Clyde’s funeral took place in January 2006. Clyde was a tribal liaison from the Pine Ridge reservation and a retired tribal court judge. He used to come to Sioux Falls often for prison powwows and spiritual conferences. He was a widower and enjoyed the social aspect of coming to Sioux Falls.
On one of his trips, I asked him if he would like to eat at a Japanese restaurant where they cook at the table. It sounded good to him so we went out for dinner. He wasn’t sure what to order and asked me what I was going to eat. I told him I liked calamari. He ordered that too. The problem was that I didn’t know he wore dentures so he had some difficulty eating the calamari. He enjoyed the show anyway!
When he addressed the men at one of the spiritual conferences, he told them that the law was different outside the reservation than it was inside the reservation and they needed to follow the Federal and State laws to stay out of jail. He also told me later he was very glad when he was able to have someone arrested by the tribal police appear before him on camera rather than in person because they often smelled terrible after a night out drinking. Clyde had a wonderful sense of humor.
After I was Clyde’s escort to see men in the administrative segregation area of the prison one time, the unit manager there told my supervisor he now understood why I helped the Native inmates since my husband was Native. Clyde and I joked around after that about him being my husband.
Clyde died in the Ft. Meade VA hospital at Sturgis, SD, and his funeral took place at Red Shirt Table, a hamlet in the northwest part of the reservation. In that community, the water was not safe to drink because of poisoning of the water from the uranium mining in the area years earlier. The funeral took place in a small Episcopalian church with a huge pot of soup cooking over a fire outside the church. During the funeral, people went to the back of the church to eat cake and have coffee.
Clyde was respected on the reservation and by the inmates, many of whom had appeared in tribal court in front of him.
My supervisor and I had stayed in Rapid City the night before the funeral and had asked one of the inmates from the area if there was a way to get back to the Interstate after the funeral so we could get back home that day rather than having to backtrack to Rapid City. He showed us on a map a gravel road we could take which would lead us to a paved road connecting to the Interstate. He said he used to use that road a lot when he was running from the law. With that assurance, we took the gravel road thinking it was just a few miles long. It was much longer than we expected and had just been covered with new gravel so we couldn’t drive over 30 mph because of all the rocks being thrown up. By the time we reached the Interstate a couple of hours later, we were famished since we had not stayed for the funeral lunch.
The next day we called the inmate to the chapel and fired him as our travel agent. He said he didn’t know anything about the fresh gravel so we shouldn’t be angry with him.
Mary Montoya
