Mahto, The Lamanites', War

By Marcus Reum

A touching and heartwarming story about two Lamanite warriors and their journey to truth. It's a stark and realistic glimpse into life of a pair of young, Sioux Indian twins on a 1950's Indian Reservation, their lives at boarding school, and subsequent years. It discusses Mormonism at length, delving into the deepest secrets contained therein, creation science, politics, and reality. It's a hard-hitting expose of life on the Reservation, as written by someone of Native American, Black, and white ancestry, who grew up there this whole life. The author highlights the horrors of Reservation life of yesterday and today, the unique, non-PC humor that's standard there, sprinkled with the pecadillos of a few funny and tragic characters. The names of most have been changed to protect their identities, and the author interveaves with great liberty, his own interpretations of events therein as told to him by others for humor or effect. However, this work is based on a true story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcus Reum
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201714291

Book preview

Originally wrote this work, some twenty plus years ago, only because I felt my Dad beckoning me to try and save his twin brother. Twins are sacred in Native American lore, and warrior sons always try and obey warrior fathers. He’s lost another since then, and now I feel beckoned to share it again. What works He may do with this, He will do.

I attended the funeral of a Super Mormon recently. What compelled me to share this additional and singular experience now, as an additional prologue to the original short story, was the proof laid bare for all to see, that Super Mormons, are not all they’re cracked up to be, and the horror that’s revealed when the very best intentions of theology are warped by the machinations of a severe narcissist with a God complex. No matter what the religion, no matter what the message is that the missionary in attendance is trying to relay, if the message is delivered with ugliness and vitriol, it is rarely well received. What’s a Super Mormon, you might ask? A Super Mormon is a person who follows all of the requirements of living a clean and chaste life, according to the Mormon Church and their various doctrines. They attend church every single day, obey the Word of Wisdom, do their missionary splits, temple ceremonies, rites, rituals, etc. They’re the types of people who consistently work to live their lives according to a rigorous lifestyle and devote themselves entirely to the gospel as Mormons preach it. This Super Mormon couple religiously paid their 10% tithing, were sealed in the Temple as a married couple, raised their children as devout Mormons, and devoted their entire lives to a gospel they claim is the most correct Book on earth. From the outside, they were the idealistic, recruiting-poster Mormons that any of their contemporaries would admire and respect for their tireless devotion, while on the inside, her penchant for spewing ugliness and hatred toward all around her overshadowed any good or virtuous acts she may have claimed to perform, as evidenced by the complete lack of attendees, other than family, at her funeral. For the purposes of this story, Karen, was married in the Temple to a man of impeccable character who epitomized kindness, humility, virtue, and all things wonderful about a modest, Mormon man. They had three girls and three boys, scads of grandchildren, and a number of great grandchildren. Both she and her husband served a mission overseas as a married couple, and then finally retired to a town in Utah, to live out the rest of their days, and much-deserved retirement. Her husband, Tom, worked for years at a local sawmill in Salt Lake in their younger years, developing a reputation for honesty, integrity, and hard work. He was a skilled craftsman who could also build anything he wanted out of wood. Tom gave generously to all and was the kindest of men I’ve ever met. His diminutive frame belied his gargantuan and unfettered belief in his morals and upbringing, which made him a powerhouse of respect among all of his contemporaries in any Ward in which he appeared, and also an absolute victim of a tyrant whose reign of terror apparently lasted for over sixty years. Back when Tom and Karen were married, marriages lasted forever. Moreover, in the Mormon church, especially for Super Mormons, divorce was never an option. When Tom put that ring on her finger, he unwittingly subjected himself to a lifetime of nagging, bitching, and a tempo of consistent ugliness that he could have never foreseen. However, because he was raised the way he was, escaping the monster he’d married was an impossibility for Tom. Like it or not, he’d bought the package, and now, he was stuck with her. For the next sixty plus years, she would systematically and consistently push all those away who would have naturally loved her, including her own brothers and sisters, and children. What was always a running joke in the family, the notion that nobody could stand to be around Karen for more than ten minutes, because that’s how long it would take for Karen to jump on her high horse and begin lecturing all in attendance about how hell and eternal damnation were awaiting them if they didn’t live their lives as perfectly as she, the Super Mormon had. All of her bluster and self-righteousness were starkly juxtaposed against the reality of the complete lack of individuals who cared enough about Karen after she passed, or her virtue, to even attend her funeral. In other words, whatever pious, lasting impression she’d hope to convey to however many hundreds of thousands of people she must have met in her life while she was preaching fire and brimstone to them, was clearly not delivered with love, kindness, or in any manner that would cause someone to attend the funeral of a friend who’d introduced them to the saving grace of any gospel. I found this reality to be quite staggering. Of a life devoted to purportedly spreading the gospel and trying to live a life like Christ lived, only reluctant family members attended, with not a wet-eye in attendance that I could see. How incredibly sad, on the one hand, that a missionary’s best intentions could be trammeled by a clear failure to reach anybody willing to travel to pay their last respects at their passing. On the other hand, if someone was such a tyrant that she made anybody and everybody who met her recoil at the thought of meeting her again, the man she was married to, should be sainted. It is a guarantee, and without question, that Tom’s funeral will be attended my many, because he’s a man who’s built a reputation for being a man of kindness, integrity, and unabashed devotion to a gospel he believes in wholeheartedly. What was never said, and never really needed to be, was that all admired him for being able to stomach the woman he’d chosen to marry so many years ago, and absolutely pitied the fact he was forced to stay with her. They were clearly, two different types of people, and it showed in their reputations among their friends and family members. Not a person could be found who would say a bad word about Tom, and not a person could be found who would say a good word, about Karen. They were simply that one couple everybody knows that were polar opposites in their personalities, didn’t display any overt or subtle warmth or affection toward each other, and appeared to stay married out of devotion to something bigger than themselves. If you’re thinking that maybe Karen simply came from bad stock, you’d be wrong. She had wonderful brothers and sisters who were nothing like her, also Mormons who lived according to their church standards, but were loved and liked by all they knew. She was brought up in a middle-class family in southern Utah and enjoyed a normal childhood. From the outside, there was nothing visceral that would have caused such a callous and heartless person to emerge from the cocoon of an otherwise seemingly loving and warm theology. On the inside, Karen wrestled with demons and beliefs that caused her to be thoroughly loathed by anybody who spent more than five minutes in her presence. She had one friend growing up and to my knowledge, made no others throughout the rest of her days, at least none close enough to show at her funeral. She was a woman who literally had contact with the outside world only because her husband was approachable, and they belonged to a Church. Had Tom gone first, I have no doubt that Karen would have spent the rest of her days alone, without a friend or family member willing to take her call, much less allow her to be around them for more than a day or two at a time. That’s all anybody could stand while she was alive. Within that time frame, family or not, Karen would start cleaning their house because it wasn’t clean enough, dictating how the children should or shouldn’t dress, what should or shouldn’t be said and how it was Godly or not, and generally making a nuisance of herself. I can only imagine the number of times she received a tongue-lashing from someone, and poor Tom had to quickly usher her away or try and end the conversation quickly. Reality, doesn’t lie. At the end of the day, people attend the funerals of others who’ve made an impact on their lives significant enough for them to stop what they’re doing, and attend their funeral to wish them well on their journey. Karen, had almost none. Two friends showed, couples, and the only thing either of them discussed during their remarks at the funeral, was the kindness of Tom, and things they had done together as a couple. No stories about how Karen had selflessly done this or that, or was so kind and loving that she was renowned for it. By all accounts, she’d lived a life of nearly complete devotion to a gospel promising to bring all believers to peace, eternal life, and eternal happiness, and left this world without one person who will be eager to greet her in the next. 

