>> guest: well, perhaps it's less hard line in let's go and invade them. perhaps that sentiment no longer is that strong. although there are still somee a people that would rather go ando just, you know, invadeut i physically. but i think there are more people open to speaking, opening relations, perhaps lifting the embargo. i know that there's a lot of people that feel that way because they feel the only wayho to change things in cuba is to c change it from within. i and you can't change it from t within if they don't have any information from outside. that's the most important thing is to get information from the rest of the world inside of cuba. >> guest: part of the work thatt we did was to promote civil disobedience, a nonviolent approach to a confrontation with the government and to reclaim human and civil rights of the cuban people. we started sending literature to the island, and slogans like "i

am the change." i that meant that cuba had to assume respondent for its circumstances, and it will want to change. we had to produce it ourselves. not to expect the u.s. to do it for us. and all the messages like o establishing ourur relationshipo one another like the one that says come raids -- comrades? no. brothers -- to break with that pattern that they should call each other comrades. and so us it was a bad word. we wanted to call each other brothers. and in the mission of brothers to the rescue i say the second objective after the saving of o lives was the first, reaching the cuban communities out of th island with a message of we care about you, there is such thing of human solidarity to risk

lives. to assist you in the event thatu you decide to not take ittake anymore and come to the u.s. by whatever means. >> host: now, in the book, "seagull one," you identify ileana ros-lehtinen as the godmother of brothers to the rescue, the congresswoman. >> guest: yes. i i interviewed the congresswomane and she's very close friends with jose, and that's exactly what she was. she was always there to take their needs to a higher place ia the government. kind of what god parents do. they know someone, they can get something for you you probably can't get for yourself, and ileana worked tirelessly.hers >> guest: ileana was instrumental in getting the coast guard to come after ime would call.o >> host: now, fidel castro has i stepped down in name. raul castro is now leading cuba.

has policy changed? is there more trade and travel between cuba? could you go back or, lily, could you go back? i >> guest: i don't think i couldg go back to cuba. i think they would shoot me on sight. they missed the last time. i'm sure they wouldn't miss the second time. and i don't think there's been any change, and i don't thinkhik fidel castro has ceased to bemae the ultimate voice on the him island. his brother is just managing, on a higher level, the country for his brother. nevertheless, it's for hiso brother. >> guest: i would love to goo back and have a bookok signing there. i would love to get this story inside of cuba.his i think it would be great. wou >> host: now, some cubans are going back and forth. you can fly from miami now, can't you? >> guest: yes, you can. but i don't have any family there. and even though i would love to see the country where i was born because i don't remember anything, and it's just the natural beauty is still there. i would love to see that, but iu

wouldn't feel comfortable at this time to go to cuba. >> host: we have been talkingh with lily prellezo and jose basulto. "seagull one: the amazing true story of brothers to the rescue." thank you both for joining us here. >> guest: thank you for having us. >> host: at the miami book fair. >> guest: thank you. >> next, pulitzer prize winning author thomas powers recounts the death of native american leader crazy horse who died in 1877. this event, hosted by the maine historical society, is about one hour and ten minutes. >> just listening to it, it might seem that crazy horse is a deep departure from thing thingt i've written about in the past, but it's not really that or different. i found when i started to work on this project that the nature of the events that i was trying

to understand were hidden in much the same kind of way for very similar kinds of reasons, and they took the same kinds of effort to dig out, lift up to the surface. whenever you're dealing with violence and conflict that descends to the personal level, it becomes highly secretive. and it was that, i think, that first caught my attention about crazy horse and about what happened to him. i have written in the past about serious american attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. one of them was fidel castro, and the other was during the second world war. ice pgen berg was the chief theoretician of the german bomb program, and the united states

made a serious effort to kill him in several different ways including by bombing him where he lived during the war and also by sending somebody to possibly shoot him while he was giving a lecture during the war. and fidel castro, i'm sure everybody vaguely recalls the various efforts under john f. kennedy to kill fidel castro which failed. which i think already everybody now says, well, thank goodness. to carry that burden around would not be a pleasure. and i can tell you working on those things and delving deeply into the record and down to the darkest rooms of the archives you never, you never, you never find a piece of paper where american officials are actually talking about killing somebody. it's always by with implication,

it's always from additional sources, things that were overheard. you never find them doing it directly. well, with crazy horse you do. and i ran across that a number of years ago. my brother, we paid a visit to the little bighorn national battlefield, and i picked up a book that contained three eyewitness accounts of the killing of crazy horse. and i had never heard of any of those people or read those accounts before. and one of them by a fellow named billy garnet who was only 22 when crazy horse died. he was a half-blood ogallala/white interpreter working for the army and for the indian department. had many years afterwards given an interview with a retired general named hugh scott who was very interested in the indians, and scott wanted to know, well, how was crazy horse killed?

be why did that happen? so garnet gave him an extensive account which was transcribed, and in it he described a meeting at fort rob robinson in the quarters of general bradley. general george crook was present, he was commander of the department of the platte, and he was the man in charge of all military activities in a big chunk of the west which included nebraska where fort robinson is. and crook and a lieutenant named william clark and 13 ogallala chiefs on the third day of september, 1877, planned to kill crazy horse that night. and this was somebody who was in the room, heard the conversation and recorded it for history.

