As an adult, Lost Bird saw one child die and gave away
another because she couldn’t raise him. She died of syphilis and the Spanish flu
on Valentine’s Day, 1920, aged 29, and was buried in a pauper’s grave in
California But 71 years later, her
people, the Lakota, found her grave and brought her remains back to Wounded
Knee.
I wrote about Lost Bird’s story on my blog “A Rolling Crone”
in 2012. Then, early this year, I
received an e-mail from Brian George, a Native American who works at the St.
Joseph’s Indian School In Chamberlain, SD, which houses over 200 Native
American children whose parents cannot care for them (and there are 100 more on
the waiting list.) Brian told me an
intriguing story of how he has taken Lost Bird as his “guiding spirit” and visits
her grave every year on the day she
died. While he says he is cynical, he
has encountered many unexplainable signs that her spirit is with him.
Brian emailed me a photograph of a tattoo of the baby Lost
Bird on his shoulder, with the word “Wakanyeja” which means “children are a
sacred.” “Every morning I look at the
tattoo and vow that our 212 young Lakota students don’t endure the same,” he
wrote. “I have tried to turn her tragedy
into an inspiration. I believe Zintka knows
that I am all about helping the Lakota children and she is my guide. I see endless cycles of poverty, addiction,
suicide and abuse…However, the people are resilient, strong and have that
special Native sense of humor. I call the reservations in our country “The forgotten
America.”
(Today, Monday, May 4, The New York Times published on its
front page an article about the epidemic of suicides among the young people on
the reservations of South Dakota—especially Pine Ridge, which is on the ground
of Wounded Knee. Since December, nine
between the ages of 12 and 24 have committed suicide and 103 more have tried.)
Brian wrote that he is the Major Gift Officer for St. Joseph’s
and often travels East on business, so on April 15, I met him in Philadelphia
to learn more about his connection to Lost Bird.
Brian George with photographs of Lost Bird's grave stone
Brian describes himself as a member of the Chickasaw Nation
of Oklahoma, but he’s one- third Irish and one-third Scottish. He grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and
never thought of himself as Native American until, at the age of 30, in 1993,
he attended the funeral of his full-blooded grandmother. “As I walked in, all
these elderly Native ladies ran up saying ‘You look just like your great
grandfather’ --a man named Winchester
Colbert. I looked him up and our
likeness is stunning. He was a governor of the Chickasaw Nation and served in that
capacity during the Civil War.”
After a divorce in 2007, Brian was working for the Chickasaw
Nation outside Oklahoma City as a host at a casino by day and a bouncer by
night, but he felt a “hole in my heart.” A number of coincidences drew his
attention on Easter Sunday, 2010 to an ad in the newspaper saying, “Want to make
the world a better place? St. Joseph
Indian School.”
Brian started at St. Joseph’s as a houseparent. “That hole
in my heart has become whole again with the unconditional love I give and receive
from the Lakota children I raised and continue to mentor. No more breaking up
fights in bars. Now I help put together
lives once shattered by the tragedies of reservation life. Then a person named Zintkala Nuni, Lost Bird of
Wounded Knee came into my life.”
Brian first discovered the story of Lost Bird when he was substitute
teaching in St. Joseph’s “Native
American Studies” class. The class watched a 30-minute DVD titled “Lost Bird of
Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota.” Then he purchased a book with the same title, written by Renee Sansom,
who was a social worker in South Dakota when a co-worker showed her an old
photograph she had found in an attic. It
was the self-same photograph that I bought some years later. Sansom spent the
next five years researching and writing Zintka’s story. In the book, Brian discovered that Lost Bird
had spent two years—1905 to ‘06—attending a school named Chamberlain Indian Industrial
Boarding School on the same ground where St. Joseph’s is today.
He decided to make the three-hour drive from St. Joseph’s to
Wounded Knee to pay his respects to Lost Bird and the other victims of the
massacre. The visit was unremarkable
until he was leaving the burial site, when “Something happened. Something
touched my back like I had never felt before.
