AN INTERVIEW WITH STEVE
Some of this interview was conducted in the summer of 2006 by a student reporter, who has given permission to post it here. From time to time Steve adds questions and answers in reply to e-mails he receives. Reporters and others may quote from the interview freely.

What kind of book is The Unquiet Grave?

Some of it is a murder mystery, and some of it is a courtroom drama, and some it is a popular history. Above all, though, it’s a story about the cry of anguish of a people—of Indians generally and the Lakota Indians specifically—and a critique of the many people who betrayed the Indian struggle for rights from the 1970s through today.

And it’s nonfiction?

Yes. It’s a true story.

Did you enjoy writing The Unquiet Grave?

That’s a bit like asking a mother if she enjoyed being pregnant and giving birth. The only sane answer has to be yes and no. It’s immensely rewarding to see this thing you’re creating take shape before you. I’m one of those people who likes nothing better than poring over every sentence to try to get it just right—making sure each word is the best choice possible, making sure there’s nothing extraneous in the sentence but also that the total effect isn’t Spartan, making sure the rhythm is exactly right. But of course that’s all hard work, and by the fifty-third pass over the same sentence it’s drudgery. And you always fail—I do anyway—as often as you succeed. It’s the best and worst kind of work I can imagine doing.

Did you enjoy researching the book, as opposed to writing it?

Same answer. Yes and no. I loved digging up things that badly needed to be dug up. It was exciting to pry documents loose from the government that positively screamed SCANDAL! And I met a lot of wonderful people in my travels and interviews.

So what’s the downside?

Most of The Unquiet Grave deals with things that people would rather not talk about, and it was very hard getting people to open up. A white guy walks onto an Indian reservation in South Dakota and starts asking about cover-ups and murders that are as old as he is—well, I got about the kind of response you’d expect. When I started, I didn’t have thick-enough skin for this kind of book.

Do you have thick skin now?

It’s thicker in spots. And thickening daily.

Tell me more about being a white reporter on an Indian reservation.

It’s hard to imagine just how badly Indians have been treated and still are treated in many, many parts of the West today. A few years before I started working on this book, a white teenager in South Dakota ran over an Indian who had passed out in the road. Killed him. When the cops talked to the teenager later, the teen said, yeah, he had seen the Indian lying in the road, but he ran over him all the same because he didn’t want to swerve out of his lane. Then white prosecutors gave this white kid a slap on the wrist, and the press, which in South Dakota is very white, raised only a modest fuss about it. Neither the prosecutor nor the press—much of the press anyway—ever understood why Indians were pissed off about the episode. This may be an extreme case, but it was by no means an isolated example. So to say that whites and Indians still don’t get along on much of the Plains is a big understatement. If you’re a white reporter and you show up on someone’s doorstep on a reservation, you bring this baggage with you. I found that unless I had some connection, a referral from someone trusted, most of the time when I approached Indians, they regarded me with suspicion or fear.

How did you overcome that?

Well, I’m not entirely sure I did.

But you must have to some extent, or else you couldn’t have written the book.

Sure. But to the degree that I was able to build trust with people on reservations, I think it had a lot less to do with some useful approach that I found to bridge the centuries-old racial divide than it had to do with simply winding up at the right doorstep where someone was generous enough to talk. Knock on enough doors, and it happens, whether you’re on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota or in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Now, just to be clear: I don’t want to paint the wrong picture of Indians as xenophobes. It’s just that—imagine, say, you’re a black person in Jim Crow Mississippi. We’re talking rural, racist, dirt-poor Mississippi of 1960. Any white man shows up on your doorstep in your all-black sharecropper’s district, and you’d be a fool not to be wary of him. Now, a white guy shows up and starts asking about old murders by the Ku Klux Klan and, sweet Jesus, who wouldn’t slam the door in his face? Some of that feeling still exists on Indian reservations today.

How long did you work on this book?

Nearly four years—longer if you count a book about Indian issues that I had been researching before this one but wasn’t able to pull together. That earlier book had been about three years in the making, and The Unquiet Grave evolved out of that one.