it was a startling, startling document. and when i read that, my interest was piqued. and that's roughly how i got involved in doing this particular, this particular project. it always takes me a long time to decide what i'm going to do because once i do decide, then i spend a long time working on it. you've got to live with it. and i can tell you that the worst nightmare of any author is the possibility that you wake up one morning, and you won't care anymore. [laughter] and you won't want to look at it. and i've known a couple of guys that's happened to. it's a terrible thing to witness, and it is a ours of fear in the middle of -- a source of fear in the middle of the night. [laughter] so you've got to be sure you're really interested. it took me a long time to decide i was really interested in this, and that moment of reading an account of a plan to just kill a guy in the -- in his bed, that

sort of got me paying attention. but it's not just crazy horse that i'm interested in, and it's not just crazy horse that this book is about. it's about the larger episode of the contents that surrounded his life and death. and that larger episode is, essentially, the dispossession of the sioux by the united states government. a process that unfolded over a period of about 40 years, roughly 1850 to 1890. and that, also, is an event that fits into a larger context, as everybody knows, which is the dispossession of all the indians of america of the places where they lived at one time.

and it's happened scores of sometimes, hundreds of times probably with different tribes, different languages, different specific circumstances. but the process is kind of roughly the same, and the essence of it is white people arrive at the edge of an interesting territory, and they want it. and the process becomes that they take it over and occupy it and dispossess the people who are there. so this has happened very frequently, but nobody can absorb all those stories, and many of them are hidden because the record is thin, and you can't really recreate now at this late date what happened and what it was like. but in the case of the sioux between 1850 and 1890, the record is not thin. the record is very robust. and when you start getting interested in this, not only do you find that there are many

volumes of memoirs by the soldiers, principally the military people and some civilians who were involved during that period, but also to a surprising extent you find books by indians. and the books by indians are by indians in a special kind of way. typically, somebody got to know an indian, was interested in the story, began to take down information and wrote an account. and there are many such books, and you -- they all pass through the hands of a white writer. generally speaking, you know who the writers are and we know something about them so we have an idea of their kind of general take on what's going on. but they, these books, they sort of line up. you think there'd be nothing there that you could really rely on, but they're surprisingly

consistent. i don't think in the course of my work more than once or twice did i run across an account that i thought, whoa, that's fabricated. that's just plately false, that didn't -- completely false, that didn't happen at all. they get close to the truth and many details, of course, are lost and cannot be reproduced. be many can. -- but many can. and in that larger context of the dispossession of the sioux there is this event, the killing of crazy horse. one man, it's an isolated event when you think about it. and nevertheless, if you work at it, you can kind of fit in the pieces. you can kind of fit in the pieces. the first time i tackled something that was deeply hidden

was in writing about the cia. and i quickly discovered that there are two kinds of things that might be said to be true about the cia. and one thing would be the formal secrets. and if you, for example, wanted to know the combination to the safe in the directer's office on the seventh floor of the cia's world headquarters in langley, virginia, you could not find out. that is hidden. and there are a lot of things having to do with times and dates and places and stuff like that that you can't find out. but you can find out what they are like. and if you start paying attention to the intelligence business, pretty soon you begin to get a sense for the feel of the culture of various different intelligence organizations, what they're like. and it allows you to read the newspaper in an interesting way because you pick up the newspaper, you read something about an event that's taken

place in london, and you say, jesus, that's the russians, you know? it's just got every signature, that's the russians. [laughter] or some guy will have a car accident in tunisia, and can you say, that's the israelis. you know their style, and you know what they're going to say when they're asked if they did it. the russians, for example, sometimes when they've killed somebody, they don't really hide it. that's part of the point. they're trying to let people know, hey, we're serious. so you can find out what intidges organizations -- intelligence organizations are like, including the american intelligence organization in how they think, how they operate and it is also true, i feel, of the indians in the 1870s. there's a -- i don't want to underestimate the gap between us and them, the gulf, the difficulty of crossing that and really understanding what they were like. but you can if you do the work and you pay attention and you

immerse yourself in that world. you begin to get a kind of a feel for it, and you stop talking about it as if it were something you had studied and learned in school, and you start talking and thinking about it as if it were something you had experienced. so if you were to ask me, you know, what kind of a man was red cloud who was one of the principle rivals of crazy horse and he was the leading chief of the ogallala sioux for a very long time from 1840 until his death in about 1909, i would tell you on the basis of what i know about him, what i feel about him. i mean, i would describe him like somebody i had actually known, say, of my father's generation. and i might even be wrong, but that's the way it has been internalized and kind of absorbed. so you can, you can find out what these things are like and what those people are like.

it would be the same with lots of other characters. if you were to say, well, why did so and so do that? my memory banks come up with a roll of evidence about why he did that or the other, but the way i reason about it is from the basis of sort of knowing what kind of a person this might have, this might have been. so if some of you have already actually obtained a copy of this book, i've seen a few in hands here and those people who have actually picked it up and held it know it is a substantial, rather heavy work. 462 pages of text, another 100 pages of notes. i myself do not think it is heavy going. i think it reads like the wind. [laughter] other people might feel, no. [laughter] it takes a little getting used to. so why a book about crazy horse?

