An American tragedy centuries in the making

AS everyone knows, liberals cry easily. We are like the weeping women of mythology who have wailed down the centuries for reasons of love and betrayal, as well as family fights, unpleasant children and nothing in particular.

Although I have not always cried, I have, as charter president of the Liberal Puke Society -- a name given me by an outraged conservative -- mourned the mistreatment of all living things, including humans, animals and various forms of lower plant life.

Unlike many on the right whose insensitivities allow them to shrug off anything more pathetic than a limping dog, I assume the burdens of social iniquities like a nun shouldering sin, hunched under the heavy weight of the world’s evil.

I mention this today because I don’t believe I have the strength to bear more tonnage on my conscience. Even a liberal puke has his limits.

However, after viewing a documentary called “Lakota: Voices in the 21st Century,” I’m going to have to leave a space on my back for the fate of the Indians, whom we now call Native Americans. As the originals, they are faring poorly.

Filmmakers Robert Celecia and Amanda Strolin bring us the often-woeful tale of a people who have existed for about 400 years and have rarely stopped struggling to seek their place in the elusive cultural neighborhoods of white America.

Their story is told through the voices of those living in the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. It opens with one of them saying, “We are a people out of sight and out of mind.” Scenes of dazzling sunsets over bleak landscapes form the backdrop for the men and women who present their narratives in deceptively emotionless tones.

We hear much about traditional beliefs and future hopes from a tribe that once ruled the Great Plains. The Lakotas pray to gods of wind and earth, clinging to an ancient spirituality while demanding a better place in the body politic. We hear a chief say, “If we were foreigners, everyone would try to help us.”

Celecia and Strolin bring us sepia-toned snapshots of an Indian past, when the memory of their freedoms were still fresh, when they danced in feathered apparel to please the spirits and chanted in the tribal rhythms of their yesterdays.

“Remember who you are,” a tribal elder tells the young people. “Everything on this land is sacred,” another says. “The land is alive.”

But we also hear disturbing statistics of reservation life:

An infant mortality rate 300% higher than the national average. Alcoholism that affects 8 out of every 10 families. A rate of diabetes and tuberculosis 800% higher than the national average, and cancer 400% higher.

The world of the Lakota Sioux Indians is a world largely forgotten in the great sweeps of history. Battles to survive in westward-moving America are the stuff of passing legends: Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee stand out in tales of gunshots and arrows. The blood of massacres stains the open plains.

Some years ago, I had occasion to visit a Navajo reservation at a place in Arizona called Birdsprings. I sat in the makeshift hogan of dirt and logs with the daughter of the medicine man Hataali Yaazhe and listened to the wind. Her name was Polly Curley. She called the wind ni-yol and said it carried voices of spirits from the past, telling them to fight for the preservation of their culture and their language.

She listened for a moment and said, “They’re saying to keep our children home.”

The hogan, dampened by a summer rain, was a sacred place for the Navajos who lived in the small town. There were other hogans in the vast open land of the Painted Desert, occupied as dwellings for those who had next to nothing. And although spirituality prevailed in some areas, so did a sense of hopelessness. Alcoholism was rampant here too. The very air seemed to smell of stale whiskey.

I haven’t returned to Birdsprings since, but after seeing the Lakotas documentary, one can almost conclude that the plight of America’s originals hasn’t changed much. Today, as then, they label as corrupt and inadequate the tribal bureaucracies that are supposed to help them emerge from their cultural prison. A Lakota chief reminds us that they are still an invisible people.

I watched the film with some misgiving, knowing that it would in many ways be an appeal for help that I am not prepared to give. I don’t know how. Send a check? They need more than I’d ever be able to offer. Write my congressman? If he cared, he’d have done something long ago. What we do in America is essentially nothing until the suppressed hit the streets, smash windows and set fire to the structures of the rich on land that we probably stole from them in the first place.

So I sit here, another weeping liberal, wondering how it got to be this bad that so many need so much in a country that cares so little.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. E-mail: al.martinez@latimes.com.