by Tim Findley
(Click here for Parts 1 and 2)
 These stories about Fortunate Eagle get told
almost everywhere he isn't listening in Indian America,
with great variations on each version, except when he is
telling them himself. |
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| Possessing
eagle feathers in America, Indian or not, is a big deal.
You can't really even pluck one off something smashed on
the highway without technically violating the law of
"taking" a protected bird. The only way you can
actually own such a feather is by specific permission of
the United States government and by registering the
specific unit in question. The charges against Fortunate Eagle were not
that he was killing eagles, but that he was taking them
without permission and registration with the United
States government. For that, they told him, the federal
prosecutor would demand that he spend six years in
prison. He went to trial in Federal Court in Reno. All
of the most respected and well-known Indian rights
organizations, such as the Native American Rights Fund
(NARF) had declined Adam's request for help and pushed
somewhere aside his arguments based on freedom of
religion. Fortunate Eagle, apparently, could be amusing,
but it wasn't enough to get religious about. Yet on the final day of trail, when the heavy
oak doors of the courtroom mysteriously blew open from an
unexplainable wind storm, the jury found themselves
deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal. Once again, the government dragged out old
Phil Sheridan. If they couldn't convict him of a felony
crime, they could make their case before a magistrate for
civil damages to the United States. Adam Fortunate Eagle
damaged the United States of America in the amount of
$15,000 plus costs. And the United States would keep what
it found at the Round House Gallery, including the old
ceremonial headdresses. Pushing 60 as a former termite inspector and
discoverer of Italy is a tough place to start from in
finding a new career in life. Unless, of course, you're
Fortunate Eagle. He's not yet made it back to biennial
Cadillacs, but in the time since the feather case,
Fortunate Eagle has achieved international status as a
Native American sculptor, last year winning his category
in the prestigious Santa Fe Native American Market and
art show. Big bucks, in the thousands, are paid for
single pieces of his work, though the big payoffs come
much less frequently than the old reliable termite
checks. All that, despite how long it takes to tell,
is pretty generally known about Fortunate Eagle, and,
maybe, will someday be told by collectors of art with the
same enthusiasm as goose-pimpled white drum beaters today
sometimes talk of Geronimo or Crazy Horse. But even if those guys had a sense of humor,
they might still not understand the 5,000 used tires. It all goes back to those circles. Every time
Fortunate Eagle would see one of those little tornadoes
whipping around the yard, he'd get this thought about
someday building a whole big earth lodge, something on
the design, but with even grader scale, of the Mandan
lodges that impressed William Bodmer in his artist's tour
of the west in the 1830's. Fortunate Eagle saw it in grandiose terms that
would rope it all back in, including ceremonial
gatherings and even classrooms with a sort of traditional
bunkhouse to accommodate visiting students. There would
be living quarters and even a verandah on top with a
small swimming pool out back. He actually used to go out in the yard and
pace it off in a big, broad imaginary circle. Bobbie, by
now even more convinced that he was a little out of his
moccasins, said little, but worried about the waste of
time. Then came Dennis Weaver and the Tanager
Foundation. The same slow-talking Dennis Weaver of
"There You Go" TV western fame, who now was
eagerly promoting the greatest recycling idea in the
history of environmental construction. His house, as he
showed on the promotional video, and another house being
built in Taos, was perfectly insulated, grandly
appointed, sturdier than the storms of hell, and put
together entirely from old tin cans and tires. "Ohh, no," Bobbie groaned. But it
was too late. Fortunate Eagle was already flattered by
the wannabe eagerness of the Tanager people and by their
devoted promises to help with the whole thing. The old
alkali flat would become the site of the first earth
lodge ever made out of old tires, a showplace of the
Native American West, even the Taj Mahal of Churchill
County, Nevada. Adam showed the Weaver video to everyone he
could corral in front of a VCR. He had the whole thing
built in his mind already, anyway, and all he needed was
the sort of enthusiastic support he found for claiming
Alcatraz and Italy. Well, that, and a few thousand old
tires. You can't say that White business folks in the
town of Fallon or around Churchill County, Nevada are
exactly bigoted towards Indians. It's not true. Most of
the older residents of the county, Indian and White, have
known each other all their lives. They went to school
together, met each other at church, shopped at the same
stores. You might say, though, that the older established
residents of Churchill County, Indian or White, don't
readily accept some crazy Chippewa from San Francisco
telling them about his tubeless Taj Mahal. Fortunate
Eagle's reputation around town made him, well,
"unlikely." The biggest used tire guy in town turned him
down flat. "Those old ones some old folks use to
build corrals and the like," he advised. "I
don't have any to spare." Fortunate Eagle did get a little hope from