you know? there are a lot of indians. i've mentioned red cloud, and can i could mention hot of others. and they're -- lots of others. and about many of them there's a lot more. american horse, that's a very interesting guy. little big man, he flies through the story briefly but very intensely. there's a lot known about him. but i crazy horse is the one that i concentrated on. and in many ways he seems like an improbable subject for such a long study. he was not a prepossessing person physically. no one ever described the entrance of crazy horse into a room by everybody falling silent. he was slender, he was below middle height. he had a kind of a mournful, melancholy expression on his face most of the time. the accounts we have of his physical appearance come from some whites who knew him during a brief window, the summer of

1877, roughly four months. and also from indians who knew him over a longer period of time. but he had a powerful presence. he was a genuine leader. it takes a long time to describe exactly what the -- what to call an indian chief. but he was induke tab my a chief, and it came from some of his personal attributes that you wouldn't notice initially by looking at him. a lot of indians of that era, that part of the world were gifted orators. and spoke all the time. red cloud made speeches right and left, and many of them were transcribed. and they're remarkable. they have a remarkable eloquence and poetry in them. crazy horse never said anything like that.

he, he leaves no words behind or very, very few. the collected sayings of crazy horse you could put on three typewritten pages probably. the ones that are really well tested to. so he leaves no words behind, he left no children behind. he had one daughter. she died of some kind of a fever, unidentified, but it could have been a childhood illness of the sort that killed so many indians during those years. so he -- and he never had another child. she had a remarkable name, they are afraid of her. and she died at the age of about 3. you wonder, boy, what kind of a kid was that? [laughter] and that was a very painful experience in crazy horse's life, as you would imagine. there's an account by a man who actually accompanied him to the burial site of this daughter. and his name was frank ruard.

he was also a mixed blood, but he was part polynesian and part white, and he had lived with the locona for a while but, fully explained i promise, in the course of the book. and he went with crazy horse who had learned on returning from a war party that his daughter had died to the place where she was buried on a scaffold. and he went out there with crazy horse, and crazy horse climbed up onto the scaffold with the body of his daughter. they, that's typically how they buried people. they e corrected a scaffold 6 feet or so off the ground. the idea was to keep wolves and things at bay. and he climbed up there for three days just mourning. and indians were very open about grief. but he never had any more children. there's no, there are lots of people who claim to be descended from crazy horse, but there are no actual descendants. and there are no photographs of crazy horse.

there are indians who drew pictures of him and who knew him, and some of these pictures are great. the style of drawing called ledger art which i love, and it's called that because the paper that was used by these indians mostly came from military posts and trading posts, and it came out of ledger books initially. and they would draw them in pencil or pen and then color them in with either crayons or water colors. and there are a number of drawings of crazy horse in battle and in counsel-type situations. there's a likeness of that kind but no photograph. all these other indians of the plains, the sioux indians, almost every single leading figure has left bemind not just -- behind not just one or two, but in many cases many photographs. red cloud andier on mow and sitting bull must have been photographed hundreds of times. but no photograph of crazy horse. and crazy horse was buried in an

unknown place. there's a whole mini literature about the burial place of crazy horse. it's kind of fascinating. and when you're out there in indian country -- which it still is on the pine ridge reservation -- you will meet people who will tell you stories about where crazy horse is buried. and it will come from an uncle who was told by his father that on a certain night back in 1878 when it was raining like hell that he and his wife in their cabin saw a procession of people coming up the anderson road, you know, and they will tell you they were carrying the body of crazy horse and buried in it in a place to keep it secret from the white people. it was his father who buried

him, and his father who principally did not want anybody to know where his son was buried. he did not want white people to touch his son's body. so crazy horse is buried in an unknown place. but crazy horse did a notable thing, a really remarkable notable thing. and it's the reason why it makes sense to pay attention to this particular person. the notable thing was to defeat on two occasions closely together the united states army, a significant detachment of the united states army soldiers and cavalry. first on the 17th of june, 1876, at the rose bud river in south central montana and, secondly, at the little bighorn river a little bit to the north, a little bit to the west of the rose bud on the 25th day of june, 1876.

and it's the second of those days that really lives in the american memory. the defeat and annihilation of george armstrong custer was a shocking and traumatic event for the entire united states. the 25th of june, 1876, was just one week before the centennial which was being celebrated in the philadelphia at the time, and the news of custer's annihilation arrived, reached the rest of the country just about on the 4th of july, 4th and 5th of july. and it was of a deep, deep shock. i would say that the united states has never been so startled and disturbed by an esteemed feat except on two other occasions, one at pearl harbor and one on 9/11. and in the case of pearl harbor and in the case of 9/11, part of the shock was being attacked out of the blue.

