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Jeff Turning Heart: A profile in courage

He had a big engine under his hood




Jeff Turning Heart standing in front of the tree where he feeds his three eagle friends.

Jeff Turning Heart standing in front of the tree where he feeds his three eagle friends.

LANTRY — Hours before sunrise Jeff Turning Heart would get out of bed, get some clothes ready, which his brother would to take to school for him on the bus. Cheyenne-Eagle Butte High School was 18 miles away, but Turning Heart wasn’t going to take the bus, and he wasn’t going to ride a horse, or a motorcycle, or a bike, or even a unicycle.

He was going to run.

Not jog. Turning Heart has probably never jogged a day in his life. But forty years ago he ran 18 miles to school, and when he got there he would shower, put on the clothes his brother brought, go through a whole day of school, and then report for hours of cross country practice.

One of the two spotted eagles, either Snickers or M&Ms, who live in the little valley just west of the Turning Heart place.

One of the two spotted eagles, either Snickers or M&Ms, who live in the little valley just west of the Turning Heart place.

It is tempting to say that Turning Heart was a running machine, gifted by nature with speed and endurance, honed to a competitive edge by dedication and hard work, but that would not be true. He is still running, still dragging a tethered tire behind him for miles, to build up strength and endurance, and he is no machine.

Jeff Turning Heart competing for Cheyenne-Eagle Butte in the late ‘70s.

Jeff Turning Heart competing for Cheyenne-Eagle Butte in the late ‘70s.

He is a man of deep spiritual conviction, of simple tastes and behaviors, living six miles off the highway between Lantry and Eagle Butte, isolated on 200 acres of family land, where he looks after his 11-year-old granddaughter, Kailen, and feeds his three special nearby friends frozen smelt, which he lays on the underside of a large strip of upturned bark.

His friends are bald eagles, and they live in a quiet, picture book valley, their nest high in the bow of an ornately gnarled cottonwood tree, and Turning Heart approaches them quietly, respectfully, and he calls to them, “Wopila! Wopila!”

Pat Porter, left, and Jeff Turning Heart, right, running practice at Adams State in 1983.

Pat Porter, left, and Jeff Turning Heart, right, running practice at Adams State in 1983.

They would have long before taken to the air, and whisked off over the nearest horizon, but they know who their friend is, and in some inexplicable way, they know he belongs in the little valley with them. There are rabbits in the undergrowth, deer bedded down safely in tree groves, a fat toad hops along the pathway, insects buzz, butterflies flutter. This is a gentle place of peace and Turning Heart is part of its life pulse, he contributes elementally to its harmony and grace.

Jeff Turning Heart in earlier days.

Jeff Turning Heart in earlier days.

It is so quiet the air rings with silence, but to Turning Heart, the real isolation, emptiness, loneliness, is the outside world, angry, impersonal, desperate. This place is none of those things, in this place, Turning Heart finds strength and identity and purpose.

Turning Heart came here in deep pain three years ago. He had just lost his mother, Gladys, and he was feeling lost, disheartened.

The tire that Jeff Turning Heart pulls behind him on his training runs.

The tire that Jeff Turning Heart pulls behind him on his training runs.

“I needed some healing,” he said. “So I sat there thinking about my career, about where can I get my healing from. All of a sudden one of the bald eagles popped up and landed in a tree. Later, I came back, I put tobacco down, and prayed. Pretty soon, he came back, and I realized this place is gonna be my safe haven, where I can come and find my peace.”

The eagles lost the wariness around Turning Heart: “It became a trust. I trusted them, they trusted me. They became like my relatives. Then these two spotted eagles showed up. I named them M&M’s and Snickers. They know who I am, and they know my voice. It’s kind of a blessing to have them in my life.”

That life started in 1961, as a tiny Turning Heart, living with six people in a small two room shack far out on the prairie, with his four brothers, one sister, and mother.

“We were poor,” Turning Heart said. “The poorest of the poor.”

