Rosebud
Week of November 19, 1973
Michael
The first thing I think Jo will need to do for her objective of interviewing some veterans of the Wounded Knee Occupation is hit the books on what happened. Part of that will be consuming the media reports from back in the spring, back when Jocasta was just a new member of URIEL and had bigger, more immediate events to deal with. But the other part will be going through federal records. Obviously, the agents for the Wounded Knee operation worked out of offices in the Plains states, but the San Francisco field office keeps copies of a lot of Indian activist files because of events like the Occupation of Alcatraz back from '69 to '71.
(Leonard, I'm going to assume that Jo got a success on her Contact roll here; given enough days she'll eventually succeed. Of course, with her new SANDMAN credentials and Security Rank and her existing Military Rank she doesn't really even Padden and Hall to walk into the FBI Field Office in San Francisco anymore.)
(But, still, Padden and Hall will be a couple of good guys to bounce ideas off of after this Research roll is done.)
So! Given you've spent your character points, I'll do this and subsequent scenes off of your Mission 9 character sheet. So that means this Research roll will be Research-15.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 1
(Jo gettin' lazy now that Sophie is back)
Michael
Much like the Alcatraz Occupation, Wounded Knee was a huge public black eye for the Bureau and the U.S. Marshals who were involved in the siege. They may have eventually been victorious in quelling the uprising, but the headlines, editorial pages, and world of celebrity screamed bloody murder from February to May of this year, and not just the pinko rags. The Bureau has a file on the shenanigans at the Oscars back in March and San Francisco local Sacheen Littlefeather (a.k.a. Maria Louise Cruz). In the aftermath of the breaking of the siege, most of the occupying Indian forces were booked, jailed briefly, and then released to avoid a public outcry.
Now, six months after the siege was broken, the Bureau is continuing to put the screws to Indian activists and the American Indian Movement (AIM). The situation on the ground at Pine Ridge is pretty grim in November of '73, with Oglala Lakota tribal chairman Dick Wilson going right back to the strongarm tactics that caused the AIM uprising. The FBI is keeping a hands-off policy on Pine Ridge itself after the occupation, letting Wilson handle "his people," but the Bureau is going full-bore trying to find friendly snitches involved with AIM off the reservation, specifically from among the folks who travel the country supporting AIM, keeping activists supplied with information, materiel, and presumably (according to the Bureau) weapons. The identities of the agents trying to worm their way into AIM are closely-held, but Jo could easily use her SANDMAN connections to get a list of informants and undercovers. In addition, it's clear most identified AIM members found out there in the world, off the reservation, since May have been subject to harassment, violence, and even murder. While few of the AIM activists at Wounded Knee are currently incarcerated, it's clear the reservation has become a unique prison of its own for them.
Mentions of the mysterious "Ghost Dance" are few and far between in the official government record (the agents on the scene are aware of the Ghost Dance in these federal files, it's mentioned dismissively with no intellectual interest in the anthropological, political, historical, or social impact of a returned Ghost Dance) but in some of the AIM-friendly publications out there—leftist counterculture newspapers, Indian newsletters and the like—it's clear that on the Pine Ridge reservation, a full-throated resurrection of Indian spiritual life was as essential to the rebellion as making sure the AIM-allied rez folks were fed and kept safe. AIM forces on the ground used traditional medicine whenever needed, which was often. The spiritual leader of the AIM band was Leonard Crow Dog, a fourth-generation medicine man currently residing with his new bride on the grounds of Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota, quite near Pine Ridge. Dennis Banks and Russell Means, two prominent figures in AIM, recruited him to the movement.
Leonard
Okay. Jo's gonna do as much reading up on the Ghost Dance as she can (and has probably already done so), and then she'll move on to the next phase of this: finding someone as close to the Ghost Dance as she can. She'll take Crow Dog, Banks, or Means, but she'd really prefer someone she can get leverage over, a 'true believer' who's either in the joint or under a lot of pressure. (That might include the three aforementioned.) Once she's identified a likely candidate, she'll see about arranging a meeting. She wants to put the word out that she's officially Army intelligence, but with enough dangling ends that anyone with eyes could figure that's just part of the picture. She wants her contact or contacts to be suspicious of her official story — not so suspicious that they straight-out won't meet with her, but enough that they think the Army intel story is probably a cover.
Michael
(This is where I confess that in the research I did, I expected scores of AIM folks to have been put away and put on trial after Wounded Knee, but the government in our timeline really did just release them due to public opinion but also kept them on the reservation under the watchful eye of agents, white-sellout Indians, and undercovers.
Now one thing that I did read about in the Wounded Knee retrospectives is that quite a few of the activists were Vietnam veterans; in fact, that was one of the reasons they knew strategy and logistics so well. I'm actually just now reading a senior college thesis subtitled "We had become the VC in our own homeland." I'm guessing the Army Intel cover would work pretty well, especially given, you know, Jo is a woman. I hate to put Jo in that position but gender certainly might help her here. But yeah, if you want to go with Army Intel as a cover, it does seem Jo will need to travel to South Dakota to get the face-to-face skinny. Pine Ridge and Rosebud, not penitentiaries, are the federal institutions where the veterans of Wounded Knee and the Ghost Dance are "incarcerated." And if Jo wants the Ghost Dance, Leonard Crow Dog is the most direct route to that.)
(And yes, it makes sense that Jo would have as much knowledge about the original Ghost Dance movement as possible.)
An elaboration of the Ghost Dance concept was the development of ghost shirts, which were special clothing that warriors could wear. They were rumored to repel bullets through spiritual power. It is uncertain where this belief originated. Scholars believe that in 1890 Chief Kicking Bear introduced the concept to his people, the Lakota,[11] while James Mooney argued that the most likely source is the Mormon temple garment (which Mormons believe protect the pious wearer from evil).[12]
Also interesting that the original Ghost Dance was triggered by a vision during a solar eclipse.
Some interesting "parallels" in the table of contents of James Mooney's 1896 The ghost-dance religion and Wounded Knee, reprinted in, ha, 1973
My armchair amateur's opinion of the Ghost Dance was that it started as a "let's all be friends, come on people, smile on your brother" kind of millenarian movement but then the Lakota got hold of it and were like, "uh, nah, we're taking this all the way" (From Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, published in 1972, lol)
Also, this sounds like memetics to me: "different designs which traveled from tribe to tribe"
Anyway, Leonard, take all this as part and parcel of Jo's prolonged research on the Ghost Dance; all of this stuff is widely available in the literature in 1973
Bill
If Jo wants to strategize on an initial approach, Roger might be able to help. He gets the foot in the door, she follows up?
