SOCIOLOGY

AUO_SOC111_Good_Meat_Working_Script.pdf

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Page 1 of 18 The Working Poor in America

Good Meat Working Script

Introduction

00:01 BLACK VIDEO: The buffalo hunters have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. Send them powder and lead if you will. But for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated.

— General Philip Sheridan

Statement to Congress, 1875

VIDEO/AUDIO: Blue gramma grass at sunset blowing in wind buffalo head turns to camera

AUDIO: Drum group--singing

VIDEO: Sweat lodge fire

VIDEO: Beau and Jerome and Nick at sweat lodge fire

1:18 NARRATION: My name is Beau Le Beau. I am Oglala Lakota.

VIDEO: Beau being rigged for stress treadmill test

1:23 NARRATION: I grew up in the little housing project called Evergreen on the Pine Ridge Reservation... right in the heart of ancient buffalo country.

VIDEO: Park Ranger tracking herd of running buffalo with rifle.

VIDEO: Beau and men carrying tipi poles-wide/tight

VIDEO: Wide shot through door of Beau starting stress treadmill test

VIDEO: Tight shot of men setting up tipi

VIDEO: Wide shot of men setting up tipi

VIDEO: Sun Dance tree

VIDEO: Tight shot of Nick and Beau entering tipi, Beau looks up

1:51 NARRATION: Many years ago, when I was just a little boy, my parents returned to the Sun Dance, and a traditional Lakota way of life...and they took us children with them.

VIDEO: Tight shot of Beau suffering through stress treadmill test

VIDEO: Theresa LeBeau gravesite tight

VIDEO: Theresa LeBeau gravesite wide

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2:13 NARRATION: My mother passed away in October, 2005. She died of cancer, but she was over- weight, and diabetic. She died of being a modern Indian. She is buried on a little hill above our Sun Dance grounds.

VIDEO: Beau washing Trinity in sink

VIDEO: Beau talking to Jeffrey about basketball.

VIDEO: Beau to Jeffrey: “You’re doing good. Keep it up.”

2:29 NARRATION: Before she passed, she used to tell me, “Beau, you’ve got kids now. You’ve got to change your life. You’ve got to get healthy or you won’t be around to help them grow up.

VIDEO: Beau with Tangerine in kitchen.

VIDEO: Beau with Tangerine: “It’s your first prom. Are you scared?” “Scared of falling.” “Are you scared of me? It’s your first prom.”

2:58 NARRATION: Staying alive for my children...that’s where this story begins. (1) And it begins with a puzzle that has bothered me for many years...Back in the day, when the Lakotas were strong...there was no such thing as a fat Indian.

3:03 Good Meat Titles

VIDEO: snow blowing across Rapid Creek “Winter/Western South Dakota)

VIDEO: Golden Corral restaurant in snow

3:43 BEAU ON CAMERA: “The Last Supper”? I had a little bit of everything. I had some pizza. I had some pot roast. I had several steaks with fries. That’s what I started off with was steaks with fries, and then I went to the pot roast and pizza and topped it off with a sundae and two big cups of the largest cups they have of root beer.

VIDEO: Beau in kitchen with Feather and Tangerine

4:20 DANI on Camera with sisters: Before he went on this diet, he was really crabby, mad all the time. Mad at everything. Miserable with life...Clear down to eating...He would eat like he was mad.

4:45 FEATHER: He would stay up, four o’clock in the morning, and sit on the couch and all night just snack.

4:52 NARRATION: One night, sitting on the couch, I finally hit bottom. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have any money. I’ve never had a vision before, but that night I had a dream of the future...a

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beautiful dream of the future. What would happen if an overweight, unhealthy Indian like me returned to the traditional buffalo diet of my ancestors?

VIDEO: Beau getting ready for stress treadmill

NARRATION: The idea was simple...for six months I would try to stop eating junk food...learn to eat buffalo and fresh vegetables...and get lots of exercise. The first step was to find out just how big a problem I had.

5:29 VIDEO: Archival basketball game: Beau LeBeau, down to Fairbanks, has some space. Tough shot, yeah!”

5:32 NARRATION: I mean it seemed like yesterday I was running up and down the court with my high school basketball team.

5:36 VIDEO Archival basketball game: “There he goes, simply unstoppable, weaving his way through the defense. Oh...! Left hand. We just pulled through as a team and we did it.”

5:45 NARRATION: Back then they called me husky. I had big legs, but I was strong, and I could run forever. I never imagined this!

VIDEO: Beau face tight on Treadmill

“Do you want to quit?” “Yes.”

6:00 NARRATION: Now I can’t even walk six minutes on a treadmill. I must have weighed 280, maybe 290 pounds.

