I study faces. I buy books of old photographs and new photographs and study faces. Take for instance these books. Look at the faces in a book called Matthew Brady, Historian with a Camera; look at Edmund Ruffin, the Southerner who claimed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter. His eyes are like hawk's eyes—a scheming hawk—and they are bright and crazy. His mouth is wide and stubborn; his jaw protrudes slightly. His hair hangs to his shoulders. Then look at General Grant in the same book. His eyes are gentle and his brow is concerned. His mouth thinks. His face is of the future; it doesn't matter what politics he had in context of his time, he's a liberal; the grandfather of Jimmy Carter as well as Richard Nixon. Then take a book called Faulkner's County: Yoknapatawpha—(If you want transition first, look at Walker Evans' photos in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)—no hawk eyed Edmund Ruffins here, but scared faces; threatened mouths; captured eyes. U. S. Grant won and rules in Washington as well as Atlanta, Chicago and Sacramento. Look at Jerry Brown and see Grant; but look at the taxpayer, the veteran of World War II, and see the trapped eyes of the southern redneck—the man with the shotgun in Easy Rider may be from Illinois as well as Mississippi—he knows now the liberal truth that all men are equal and he lives with the fear that if all men are as good as him, then any day he may fall and disappear.

L. A. Huffman was a photographer at Miles City on the Montana frontier. A book of his photos, The Frontier Years has pictures of many old time Indians. Their eyes are hawk's eyes, too, but a hawk of a different breed—a wild hawk to Ruffin's crazy stubborn, calculating one. Their mouths are set, posed either with ferocity or often a kind of cynical mirth. But most of all, there's arrogance; an arrogant set of the head on the shoulders; arrogant eyes and mouth. Laura Gilpin's The Enduring Navaho covers a period from not long after the end of Huffman's until almost the present, and her Navaho have the same faces. Along Grassdance Creek, Bill Cloud, Gid Shell, Frazier Snakestrack—all my neighbors—looked that way.

You know what's happened to the Indian in the past two or three hundred years; you might well wonder why they look so arrogant.

Because they're The People. If they happen to be Sioux, then they're not Crow, Blackfeet, Flathead—or white. They are The People. And this leads to an interesting point of view; they can hold the most un-liberal position that their enemies are not quite human. Check out the scene in Black Elk Speaks where the women get hold of the white soldiers' bodies after the Custer fight. I sent that book to my good friends, Joe and Mildred Birdwing at Grassdance. Mildred wrote back, "Joe and I think a real Indian wrote that book."

But that doesn't mean my neighbors on Grassdance Creek had much in common with a teenage soldier at Mylai. Before an old time Indian killed a deer, he had a prayer, "I kill myself." I've seen white hunters kill deer with high powered, scoped rifles from heated, aluminum "deer blinds" mounted on towers beside specially seeded deer feeding areas. And then have their "guide" go get the deer, dress it out, and have the meat frozen for them—if indeed they didn't think it too "wild" tasting to eat. When Joe and Mildred came back to Montana from California and a trial at city living ten years ago, they were broke. They lived in a little cabin up in the mountains and Joe got whatever work he could. For meat, they had to depend on his hunting skill. Whenever he'd come in late in the afternoon with a fresh killed deer over his saddle, he'd throw it onto the ground and their daughter Marsha, who was not yet old enough to talk, would run to it and pound on it like Indian drums; she would make up Indian songs to sing with no words; and she would drink fresh blood from the wound.

And that's not to say something else.

I found myself at a house in Los Angeles one night where a tall effeminate young white man, impressed that I'd been living with Indians, said to me seriously (and profoundly), "The thing I like about Indians is, they're so mystical." I told him these stories.

The first time I went to an Indian dance, I expected buckskin and feathers; there were buckskin and feathers, but there were also headdresses of feathers stuck in plastic bleach bottles; sueded cotton instead of leather and an abundance of safety pins holding the whole thing together. I thought, "They don't make their outfits any different from the way my cub scout pack made them."