I literally left the ground. I had chills. I knew immediately it was
Lost Bird’s spirit coming with me.”
Brian visits Lost Bird’s grave every Valentine’s day—the anniversary of her death.
“I lay flowers and ceremonial tobacco prayer ties on her grave. In
2013 I rubbed my left hand across the word ‘Lost’ on her headstone. A
few days later, my watch began to malfunction. A jeweler told me that my
battery was ‘burnt up’. I realized it was
on the arm that was touching the headstone. I had always heard that spirits use
electrical energy to communicate.”
On subsequent visits to the grave in 2014 and 2015, Brian
again noticed electrical phenomena. In 2014, “I went to Lost Bird’s grave and
took out my iPhone 5 that was fully charged. From YouTube I pulled up the Lakota
Healing Song, which is 5 minutes long. I
placed the phone on the grave. At the
end of the song, I picked up my phone and noticed it was completely drained. I
showed my girl friend. As we got in the car, she saw a strange kind of bird
circling overhead. Then that bird flew about nine feet above, as if it was
escorting us. I told her it was a Scissor-Tail
Flycatcher—the state bird of my state of Oklahoma. Later I found there had only been 12 reported
sightings in the history of South Dakota. This time of year it should be in
Central America. Was this, I wondered, a
lost bird or Lost Bird?”
On Valentine’s Day 2015, Brian again played the Lakota
Healing Song on a fully charged phone, The phone was drained again. This time,
in the photographs taken by his girlfriend, there seemed to be a mysterious
mist surrounding Brian, despite no visible fog.
He also experienced signs of an electrical nature back at St
Joseph’s in the area where Lost Bird had gone to school. “I had left my car in
a parking lot close to the Missouri River,” he told me. “It was dark and I
looked up at this storage building that was used as a chicken coop in the early
1900’s. The flood light was not on. What I did next is unexplainable. I asked ‘Zintka, Zintkala Nuni, were you
here?’ Immediately the light came
on. I got in my car and drove off. The next day I asked the maintenance guys if
that light was on a timer or sensor and they said no.”
About a year later, Brian was on the school’s playground
sitting on a bench and he noticed the light on the old bulding was out
again. He asked the same question
“Zintka, were you here?” and immediately it came on. When other adults asked
what had happened, Brian repeated the question three more times, each time with
the same result, to the wonder of the onlookers. “Each time I received an answer exactly
after I asked, with no delay.”
“All my experiences with Lost Bird are comforting to me and
unexplainable,” he told me. “ I believe she is my guiding spirit and knows that I was brought
to South Dakota to help her people. She
knows that my passion in life is helping the most forgotten and underserved
people of a land that was originally theirs.”
Like Martin Luther King, Brian George has a dream--to unify,
lead and be a vocal advocate for a better quality of life for all Native
Americans. “Reservation life has many of
the same challenges as our inner cities and other third-world countries,” he
said, "the difference being the lack of
attention by mainstream America. I
embrace becoming the leader who will bring this to light. I want to launch the
revival of the Native cultures. Our
commonalities are closer than our differences. This is a time for
forgiveness. I want to create this
foundation, to help Native Americans in the areas of education, housing and
rehabilitation."
The centerpiece of Brian’s plan is to bring back the 40
acres of land that surrounds the graves of Wounded Knee. “I want to bring that land back to the Lakota
people—and not as a tourist occasion.”
Brian has even written the speech he would give on the sacred
ground to mark that moment. “Let us not dwell on yesterday’s injustices and
broken treaties,” he would say, “so we can reap the rewards of tomorrow’s
dreams and blessings from the Creator.
We must replace bitterness with forgiveness. Forgiveness of the past is
the pathway to the future. Let today
mark the beginning of a new era in our stormy and storied relations…As Native
people, we must join together and honor all that is right. The return of these lands is honorable and
right.”
No doubt Lost Bird, who spent her short life trying to get
back to Wounded Knee, but returned only after her death, would agree.