Leonard
Whoa. Sorry if I seemed to be rushing through the Ghost Dance Revival stuff — I'm pretty fascinated by it and have read a lot of the literature - but the Mormon influence is new to me, and so thematically perfect for this game. Also, as an aside, it's fascinating how widespread the rebel-cult connection to some kind of magic ritual that will make its adherents bulletproof is. I had read before about the Ghost Shirts; there's also the prayer ceremonies and 'bullet baptisms' that the Lord's Resistance Army in Africa practices that they believe will make them immune to bullets, the splinter-cult Old Believers of Russia thinking they could do a purification by fire that would make them bulletproof, and the Taoists of the Maoshan school during the Boxer Rebellion who thought inscribing certain prayers on a piece of paper and tying it to their chest would make the bullets of Western guns bounce off (as seen in the Lau Kar-Leung classic Legendary Weapons of China).
Anyway, with all this in mind, yeah, Jocasta will arrange a trip to the Rosebud reservation to pay Mr. Crow Dog a visit. She'll arrange to have her arrival telegraphed, and is willing to use SANDMAN funds to have some 'bendable' sources within the community spread the word that a woman from the white man's Army is coming. Again, she wants him to be skeptical and distrustful, but also curious enough to want to talk to her. That's the next step for me -- let me know if I need to make any rolls.
(EDITED TO ADD: Bill got in before I finished this. Jocasta is 100% on board with working with Roger -- that's been her plan all along. Bill, if you wanna roleplay this out before one or both of us actually travel to the Dakotas, or just talk about Jo's strategy and approach -- which is, to clarify, to find out to what degree the Wounded Knee insurgents actually believed in the Ghost Dance being real and achievable, gaining their trust, and possibly bringing one of them over into SANDMAN as part of a program to integrate spiritual aspects into the mission and its goals -- I'm totally game. We can also just head out there and play it as it lays. But I think generally we'd want to do a good cop-bad cop thing, with Roger being "Hey, I'm your friend, I dig what you're doing, I don't trust the white man either but maybe if you can show me this is legit we can help each other out" and Jo being "I think this is all bullshit and I can use the power of government to crush you, but if you can prove to me that it's not, I can show you a way to make it happen.")
Michael
Leonard, you didn't seem like you were rushing through it at all; this was all me getting excited about finally having the time to do some reading deeper into it! I love the idea of Roger and Jo heading out to South Dakota (around Thanksgiving, around the same time Archie is out in Deseret, lol) and doing some shoe-leather interviews and HUMINT gathering out there.
Bill
That’s a perfect strategy. Roger’s in for the possible spirit discovery, keeping an eye out for shaman candidates, and once she mentions the high level of veterans in the group, just to flat out help in some way.
Both going out at the same time, with good cop, bad cop plays sounds great.
Michael
(If there's any more preliminary strategy Leonard and Bill want to hash out, feel free, but SANDMAN rank et al. will smooth out any access and travel issues. I am fine with the two of you approaching the folks at "Crow Dog's Paradise" (Leonard Crow Dog's little commune/holy site) directly, but if you want to do some preliminary interviews with the local administrators of the reservation, the BIA folks, and so on, just to get a sense of the human terrain, that's fine too.)
Leonard
Yeah, I think we want to talk to at least one intermediary first, however you wanna set that up. Just going straight to him directly I think would put him too much on the defensive. Let him know we're coming.
Assuming that's good with you, Bill, but feel free to tell me otherwise
Bill
Definitely let the local networks relay we’re around; nobody likes surprises. If Roger’s establishing his position as good cop, he’ll also ask around about veteran support, stories about VA issues, etc.
Michael
So I will lay out the vibes and the VIPs on the white man's "administrative" side of the rez but before I do (and to give me time to do a little more research) let's first do a couple of skill rolls for both protective coloring and information-gathering when meeting with the reservation's powers-that-be. Both of you are ostensibly representing the Army (or the VA), plus you've each got Military Rank, so you'll both be rolling Soldier for sure. And given each of your strengths, we're going to have Ms. "Roederer" ponder the Wounded Knee survivors' legal situation and have Roger turn his attention to the street-level anthropology of the reservation: while it's not precisely something he's familiar with, the social intersections of the Man and the criminal element most definitely are.
Jocasta: Please give me a Soldier-17 roll first, then a Law (U.S.)-14 roll.
Roger: Please give me a Soldier-15 roll first, then a Streetwise-15 roll.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 8
>> SUCCESS by 3
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 3
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
Great, these rolls should put you all in the driver's seat with the rez authorities and give you some tips before interacting with the folks at Crow Dog's.
Jo and Roger take the opportunity before meeting with the tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs government figures to take a casual drive through the main drags of the Rosebud reservation. It jibes with what Jo's read already about both Pine Ridge and Rosebud: poverty is endemic, a younger generation at liberty with a lot of free time and quashed revolutionary energy, an older generation dying slowly, and BIA/tribal cops everywhere.
The Rosebud Indian Agency, the main administrative and records office for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on Rosebud land, is a squat, one-story brick modernist structure that sprawls over most of a block right off of US-83 in Mission, South Dakota. All federal support functions for the Rosebud Sioux—welfare, health benefits, Social Security, family and veterans' services, fish and wildlife, legal aid—come through this office. As such, it's where the meeting between these Army/VA investigators from San Francisco and the Rosebud Indian agents and authorities will take place. As Roger drives through Mission, he considers the origin of the name and then sees, as if in answer to those idle musings, a sign for the "Father Eugene Buechel, S.J. Memorial Museum" down at the St. Francis Indian Mission a few miles to the southwest.
During the meeting in a drab, drafty conference room, Jo and Roger are introduced to a bunch of names that flash hurriedly by but the real juice in the room is split between two men: the tribal business affairs supervisor and Acting Superintendent, Elmer Compton and the chief of the BIA cops, Bob Mitchell. Both of them are Rosebud Sioux, but here in the offices of the BIA, they look on their fellow Sioux out at "Crow Dog's Paradise" with unmitigated disdain.