Memorial Day, once, I went to a ceremony with Joe and Mildred. We got to their cemetery before the rest of the family, Judy and I following their pickup in our jeep, driving out across rolling prairie land up toward the mountains. The cemetery was on a bare hill-top, a net wire fence around it. Judy helped Mildred and her older girls start cleaning the graves while Joe and I stood back, leaned up against his pickup. Mildred told us all the graves there but one were of her family. She said that belonged to an old woman who'd died dancing at a dance hall that used to be on the next hill-top over toward the mountains.

The old woman was from Canada and had no relatives nearby, so they decided to bury her in the closest cemetery. It was winter time then, Mildred said, and the ground was frozen, so they couldn't dig the grave very deep. Every year after that, part of the old woman used to protude from the ground—until finally none of her was left. After Mildred's relatives came to the cemetery, their cars in single file winding across the prairie like a parade, the ladies prepared a paper plate and paper sack for each grave. On the plates, they put cookies, saltine crackers, sticks of wrapped chewing gum, candy bars, fruit, packaged fried-pies, and canned soft drinks. They placed a sack and a plate on each grave. Alan Cone, who would die sundancing at another reservation before the summer was out—and who was a grandson of the chief who stopped his people at Grassdance and took up the white man's road—prayed in Indian. He said, "Today is the only day we are all together, the living and the dead." Two eagles swept up from the mountains and hovered above us; the people saw them and pointed and told one another. They were happy, for the eagle is a very good sign. The ladies lifted each plate up a few inches and set it back down, giving thanks Indian style. Then they called people in the crowd and these people came forward to get one of the plates or sacks and eat. The dead had first chance, but they didn't eat much.

While we ate, rain threatened. When we finished, we went to the real feed on the prairie a few miles away. Food was stacked in cardboard boxes and cooking pans and we circled around it. An American flag flew in the center of the circle. Had it not been rainy, we would have sat on the ground in a circle, but as it was, we pulled up our cars, hoods pointing toward the flag. Alan Cone prayed again, this time in English, and the food was passed around. We brought our own eating dishes and we were served by people carrying the food around the circle. We were offered more than we could eat—it was expected we would take food home. We had boiled beef, boiled in plain water and underseasoned by my Southwestern tastes, but with a unique flavor all its own; soup; Indian fried bread; crackers and cookies; watermelon; Kool-Aid and coffee. There's always coffee where there are Indians. The man carrying the dog around passed Judy and me by since we were white; he didn't think we'd want to eat dog. But we did and Joe, thinking it was funny, sent him back to us.

As we finished the feed, rain came, first big isolated drops on car hoods and windshields and then a driving thunder storm that sent the food-servers running. We went back to Joe and Mildred's house in Grassdance, and after the rain stopped, we sat out in front of Joe's tack house—where he repairs saddles—and watched the clouds still raining in the mountains. The clouds spoke to the mountains and the mountains answered. Clouds talking to mountains and eagles, the young man in L.A. thought pretty cool. Headdresses made from bleach bottles and packaged fried pies were something else; he said he thought that was corruption of Indian culture. He was wrong. In the old days, Indians had bone and leather laying around to make costumes with; today they have plastic bleach bottles—in either case, they've used what was at hand. If they eat packaged fried pies today and chew chewing gum, why not offer it to the dead. It is an everyday magic the white man with his European heritage of mysterious and high church cannot understand.

