Fire No Longer Keeps the Beast at Bay : Indians: In times past, the predators within a man would be tamed by songs. Now the songs are gone, and alcohol is the beast that kills them both.

There was a moment in which he knew he could not go on. But the moment passed, and the next, and he was running still, and he could see the dark shape of the man running away in the swirling mist, like a motionless shadow. And he held on to the shadow and ran beyond his pain.

--N. Scott Momaday, “House Made of Dawn”

Sometime last April, the spirits left the body of William Smith along Highway 33, about 25 miles north of Ojai. Smitty was a Shoshone Indian from Fort Hall, Ida., and his body is buried there. But the spirits he collected during his lifetime should also be put to rest, as is customary, one year after his death.

Born in California on April 18, 1955, to a relocated Shoshone woman from Idaho and an absent white father, Smitty died homeless, caught like a shadow between two worlds, Indian and white. Most Americans know and accept Indians only if they are feather-bedecked caricatures: “redskins” and “braves” who bear Hollywood names like Tonto and Iron Eyes and do fine as targets for John Wayne’s hundred-round six-shooter. American guilt can, to a certain extent, be assuaged of the theft of native land and resources by painting Indians as aboriginal oddities in the realm of natural history rather than human history. William Smith was none of these. He was a son, a father, a brother, a friend, and an Indian homeless in his own land.

In the early 1960s, Smitty’s mother found her way back to the reservation and he grew up along the banks of the Snake River. Like most Indian reservations, Fort Hall is an island of absolute poverty in the midst of awesome beauty. Like most boys, Smitty was interested in baseball and fishing, and like most Indians, he dropped out of school and learned a trade.

In past times, the native people marked the transition from child to adult with a solitary stint in the womb of the earth mother. There they would seek out the sacred names for predatory animals born into each human soul and shape the animal spirit’s energy into the cycles of all life. Nowadays, when the animals awaken, there are no prayers. There is alcohol, and while it dulls the roar, it also sharpens the claws and teeth until a beast is born that can rip the soul to shreds. And so it was with Smitty.

Crime on an Indian reservation is a federal offense, and when the drunken spree was over, Smitty was sent to a cell in Lompoc, less than a hundred miles from his place of birth. Smitty was a short-timer, and was soon back on the streets. He struggled with the beast, praying hard to hear its name, and for a time his artwork and Indian singing kept the claws at bay. I remember his clear sweet voice beside me in the sweat lodge, a place that Smitty sought out time and again. There used to be lots of sweats around Southern California and Smitty went to many. But the twin threats of pseudo-shamans and their new-age supporters drove the sweats underground. And instead of the warm caress of steam to still the beast he carried, Smitty poured poison down his throat.

In and out of jail a hundred times or more, and no one in the system could find the name to call the beast growing inside Smitty. What had been an animal of altruistic potential was now a monster who could only be tamed by ancient songs and ceremonies. But many of the healing songs have died with the old ones, stuck to their tongues, frozen there by the pilgrims who are only now wanting to hear them, and steal them, like they did the land.

When Smitty’s body could no longer absorb the alcohol, he tricked the monster to sleep with a heroin assault. But the beast was tired, and angry, and hungry for the songs that Smitty could no longer sing, for the fire that kept the beast at bay also burned Smitty’s throat until his voice cracked like dry leaves underfoot. Since the songs the beast craved are born of the wind in the language of the birds and four-leggeds, it was in their land, high up a twisting canyon road, that the beast left the body of William Smith. No one was there to see it, but Indians in the Americas know too well what happened; this horror is familiar to us all.

The last time we saw Smitty, the beast was searching for a place for him to die. And finally that happened, under some chaparral. Smitty’s clothes were strung out along the hill where the beast tore away the only things left that looked human about the body of William Smith. In the last moments of struggle, Smitty could not have sung his death song, for by then the chords were burned like sticks to rattle in his throat.

There are other beasts, thousands of them, loose in the bodies of Indians who can be healed only with ceremonies that can no longer be learned. For the wind creates no songs against square stones and metal. And the lyrics of the birds and four-leggeds are closed out with walls, or caged away. But I know that there are still some songs being tended like small warm fires, here and there, in sweat lodges. May one of them at this time be sung for the spirits of William Smith.