Since I was a kid, I have felt an affinity for the first Nations people. Growing up in Winnipeg Manitoba, where there was a fairly large community of disenfranchised homeless and jobless First Nations people, I noticed that they were mistreated and not respected by some of the Winnipegers. Walking past the famous Portage and Main intersection and then along Main street, I could see many people living there, gathered in that area, disenfranchised. Back in the old days less than a mile from that intersection, First Nations Tribes from all over Canada and the northern US first gathered centuries ago for trade and commerce at the Forks, where the Red and Assiniboine rivers converged, a practice continuing yearly.
A few years later, with my first band, the Squires, I traveled far North to Hudson’s Bay to play a Hotel bar in Churchill Manitoba. It was a long trip on the train, a day and a half, to get up there. It was our first road gig and I was very excited to be playing at the Churchill Hotel for a week. The folks there were all workers of one sort or another, white folks. It dawned on me that the First nations people were not in the bar. They did not seem to come to the Hotel.
One night a bear had gotten under the Hotel and started rummaging around under us. The floor was moving. Soon the bear left and everything continued. We kept playing. Another night, exceptionally cold, way below zero, we heard about a First Nations man who had gotten so drunk he fell asleep leaning on a telephone pole and died, frozen to death. Our rooming house, where we stayed was just a few hundred yards away from where that happened. We talked about it that day and went to the bar at the Hotel to play our sets, walking back afterward in the cold windy night. I thought about that First Nations man.
On the train back to Winnipeg, we again saw the tipi encampments along the rails as we headed south, snow falling in the cold.
A few years later, after playing many places in Canada, I traveled to LA with Bruce Palmer and we started Buffalo Springfield with Steve Stills, Richie Furay and Dewey Martin. Playing at the Whisky a go-go, I purchased a leather Indian coat with fringe at a cool place I saw with hippy clothing called Sidereal Time. When we were onstage, Stills wore a cowboy hat and I wore the fringed Indian jacket…..Western history – Buffalo Springfield. I wrote ‘Broken Arrow’ and we put it on one of our albums. I imagine the ‘brown skinned Indian’ in the song is me.
After the Springfield broke up, I started a solo career, naming my own band Crazy Horse, in honor of the great Chief. We began playing as Neil Young and Crazy Horse and made records under that name.
Eventually, I moved North to Broken Arrow Ranch. At the time I thought Broken Arrow was the Indian sign of Peace, after a war.
Around that time, traveling in the southwest, I had found a great wooden Indian in a junk store and took it back to Broken Arrow, placing my new carved and painted Indian holding cigars (Back in the day Indian tobacco was the best) near the front door on the porch, where everyone would have to pass to come in the house.
In the mid-seventies, I had collected some more wooden Indians that were placed in the trees around my Southern California home on the ocean in Malibu. At the time, I started taking ‘Woody’ (as he was then called) to some shows and having him stand onstage with me. He is still there with me.
When I played the Boarding House in 77 or so, I had the three wooden Indians from Malibu on stage with me. I introduced a new song – recently written at my friend Taylor Phelp’s ranch. Regrettably, the Aids epidemic had just started and Taylor was taken by Aids.
I played that new song, ‘Pocahontas’ at the Boarding House.
We were making a movie at the time and we took all the wooden Indians from Malibu with us to Taos where we were filming. Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper and Russel Tamblyn helped with the film.
In the film, group of local Native Americans carried in those same wooden Indians from my Malibu home and stacked them around a fire, lighting it. I played there as they burned, dancing around the campfire with many First Nation and other local folks….It was a heavy vibe.
The next year -1978 at the end of Crazy Horse’s ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ tour, we played in LA. I returned to my home in Malibu, finding the house was burned to the ground in a big fire that hit the area while we were playing onstage.
Woody was still at the ranch. He had missed the fire. He had not been on that tour but he was on almost every tour after that.
He became my companion. I would talk to him sometimes during and after shows, forming a close bond.
Decades later, 2014 saw us touring across Canada with the ‘Honour the Treaties’ Tour, raising several hundred thousand dollars for the First Nations Legal Defense Fund in their lawsuit against the Canadian Government for breaking ancient treaties protecting First Nations land and the First Nations “hunting and fishing way of life”. Their land was being destroyed and poisoned by the Oil Industry, particularly in Alberta’s Fort Mackinac Tar sands. A film, ‘Honour the Treaties’ is being released in 2022 commemorating that tour. Woody was at every show and press conference, alongside First Nations People.
Just two years later in 2016 as I was playing with Promise of the Real in Salt Lake City at an outdoor show, the people putting on the show objected to Woody. It was a Native American owned Casino and folks running it demanded we not have Woody on the stage. I covered Woody with a blanket and he listened but no one could see him that night. He did not seem to mind. Later that week, he was back onstage at Coachella, the huge southern California Music festival. We had tipis on the stage around us at the show. It was beautiful.
Over the many years, Woody has been with me onstage all around this world, my companion, friend and confidant. I hope we tour together many more times.