"See, the thing about these kids out there," Mitchell says, "is that they don't trust anyone they don't know after Wounded Knee. They keep the kids out of the tribal hospital and schools—which is their right. They get visitors all the time from other reservations and tribes—and we keep good surveillance on them, don't you worry about that—but you send anyone out there that's not with AIM—social workers with clipboards, old grannies with baskets of food and medicine—and they say thanks but no thanks. So you got your work cut out for you, despite your... protective coloration," Mitchell says, acknowledging the fact that Army intel and the VA have apparently sent a woman and a Black man.
Compton adds, "The most important thing is that if they think you've been sent by us, they'll reject you outright. Now we could summon Crow Dog here, along with his flunkies, say you two are an overture direct from the federal government, from the VA, and that might fly. Crow Dog and a bunch of others did fly to Washington in the middle of the standoff back in April to try to negotiate an end to it, so they're not immune to the idea that certain elements of the federal government might be looking for a way to ratchet down tensions, a show of goodwill. But as Bob says, these kids are troublemakers. As bad as the Weathermen. They're wary of strangers and conscious that even the feds might try to get a foot in the door. We'll help you with any cover story you want to use, but our help might be the last thing you want in this case."
Leonard
Jocasta is playing the Professional Hardcase role to the hilt: taking extensive notes, flattering and questioning Mitchell and Compton as necessary, deferring to Roger for questions of community and public relations, asking strategic questions (how much support the AIM people have in the area, how much of the law enforcement presence is direct response to threats vs. just a show of force, how likely they think there is to be another, similar uprising, etc.). She'll tap the gas on Leadership if necessary.
"That's good judgement, Superintendent Compton," she responds. "As far as our presence here, we want the cover story to be the truth -- or as much of the truth as we can let you boys in on, for the usual reasons. We're here on behalf of Uncle Sam, we're investigating possible AIM infiltration of the armed forces; naturally there's other radical groups in other branches, but this is the job we were handed. I'm on the intel and enforcement end, Sgt. Martin here is on the support and rehabilitation end. He's here for the causes, I'm here for the symptoms, you might say. We'd like to approach Crow Dog on his own terms, and frankly, we want him to be on his guard. We know he'll be suspicious and we're fine with that. As you boys know, the more open someone is with people like us, the more likely it is they're selling junk info or just trying to get in good with whoever's on the upside of power. We want him just curious enough that he'll sit down with us in private, even if he thinks it's a chance to shovel some shit at us."
After a short pause to pass over some jury-rigged paperwork, she asks them a pointed question. "Tell me the truth, fellas. Is there anything to this whole Ghost Dance thing? I'd be curious if you believe it, and if -- and this is strictly in confidence -- you saw anything happen during the siege that you couldn't explain through anything else in your training. But I'm more curious if you think he believes it, and how much, if any, of the other locals and these visitors you mentioned are on board. What do you think? Is it just some story he cooked up to put a coat of paint on this dissident activity, or is there something behind it?"
Michael
Got a couple of options here, Leonard. You can take your chances with a standard Reaction roll, 3d6+3 on the Reaction table (+3 is bonuses from Appearance, Rank, and Status) in the hopes of a better-than-Good result on a 16 or better, OR just use Fast-Talk-18 (I think it wouldn't be too hard for Jo to realize these Indians are not the Ghost/Sun Dance types, so Fast-Talk seems the right Influence skill for talking "superstition" with these grey men) to ensure a Good result, which will result in "Requests for information are successful. The question is answered accurately."
Leonard
Let's go with the latter, Jo has been less risk-averse lately
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
Bingo.
Elmer and Bob share a little chuckle over the Ghost Dance business. "Leonard's got you believing his line of bullshit a little bit too maybe, huh?" Bob says. Elmer is a little more diplomatic, but not much more.
"Miss Roederer, I'm an Indian myself," he says, as if he knows it's not clear to these outsiders from his wardrobe and manner, his aligning himself against the young people in AIM. "I don't hold much myself to the old ways. Which isn't to say I don't think it's a good idea those kids out there are trying to get in touch with their ancestors." Elmer chuckles, looks at Bob. "Ironic, isn't it? Us couple of old farts sitting here passing judgment on the kids out there for getting in touch with tradition. But it is all just a smokescreen for their politics, isn't it? Ghost Dance, needle ordeals, sweat lodges... Leonard has cobbled together all this stuff from what he's read in books. I'm sure he's talked to some of the old folks here and at Pine Ridge but their memories are cloudy... you get a bunch of codgers and grannies saying they remember seeing Sitting Bull when they were only 2 or 3. I admire them, both elders and kids, for what they're seeking, but I also don't let their 'traditions' hoodwink me when they want to raise Cain and start trouble on my reservation."
Elmer continues, "These kids, they don't know what they believe. When Bob and I were young, there was a war to be fought, against the Nazis and the Japanese. We rallied to our country's defense because we knew while the U.S. might have been rotten to us Indians, the Krauts and J-ps weren't likely to be much better." Elmer looks at Roger when he says this. "They didn't grow up comfortable like the white kids out there, but these young men, they still ended up spoiled and selfish when their country called for their service. That's if you ask me."
"But this Indian stuff? It fills that void in them. Sure, it might have been useful for morale at Pine Ridge. But underneath it all is power, Miss Roederer: power and politics. Leonard knows just how to play it with young Indians. Say you're a medicine man, tell everyone about your great-grampa who miraculously escaped both the hangman's noose and the original Wounded Knee because he danced the Ghost Dance, and they concentrate all their faith on you."
(I want to give Bill an opportunity to chime in here if he wants, so I'll wait to deliver any further responses from these two.)
Bill
Roger lets a tiny bit of the anger show on his face. "Service against the Commies may not be as straight clear as was against the Axis, but don't ever doubt it was service. I know what a gang is, Superintendent — and I know first hand what it takes to keep kids from falling into them. One big piece of it is respect. Maybe these men won't listen to a word I say, maybe they're good for nothing, but Goddamn I'll make sure the vets among them get some respect for their service."
Michael
Bob says, "Yeah, there are quite a few veterans among the folks at, ugh, 'Paradise.' Vets Against the War types. Crow Dog isn't, of course, but a lot of the hangers-on and veterans of Pine Ridge are. Honestly it seems to me that Crow Dog got ahold of the good kids, the Christians, the vets, and... turned them while they were all holed up at Pine Ridge. Indoctrination." Bob Mitchell hasn't said much yet, but it's clear he finds Crow Dog's indigenous magic to be far more pernicious than Elmer does. "If you can get these kids back in the system by explaining this... 'gang' situation as you put it, so much the better."