What was that earlier book?

It was going to be about a particular reservation in Montana that’s desperately poor. I wanted to answer the question—or try to answer the question—of why this one reservation was so destitute and through it explain why nearly all Indian reservations are still so catastrophically poor. I got interested in the subject because my wife and I were moving to Montana and the poverty of Indians struck me as one of the grossest, most under-addressed problems of that state and most states in the West. But when I went to the library to find a book to answer my question, there was virtually nothing, certainly nothing that a layperson could understand. Even the academic literature was very, very thin on the topic. I thought I might tackle it.

Why didn’t you?

A lot of reasons. The biggest was that it’s very hard to find a compelling story to build a book like that around. I mean, the problem was something that spanned generations, and a good book on it probably would have been as long as Roots and would have had something of the same labyrinthine structure, which was more than I was capable of doing for a first book. So I was floundering around, having bitten off more than I could chew—to mix my metaphors—when I stumbled onto the story that became The Unquiet Grave.

Do you still plan on writing that other book?

If I can ever find a good way to do it, yes. I’ve got a few years of research in boxes in my attic, and I’d like to think I can use them. But often as not, a book finds you rather than you finding it. I’ll keep mulling it over, and eventually, maybe, a good idea will come—or someone will bring a good idea to me.

How did The Unquiet Grave evolve?

I knew an editor in Washington, D.C., who worked for a fancy magazine, and I wanted to pitch him a story about Indians. All my ideas were centered on Indians of the Plains, and his magazine only wanted stories that had some tie to the East Coast. So I started looking for a story that would have more pull on the nation’s power centers. I came across a web page about Bill Janklow, a congressman from South Dakota I had never heard of, and how he had allegedly raped an Indian girl more than three decades earlier and got away with it. The story fascinated me, not least because the more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that the authorities, including the FBI, had given Janklow a pass. But the story was also fascinating because it opened a window into a whole shady world of how state and federal governments had committed all kinds of small atrocities in order to keep Indians down. The atrocities were tiny in scale, but they added up to large atrocity, a greater evil perpetrated against an entire race.

Some of this is ground Peter Matthiessen covered many years ago in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, right?

Exactly. Crazy Horse was published in 1983. When I read it twenty years later, I wanted to know what had been found out in the years since—what more had been learned about the conflict over Indian rights, particularly in the main battleground state of South Dakota. It turned out just about nothing had been written since. There was a pretty good book about the early Indian rights movement called Like a Hurricane, but the book ends right as the movement was heating up, right where the action in The Unquiet Grave begins. I wrote The Unquiet Grave to try to fill in some of the missing pieces.

Did you ever publish the piece about Janklow?

Sort of. No major publication would touch it, so I published it in a scrappy little newsletter called CounterPunch.

You mentioned getting documents out of the government earlier. How’d you get those?

I sued the bastards.

Why did you sue? Were the documents not available under the Freedom of Information Act?

The Freedom of Information Act says, basically, that if you want papers from the U.S. government and if those papers don’t deal with national security–type issues or don’t violate the privacy of a living person, then the government has to hand them over. Actually, even if the papers might violate someone’s privacy, the government has to hand them over if there’s a compelling public interest in them. FOIA also says that the government has to give you those papers in twenty days unless there’s some dire reason they can’t. Sounds pretty simple, right? But what would happen is, I would request, say, the FBI file on Pedro Bissonette, an Indian activist who was killed thirty years ago by the police of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Indians say Bissonette was assassinated. The BIA police and the FBI, which investigated the police, said Bissonette was shot justifiably. So here’s a case three decades old, no way it has anything to do with national security, the victim is long dead and so has no privacy interest, and there’s a compelling reason for making these papers public, yet the FBI stonewalls me. They say they might release a few pages of their several-hundred-page file but no more than that, and they’re not going to do even that until two or three years from now. So I sued.

What’s the FBI’s justification for withholding files like that?

