Peter Matthiessen and I, Part One

Peter Matthiessen died on April 5, 2014 exactly seventeen years to the day after Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. Both men played significant roles in my life, one more closely and intimately than the other, but both equally impacting.

As an avid reader in the 5th or 6th grade I acquired, and read, a copy of Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark (1971). I was enthralled. That initiated a period of serious interest in the oceans, in sea creatures, in sharks. My classmate, Clarence West, and I spent hours drawing sharks and undersea divers and reefs and strange ocean life like the mola mola and the manta ray. And that interest in the ocean expanded into an interest in all wild things. Later came the yen to travel and traveling brought me to Peter Matthiessen's wonderful travel narrative, The Tree Where Man Was Born. I read that and fell in love with the idea of traveling overland through Africa (something that, 40 years later, I realize that I will never do).

Though I'm born and raised in New England, my family had relatives in the west and during many summers we would travel to Minnesota and Montana to visit relatives. Not only that but my mother was a lifetime student of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (formerly known as "Custer's Last Stand") so a sense of western-ness and American Indians and the Great Plains was in my being from early on.

I came of age politically in the early 1980s. Nicaragua and anti-nuclear power were my issues of choice. And then there was In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) and the subsequent libel suits against Matthiessen and Viking Press and the book's suppression. I read the book and became obsessed with the case of Leonard Peltier. That is a saga of injustice that continues to this day and I'm sad thinking about Leonard Peltier in his jail cell in Leavenworth, KS thinking about Peter Matthiessen dying, PM his great advocate and defender, now gone.

I met Allen Ginsberg in the early 80s and we became lovers briefly, and good friends before and after, and stayed that way until he died. We traveled together to the Ruben Dario Poetry Festival in Managua, Nicaragua, 1986 (an experience about which I've compiled/written a book, Nicaragua Beat: Allen Ginsberg and the Sandinista Revolution, that remains unpublished). In October of 1986, Peter Matthiessen, and his lawyer, Martin Garbus, gave a talk at the PEN Club in New York about the libel cases brought against Crazy Horse. Allen Ginsberg and I went together, and I recorded the conversation. I still have the transcript of that event, it's never been published.

In the months preceding that event I attempted to meet with Peter Matthiessen and we exchanged letters. Actually, I sent letters and he replied hastily on post cards. I told him I was a journalist who wanted to write about the Crazy Horse case and Leonard Peltier and that I was a friend of Allen Ginsberg's and that I didn't want much of his time, just an hour or two or three.

In the end, we were never able to arrange a time for the two of us to sit down and talk. We did speak face to face after the PEN Club talk on October 8, 1986, and we did exchange subsequent postal communication, but that was the extent of our contact.

Though I typed up the transcript of the PEN talk, I never placed it anywhere and never wrote the long piece I'd intended to. Still, I'm grateful for having met Peter Matthiessen and corresponded with him, albeit briefly. Everything about him struck me as genuine, compassionate, straight forward, empathetic, generous. I've read many of his books since first devouring Blue Meridian. The Snow Leopard, I can honestly say, helped form my world view and my understanding of psychedelics and eastern spirituality in dramatic and everlasting ways. The Snow Leopard opened up for me the idea that a travel book could also be a deeply personal narrative, a journey inward as well as outward, a confession, a marauding questioning of reality, a pure-spirited observation of Now.

So when a close friend emailed me and told me that Peter Matthiessen had died, memories of my brief interaction with him came to mind, and I dug into my archives in search of documents or correspondence related to my attempt to write about him. Below are two postcards from him, replies to letters I sent asking about Leonard Peltier and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and wondering if or when we could meet. To his credit, he treated me with respect and cordiality and replied personally to my missives despite being exceedingly busy with more important matters than my youthful self.

