An indigenous rights activist recently accused my town of hoarding a stolen Lakota headdress. Headdress. It seems strange to me that that word has two “d”s in it. Headress.

How much would we really lose by dropping the second d? (Get your mind out of whichever gutter it’s currently in. Mine went to breasts [dd], then dicks [the d], then a drug [dropping the second d]. The drug is probably psychedelic and people call it “d” for slang; maybe it’s acid?).

I guess it does sound different without the second d. Normally when I say “headdress” it has two: “head-dress”. Or does it? Depends on how fast I’m talking and how badly I’m slurring (or how many ‘d’s are near my face). And fast-talking does feel like the norm these days.

Headress. Is “ress” a word? One site tried to say it’s a feminine agent noun, but I feel like that’s just “ess”, not “ress”. Well, if it hasn’t been claimed already, I guess headdress can have it. “Ress”. It sounds a bit like headrest, but not too much.

A headdress is a bit like a headrest, except the headdress is resting on you, whereas you are resting on the headrest.

Perhaps this is a discussion for another day.

As I was saying, misleadingly, an indigenous rights activist recently tried to call my town out for imperialist thievery. I’m putting it like this because he was very lazy with his accusation and I feel like replying in the same (or a similar) churlish way. The difference is, however, that my people and culture weren’t almost brought to extinction by psychopathic imperialist invaders. I mean the Romans and the Christians invaded Britain and slowly eradicated most of its pagan culture, so much so that we don’t even really know what the words and practices were that people used. But that was ageeess ago. And it’s not like I’m called Merlin, am a pagan and have in me the blood of Britons, witches and the nomadic peoples of old. Oh wait.

So anyway, this guy’s Instragram post was not actually about me, or about Hastings as such. If it was about Hastings I figure he might’ve had a bigger problem with Grey Owl – the Sussex boy and ex-soldier who pretended to be an Apache (by the way probably a Spanish word, not an indigenous word, but still widely adopted) for much of his life. He even represented indigenous folk to Queen Victoria. A Hastings man who used to taint his white boy skin with tea. Madness.

The post was about England refusing to give back the headress (headdress?) of Lakota chief Iron Tail.

(Okay, the wording was “continues to keep…rather than returning”. I summarised it fine, right?)

Now, I don’t know if anyone’s actually asked to have the headdress ‘back’. I’m in the investigation stages of this article, so I do not know, but there’s nothing in his post to suggest that the Lakota want it or have a place for it, either in active ceremonial use or in some kind of museum or reliquary. I mean obviously there’s the context that it’s part of their history, so they’d probably want it back, but that doesn’t mean there’s anyone looking for it or anywhere to keep it.

Iron Tail was an actor. Kinda. Some Lakota were forced to attend boarding schools by the US to try and turn them into white people, and as a result, kinda out of necessity, some of them got good at acting. Among their own people, these actors/performers were referred to as ‘Oskate Wicasa’, like “showman”. I don’t know to what extent this was a profession versus something you could do as well as other things. Some sources talk about warriors being recruited to Wild West shows while on the run from the US cavalry. Some suggest everyone in the show was a primarily a performer. They’re not mutually exclusive.

However, there is apparently some confusion in professional-looking sources about which Iron Tail they’re referring to. There was also a contemporary Iron Hail, says wikipedia, who fought at Little Big Horn, whereas Iron Tail didn’t do so much fighting. And people got befuddled because you kinda just assume that the man who got his head on a coin was a great warmaster. But you don’t have to fight to be a good chief, you know? Or to be a real bastard.

Speaking of real bastards, I’m pretty sure it was Thomas Jefferson who set out the US policy of trying to destroy all indigenous cultures in his part of the ‘New World’ and make every ‘indian’ a 2^nd class American. And the land of the free never gave up trying to fulfil that goal. So, if you’re a Lakota, for example, who wants to be treated slightly less like shit by everyone around you, what do you do?

Well, you learn the Christian stuff, you go to church, maybe you do a little acting for Buffalo Bill. And then you go home, talk with your friends and family about your tribal and cultural history, make sure your kids learn it by memory, keep your language and rituals alive in private where it’s pretty safe. But publicly – you make yourself look like ‘the good Indian’ or whatever.

