Disciples in the cast list. The secret comes out at the end of a children's party/Last Supper. When the apprehended Blakey is being frisked by police, his posture, with arms outstretched to his sides, is a clear reference to the Crucifixion.”

I asked Hayley Mills (the daughter of the late great actor Sir John Mills who went on to star in so many Disney films, TV and theatre) about what it was like to act in a film based on her mother’s book.

“It was great because it was not only her story but it was directed by a very, very old friend of the family, Bryan Forbes, the first picture he directed,” she said. “The producer was Richard Attenborough, a very old friend of the family, so it really was a family picture. But the difference was that the book which our mum wrote was actually very sort of loosely based on all of us and it was set in the south of England on a farm and they were much more knowing and sophisticated children and the scriptwriters (Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall)….transferred it to the north.”

She believed the “key to its success” was setting it in Lancashire around the village of Clitheroe.

“I loved the story,” she said. “It was one of those things where all the elements that came in worked so brilliantly, not least the music by Malcolm Arnold…and the whistle in that film was Dickie Attenborough, that was him whistling. And Alan Bates was such a brilliant actor.”

(I agree – this was his first starring role. Check out the totally insanely brilliant King of Hearts and of course Women in Love – can anybody who saw it ever forget Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling naked?) In the mid 1990s, Whistle Down the Wind was adapted into a musical by Russell Labey and Richard Taylor for the National Youth Music Theatre.  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman later created a more commercial adaptation of it.

Juliet Mills’ husband, Maxwell Caulfield, who plays the producer in Legends, was at the same press conference and he fondly remembers how “wonderful” it was to see Lady Mary taking a bow and a “royal wave” from the balcony during the West End Andrew Lloyd Webber production in the West End around 15 years ago.

Critics talk about the early 60s as being a time of high creativity in English cinema – Whistle Down the Wind is a perfect example of that.

TRAVEL FACES: Laila Spik, a woman Joni Mitchell would be proud of

                                                             Laila Spik, Sami guide.


The sad news this week that Joni Mitchell was in hospital reminded me that I had read that she is of Sami heritage.

The Canadian singer’s father's parents were Norwegian and she has told journalists she believes they were Sami people.  (According to a statement on her official website, Mitchell is now awake and undergoing tests.)

I discovered this information when researching a trip to Sapmi or Lapland in Sweden last year. Through my contacts I was introduced by email to Laila Spik, a Sami guide and writer of cookbooks and guides to native plants.

She lives between Kiruna and Jokkmokk near a place called Gällivare, above the Arctic Circle. She very kindly suggested she come to my Kiruna hostel to meet me, one freezing April morning.

I made her a cup of tea and she told me her story. Her parents were both reindeer herders from different areas of Sapmi. When they first met they couldn’t understand each other because they spoke different languages.

 She was the eldest daughter, so her father taught her about their culture so it wouldn’t be lost. She has written widely about this.

 Explaining Sami beliefs in animism, spirits and shamanism, she told me they believed in goddesses, including the fire goddess who must be respected and always fed first.

 “Every morning when we come to the tent to eat we boil tea and coffee and under the fireplace are seven stones, one stone for every day and one stone for baking and drying and putting the hot pan but there was somebody who lived under that and it was the goddess who helped the child be born and who protected the people and we never should forget her,” she said.

These days the Sami Parliament, with elected members who sit in Kiruna, works for increased self-determination, protects Sami languages and land including  mining negotiation and is the central administrative agency for reindeer husbandry. However many are still coping with the consequences of culture loss during the missionary years when from the early 19^th century they were denied their rights, including being able to speak their own language and practise shamanism and their children were taken away to boarding schools, Laila said.

The Sami are also the exponents of one of Europe’s oldest vocal song traditions, known as “yoiking”. When I visited the Sami TV station in Kiruna the young journalists there explained the “yoiker” and the subject of the yoik are intimately connected, which is known as “yoiking”.

Traditionally instruments weren’t used. Instead the music, which is said to create an emotional bond between people, animals and nature, uses melodic and often haunting vocal sounds and sometimes lyrics. Sami say they ”yoik something” rather than sing about something in a tradition that is becoming more popular now with one of its exponents winning a TV talent show.

I’m sure Joni Mitchell is very proud of her heritage.

**   Laila is available as a tour guide for individuals and groups, which can include gathering plants and herbs traditionally used in Sami cooking and medicine. Her email is:laila.spik@gmail.com

The Sounds of....Silence?

We’re at the Beng Melea  temple around 60km east of Siem Reap in Cambodia.

We’re hoping for less people here than at Angkor Wat but the sounds of cicadas quickly mix with the loud voices of tourists from a certain country.

Nothing can be said quietly. It has to be yelled across the temple complex. Never-ending selfies are taken while the ancient engravings  on the walls and the mystical trees growing between the stonesare ignored.  Blood-curdling screeching and laughter at the top of their voices. Guides screeching at their tour group.

It would be a magic place without all this noise pollution.

When a couple of tourists start climbing on the piled -up stones we have climbed to along rickety timber steps an Argentinian tourist can’t take any more.

“You have no respect, no respect. You are animals.”

We nod in agreement.                                                                                                    

We have seen the future … of Cambodian tourism. Hordes of tourists arrive in buses, take photos of themselves then leave.

An elderly French couple wander through complete in safari outfits, grey long-sleeved shirts and long pants and boots. Where are their pith helmets? I know I too look a sight in shorts and sandshoes, but temple tourism requires practical clothing.

I too am a tourist but I don’t wear crazy, mix-matched multi-coloured outfits and carry a pastel umbrella today. (At least my colours match!)

