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He may be the most recognized face in Indian Country, with a dignified and melodious voice to match. He’s met Prince Charles, President Mitterrand of France, the late Pope John Paul II, and the King and Queen of Spain. He has toured the globe with Sting on a speaking tour about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and its Native peoples, acted in films from Dances With Wolves to Hidalgo, and performed hundreds of concerts alongside the likes of Willie Nelson, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Kris Kristofferson. He’s produced a documentary film, narrated others, and is in demand as an event host and motivational speaker. An early member of the American Indian Movement, he is also active in social change and lends his time to supporting many nonprofit organizations and projects. Currently, however, the next breath of air is about the finest thing going for Floyd Red Crow Westerman.
About six months ago, Westerman (Dakota) underwent a successful lung transplant operation. “Right now, I feel so grateful that I’m able to approach life with a deeper appreciation than ever,” he explained in a recent interview in Santa Fe. “We take so much for granted, including our breath. It’s a gift. I give thanks now when I wake up with the birds chirping, can take a breath of air and do things I thought I’d never get to do again—like singing—which is really what I’m about.”
Born in 1935 on the Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation in South Dakota, Westerman was carted off to boarding school at age seven. “You bite the bullet at the beginning and then somehow survive. Survival is easy when there is no other choice,” he recalls. However, it was not all hardship—he made some lifelong friends there and first picked up the guitar, the key to his future.
After graduating from Northern State College in South Dakota, where he majored in secondary education but most enjoyed his studies in speech, theater and art, the young man headed to Denver, Colorado. Here he befriended a young Indian writer, Vine Deloria, who has gone on to international fame as a writer and leading Indian intellectual.
“Vine is the reason why I moved into the public eye,” Westerman says. “He’d come to the lounges and piano bars where I was playing in and near Denver and sit around and sing. We’d talk about his book he was writing—Custer Died for Your Sins. He said, ‘You know, there should be a song about the anthropologists who poke around in our lives.’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that. That’s true.’ He’d written about anthropologists, about missionaries and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who really got Indians hung up and frustrated and castrated. I decided I wanted to express the Indian point of view through songs, so we lifted songs out of these chapters. It’s possible I could have gone to Nashville and had a very successful career on the country-western route, but instead I went to the core of expressing the Indian point of view—sometimes very critically of America—which explains why my music is more popular in Europe than America.”
Despite the often-stinging bite of his songs, Westerman’s early albums—Custer Died for Your Sins (released in 1970) and This Land is Your Mother (released in 1982)—sold well enough to launch him into the public eye. (Much later, Westerman acquired rights for the two albums and reissued them on his own label, Red Crow Creations. They are available today through Amazon.com, select other Web sites and his live shows.)
The 1970s also saw the rise of the American Indian Movement, a civil rights organization that reflected the increasing pride, and frustration, of a new generation of Indian leaders. The movement crossed a deadly watershed with the occupation and eventual shootout with federal and local authorities at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973. Among those leading AIM was co-founder Dennis Banks (Anishinaabe), with whom Westerman had gone to school. “It’s no wonder we ended up at Wounded Knee together—we’ve been brothers since we were kids,” he says.
In 1978, Westerman made the first of his 60-plus trips to Europe, teaming up with musician Harry Belafonte on a tour protesting the nuclear power industry—a cause he remains dedicated to today. “It’s the worst thing man ever invented. It’s stupid. It’s like jumping in front of a moving train. It’s Pandora’s box. You can’t get rid of the waste. The future is supposed to be built around what’s good for children, not industries. I think this country is bankrupt when it comes to imagination and enacting the principles of the seventh generation.”
The next phase of his life centered on making films and working in television. Among his first films was Renegade, playing the father of Lou Diamond Phillips. In 1989 he was the voice of a CB trucker in Pow Wow Highway, and then in 1990 came perhaps his best-known role, as Ten Bears in Dances With Wolves. In 1991 he played the shaman to Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison in The Doors, and in 1992 he starred in the Canadian production Clearcut (the New York Times said of his role, “He’s the deepest character, and a man of few words.”). Other films he has appeared in include Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994), Naturally Native (1998), Grey Owl (1999, with Pierce Brosnan) and Hidalgo (2004).
His television roles include the award-winning miniseries DreamKeeper (2003) and numerous appearances on The X-Files (as Albert Hosteen), Walker: Texas Ranger and Dharma & Greg, as well as Northern Exposure, L.A. Law and as Sitting Bull in the miniseries Son of the Morning Star. Yet another endeavor has been serving as a narrator on several documentary film projects, including 500 Nations.
In the late 1990s, Westerman launched a film, television and music production company in Los Angeles, the nonprofit Eyapaha Institute. A secondary goal of the group is to provide training for young Natives in media production, which has taken many forms from seminars and conferences to the making of the company’s first major documentary, Exterminate Them!: America’s War on Indian Nations—Part 1: The California Story. The 47-minute work focuses on the holocaust of Indians in California and is planned as the first in a series. “Research is almost done for other parts of the country,” says Westerman. “Now I need money to produce them. After the premier occurs in California, I’m taking the whole package to cable television and sell it as a brand.”
On top of this, he has recently begun creating a series of life-size bronze busts of great chiefs like Sitting Bull and Geronimo, and is writing his autobiography (with Deloria serving as editor).
Despite all these projects and recovery from his operation, Westerman is also excited to be helping to organize and perform in a series of concerts to raise funds for presenting cultural programs to Native youth in response to the school-shooting tragedy on the Red Lake Reservation. Three days after our conversation, he was to perform at a concert in Minneapolis with Bonnie Raitt, and he has been discussing shows around the nation with Willie Nelson and many other well-known performers.
“We want to educate the general public about Indian issues and develop money to help these youth programs that are so desperately needed,” Westerman says. “I’m calling it the ‘Concerts for the Healing of the Nations.’ We need to highlight the youth, put them in front, make them our first priority. Everything follows behind that. Basically it’s to bring the traditional culture back into the young people, because there’s been a few decades where the Indians are becoming more like Yuppies and it’s pulling them from their traditions.”
With his middle name—Kanghi Duta—handed down from his great-grandfather, his immersion in his cultural practices and his lifelong efforts to sing—both literally and figuratively—the praises of his people, you can be sure Red Crow will not stray from his course flying high above the status quo.
Daniel Gibson has served as the editor of Native Peoples since February 2001. His latest book is Pueblos of the Rio Grande: A Visitor’s Guide (Rio Nuevo).
Photos by Daniel Nadelbach Photography in Santa Fe, NM.
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