but in the case of custer at the battle of the little bighorn, the shock was that a famous civil war general and a gifted military commander was beaten so completely and so utterly by an indian chief. i mean, nobody thought that was possible, and you cannot imagine how disturbed people were and how angry they were about that. that was a very, very powerful thing. and the first up with, rose bud, did not involve massive loss of life, but it did involve running circles around exhausted soldiers and driving them out of the campaign of which they were a part which was a notable thing to have been done. so how did, how did crazy horse do this? there's plenty to pay attention to there and to really think

about, it's so remarkable. the short answer is that he had a gift, and he had a gift sort of like an athlete who plays with balls. and one of the things that tennis players and scwas players and -- squash players and basketball players really have a sense of is sort of where people are going to be, where they're going to be expecting something, and where they're not going to expect something. they have a gift for the field, a gift for the court and how to behave on the court. and winning rapidly over a large field, that is also a gift that controls the outcome of a conflict. and crazy horse had this god-given ability to sort of know where the other or guy was going to be weak and to know at what moment he would respond or be crushed by an attack. the battle of the little bighorn

is something that's been frequently argued about over the last 130 years since custer was wiped out there with 200 men which, as i say, was a deeply shocking thing. nothing like that ever happened in the civil war. your never had a major unit just wiped out to the last person. how did, how did crazy horse do that? i'm guessing that there'll be some people in this room who have opinions about the battle of the little bighorn. i could be wrong. so they very easily might disagree with my reading of what actually occurred, but what actually occurred was that custer, although intending to attack the indians, never actually did. he never actually got to a piece where he could attack the indians. they kind of rose up and can swarmed him and defeated him before he could ever respond in an organized way. and if you go to the little

bighorn which i urge anybody to do who can, it's a dramatic site, very little changed from june of 1876. you can stand on the hill where custer, where custer's body was found, where he probably died but not certainly, but his body was found there. and if you just look back to the south up the little bighorn river to a hill in the distance where his second, a second group of soldiers that had been broken off by custer who was making a stand called reno hill after the major who was in charge, if you looked back there, you can kind of see how the battle unfolded in its final moments because when the bodies were discovered the day after the fight by other soldiers, they placed crosses in the spots where the bodies were found. so you look back, you see where the men fell, and you can see the sweep, and you can see the sort of mad rush of them coming

up along the side of this hill heading for this custer hill where custer himself was killed. and custer was not at the top. he probably would have liked to have been at the top, but he couldn't get to the top. there were just too many indians there, and you can see them all sort of rushing up there. well, that backbone or ridge that extends from custer hill down in the direction of reno hill for about a half a mile or so slopes down towards the little bighorn river in the west and then away from the little bighorn river in the east. ..

there is a lot of verbal evidence they indians have a lot of archaeological evidence from the field that suggest that at that point organize resistance collapsed and a panic gripped both halves of the soldiers and they were defeated. it was such a simple thing to have done. it happened in a moment, and within a few minutes after that attack, custer was dead, and so were all the men with him. this was an amazing, remarkable thing so it makes sense to pay attention to crazy horse who did this remarkable thing. that is why crazy horse and why

"the killing of crazy horse" -- crazy horse passmark killing was the price he paid for his victory. if you look at that event which took place a year after the fight that little bighorn fightt closely, almost everybody who played a significant role in this sioux war and the disposition of the sioux over that 40 or period and almost every event that was significant during that episode can be seen in clear relief in the actual killing of crazy horse. he was induced to surrender near camp robinson, now fort robinson in northwest nebraska largely because he understood that there was no point in trying to conduct an endless military campaign against a power as

great as that of the united states. he knew that was hopeless and he did not want to surrender, but he did because it was the best thing for his people. and he surrendered at the beginning of may of 1877 and he was killed in september. at first it was a very confusing summer in many ways. at first the army toyed with the idea, general clarke toyed with the idea of making crazy horse the chief of all sioux indians in the hope he could somehow work him. he was this young army lieutenant, william clarke who was a very intellectually competent man, and quite interested in india and, taught himself the indian sign language to communicate with them in a nuanced way and believed he could work those indians. he felt that, as well that crazy horse could be induced to work for the united states in ways that we wanted him to do.

and he resisted that. he was a contrary kind of person. he had his own goals which were essentially to get -- ah-hah. blasco. [laughter] crazy horse was the one person that really commanded the general respect of all of the young indians at that agency, and he engendered a great deal of jealousy on the part of rival chiefs like red cloud and spotted tail. and that jealousy contributed greatly to his killing. if you have to wth army want to kill crazy horse,

and basically it was because of their anger at him over custer and a little bighorn and their fear. they were afraid of crazy horse because he had the ability with a relatively limited military to cause endless struggle for the united states army. he had a great gift for running more, for a protracted war over time and they were afraid that he might be induced to go out again and the rival chiefs who wanted to get rid of crazy horse began to spread rumors about him, that he was planning to leave the reservation and resume the war. so the army became very agitated and in the end, they didn't creep out in the night and enter the lodge and kill him in his bed but try to place them under arrest for so they could send them to florida. where he would be placed in prison.

it sounds amusing, but actually that was the treatment of choice for troublesome indians. we send a lot of cheyenne and arapaho to florida, fort marion and augustine florida in 1875 after the end of the apache wars and send geronimo there. he spent a long time in florida and let him come back piecemeal a little step at a time and eventually got to oklahoma where he died. he never got back to arizona but that is what they plan to do with crazy horse and things turned out another way. and he was killed. there is one last question i will raise and try to answer it. i spent this long book essentially trying to answer that question. whited crazy horse let them kill him? here is a guy with a well-deserved reputation as a warrior and a combatant, and

somebody quick to defend himself and with a gift for rapid movement and rapid response, and in the last 36 hours of his life, the army made it apparent over and over again in explicit ways that whatever promises they had given him in the past were gone, but crazy horse did not respond like a man in danger, and on the last day of his life, he wrote back to fort robinson where he was fatally wounded in the evening by a guard with a bayonet and six times in the course of that last 36 hours lieutenant jesse lee, who was the man in charge of taking him to fort robinson assured him that he would not he harmed and that he would not be heard and at every stage along the way,

