male narrator: major funding for the thick dark fog was provided by the corporation for public broadcasting. - [breathing heavily] - they called me indian, sioux, savage, and uncivilized, but i am a human being. i am a lakota. like thousands of others, my life was turned upside down

through the turmoil forced upon me by a system designed by the u.s. government to destroy my culture. i am finding my way back to the lakota way of life. i didn't know the medical words, so i called the problem what i felt it to be: the thick, dark fog. [slow electric guitar melody] ♪

- you're supposed to get-- look excited. [laughing] see? happy. oh, my god. it's a book. [laughs] it's not even the hardcover. - it's a start. - walter decided that he wanted to write down his memories for his children. and shortly into it, he reached a block where he had started talking about his boarding school years and he couldn't keep talking. he withdrew. he became very tearful. - my own children-- i'm estranged from them, simply because i never figured out how to be a father or even how to be a human being.

and i realize that they didn't know anything about me, because i never talked to them about what i was. - it took us four years before we finally came to the end of what he had to say. - so when the roads are bad, you know they're not gonna come after you. trying to remember if this is the road here. i think it is. this is the old road that i followed. just one thing on my mind: just to get home,

not get caught in between here and home. and i know i ran all day long, about 16 miles. the quicker i got home, the better off i'm gonna be. i knew they would take me back to school, but just being in that house for a few minutes, that was good enough. - this is a very peaceful place, and you can get spoiled living here. 20 years ago, a man in the community i lived in in connecticut started a clothing drive for indians on this reservation, and he said that they were dying of the cold and they were starving. friend of mine came to me all in tears, upset over it, and i said to her, "what do you mean?

"what indians? there aren't any indians left." - like so many, i have lived a life blocked by fear, led by fear, and governed by fear, that was created in those childhood days. nightmares of the government boarding school, the loneliness, the beatings, they seem to be on my mind every minute of the day. i had been punished to instill a different way of life that i didn't understand, nor want it. - [breathing heavily] [grunts]

- the government school had tried to force me to forget the lakota language, and i wouldn't do it. yeah, we had a deep sense of preservation for our culture, our language. so we would go and hide in order to speak lakota. if we got caught, they were allowed to beat us with whatever they could, but we took that chance. the lakota language is something that comes from deep inside of you. it comes from... how you look at things and how you see things. sometimes i feel like i'm not able to communicate with a non-indian. the lakota feeling is what forms my language.

so i try to put that into the english language, but it--at times it just doesn't seem to work, and i lose a lot of confidence in myself. - that's fine. everything helps. we've been really busy with the holiday. - so this is where we need an interpreter. - okay. - thank you so much. - one night, i went to a 7-eleven store to pick up some things, and i passed by a rack of magazines, and one magazine fell off the shelf, and it had opened to an article about a man called walter littlemoon who had been helping his family and the people in wounded knee. so i bought the magazine, and i went home, and i called him. and since then, we've become friends. i learned of the living conditions

out on a lot of our reservations, and it was all news to me. in march of 1985, walter drove across country with a friend of his. he spoke at the local library. we're just about in this little area right here. it's a 2 million acre tack that was given to us by the united states government. we had other ideas of where to live, but our ideas weren't that important, i guess. - after that, i-- we tried together various ideas that would be helpful for the people in wounded knee. in 1998, he asked, did i want to move out here and stay for a time

and see if-- if this was where i wanted to be. and that's how i came to live with him. - if everybody gets a share. this boarding school experience had a-- did a lot more damage than we realized. we were made ashamed of our culture. we were called uncivilized. we were called savages. we were forced to submit to something that we don't even know and didn't even want. we will never be able to forget what happened to us. those memories will be with us all the time. - if you don't learn how to live with it, you just blank it out. you just-- and you don't talk about it. and then all of a sudden, you start talking about it, and you can't remember pretty soon, 'cause you blanked it out so damn many times, and, you know, you just--