So Iron Tail seemed to spend a long time on the road with Buffalo Bill, and got photographed a lot wearing this headress. There’s one of him trying to start a car while wearing it. Now I’m not 100% sure but I think it’s supposed to be a war headress. It either is, or that’s what all the American commentators thought it was. And Iron Tail was not so much a warrior, more of a wise adviser type as I say. You know, looking sternly into the camera, not needing to speak in order to deliver a line. And he’s wearing this warrior headress, maybe, while cranking a car engine for Buffalo Bill. As far as I’m aware, they got along. Were buddies or whatever. But damn, you know? That feels cold.

‘Lakota Chief Cranks Car for Buffalo Bill’. Buffalo Bill, if you didn’t know, got that name by killing a fuck ton of buffalo. Buffalo, in case you didn’t know, are very significant in indigenous nomadic and plains cultures, being the animal that used to give many people a way to survive and thrive. And cars… don’t get me started on cars. Cars bring roads, demand for oil, all kinds of wild and arguably very nasty infrastructure to places that used to be dominated by nature. Roads made the US what it is today. Euuugh.

I really wanna know how Americanised Iron Tail became. You know? Was he sipping margaritas with Bill at the Savoy while his kin were left abandoned back in Salford? Yeah, the Wild West show came to England, and yeah some of their oskate wickasa contingent got left behind in Salford, including a veteran called Black Elk. They did a mini European tour of their own before making it back to the US. One guy called Surrounded by the Enemy got a lung infection and died. He was 22.

Now, Iron Tail supposedly sold the headress to a Texan not long before he himself passed, and an Englishman bought it off the Texan, and through the Englishman it ended up in Hastings Museum.

‘England’ didn’t buy it. But whatever. Let’s say England bought it off Texas, which bought it off Iron Tail while he was still alive. Iron Tail was an actor, sometimes. I guess that means… Iron Tail, Texas and England stole it off the Lakota? But it’s here now. Buck stops here, n’ all that.

I’m going to try and take a supportive angle in this article, when it’s done. I emphasise it is not done yet, and do not consider this blog post to be factual, though some of it probably is. I wanna be supportive of indigenous folk and the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Nation specifically – because they exist. I don’t know if I’m capable of being supportive, as a well-to-do imperialist, but, as I said earlier, my people got wiped out too so… maybe we can bond a little?

Can’t help being annoyed at this activist who posted the thing, but then again, I do get annoyed at activists. I am an activist and I don’t like myself some of the time. It’s just this feeling that he’s doing it for likes. As an “influencer”, eugh, you know? Not for… truth? Accuracy? And, sure, it gets the message out there, but when you’re willing to compromise on a few details for the sake of good coverage, what message are you sending? Well, I guess that England doesn’t want to repatriate items of cultural significance to the indigenous folk trying to preserve and develop their culture?

I don’t know yet whether that’s true, but I can believe it. It sounds like what we’ve done to plenty of people across the world. Also I have found a bunch of stuff about our ‘study’ of ‘Native American history’ in Hastings that seems kinda shit. Treating them like they’re either dumb monkeys or brutal savages who’re mysteriously well-attuned to nature. Neither of those is really an adequate story, and we don’t seem that interested in hearing from these indigenous people themselves to correct the record.

Except… a lot of that ‘study’ was from last century. It is being updated. Hastings is unusually interested in the indigenous folk of the Americas. We’re a mystical town. Pagan in our ways, almost Brythonic at times. Maybe we’re the dumb children trying to make a connection with our ancestry. Maybe no-one has to be the dumb children? Maybe children aren’t dumb? I mean heck, they certainly make a lot of noise.

And the museum is changing a lot right now, to the extent that it could maybe just start being a positive influence here, and really do something to promote indigenous culture, and maybe even advance their rights over in the US! You know, do some fundraisers or something. Do fundraisers help? Maybe King Charlie could recognise their nation status or something. Really fuck up everyone’s day.

I can imagine some of the volunteers in and around Hastings Museum putting the work in to find a good home for this headress and other artefacts, among the Lakota and any other groups we might’ve acquired them from. I can imagine these items being used to revitalise, rebuild and evolve their culture in their own terms, to keep up the fight against centuries of attempts to see it wiped off the face of the earth.

Yeah there’s anger here, sure, there’s people insulting eachother, crimes against humanity are involved. But really, what this headress matter boils down to, is one of the most deprived towns in England, and a (now) small nation that the US refused to acknowledge as existing. Why wouldn’t we get along?