Part Three: Friends
Nothing is known about his first wife, aside from the fact that he married her in 1948 and had two children, before seemingly just walking out one day and moving in with a divorcee who lived across the street and had a young daughter. This woman, Wanda, would become his companion for the next half-century. [KK]
He became a merchant marine, not for the love of the sea, but because the Navy offered the only chance to escape prison time for his association with the Home Army. If he was lucky, he would even get to travel outside of Poland. [KK] He did eventually travel all over the world, and even visited the Indian reservations in Canada, but any claims that he met old friends and relatives there -- his brother, his sister, his childhood friend Jumping Owl -- are either highly suspicious or clearly fabricated. His mother died in Kielce in 1963, aged 82.
By the mid 1960s, his first two books had been translated into a dozen languages, and the man himself made frequent appearances on TV. In the 1970s, he started putting his name behind such political campaigns as the release of Leonard Peltier and better living conditions, medical care, and education on the reserves. His articles in Polish newspapers decrying the plight of “his people” were no doubt well received by the authorities. Exposing racism in the United States was a favorite tactic of the Soviet propaganda machine, and with sentences like “Of those Indians who are able to find work, most earn less than twice the salary of the average Negro” [KK] Sat Okh was playing right into their hands.
But just like that magical feeling one got when opening one of his books – that this wasn’t just another story, that no one could write like this unless they’d actually been there – there must have been something about his articles that made them feel like more than just another piece of rhetoric. The last chapter in Katarzyna Krępulec’s monograph is dedicated to the movement that started growing around Sat Okh at this time: Friends of the Indians, “a people almost as fascinating as the object of their fascination, because their views, their nature, and sometimes even their entire lives were shaped by this passion.” [KK]
No single person claims the title of the “father” of the movement, but over time, Sat Okh, now in his 60s, became its “grandfather”. A real live Indian in full ceremonial dress, the main attraction at rallies; but so much more than that. In a country cut off from the Western world by the Iron Curtain, Sat Okh was “a walking repository of knowledge.” Secrets of rare crafts learned during far off travels were shared. Priceless books and artifacts received from Native American friends in Canada were brought to meetings and bestowed as gifts to disciples. [KK] And although ‘Grandpa’ ”smoked like a chimney and drank like a sailor (which he was)”, several sources [KK, W] point out that one of the most valuable aspects of the Movement, in addition to teaching about Indian culture and respect for the Earth, was that it saved many young people from alcohol and drug addictions.
“Warrior by Birth” contains incredible footage of Polish teenagers building a giant tipi, curing animal hides, and showing off their beautifully embroidered costumes. Don Yellow Kidney from Browning, Montana, grudgingly admits on camera that few Native Americans today know how to do any of these things, and that the quality of the objects produced by the young people at Tuchola surpasses that of many Native American craftsmen. Three of Sat Okh’s disciples, twin brothers Leon and Jan Rzatkowski and their friend Cyprian Świątek, even went into business with the Dakota Sioux, exchanging hard-to-obtain raw materials for finished crafts that regularly win awards at exhibitions of Native American art in the US. [NW]
Children hung on to his every word. Young women found him irresistible. But there were other people in the audience, “the so-called grown-ups”, who kept asking the same tough questions, year after year. Yet Sat Okh somehow always managed to “dispose of the enemy”. He was handsome, quick-witted, and an incredible storyteller. [KK]
In 1997, “The Evening Coast”, a newspaper serving the city of Gdansk where Sat Okh now resided, published a series of articles titled “Fake Indian”. I have not read them in their entirety (the online archive only goes as far back as 1998.) As quoted by Krepulec, the articles were rather mean-spirited and sensationalist. But they validated the doubts of many “Friends of the Indians”, who now had access to sources they could not have dreamed of just a few years earlier; and they confirmed the suspicions of all those who had ever caught Sat Okh in inconsistencies and fabrications. [KK]
To some, that settled it. “Sat Okh was no longer an Indian, and Stanislaw Suplatowicz was no longer a friend.” [KK] Others went to great lengths to explain away the problematic aspects of the legend and defend its basic elements. Still others maintained that the man’s legacy mattered far more than where he was born. The man himself declined to comment. Retreating from the public eye in the late 90s to care for the terminally ill Wanda, Sat Okh reappeared in 2002, with a new wife on his arm and, as we have seen in “Warrior by Birth” [W], still steadfastly telling the same story. Where was he born? Who was his real father? What were his childhood and adolescence really like? To those who doubt the official version, there may never be a satisfactory answer to any of those questions.
One version of events would go something like this: Stanislaw Suplatowicz is born in Alekseevka, his father either someone inconsequential or someone best forgotten. There is no brother, no sister. His mother, after 20 years in Siberia, is very different from the delicate young woman she once was. There is no one waiting for her back in Poland. And yet she undertakes the perilous journey home, with her son in tow.
In Radom, Stanislawa washes bedpans while Stan, an odd little boy who speaks only Russian, is tormented by teachers and bullied by classmates at the monastery school. Books become his escape. Later in the forest, he wows his comrades with a combination of an uncanny natural talent and “Indian tricks” learned from Karl May, Thompson Seton and Fenimore Cooper.
In a way, the story is all there in his books: the remnants of a proud nation, surviving in harsh but beautiful terrain; a woman's arduous journey; the Camp of Young Wolves, where little boys are separated from their mothers and subjected to many trials; a boy in the forest, fighting for his people’s freedom.
Wherever Stanislaw Suplatowicz actually grew up, he was clearly not an ordinary person. Fearless, charismatic, extremely intelligent and resilient, he was, like the young hero of his books, a survivor. And perhaps one of the things that helped him survive against extraordinary odds was that, when life became unbearable, this boy dreamed. He dreamed of a father who was a wise and noble chief. Of pain and hunger and loss that had a greater purpose, of a people that celebrates its heroes instead of forcing them into hiding.
The fact that he chose to tell these dreams to others, and to continue telling them and insisting that they were true even as the inconsistencies kept piling up, might prompt us (the boring grownups) to meditate on the nature of publicity: the way a little lie, a harmless fantasy, can grow and grow until it swallows a man whole; the way one’s very life story can become not one’s own any more, pressed into service to further someone else’s agenda. Or we could simply admire the fact that this boy’s dreams had so much power that not only did he get millions of people to believe that they had been true for him; but he made them come true, after a fashion, for the hundreds of kids who called him ‘Grandpa’.