just a ton of evidence, just obvious evidence that this could not be true. they were not treating them that way and he was not going to survive the day. he was deeply apprehensive and when you pay attention to those final days you see, here's this man deeply apprehensive about what is about to happen. that he went along at every stage and when he got to fort robinson and he was handed over to the officer of the day, a man named lieutenant kennington, he took his hand and they walked hand-in-hand -- the first time i read that i was so startled. hand-in-hand to the guardhouse where they plan to put them in prison, contrary to all the promises they had made to him. he walked into the guardhouse and it wasn't until he saw the bars on the window on the guardhouse door that is born warrior did what you would think, surrounded by 1000 people himdid not intend to let

survive the day. he tried to break free, escape. i mean, but it was not until then. he had let them do it. so why did he do that? i am not going to tell you. [laughter] you have to kind of absorb yourself into it and let it merge from the facts of the story. i would want to spoil that for you. i would like to read a brief piece of this book if they made to give you a sense of what sort of a book it is and how it i went about it and it is a passage about the preparation of the indians for the rosebud fight. that's it plays as i mentioned on the 17th of june, 1876 and the indians were first reluctant to fight, but crazy horse and sitting bolt finally decided

they had to. general crook was approaching them in a threatening way, and the young men of the tribe wanted to go out and fight them and it is certain point they just had to say all right and so they made their preparations for war and they went off to fight. so i would like to read the section about their preparations to give you a sense of the flavor of what i think these people were like. not since the boseman warhead sioux gone out in such numbers to attack soldiers and they went prepared dressed in their war clothes with faces and horses painted in the right way wearing the protective ambulance called at a tow away singing their sacred songs. some indians that the warriors did not number more than 750 in all. whether said maybe 1000. only if you have the best new guns. henry or winchester repeating rifles. others had a one-shot military guns using cartridges, the kind crazy horse called open and

shoot. the cheyenne wooden legs if he brought his six shooter perhaps two-thirds of the indians had firearms of one kind or another that it was not numbers or weapons alone that made this soup mack strong. it was the protection that comes from the favor of the great spirit and the power of acquired in dreams or visions. just before the fight of the rosebud according to heat up, crazy horse's friend acod dreamers i conducted some of the most powerful dances, elaborate ceremonies invoking the special power of the black tailed deer and bear. all the sources of power and the religion of the sioux was an instrument for understanding and partaking in that power. sioux religion is a complex affair that defies neat description that at its heart is a sense of the world is fluid and interconnected, controlled by an animating power that inhabits the four winds. this power is sometimes called called -- that which stirs or

something that moves. a godlike spirit that shares its power with every creature and thing. these in turn can grant favor or withhold it. on the spirit level all creatures and things speak a common language. what they say is sometimes transparent. sometimes obscure. the men weitz called medicine men they sioux called men sharing in holy or sacred power. the sacred medicine men can query or intercede with lafontant and interpret the instructions received and visions or dreams thereby helping men to control the power given to them by the animal or natural world. these powers reside not only in the world of the spirit that in themselves. the speed of the hawk for example resides in the body of a hawk. the power of an eagle and the eagles talon, the veracity of the bear tooth or cloth with its

pickling call resides in the horn or the ivory tooth or the dew clause of the elk. these physical things properly prepared share their inherent power with the man who carries them on his person or ties them to the shield or lands. it is the same with the representation of things, the image of a dragonfly gives a man some element or aspects of the quickness of a dragonfly. the zigzag lightning streaked down the leg of a horse is at the trampling power of thunder making it fearful to enemies, a drawing of a bear or ebenefits claw can convey the actual power and ferocity of the bear. he prepared for him a friend, the medicine man whose name in lakota men something like the crushed residue of a pulverized buffalo horn. weitz called him chips.

it was worn chips to interpret it crazy horse the meaning of this vision many years earlier. in addition he had seen a man emerging from the leg on a horse. this man told crazy horse that he should not tie up his horses tail as other warriors did when he went to war and he should dress in a certain way, that he could not be killed by a bullet and he could be killed only if someone held him. later foreign chips prepared protective charms for crazy horse. he directed crazy portion where only one feather plucked from the center of the tale of a war eagle. from the eagles -- made for him a whistle to as he rode into battle. about the year 1862 or 1863 according to red feather his brother-in-law, corn chips prepared for crazy horse the most powerful of all his protection. it was made from a rock drill through the center which crazy horse was to wear on a thong under his left arm.