(Leonard and Bill, feel free to follow up here with more questions or let me know when you've had your fill of these guys )
Leonard
Jocasta smiles a tight little smile, trying to make the two BIA men feel heard but making sure that they know she's on Roger's side. So much for good cop-bad cop, she thinks. "Sgt. Martin and I have our job and you have yours," she tells them. "Same boss, different duties. As far as Crow Dog's line of bullshit, Chief Mitchell...well, it doesn't really matter if I believe it. It doesn't even really matter if you believe it. I don't particularly think all the young men in Japan believed that Hirohito was the direct descendent of the god of the sun, and that their deference towards his representatives would accrue blessings on their families. But they believed it enough that, when the time came, an awful lot of them were willing to destroy themselves attacking our boys. Whether or not the Ghost Dance is real for us in this room doesn't matter that much. But is it real for them?" she asks, gesturing out of the room to some of the Indians outside walking past and waiting in lobbies and offices of the BIA building. "That's what I care about." [We can button on that unless Bill or the BIA gents want to follow up.]
Michael
(I have a button if/when Bill chimes in)
Bill
(Hit that button!)
Michael
On the way out of the Agency the two representatives of the Pentagon stop by Compton's desk in the central office for their reservation pass/IDs (to be used if needed with rez cops to supplement their federal IDs) and there's a little Rosebud Sioux Wall of Fame up near the entrance to the central office. Included in the photos/images are Spotted Tail, the chief who made peace with the white man back in the 1870s (and who was shot by Leonard Crow Dog's great-grandfather for his trouble), Representative Ben Riefel, successor to George McGovern in the House and now working a government job in DC for the Nixon administration, and, the photo Elmer considers his "pride and joy," an autographed studio shot of the guy from Truth or Consequences, Bob Barker. "He's a great guy, that Barker. Comes back to the rez all the time, donates to the kids' causes, the Jesuit museum, he's a great animal lover, a hell of a horseman." Elmer smiles widely at this "model Indian" giving him a faint whiff of the glamour of Hollywood here on the rez as he shakes Jo's and Roger's hands and wishes them luck with their "interviews."
The drive from the Agency building to Crow Dog’s Paradise takes about a half-hour on badly-paved or unpaved roads. Roger and Jo drive from Mission, which is really just a one-stoplight town with a few administrative buildings, businesses, and homes, to Rosebud, which has an elementary school, fire department, post office, hospital, the actual tribal offices, court, and a police station, the aforementioned Father Buechel Museum, a couple of mission churches (Catholic, Mormon), a "business district" and lots of homes. Passing through, Jo and Roger are able to get a quick sense of the vibes: struggling but surviving. It honestly looks like any other Great Plains town of a couple thousand people. Out near Crow Dog's Paradise, though, things are definitely rural. The cluster of buildings that form Paradise are a motley mix of trailers, brick outbuildings, and more-or-less permanent tents. Drying clothes and cured hides lie draped over racks in the weak November sun. Tin roofs, old fences of wood and bobwire, some horses, pigs, chickens, and other livestock. Dogs. And kids, loads of kids that are either too young for school or are being kept out of the schools intentionally, given the circumstances. A wide, shallow stream—South Ironwood Creek—lazily winds through Paradise Roger and Jo see a few grown-ups too, mostly women, from the car, who give Roger and Jo a few quite steely looks.
(Feel free to do any IC interaction you two want on the ride over but if there's nothing, I can kick into your reception at the Gates of Paradise)
Leonard
I'd be happy to move on to the main event unless Bill has something.
Bill
Roger is mostly quiet on the long drives. He’s both enjoying the driving, and just giving Jo quiet companionship, no pressure to talk.
Michael
As Roger pulls into the area right in front of the gate to Paradise, two young Native men, "hunting" rifles slung over their shoulders, neither of them by the looks of it Leonard Crow Dog, come to the gate and wait to speak with these two interlopers. They don't say anything; they wait for you two to speak first. (I'm going to offer you two the same set of options I offered back at the Agency, as far as seeing if you can get your feet in the door here. You can take your chances with a straight-up Reaction roll. Here of course your government Ranks and Statuses will work as penalties, and Roger's Social Stigma will work as a bonus to Reaction rolls. There will also be a blanket -2 penalty for the fact that the folks here at Paradise are in a siege mentality. You each can choose either of these options.
REACTION ROLL:
So you can take your individual chances with a 3d6 Reaction roll, which, if you show your IDs would be 3d6-3 for Jocasta (+1 Appearance, -2 Status, -2 their suspiciousness), and 3d6+1 for Roger (-1 Status, +2 Social Stigma, -2 their suspiciousness). Roger could get that up to 3d6+3 if he's able to convey his Sense of Duty (Veterans) in this conversation with the guards. I'll also give bonuses for RP. The threshold for success here is a Good Reaction: 13 or better on the dice. And of course you have the chance to do better than that and get up to Very Good or Excellent. Well, Jo doesn't but that's okay.
INFLUENCE ROLL:
Or you can do an Influence roll: Diplomacy, Fast-Talk, Intimidation, Savoir-Faire, Sex Appeal, or Streetwise, with the same modifiers above (-3 to skill for Jo, +1/+3 for Roger). "The GM may allow other skills to work as Influence skills in certain situations," so feel free to sell me on that. And they get to resist with Will. A success is another Neutral-to-Good Reaction which would at least get you in the door. Jo, if you wanted to do Intimidation, I'd allow your gubmint bonuses to return as bonuses, but of course you don't have that as a skill, it defaults to Will-5. So the math there is 19-5+1+2-2 or Intimidation-15.)
Bill
Roger will take the Streetwise Influence approach. There’s respect to show when you come up to another gang’s territory, and you gotta show strength at the same time. He’ll put a tough look on, and lean out the car window casually— not getting out, not making a hostile move— and say “We got business. We don’t have to be trouble.”
He’ll wait coolly through whatever chest beating comes next.
(Jo is welcome to be the implied trouble we could be.)
Michael
Cool, I'll wait for Leonard to chime in and then have you roll "simultaneously."
(And it will be Streetwise-16 for Roger, ftr)
Leonard
Jo will go with Influence. She'll try Diplomacy, with a small shading of intimidation: "Gentlemen, we're coming in. Our papers are in order, as you can see. We just want to have a word, no more, no less. Nobody wants any trouble. Let us speak to Leonard Crow Dog and we'll be gone by evening and you'll never see us again. Raise hell and we'll be on our way, but the people who come next won't be so nice."
