Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (13 page)

After they have laid the yuwipi man on his bed of sage, the helpers step outside the square of tobacco ties, leaving him alone in the center. He lies there so that the spirits can come in and use him. While all this has been going on, the yuwipi wichasha has prayed to the four winds of the earth. Now the moment comes when all lights are put out, plunging the room into darkest darkness, into womb darkness, blacker than a moonless night. It is like floating in a river of black ink. It is the darkness of the grave. Then the drums begin to pound in step with your heartbeat. You feel it pulsating in your veins. Then the singing starts. There could be one singer and one drum or there could be several.

Uncle Bill Eagle Feathers used to say, “That man all bundled up like a mummy, he is like dead. It is up to all who participate to bring him back to life.” When I am lying there I am a foundation, a receptacle for the spirit. So you are empty for that, lifeless. You make yourself completely empty to let the spirit energy come into you, to fill that space. At the fourth song the spirits come in. They speak to me in little voices. They use dream language. Wrapped up in my star blanket, I understand what they are saying. They are telling me the answers to what the sponsor and the other people present want to know. They can hear the voices, too, but they can’t understand them. If they put a sprig of sage behind their ear, or in their hair, the spirits will talk to them. When I am tied up and they sing the songs, I feel the powers of the singers coming into me and my power going into them. And I travel while I am tied up, to all kinds of spirit places. I could
travel to the place where Sitting Bull is buried, and still my body is lying there all wrapped and tied up. I could travel all over and, at the same time, spirits could come in from far away—Crazy Horse’s spirit, maybe. The spirits of people who used to live, who have passed on, speak directly to the one who is tied up.

One sign that the spirits have come in are sparks of light flickering in the darkness, flying all over the ceiling, dashing all over the place, sometimes making a sound like two pebbles clicking together. These are the spirits of wakinyan, the thunderbirds. The wakinyan works with the sun, with the light that is everywhere. The sun is life; it lives within us, even in the dark. Wakinyan and inyan, the stone, are related. Two flint rocks knocked together make a little spark, a tiny bit of lightning. The rock and the wakinyan go together. Nobody can explain the yuwipi lights flitting through the darkness. The white man’s science can’t. It is the work of Tunka wasichun, rock power. Sometimes an eagle comes into the ceremony. You can’t see him, but you hear his cry far above you and you feel the touch of his wings.

Sometimes I do a kind of yuwipi ceremony called iktomi lowanpi, spider ceremony. For this I use only seventy-five tobacco ties. It is for somebody who is in trouble and needs help in a hurry. So this is a shortened ceremony. I trace a spiderweb design on the earth altar. Iktomi, the spider man, Tunka, and wakinyan are closely related. It is all part of the yuwipi. A spider ceremony is a scouting. If anything is going to happen in the future, you scout for it. We have the power to do this. The Iktomi lowanpi is a one-track identity spiritual power given to our tiyoshpaye. It will always be in our family. The spider man is speaking to me when I am tied up, like a voice out of the womb. He is talking in a high, sharp voice, a voice you hear only in the yuwipi. A voice of the fathers and grandfathers.

In the end they sing the sixteenth song, the wanagi kiglapi olowan, the spirits-going-home song. When the lights are turned on again, the yuwipi man sits in the center, untied and
unwrapped. Then he interprets what the spirits have told him, where to find a person or a thing lost, how to cure someone’s disease. The yuwipi man could do some doctoring at that time, lead a sick person to the altar, smoke him up with cedar or sweet grass and fan him off with the eagle wing. Maybe he gives him or her a special medicine, a kind of root, for which the white man has no name. Then the sacred pipe goes around, clockwise, and everybody smokes it. Those present have the privilege to speak, to say something good, to ask questions. After the last person has smoked, we say “mitakuye oyasin,” all my relatives, and the ceremony is finished.

After that we eat the sacred food. There will be a kettle of dog soup, because the yuwipi is also a dog feast. The dog is a sacrifice. The dog is sacred. If you leave your home, the dog will stay around until the last bit of food is gone. A dog will stay by the side of his dead master and starve rather than leave. Every once in a while the dog will bark toward the east and the west. When somebody dies he’ll be calling to the family, barking. The dog sees the spirits, the dead souls. The dog knows when someone is about to die, but you don’t know it. They choke the dog toward the west. We let a man pull the rope on the dog only for the yuwipi, heyoka, and memorial ceremony. The dog does not suffer. The rope kills him instantly. My father always painted a red stripe from the dog’s nose and down the spine before choking him, because the dog is sacred. They also scent the dog, cedar him, or fan him off with sweet grass. The women singe it, cut the neck, and let the blood come out. They pray while doing this. Besides the dog we eat other sacred food: wojapi, which is a chokecherry pudding, and corn wasna, which is corn and kidney fat pounded together; we drink a kind of herb tea. We also drink the pejuta sapa, or “black medicine”—namely, coffee. That is not sacred, but good, hot, and strong. And then it is over. Maybe it is already close to sunup. Time to say good-bye, go home, and go to sleep.