you know there's something you want to say, but it's not there. - you know, back then, we didn't see it as abuse. we didn't even know the word as "abuse." [all laughing] - beat up. - we got beat for just about everything. got beat because you look like an indian, beat because you smelled like an indian. - said the wrong thing. - to me, it wasn't just physical abuse. it was mental abuse too. - oh, yeah. they got in there. - to me, what they were trying to do was turn us into a white man, but still, they couldn't do it. - come on, hootie. this is, uh--you probably hear it in the movies--

the sacred tree of lakota. that's this ash wood. it's a hardwood. and a lot of it grows-- that's what they used to make the bows and arrows out of a long time ago. yeah, they were pretty stout. but pollution has got to them, to where they're just rotted on the insides. this tree was here when i was a little boy. so if you look up that way, you see these little red-- those are plums, wild plums. i was the youngest of my mother's ten children. by the time i was three, all the rest were away from home.

we learned to be lakota in the natural way, as easy as breathing. no one sat us down to preach at us. adults guided us as life presented different situations. the bright and positive memories of those childhood days had stayed buried within me for nearly 60 years. i had to remember and see clearly how i had been shaped and twisted, mentally and emotionally, by something outside of our culture. [children singing in native language] indian boarding schools were created by henry pratt, a military career man whose motto was, "kill the indian and save the man." he felt that by removing the children

from the influence of their families and their tribes and forbidding him to speak any native language, they could be shaped into the image of the dominant society. - you either sent your kid to school or you could find yourself in jail. or the government would just take them and might tell you where they are, might not. and there was every imaginable abuse to getting these kids into these schools and keeping them there. - shortly after my fifth birthday, in 1947, a car pulled up to our home with two strangers in it. my mother was crying. she told me i had to go with the people in the car. i had no warning, no preparation. - what is this on the left here? - this is the boys' building.

- was this here when you went to school? - no, this was a-- it's a different building. they finally stopped at a strange, foreign place with tall buildings. i was overwhelmed by strange smells, sounds of children talking and crying, and everyone speaking in a language i didn't understand. all of this stuff is new. even the old girls' building is gone now. i used to sit right here. now they got a bunch of buildings i don't even recognize. no, this girls' building is still the same. now, we can go along here. - oh, looks like we got a snowball fight. you ever do that when you were here? - no, they wouldn't allow us to play like that.

got too noisy. we couldn't throw snowballs at each other. all the stuff like that, it was all forbidden. with all of this modern stuff, with all of these new designs, with all of the new buildings and playgrounds, that still doesn't change anything. i still hate this place, and i don't like it. and, you know, the sooner we leave, the better off i'm gonna be. - this is where they brought you the first day? - yeah. well, actually, they brought me right where that white pickup is. there used to be an old gymnasium there. and the buses would pull up like that and just dump you off there. within minutes, i was stripped naked and scrubbed with a harsh, yellow soap and a stiff brush until my skin was raw.

- my older sisters went to boarding school, had their hair cut, so i wanted a haircut, and my grandmother said, hiya-- no. until i die, or mama die or daddy die, no. in lakota, she told me... [speaking lakota] nobody does that. you do not ever cut your hair. you can trim it, but you don't cut your hair until you lose a loved one. - and then they march you across, right through here. and then this--well, the builng used to be here, and that's where they'd cut your hair off, change your clothes, take your clothes away and give you old clothes. - i tried to run, but the matrons caught me and run-- they grabbed my hair by my braid and just cut it. - i started crying, 'cause, you know,

i didn't give him permission to cut my hair. and i cried, 'cause i felt they killed my spirit. - all the thoughts going through my mind at the time-- now all i remember was, "who died? "did my mom die? "who died so they're cutting all of our hair? what's going on here?" - every time we tried talking about his boarding school years, he reached the same block. we went to his doctor at the v.a. hospital, and his doctor said, "keep talking. "as painful as it is, "the key is to keep talking. bring all those memories out." and he said, "don't be afraid "of any of the emotions that come with them. "go with those emotions.

