3-Stories––CORAL SNAKE HAT, TWO BREECH BABIES, and DON'S KNIFE.

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Jul 26, 2024

CORAL SNAKE HAT

In Ronan Montana, May of 1983, I was given a hat by an Indian on the Flathead reservation. The Indian, whose name was Greg, gave me the hat the day he saw that I’d forgotten mine while I was recording sound for a friend’s film. I think he must have identified with me as an underdog, being told what to do by a “boss,” and had decided to give me some additional status by making a fuss over me.

After filming wrapped for the day he insisted that I follow him to get it. My “boss” was my friend Jon Jost (director of the movie for which I was serving as his on- location sound man). Jon and I drove after him, following his beat-up pickup truck, first stopping at one house, then watching him cross the back yard to the house next door, then back again.

We waited out there for about twenty five minutes before he finally appeared with the mysterious hat. And it wasn’t just any hat. It was made of heavy felt, featuring bead work around the rim, an alternating pattern of colors; red-orange, orange, yellow, orange, red-orange, brown, white, brown, the design repeating all the way around without a flaw. In the front of the hat was a small turtle pin with a “pearl” set in its back. And all around the center of the hat was a thick piece of fur, which deteriorated over the years since and was replaced with a simple hatband.

Greg told me that the brim of the hat would protect me from the coral snake (one of the most poisonous snakes in North America). The turtle pin would help carry me along, safely on Mother Earth (it was thought in ancient times that the turtle carried the Earth along on its back). And the bear fur would let that ferocious animal know that I was his (or her) friend.

Hat from Ronan.

The hat looked expensive, and I asked a few times if Greg was sure he wanted to part with it. He was steadfast in his decision to give me the hat. Without further hesitation I accepted it, expressed my passionate Thank You, quite touched that a stranger would grant me such a special gift.

Several weeks after I returned home to Oakland I took a short trip to Nevada with my wife Julie, and while driving along a desert road came upon a sign that read "Planet X Ranch." At the ranch’s gift store I bought a cap that read, “Visit Planet X before it visits you” and sent it to Greg courtesy of the bar where I’d met him, adding a few dollars to buy some drinks. Hopefully he got a kick out of getting a package from one of “those movie guys” who were briefly in his town.

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TWO BREECH BABIES

I saw my friend Don Rich one evening at a Passover celebration being held on the art college campus where he taught sculpture and I was a graduate student. Remembering that he had once mentioned something about living on a reservation, I finally got around to asking how he was connected to the Native Americans. He said that he was 1/4 Cherokee, that his Indian name was “One Feather,” and that he had lived on the reservation for the first nine years of his life. He told me that he had returned there for a couple of years when he was 15 before joining the Marines. He’d had trouble locating his birth certificate when he was joining up, and that his mother finally found it under the name of “Dawn” Rich. It seemed that the doctor that had delivered him had misrepresented Don, making him appear as a girl in the birth records, so the tribe wouldn’t receive their normally-allotted grant money for a baby boy.

In our conversation, Don told me that he had been born of a “shaman birth,” meaning he’d come into the world "breech,” feet first. I told him that had been my fate as well, that I was born an arm and leg first, beaten up black and blue by forceps and hospitalized for the first month after my premature birth. We laughed, and he said that was why we had always gotten along so well. “Hadn't I always known that I was special (like he had known about himself),” he asked? Well, I said that I’d always known that I was fucked up, if that’s what he meant. We laughed some more.

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During the Indian’s takeover of Alcatraz I ended up sitting at a powwow of tribal leaders with the daughter of Jim Thorp in some apartment in the Marina district of San Francisco (Don wasn’t with me on this occasion). A man in my video class at CCAC (California College of Arts and Crafts) had decided to tape the proceedings and had picked me to help him on the shoot. We were both members of a class taught by artist/author Philip Makanna, using the first portable TV camera and reel-to-reel video recorder (Sony's Portapack VTR) he had convinced the school to buy in 1970.

It was a heavy group; one Indian member there already had an arrest warrant issued and was hiding from federal agents. And the guy I was with had just spent ten years in San Quentin State prison. Two joints made the rounds of those seated in the circle, and I remember a moment of holding both of them before taking a drag from each before sending them on in opposite directions We never cracked open the suitcase containing the video equipment.

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DON’S KNIFE

Don Rich said that when he’d recently visited the reservation––it had been over 30 years since he’d been back––everyone called to him by his Indian name. “Hi, One Feather! Welcome back One Feather.” He said he cried, couldn’t believe how welcome he felt, being remembered, treated so warmly as if he’d never left.

One of the men brought him a branch from a large dead tree covered with a tarp, which he pulled off to reveal a knife stuck into the wood. Don had stuck his hunting knife in the log thirty years earlier and this Indian had considerately covered it up from the weather, knowing he would return at some point in the future. Don exclaimed how touched he was again, by this act of brotherly love.

He then talked about how the Indians of the plains followed the migratory circle of the buffalo, from Montana down to Four Corners where four states meet. He said that a few centuries ago the Indians watched as the entire earth turned black, because millions of buffalo led the way. I told him I’d read how some buffalo herds could be 70 miles long and 35 miles wide. We looked out over the Bay Area vista from Oakland’s California College of the Arts and Crafts campus (recently California College of the Arts, before moving to San Francisco) and tried to imagine that large an area covered with buffalo.

Don went on to speak about how the idea of the circle played such a significant role in that of the Indians. It was the symbol of life. They lived in a circle, danced in a circle, sat in a circle, painted circles on their backs and faces. And they believed that life was that continuous circle, meeting up with the shadowy land of the dead departed relatives. Death was understood as being a transition, by which to join all one's brave friends and loved ones––just a part of the circle. Don said that when the white man broke the circle of wandering buffalo with his iron wheels (transcontinental railroad) the Indians knew that the end was in sight.

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See Don Rich’s foundry and artworks here.