Michael
Okay, great. So let's do Diplomacy-14 for Jocasta (removing her government penalties to reflect the "shading" of Intimidation, bonuses for Appearance and RP canceling out their suspicion penalty) and Streetwise-16 for Roger. Jo can use Corruption but Roger can't. And as said before, these guys will get Will rolls to oppose.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 6
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 11, CRITICAL SUCCESS
Too cool for school.
Michael
One of the two guards dashes back to the main compound and runs into a barn-like structure while the other guard keeps Roger and Jo cool out here in front of the gate. About a minute and a half later, the guy who dashed to the barn comes back double-time. "Park next to the garage," he says, pointing at the barn. "Leonard's inside, we'll escort you in."
When Jo and Roger walk into the barn structure they see it's a mechanic's paradise; any number of unfinished projects are arrayed around the dirt floor of the structure; a van, a pickup, a couple of cars, and a bunch of smaller, non-vehicular metalwork projects; some are pieces of Sioux-inflected metal sculpture, also iron stoves, furnaces, oil barrels being turned into grills, etc. Leonard Crow Dog is working on one of the cars as the two guards walk Jo and Roger into the garage. He slides out from under the car, takes a look at the two Sandmen, and has an evident (but politely stifled) laugh. Jo and Roger can feel the smiles on the other two Lakota behind them. "Hah, okay friends. Let me see those IDs my brothers told me you showed them out front."
"VA and Department of Army, huh? To what do we owe this honor?" As Jo and Roger prepare to answer, they can hear a few Crow Dog Paradise children, probably between 5 and 7 years of age, peeking into the now-open garage.
Bill
“I’m Sgt. Roger Martin… actually, Engineer Sgt, which it looks like we might have in common.”
Leonard
"Jacqueline Roederer, USASA," Jocasta says. She'll give the standard cover story, adding "You probably heard already why we're here." Nudging the bad-cop needle a bit to the right, but also trying to provide some cover for an ears-only conversation, she asks: "Do you mind if we walk and talk?" Softly, she adds, "The BIA seems to think half the people in Rosebud are on the FBI payroll."
Michael
"Half of us? The kids too?" Crow Dog laughs towards the kids at the door, and his two buddies laugh as well. "Nah, sister. Anything you say to me I'm going to tell all my people tonight over dinner, so we might as well talk here and now. If I went off on my own with you two, what would my people think of that, do you think?"
Leonard
"That's fair. I'd say the same thing myself, if it was my people. There are ones you trust and the ones you don't, and only you know who those are." She drops the tone in her voice a bit, almost a signal that the bullshit part of the talk is over. "Of course, you have to be sure you want them to know everything they hear."
She leans back against one of the few empty spots on the wall of the garage. "Mr. Crow Dog, the story that got us here to see you is true. I want to know about how extensive your movement is, especially in the service. My colleague wants to talk about integrating your men who have served into a special program. But that's not the end of the truth. You probably figured that out already.
"We're going to talk to you seriously. Maybe more seriously than anyone from the government ever has. Now, this isn't some rinky-dink threat. And if you work with us -- and that's more our decision than yours -- we aren't handing out party-favor bribes like the other feds.
"You're used to being bullshitted, probably your whole life, by people just like me. So all I can do is tell you that this isn't bullshit. If you're the man I think you are, you already know that. I'm going to ask you something pretty simple. Depending on your answer, I can walk out that door, no harm done, and you can forget I was ever here. Or we can talk more. And that talk...well, it'll open another door. A pretty big one.
"How real is the Ghost Dance? Not to your people. Not to your culture. Not as an idea. How real is it, to you?"
Michael
(No skill roll yet, I—and Crow Dog—want to see where this goes.)
"It's not a question of degrees of real, 'how' real. It's a question of real or not, isn't it: the question you're asking? So. It's real. As real as that patch of earth you're standing on."
"The government's always taken Ghost Dance seriously. Ever since the days my great-grandfather danced it. It's what Sitting Bull got killed over. It doesn't surprise me you've come asking questions about it. I did figure it would take longer, honestly."
Leonard
"Okay. Next question. This is a tougher one. Maybe someone's fed you a line like this before, but it was a line." She steps forward from the wall, getting closer to Crow Dog and turning on her acid-witch vibe as much as she consciously can. "Is the Dance just for this?" She waves a hand out the tin gate of the garage, out to the misery of the reservation. "Is it just about your people, and your struggle? Does it start and end with getting you free? Or is it part of something bigger than that? A bigger struggle?"
Michael
"You'd like to think it was about something bigger than 'just' us, I bet. Maybe you got some guilt, maybe you want to think it can still be you and us when the Dance gets through. One of the good ones, feather in your hair. The original Dance was supposed to 'roll up the Earth like a carpet with all the white man's ugly things—the factories, the mines, the telegraph lines. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came.' Living side-by-side with our dead ancestors. The land restored to health, all the cheap lazy easy ways of the white man vanished. Tell me, does that sound like the kind of place you'd want to live? Does it sound bigger than just us 'getting free'?" He looks at Jo but then at Roger as well.
Leonard
Jocasta's eyes tighten. Behind them, the dark beginnings of a nasty headache are pushing forward. She can't shake the idea that she was wrong to come here, that she was arrogant to presume to have anything to say to this man; she keeps flashing back to Anthony Reinhardt giving her a similar recruitment pitch, and is slowed by a nagging sense that she's perpetuating the same lie.
"Mr. Crow Dog, I can't answer that, and I'm not sure you want me to. You've got an answer for anything I could tell you. That's not what I want to do here," she replies. "What I'd like to think...what's the shape of my guilt, whether I want you to accept me as something other than what I am, whether your paradise and mine are the same thing...I can't tell you the truth because someone took that away from me. A long time ago, almost everywhere in the world, some places easier than other, someone took everything away from us. Who we were, our histories, what we believed, what we saw in the world, what survived of us after death. It was replaced with something that made us forget everything that was taken. It made it so we couldn't even think about it.
"Here and there, people figured it out. People maybe like you and me and Sgt. Martin. It's a lonely life. I expect you know that too. But we realized that we'd been playing by someone else's rules since before we could remember. And if we did remember, if we took back what they took from us, there would be nothing we couldn't do, together or apart. New game, new rules. Nothing between us and what we believe.