VIDEO: Beau on scale with nurse.

Nurse: “333.” Beau raises fists like a prize fighter

6:16 NARRATION: I put myself in the hands of Dr. Kevin Weiland. And he put me through a dozen different tests. But come on, it can’t be just me. The guy looks just like General Custer, don’t you think? chuckle...

6:31 Kevin Weiland: “When Beau came in he had a fasting blood sugar of 158. According to the American Diabetes Association...we want to see a blood sugar level below 100.”

Beau isn’t just obese, he’s morbidly obese. About a third of my Lakota patients are really struggling with obesity, and diabetes. Some estimates are that as many as a third of Lakota adults are diabetic. I think that obesity and diabetes are going to destroy Indian Country a lot faster than the 7th Cavalry ever could. I ran a lot of tests on Beau, but I knew it just looking at him.

Kevin Weiland: “The bad news is that you are a diabetic. I think you sensed that.

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6:49 NARRATION: I just sat there in silence. It really scared me, but it also pissed me off. Diabetes runs on both sides of my family, and it’s a death sentence. Everybody on the Reservation knows that.

7:03 Kevin Weiland: “When I told Beau he was diabetic, his jaw dropped. He felt terrible. I knew this was fairly unexpected news for him. I do think he has these visions of his ancestors, his family members, with diabetes, without legs, on dialysis, visiting their doctors three times a week in dialysis. I think these are the visions he had. I saw a lot of denial. I saw a lot of anger.

7:31 NARRATION: Dr. Weiland sent me home with a sleep apnea machine, a portable blood sugar monitor and a diary. The first thing I wrote in the diary was... “Bullshit. I’ll show them.” I took a blood sugar reading in the afternoon, just to try it out. 225! 225! I was so pissed off. My sister asked me what it said. I told her the machine was broken and threw it on the book shelf. I thought to myself, “This isn’t going to be easy.”

VIDEO: Beau at basketball game

BEAU w/Jeffrey at Porcupine basketball game: “Those little short dribbles, remember.”

8:07 NARRATION: The first day on my own it became clear that I had two problems. Everywhere I turned, I was looking right in the face of the reservation junk food diet. I went to my son’s 5th grade basketball tournament at Porcupine School.

8:22 BEAU: When I first walked in, I was there ten minutes, and the announcer gets on and says, “Don’t forget to visit our concession stand, we’ve got hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, candy and pop. And I’m thinking, awe man, I don’t want to hear that. I was sitting there a little longer and this woman goes by me with two Indian tacos, right in front of me. Two minutes later a man goes by with two cheeseburgers. And then this little kid goes right by me with two cheeseburgers and then a little kid with a hot dog. I said, “I gotta get out of here. The temptation is too great. I don’t think right now I am strong enough to be around that.”

9:18 NARRATION: My second problem was...Buffalo. Could I even find the traditional diet of the Lakota on Pine Ridge?

VIDEO: Truck driving through snow, elk, buffalo, driving in truck

9:35 NARRATION: The Parks Department of my tribe has a herd of elk and buffalo on some of the most remote land on the reservation. This is a part of Pine Ridge that people almost never go to...one of those places where tribes hid the last of the really wild buffalo a century ago.

VIDEO: Buffalo in wilderness

AUDIO OF DRUM GROUP

VIDEO: Beau and rangers and Dr. Weiland looking for buffalo

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9:56 NARRATION: The tribe liked my idea, so they gave me a buffalo for $400. Dr. Weiland helped me raise the money, and two park rangers took us into the backcountry to shoot a two year old bull.

AUDIO: Drum Group

VIDEO Sequence of herd/hunt

10:22 NARRATION: It was a bitter cold mid-February morning. The wind was howling, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like to chase a herd like this two hundred years ago, on foot, as if food for my family depended on it.

VIDEO: Rangers approaching herd

10:57 NAT SOT: BANG

VIDEO: Buffalo lying on ground

11:12 NARRATION: We made a small prayer to honor the spirit of the buffalo, then we slit it open and began to pull the guts.

VIDEO: Gutting buffalo in pasture

11:22 NARRATION: I know it’s hard for people who grew up in the city to watch a hunt. Most Americans these days aren’t used to seeing an animal cut wide open. But I hope you’ll understand. When you learn in school that Indians used all the parts of the buffalo, this is just what your teacher meant.

11:46 KIBBE CONTI: The four-legged animals that grazed the grasses, and plants, are basically bringing those nutrients and storing them. A good example would be Omega Three fatty acid is present in some of those plants. The buffalo would consume that and concentrate that. So when we eat the buffalo we’re getting a great source of that essential fatty acid and other micronutrients.

