Maĥpíya Kiŋy’Aŋ (Flying Cloud) Glí: SD Nelson Returns

Nelson's cover painting to "Greet The Dawn: The Lakota Way."

The Ancient Painting Tradition

Maĥpíya Kiŋy’Aŋ (Flying Cloud) Glí
SD Nelson Returns

By Dakota Wind
White Shield, N.D. – White Shield rests on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, about a two hour drive north and west from the North Dakota state capital. The drive may have been a few hours, but it allowed me to take in the majesty of the vast open plains and the great open sky and the quiet drive north on HWY 83 took me through Lake Sakakawea and Lake Audubon.

I had been in contact with S.D. Nelson since the South Dakota Book Festival of 2012. I happened to pass him by one afternoon there. He had just finished a conversation with another festival attendant and it was obvious that he had other business to attend to, and I had wanted to meet him so I called out to Nelson. He gave me a nod and wave, and intended to continue on, but when I said, “I’m from Standing Rock.” Nelson immediately stopped in his tracks, turned around and made time to visit with me.

A late winter storm the previous week dropped about eighteen inches of snow on the prairie steppe. Piles of snow were pushed or dumped in efforts to open the roads and drives, but the daytime warmth of spring had melted much and puddles of water had collected in potholes and ditches, slush lined the sidewalks and steamed as it evaporated.

White Shield public school, an unassuming weary-looking older building dominates the townscape. A pale beige brick exterior masked an updated interior. A tiled floor carried the echoes of children at play or lessons down the halls and out the main door when I entered and made my way to the library.

Nelson's program was received with great enthusiasm and many students had questions.

It was a tidy library but bigger than the school library of my youth back on Standing Rock. The chairs and tables were arranged in a horseshoe to accommodate Nelson’s presentation. A select cadre youth had made the drive up from the Cannonball Elementary School on Standing Rock just to see Nelson’s program and to get him to sign their books. They arrived about forty minutes early and Nelson graciously gave them his complete attention before the program began.

Nelson is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. His traditional name in the Lakota language is Maĥpíya Kiŋy’Aŋ, or Flying Cloud, which is also the name of one of his ancestral grandfathers who was a storyteller and horse thief. He may not have grown up on the reservation, but he spent his summers there with his maternal grandparents and frequently returns. The land of sky and wind reached settled deep into Nelson’s mind and heart, and while he traveled with his enlisted father across the nation, and even as he now lives in Arizona, Standing Rock and the Great Plains are still home.

Nelson is a retired teacher. He earned a BS in Art Education from Minnesota State University in Moorehead, MN and taught art at Wahpeton, ND before making a move to Arizona and teaching there. “The winters got to be too much for me,” said Nelson with a smile. He is now retired from teaching, but he still engages learners in scheduled workshops and makes time, like today, to be with native youth back on the plains. Nelson may be self-employed, but he’s still an educator at heart.

Images like this of an old pickup truck out in the field and horses speak to the native youth who for them is a common occurrence.

Nelson actively engaged the students. His use of the lecture style presentation tells how he was taught and how he learned, but Nelson includes a media presentation, a showcase of selected past works, sketches of works and brilliant finished paintings which keeps the students in rapt attention. One painting depicts children on a prairie in the morning waiting to get on a bus, and putting it that way makes it sound unexciting, but the painting reaches out to the children because the landscape is alive with plains symbols of strength, medicine and life. The imagery and symbolism meant more, meant something cultural as well as personal to those children.

Whether the children are aware of it or not, Nelson had shown them the importance of going to school and getting an education. Later in the hour, he reinforces that message by encouraging them to pursue an education and in a field they love. 

There is evidence in many of Nelson’s paintings of a deep love and respect for horses, or as he would say, “The Horse Nation.” Horses are also associated with thunder too, and much of his work ties the horses with thunder. Once a traditionalist questioned Nelson’s authority to depict lightning and the workings of thunderstorms, which stemmed from a deep-seated tradition that only certain people could depict, to which Nelson replied, “Lightning came to my house twice. I have a direct connection to lightning, thunder and hail.”

Along with a presentation of stories and select images of his paintings, Nelson shared painting techniques with the children. “I brush the paint on, but I also take a little sponge. I get them wet and squeeze them until their soft and pliable and then dip them in paint, and I sponge paint on.”