another tiny stone he were behind his left ear. such stones were known as spirit rocks. they possessed magical properties given by their nature, their shape, their source or the songs sung over them. it was commonly believed by the oglala lakota crazy horse was protected by the hotel way. with their eight crazy horse could hide from bullets and battle or the bullets were knocked away by the power that dwelt in his stone. but that was not all. was said that foreign chips convert power and many other ways. on his body to cheat carried in medicine bundle or war zach. there a several descriptions of the sac itself and what it contained. some provided by those who knew him and others by a later generation for whom crazy course had become a mythic figure. some say the chief sponsor was wrapped in deerskin suspended on a braided song. bundles typically were made of the skin of a small animal like

a badger, we saw her on her. they might be decorated with beads or quills, sacred objects would be carefully wrapped in cloth or tied in small pouches of leather from muslim. many years later peter pardo said the medicine bundle given to crazy horse by horn chips contained the dry seed of the wild esther mixed with the dried heart and brain of an eagle. a son of fire thunder reported crazy horse had on his person a little medicine bag just before each battle he would chew a small portion of this medicine and rub it on his body. chips himself said that eagle clause were part of the medicine bundle and that he further instructed crazy horse to make a zigzag streaked with red earth from the top of his forehead downward onto one side of his nose at the base, the point of the chan. this was done with one finger. one shifts added that the chief strike is horse with the mold from here.

many of the details were included in the account by eagle elk, a friend of crazy horse and called him cousin and he described what he had watched crazy horse do as he readied himself to go into battle. eagle elk said he always wore a strand of braided buckskin. at the lower end with something like medicine tied up in the buckskin. be an eagle when -- whistle tied on. just before the start of a battle when they were ready to go into it he got off his pony and got a little dirt from a molehill and put it between the ears of his horse and then on the hips of the horse and then he took some and got in front of the horse and threw it over toward detail. than he got around behind the horse and threw some toward his head. then went up to the horse and rubbed it on. then he rubbed a little on his hand in over his own head. then you take a spotted eagle feather and put it upside down on the back of his head instead of standing up as most did.

chips was the one who directed crazy horse to do these things, so he would not be hurt. the dirt from the molehill had the power to make his horse and visible from the front in the rear and the hide from enemies both the chief himself and a the weapon in his hand. thus crazy horse road to war strengthened by maggots -- magic, the power of animal guardians, the favor of god's spirit. many stories survive in the ways in which crazy horse used sacred power. it is seven and he believed to kept him from harm and helped him defeat his enemies. he was not the only one to benefit from the favor of the spirit being. when he came onto the battlefields his friends that everybody felt stronger. crazy horse had dreamed of horses which were thunder beings. as a thunder dreamer he enjoyed power that went beyond the ordinary calculation of weapons, numbers or clever plans. some of his friends were also thunder dreamers, including

kitten bear, a man crazy horse called cousin. in the summer of 1902 when the wars were long over kicking bear told the anthropologist choreographer what thunder dreamers could do. their power came from the sky bird whose beating wings were heard by men as the sound of thunder. in jan, the rock, where the first of all things. in jan created looking bikini on its companion the second of all things. to dream of what the complicated man's life beyond imagining requiring him to behave as a contrary, who laughed when he was sad, placed his hand into boiling water, wet naked when it was cold. but there was a second kind of thunder dreamer and these also had very great powers, so great that they could control the weather. by this it was not meant only that they could provide a blue day for a ceremonial event or make it rain during a dry

season. their power was much greater and more explicit. kicking bear described his power to whistler. surprise once in the open by an approaching storm kicking bear said he did not hide as the suit usually did. they were frightened by lightning and for good reason. lightning often killed men on horses trapped in the open. on this occasion kicking bear related he took a typing climbed a hill directly in the path of the storm as if inviting the sky beings to strike them. he lit his pipe in a sacred way and offered a prayer to the great spirit and with the power granted him he split the storm. by this he intended no figurative speech, kicking bear meant that the rolling clouds and black sky and flashes of lightning divided into cop and passed on either side of him, split down the middle by kicking bear's power. whistle reported he says that anyone can do this if they are worthy. that is what rode south toward

the rosebud on the night of june 16, 1876. thunder dreamers, storm splitters, men who could turn aside bullets, men on horses that flulike talks or darted like dragonflies. they came with powers as if the whole natural world, the bears in the buffalo, the storm clouds in the lightning, for moving in tandem with the indians protecting them and making them strong. the scout had tried to explain the power of the indians but it is doubtful that crooks officers understood what he was trying to tell them. they thought they were a match for any rebel of ignorant savages. [applause] thank you, thank you. i invite questions and somebody here has god a -- and is going

to explain to us most carefully that you need to hold it as if it were a microphone that you could hear and speak into it when you have a question. so if somebody has got one. there is a hand right there. >> i will break the ice by asking, what was the origin of his name? did you come across that? >> there are many stories about the origin of crazy horse's name. the lakota is the word for horse and webb is the word for something like crazy but not crazy in the sense that we might normally think of it as insane or irresponsible are incapable of rational action. it meant kind of exalted by powerful thoughts and insights and dreams. almost like being in a swoon and the name translates as his forces crazy.