12:10 KEVIN WEILAND: When you take an animal from the grasslands and put it into a feedlot, this is what happens to the Omega Three fatty acid. From three down to zero in 196 days. Remove and expand below in butcher shop sequence.

VIDEO: Beau and ranger eating fresh liver/kidneys

12:26 NARRATION: It is an old custom to share the fresh liver and kidneys. Most people get freaked out more by the idea than the actual taste. Truth is, it’s a lot like chewing sticky rubber. But I’ve watched a lot of Indians gag on their first bite.

(3) KIBBE CONTI; on dietary value of eating fresh liver and kidneys.

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VIDEO: Buffalo loaded on truck.

VIDEO empty prairie

12:45 NARRATION: The prairie was left as if nothing had happened, except for a small blood stain that will be licked by the coyotes and picked at by the eagles.

VIDEO: carcass being cut with at processing plant

13:02 NARRATION: Otte’s meat locker is really small...the owner and two or three employees. It reminds me of Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

13:12 Kevin Weiland: Beau’s chief source of protein during this whole diet was the buffalo, and it wasn’t just any buffalo. This was a grass-fed animal. Let’s just take a look at what a grass-fed animal has. Especially this buffalo. There are 22 known amino acids. The body can only make 11. The other 11 have to come from our diet. And this grass-fed buffalo has those essential amino acids that we need to build protein to keep healthy in the body.

(4) ADDITION: Dr. Weiland talking about why grass-fed is nutritionally different than feedlot buffalo.

VIDEO: Family sorting through boxes of buffalo on kitchen table.

13:41 NARRATION: The whole experience gave me my first insight into the business side of this project. $400 for the buffalo. $350 for the butcher. That’s a great deal for 320 pounds of meat, just over two dollars a pound. But it’s also an upfront cash expense of $750. No one I know on the reservation has $750 just for meat. And then, of course, I had nowhere to store it.

NAT SOT Beau: All this stuff will stay, this goes.

14:18 NARRATION: I put about a third of my treasure in our home freezer, and I hid the other two thirds in the huge commercial freezer behind the convenience store at Sharps Corner, right behind the stacks of soda pop.

VIDEO: steak sizzling in the skillet

14:38 NARRATION: I was starved. And I’ll be honest. I didn’t know how to cook a buffalo steak. A little olive oil, crank up the flame, and a ribeye in the frying pan.

VIDEO: Sizzling

VIDEO: Beau and Troy/”How does a buffalo sound? Ask your dad, he knows.” Troy...tell ‘em.

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15:02 NARRATION: My sister Feather was around the house, and her husband Troy, and their three children.

15:16 BEAU: “Whose bag of weeds are these? Troy, see my spinach mix; I guess this is supposed to be spinach. Spinach is the shit of foods.”

VIDEO: behind Troy and Beau at stove.

Exchange off camera: “What does a buffalo look like? Ask your dad, he knows.”

15:29 NARRATION: My first couple of times cooking, I just plain burned the meat. Buffalo is so lean; it doesn’t cook in its own fat. You have to turn the temperature down, and keep turning the steak. Go slow.

VIDEO: Nevada nephew in chair

VIDEO: fork pushing on steak, sizzle, and corn in background boiling.

VIDEO: tight on boiling corn

VIDEO: wide of Beau in profile pushing fork into steak

15:48 NARRATION: When I was growing up, we ate poor...lots of stew and lots of soup. With eight children, my mother knew how to make things stretch. I wish she was around today to see this.

16:03 BEAU: “As far as traditional foods, I was never taught about traditional foods. I guess it never came up. For us, traditional food was Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and crackers.”

VIDEO: knife cutting steak in skillet, blows on piece, eats and nods “Yes”, back to skillet.

16:24 Kibbe Conti: The biggest shift really started to happen in the 50s and 60s, when we went to packaged foods and we lost more and more of our food traditions. Fewer people were able to gather, or hunt, or grow gardens. The types of foods that were replacing our traditional foods were really inferior, fried starchy foods, like frybread, to replace our gathered plants or some of our traditional starches, processed meats instead of buffalo.

VIDEO: two kids looking at dinner plates. Beau sits down and begins to eat.

VIDEO: Nina and Jayden

VIDEO: Beau gives DeVon and Lyle a bite

VIDEO: Beau hands a bite to Nevada, “Where’s Nina. Nina you want a bite? Is it good?”

VIDEO: Beau to no one “This is a tomato. Want to try it? No, how about you Nevada. It’s like a grape.

VIDEO: Beau and Nina talk about tomatoes, Nina spits

17:08 NARRATION: By the end of my first dinner I had given away more of my steak than I had eaten.