let those emotions come out." so we started writing down his memories. - the sound of a car, the smell of food, the crying of children: a lot of these things trigger flashbacks. emotionally, psychologically, you're right back at boarding school at five years old. - [screaming] - you never knew what kind of a beating was coming. - [grunting] - sometimes you'd get thrown across the floor, or sometimes you'd get hit with a book. sometimes it was things that we said. sometimes it was the way we looked at people. but just small things like that

that never made any sense at all, but you got beat for it. - yeah, we got hit a lot, strapped, and mean things-- saying mean things to us, calling us names and jerking us around by the little hair in the back of your head or the ear. - usually, after the third hit, you don't feel nothing. and that's what gets 'em even more angrier, and they just beat you harder. you don't feel it. physically, you just don't feel it. you shut it out after a while. - you'd have to put your hands on the desk, and the desk lifted up the lid would lift up, and you'd put your books in there, and then it would come down, and that's what you would write on. well, you'd put your hands there, and they'd slam the desk down on your hands. yeah.

- can you remember the day your mother came to visit you? - yeah, there used to be a tree right by this power line, and that's where i remember her walking from there towards the rail. it was a sense of familiarity, but then again, i didn't recognize--i couldn't quite make that connection. - you didn't remember who she was? no. - and that was after three months from home? - yeah. what happened to me, and it happened to a lot of other kids: the case of not recognizing your own parents. - [speaking lakota] - i just completely broke that connection. - as she was leaving, you did remember her, so something finally clicked in-- - yeah, it clicked in. so i ran down this way to try to catch her, but it was just too late. and i don't know what happened after that. i-i--up to this day, i just don't remember.

but i knew that-- i told myself, "i'm not gonna forget anymore." [thunder rumbling] - walter kept talking. his memories would come out in fragments, so i'd write down whatever he said, and as time went by, we started cutting those pieces of paper and putting memories together that belonged together. - and then jane brought in a book: trauma and recovery, by--the author, i think, was judith herman. and this was based on the holocaust, but when she was reading, i was able to take out a lot of the words and replace them with the lakota, with pine ridge,

the environment here. and it began to make sense, and that's when i realized that my mind lacked focus. it was fragmented. and i would change the subject to stay away from a lot of the pain. and i didn't even know where the pain was coming from. - i came to meet walter littlemoon and his wife jane through my work here at the victims of violence program in cambridge, somerville, massachusetts. when walter and jane walked into this building, central street health center, it was very clear that he was in a lot of pain. - this is a picture of my mother. this is the way she looked, as i remembered her, growing up. i don't remember exactly when this was taken, but this is probably one of the last pictures

that we have of her, 'cause when my sister took all of these pictures, then her house caught on fire, and just about all of these pictures burned down. so this was her family, and these are all the older brothers. and this is moses. that's ben george. and this is me here. but this one is the last picture that we were able to salvage. this picture is about my mother and my father. i never knew my father. but this was taken somewhere in brussels when they were there with the wild west show. the thunder beings came and took my father home when i was six months old. [thunder rumbling] so this is where my father was killed on that day that my family had stopped here to rest.

a single small cloud appeared in the otherwise blue sky. that stove sat right-- just about right here. and my mother and i were on this side. and i think my dad was sitting right here, right in this area. suddenly, a bolt of lightning shot down through the chimney, blew open the woodstove door, and struck my father dead. my two brothers were on each side of my dad but never got hurt. but it killed him instantly. as i uncovered the stories of each generation and added them to the memories of my life, i begin to realize that the trauma that we lakota have experienced for so many generations is a part of who we are today. even before the reservation was established,

a lot of the wars or the massacres that took place, all of that gets passed from generation to generation through memory, genes, through behaviors, through flashbacks. we still experience a lot of the pain, a lot of those memories. and people want to know why they drink so much. people want to know why they are abusing their own families. - walter's experience embodies the context of intergenerational trauma. so you have a culture that's survived near-genocide on its knees, and then you pluck a child out of this family

and everything that's kept them alive. there was no safe context in which to talk about the abuse and things that he suffered. you know, he had to keep it secret. he had to keep it silent. he had to bear it alone. there wasn't a place where these words were welcome. - ♪ ride, ride, over the big divide ♪ ♪ singing along to the song of the pioneers ♪ - surround them. fight wagon train. [whooping] - and every saturday, we would go into the theater. they forced us into these movies. we never had the choice. everything that we saw was all western movies, and it was always roy rogers, gene autry. [trumpet fanfare] - the cavalry's coming. - there was always the cavalry there, riding the horses.

