[antiwar-van] Native American Sees Link Between Mideast, Indian Experience

[hanna kawas]

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Native American Sees Link Between Mideast, Indian Experience

By BETHE DUFRESNE
Day Staff Columnist
Published on 11/27/2003

Lyme — Ira Blue Coat, a Lakota Sioux who traveled to Israel-Palestine with
an
interfaith group from eastern Connecticut, looked at the wall splitting up
Palestinian territories and saw a re-run of his own people's tragic history.

So many manifestations of life under occupation — border checkpoints, passes
to get
to work, searches — seemed all too familiar.

“It was so sad,” Blue Coat said last week while preparing a Sioux sweat
lodge deep in
the woods of a Lyme estate to give thanks for a safe return.

“The Israelis are doing the exact same thing to the Palestinians,” said Blue
Coat,
“that the U.S. government did to us in the 1800s and 1900s.

“They took our land and put us on the reservation,” he said, then “cut it up
and made
lines” to divide the people.

Several of Blue Coat's fellow Mideast travelers in the World House
Interfaith group,
including Waterford rabbi Aaron Rosenberg and Old Lyme pastor David Good,
were on
hand for one of two sweat lodges he conducted last Wednesday. It was to cap
off the
group's peace-seeking mission.

Blue Coat, 51, grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in South
Dakota, home
to four Lakota tribes, including his own Sans Arc. Back when the Lakota were
split
up, he said, his grandmother was shut off from family on the Pine Ridge
reservation.

The Cheyenne River Sioux have long had a relationship with the First
Congregational
Church of Old Lyme. When Good began organizing the Mideast trip, he thought
Blue Coat
would add an unusual perspective.

Blue Coat was baptized a Christian and confirmed at age 10 in his
reservation's
Congregational Church. But he's “always prayed the Indian way,” he said.

Most American Indians, he said, see the Mideast only if they join the
military. “I
wanted to go in peace,” he said, “instead of with a uniform and a gun.”

In a terrible turn of fate, however, Blue Coat learned during the trip that
a
19-year-old nephew had been killed in the collision of two Black Hawk
helicopters in
Iraq.

To launch the Nov. 8 journey, Blue Coat built a small circular sweat lodge
out of
birch saplings, wool blankets and tarp. The travelers prayed and sweated
before they
left, as a cleansing.

Last week it was time to sweat again.

“I am not a holy man,” he told a half-dozen people who crawled after him
inside the
tiny hut. They felt along the cool, hard earth for a spot to sit.

Outside, friends and neighbors silently tended a tall bonfire of rocks with
their
pitchforks, awaiting Blue Coat's call to open the flap and shovel another
smoldering
rock into a small center pit.

The flap faced east, like the painted buffalo skull on the ground by the
bonfire.
Blue Coat said the Sioux build all dwellings open to the east, so they will
flood
with sun in the morning.

Between ancient Lakota songs, drumming, prayers and native stories, Blue
Coat dipped
a long ladle into a bucket of water and splashed a few drops on the hot
rocks. The
water popped and hissed, creating sparks like tiny shooting stars.

Indians don't travel aimlessly, Blue Coat said. Before he joined the World
House
group, Blue Coat said, he had a strange dream. In it he was driving up a
steep hill,
toward Zion, when one by one he came upon figures from the Bible.

He saw Mary, then Jesus, and finally John the Baptist, a favorite of a
Lakota
relative who is a Methodist minister. They looked down a steep, rocky ledge.

“I was scared,” he said. “I didn't know what it meant.”

Then, he said, he saw that John the Baptist looked like Rev. Good.

As the heat intensified, Blue Coat told stories old and new, of Indians
battling the
white men, and of his own battles against the enduring reservation plagues
of beer
and whisky.

“More rocks!” he called out when the heat had already permeated every pore
of those
inside. There were many rocks left cooking on the bonfire, Blue Coat said,
and
American Indians don't like waste.

Anyone could choose to leave the lodge by saying, “Mi-ta-q-ye-wose,” a
phonetic
spelling of Blue Coat's mantra, “We are all related.”

Blue Coat has been leading sweat lodges since the 1970s but does not
consider himself
a medicine man. A medicine man, he said, is “a guy with long hair, dark
glasses,
rings on every finger, a black leather coat, tight pants, and a white woman,
or two,
on each arm.”

The American Indian sense of humor, often self-deprecating, often
misunderstood, is
legendary.

Blue Coat told of his experience at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. A Jewish
man
there, he said, offered to pray for him, then started bargaining for a big
tip. Blue
Coat said he was happy to discover that American Indians aren't the only
ones who
will stoop to sell their culture.

Before his trip to the Mideast, Blue Coat said, he was “neutral,” neither
pro-Israel,
nor pro-Palestine.

Now, he said, he thinks differently. “The Palestinians are getting treated
mean,” he
said. “The U.S. is giving Israel all these billions of dollars a year.”

Blue Coat compared Palestinians fighting the Israeli military with rocks and
blowing
up their own bodies to Indians with bows and arrows battling the U.S. Army
in the
1800s.

If he were to do anything for the Palestinians, he said, it would be to urge
other
Indians to write to their congressmen.

“I can't help them,” Blue Coat said, “but I can get a message to people.”

b.dufresne at theday.com