From Nelson's "Quiet Hero: The Ira Hayes Story."

The presentation moved into illustrations of Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian from Sacaton, Arizona who helped raise the American flag on top of Mt. Suribachi in WWII. After the war, Hayes descended into alcoholism and died. Nelson then delicately shared his own experience as a recovering alcoholic.

The air grew a little heavy and the children settled into a solemn silence as Nelson spoke of the native struggle with alcohol and alcoholism, but he brought hope in his message that life is so much better without alcohol or substances. “I’m an alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink in twenty-seven years.” He credits God, the Great Spirit, with giving him the strength to stay sober. “Thank you God, for giving me a good life, so that I could write these books and tell these stories,” Nelson said.

Recalling a hangover one morning long ago, Nelson was watching his two little girls play in the backyard when he realized that he needed help. He picked up the phone and called the local A.A. chapter who immediately sent over two people to give him reassurances and encouragement to live clean.

Nelson concluded his warning of the perils of alcohol, “My hope for you is that you won’t drink and you’ll receive a blessing…I promise you.”

Art has been in Nelson’s life since he was little boy. His earliest memory of art in the home is of his mother’s project in which she applied tempera paint to the living room window. “I remember marveling at her. It was big and it was colorful, and the sun shone through the paint like a stained glass window.” Art was encouraged in the home and when he was three or four years old, Nelson recalled sitting at the kitchen table and finger painting.

Art runs in Nelson’s blood. His mother was a landscape artist who had studied academic and classical painting under the tutelage of Herr Von Schmidt, a German artist. His maternal great-grandmother, Khízá Wiŋ (Fighting Woman) was a traditional artist—a fine beader. Unfortunately, one of her creations, a fully beaded buckskin dress had to be sold to help support the family. Nelson’s mother, had little time to devote to painting due to the demands of motherhood, but her creativity manifested in quilting.

It wasn’t until a rainy day at school when his class stayed indoors that Nelson decided to consider art seriously. He was working on a wildlife scene at his desk when an older “alpha male” fellow whom the class all admired stopped by Nelson’s desk and peered over his shoulder, and said, “Wow, that’s really good.” Nelson’s confidence was boosted further when his classmate declared, “Guys, come over here and look at this.”

Nelson’s mother spoke fluent Lakota and English, and she handed down cultural stories with life lessons like the old Iktomi, or Trickster, stories. Nelson fondly recalls a summer night in his childhood in Fort Yates. His father had heard that the satellite ECHO was going to pass above so Nelson’s mother took him and his brothers and sister outside to watch for it. While watching the heavens Nelson’s mother told them that the Lakota are people of the stars, and up above was their grandfather, Nelson’s Lakota namesake Flying Cloud, riding his horse. “I looked and I couldn’t see a horse, all I saw were stars, but I knew what she was talking about. I got it. I didn’t have to ask her or say that grandpa’s not there. She was talking about infinity. She was talking about forever. I felt the stars were alive.”

When he was a little boy, when the Missouri River was still free flowing on the bottomlands below Fort Yates, his mother and grandmother repeatedly warned Nelson and his siblings not to go swimming in the river. Historically the river was dangerous. In fact, the Lakota called the river Mni Šhošhé, which means “The Water-Astir.” Before the dam, the river was brown with sediment that was stirred up by the swirling churning river and for the Lakota who had become coffee drinkers the river reminded them of the motion of stirring their coffee with sugar or cream. The river was indeed dangerous and only in the mid to late summer was swimming in the river advised for even strong swimmers were pulled under by the undercurrent and never seen from again. Today, the river and the lake are blue.

Nelson’s remembers the river as a river. As a boy, he longingly desired to swim in the forbidden waters and that longing is echoed in his voice today. “It’s a beautiful lake,” said Nelson in an accepting tone. “I like to see kids swimming there.”

After the dams were built in the 1950s, the US Army Corps of Engineers approached the people of Standing Rock and asked them what they would like to call the new lake. Their cryptic response, for they weren’t happy with the Corps, “O’ahé,” which means Something To Stand On in reference to the buildings that were taken under the rising waters and drifted apart and away leaving only the foundations.