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This is just how I imagined it in my dreams... Maybe people were hesitant now. Maybe they just thought they didn’t like the taste. But slowly, if I just start eating healthy, maybe they would start too.

17:50 VIDEO: DeVon singing Lakota War Song at beginning of basketball game. “And now...the Little Wound Mustangs”

18:32 NARRATION: It’s a funny thing. There are books about traditional foods in Lakota culture. But you can’t find anything about how our ancestors exercised. Crazy Horse and his warriors didn’t “exercise”. They just lived really active lives. These days on Pine Ridge we do a lot of sitting around, but it is basketball that has replaced the war party and the buffalo hunt. In my family, everyone plays basketball.

VIDEO: Basketball sequence, jump ball,

ARCHIVAL VIDEO: Dusty Lebeau in archival footage

19:02 NARRATION: My dad, Dusty LeBeau is one of the most honored high school basketball coaches in South Dakota. He has taken every one of my brothers and sisters to the South Dakota state tournament. My dad retired after my mother died, with one last child waiting his turn. That’s DeVon, my youngest brother, starting guard on the Little Wound High School basketball team.

19:29 When I was in the 7th grade my dad told me that I would probably be the starting point guard on the Red Cloud High School team as an 8th grader. I spent the whole summer running in the hills behind Evergreen getting in shape. It seemed like my energy was endless.

19:46 ARCHIVAL VIDEO: 1993 championship game

VIDEO: Archival footage of tournament. “Drives the lane. Oh, spectacular.”

VIDEO: of Beau playing basketball with Jeffrey (no audio)

19:54 NARRATION: I haven’t played basketball in fifteen years...too fat, can’t run down the court. But if you ask me what I dream about when I think of a healthy life, it’s not beating diabetes, or heart disease, or even looking good for my girlfriend. It’s playing basketball. God, I would love to play basketball with my son.

20:14 First things first. I’m going to have to start slow, learn to walk before I can run. So I asked Russell Price to meet me at the Porcupine Fitness Center and teach me how to take baby steps.

NAT SOT Fitness Center sequence

20:30 I can’t wait to get my brother and my friends on the machines around me. We’ll take the place over.

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20:38 I started my new life on February 14. I was eating right, exercising, taking my diabetes blood test every day. An amazing thing happened after just four days. I lost 2 pounds.

20:59 NARRATION: The next day my legs hurt so much I could barely get off the couch. I couldn’t even get up to go to the sweat. I had a nice buffalo ribeye steak defrosting in the sink. That’s when Kibbe Conti showed up. Kibbe is a member of my tribe, and a diet expert who works with Dr. Weiland.

21:19 KIBBE CONTI: One of the food sources if you look at the Great Plains, it’s a grasslands, one of the limited food sources is sources of carbohydrates. And certain tribes did cultivate, and we would trade, or pillage, and we would trade or steal for crops. Corn, beans, squash, potatoes, but as far as gathered starchy plants they were quite limited. Our people are not vegetarian. I know a number of Lakotas that tried to be vegetarian. It just doesn’t work. Our bodies crave meat.”

21:55 NARRATION: Up until last week, I figure I was drinking two 44 ounce root beers and four cans of Mt. Dew every day... That’s equal to about two cups of sugar right there.

22:06 KIBBE CONTI: 90% of our pop consumption is sweetened pop with real sugar. 17 teaspoons of sugar in a 20 ounce soda. And physiologically it’s really devastating, even more so for our own people, because it’s a jolt to our system. We are not well adapted to quantities of sugar.”

22:30 NARRATION: But I stopped cold turkey, and I started drinking water and our native chiaka.

Kibbe wanted to make buffalo chili with fresh onions and peppers. So my first big compromise was to use store bought vegetables and fruits.

VIDEO: Beau tasting: Now it smells like chili.

VIDEO: Beau and Kibbe talking about ingredients

VIDEO: Beau joking with Jeffrey “You’re a punk.”

VIDEO: Jayden: Is this healthy for you Uncle Beau?”

VIDEO: “Blow on it because it’s hot.”

VIDEO: children eating

23:57 BEAU: My nieces and nephews are all under ten. They are like, ‘I want some buffalo. I want some buffalo.’ The sisters and the brothers are...they’d rather not.

24:16 DANI: “You know, being fed hamburger our whole lives, the processed beef, that’s what we’re used to. I’m sure if we ate buffalo our whole lives there wouldn’t be a big deal. But there’s a game taste to it. I call it a game taste. It’s a...there’s more of a blood taste, personally me, I can’t handle.”

24:49 NARRATION: The hardest problem was shopping. It’s not so much that I hate to shop. It’s just that I don’t know how. Kibbe kept putting these disgusting plastic foods in front of me, trying to

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teach me about labels and food groups, and it made me crazy. It turned shopping into a nightmare of choices, almost all of them bad.