But they had a roof over their head, they had food to eat. Those were the only two things, even at that age, that Turning Heart needed to have hope. Powered by hope, he could dream, he could focus on what he needed to do to achieve those dreams, and his dreams were simple ones. He would watch older boys run at school, and at twelve years old he knew this is what he wanted to do. So, he went to the coach, and wearing street clothes, because he had no shoes or trunks, he participated in his first practice.

Turning Heart was small, and even when he got big, he never really got big. Nature didn’t want such a swiftly running bird to have too many excess parts. So it gave him a large head for thinking, strong legs for running, and a powerful heart and oversized lungs to assist the brain in driving those tireless legs down the long reservation backroads of gravel and dirt, at a pace where even the family dog could tucker out, and want to stop and recover under the cool of an inviting shade tree.

The school Turning Heart attended was full of bullies, all way bigger than he was: “There was this guy, Ellery Charging Thunder, he was like my best friend. He looked after me if I was picked on.”

Even with 20/20 hindsight, most of us miss the critical difference that forced events to play out as they did, that allowed a man like Turning Heart to develop into the champion distance runner he became. There are temptations out there, across the entire rez world, permeating down into every crack and crevice, the only world Turning Heart had ever known, and each Lakota life that is corrupted and then self-destructs, destroying many other Lakota lives along the way—all of those lost souls began by giving into those temptations and dysfunctional rites of reservation passage.

Not Turning Heart.

Offer him a smoke. No thanks. Offer him a drink. No thanks.

“All my life,” Turning Heart said, “I never smoked or drank.”

Instead, Turning Heart ran. Idle hands, St. Jerome wrote long ago, are the Devil’s playthings. In this case, it would have been idle feet, something Turning Heart would know nothing about, and eventually he would break the school records of the kid who had inspired him to run, Elijah Janis.

Faith, that’s what Turning Heart credits for starting him out in life in the right direction: “Going to church at that young age, it gave me faith and it gave me the strength to believe in myself.”

But there was a long way to go, from where Turning Heart was, to where he wanted to be, even though looking back, his goals were far from grandiose, he just wanted to get better, run faster.

“Home life was very complex with poverty,” Turning Heart said. “The way we survived made me stronger. It’s like, if I’m gonna live better, I’ve gotta work hard, and if I wanna be somebody, I got to sacrifice and free myself.”

By the time he was a sophomore, Turning Heart had reached the level where he could challenge the fastest kids in the state, but a deep bone bruise from stepping on a rock knocked him back to 27th place at the state cross country meet. He did go down to Haskell Indian School in Kansas, and beat 60 other runners to capture the National Indian Cross Country title. In his junior year, he won the State cross country title, and placed fifth in the 1600 and 3200 at the State track meet.

During that time, Turning Heart’s work out regimen was focusing on what mattered most, speed and stamina: “My speed developed way better because I did more half mile repeats.” Meaning Turning Heart would run half miles, resting two minutes between each, and do this for 25 times.

Then he would find a steep hill, the kind of hill that hates every runner it sees, that steals the energy from their legs, and the will from their hearts, and he would sprint 150 meters up that hill, only he would do this 30 times, until, like the eagles, he had also made that hill, his friend.

By his senior year, in 1980, Turning Heart repeated as state cross country champ, and he finally won both the 1600 and 3200 at the state track meet in Sioux Falls. The last thing a runner wanted to see on the track was Turning Heart right on his shoulder, because unlike other distance runners, Turning Heart could also run a 23 second 200 meters, and a 53 second quarter mile, and he could do this after having run almost a mile. Many an accomplished runner discovered

There should have been scholarship offers from local schools, but none came. The next few years would be a rough experience for Turning Heart. He accomplished some good things, but ultimately, he was forced to face the bedrock reality hard work had always kept him too busy to dwell on—he was a Lakota, in a world where everything that had once been Lakota, that had given them their strength, their faith, their purpose, had been stripped away by an indifferent dominant culture who had yet to lose that indifference toward a Lakota.