Most of the time they say that much of the information in the file came from informers and that releasing that information could violate the informers’ privacy. Or it could violate the privacy of the people the informers were spying on. The trouble is, a lot of those informers were spying on people illegally. We’re not talking about informers who were collecting intelligence to bust mob kingpins. We’re talking about informers who were spying on political dissidents, the vast majority of whom were law-abiding. It’s a neat trick really: the FBI violates X’s privacy by spying on her illegally, then the FBI covers it up by saying that to tell you how they spied on X would violate her privacy.

And what was the FBI’s justification for saying it would take years to get the documents to you?

They argue they have a big backlog of FOIA requests and their FOIA department is terribly understaffed. The first claim is true. The second might be for all I know, although the FBI sure isn’t going to Capitol Hill saying, “Please give us more money to process FOIA requests.” But let’s be charitable and take the FBI at its word: they’ve got a huge backlog and are woefully understaffed to boot. Doesn’t matter. It’s an irrelevant argument because FOIA doesn’t give them an exemption for being routinely backlogged or understaffed—only for being hit by an unforeseen crisis.

If that’s true, how does the FBI get away with it?

They get away with it because judges let them. Most judges live in awe of the FBI. When you go to court and say, “Your Honor, we can show that there’s reasonable cause to believe the FBI spied illegally on these activists, or covered up the murder of an activist, and it’s high time the public knew whether the FBI did or not,” you get the judicial equivalent of a laugh. Three out of four judges just can’t fathom the FBI would have done anything that awful. Now, we’re talking about an FBI that in this same era tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide because he was about to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s hardly debatable that the FBI illegally sabotaged thousands of leftists activists for decades. It’s cold, undeniable fact. But still judges give the FBI years to hand over the documents, despite the twenty-day requirement in FOIA, and still they let the FBI decide which documents to release and which to keep secret. The reason it’s still worth suing is that if you don’t sue, the FBI may take five years to release its handful of documents to you. If you sue, you might convince a judge to order the FBI to give you the documents in, say, eighteen months. Also, when the FBI does finally hand over some documents, they’re almost always heavily censored. So you have to sue to fight over that too. Usually, as I say, judges won’t help you much there either. But if you’ve got a 2,000-page file and, say, 1,500 pages have been withheld or censored, maybe a judge will order the FBI to release another 100 or so pages. And maybe a few of those pages will hold something valuable. That, in fact, is how many of the revelations in The Unquiet Grave came to me.

How long did you sue?

Four years to date. We have two main lawsuits, and they’re still ongoing.

That must have cost a lot so far.

It would have if I’d have paid for the suits—easily tens of thousands of dollars. I’m lucky, though. My wife is a lawyer, and a good one, and she’s been able to take time from her real work to do pro bono work for me. The huge cost of suing—which the FBI and other agencies are entirely, strategically aware of —is a big reason why the events in my book have been so little reported on. There are very few lawyers in Indian Country, and of those, how many do you think have time to spare to bring a FOIA lawsuit? Fewer still. The ultimate result of the gutting of FOIA is not that reporters like me get stymied, though that’s a big enough problem, but that people like American Indians rarely learn the full truth about what our government did to them.

I’ve read the good reviews about your book, but let me ask you an unfair question: what are its shortcomings?

Oh, God, there are so many. It’s not an unfair question, though. Orwell once wrote that every book is a failure; it’s just a question of how it fails. I suppose the biggest failure of the book is that I didn’t do nearly as much interviewing as I would have liked. My advance was minuscule, and even a small grant I got didn’t last more than a couple months. For most of the years that I was working on the book, I was racking up debt like there was no tomorrow. What all this meant was that I couldn’t spend as much time on the road doing interviews as I would have liked. You can do a lot by phone, but it’s virtually impossible to get someone to tell you by phone that, yeah, they did commit perjury or abet manslaughter thirty years ago. You need to see them in person, build up trust, often over a few days or weeks. So if I had to do it over again, I’d wave a wand and give myself a great big budget and do more in-person interviewing.