VIDEO: Beau shopping at Sioux Market

25:10 NARRATION: I live on Porcupine Butte; it’s thirty miles south to the Sioux Nation shopping center in Pine Ridge. Can you imagine driving thirty miles just to shop? Sioux Nation doesn’t sell buffalo...too expensive, I guess.

VIDEO: Beau shopping for bananas

25:26 NARRATION: Everything costs more than at markets in Rapid City. Because I go to sweat ceremony at least twice a week, I’m always dehydrated. Dr. Weiland wanted me to eat lots of bananas for their potassium and grapes for sugar.

25:45 NARRATION: My sisters do the real shopping in my family. The shops at Walmart in Rapid City, ninety miles from home. And when they shop, they shop big...really big.

VIDEO: Unloading groceries in kitchen

26:03 FEATHER: I think Walmart is way cheaper. You can get so much more groceries.

DANI: Especially if you need to feed an army.

26:12 NARRATION: You can buy buffalo at Walmart, but it’s corn fed, feedlot buffalo, pressed into patties, and it costs $5.00 a pound just for hamburger. That leaves Indians out. My sisters use the food stamp program, and $5 hamburger just doesn’t make sense when you can buy cheap ground beef for less than $2 a pound.

26:35 DANI: “How can I say this...I shop to make my children happy. And when they watch TV and see these sweet cereal commercials, and these cookie commercials and they tell me, “Mommy I want that,” when I go to the store, that’s what I buy.”

26:56 NARRATION: Bag after bag after bag. There was nothing for me to eat. I knew I was on the right path. But I could feel myself slipping away from the rest of the family. How’s this going to work if I’m going in one direction while the family is going in one direction and the family is still going in the other?

27:15 FEATHER: Shopping healthy is exhausting. I was standing in the aisle, for like ten minutes in one aisle, reading labels.

27:24 DANI: That’s another reason we don’t eat healthy. We just don’t know how. If that’s... possible. We just don’t know how, to even shop healthy. When I go to Walmart, too, I will look in my basket sometimes, and I even get embarrassed because my cart is full of sweets, and these white ladies will walk by and they will have brown noodles, and fat-free bread.

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SOT FEATHER: I never bought them until Beau started his diet.

27:51NARRATION: There is an alternative to Walmart. The tribal commodity program. This is a program that dates back to the beginning of reservation life, when the government promised to provide food to replace the buffalo hunt. We were supposed to be learning how to farm.

VIDEO: sequence of commodity warehouse, delivery truck

28:09 NARRATION: Stories about the commodity program are legendary and scandalous...rotten beef, bugs in the flour. But you know what, these days the commodity program offers healthy food, including ground buffalo burger, free to tribal members. Big trucks make deliveries directly to the neighborhoods. But there is one hitch.

28:31 DANI: ...if you choose to pick commodities, and get the commodities, you can’t get the EBT program, the food stamps, and that’s one problem. It’s either or... You can’t have both of them.

28:46 KIBBE CONTI: Typically people run out of meat in the first week to ten days. They’ll run out of the produce the first week. And so they only get the package once a month, so at the end of the month there is some food insecurity....many of our families run out of whole food groups, they might be having just fried potatoes and no meat or vegetable.

BEAU: on treadmill “March 13, 311 pounds. Twenty-two pounds.

VIDEO: Beau working out in fitness center

29:58 NARRATION: Tomorrow is my one month checkup, and I have a secret for Dr. Weiland. I’ve started to run...first time in six years.

BEAU: Last two minutes of my workout, last three times.

OFF CAMERA VOICE: Are you ready to go see him tomorrow?

BEAU: Yes, I’m gonna kick that test in the ass.”

30:01 Kevin Weiland: Beau on treadmill: “I’m not going to tell you where you’re at. Just keep going. This is easy. This is the easy part. You know how to train. Almost to your target heart rate. Much better than last time. Your target is 157. You are at 157 now. I see nothing on your EKG to suggest any coronary heart disease. Look what you’ve done to yourself. Carrying 22 pounds less makes a huge difference. Look at you.

30:47 VIDEO: Basketball game/Crowd cheering.

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30:53 NARRATION: There’s one good way to tell that the end of winter is near in South Dakota...the state high school basketball tournament. My dad was in the stands instead of on the bench, but true to family tradition, DeVon’s Little Wound team made it to the state tournament.

VIDEO: Beau yelling in stands: “Pressure him full court, he’s hurt.”

VIDEO: Beau and family in stands

VIDEO/AUDIO: Here we go Mustangs, here we go. Here we go Mustangs, here we go.”