Turning Heart went down south to Haskell Indian School, but he left, disappointed because “the program wasn’t strong enough.” He had gotten so good he needed a program where he wasn’t the best, to get better, and at Haskell, he was far and away the best: “Then I went to Black Hills State, but their program wasn’t strong enough, either.”

Doubly disappointed, Turning Heart again went south, to Adams State in Alamosa, Colorado, where he made the team as a walk on in 1983.

At Adams State, an NAIA school, and defending national champion, Turning Heart entered eight races, and he won eight races. That should have been the springboard to the next level, the Olympic games, but something strange happened at Adams State, something that even to this day Turning Heart has never reconciled in his mind, something which begs to be healed, explained, every time he walks over to the peaceful valley to visit his eagle friends.

“They promised me tuition,” Turning Heart said, “but come to find out, they only paid for my books.” Something was fundamentally awry at Adams State, because Turning Heart never fit in, and winning races only further intensified his you-crashed-our-party status: “The runners there were already picked to be on that team.”

Coach Joe Vigil had not picked Turning Heart, and not only did this kid have the nerve to not know he wasn’t picked, he kept beating all the runners that had been picked, like Sammy Montoya, the coach’s favorite, and defending national champion. He even had the nerve to beat an assistant, Pat Porter, four years older than Turning Heart, who would make the Olympic team in 1984.

“I would be running, in the lead,” Turning Heart said, “but (Vigil) would be hollering, c’mon Sam you can do it. He never encouraged me, never shook my hand after a victory.”

Vigil had tasted the top success, he had orchestrated a national championship, and Turning Heart was not a product of Vigil’s world. He was something that had just dropped in, loaded with talent, and drive, and independently strong and capable, and Vigil pigheadedly refused to adapt his program to account for that wild card. Instead of seeing Turning Heart as a gift to his program, an unexpected boost to an already accomplished team, Vigil shut his best runner out, he treated him with the indifference that had long ago destroyed Turning Heart’s culture, confined them to reservations.

Except it didn’t destroy the Lakota in Turning Heart. The spirit of who those Lakota were, burned like a blazing cauldron in Turning Heart’s belly. And so he won the races Vigil didn’t want him to win, which was every single one he raced in, and he beat a future Olympic qualifier twice in practice. And all this accomplished was to produce resentment in Vigil, and isolate Turning Heart in an alien world far from home.

It wasn’t like he was sullen or withdrawn. Pat Porter became his best friend. And Turning Heart has a folder filled with pictures and press clipping of Porter’s impressive career. The bond of brothers-in-running is still there, no amount of time can kill it, even the death of Porter in a tragic airplane accident did not kill the love Turning Heart felt and feels for his lost friend.

Eventually Turning Heart worked out with the Santa Monica track club, with teammates like Carl Lewis, and he missed the Olympic qualifying time by ten seconds.

Now past fifty, Turning Heart plans to compete in the Boston marathon. He runs the miles, drags that tire up a hill not far from the nest of his eagle friends. He works as a resource officer at Tiospa Topa where is he also the varsity cross country coach. He is also a high school basketball referee, getting certified by the South Dakota High School Activities Association in 2007.

Kailen has become the main focus in his life, and he has been responsible for her since she was 3 months old: “My mom helped me raise her and they really had a special relationship, and that’s why (Kailen) had to have healing, too. After we lost mom it was really difficult for her but the eagles helped us with healing.”

Gladys Turning Heart told her son someday she would be gone, and he would have to take care of himself, and so she taught him the family frybread secrets, and Turning Heart makes the best frybread you will ever eat: “It’s in how you prepare the dough. You can’t be in a hurry, you can’t be angry and quick, or it just won’t turn out right.”

Next Spring, Turning Heart will run the Boston Marathon. He ran quick in his day, still does, but he never ran angry. At an age when the average Lakota male is taking his last breath due to a hard life filled with bad choices, Turning Heart is still going strong, still strong in his faith and dedication, and, of course, he sees no reason why his trip to Boston won’t produce a satisfying result: “I still got a big engine under my hood.”

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com)


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