First postcard from Peter Matthiessen to me, 23 May, 1986

Text of May 23, 1986 card

Text transcribed:

Dear Patrick Warner

Thank you for your
kind letter. I'm afraid
I'm too far behind
schedule to answer these
questions properly in a
letter, but perhaps we
could meet in the fall.
I'll be teaching at Yale,
but still be in NYC
once in a while
         Sincerely
         Peter Matthiessen

Second Postcard from Peter Matthiessen,
September 26, 1986

Text of card from Peter Matthiessen, Sept 26, 1986

Text Transcribed:

Dear Patrick - I'm afraid I
arrive at Yale Tues noon and
depart Wed afternoon, with 2
long seminars, ..?.. papers, +
student interviews - I have
very little time, as you suspected.
Might be better to arrange a date
in Dec in NYC, sorry - Best
Peter M

Pine Ridge Reservation, Part II

A carefully hand-lettered red wooden sign marks the Wounded Knee Massacre site at the confluence of Highway 28 and Big Foot Trail (Highway 27). It fronts a dusty parking area while its backside faces a row of ramshackle makeshift shelters under which jewelry vendors proffer their wares to the handful of visitors who pass through. The day we stopped there were only two vendors out, one of whom was being harangued by a pair of Christian missionaries.

Lakota Vendors

When the missionaries left, we ambled over and spoke with the woman, a grandmother selling the wares of her son, Hehaka Tiospaye. Yes, the missionaries were annoying, and yes they were insulting. She looked off across the empty parking lot and sighed. She was friendly to us, told us that we should visit the small cemetery and memorial across the street, that we could walk along the creek a few hundred yards down the road, that we were welcome by the Lakota people.

The massacre commemorated by the sign occurred in 1890 and marked the end of the American cavalry's war on the native peoples. Ostensibly a mission to "disarm" the "Indians," when the operation was over some 150-300 men, women, and children lay murdered in the frozen wastes. It was the last of a long list of atrocities visited upon the Plains Indians by the United States government, the conclusion of a decades-long campaign of what we now call ethnic cleansing.

Though designated a National Historic Site, the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial site seems, like the reservation surrounding it, impoverished, ignored, forgotten by the outside. Ignored except by the Christian missionaries, that is.

Commemorative Marker

We took the Lakota woman's advice and visited the memorial and cemetery. On a small hilltop, a stone plinth inside a small chain link fence reads: "This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in memory of the Chief Bigfoot Massacre Dec. 29. 1890". As if to perpetually shame the cavalry officer responsible the plinth also notes "Col. Forsyth in Command of U.S. Troops."

More recent graves surrounded the plinth itself and reminded visitors that history is not static, that Lakota men and women continue to live and die here, that, though a way of life was exterminated, the people were not, despite the inglorious efforts of the U.S. government.

Just below the cemetery sits a round building with a sign declaring Indian Holocaust Museum. Inside, homemade displays documented a more recent history at Wounded Knee, the siege and assault by the FBI in the 1973 (sometimes referred to as the "Wounded Knee Incident") and the resistance of AIM, the American Indian Movement.

Museum Building center right

The small museum was staffed by what appeared to be teenage Lakota girls. After going through the displays and noticing no mention of Leonard Peltier, I asked one of the girls why that was so. Leonard Peltier, of course, was an AIM leader who was implicated in and, by most accounts, wrongly convicted of, the murder of two FBI agents, and who is now serving life in the Federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, KS. (For an excellent account of the Peltier/Wounded Knee Incident, see Peter Matthiessen's "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse"). The girl had never heard of Leonard Peltier. I still wonder about that, how it could be possible that in a museum dedicated to the memory of AIM and the events of 1973, there could be no reference to Leonard Peltier.

At the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee you can sign an Amnesty International petition for his release and also see exactly how long Peltier has been incarcerated (at this writing he's been in prison for 13,720 days 8 hours 22 minutes and counting).

Leonard Peltier

You can write to Leonard at:

Leonard Peltier

#89637-132

USP Coleman I

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521