"Since I learned, I couldn't turn back. I have touched the spirit world -- more than one. Mine. Theirs. Yours. Maybe that's nothing to you, too. White girl, went to some West Coast school, learned a few of the old stories. But I think you can see. I think you can see its mark on me. I think you can see that Sgt. Martin has walked the spirits' walk. And if you can see that, and you too can see what's been taken -- from you, from me, from the living and the dead -- then I think we can talk about what that means for us. Otherwise, I get in the rental and wait. Sgt. Martin can make his pitch, we'll sign some papers, we'll be out of here in 15. You just need to decide if what you think you know about me is more important than what you sense we can do together."
Michael
(Definitely want to give Bill a chance to get Roger in here before I start doing any rolls but wow, Leonard.)
Bill
Roger looks over at Jo and just gives her a short, quick nod: "Doing together, that's the key." His face opens up, as he realizes something from what Jo's said. "Shit. You're right. But no... you're not." He realizes he's babbling in a moment of clarity, but he can't stop. "I see it. Everybody's got in mind a paradise that's a pure, selfish one: me, my family, my people-- happy, at peace. Trying to build all those paradises, but rolling over other folks' on your way to yours-- that's what puts us in this shit.
"You know, what I've learned out there, that Ghost Dance you say they wanted — it's possible — you can do it. It's been done before by somebody else... and it's how we got rolled. And if we just flip it... When someone else gets to the steering wheel, if they just lay down their paradise, wipes out the others, it's the same shit. Same damn crime, different criminals."
"Your Ghost Dance? I didn't need you to tell me it's real — that it's possible. 'Cause I've lived the results of other folks' dances, the successful ones. That's the truth we fought hard to regain. Your Ghost Dance? Rolling up Columbus, undoing it? I tell you, you get to the right levers, it could happen. And I think, what does that mean for me, my ancestors? No fucking Triangle Trade, a free Africa? Pretty boss. I got an album cover with a future Africa that very nearly happened, maybe your Ghost Dance makes that. But then I think, that world-- maybe good for my ancestors, but I won't fucking be there. You'd undo people like me, the mixes. Me, my family, my paradise gets wrecked. And when you actually think beyond your own pain, your own tribe, or learn about what your real ancestry is, you learn — we're all mixes somewhere back.
"Yeah, it's good to come all this way and hear you are enlightened enough to know the Ghost Dance is real, you have a piece of the truth. But what I want to know is: are you and your folks are ready to do that Ghost Dance forward, not backward? Are you ready to stop trying to wipe out everybody's past again, just making different losers. 'Cause if not, you're on the wrong side, and I ain't got time for helping you — 'cept what you're owed as folks who did some fighting for the cause. But if you've got some people who know what the spirits can do, the worlds they can make, and want to make a paradise for all of us... then we should get working together.
Leonard
Jocasta remembers the question that Archie asked her not that long ago, and she nods. "Live together or die alone," she says. "What's it gonna be, wičháša wakȟáŋ?"
Michael
(This is all great, I'm gonna need to think about all this, come up with a couple of rolls, no doubt, do some more reading in the book(s) of Leonard Crow Dog, but later today I will have a response!)
Crow Dog nods, sighs. The two guards have relaxed their body language a little, and the kids have cleared out from the doorway after Jo's and Roger's soliloquizing; they got bored. "Okay, I got questions for you, but I can sense sincerity on you, and I can tell you've each had real business with spirits. And I get the sense you," he points to Roger, "are like me, I'm guessing you were just a boy when they took interest in you."
"But yeah, that sincerity brings me to my first question, which is why you two came here under the colors of your Army. Why do you persist sheltering under that flag that has done such evil, committed such atrocities, caused such heartbreak?"
Leonard
"Well, I mean, we're both in the service. It did something for us at one time. Maybe it still does. Or maybe we were just lied into it, manipulated the same way so many of your brothers were and still are today. We could talk about that. But the real truth is, it's a key that opens doors. You think we would have got in to see you if we were just two freaks off the street who decided we could do magic? You're being kept in an open-air jail here, Mr. Crow Dog, and your jailers want to make sure the wrong people don't come see you."
Jocasta is mad for a smoke but cautious of all the gas cans and open oil containers. "If you want to have a conversation about how the organizations people work for can end up doing harm in the search to do something good, ha, well, believe me, we can talk about that all goddamn day, the three of us. But if you want to be sincere, here's me being sincere: this..."
She taps her ID badge. "This isn't me. It's not what I do, it's not who I am. Literally. It's not even my real name. What we do, there's no flag for it."
Bill
“Me? I already said I’m a mix-up. Yeah, that ID is a little bit me. So’s the beret. So’s this gres gres” he pulls out from under his collar. “I find you have to be a lot of people to survive and try to do good. As for that flag you mention, she sure ain’t perfect. She waved over slaves building the White House and the Tulsa courthouse. But put her next to the hammer and sickle, the swastika, or the Stars and Bars, and I know which one I’m saluting.”
“But I’m not going insist you do. But you want to wear orange in the jungle, don’t be shocked if your platoon gives you wide berth.”
“If the spirits found you, picked you, when you were young, did you too have a elder guide?”
Michael
"My father, but he wasn't the only one. I had grandfathers, cousins, and all those who came before. All the stories the older folks told, those who'd gone before me, they were all around the fire with us from the earliest I can remember. When I was five I was walking with some other boys, and I saw that my shadow was not like theirs; it was the shadow of a grown man. My father wouldn't let me go to the white man's schools, he made sure I learned Lakota as a language first. Language is important, it changes how you see the world, and how the world sees you."
"I had the weight of four generations on me coming down from the first Crow Dog, from what he did, but I also had them looking after my initiation. From early on, Tunkashila, Grandfather Inyan, the Earth, the Stone, had favored me. In the sweat lodge when I was seven he passed by me. Just getting me ready. At thirteen I spent days in the sweat lodge, four times a day for four days. Then the vision quest, the four-day fast, what we call the hanbleceya. Now the voices were clearer to me, and I was a medicine man. But the initiation never ends, really. There are new voices I hear nearly every time I sweat or fast."
Leonard
"Roger had something like that too. Elders, watchers, people who made sure he knew the old ways from the start. I didn't have anything like that. Whatever you're imagining I am, I was worse. Just a...quiet little housewife. The spirits found me. They reached out when I was in darkness."