Magic which is not stylized, but is style. The Indians along Grassdance Creek are into style on many levels. Nicknames are common; they range from Indian names to something reminescent of 1930's movies about college boys. Way of dress is important; in Northern Montana (as in most of the west), the proper clothes are Levis—the button kind,sometimes with top button left loose, so they'll fit lower—western shirts; boots; and a properly high crowned, narrow brimmed cowboy hat. A few months ago, I overheard a conversation between Joe and Mildred about somebody's hat. Joe had just come home from town and he was telling Mildred about a big hat somebody had on—much too big. He told the story partly in fun, more than a little in contempt. Joe said, "He claimed he had skin trouble; had to wear it that way." We were in Denver before we first went to Grassdance and an Indian there told us he thought Grassdance was the toughest reservation town in the country. Two young white men had been driven from town by gunfire; kids had shot into their trailer house and had shot at one especially—an eastern kid with shoulder length blond hair and an Australian hat. "I guess they liked the way he jumped," the Indian in Denver told us. I wore Levis and boots because that's what I wear. I wore a sheath knife then. My hair was a little long, but not shoulder length; it was not blond. I was from Texas, not the east. We were never even threatened, must less shot at. Little kids would ask us what tribe we belonged to and think we were teasing them when we said we were white. This is not bigotry or intolerance. A man's style is his truest mark—it is how he sees himself and how he sees himself in his environment; it tells true which side he's on.

It's the base and frame on which his power is built. Power is medicine; it is what a man has to use.

Indians do not take medicine power lightly. Joe and Mildred, like most Indians, are interested in horses. Joe used to ride the rodeo and they keep horses. They talk about people with horse medicine; these people can always win races—and they can control horses in other ways. Last summer Joe and Mildred went to a rodeo down on another reservation; they knew the producer, a white man. They were with him in his trailer house beside the corrals where he had his horses and Joe noticed young Crow and Cheyenne men up on the corral fence, talking to the horses and touching them. He said to the white producer, "You better keep those kids away from the horses; them horses won't be able to throw 'em." Joe meant they were working medicine on the horses. The producer laughed. No Crow or Cheyenne young were pitched that day. The same thing happened the second day and Joe told the producer again to keep the kids away; when they came the third day, the producer ran out of his trailer, threatening them and yelling for them to leave. Joe said, "You should have just posted somebody to keep them away; you shouldn't have yelled at them." That day the rodeo was a carnage of horse flesh; Mildred said they watched the horses kill themselves; they cut themselves on the fence and broke their necks coming out of the chutes.

But power is usually not that magical; usually it is in the faces and postures of the people—the way they wear their clothes. It is the sound of their voices, the old men's accents like Chief Dan George in Little Big Man. It is in their language; in their stories; in their life. It was said Old Tony Beaver had medicine. "Must be true," Joe said. "He never has worked a day in his life and he always gets by."

They are The People.

They are Stars.

I discovered by looking at many photos of the last great Comanche war chief; half-white Quanah Parker, that his medicine had something to do with a star. In Indian clothes, he always wears a star on his necklace; in white man's clothes he wears a star tie pin. His house in Oklahoma had giant stars on the roof. Sometimes stars are beaded onto moccasin toes and beaded into necklaces and earrings; it's a good symbol.

This is a question: Was Paul Newman in Hud the Star, or was Hud? I saw Hud when I was in highschool senior in West Texas; I was amazed to find my friends and I were living a movie. When I saw Little Big Man, I was moved by Chief Dan George dancing on the point of a hill with Montana's landscape beyond him; then I thought; Jesus, there's a crew of probably not less than fifty people and all kinds of complicated equipment not twenty feet away from him.

When I first went to live on Grassdance Creek, it was a movie. I was living in a one room log cabin in Northern Montana; I was living on an Indian reservation; nighttimes, I was hiding in the brush along the creekbank, wrapped in an army blanket poncho, waiting to run off kids who would come to steal; I was eating dog meat and seeing eagles. I wore a sheath knife. But then as months passed, as I settled into the place and the rhythm of the days, without television or old friends; with past scenes grown dim, I lost the feeling of a movie. I was just living on Grassdance Creek.

A Star not only dances by himself on a mountain point—without cameras or other men—he doesn't even have knowledge of a camera. He is a pure clear light, burning with fire which is only his.

Mildred wrote in the spring that Bill Cloud was dead. He'd got some money somewhere—lease money or something—and gone off to Hardy drinking. After he'd been drunk a week or so, he fell under a moving train. About the same time, his daughter Apache had her collar bone broken in a car wreck. The day she got out of the hospital, she was celebrating and suffered a concussion in another car wreck. Early in the summer, we were staying with Joe and Mildred and Mildred said she'd heard more about Bill's death. When he first got the money, he went off to Canada where he was drinking around with some Canadian Indians. They beat him up and he came back to Hardy. When his body was found in Hardy, all his money was gone, the story was some of the Canadian Indians killed him for it.