Childhood memories came swift to Nelson. His grandmother, Josephine Gipp Pleets, was born in a tipi, and lived in a cabin in Fort Yates when he knew her. In her back yard grew a modest grove of Chinese Elm trees. Nelson would climb them as high as he could. The birds were used to him and continued to land in their nests or flit away unconcerned in their business. He would gaze out over the tree tops for hours at a time watching the river, the valley and the sky.

SD Nelson may live in the southwest. His house is there in eternal summer, but his heart is in the never ending horizon of the Great Plains, his soul is with the Lakota and Dakota people in the land of sky and wind. He is a son of Standing Rock and his life’s work recalls it in each sketch and painting, and his paintings touch the souls of children.

For more information about SD Nelson visit him online at SDNelson.net. 

The KKK In North Dakota

Former Confederate soldiers founded the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) after the American Civil War (1861-65). The KKK used violence and intimidation to keep blacks segregated and to prevent them from voting and holding office. Courtesy of D. Jerome Tweton.

The KKK In North Dakota

An Investigative Report
By Jerome Tweton, North Star Dakotan, January 31, 1932
Grand Forks, ND - Following the American Civil War an organization called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) spread like wildfire across the South. Begun as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1867, the KKK soon became a symbol of hatred and bigotry. Its main objective was to keep black people from voting and taking their constitutionally rightful place in society.

Led by the Grand Cyclops, the Klan, a secret organization, was organized into local Adens. Dressed in bizarre fashion - high-pointed hats, masks, and flowing white robes - KKK members promised to defend the constitution and to protect the weak and oppressed, but in reality they terrorized black Americans and filled their lives with fear and fright.

Having succeeded in reducing the black vote, in 1877 the KKK disbanded as a national organization. This did not mean, however, that local Adens stopped tormenting blacks. Lynchings and cross burnings continued as part of the southern scene into the 1890s. The KKK then pretty much faded from view until 1915.

In that year a new Ku Klux Klan was organized in Georgia as a fraternal organization dedicated to the principles of white supremacy. It sounded and looked like the old KKK, but it was different. The new Klan added Roman Catholics, Jews, and left-wing political radicals to its list of enemies. The new KKK sought to protect the purity and values of native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon Americans and claimed a higher morality and dedication to Christian ideals. Led by the Imperial Wizard, the KKK, like its predecessor, held secret meetings around fiery crosses with members hooded and robed in white. Its tactics for intimidation included whipping, branding, mutilating, and lynching.

In the summer of 1921 Klan organizers moved into South Dakota and gained many followers by attacking the politically radical Nonpartisan League. The national organizers attempted to recruit Protestant ministers who were staunchly anti-Catholic to serve as heads of the local klans/klavens. This has been a successful method in South Dakota.

At that time an Indiana Klansman traveled secretly to Grand Forks where the Presbyterian minister, F. Halsey Ambrose, had gained a reputation as a powerful orator, a staunch foe of the Roman Catholic Church, an arch-opponent of the Nonpartisan League, and a booster of white Protestant Americanism. Soon after arriving in Grand Forks in 1918 Ambrose began attacking the Nonpartisan League as “socialist” and “Bolshevist,” endearing himself to the Grand Forks Herald and its owner, Jerry Bacon. Ambrose’s pamphlet, “A Sermon on Applied Socialism,” a violent assault on the League, was published with the help of the Herald and sold 5,000 copies in two weeks.

Ku Klux Klan Rally. Courtesy of D. Jerome Tweton.

Ambrose believed that a Roman Catholic couldn’t be a good American because the Catholic’s first allegiance is to the Pope in Rome. His sermons were full of anti-Catholic statements. Ambrose was a clergyman who fit the KKK’s qualifications for leadership. His popularity tripled church membership and his special Sunday night services usually have attracted 1,200 people. What more could the Klan want? Reverend Ambrose became its chief leader for Grand Forks and for North Dakota. Even though Roman Catholics were outnumbered almost three to one by Protestants in Grand Forks, Ambrose persuaded Protestant civic leaders that the Catholics had a master plan to take over the city’s government. The minister’s charisma convinced business leaders that the town’s Roman Catholics, led by furniture dealer and funeral director Moses Norman, presented a threat to their livelihoods and American values.

A source within the Klan has told the North Star Dakotan that the Grand Forks Klan first met 22 miles west of that city in September 1922, and that its leaders were members of the business community, including three bankers, three insurance men, seven store owners, two hotel proprietors, three lawyers, one doctor, one architect, and one clergyman other than Ambrose. According to our source, about 500 men have joined the Grand Forks klaven.

That North Dakota legislative leaders saw the KKK as a mounting threat became obvious in 1922 when a bill was introduced to outlaw the wearing of a mask or regalia which concealed the identity of the wearer except when such a mask was worn inside a building or by a person less than 15 years old.

Reverend Ambrose, who has never denied his leadership in the KKK, went to Bismarck and testified for an hour against the bill. He argued that no klansman had ever been convicted of a crime committed while wearing hoods. He insisted that hundreds of klansmen around the state were pillars of their communities and concluded that the KKK had to remain secret, in his words, “to do its valuable work.”

Both houses overwhelmingly approved the bill and Governor R.A. Nestos signed it into law, earning him the hatred of klansmen.

That fall of 1923, paying no attention to the new law, Ambrose organized a Klan rally west of Grand Forks. A thousand hooded klansmen from all parts of the state gathered to hear Ambrose preach the virtues of the KKK. Amid burning crosses, he emphasized the Klan’s patriotism and its desire to accomplish its goals in a peaceful manner. A reporter has told the North Star Dakotan that he saw at least 300 carloads of klansmen arrive at the ceremony and that a major reason for the rally was to initiate new members and install a klaven in Larimore.

With a growing membership and increasing strength within the city, the Klan moved into civic politics, endorsing and working for candidates who were in the KKK or sympathetic toward it. In the 1924 Grand Forks city election, one Klan candidate won a seat on the five-person city commission, and a klansman defeated the incumbent city justice, a Roman Catholic.

Flushed with victory, the Klan entered vigorously into the school board election three weeks later. The division was clear: two Klan businessmen versus a physician’s wife and the wife of a retired minister. In a Sunday night sermon Ambrose attacked the women as pawns of the Roman Catholics and charged that the Catholics were attempting to gain control of the public schools. The campaign tore the community apart. Mass rallies on behalf of the Klan and the anti-Klan candidates drew crowds numbering in the hundreds.

The Presbyterian clergyman told the North Star Dakotan that Moses Norman had started the petition drive for the women. “He will give his unqualified support to circulating those petitions,” he stated. “Any woman who will accept his support absolutely deserves the disrespect of every respectable woman in the city. Any two ladies who will permit a dirty thing like this to take his support are unworthy of the name of woman.” He referred to Catholic supporters as “the scum of the earth” and pledged that Catholics were the same the world over, “rotten.” Jerry Bacon and his Grand Forks Herald now began to attack the Klan. The paper backed the women candidates, stating that Ambrose’s reasoning was absurd. Tracy Bangs, a longtime Grand Forks lawyer, told the North Star Dakotan, “Ambrose has disturbed old friendships and has torn families asunder with his gospel of hatred.”

The two klansmen easily won election to the school board. Their objective was to reintroduce Bible reading into school classrooms. This, the Klan believed, would make the schools safe from the Roman Catholic threat. The board passed a Bible-reading motion. The Klan achieved its goal.

Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., 1928. Courtesy of D. Jerome Tweton.

After its political victory in 1924, the Klan became much more open. A statewide Fourth of July rally at Hillsboro drew hundreds of klansmen, mostly from Fargo and Grand Forks. The visit of the national head of the KKK, the Imperial Wizard, attracted a crowd of 5,000 to the Grand Forks fairgrounds. In 1926 the Klan won control of four of the five seats on the city commission. The klansmen voted as a block to dismiss many Roman Catholic and anti-Klan city workers. The fire chief, a Catholic with 33 years in the department, and the electrician, a Catholic with 28 years of employment, were fired. In all, ten officials were let go, including the City Hall’s janitor who was a Catholic.

A Klansman told this paper that most members believed that the KKK’s work was finished with the housecleaning at City Hall and that there was no longer a need for the Klan. Ambrose tried to whip up Klan enthusiasm for last year’s city elections and asked, “Will our citizens stand for a silent campaign?”

