Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 58-59.
Abstract
The Great Plains region has given us minority civil and cultural rights leaders out of all proportion to the minority population of the region: Crazy Horse, Quanah Parker, Gordon Parks, Dull Knife, Rudolpho Gonzales, Zitkala Sa, Suzette La Flesche, Earl Little (Malcolm X's father), Tomas Rivera, Ernie Chambers, and on and on. Biographical scholarship unfortunately has not given us many good accounts of these leaders. The gap is dramatized and at least partially filled by Fikes' book. Jay Fikes, working with Reuben Snake just before his death, has written a work that ultimately celebrates both the latter's humility and his greatness.
Fikes is well positioned for this task since he has completed postdoctoral work in anthropology at the Smithsonian, has lobbied for Indian causes, written a good debunking of Carlos Castaneda's manipulation of Indian religious lore, done a film on Huichol ceremony, and worked with Reuben Snake on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. He received the basic material in this book in dictations given by Reuben Snake in the weeks before his death, and he explains how he edited the dictations lightly, leaving out only pauses, mistaken sentence starts, and the like. Additional material by James Botsford and Walter Echo-Hawk, plus a dictation on the peyote religion given by Reuben Snake to another researcher complete the book. Fikes' scholarly interests come through in the more than twenty pages of finely printed footnotes that close the book and supply background material on the Winnebago culture and the historical milieu out of which Reuben Snake's work emerged.
Fikes makes clear that his account is no impartial story, and I should add that I am no impartial reviewer since I was Mr. Snake's friend from 1968 until his death in 1993. The record contained in this book accurately reflects Reuben's life and carries the nuances of the stories that I heard him tell about other parts of his life. The detail of the account is remarkable since Snake's part of the work was created as he stood looking in at death's door, his body ravaged by heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other ailments. The book gives an account of Snake's rather traditional Winnebago childhood in the late 1930s-remarkably traditional for this period- his education in a series of religious and melting pot public schools, his life as a Green Beret in Berlin, his down-and-out period as a street person thereafter, his marriage, and finally his long period as advocate and prophet in the movement toward Indian revitalization.
The biography leaves out some stories, probably because Snake had time only to offer touchstones in his last weeks. His participation in anti-Vietnam peace activities, his development of a joint Indian-white movement to defeat a particularly harsh sheriff in northeastern Nebraska, the full range of the educational reforms that he sought to achieve in his mission to develop a culture-based education among the tribes, and many details of his work with the American Indian Movement are left out or given short shrift. Especially important are the book's descriptions of the numerous visionary episodes that Snake and his group experienced and his apparently anachronistic attachment to Christ. Snake's Christ, however, is not the Christ of post-Nicene Christology but of the precepts of love fitted to Winnebago clan and family tradition as is clear in his rehearsal of a vision that the ancient ones in his religious tradition experienced. Snake also relates the serpent's precepts of love to Winnebago Medicine Lodge teachings about compassion, respect, honor, and sharing. N ear the end of his life, Snake sees a vision of his brother, Sterling, fanning him with a golden eagle feather, a vision anticipatory of the last ritual that he experienced before his own death.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln