Jerry Lee Lewis, original wild man of rock ‘n’ roll, dies at 87
Jefferson Airplane, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Tom Petty, Steve Earle and other artists remembered the singer as a man who “kept the faith.”
“He was a guy who believed when nobody else believed,” Jeff Tweedy said in a statement.
Wild Bill Elliott, the American Indian activist who spent much of his life fighting against injustice, died on Friday. He was 87.
Elliott was born in Omaha to Native American parents. At the age of 19, he began working as a rodeo performer for the Sioux Tribe of the Grand Teton National Park, which is part of the National Forest System. While working there, Elliott began to see how the national park could be a place where young people could go to “learn about their roots.”
Elliott became a legendary rodeo cowboy, performing with rodeo star Jim “Super” George and also rodeo star James Colosimo, who both performed at the Sioux tribe’s annual powwow in 1988 that included a performance by Elliott. Colosimo later told Elliott that his performance had been a “great honor.”
In 1992, Elliott published an autobiography, Cowboy Way, in which he recounted a personal history of what it meant to be a Native American. The book was well-received and published in five languages.
“I learned that I was more Indian than I realized,” was the final line of the book, according to the Sioux nation’s website, www.tribes.org. “I also discovered that my great-grandparents, my great-grandmother, and her grandparents had been stolen by the United States government at different times and different times again, and that all these were real, and as real as the sun’s hot rays and the rain that falls on my roof and the wind that blows through mine.”
In 1998, Elliott traveled to Washington to testify on the 50th anniversary of the Dawes Act,