31:23 NARRATION: When I went back and looked at the video tape of my family in the stands, I was shocked by how big I looked. I knew I was making progress...almost 30 pounds, but I still couldn’t see the difference. There was something else I noticed. In the middle of the crowd, surrounded by family and friends, I felt all alone.

31:46 BEAU: “I think every person I’ve talked to said, I should try that. I should do that. Every person I talked to. Every person I told about this diet, “I wish I could do that. I should do that.” It’s to the point now where the next person who says that, I’m going to say, “Well, why don’t you?”

32:16 VIDEO: Beau getting on sale: “300. Exactly.”

VIDEO: Beau doing blood test “89”

32:54 SPRINGTIME

VIDEO: Clouds

Sun Dance tree

33:06 NARRATION: After months of being cooped up, everyone comes outdoors with the first hint of spring.

VIDEO: Nevada playing basketball outside

VIDEO: Children on trampoline

VIDEO: Fire at sweat lodge

VIDEO: Horse Shoe sequence

33:15 NARRATION: It’s still cold, but Nevada starts playing basketball outside, and the trampoline is dragged to the side of the house to protect it from the wind. Even afternoons at the sweat lodge change. In winter, everyone shows up at the last minute, just before we go inside but come spring, there’s time to stand around the fire and talk. There’s even time for a game of horseshoes. And with spring comes Easter Sunday, and the beginning of my week from Hell.

33:58 BEAU: I found one of my big weaknesses is potato salad. That’s how it started. I’ll have a little more, small plate, but I’ll have a biscuit with that. Before I knew it, but the end of the day I could feel it.”

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VIDEO: Kevin weighing Beau

34:35 BEAU: “Get to the doctor’s office, step on the scale, I gained four pounds, and I was, that started it off, I was pissed. I was thinking the damn scale is wrong. I should have taken my clothes off. All kinds of excuses. Took my blood sugar, came back, 142. Before Easter, and the potato salad, and all that stuff, I was under 100. And then he comes in and he wants to try a monitor on me, a glucose monitor. It’s a little needle that they stick in my stomach, wires coming out. So I walk out of the hospital with pills, and wires hanging out, and a packet of information and pills, coming out of the hospital it felt like I was sick, and I didn’t like that feeling.”

35:42 KEVIN: “We could continuously monitor his blood sugar over that three day period. And show him what he was doing. Well, it was a complete failure. He was frustrated. He felt like a guinea pig. Poked again.”

35:57 BEAU: “All the way from Rapid to home, which is a eighty-mile trip, it goes off. It went off all the way home. It said, error, some kind of error. I didn’t want to be monitored anymore. So it goes off all the way home, just goes off, so pretty soon I just turned it off. Get home, I took that thing off, I ain’t gonna do this.”

36:24 KEVIN: “You know, there was some tension. I think he trusted me. I know he trusted me. But there was an element of some experimentation going on.”

36:34 BEAU: “I like Dr. Weiland, he’s a cool guy. But he is a doctor. Maybe it’s in our genetics. We just won’t fully trust the wasichu guy. We won’t fully commit. That’s the way it is.”

VIDEO: Beau on treadmill in fitness center.

36:54 BEAU: “...felt a little frustrated today. Visited Dr. He tells me eat less, work more. Half a steak a day. The whole day sucked. 52 days in and I’m still by myself, expect for my son. My son came with me today. That’s good, that’s a start.”

37:40 NARRATION: I ramped the incline on that treadmill up more than I ever have. And when I got home I was totally exhausted. But I kept telling myself, don’t panic. I still had my buffalo and my corn.

37:59 Black Card: The Next Day

VIDEO: Beau on treadmill

VIDEO: Trying to get on cycle

38:08 BEAU: My left foot, the one that is injured, it feels like this. This foot’s turned in. I knew something had to happen because this is going a little too good for me. Ouch, that’s worst. That’s worser.

VIDEO: Beau and Dr. Weiland looking at X-ray

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38:37 NARRATION: Just when I imagined going outside, hiking in the hills, Dr. Weiland’s advice was the last thing I wanted to hear. A stress fracture, no exercise for two weeks.

38:52 VIDEO: front of Red Cloud Indian School

ARCHIVAL VIDEO: photographs of kids on Red Cloud farm

38:53 NARRATION: In the old days, before my time, when Red Cloud Indian School was still a boarding school, the priests and students grew their own food. They even had a small ranch where they raised grass-fed cattle. Elders like to say that nobody got sick back then. And those who grew up during the Depression still make little victory gardens wherever they can find good soil along the creeks.