She sighs, out of some strange sense of loss, of something gone that was never really there. "But that wasn't enough. We had to learn a lot of rough lessons. We had to learn that the people who stood beside us in the fight were sometimes not truly with us in the fight, or that they did not believe we could win. I think you may know about that too. But we came to believe that how we get free, how we all get free, is to take a different approach, and that approach means convincing the world that the old ways are not gone. They're not even old. There are spirits that walk beside us every day. Language is important, more than your father could ever imagine. We want to train people not just to believe in those spirits, not just to walk with them, but to understand what their existence means. We want to...widen the path between our world and theirs.
"It's a hard job. It may be impossible. You can't bring everyone you care about with you, at least not at first. You'll come to doubt what you trusted. This game is for higher stakes than anything you have done so far. But I think that if you walk the Ghost Dance steps the way you say you do, you can be the first of an army of people who will put us on that widened path. I did not reach out to the mishipeshu, Mr. Crow Dog. I am the last person in the world who would have. But it came to me. It was in my spirit and I was in its spirit. And I think your spirits let us all be here today. I have done nothing to earn it, but I ask for your trust. I ask you to let us help you open your eyes to how wide the path you have been walking truly is. You will be the first among many to not just dance the dance of the sun, but a thousand other paths that will make this world something more vast and free than you can imagine."
"I am not asking because I want anything from you, or because I am looking for leverage over your people. I am asking you because it is a duty I have been given, and that I have accepted."
Michael
(So we are coming (close) to the point for a pair of rolls, I think, and I think that both Jo's and Roger's Spirit Empathy will come into play here. It feels to me like we base Jo's roll off Diplomacy and Roger's off Streetwise. I'm going to put together some modifiers here and get back to you both.)
Okay, you're each gonna roll against Spirit Empathy to see how much it helps you all first. Bill, two things before you roll: if you have more to say in the scene, please do so and I can assess if there's any more bonuses that can be eked out. Second, if you feel the need to spend any XP right now to boost anything, this feels like the kind of dramatic moment that can elicit a spontaneous improvement in skill.
Jocasta's Diplomacy:
Base skill: 14
Appearance: +1
Military and Security Rank: -2
Sense of Duty (Psychic/psychedelic situations): +2
Spirit Empathy: Roll against IQ-16 for a +1 (+2 if it's a crit, -1 if it's a failure, -2 if it's a crit fail)
Roleplay: +2
Mention of Underwater Panther: +1
Roger's Streetwise crit at the gate: +2
Depending on your Spirit Empathy roll, anywhere between Diplomacy-18 and 22.
Roger's Streetwise:
Base skill: 15
Military Rank: -1
Social Stigma (reversed): +2
Spirit Empathy: Roll against IQ-13 for a +1 (+2 if it's a crit, -1 if it's a failure, -2 if it's a crit fail)
Roleplay: +2
Roger's Streetwise crit at the gate: +2
Depending on your Spirit Empathy roll, anywhere between Streetwise-18 and 22.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 1
So now make a Diplomacy roll?
Michael
Unless you want to wait for Bill.
This has been really both of you working side-by-side, so maybe we see if he needs to add anything.
At the very least, the spirits are with you.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 7
Bill
Roger is honestly speechless listening to Jo— where she is, where she’s come to. He’s a little overwhelmed with empathy for her. And struck, he thinks, about how different a lonely path is, but still how powerful.
(Hopefully that doesn’t distract from the spirits. Here goes.)
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Okay, great, that gives you a Streetwise-21.
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 11
Leonard
Swish
Bill
Nothing but net after that pass set me up.
Michael
"We're gonna talk again." Crow Dog looks long into both Jocasta and Roger's eyes. "But I am going to bring what you've brought me to my people first. Then I need to take it to the spirits. You know, it's funny," Crow Dog smiles—really smiles, for the first time with Jo and Roger, not in arch irony or "I've seen it all before" cynicism mode but real amusement; at his own expense, it turns out. "I remember when I first started meeting with the Native American Church, when I first started learning peyote medicine," Crow Dog has no fear talking about peyote use with these federal agents even though it's currently in kind of a federal gray area, although many states with Native populations have made it legal to harvest and use in church ceremonies (Jo's Law-14 tells her).
"There were a lot of Lakota here who felt peyote didn't belong to us. Despite us Lakota using it since my grandfather's day. They said that peyote comes from another tribe and another place, another climate far south of here, and that I shouldn't, heh, 'mix 'em up.'" He looks at Roger, grinning. "But at Wounded Knee we were all one. Didn't matter what tribe. AIM started in Minnesota, my buddy Dennis Banks is Ojibwe. Didn't know shit about medicine when I met him, but we got together. We had white people running us supplies, Chicano and Black brothers carrying weapons. But that's the lesson of Grandfather Peyote. All tribes are one when they're at a peyote meeting. You," he points to Jo this time, "have Grandfather Peyote's mark on you. He's whispering to me, giving me a great push to hold a meeting as soon as I can. So that's what I'm gonna do with my father and my wife and my brothers and all my guests tonight."
Bill
Roger nods, smiles, lets out the breath he didn’t know he was holding. “I’ve been hearing Legba’s voice since I saw guards at the gates of Paradise. There is a Way to be opened here.” Then he laughs, and bursts into a wide grin. “But first, man, I am dying for a drag. You mind if we take a smoke break?”
Michael
I think we could absolutely break the tension with a cig break outside, but Leonard's going to keep his guards/witnesses close to him with these two agents all the while; Jo and Roger can tell it's less to do with Crow Dog's trusting or not-trusting the two of you and more to do with making sure his people are seeing everything he's talking about with the two of you transparently as possible. I think at this point there's been a, yes, gateway opened here but it's going to take more interaction over a sustained period to really gain his complete trust. But tonight and tomorrow, with his people, he will have a peyote meeting, and Jo and Roger's successes on their Spirit Empathy rolls will make it clear to the spirits that Jo and Roger are legit.
Leonard
I don't know if it needs a scene, but Jocasta is going to overcome her tendencies and training and not be too controlling about who knows what and who Crow Dog talks to. She's almost on the verge of thinking that the whole veil of secrecy around what SANDMAN does and why is a bad idea (almost but not quite -- she allows that people need a pretty huge prevailing counter-narrative or they might go over to the enemy willingly). Basically, she's decided that keeping a tight, heavy lid on who knows what, backed by violence and mind-wiping, is the Old Way, and we're trying things a New Way now. So aside from very practical 'hey, we're engaged in some heavy shit here and our enemy is very insidious' warnings, she's gonna let the usual cone-of-silence stuff go.
