'There's going to be change': Native activists count coup on enemies in the community

Tuesday, July 9, 2019  

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – As SUVs and cars sped by and water from the Missouri River rushed below him, Michael O’Connor stood on a bridge and called on those gathered to take courage.

After a Lakota prayer song, the 48-year-old Yankton Dakota man repeated the words of recently departed Winnebago elder and activist Frank LaMere.

“Be bold,” O’Connor said.

Then the nine Natives and their loved ones began a brief walk down the bridge and into the city.

Once there, they would stop five times, praying each time. Along the way, they would attempt to educate those they encountered and to revive an ancient practice that Great Plains warriors once used to demonstrate their bravery and prowess.

By “counting coup” on a downtown bar in Sioux City, they hoped to raise awareness about the institutional racism that they say has facilitated the addictions and poverty experienced by their people.

Their first stop was an Iowa Department of Corrections facility near downtown Sioux City.

As inmates sat smoking and watching, O’Connor dropped his backpack on the ground and began searching it. He pulled out a conch shell and sage, put the sage in the shell and lit it on fire.

“I’m going to offer up some prayers to these brothers,” he said, loud enough for the inmates to hear.

“Thank you!” several yelled at him.

He then took his drum and began pounding it as he sang a prayer song.

As he finished, Maureen Hansen, residential manager for the facility, introduced herself to O’Connor.

“We know that a lot of our relatives here are suffering from the addiction of alcoholism,” he told Hansen. “We’re here to pray for these people, but we’ll also pray for people like you that serve our people.”

As Hansen listened, O’Connor began speaking louder and directing his comments to the men of the correctional facility, some of whom appeared to be watching from their windows.

He began criticizing corrections officials for treating Native people the same as non-Native people, and failing to try to better understand the perspectives and culture of their Native clients.

“A lot of the organizations serve our people, but they don’t’ know who we are,” he said. “From this day on, that ends.”

Hansen then tried to speak, asking if she could have a conversation with O’Connor.

But O’Connor kept talking.

He said too many social workers who serve Native people lack cultural competency training and are unwilling to receive such training.

As he continued talking, Hansen tried to get him to stop talking so she could talk.

“Would you allow me to finish?” O’Connor asked.

“No, no, you’re just preaching right now, and I want to have a conversation,” she responded.

But O’Connor continued speaking loudly, criticizing Hansen for trying to interrupt him.

“We deserve to be heard because it’s our relatives in these buildings,” he said. “We deserve to be heard without being interrupted.”

Hansen then told him that she and some of her staff had attended a sweat lodge in order to learn more about Native culture.

“We want to know more about your heritage and your culture,” she said. “We want to end this cycle of in and out of the facility and addiction. It’s horrific, and it’s sad.”

O’Connor then thanked her for being willing to learn more about Native culture and offered to host a cultural competency workshop for her staff members.

After they finished talking, O’Connor and the group walked about two blocks to the Brass Rail, a downtown bar that he says serves visibly intoxicated Native people.

After burning sage and singing a prayer song, O’Connor talked about the practice of “counting coup.” He said Native people didn’t like to kill their enemies, preferring instead to strike them with a stick as a show of bravery.

“To be counted coup on is shameful,” he said. “That means you let an enemy relative come up on you and strike you.”

O’Connor said by counting coup on the Brass Rail, he would be identifying it as an enemy to his people.

He said there are establishments like the Brass Rail in nearly every community with a significant population of Native people, bars that are willing to serve Native people no matter how drunk they are.

With the Sioux City Police Department’s headquarters right across the street, city leaders are clearly sending a message that they don’t care about enforcing the law when it comes to protecting Native people, O’Connor said.

“The law turns the other way and allows our people to victimized, by not only their own alcoholism, by a system that says you can drink here as long as you can come in and you can stand on one foot and you’re able to order a drink,” he said.

“Hell, I was drinking in here when I was 15 years old. Today, that stops.”

He then grabbed his coup stick, a carved stick decorated with an eagle feather and a medicine hoop made of porcupine quills and emblazoned with a quote by Frank LaMere: “Nothing will change until people are made to feel uncomfortable.”

O’Connor walked slowly up to the glass front door of the Brass Rail and tapped it with his stick. He then turned around, hoisted the stick into the air and war whooped four times as two other Native men began singing a prayer song.

Afterward, the group walked across the street to the police department, where they again burned sage, sang and spoke. As they did so, a police officer in a cruiser drove by, briefly turned on his sirens and then turned them off again just down the street.

“Is anybody surprised by that?” O’Connor asked. “It would have been a surprise if he would have pulled up, got out and shook our hands and said, ‘Tell me more. I want to know more how we can better serve you and your children because your children go to the same school as my children. They come to my house and play.’”

The group then walked across the street to City Hall, where they again burned sage, sang and spoke before walking across the street and down the block to the federal building.

As they sang a prayer song on the steps of the federal building, an employee walked out of the building, took a look at the nine people gathered there and began trying to walk through the group. As he did so, O’Connor tried to direct him to walk around the group, but the man pushed his way through instead.

After their song ended, O’Connor addressed the federal employee’s behavior.

“I asked him if he could go around nicely,” he said. “He got mad by me talking to him. He got mad because we were here. We were practicing our rights. He got mad at us First Nations people just by the sight of us.”

“So there’s going to be change.”