so he is not really crazy horse. his forces crazy but in a special, magical, powerful religiously significant way. it is a big name in the comes from his father. it had been his father's name and when he was a young man and performed in the notable battle his father held a kind of a giveaway and gave horses to overly needy folk to bring honor on his son and gave him his own name which was crazy horse, and crazy horse carried that name until he died. than his father took the name back so for the last two years of his life, the father was once again known as crazy horse. yeah. >> why hasn't the monument to crazy horse been finished, carved on all sides? >> you would have to ask ruth,

the chief widow of the man who started in 1948 or 49. it is a huge undertaking. they have carved quite a lot. it is extremely expensive. it is a thing to do and i don't think they are in a hurry. [laughter] >> i was looking through your introduction and something struck me that i had never really realized in all of my readings, and that is crazy horse wasn't killed. he was assassinated, and i'm wondering if you ever thought of using that word in your title or looked at it that way? >> if things played out a little differently, then i would have been happy to use that word. crook in meeting with the other chiefs and lieutenant clarke fully intended to arrange his

assassination, his murder in the middle of the night then they change their mind. is interesting why they changed their minds. colonel bradley who was the commander of the post learned about the plan to kill crazy horse in his bed and he intervened. as sns crick had made these plans, he did what you would expect somebody to do in that kind of a case, he took off and he was immediately -- started heading for fort laramie and eventually he was going to get on a train in cheyenne and go out to western wyoming where he was scheduled to command an expedition. so he was off the post. he was no longer the senior officer crooke his planet was that he basically said no, no we are not going to kill this guy and then he actually said his life is as sweet to him as mine is to me. quite a remarkable moment.

so they did place him under arrest. they were under orders from general sheridan and chicago who was the commander of the army of the west. they had no choice but to do that and from their point of view it seemed like a rational thing to do, get him away from this dangerous, easily inflamed situation but he wasn't, that point things just went wrong and it wasn't really an assassination any more. yeah. >> with magic course, did you interpret him as being all indian? remember the strange man of a oglala? he didn't do indian things. he didn't do any sundance.

he didn't fire his rifle like a white man. his mother and father were both indian. did you ever hear any talk of that? in other words did he have a white way in him? >> there has been much speculation about that and after the battle of the little bighorn initially white people for the most part thought that sitting bull had been in charge, the man who really won the battle which is not at all true. and that described amazing qualities to sitting bull. it was reported that sitting bull had actually read the maxims of napoleon and that he spoke french and it was a french military tactic. nonsense, but the kind of thing that was often talked about. crazy horse was sometimes spoken of as possibly white or part white tickets he had

light-colored hair. it was brown as opposed to black and there is no good explanation for why he happened to have brown hair except he did. his surviving relatives, who are numerous, the lakota say we are all related. and they take a very intense proprietary interest in exactly what he wasn't who he was. there is a large group of people who say he was not oglala. his mother was a minnick on but they say no he was more than that. they have a big argument at pine ridge about that but i have never seen any evidence that actually identified any white ancestor so if it is true, it is unknown. >> just different people have talked about at. >> they have talked about it but i can tell you one of the things

i did notice was that during that period, almost any indian who is remarkable in any way people would say he must have white led. [laughter] >> even mary sandoz, she writes of her book the strange man. the indian thing. they got mad about that,. they were stoic about it. am i right? >> i am saying you are in interesting territory. >> could word of crazy horse's death get out to destination and if it did what was the reaction of the sioux nation to his death? >> his stabbing took place in the middle of a very large and unruly crowd. filled with people who were

shoving and pushing and there a few people actually saw what -- with any clarity what happened. the whites immediately began spreading the word that crazy horse had not been stabbed by the guard although plenty of people actually saw that very explicitly but that he had somehow -- he had stabbed himself with his own knife in the course of the struggle while he was trying to break free and to get away. as i mentioned earlier there is about 1000 people roughly or maybe even more at the scene at that fatal moment. the indians were probably easily divided between support of crazy horse he wanted to protect him and supporters of spotted tail and red cloud who wanted to make sure he did not survive the day. so they reacted very differently. there was no immediate clear sense that they're cheap had been murdered. that was a little bit slow to emerge over a period of time.

and the red cloud indians who has not taken part in the battle of the little bighorn and had been living on a reservation for a long time went out of their way to make peace with the crazy horse people and particularly his relatives in the traditional way by giving them blankets and by giving them horses and sending chiefs around to all of the tribestribes, counseling patience and forbearance and the avoidance of a major conflict. at the moment when he was stabbed there were a number of people who were ready to start shooting. but they didn't. if they had there probably would have been a big killing. it's amazing forbearance to not allow that to occur and at that moment with one or two exceptions, lost everybody in the crowd tried to prevent further bloodshed. get this guy moving.

>> gesture perspective. crazy horse was the great warrior and the great leader but in hindsight, when you look at sitting bull, crazy horse and red cloud, red cloud had recognized in 1868 when he signed the fort laramie treaty that he couldn't win. he couldn't beat the army. the other two went on and fought for nine years with thousands of their own people being killed. he was impetuous but wasn't really red cloud the wiser of the chiefs? >> that is a reasonable question and i would say that you are missing some parts of the history here that are important. under the treaty of 1868, also indians were allowed to inhabit any part of the great sioux reservation which included all of south dakota from the

missouri river to the borders, the state borders, what are now the state borders and they were also permitted under that agreement to occupy what was called the unseeded territory which was hunting territory up to yellowstone river and west of the bighorn mountains and south down to north platte. so the crazy horse people and sitting bull people did not go outside of that territory and they were doing exactly what the treaty granted them. a perpetual right to do unless they would give up that right at some future date by the formal agreement of three-quarters of the male population. and so, they were not engaged in hostile acts with the united states and thousands of indians were not killed during that period. there was very little warfare. the problem began in 1874 with the discovery of the black hills where the united states, the