Ghost dance

On January 14, 1890, my great-grandfather Jerome Crow Dog came out of the Badlands with his people to surrender. He and his band were the last of the ghost dancers, the last to dance the wanagi wachipi. In March of 1973, I, Leonard Crow Dog, brought the ghost dance back. At the right place, at the right time. I started from where the first
Crow Dog had stopped. I brought it back at Wounded Knee, during the seventy-one-day siege, when I was the spiritual leader of AIM, the American Indian Movement. My great-grandfather’s spirit gave me a vision to do this. The vision told me to revive this ceremony at the place where Chief Big Foot’s ghost dancers, three hundred men, women, and children, had been massacred by the army, shot to pieces by cannons, old people, babies. I could feel their spirits telling me to do it. Everybody at Wounded Knee could feel the presence of the ghosts of those who had been killed, their bodies lying in that ditch, right under our feet. So I rounded up as many people as I could get hold of, with the help of Wallace Black Elk. We were going to dance for the sake of the spirits. For our own sakes.

I spoke to the people. Somebody taped it, so my words are not lost: “Tomorrow, we’re going to ghost dance. For eighty-three years it has never been danced. When they killed our people here so long ago, it was said that the nation’s hoop was broken. We’ll make the sacred hoop whole again. We’re going to dance, whether it rains or snows. Whether the land is muddy or covered with snow, the spirit will come traveling. There’ll be no rest, no intermission, no coffee break. During the day, we’re not going to eat or drink water. We’ll unite together as one tribe through the language of the Great Spirit. We’re not going to divide. We’re going to be brothers and sisters. Whether you’re Mohawk, or Cheyenne, we’ll be as one.

“We will hold hands. If one of you gets into the power, if he’s in a trance, if he falls down inside the ring, let him. If somebody goes into convulsions, let him. Don’t get scared. The spirit will be the doctor. If anything happens like that, hold hands, keep dancing. There will be no drum. The earth will be our drum. Our feet will do the drumming. There’s a song I’m going to sing, my grandfather’s song. The clouds will be dreams. They’ll go into your minds. You will see visions. We will elevate ourselves from this world to another. From there we can see Tunkashila.

“We’re going to remember our brothers who were killed by
the white man, and you will see your brothers, your relations who have died. You will see them. The ghost dance spirit will appear. The sacred pipe is going to be there. The fire is going to be there. The sage is going to be there. Indian tobacco is going to be there. It starts physically and goes into spirituality. And then you will get into the power. It’s going to start here, at Wounded Knee, and it will continue. We are going to unite as brothers and sisters. We will ghost dance. Everybody has heard about the ghost dance, but nobody has ever seen it. It was something the United States government had forbidden—no ghost dance, no sun dance, no Indian religion. That hoop has not been broken. We will dance for the future generations.

“I don’t have to instruct you. After you get into the circle the spirit will tell you, give you the power to speak. We’re all going to speak another language all of a sudden, because we dance in a sacred way. We’re going to bring everybody together with his eagle bone whistle. I want to see a vision tomorrow. We’ll all be blessed in the Indian way. This hoop has not been broken.

“This is a vision of four dimensions. Nobody can stop us. An old man should direct this dance, but there’s no elder here who knows how to do this. So I guess it’s up to me, because this dance has been in my family for four generations. This sacred stick will travel from tribe to tribe. We will eat sacred food. You’ll hear the buffalo, hear their voices coming up through Mother Earth. Then the buffalo could come back. You’ll know how the Indian has been born. There will be spiritual knowledge.

“We have a medicine bag. We’ll make ghost shirts and medicine bundles. We’ll wear eagle feathers. We’ll wrap ourselves in upside-down American flags like the ghost dancers of old. We’ll paint the shirts—yellow for the thunder, red for AIM, flowers for the yuwipi, stars, half-moons, eagles, magpies, designs like that. I’ll wear a breechcloth, won’t wear white man’s pants. But it’s up to you what you wear. The women should wear shawls. We’ll have the sacred tree there, the evergreen, the tree of life.

“We need a young girl, a virgin, representing Ptesan Win, the
White Buffalo Woman. She will fill the pipe and take it to Mother Earth. There is going to be an altar there. The virgin will light the peace pipe and she’ll let Mother Earth smoke. She’ll let the smoke rise to the four winds of the earth and up to Tunkashila, the Great Spirit. The ghosts are going to smoke. Our dead relatives are going to respond to this.

“I follow my great-grandfather’s way. He performed the ghost dance. He warned Chief Big Foot not to come through here with his people, because a dream had foretold him that death was waiting for them. And this happened. They were all killed, by the quick-firing cannons and by the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old regiment. They were avenging themselves for having been beaten by us, avenging themselves on women and children. Today, here at Wounded Knee, the white man is again all around us, with his armored cars and heavy machine guns. His planes and helicopters are circling above us. Like Big Foot’s people we might be killed here. If we die we’ll be buried here on this sacred ground. That’s where I want to be buried. First, put me on a scaffold in a blanket, and then put me in the earth here. Whether we’re going to die or not, we’re going to dance!”

