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Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 1 of 1
 
Charlie Colombe Keynote AddressNational Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995Transcription
Transcribed by Ross Fuqua, March 31, April 3-4, 2006. Edited by Ross Fuqua, April 4, 2006.
Hal Cannon
: I’m going to turn the microphone over to a gentleman that I’ve grown tolove and respect very much. He is a lone wolf. He came to the Cowboy PoetryGathering to recite poetry about five or six years ago, and he was the first voice of theIndian Cowboy at the Gathering, and I think that took a lot of guts and I think that took alot of love. And this is a man who is full of guts and love; and I think he was really theinspiration for going out and doing this research and starting on our quest to understandNative American ranching and to celebrate Native American ranching. This is a man thatwill introduce our keynote speaker. I’d like to introduce to you Henry Real Bird.[audience applauds]
Henry Real Bird
: I’m honored to stand here today. Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was just like waiting to ride at the Calvary Stampede or the Cheyenne Frontier Days. Haveyou ever wondered of the blood lines of the great chiefs like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse,Red Cloud, and Gall? When I was young, I saw this bronc rider at the Crow Fair and AllIndian Rodeo up in Montana. This bronc rider had the hair fly from a Montana bronc,and when he returned to the bucking chutes, my brother Richard took me over andpointed at this bronc rider’s spur rolls that had hair on there, and said, “When you havehair on your spur rolls, you are a rider of wild horses.” That bronc rider that day is thisyear’s keynote speaker for the 1995 Cowboy Poetry Gathering here in Elko, Nevada. Ipresent to you Mister Charlie Colombe of the Teton Sioux – Teton Band of the Siouxfrom the Rosebud Indian Reservation, a bronc rider, cowboy and a rancher.[audience applauds]
Charlie Colombe
: It’s awful hard to live up to the things they say about you sometimes.I guess it’s harder to live them down at other times. I’m greatly honored and I – to behere, and I had no idea this was this large a deal. I honestly didn’t. I, I told Meg Glaserwhen she contacted me that I was really busy, and I said, she said, “Well, we’ll pay you.”And I said, “I don’t need the money.” But anyway, looking out through here, maybe Ionly have to worry about one thing, and that’s I believe what us Indians generally worryabout. We want to make sure that what we do and say, when it goes back to the peoplewe live with, that it’s said about us that we might be a credit to our people. And with that,I’m just going to visit with you a little about Indian cowboys, and we have a tradition inSioux country, we try not to talk a lot about ourselves. There, there’s just part of culture
 
Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 2 of 2
 that best leaves said those things by other people. We also have another thing that wedeal with many times, and it translates into, “The bird that flies gets shot.” And thatmeans if you rise very high, look out.[audience laughs]I think that will tell you more about me than you need to know.[audience laughs]I grew up on a reservation in South Dakota, and that’s back when they said thenickel was big as a wagon wheel, but we didn’t have either, so I couldn’t measure that.But we did have horses, and we had a strong tradition, and I knew about my great-grandfather and his involvement with horses, and wealth was measured by how manyhorses you had, and what kind of person you were was measured by how much you couldgive away. Now that sounds a little strange.In coming into this century, Indian cowboys have, have been measured manytimes by that. We’re basically caught in a time when business and good business saysyou save everything you can. And yet we’re pulled back by our people, and they say,“Give it away.” That’s how you become the, the right kind of person. So it’s been astruggle for us. And I may be talking too serious about some things, but I think knowingthat about me is important, and another thing I want to clarify: because this is, as I see it,an honoring for we Indians, and it’s certainly a great honor that you would pick ourtheme. But you’ve all had an accountant write on the bottom of his report, maybe on hiscompilation, that this represents the views of what he saw, or you’ll a – it’s kind of adisclaimer. I don’t what you to leave here today thinking that I’m speaking for allIndians, because I’m not. I’ll just tell you a little about my experience with my friendsand neighbors, and there’s many, many tribes of Indians, and a lot of us have a different,we have different languages, we have different backgrounds, we have differentinvolvements and experiences.But in Sioux country, it’s always been real simple. You can be an Indian cowboy,and that’s greater than being a jet pilot or going to West Point, so it’s easy for me tospeak about those people.As I was saying, when I was a youngster, it was just automatic that I was going tobe a cowboy. My grandfather raised many horses, my grandmother’s brother was killedon a, a saddle bronc at an Indian rodeo – or a rodeo – on the reservation, and I alwaysheard of that. And there was a, that was a single most important thing to me growing up.And we Indians that grew up like that, we were the lucky ones. We didn’t have to worryabout anything else. We didn’t have to worry about getting rich, we didn’t have to worryabout owning any big ranches, we didn’t have to worry about going to school much. Aslong as you learned how to ride them broncs, you were somebody. And I think theIndians and the cowboys they, they joined hands many years ago, and the true westernpeople, you know, we crossed the lines many times between Indian and Cowboy. Lately,we see a lot of the Indian motif clothing that people are wearing wherever we go. We seea lot of the movies that are made, and some of them now are even – you know, thewheels go the ride way on the stage coaches and the –
 
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 [audience laughs]-- and they’re, they’re portraying some Indians, strangely enough, as we told them wewere.But getting back to Indians, horses, cowboys, we, I guess the only cows we knewabout were buffalo cows and we, we dealt with those, and, and we treated them withgreat respect, but from the – and this is in our part of the country which was, you know,traditionally a buffalo society, if you will. And of course, again, different Indians livedifferent ways. I, I think Indian folks on the west coast probably had a different staple.But anyway, growing up as I did, and watching my friends and relatives trade horses andoccasionally get the best of each other and talk about the, the broncs they rode, andsometimes we even talked about the ones we were going to – but we usually had a few of the spirits in us, when that was, when that was happening. But that’s not so muchdifferent than all cowboys.I think something that’s important for me for you to know is the values that welive by in our, our part of Indian country, and maybe the most important one there is, iscourage. And it takes a lot of courage at times to pick yourself up off the ground andwalk back to the, the chutes amongst your friends – and sometimes you can barely walk,you know, but it’s important to get up and do that. Anyway, it, it replaced for us some of those things that we gave up when we gave up this great land. And we’re – but the factthat it was for us, a test of courage made it a great thing for us. We didn’t have to go outand drive cars fast or we didn’t have to make a lot of money, we didn’t have to get As inschool. In fact, we didn’t look at those things as being very important. Those werethings for our, we call them, white counterpart, or really they might just be our neighbordown the road who would not share the same ideas as us, but still be a cowboy and afriend and all those things, they were our white neighbors. And we, we still have a lot of that that’s in us, those values. Those, I hope, we never give up.And it brought other things out in us. And I’ve always kind of envied – for yearsI did, I guess I’m fifty-seven years old now – and probably until I was fifty I envied thenon-Indian at times. And one of the things I envied him about was he could go to churchfor an hour on Sunday and the rest of the time he got to do what he wanted to do.[audience laughs]And I thought, “That lucky rascal. Why did God give us a church, you know, that wasthe whole outdoors? We can’t get away from it.” And you, you never heard anybody tella lie in church, and nobody ever really does a real shaky business deal in church, but herewe are – we’re stuck with this great outdoors that we think is our church. Son of a gun –seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day – it just is crushing down on you. You can’tgo over here for an hour and kind of get rid of it, you got to just live it all the time.So anyway, I, I stayed true to my, my values, and lo and behold, I’ve been solucky, just so terribly lucky. I’ve, sometimes I say I’ve got all the friends I can afford.[audience laughs]
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