Below is an overview of the "Trickster" story. I will be adding many more related documents hyperlinked to sections of this story and under the features tab that may over time help you or I solve this mystery.
Trickster
I. A Lakotah Life.
I grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Went to local schools named after Native Americans: Hopewell, Lakota, and Miami. In all that time I never met a "real-live" Indian. To me they were statues in the natural history museum, warriors and mystics riding across celluloid plains garbed in feathers and war paint. Myths long dead to history. That is till I moved to Prague in 1992 and met Kaniwa Sa-el Shunk Manitu (Coyote).
Sal (or Sa-el) for short.
The first time I met him, (and as I much later told him), I thought he was the weirdest looking Italian person I'd ever met, an apocryphal thought if there ever was one. Long hair, eyes intense like a Picasso: deep, dark, angry. Unless he found that he liked and trusted you.
I got to know him. I laid back at first embarrassed and intimidated: I knew little about the Lakota(h), my high school's namesake, the irony of which wasn't exactly lost on me. Sa-el was also a very knowledgeable, well-read person in general and had little time for the un-curious, un-free thinker. A group of friends began to form. We started a restaurant and a Free School to teach Gypsy (Roma) kids English. There were about 30,000 Americans in Prague in the early 90's by some estimates, most of them there to write, paint, make films, play music. Sa-el had done all of this and more in cities all over the world. We looked to him for his opinions and guidance. Here was someone with a fully formed and opinionated world-view, something few of us had, all being in our early twenties.
Sa-el was much older than the rest of us. He'd been there in the 40's for Swing, the 50's on the Freedom Buses and on to road trips with the most famous of the Beats, whom he knew personally; the 60's spent in Haight-Ashbury, travelling with the Merry Pranksters, hanging out with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, protesting at the '68 Convention in Chicago, the Weathermen, witnessing Woodstock, The Second Battle of Wounded Knee and then settling down in the 70's and 80's to write and publish books and get his screenplays optioned.
At the end of the 80's the revolution in the Soviet Union happened and Sa-el took off to Europe to find the spirit of an age he then felt had been lost in the U.S. Looking for a city called "America" in pre-separation, post-revolution Czechoslovakia. Looking for the euphoria of "everything's possible". He found it, as we all did, for a while.
I learned a lot about the Lakotah people from him, the life on the reservation. The paradox of the glamorization of the Indian Life in Hollywood film, while Lakotah children were struggling through life amidst extreme poverty in the middle of the richest country in the world. Infant mortality rates on the reservation were often as high as some third world countries. I learned from him a bit about his Lakotah spirituality and it's similarity to the "Don Juan" books by Carlos Casteneda. How it differed completely from Christian beliefs and how Jesuit missionaries and the European/ American conquest of the West have left the once nomadic and proud peoples of the plains penned up on reservations protecting the corrupted remnants of a nearly extinct culture, one rampant with alcoholism and the diseases born of poverty that leave little hope for the future. This is what I learned from Sa-el, and sometimes adopted as my own opinions, especially when they were backed up by the books he gave me to read: "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", "Black Hills, White Justice", etc.
Over time I also learned about Sa-els own story which, tragically, wasn't an uncommon one for the Native American People. He told me that when he was eight he was taken off the reservation by the federal orphanage authorities after his grandfather was arrested for performing an illegal ceremony involving the sacrifice of the then endangered buffalo. His teacher at an orphanage in St. Louis sold him on the illegal adoption child market to an Italian family in Boston who had a birth certificate forged to give him a new identity. He worked laying floors for a few years for the family company till he could reason out where he was from geographically, and then he ran away, setting off on an extraordinary life that encompassed most of the major events of the 20th century.
I was lucky enough to have recorded his oral history surrounding these events in Part I (A Lakotah Life: The Last Buffalo Hunt) of an extensive audio-biography Sa-el was writing about his amazing life. (See features section). When this first part was finished, we decided to try and return to the States together on a ship and in the process make a documentary about our planned road trip from NYC to LA. We would stop along the way so Sa-el could reminisce.
These projects, plans and that amazing life was sadly cut short when Sa-el passed away in September 2002, not long after we made a hastily planned flight back to the States as Sa-el's health noticeably deteriorated. One of Sa-el's last wishes was to be cremated, but there wasn't a next of kin to sign and the State won't cremate without it. I contacted the Lakotah Nation to see if their laws, as separate nations, could circumvent Michigan law. No record of Sa-el's existence on the reservation could be found. And he didn't want "those people" from his adoptive family in Boston contacted. He was buried in a pauper's grave in a section of the Ann Arbor cemetery called "Hope".
II. A Lakotah Life?
I went on with my life back in Prague, but decided to move back to the States in the spring of 2003. Prague had become a bit of a ghost town, and my family needed me here. In September, me and three more of Sa-el's close friends decided to take a road trip out to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, return some of Sa-el's belongings as a symbolic gesture, and try to get something more conclusive on his identity. We met with Lyman Red Cloud, the son of the Lakotah chief and his wife Summer who were extremely generous with their time, home and information. We played them the 3 hour long audio-biography I had recorded with Sa-el. "A Lakotah Life". Some things in the story jibed, but others didn't.