The answer was “yes”; the Klan began to run out of steam. Reverend Ambrose has departed Grand Forks for a pulpit in St. Paul. He has left behind a bitterly divided town. He convinced many of its people, through the force of his dynamic personality, that Protestant Grand Forks had much to fear from Roman Catholic Grand Forks. This, of course, was an imagined fear - a danger that existed in Ambrose’s head. For all the hatred that he spread, the accomplishments were small: Bible reading in the schools and a dozen fired city employees. There were no whippings, mutilations, or lynching in North Dakota, but the mental scars left by the KKK run deep.

Winter In The Land Of Sky And Wind

A beautiful vesper dusk sets on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, south of Mandan, N.D.
WINTER IN THE LAND OF SKY AND WIND

A Reflection of The Changing of Seasons

By Dakota Wind
Mandan, ND - It was quiet uneventful drive through the countryside. Despite the dawn, the clouds hung heavy and cast a steely grey pall over the landscape. Clouds hung low, low enough that I could reach high and feel the cool droplets that filled the air. The land itself reminded me of a patchy brown and white mottled pony.

Some would call it spring, and if it weren’t for this last snowfall, it might very well be spring. A wind came out of the west carrying the promise of rain, or more snow. It smelled clean and earthy, like rain, but it also smelled cold too.

It’s always windy here on the Great Plains. It is rather like a messenger carrying the scent of ionized air before a storm, the promise of a storm. In the days of summer the wind cools nothing. It’s like standing in front of a furnace with the heat blasting you right in the face. In the heart of winter the wind whips the snow into a riot and locks the land in a blizzard.

...the years were literally called winters.

Today though, the wind and the snow only remind the citizenry that winter is the lord of seasons. In the days of warriors and legends, the winter and wind so shaped the relationship that the Lakota share with the land that the years were literally called winters. We have no mountains to reach the heavens and take snow and rain from the sky. We have endless rolling hills that allow the arctic air to stretch forth from the far north and touch the land here.

The geese have returned, heralding the change of winter to spring. Only their honking has been subdued by the sudden return of snow. The meadowlarks keep their enthusiasm and sing through the cold wind. It’s a tradition going back to the moment of creation. They welcome the end of the winter, the end of the year, and sing in the new. On the Great Plains, that's how it is. Spring marks the new year, not the middle of winter.

Deer prance in fields of last year’s left over corn stalks, noses to the ground in search of bites of last year’s harvest. Ducks waddle into a pothole lake, submerge their heads in that half way manner that only ducks can and set themselves back upright, and then vigorously shake their heads as though they were trying to dislodge water from their ears.

A peregrine falcon...settled itself...as a king on a throne, on a fence brightly labeled "No Hunting."

A hawk, a peregrine falcon to birders, one of many of the birds of prey on the prairie, settled itself in bold irony, as a king on a throne, on a fence post brightly labeled “No Hunting.” Its head turned nonchalantly in my direction as though it had planned on looking my way all along. As I drove by, it casually spread its wings and took flight in front me.

To the west of the road lay a swath of wind turbines, giant windmills, erected in the past decade to harvest the wind and convert the wild energy into electricity. The ever-present wind passed them by, its raw energy undiminished by the great turning wheels. The blades silently cut through the low grey overhang of clouds.

By the time I get home, the sun has burned through most of the fog and the wind had blown some of the low cloud cover to the east. Rays of light playfully pierced through the remaining cover and practically danced; the motion of the sun’s rays are like looking up through water from the bottom of a pool.

This is North Dakota. This is the Great Plains, a rolling steppe west of flat prairie, a gentle swell east of the Badlands. Winter rules much of the year, and the wind has been here since creation. 

Dakĥota Kaškapi Okicize Wowapi: The Dakota Prisoner Of War Letters, A Review

The Dakota Prisoner Of War Letters
A Review Of A Powerful Narrative
By Dakota Wind

BISMARCK, N.D. - I received my copy of Dr. Clifford Canku’s The Dakota Prisoner Of War Letters: Dakota Kaškapi Okicize Wowapi through the mail and I carefully removed it from the box it came in. I was excited to read it, but not joyous to do so. Its about a real life tragedy, the consequences of which the Dakota and Lakota are still living with today. 