39:15 My brother-in-Law Troy got all excited about the idea of planting tomatoes behind the house...but we don’t have enough water pressure for a real garden, so my cousin Jeremy invited us to give it a try at his place.

VIDEO: Lawnmower

VIDEO: Sequence of lawn mowing, rototilling, garden preparation

39:32 NARRATION: My grandpa always kept a big garden along Porcupine Creek, and when I told him that we were going to plant a garden in the Badlands he just laughed; “Nothing’s gonna grow up there. You gonna plant cactus?”

39:45 NARRATION: We Lakota have always thought of ourselves as buffalo hunters, and our warrior chiefs hated the idea of becoming farmers. I tried to make believe that Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull weren’t looking down on me.

39:58 I mowed the cactus, the buffalo grass, and blue gramma. We rototilled, and rototilled, and rototilled some more. All afternoon we rototilled, and after two hours we had not even scratched the ground. That gumbo soil was like trying to plow granite.

40:24 NARRATION: You know what? We’re not farmers. We’re warrior hunters. I didn’t even try to plant seeds, and I never went back to the garden for the rest of the summer.

VIDEO: Beau cooking pot of buffalo tongue.

VIDEO: Sequence of women prepping girls for Prom

40:43 NARRATION: April 15. Prom night. There’s no rite of spring like high school prom night, and the house is full of women, including my daughter Tangerine.

BEAU: “Anyone want some tongue before they go to prom?”

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BEAU: “People are just grossed out by tongue. Because it’s really a tongue. But I love it. I could probably eat it every day if I had it.

BEAU: You know what’s really good for holding hair styles? Buffalo grease. Laughter.

41:23 NARRATION: I’m down to 294 pounds, and I’ve got about half my buffalo left. My sisters are starting to notice.

41:31 DANI: One day he was standing here dribbling the ball, and he was taking it around his back, and then he looked, and he was like “Ahhhh” I can put it around me back; I couldn’t do that before because my stomach was in the way.

41:50 NARRATION: One day, in early May, I went for my regular workout and the door to the fitness center was closed. And the next day. And the next day.

42:01 Fitness Center been closed for five days now, having some kind of flooding problem. I’ve been stuck at 287 for five damn days.

VIDEO: Thunder Valley boys cutting wood

42:19 NARRATION: It was like the spirits were forcing my outside. It was time to start preparing for Sun Dance. A hundred men and women will dance, sweat, fast and pray for four days.

Many of the dancers will pierce. I will drag buffalo skulls.

VIDEO: Montage of activity prepping sweat lodges, fire pit, Sun Dance grounds.

43:16 NARRATION: Look around, you can see it, I’m not the only over-weight Indian out there. But I still can’t get anyone interested in eating buffalo meat.

43:25 FEATHER: I was talking about that with Troy today. I was thinking to myself, “Why can’t I join him?” And I think it has something to do with that buffalo meat. I can Make Sloppy Joe’s, buffalo meat, up to the Sun Dance grounds, and they ask me is it beef or buffalo, and I have to lie. I say, It’s beef. If I say buffalo, they say, “Yuck. I can’t believe I ate that.”

VIDEO sequence: family playing basketball, gathering n backyard

43:58 NARRATION After the sweat lodges have been completed, and we’ve dug the fire pits, my brother Jerome calls our circle together to record Sun Dance songs. I’ve traded some of my hamburger for tongues, and I’m eating them like snack food.

VIDEO: Beau calling to Nevada

VIDEO: people playing basketball

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44:21 My whole family descends on the house.

VIDEO: Jerome, DeVon, Tangerine eating tongue

VIDEO: Beau “Damn, I knew I should have cooked two.”

45:13 VIDEO: Jerome talking about “singing from your heart”

VIDEO/AUDIO: Drum sequence

46:23 VIDEO: Beau: June 11. I weigh 278, five pounds away from 60 pounds. Shaving tipi poles today.

VIDEO: Scrapping tipi poles

VIDEO: Sequence Putting up tipi

BEAU: “We’re going to lift it, and then walk out. One, Two, Three, Lift.”

47:58 Black: SUMMER

NAT SOT Sequence of summer shots

VIDEO: Buffalo in pasture

48:23 NARRATION: It’s mid-June, and we are now within a week of the Summer solstice. Sun Dancers have come from all over the country to participate. The tribe has given our circle a buffalo.

VIDEO: BEAU in pasture watching buffalo being shot

VIDEO: Group gathered around kill drinking blood

48:48 NARRATION: One buffalo won’t stretch very far among 500 people, it’s mostly a symbol of our ancient relationship. But there’s plenty of blood to go around...more than most of the guys want.