BATTLING DAD FOR MY FATHER'S SOUL

I'll never forget standing at the foot of my Dad's grave, watching them lower his coffin into the permanent, shallow abyss. Wearing a white shirt and tie with a black formal vest, black dress slacks and black dress shoes, I must have appeared to be a strange sight extending what I thought was a perfect military salute. At that moment, it didn't dawn on me that I had helped save his soul, but I wore the pride of doing so covertly, and shamelessly. For the moment, all I cared about was saluting a fellow soldier, my instructor and superior officer, as we laid him to rest, hoping he'd approve of the gesture, man to man, soldier to soldier, not Dad to son. The most difficult sight my eyes have ever absorbed, was watching my Uncle sob convulsively at the loss of his lifelong partner—of everybody there, I felt for him more than even myself.  There are a million battles we all fight before we reach adulthood and contemplate, decide, and try to live according to what we view as our principals. It starts at conception and, if you're reading this, you were the fastest swimmer out of a ton of rivals. The battle for basic cognitive abilities begins and, before we know it, we're formulating our first words. We battle to crawl, battle to walk, battle to keep our bodily functions in check (as well as our emotions), and then the really difficult battles begin. This is actually a story of a Dad and his son, some of their agreements, many of their disagreements, and victory. It encompasses a brutal upbringing for the Dad, a tempered, yet similar one for the son, and a fight they both waged ferociously for the soul of a Father. A son should never relish the day he should find himself the victor over his Dad, but you can be damn sure I relished mine.

