Scalped #1

"Indian Country" (Part 1 of 3)
written by Jason Aaron
art by R. M. Guéra

He's not a large man, but he's been causing a lot of trouble for the local tribal thugs who strut around the Reservation like cocks in a barnyard.  Eventually, he's sufficiently outnumbered to be restrained, beaten, and brought before the tribal chief and crime boss Red Crow:  President of the Oglala Tribal Council, Sheriff of the Tribal Police Force, Chairman of the Prairie Rose Planning Committee, Treasurer of the Highway Safety Program, Managing Director of the new casino.  To the FBI agents attempting to make a case against him, the list looks a little different:  most powerful crime figure in three counties, who "traffics in methamphetamine, illegal arms and prostitution, runs his own private army of murderous thugs, and generally rules over this reservation like a medieval warlord" (Scalped #1: 22).

In one of the most chilling sequences in the medium, Red Crow interviews this prodigal son handcuffed to his office chair, encircled by two pacing pit bulls, with a freshly scalped corpse on the floor just next to him, and the knife responsible dug into the desk still dripping with blood.  Lincoln Red Crow might just kill him with so little fanfare he might not remember next Tuesday, but instead he offers him a job.  And so one of the most enviably named protagonists in literary history arrives back home after fifteen years to a badge in the Tribal Police Force:  Dashiell Bad Horse.

Inspired by the 1975 conflict that led to the shooting of two FBI agents on Reservation land, Aaron re-constructs a fictional history that capitalizes on the real animosity, willful misunderstanding and cultural hostility that seethed between American Indians and federal agencies in those decades.  But he's more interested in the current fallout of those mutual failures:  corrupt politicians and law enforcement, drug trafficking, epidemic drug and alcohol abuse, rampant poverty, and cultural activists increasingly willing to employ terrorism.  Aaron's political and cultural criticism is scathing but refreshingly unsimplified, and his implications go far beyond the borders of his fictional reservation.

"Do you know who we are?"
"Buncha football mascots?  I don't give a fuck."  (2)

But if the unjust treatment of American Indians by the federal government, the exploitation of stereotypes in American pop culture, and the persistent racism exhibited by people on and off the Reservation would perhaps earn some sympathy for the tribal residents, their unchecked hostility, willingness to exploit both what little federal aid they receive and each other for individual gain, and the complete ineptitude of local organizations and institutions negate that good will.

[March 2007]