Judy asked Mildred how Ethyl was taking it all. "Okay, I guess," Mildred said. "She's drunk as usual."

Bill and Ethyl Cloud were our closest neighbors at Grassdance. They lived in a little log and fiberboard cabin across the creek and down in the brush. Bill was a leathery, wiry old guy; despite years of incredible dissipation, he looked a full ten years younger than he was. He asked me to guess his age; when I guessed ten years young, he laughed in the short, choppy was of old time Indians and said, "That pleases me." He had been a cowboy as a young man; he'd worked for a big Texas ranch that had leased the reservation; he still rode with all the grace Indians are supposed to, relaxed, straight up and easy in the saddle. When he found I was from Texas he said, "Bet you're a good roper; never seen a Texan wasn't a good roper." He wouldn't believe I could hardly rope at all; he kept saying he would bring a rope by to watch me rope.

Ethyl must have been twenty years younger than Bill, but it hardly showed. The kind of life they lived tells more on a woman than on a man. She was overweight and her eyes were dull; but even so, sometimes I thought I could see a kind of beauty that might have existed once. Apache, their daughter, was nineteen. She was beautiful. I never knew anyone like her before and I think I won't again. I saw her first in the tribal hall; she'd just come home from BIA boarding school. She was friendly and chattered away like an ordinary American highschool girl; I was a little surprised that Bill and Ethyl had such an innocent and middle class daughter. After that, she'd wave at me when she'd ride by on horseback or when she was walking and I'd pass her in my jeep.

But after a while, I noticed a change in the way she acted toward me; I saw a change in her eyes. Instead of talking to me, she would stare at me; and her eyes—deep black Indian eyes—would burn.

A couple of times, she came late at night, drunk, to ask me to take her and her mother somewhere. I took them and she wouldn't talk to me during the ride. I found I'd been a little hasty in thinking her Bill and Ethyl's innocent and middle class daughter; she could not have lived in that house and been either. They partied down there almost every night; we'd hear Indian singing drifting up from the creekbed. Tearful wives would knock on our door at three in the morning, hoping by some miracle their husbands were at our house. "He's always down there with those Cloud girls," they'd wail. Apache's eyes were often swollen and bruised; there would be red patches and cuts on her cheeks. Whenever her face was marked, she would be more sullen than usual. A forty-five year old man she stayed with sometimes was supposed to be doing it to her. One Sunday morning after a long loud night before, Bill came to our house at sunup and asked if I could take Apache to the hospital? I went back down to their cabin with him and found her curled up on a bed, her eyes closed tightly, her mouth a firm line. Her face and arms were battered and swollen.

Once she sent her cousin up to the door one night to ask me to come around to the side of the cabin. Apache was there, drunk. She giggled and tried to tell me something I couldn't understand.

Finally she sent her cousin one night to tell me to come see her in the hall. She was waiting to fight. Even her cousin, who had herself stabbed Barry Ringing the winter before, was amazed at her fury. Her cousin said, "Don't mind her; she's just mean." I talked to her, and white man I was, we ended up laughing. She asked me after a while if I could take her up near the mountains; she said she had to babysit for someone. I took her, and when I let her out of the jeep, she went to a man I knew. He was drinking beer with other men in front of a log cabin. I saw her last at a softball game in Hardy. Judy had played and we were waiting for two other girls we were going to take home. The car Apache was in passed slowly by us leaving. She was on the side next to me and she passed not five feet away. She looked at me in her old way, arrogant, full-mouthed and hateful. I realized then in a flash: She was looking at me exactly the way I looked at her! I always look at people that way—especially women I want. My God, I thought, awed at the thing she offered—a journey to dark places where Stars burned bright; a mapless trip which will most likely have no return.