Once we start kindergarten, we're taken from (ripped rather,) a world of relative ease and gaiety and thrust into a reality in which expectations are thrust upon us during interactions with other, young children, the reasons for which, we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out. As hedonistic as young children are, they literally have to learn why taking Johnny's toy away is a no no, even though he wasn't strong enough to stop it from leaving. These begin some of the first, physical battles, we all learn to face. In my father's case, most of the above never really happened—at least not the good stuff. Those battles, the ones that seem relatively trivial in comparison to what we, as adults, face today, usually involved coaching, mentoring, and a loving shoulder to cry on while learning the lessons presented to us. In my Dad's case (and that of his twin brother) their lives started shortly before one of them, the actual one was never certain, but we'll use Dad for the purposes of this description, was tossed out the doorway of a lonely, desolate, and desperately decrepit cabin, at the age of seven months, in another bitter winter of 1947 on the Ft. Peck Indian Reservation (a.k.a. The Rez) in northeastern Montana. The landscape was sparse, barely inhabited, and the icy wind punished the frozen landscape. No stranger to conflict, drunkenness, or lewd and lascivious behavior, I'm told my Grandma had a temper nearly as fearsome as the love she had for her Chuckbaw's (Native Sioux for Twins). In the course of tossing one of the measly representations of luggage she owned into the snowy night to escape, yet another, abusive and similarly intoxicated live-in boyfriend, she mistook my father's hand-me-down and ragged child seat for her garment bag, thereby pitching him face-first into the forgiving embrace of a snowy bank, poised like a catcher's mitt waiting for a fastball, just outside the door. Fortunately, his immediate screaming reaction permeated her alcohol-induced fog and her mother's instinct kicked in and she rescued him from his would-be chilly crib—she died from cirrhosis when he was five or six years old.

Grandma had a sister, Dad called her Aunt Jenny. He spoke of her fondly, but not often, not that I cared to ask. Memories of relatives I knew I would never meet, stories I knew I would never hear about them as they were lost to history, and my ignorance of believing stuff like that just wasn't important, will probably haunt me the rest of my days. Aunt Jenny had a common-law husband, I'm told he was twenty or thirty years her senior, named Frank Sherry. Everybody that knew him called him, Blackie, and the smart people avoided him like the plague. Dad spoke often of him, called him Uncle Blackie, although the man didn't have any more Indian blood than he spilled at the local Reservation bars and certainly wasn't any relation to Dad other than through his common-law wife, Aunt Jenny.

Even the cops avoided him, and they weren't to be trifled with. For anybody that grew up on the Reservation, violence, drugs, an endless litany of historically grotesque and egregious events were commonplace, and that's what the Reservation cops dealt with every single day and night. Whenever an Indian cop would transfer to a precinct off the Reservation, to a nice, civilized, white police force, the inevitable excessive force complaints would immediately start flowing in. Generally speaking, Indian cops were just Indians like everybody else and, if they managed to reach the age of eighteen without a serious felony conviction, they were all but eligible for police work. The training was pretty anorexic and, for the most part, cops didn't even have to really attend law enforcement academies back in those days, as long as they were going to serve on the Rez. Growing up with unspeakable acts of violence, working under those exact same conditions and, usually, with the same people they'd already watched their whole lives try and destroy each other, why wouldn't they think returning the same was normal? A wise tongue is always a precursor to a knife being pulled or a punch thrown so, when your averaged, civilized-while-drunk white person lipped off to the seemingly docile, new Indian cop on the white man's force, he received the same treatment any Indian would have and spent the next two or three days in the hospital contemplating it while, in most instances, the Indian cop would be relegated to returning to the Rez a conquering hero, able to now add an impressive stint of working with an outside police force to his resume, however short that tenure may have been. Well, he could have if resumes were really required back in those days.

In any event, everyone was terrified of Uncle Blackie, the cops were no exception, and they were the very ones that finally came after three terrified and panicked calls by the neighbor of Aunt Jenny, Wilma Black Crow, screaming that Blackie was having at Jenny again while bidding the operator to listen as she pointed the phone in the direction of the yelling and screaming that could be faintly heard, some four hundred yards away at Blackie's place. As usual, Aunt Jenny would lose the battle, depart for a few days, sometimes taking the twins, sometimes not, only to return a week or two later once Blackie had taken the time to go and collect her from some relative's house. You've heard the story before. I won't bore you with the details but will only add that they lived a tumultuous life, one of the players had darker skin than the other, and the lives of two, little twins, were indelibly etched with the memory of a pseudo-paternal, impetuous, abrupt, sometimes loving, and universally labeled madman.

They say that Blackie came from Chicago during the bad years. Oddly enough (it will make sense later), he'd been shot six times throughout his life, Dad never said how or why, and he never talked about his past. Nobody really knew where he lived in Chicago, what he did for a living, but they knew he always walked around in old Cockner boots, spoke with a low, rumbling, staccato tone that purred like an exhaust leak through every, single syllable. He was about seventy years old in 1954 and still just as feared as the day after he arrived on the Rez back in 1936. I do recall they said that he had spent over half of his life in the Federal prison system but, on the Rez, that didn't necessarily distinguish him from many others. Point of fact, Dad and Uncle Chug (Dad's twin brother and, no, I'm not sure how he got that particular nickname) had six, blood related uncles, all of which, had done serious time and, most of which, also claimed a lifetime incarcerated percentage equal to or exceeding Blackie's. Luckily, they didn't live with those uncles but I would be lying if I didn't admit that Dad spoke of them in a respectful, yet guarded tone. Like Blackie, they were renowned for their violent tendencies and drinking prowess, but not even they relished the thought of mixing it up with Blackie.

Dad's last surviving Uncle, Boke, died back in the late eighties. I was