there was always the indians there. just before we went in, there would be somebody standing there, and they would say, "whenever you see the cavalry, you start clapping your hands "and you start stomping your feet. "if the indians get killed, don't say anything about it." - you know, down deep, you always wished the indians would win, and they never would, you know, 'cause the movies don't, you know, let you do that. - oh, yeah. - and you did a lot of cheering and stuff, you know, that the indians would win or whatever, you know. i can't even remember what movie it was. and that's what we did, is cheered for the indians. they marched us out of that theater. [all laughing] they come down there and got us. - yeah. - shined a flashlight on us and marched us out. - now, we're not here to fight the indians,

as the custom's been in the past, but to make friends with them. - he don't know nothing about redskins. - no. - he's a good indian. - ain't no such thing. - we weren't allowed to talk. we weren't allowed to go to the bathroom. we weren't even allowed to buy popcorn. we just had to sit there. - ahh! - i didn't learn much that first year. all i knew was that i wanted to go home. vacation-- the end of the school year -- and you know your mother's there and there's gonna be something to eat and you can take your shoes off and throw 'em away, go barefooted for the rest of the summer. first thing you do is, you go check the water to see if it's warm enough to go swimming.

so that was the best time. about the second or the third week in august, the whole community would just suddenly become a little bit more quieter. it was almost like a death in the community. no matter how you worked it, no matter how you looked at it, it always came down to the same thing: that we were leaving. - can you talk about bringing things from home to try and-- to school, in order to keep that link between-- that you could bring something from home, little things that would maintain that link with home

that were important to you? - [crying] by the middle of the fifth grade, i decided i didn't want to go there anymore. i started running away. i'd run home, 16 miles straight across country. there was only one thing

that always went through my mind: that was to get home, and that was it. it didn't matter whether i ran or whether i walked. i just knew the certain area, certain routes that we had to take in order not to get caught. and you run as far as you can and don't look back, 'cause there was always somebody that would be out there looking for you. - if you could destroy the indian society at its roots, which is the family, then you destroy the society. and children are the core, obviously, of any family, but especially, i think, indian families. - he had never seen children being beaten before by adults. in traditional lakota culture, your children are your most precious resource, and who would ever think to harm the children?

- so i think we learned that it was okay to beat up on kids, and it was also okay to beat up on your next of kin, your siblings, or whatever. and so that behavior carried right into marriage. i know i slapped my wife around a number of times, but i've always felt bad afterwards. - when i had my own family, it took a long time for me to realize that... that all i did was punish them and discipline them. there was no love, no respect, no nurturing, no honor. - it didn't come from me naturally. that wasn't even part of me. it came from someplace. it came from here, the boarding school.

- that whole trauma associated with shame about who they are, being told by the government, "you're woe than the rest of us. you're less than the rest of us." is it any surprise, then, that they become abusers? whether violent abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, all of the things that were done to them, they're going to carry out on the next generation. - some of my former classmates committed suicide, some drank themselves to death, and others just gave up and didn't care whether they lived or died. he was trying to quit drinking. didn't have any help. so he committed suicide. these graves fill up so fast. i can't even remember whose those were.