My initial perception of the book, my judgment of the book based on its cover, was that I was getting a book in the vein of Albert White Hat’s Life’s Journey. In the case of White Hat’s book, the transcriber, Mr. John Cunningham, and White Hat took great pains to keep the oration of the book even as a translation into English as how a traditional Lakota would speak English. White Hat’s work retains the “flavor” of the language.

Canku’s book goes a step further. Not only did White Hat and his associates invest several years translating beautifully hand-written letters in Dakota to English, Canku keeps the original Dakota, but he adds a word for word translation, then a free translation into English which contains Dakota connotations.

Dr. Canku carefully reads a letter of a Dakota prisoner.

There are two things which reached out to me about this book. The first being that its about the Dakota who became prisoners of war following the Minnesota Dakota Conflict of 1862. The book contains letters, first-person accounts of innocent men and women who were wrongly accused and imprisoned. They weren’t US Citizens, so due process didn’t apply to them, so they were guilty and imprisoned until they were determined to be innocent or no longer a threat.

Part of the story of the letters involves a missionary to the Dakota people, Rev. Stephen Riggs.

Riggs, a missionary among the Dakota in the 1850s, was present when cases involving the Dakota were judged, as fast as the service at a fast food restaurant. In one day, Riggs saw forty Dakota cases judged and sentenced to death in about seven hours. Some of the cases took mere minutes.

The missionary Stephen Riggs.

Missionaries, including Riggs, visited the Dakota prisoners, and converted a captive audience, while writing their letters of appeal for them, letters to loved ones at different agencies and letters to military commanders pledging to never more resist the American expansion westward.

The second thing which reached out to me was that the book is bi-lingual. There aren’t many resources published in both Dakota and English. As a person whose first language is English, and being a Dakota-Lakota person, having the original Dakota language present for me to read and learn is wonderful.

The most intriguing part of this book is the scholar himself. Dr. Clifford Canku. He is an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and a retired Presbyterian minister. Canku is a common man and his stirring introduction includes early efforts from the previous teams he worked with at Flandreau, SD, the Sisseton Wahpeton College, and then North Dakota State University. Even though his name is on the cover alongside Michael Simon, Canku is quick to acknowledge the efforts of others.

Taoyate Duta, His Red Nation, more commonly known as "Little Crow."

Before being brought on to earliest efforts of this translation project, Canku was visited by the spirit of Taoyate Duta (His Red Nation; aka Little Crow). Throughout the translation process, a spiritual presence was always present. When the project wrapped, Canku received another visitor through a dream. He was at a sundance in this dream and a old man was brought into the east gate where his name was announced four times. The grandfather’s name: Wakaŋboide (Sacred Blazing Fire). The grandfather came to Canku and said, “Hau, wičohaŋ ečanupi kiŋ de wašhté do.” (Yes, the work you are doing is good, it is so.)

Canku is deliberate in that the reader, casual or otherwise, clearly understands that the book is about the Dakota prisoners of war. There are plenty of books out there, and more so with the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War and the Dakota War, but Canku’s and Simon’s book is the only published primary resource from the perspective of the people who fought, the people who defended, and the people who were entirely innocent of the 1862 Minnesota Dakota Conflict.

Camp Kearny, where the Dakota prisoners of war were taken.

An excerpt of one of the letters places the reader in the first person. Wiŋyaŋ, or Woman, writes to her relative Pa Yuĥa, Curly Head, about starving and the heartbreak in the prison camp at Davenport, Iowa:

…my heart is so very broken, it is so. Last summer, we all know one terrible event has occurred, and always we are very heartbroken, because now again, my heart if broken very much, because this winter we are without, we are all suffering. I hate to live, it is so. And now where will they take us?...now we don’t know where they will take us, and therefore I thought maybe we will never see all of you, and therefore my heart is very sad.

Another letter by Stands On Earth Woman tells her relative His Country that she is recently widowed and with a new baby, at the prison camp. She asks for her relative’s assistance because she literally has nothing and she’s starving.

Get this book if you are interested in the “other” side, the forgotten side of the story. Get this book to support a native elder and scholar, but get this book so that we never forget what happened as a result of this terrible conflict.