I heard you had a medical mishap during the writing of the book. Can you tell me about that?

It’s kind of a long story.

Go right ahead.

We had a series of editing snafus, my publisher and I did. My original editor left for another publishing house just as the editing was getting underway, and the freelancers who my publisher contracted to edit the manuscript didn’t quite work out. The upshot of this was that I had to do most of the editing myself. There was a point last winter and spring where I had several insane deadlines—periods of two or three weeks in which I had to rewrite the entire the book. I’d work like mad, send the latest rewrite off to my publisher, get a short breather, then have to rewrite it again in another two or three-week span. I did this, I think, four times, maybe five. During a couple of these insane periods, I was working twenty hours a day, and more than a few times I was up two and three days straight without sleep, which was both stupid and necessary. Naturally, I got sick a lot.

At one crucial juncture, a day or two before a major deadline, I finally went to see a doctor with what I knew was strep throat. I’d had the strep about ten days or so but had been too busy to go in until the pain finally became unbearable. So I had the strep test, which came back positive. The doctor says, “You got two choices: pills or shot.” I say, “What’s the difference?” Doctor says, “Pills will take two to four days to kick in. The shot’ll kick in in two to four hours.” That’s a no-brainer: “I’ll take the shot.” So a nurse comes in and sticks a needle in my butt. Then they sit me in a chair in one of those little barren examination rooms that the practitioners of the healing arts specialize in, where I’m supposed to wait ten minutes to see if I sprout horns or something. The shot was in the penicillin family, and I couldn’t remember if I had allergies to anything in the penicillin family, and they didn’t want to turn me loose on the streets to have an allergic reaction.

So I’m in my room alone for maybe two minutes when I start to feel a wave of something—it’s like a cross between nausea and leadenness, and it’s creeping up my legs to my stomach. By the time this feeling reaches my chest, which takes all of about three seconds, I decide I ought to lie down. I don’t remember whether I tried to or not. The next thing I remember is being on the floor feeling entirelyleaden. I couldn’t move. Had my wits been clearer I would have wondered if I was paralyzed. It took me a while to remember that I was at the doctor’s office, also that I had been wanting to lie down. When I remembered that, I thought, “Well, this must be good, I’m lying down.” But then I sensed that my glasses were askew on my face, and I could feel liquid trickling down my forehead. After another ten or twenty seconds, I was able to move my limbs a bit. One of my hands was in an awkward position close to my head, so I moved it over to my head—it felt like moving someone else’s hand—and touched the liquid. I pulled this foreign hand down toward my eyes, and I saw that the liquid was red. It took me a little while before I realized that this was blood, and a little while longer still to realize it was my blood.

By the time I finally figured out that I had passed out and conked my head on the marble floor, nurses came in. They said they’d heard a crash and wondered what it was. Our health-care system in action. Once they got all the blood washed off, they found two deep gashes on my forehead and chin. Took the doctor an hour to sew me back up.

I went home, and the strep was gone in a day, but my head hurt so damned bad that I couldn’t work for three or four more days. Missed my deadline completely. It’s a delightful cocktail story, and I’m just maudlin enough and self-pitying enough to love telling it. But I must say that it made clear to me, if it wasn’t already, that whatever glamour there is in suffering for one’s art is greatly overrated.

Was it a reaction to penicillin that you experienced?

Nope. Just a reaction to the needle—to being jabbed. Apparently some people’s bodies shut down shortly after they’re jabbed or stabbed, which strikes me as a bad evolutionary response. A woolly mammoth sticks a tusk in you, you wriggle free and start to run away, then you just pass out and let the mammoth trample you? Who thought that one up? It’s a wonder my caveman ancestors survived. Anyway, that shutting-down was what was happening when the leaden feeling rose through my body. Why, of all the shots I’ve had in my life, my body decided to shut down right then was a minor medical mystery to my doctor. I prefer to think it was my body’s way of letting me know I was an idiot to work it to the point of collapse and it was going to force me to rest whatever way it could.

© 2006–2010 Steve Hendricks