We went searching for a particular place form the story, a place where Sa-el mentioned having jumped up on to have a vision during "The Last Buffalo Hunt" with his grandfather. We followed directions gleaned from the audio-biography as best we could, asked the Lakotah if they had ever heard of a place called "Rock That Stands Like a Bear". "Yes" they said. "You know that film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'? The mountain in the film? That's it." We drove there and of course couldn't imagine anyone having "jumped up on it". "Was he talking about the spirit world?" We found ourselves bending far over backwards to lend his tale veracity.
All the things Sa-el had always mentioned that he hated about life on the reservation, the poverty, the corruption by Christianity, the corrupted "culture" stultified as a museum piece, then venerated as the pure "religion", it was all there. Indians dancing to Christ, the most sacred mountain being blown up to build a monument to Crazy Horse equivalent to that of Mount Rushmore, the European monarchial system of one family rule replacing the influence of elders…all was there and just as Sa-el had described it. There was a lot of truth in his worldview, but we couldn't find much to corroborate his autobiography.
We spent nearly two weeks there checking the records of the post office, the school he claimed to have attended, names he had mentioned in the audio-biography. Admittedly, the records kept on the reservation aren't the most accurate, but even the timeline of events in Sa-el's audiobiography weren't adding up. We were sometimes dealing with the Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives which Sa-el had told us were corrupt...but there had to be something or someone to corroborate his story. But there wasn't…and we were beginning to feel a little foolish…and then it was time to leave.
I then entered a true hall of mirrors from which I still haven't exited.
III. Trickster
In January of 2004 I received a trunk full of Sa-el's only belongings: books on Lakotah culture, copies of his novels and scripts, letters, photos, newspaper articles on himself, cassettes of radio interviews with him, a birth certificate and an address book. In this address book was an entry:
"Pine Ridge Reservation:
Joseph Gray Hawk P.O. 7210
Walking Little Deer P.O. 2241
Larry White Cloud P.O. 2316"
I immediately called Lyman Red Cloud's wife, Summer. She went to the Post office and the records bureau. None of these names had ever been registered, none of them were even known Lakotah family names, and she said that the Post Box numbers had never gone so high on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Also, I found several Xeroxed cut and pasted pages assembled from a variety of books on Lakotah culture in the trunk. These in their own way followed the narrative of "The Last Buffalo Hunt". Was Sa-el just refreshing his memory or just making it all up? Had he invented this entire identity, being "just" the wayward son of some Italian-American family. I had reached the two poles of the conundrum of Shunk Manitu's (Coyote's) history, and it didn't stop there.
IV. Shapeshifters and Multiple Personality Disorder
Sa-el, both in his fiction writing and in general, had always expressed an interest in Multiple Personality Disorder. He suggested several titles for me to read and made an indirect connection between shamanism and MPD. An ability to "become" one's totem was central to Native American spirituality, he seemed to indirectly suggest, especially in terms of the "separate realities". Most of his major characters in his fiction writing, which was mostly in the psychological thriller genre, are suffering from some mental disorder or another. In some cases, his younger male characters are molested, develop MPD and then go on to commit horrendous crimes of which they are unaware. Was there a key to Sa-el's story there somewhere? I have yet to find out and may never know. Recently, through Sa-el's social worker in Ann Arbor, I was told that a sister has turned up in Boston. Would she be able to tell me the "truth" or would she just be trying to keep "skeletons" in the family closet? I was wary of what I might find. It was and still is a case of my head versus my heart. I feel that he was Shunk Manitu, although there may never be a piece of paper that says so. Or at the very least he was the truest of Coyotes: a metaphysical trickster par excellence.
V. Shaman or Sham-man?
Early on in my friendship with Sa-el, we began discussing the Don Juan books by Carlos Casteneda. I have subsequently learned that Casteneda was discovered to be somewhat of a sham, that he made up most of the events in the Don Juan books, although I and many others have had success with some of the cues and philosophies suggested by Don Juan.
Sa-el always said that he wasn't anybody's shaman and didn't want to be. He was in Prague for "personal reasons", a kind of "secret" which I found out piecemeal over time, and which he related to other friends as well as at least one journalist friend during an interview (See Features). His revealing of secrets seemed to be a battle against what he termed the "gradfathers", who were trying to control his life's path, something he often bristled against.
He said his reason for being in Prague, besides looking for a 2nd wave of Sixties euphoria, was because of a nephew named Boro, which meant, according to Sa-el, "2 times, 2 ways". Boro and he had crossed over in a vision quest in the 60's. In the vision Boro crossed over a bridge but "didn't return". He was meant to "return" as a woman. In Prague Sa-el believed that he had discovered a reflection of the bridge from this vision quest and even the woman that Boro had returned as. But it didn't work out the way he thought it would and over time he became more embittered to the point where he couldn't wait to return to the country he had fled in disgust so many years ago. His vision had evaporated and maybe so to had his will for life.
To be honest though, many others and I have found a lot of wisdom in the Casteneda books. I also found a lot of wisdom and knowledge in Sa-el. He was a close and valuable friend who showed me how to live, paradoxically enough, in the "real-world".
The creation of Identity, Truth and Myth are all intertwined in this story. What I still hope to find, but may never, is that the truth of his knowledge and the truth of his history are one.
In either case, the impact of this experience and the lessons I have learned from my contact with Salvatore Richard Giannnetta aka Kaniwa Sa-el Shunk Manitu aka Coyote the Trickster are invaluable, and I'm sure there will be many more enlightening surprises on my path through this hall of mirrors to the finish of "Trickster".