VIDEO: Group washing intestines and cutting up meat for tonega

49:19 NARRATION: Every year I am put in charge of cleaning the tonega. Most of the elders complain that we clean the intestines too well. They like a little dirt in their tripe.

VIDEO: group eating tripe

VIDEO: Beau being put inside heart monitor

49:53 NARRATION: I have completely forgotten about my diet. I have a new life. It’s second nature. But I have one more appointment with Dr. Weiland to check my heart and make final measurements.

50:08 Kevin Weiland: Typically with metabolic syndrome with diabetes, we see abnormalities in the lipid profile. His cholesterol wasn’t that bad. Despite eating the red meat that he did, and the exercise, his

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cholesterol got lower. His HDLs went up and his LDLs went even lower. So that was impressive. Beau went into this tube to assess for calcium in his arteries; calcium is a component of the plaque in the arteries. Beau had zero calcium.

50:44 VIDEO: Beau with Kevin Weiland, at lab and treadmill

50:54 Kevin Weiland: The other take home message here is that he didn’t have to take medication. This study suggests diet and exercise alone you can prevent diabetes in 66% of the population. The Native Americans, they have the ingredients, they have what’s right in their backyard. The grass-fed buffalo.

51:13 VIDEO: Beau setting up last tipi: June 20th. I lost 59 pounds so far. Blood sugar is at 93 this morning. Now I’m a supervisor.

VIDEO: tipi village

51:34 VIDEO: “Next week coming up is one of the most strenuous on me. Getting ready for Sun Dance which is one of the biggest ceremonies us Lakotas have. And one of our most sacred. As far as I know no sun dance has ever been filmed and we’re not about to start at this one. So we’ve got to shut it down. I’ll talk to you guys in a week maybe a week, week and a half.”

52:04 Epilogue: The End of the Beginning

VIDEO Montage: Badlands, Porcupine Creek/, Sun Dance Tree, yellow cone flowers, purple flowers

52:32 NARRATION: It was 110 degrees on the first day of the Sun Dance. And 100 degrees the next. By the end of the second day we had danced the grass into dust and some dancers developed painful blisters on their feet. But we kept dancing.

VIDEO: Sun Dance tree and arbor after dance

52:48 On the third day, I dragged buffalo skulls, but I since I weighed sixty pounds less, I kept leaning forward and pulling, pulling, but the skulls just dug into the ground and wouldn’t move. I really had to work hard to drag them around the circle.

53:03 Kevin Weiland: I saw him right after Sun Dance. I was very impressed by the deep wounds in his back. I thought they might get infected. They were fine. Just his whole condition, he came back so euphoric, so energized. It was grueling. It had to be.

VIDEO: Sun Dance arbor

53:26 NARRATION: Everything slows down in July while the dancers heal up.

VIDEO: Beau getting shampoo and hair cut

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53:41 NARRATION: I went to Rapid City to get my hair cut, and took a whole day just walking around the air conditioned mall, eating ice cream.

VIDEO: woman washing Beau’s hair

VIDEO: Beau with jeffrey and chokecherries

VIDEO of Beau cutting onions

53:53 NARRATION: I still had no job. The tribe never re-opened the fitness center after the sewage pipes broke. The camera crew left. Dr. Weiland moved on to other patients. It was so hot at night that I stopped wearing my sleep apnea mask. The headaches came back.

VIDEO: cooking ground burger

54:16 NARRATION: I was mad for a while, mad at everyone. In the winter, when I was excited and full of enthusiasm, I ate my steaks first. By August I was down to just ground burger.

VIDEO: Porcupine community pow wow montage

VIDEO: Montage of fat people

54:38 NARRATION: When the Porcupine community pow wow came around in September, I had lost almost seventy pounds, but after the pow wow I finally ran out of buffalo meat. I couldn’t expect the tribe to keep me stocked with cheap meat. And Feather kept asking me, “What if every over-weight Lakota showed up wanting a buffalo.” I was on a roller coaster. I started to gain weight. And worst of all, my blood sugar started to shoot up again. And I’m diabetic again. Did I fail? I don’t really think so. Those six months were like a wonderful dream of the future.

55:26 Kevin Weiland: He even says he took the buffalo off of the ceremonial shelf, and put it on his plate. He worshipped it. He consumed it. He ate it. He honored it. There had to have been a cultural component that energized him.

55:45 NARRATION: We spend an awful lot of time thinking that the solutions to our problems lie in some government office in Washington, or a grant from a casino tribe, or even a miracle. But you know what I learned...If we can get ourselves organized, if we can learn to work together, if we can use the Sun Dance circles for support, we’ve got solutions right in front of us, staring us right in the face.

VIDEO: Nevada eating buffalo

56:15 VIDEO/AUDIO: Children’s drum group