another guy further down the road who looked at him with
a cocked eye and then invited him to "take those if |
you can haul 'em." Gradually, to Bobbie's dismay, the yard began
to fill a little at a time with used tires her husband
talked out of everybody he could find. It was, frankly, a
bit of a mess, but at least Adam, in his enthusiasm,
stacked them all in neat rows. And then, the Environmental Protection Agency,
following its own federal mandates, announced that the
Churchill County Dump was, in fact, a dump. New
regulations would be imposed, including a charge of $1.50
to get rid of an old tire carcass. Suddenly, Fortunate Eagle had found the
four-ply motherlode. Tractor truck loads of tires started
showing up in his driveway, with forklifts to help them
unload. Adam was delighted, exuberant, until still more
truckloads began arriving, some of them even sneaking in
at night after he and Bobbie had gone to sleep. The pile
of tires grew and grew and threatened even to overwhelm
the house. Fortunate Eagle had guessed he might need
three thousand, maybe four thousand tires to accomplish
his grandiose earth lodge dream. But now, he had more
than 5,000 tires in the yard, and, after midnight, the
pile was growing. Bobbie was threatening to move. Stemming the glut of tires, though, was only
part of Fortunate Eagle's problem. In the Weaver video,
it had all looked relatively simple and quick, with eager
hordes of young men and women all happily working
together pounding sand into the tire carcasses and laying
them up like bricks, then filling in the gaps with old
cans. Pounding in the sand? Laying them up like
bricks? This was work of the kind not happily done since
the days of the WPA, and Adam's first efforts to enlist
the paid help of his oldest grandson and friends soon
created a family rift. The Tanager Foundation, so eager at first to
offer assistance and labor, turned out to be one guy and
two girls who after three days of pounding tires decided
it was more urgent to save ducks or something. Dennis
Weaver, despite the letters, never got back to Fortunate
Eagle. So there it is today -- the Taj Mahal of
Churchill County, still under construction by the
discoverer of Italy himself. He is going to be 67 this year. No big deal to
him, unless you consider that he has also talked the U.S.
Navy into letting him pick up the usable wood structure
remains from their nearby bombing range and a Reno dealer
to hand over one-ton laminated beams from an old
warehouse, and a bunch of local farmers and miners to
dump some loads of dirt and sand. No big deal, unless you
realize that it's just Fortunate Eagle himself who is
cutting it, lifting it, digging it and hammering it. At
least the tires have stopped coming. Oh, he made another trip to Europe since the
whole thing started, this time "discovering"
Sweden in the process, and he is still building on his
reputation as a sculptor. But few know about those circles in his mind
when he sits on his front porch now and stares at the
half-completed earth lodge of tires. Last year his son and namesake, Adam Nordwall,
was at another pow wow in Coos Bay, Oregon. A friend of
the family came up to Adam and asked if he had noticed
Kieth Taylor there earlier. "No," said Adam. The next day, the friend gave young Adam a
photograph of Taylor, the former prison guard and Fish
and Wildlife undercover agent. In the picture, Taylor is
wearing the eagle feather headdress that was once a
center piece in Fortunate Eagle's Round House Gallery. The Indian who fingered Taylor wearing the
purloined headdress turned out to be a former California
prison inmate. As they say, what goes around.... Today, if you happen to find yourself on
Stillwater Road east of Fallon, you're likely to notice
the sculpted totem poles and maybe a bit of the Round
House Gallery obscured behind what the locals have taken
to calling "the tire house" in front of it.
They know it's still unfinished, but the still haven't
quite gotten the idea of what it's all about. Adam himself has scaled down the notion some.
The Swimming pool, for example, is now more the size of a
horse trough, but there a lawyer close to the family who
says he has a hot tub he doesn't use. Adam is nurturing
the relationship. There are still a lot more tires than actually
necessary, but Adam mutters something about their use as
"back-fill." Behind his house, out of view from
the road, there are waiting several thousand aluminum
cans, if they all don't fit when it comes time to fill
the cracks. With a little help, Adam figures, the earth
lodge can be finished by, maybe, the end of next summer.
There's a group of high school kids from a private school
on the East Coast coming out this Spring for a Native
American experience. They don't know it yet, but there's
still all those nails to pull from the Navy's old lumber.
Don't get it wrong, Fortunate Eagle doesn't
use people for his own purposes. He just has a way of
convincing people like the Pope that being an Indian
doesn't mean you can't crack a joke. The locals slow down a little more in passing
Adam's place these days, maybe thinking a little bit
about what he has in mind after all. What will he do with
that "tire place" if he ever gets it done? Only Fortunate Eagle himself really knows
that, but you'd have to be in his head to understand it,
and that's a place where even Bobbie has been reluctant
to venture. Round and round, he's thinking. Round and
round and back again, stomping Phil Sheridan in the
process. |
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