Bill
If she admits as such during their smoke break— which Roger also wanted so to check in with her— Roger will be something of a sounding board, and something of asking his own questions.
Again, doesn’t need to be conversation, but Roger, who wants the spiritual back in humanity’s life so terribly, is a little worried about blowback, or bringing on that hollow New Age he saw in our glimpses of the future.
Michael
My feeling on your all visit to South Dakota, is that LCD is going to take a few days to contemplate all this, consult with associates, ancestors, and spirits. If you two want to stick around here cooling your heels waiting for a response from him, that works for me (and thematically keeps you both in South Dakota through Thanksgiving, which is quite fun).
Basically the result of all your successful rolls is that LCD is willing to work with you both (and can be bought as a Contact-with-mystical-powers or even an Ally: he feels like a "75 or 100% of starting points" type character) but he has two pretty-much ironclad provisos attached to it:
1) That the government harassment of his people here at Rosebud and all his AIM comrades stops. Immediately. They've lost more brothers and sisters since Wounded Knee than they lost at the occupation. Random night rides, random bullets putting the kids in danger, rez cops doing extrajudicial executions and harassment: LCD wants all of it to stop, and he's trusting you to make it happen. We can talk about what that might entail for Jo and Roger, but it's absolutely paramount. The second proviso is a little less ironclad than that, but...
2) That you both understand there are certain Lakota rituals, practices, spirit secrets, and medicine that LCD can't divulge to you, just like he can't necessarily divulge them to an Ojibwe or a Navajo or a Mi'kmaq. The broad, all-Native magic and ritual and medicine he practices with outsiders in the NAC, he can let you in on, and he can tell tales of his own Lakota and personal practices with you, but giving you an in with whom he considers specifically protectors of his people spirit-wise, he's going to be more circumspect on.
Now in exchange for both of these agreements, what LCD proposes to you is an ongoing series of encounters to discuss spiritual practice with Roger and Jo, personally. Maybe expand that to the medicine men of other tribes, if they agree. The reality war side of things is something LCD only has the most tenuous internal knowledge and intuition about, but he's definitely aware of how belief and blood can shape reality. So you may have to give him a little bit help developing his Hidden Lore (History B) but in exchange he can talk about what reality-twisting impact big memetic events like the original Ghost Dance and the one he tried to start at Wounded Knee earlier this year might entail and how that could be expanded out further to, er, change the world. But LCD will concede that getting a big group of people, even Indians, to all think and believe the same thing and to channel that power of belief into change is a real challenge.
I'm more than willing to have a follow-up scene to hash out the details here, but that's his first offer on the table. LCD will probably wryly state how he's had to do a lot of this kind of bargaining with representatives of the US government but this is the first time he's done it on a spiritual level, so it's new ground for him.
As far as followup from all this goes, I want to slow-roll it a little bit, as word trickles out of Rosebud and onto the "moccasin telegraph," as Leonard Crow Dog calls it. But I think before you leave he'd be able to share with you how it all went down at Wounded Knee back in April. This is from, as most of the stuff I've been posting, Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men from 1995. I figure if this stuff was suitable for white people to read in 1995 it'd be something he'd share with Roger and Jo after your successful Reaction and Influence rolls. (You can feel free to imagine LCD folding in some of the details from the future '74 dance into his descriptions of the Wounded Knee one.)
In fact, after that narrative from Leonard, @Bill B and @Leonard, the two of you can each give me Hidden Lore (History B) rolls.
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 2
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
(Please note that from here forward, when we talk about the power of the dead/the dead's belief/the living's belief in the dead/ancestors to influence reality, I'll likely call for Hidden Lore (History B) rolls, given what we discovered in Mission 8 at Pascagoula, White Cemetery, and elsewhere.)
Leonard Crow Dog's explanation of picking the Wounded Knee massacre site as the place to try this 20th century Ghost Dance does seem to be very important. There were only forty or so people dancing that night: Jo and Roger know from their SANDMAN training that the impact of belief on reality seems to be logarithmic in scale, like the Richter scale (OOC, I'll just post this bit from the Madness Dossier book to give you a sense of what that means). Obviously, there are other factors that can give groups of people more impact, as we've seen at the St. Francis and elsewhere: death and blood and the foreclosing of timelines that come with it; apposite symbolism, either from belief or architecture; strong personalities/leaders with a connection to the source code, memetics, or NLP; etc. etc. Leonard Crow Dog and his band of Ghost Dancers just barely touched upon something that night; his description of "the earth trembling" is so reminiscent of a reality temblor that it might take Jo or Roger aback a bit. And the close contact and channeling of the dead of Wounded Knee as LCD attests to: as LCD notes, most of these kids did not know Indian history, let alone their tribes' rituals. If a dead Lakota victim of the original Wounded Knee tried to talk to them or reach out to them in the ways that their ancestors used to be in touch with them, the kids in 1973 would not know what to do to channel or commune with them.
Jo and Roger's analysis of the 1973 Wounded Knee Ghost Dance is that it could have worked—and arguably it did work, by which I mean it created a timeline where the occupiers, with a couple of notable and tragic exceptions of course, all managed to walk off the reservation at the end of it alive and not just that but avoid prison. Not sure if Roger or Jo or both of them would go this far in their theorizing, but the occupiers might have managed/did manage to make the slightest of rewrites of the world there. Think about how outnumbered and outgunned they were, and think about what the typical "decision tree" of US marshals and FBI agents confronted with a bunch of rebellious Indians would and should have been. Not all of this is down to the TV cameras onsite or Sacheen Littlefeather at the Oscars. That's memetics, obviously, and it has an effect on how far the feds were willing to go. But some of it surely was Leonard's doing, his ritual doing. Imagine what more these kids could have done with a wholly in-tune, clued-in bunch of Dancers, Dancers who could speak with the power of their ancestors properly and channel that fervent, echoing belief from the lands of the dead.
Are we good here, you two? Just wanted to know if I can close the thread for now.
Leonard
Good with me. I'll have some follow-up on the subject, but this particular scene is good to close from my end.
Bill
Yeah. There’s lots to think/talk about, but it definitely goes past this scene.