i survived seven years at the oglala community high school before my mother was allowed to transfer me over to the holy rosary, run by the catholic church in pine ridge. i lived day by day in a dark fog, governed by stern men in long black robes. finally, my mother was able to get me transferred again, to the community public school. i went there for two years, graduated from the eighth grade, and quit. our world on the reservation

had become more or less meaningless. there was no place to go, nothing meaningful to do, no movies, no libraries, no public transportation, no jobs available to make a decent life. two months after my 17th birthday, i left the reservation. - were you in vietnam? is it vietnam or korea? - vietnam, yeah. yeah, that was-- to me, that was easy too, 'cause that was just like boarding school. - i think, yeah, the service was a little bit more better. - similar to that-- - yeah, i used to lay there at nights and listen to these guys cry, you know? "what am i doing here?," and such. and i'd lay there and think, "now, what's wrong with this, man? "we're getting three meals a day. they get us up and run us, you know." - get money. - yeah, and they talk to you.

i said, "it ain't anything like boarding school." heck, there, they'd beat you. they kicked you out. you know? - seemed like, after vietnam, everything--every day was nothing but looking for drinks and staying drunk, landing in jail, getting out of jail, and that was the extent of my life. - hi, how are you? - hey, how are you today? something was wrong with me. i couldn't function like what i thought a human being should. i began to look within myself and get rid of the things that i knew made me feel negative, like drinking was one of them. that didn't fit into my life, so i had to get rid of that. - oh, this credit counseling workshop. that's something i don't understand. - why not? - well, you know, we don't have credit.

[laughs] we never could get credit. first time i seen that sign, i thought it meant that maybe they'll teach us how to apply for credit. but it... i just don't pay attention to it, 'cause you can't get credit out here. - four days after christmas in 1890, gunfire rang out on the plains at wounded knee, south dakota. last night, near the site of that massacre, some 200 indians took control of two buildings. - the indians held ten hostages, and they said through a spokesman that they are willing to die if necessary to bring about federal actions on their grievances. - the indians are from an extremely militant group called "a.i.m."

- a.i.m. leaders said they seized wounded knee to force attention on their charges of corruption and mismanagement in the bureau of indian affairs. - either we force the federal government to kill us all once again like they did 83 years ago at wounded knee, or else they come out and they negotiate and meet our demands. - this is the original site for the wounded knee trading post. it was here since i can remember. they destroyed everything in this store. that was destroyed out of carelessness. - a.i.m. leaders sent word that they wanted south dakota's two senators to visit them and a promise from the white house to honor all treaties with the sioux, treaties going back as far as 1868. - either negotiate with us for meaningful results, positive results,

or you're gonna have to kill us, and here at wounded knee is where it's gonna have to happen. - this is where the old houswas. - so this was your first house you ever lived in, or-- - yeah. - what happened to this house? - now, this house was torn apart during the '73 occupation, and they used all the lumber to line the bunkers with. there used to be a catholic church up there, and it's no longer there, but that's where everybody was. there was a bunker up here that people--that's where they took all of the lumber. - there was an a.i.m. bunker up there? - yeah. - the occupation of wounded knee, south dakota, by militant indians ended today. the indians and their supporters put down their guns and surrendered to federal marshals and fbi agents. - then they left.

what once was our wounded knee community was shattered. no trading post, no running water, no heat, no electricity. our people had to live the best way they could with nothing. - i thought the a.i.m. were doing us good. look what they did to us. - longstanding friendships and trust were replaced with suspicion and hopelessness. we were left alone to deal with our own problems as no help came. - the guys that came into wounded knee at that time were nothing more than just little bullies with guns. no, they promised, you know, many times they would rebuild this house, but they never did. just a lot of empty promises in it, and this is-- so this is all that's left, and after that, it just-- you know, they take something from you when your house is destroyed like this.