Many of those who danced with me at Wounded Knee knew nothing about the old ways and ceremonies. They were Indians, but they had lived all their lives in the white man’s big cities, or they came from tribes where the missionaries had destroyed their old religion. Many had never been in a sweat lodge. So before dancing we had to have a sweat, and some of them found it hard to take the heat.

I ran this ghost dance the way my father, Henry, and Uncle Dick Fool Bull had described it to me. My father was fourteen years old when Jerome, the first Crow Dog, died. So he still remembered much of it, and also what he learned from his own father, John. Uncle Dick Fool Bull died in 1975. He witnessed the ghost dance as a teenager.

We began with the sweat bath, one sweat for the men and one for the women. We rubbed our bodies with sage and sweet
grass. We prepared the dance circle. We put the evergreen, the tree of life, in the middle. We put tobacco ties and cloth offerings on it. We used sacred red face paint. We used magpie feathers. Every dancer wore an eagle feather in his hair. We danced in a circle, holding hands, from right to left, starting slowly and then going faster and faster, sometimes with arms upraised. We danced in the ravine where so many of our women and children had been killed by the Seventh Cavalry. It was cold. The grass was brown. There was frost on it. In some places there were snow patches. On and off it snowed. We had the young girl representing Ptesan Win standing in the circle, holding the pipe. She should have had an elk horn bow and four arrows with bone points to shoot toward the clouds in the four directions, but we did not have such a bow. I wished that I had the sacred stick my great-grandfather used when he was the dance leader so long ago, but that is now in the museum in Pierre, the state capital. It has two buffalo horns on it, bending downward, forming a moon crescent. The handle is made of wood, but you could not burn it, no matter how hard you tried. I will get that stick back someday.

The earth trembled. I felt the ghosts dancing beneath the ground. And some of the dancers fell down in a trance, fell down like dead, receiving visions. So, at Wounded Knee, with a cold wind blowing, we reeducated ourselves. We had about thirty dancers. Many were barefoot, in the old ghost dance way, even though there was snow on the ground.

Wounded Knee gave knowledge to the people. Wounded Knee is the spirit that knows the red man. It is an identity you can stand on. I felt good. I felt proud. I had brought something back to my people that had been lost for almost a century.

At Wounded Knee I brought the ghost dance to the American Indian Movement. A year later, in May of 1974, I brought it back to my own people. I put it on at the place where we Crow Dogs have gone on vision quests for generations, where we have our vision pit. Nature has split the Crow Dog allotment land into two parts—a high and a low one. At the bottom, near the Little White
River, my father had his house, which burned down some twenty years ago. This is where we hold our sun dance every summer. To get to the high part you have to cross a little stream. There is no bridge, just a large tree trunk to get over as best you can, and then there is a very steep footpath to the top of the hill. Up there is a large flat place covered with grass, with pine and cedar trees all around it. This place is very beautiful and very sacred. Nobody ever goes there but some animals, for whom this is a shelter where they are safe. It is this spot I chose for my ghost dance. This time I was happy to have my father there and old Uncle Dick Fool Bull to instruct me and the dancers and to teach us some of the ancient ghost dance songs.

This dance was not advertised. It was supposed to be only for us Rosebud Sioux, but somehow, through the “moccasin telegraph,” which always spreads the news among Indians in an almost mysterious way, the word got around, and many native people came to dance from as far away as Canada, Alaska, and Mexico. A Navajo man came, and a young mother and her daughter from a Northwest Coast fishing tribe. Two Mexican Indians came in their loose Huichol and Nahua outfits.

Before the dance I gave everybody medicine in the form of a special kind of tea. Everybody put on ghost outfits. Some wore upside-down American flags. Everybody wore a small medicine bundle made for this day. I had on a yellow buckskin shirt and leggings. I had an eagle head tied to the back of my head. I wore the old Crow Dog wotawe—a shield showing the two arrows and the two bullets. My father wore a buffalo horn headdress. He had his face painted. Then, in a long line, walking Indian file, we went up on the hill. On the hilltop my father had prepared the fire and the sweat lodge. He had put up a tipi. The dancers formed a circle on the grass and sat on the ground. My father, Henry, talked to them for a long time, telling them how our family had been connected to this ceremony right from the beginning. He instructed them in what to do. Then I took over. The dance
began. We were holding one another’s hands and moving, making the sacred hoop.

Some of the dancers went into the power. One teenage girl got into a trance. Two women fell down, lying there unconscious for a while, having visions. I doctored them and fanned them off with an eagle wing. When one of these women came to, she said that in her vision she had reexperienced the killing of our women and children at Wounded Knee. This woman wore the upside-down stars and stripes, just as those did who were massacred by Custer’s cavalry. At the end of the dance a snooper plane came out of nowhere and flew in circles above us. What did the pilot look for? All he could see was some forty unarmed Indians, including women and some children, dancing and holding hands in the middle of the lonely prairie. I could not understand this. But then a whole flock of eagles came circling over us. They seemed to fly in some sort of formation. The eagles made the plane fly away. So our dance had a good ending.