first thing they discovered was the black hills were not as they hoped in wyoming. they were actually in south dakota right in the sioux reservation so that created a problem. to distinguish their title in the sioux reservation led to military operations have forced them on the agencies and various other efforts to compel them to surrender that territory. went crazy horse was attacked by crooke and custer or when he came, they were in his territory contrary to the stipulations of the 1868 treaty and nobody who paid normal attention to the laws of war would have said that they committed any kind of a warlike act that was justifying this section. even the united states

government doesn't try to say that any more. they just say they were going to take the black hills and they did. so that wasn't really a question when custer attacked the indian camp on the little bighorn river, they really had very little choice. the way such such attacks if wiki would take place as soldiers would come out of nowhere and usually get dog and shoot every and moving figure, so you either respond or you don't. there would be reasonable to expect him to simply not do anything under those extremely provocative situations and circumstances. but afterwards, you know, he saw their handwriting on the wall. he didn't resist. he basically wanted to live in a place where there were no white people and a place where they were, this huge territory south

of yellowstone between the missouri and the bighorn mountains and down to north platte,, that was indian for a tory. i would say that red cloud made peace in 1868 and crazy horse didn't. he didn't sign a treaty and he didn't go to the reservation. he didn't accept annuities are rations from the government nor was he compelled to under the treaty. so he just took a different road as long as he could. >> i am sure you have seen some reenactments. i know that the white people have done custer's last stand a few times and it has been in the movies a lot but i also understand that there are some indian reenactments --

reenactments now too. did you see them and can you sort of the versions? >> i have not seen the indian reenactments. that is a -- the ocala had been doing it at pine ridge. they do a duet at the little bighorn. they been doing it for many years. there is a large community of custer buffs who are fascinated by this spectacle of this war. it must have been one of the most astonishing things to witness it could possibly imagine, thousands of people on horseback riding hell-bent and the excitement of that, they try to reestablish reenactments. i would say that the indians are sometimes now getting to be a little unreliable in the way they think about these things. they are unpredictable i should

say. they are unpredictable in the way they think about it. in recent years there has been a group of indians to have tended to exaggerate the number of indians who were killed at little bighorn and there is a group now that says maybe 500 indians were killed at little bighorn. well, that is not true. a guy named richard hart orff has done a careful study of that question and the true number represents more accurately the kind of unfolding that the battle went through, about dirty 240 indians were killed. that a big deal for those people of course and their families, but they killed 260. remarkably one-sided military encounter but for some reason indians now have begun to think know there must have been a lot more and they seek permission to go onto the battlefield and to erect piles of stones where

their great grandfather was killed and things of that kind. it is unreliable. >> i know this is completely way off, but my grandmother is full-blooded. my grandmother was full-blooded iroquois indian. >> everybody in the united states is part indian. >> i can prove it. >> i believe it. [laughter] >> i have been up to canada to the hometown where my grandmother was born, okay? and there was between 15 to 20 million american indians buried in wounded knee. will the president of the united states ever apologize like the germans have to the and etc.?

will they ever apologize for the genocide of the american indian over 500 years? and don't tell me it is not a genocide because i don't want to listen to it. >> i won't tell you that. but, i don't think, i don't think that is likely to happen. >> why not? >> the circumstances are so different in each case, but not in the way you describe it. in other words what he would like to hear yourself. >> 55 million buffalo. >> that is sure and they haven't apologized to the buffalo either. but they are sorry about it. >> you would not have wanted me to be a full blood because would have been along with crazy horse. >> at a bunch of them that were in a fighting mood but they all what he did. they all came in and gave up.

by which what that meant at the time was to live on a reservation. [inaudible] the patriot from wounded knee was sand creek was one of the biggest before the other one. that was one of the real big battles, sand creek. >> that one, i wouldn't call that a battle. i would call it a massacre for sure. >> massacre, what's new? they had wanted me and they went out and had gatling done. one indian started screaming in the air. >> two examples you just cited are ones that i would certainly agree are something that deserve apology and in fact i think both of those have received apologies. >> you don't see them giving much of the american indian.

i rest my case. >> one more. >> last question. >> in your research, to you, what was the most startling or most surprising or memorable realization that you made? >> there were so many things that came as a surprise to me and a revelation, but -- was the biggest by far, was the complexity that i found in lakota religion and the richness of it, the richness of the poetry is astonishing. and there were a lot of anthropologist who went out there and very carefully recorded in the last years of the 19th century in the first years of the 20th what those people thought and how they believe those things.

frances densmore was a collector of sioux music and she spent a lot of time at standing rock and other reservations. the elderly men came to her for the most part men, and would talk to her at great length. one of them told her at one time, we have come to you as from the dead. after we have told you what we know we will return to the dead and no one will know these things any more. they had a very, very deep connection to the way they visualize the world and it is interesting, he was wrong. the sioux religion is alive and well and it is practiced, it is taken seriously, it is understood in a kind of deep and serious way and i tried to talk about it a little bit in that section that i read. it is sort of like reading about

physics, when you actually get into it. it is like the way they see the interconnectedness of things is like the gravitational field that holds all objects in the universe in a matrix power. and the more you read it, the more interesting it becomes. sometimes talks like this i've been asked well what about those thunder beings? do you believe that? and i don't answer that question right away, because the answer to quickly is to miss what is interesting. okay, thank you very much. [applause] crazy horse the leader of the lakota defeated general