over the years, i had sought out lessons in lakota spirituality, attended sweat lodges, saonills and st visions. yet nightmares of the government boarding school-- the loneliness, the beatings-- seemed to come back stronger. they seemed to be on my mind every minute of the day. my true sense of self was buried way down, deep inside of me. finally, a breakthrough in my understanding came when i sought counsel at the victims of violence program in boston, massachusetts. they gave me the name of what i was suffering from: complex post-traumatic stress. once my fear had a name,

i could battle it and win. - walter's world probably became quite small until he was able to process and begin to reconnect with people. - i always had this need to help people. sometimes, growing up, i would go out and visit with elderly people, just sit around, talk to them. sometimes i would haul water for them or maybe bring in firewood for them. and it just-- it was a good feeling. so after i got out of the service, then i relocated to denver. - okay. - thank you. - thank you so very much. - eventually, i got certified as a alcohol and drug counselor, but that didn't fill in that void. - he had seen such a decline in this community

which he had grown up in after the 1973 occupation, where people tended to withdraw, and they tended to mistrust each other and not work together like they had. - we had to be very careful on how we dealt with the people, 'cause that occupation had drove all of the people inside of their homes, and they wouldn't come out. - he had ideas that perhaps would spark more caring and sharing in the community if he held easter and christmas gatherings to bring people out of their homes and socialize together. he tried gardening ideas. he brought in rototillers. people donated livestock: chickens and goats, buffalo, all sorts of things.

he was trying to ignite the atmosphere that he had grown up in to try to restore it. - walter, i covered, as you know, the takeover at wounded knee by the american indian movement and the response of the federal government, and i remember, aside from the crushing poverty, a pervasive sense on the reservation of depression, and it seemed almost as if the whole uprising and its aftermath-- with the people being hurt, some people being killed-- had stripped the people there of their self-respect, their self-esteem. was that the hardest part to overcome? - yeah, basically, we divided this up into three different parts, but every project that we've developed was more or less a setup for developing self-worth, self-confidence, a little respect,

which, i felt that was completely destroyed. there was too much drinking. people were dying. there was a lot of sicknesses, and it was a case of slow starvation during that time. people were trying to survive on $54 a month. so we tried a number of projects. sometimes it was trial and error, but in the end, we still have a long ways to go. - life on the pine ridge reservation, in terms of pride, and really in terms of the quality of life, is better because of that man, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] - we tried everything to try to bring life back to this community. it seemed to have worked to a certain point. but i was hoping that it would catch on and it would go on by itself, but it never did.

- it took us four years before we finally came to the end of what he had to say. and at that point, he was able, finally, to look at his whole life and see it in its entirety. and at that point, he began to feel peace. positive memories started coming to him, things that he had never thought about for years and years. it was as if, buried under all of the agony that he had suffered through as a child and all of the negative behavior that he had displayed as an adult, that buried under it all was the positive of what it means to be a lakota.

- the fear created by those beatings is gone. the anger fueled by alcohol is gone. my mind is clear. even today, after so many years, the memory of the elders who raised me is strong. i see now that throughout the most difficult times, they walk straight-backed with clear and focused eyes. they had no need to beat their children, their wives, or each other. they had no need to shout in angry voices. they kept their homes neat, and the ground that they lived on was clean and free of litter. they were lakota, and they knew it deep in their souls. - it took a lot of courage for walter to come forward

and tell his story in this book, to break this legacy of isolation. if you tell your story and you learn something from your life story and you can share it with others, that's how healing happens. - the more survivors that can speak, as far as their experiences, and tell that story, the closer we are to becoming who we used to be. [drumming, bells jingling] [chanting] [applause] - yeah, we'll be here till 3:00. this is my sister. that's my oldest brother. this is francis. what i know about brussels

is just the stories that my mother told me. she never told us very much. part of our culture is, the mother does not tell the son anything. the father is the one that tells the son. the mother tells the daughter. but as part of the culture, our uncle steps in to fill the father's position. but he's never been to brussels, so we were lost there. that one--see my sisr being pulled into the picture. a lot of the pictures that we had from that time, it got burnt up in a fire. we only had one picture-- one family picture that was-- that we were able to salvage. so from that time up to the present, there's no information. - 2004. i had the opportunity at that time to buy about 150 indian artifacts.

the guy that collected all the artifacts bought that collection in 1935 from the indians of the wild west show when they were at the world fair of 1935. so i found a few pictures, and the very first one i found was walter's family. i recognized immediately the two vests that i had. that was just incredible. i had a tv crew that stopped by because they heard about the story, and they said, "maybe we can fly with you to denver." i said, "should we drive to pine ridge?" thank you, sir. down this road and then-- thank you. - moses. - moses? - live up here. - yeah. we drove up to wounded knee, and we found moses, walter's brother. we are from belgium.

