American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Out of his black robe came Kraft, feedmills, blight, Benson Mines. From his prayers flowed the death of salmon and trout in mercury pools. From letters home to his mother settlers followed soldiers behind hooded priests. —Maurice Kenny Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues It must be said, first of all, that I find it quite humorous to be sitting here in midsummer 2007 framing a reply to a critique of a critique of a film I first published in 1992 and that was anthologized more than a decade ago. Somehow, I just can’t quite shake the eerie feeling that Miss Shively, my tight-lipped neo-Puritan of an eighth-grade teacher, will shortly be returning from her final resting place to correct the punctuation in that theme on the Black Hawk War I turned in on my way to becoming a freshly minted freshman at Elmwood High, majoring in football, small-block Chevies, and that oh-so-James-Dean-meets-Brando cool one might affect simply by firing up a Marlboro at the table outside our local Dairy Queen, smack-dab in the midst of Illinois’s endless cornfields. Fact is, I never quite managed to shake the image of the woman’s grimfaced visage extolling the virtues of the Pilgrim fathers, even after I was drafted as fodder for the war in Vietnam, coming back a Students for a Democratic Society/Vietnam Veterans Against the War (SDS/VVAW) volunteer and member of Fred Hampton’s original Rainbow Coalition in Chicago before gravitating to Sangamon State University, a governor’s grant magnet school for radicals situated outside Springfield, the state capitol, and, from there, being recruited into the American Indian Movement (AIM) by Clyde Bellecourt for what eventually turned out to be service in South Dakota, and later Colorado. Somehow, Miss Shively was always there, frowning at the way I saw things, the less-than-patriotic attitude I displayed, a hometown boy gone seriously wrong in her Middle American estimation. But, hey, that’s another story.