s
After a day of questioning by the FBI, the trip home for Toby was long—a bus to Klamath Falls, where her aunt picked her up and drove her home to Hatfield. She’d hoped Danya’s trailer would still be parked in the barn, but knew that was wishful thinking. Still, the first thing she did was to check the barn. She found it empty, except for a brown paper bag.
The long trip home from the FBI office in Las Vegas gave Toby ample time to think and reflect on what had happened, her life in general, and what she wanted to do with her future. She returned with a new purpose. Her conversations with Leonard Cloud and Sacheen Crow Dog, despite their violent intentions, had fueled her interest in activism for the rights of all indigenous people. She took heart in the minor concessions coming from a few state governments to rename Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. She told herself that it demonstrated a growing recognition of, and willingness to right, past wrongs. A small step forward. But a step, nonetheless.
And as odd as it seemed to Toby, the news that had followed the story of the Alcatraz takeover, and of the life-and-death struggle on the Duck Valley Reservation, had added considerably to public awareness of the plight of the nations. Especially the story of Sacheen and Leonard, and their doomed love affair, which captivated the media and public attention. For weeks, the story dominated the twenty-four-hour news channels, with the reporters always citing unnamed sources when mentioning the unborn child that had perished with Sacheen.
Toby suspected the fire that had engulfed the plane wreckage must have cremated Sacheen and her fetus, which meant no one in the FBI would have known she was pregnant. She concluded the unnamed source was Danya, but it was only an educated guess. And if it was Danya, Toby could only speculate as to why her mysterious friend would risk contacting the media. Maybe she’s trying to help raise awareness of our plight, and the desperate measures some members of the tribes are driven to undertake?
The next morning, Toby called Clyde Means. It hadn’t been too difficult to track down his phone number. After twenty minutes of conversation, mostly about the American Indian Movement, she volunteered to work for the cause. The money she’d received from Danya allowed her to quit her job at the gas station and split her time between caring for her mother and advocating for compensation from the federal government for the dozens of broken treaties.
For the first time, Toby felt she was doing something meaningful, and she learned how to effectively deal with lawmakers and their staffers, who often couldn’t care less about the rights of American Indians. Toby used the news media—which appeared ever-eager to fan the smoldering flames of bigotry and discrimination—to her advantage, appearing often on radio and television. Within months, she’d become a national celebrity who was being sought for speaking engagements at a range of public and private events.
Donations to the American Indian Movement surged. The once all-volunteer organization had the means to hire a professional PR firm and rent a modest office space. The publicity elevated national awareness of the injustice indigenous people had been suffering since the arrival of European settlers. Politicians were reaching out to Toby for input on drafting new legislation that would include reparations, and return of some tribal lands.
“It’s just the beginning,” Toby had told her mother. “I hope and dream we can finally see this through.”
“You can’t trust the government,” her mother had replied. “You should know that from history.”
Toby smiled. “As a wise friend once told me, it doesn’t have to be that way forever. History cannot be changed. But together, we can change the future.”
Author’s Postscript
In the Author’s Notes at the beginning of this work, I addressed much of the technical background underpinning the plot. Another facet of the story that deserves serious treatment relates to the American Indian Movement, and the historical notes from the 60s and 70s, when Native Americans were protesting for recognition of their civil rights.
For most of my life, I’ve held an intense interest in American Indian culture and history, which is grim indeed. Partly by design, ever since the landing of Europeans in the Americas, disease and warfare have claimed an untallied number of Indigenous Peoples’ lives. The original inhabitants of the Americas lacked antibodies to many deadly diseases, including smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhoid fever, leading to catastrophic epidemics.
According to Guenter Lewy, writing in History News Network (Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, The George Washington University), there were an estimated twelve million indigenous people occupying North America in 1500, and only 237,000 by the end of the nineteenth century.1
Relations between native tribes of North America, and the invading colonial powers, is marked by a string of broken treaties. Following independence from England, the United States government continued this practice. The result was that the native people were constantly being forced off their land and onto reservations.
President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy opened the South for American settlers to take land belonging to five tribes. The policy was the beginning of three decades of forceful evictions of Native Americans westward, beyond the Mississippi River.2 In 1838, more than fifteen thousand Cherokee were compelled to march the Trail of Tears, to present-day Oklahoma. Nearly four thousand perished under the brutal conditions of the forced march.
During the second term of Ulysses S. Grant, his peace policy with the indigenous tribes was abandoned when settlers, seeking gold, began to covet the Black Hills. Grant secretly precipitated war with the Sioux, in violation of the Treaty of 1868, which granted the Black Hills to the Sioux people in perpetuity.
Gold also sparked another disgraceful