- oh, belgium? - we are from belgium, and we are looking just for history. in 1935... - yeah? - there were chiefs that came to belgium for the international fair. and i got a picture here... - oh, yeah. - of joe littlemoon... - yeah. - with his family. - yeah. - is this-- are these relatives of yours? - that's my mother and father. - oh, really? - and my oldest brother, whose name is al, and then--aloysius-- and francis, wilson, and my sister, pauline. - this is history that we'd need. what boarding school had did to us-- make us feel ashamed, make us resent our culture for what it is. - thank you very much. i'm really happy that i found-- - so to overcome a lot of that,

then this is the type of knowledge that i need to put it into the book and say, "we are people. we are human beings." - okay, well, thanks a lot for the picture. thank you for stopping by. - thank you for talking to us. - yeah. well, have a nice trip. - thank you. - you bet. we'll see you later. - the frosting on the cake today is this display here and meeting francois here. the history of our family is something that we've been putting together. that gives me the strength to stand up and walk a little bit more taller and be able to look at people in the eye and say, "hello, how are you?" and that's about it. that's what this means to us.

to be a human being in our world, it means-- it means something big. that's-- it's almost like a title. you earn the right to be a human being. you're not born with that. you need a lot of respect. you need a lot of honor. you need a lot of dignity and a lot of compassion to reach that level of being a human being. it means something to us. today, i stand facing the sunset, where my lakota grandparents have gone home. i acknowledge their wisdom, courage, and generosity. i am grateful to them. through their efforts, i have dignity, respect, honor, and pride.

i can face the future until i go home to join them. because i have remembered the lessons from my lakota elders, i am discovering who i am. the dark fog has lifted. i can finally hear the creator, touch the creator, taste the creator, and smell the creator. i see the creator. i am able to say, "i am lakota. i am a human being."

narrator: for more information about the thick dark fog, visit n.a.p.t. online at nativetelecom.org. [singing in native language]

major funding for the thick dark fog was provided by the corporation for public broadcasting. to order a copy of the thick dark fog, call 1-877-868-2250 or visit shopvisionmaker.org.

>> garrison keillor: seamus heaney grew up the eldest of nine children on a 50 acre farm in northern ireland, his father a cattle dealer, his mother's family worked in the linen mills. when he was 12, he won a scholarship to a catholic school, learned latin and gaelic. over the years, his poetry has become enormously popular, especially since he won the nobel prize in literature in 1995. >> blackberry picking. late august, given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen. at first, just one-- a glossy

purple clot among others, red, green, hard as a knot. you ate that first one, and its flesh was sweet like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking. then red ones inked up and that hunger sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. 'round hayfields, cornfields, and potato-drills we trekked and picked until the cans were full; until the tinkling bottom had been covered with green ones, and on top big, dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes. our hands were peppered with thorn pricks; our palms sticky as bluebeard's. we hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. but when the bath was filled we found a fur, a rat-grey fungus,

glutting on our cache. the juice was stinking too. once off the bush the fruit fermented; the sweet flesh would turn sour. i always felt like crying. it wasn't fair that all the lovely canfulls smelt of rot. each year i hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

>>joanne: i am absolutely in love with spain and i'm not sure, is it the flamenco, is it the people, is it the food? i love all of it, it gets me so excited and you're definitely going to see that on today's show. i'm going to start by making a cold tomato soup call salmorejo and then i'm going to cook with my student juan and together we're going to make this fabulous lamb stew with chorizo and white beans and tomatoes, it's so fabulous and i cannot wait to cook that with you today. [ music ]