Later the reds of rambutans are reflected in the clothes worn by the market sellers, who smile and laugh as I take their photos.

At sunset we take a tuk tuk to the Terrace of the Leper King at Angkor Wat, attempting to find a quiet place to do our readings of the day. (I’m on one of Jan Cornall’s writing retreats.)

A throng of kids guided by two monks comes swarming around a corner through a stone gate. They chatter to us, saying hello and good luck. The older monk, one-legged and walking with the aid of a stick, smiles warmly at us.

It’s a totally different experience to end the day of temple wanderings.

TRAVEL FACES: GROETHE's LAST STAND - a photographer extraordinaire

Bill Groethe considers his most important work the series of photos he took in 1948 of the Native American survivors of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, better known as Custer’s Last Stand.

These portraits were taken at an event at Custer State Park in South Dakota, a place I stayed at in September, 2014 just before the annual Buffalo Roundup.

(On June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7^th Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer was defeated in Montana at what Indian tribes called the Battle of the Greasy Grass. I understand the people in the photo are Little Warrior, Pemmican, Little Soldier, Dewey Beard, High Eagle, Iron Hawk, Comes Again, Nicholas Black Elk and John Sitting Bull, who although not a survivor, represented his adoptive father, Sitting Bull.)

Later I visit the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and while talking to archivist Tawa Ducheneaux at the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, my eye is drawn to the prints of these photos on the wall. I try to do the maths and work out what Groethe later tells me – these men were between 85 and 90 years old when he took their pictures.

Ducheneaux tells me Groethe is not only alive (he’s 91) but still working as hard as ever. I call him at his shop when I get to Rapid City and he says to come quickly as he and his wife are getting ready to do another trip to the battle site in Montana, where a frieze is being made of his photos, sandblasted into granite – part of a memorial to the Oglala Sioux area tribes, who fought there.

“They’ve had a memorial from day one almost of the troops; the battlefield used to be called Custer Battlefield but now it’s Little Big Horn Battlefield (national monument).  It took many years to get it changed,” Groethe tells me.

As for the background to the famous portraits: “I took the photos all in the one day. The youngest was 13 at the battle, 85 when I took him.”

So how did it come about? Well, as he says, they all knew this pesky, teenage photographer, who’d been hanging round taking photos of them for months.

“I grew up here,” he explains. “I used to follow them around. They called me ‘the kid’. I was always going to their dances and stuff and photographing them.

“They were disappearing fast. In ‘51, the 75th anniversary, there were only three of them left.”

I ask Groethe if he asked his subjects about their experiences at this famous almost-end to the Indian wars.

“I never talked to them…the battle’s over. They were trying to live and assimilate into the community, make a little money when they dressed up for a powwow.

“I concentrate on my job. I want to get the images right and (it) takes a little more time. Talk to and learn from the people so I didn’t have to take a lot of pictures because I couldn’t afford to buy so much film.”                                 

One of his subjects, Dewey Beard, also survived Wounded Knee, 14 years later.

 “He lost his wife and daughter and he and his brother escaped. He was the last to die. He has a double survival record. He died November 2, 1955 and that happens to be South Dakota Day.

 “It’s the most important work I’ve done,” he says explaining he started as an apprentice with  Bert Bell,  when he was 12.

 What have your learnt from the Lakota and other Oglala Sioux, I ask?

 "I thought I had compassion but they’ve got more than the average white man to put up with us, I tell you.  When you’re all in the same boat in the Depression you’re all poor. I had no problems. Today we have more problems all the time because disparity is increasing all the time.

 “I learnt a lot, these people are very gentle really, considering they’re the warrior bunch. After the war was over and they were made to settle down and so many of them are all over that. They don’t want to talk about that. I never ask them either.”

 One major regret he has is that a writer, David Humphreys Miller, who asked to use his colour slides of the Battle of the Little Big Horn survivors, never returned them.

 “I shot 5 x 7 black and white of each one and then I shot 5 x 7 transparencies in colour the same time, so the images are almost exactly the same but I was young, I trusted this man and he was going to write a story for National Geographic and I foolishly gave him the transparencies and he never returned them.

 “He’s gone, his wife’s gone, I know the family has them someplace because 20 years ago he tried to sell those to the battlefield and of course they recognised immediately that they were the same poses as mine. They refused him and they called me right away and I still haven’t been able to run him down and now he’s gone.”

 One of his projects is to shoot all the phases of what is known as the Lakota Moon, so laborious a task that he’s so far only taken eight shots in 25 years.  The moons represent the different seasons, based on information from the famous book, Black Elk Speaks.

 “The scarlet moon is September and that’s when the wild plums are scarlet in the reservation. The moon of ripe cherries, that’s when the wild cherries are a deep plum colour.

 “I’ve still got four to get. You only get a minute or two to shoot. The foreground and moon have to be at the same density. You can teach chemistry and how to fix a machine, but a natural view is God-given.

 “I sit there and wait and then I shoot. Otherwise I pack up and go home.  I’ve set up and packed up 100 times.”

 "You’ve had a very interesting life,” I say in awe of this modest and fascinating photographer, who never uses a digital camera for his own work, as he shows me his room full of cameras and lenses. (He also once owned production labs in seven states – all since closed.)

 “Well, it’ not past,” he answers. “I work every day. I work four days in the lab and I take Friday to get ready to do a shoot. I went to (Mount) Rushmore every Saturday all summer.

 "I’m a commercial photographer. I’ve done portraits. I no longer do that… I do a lot of the tough jobs, photographing murals, things that nobody else wants to spend the time to do.”

 *        A longer version of this interview/story is available at request.

Photos: Diana Plater. Apologies to Bill Groethe for the quality!