Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (18 page)

Crow Dog’s paradise, 1974.

Mary Gertrude Crow Dog in the old house, 1974.

Leonard Crow Dog in the interior of the Crow Dog home, 1981.

Henry Crow Dog, 1981.

Leonard Crow Dog with his children, 1989.

Hunka song

Finally, I am going to speak of the hunka lowanpi, the relation-making ceremony. Some call it the “They are waving horsetails over each other” ritual. At times two people want to make a bond between them, a bond stronger than the bond between parent and child, a bond stronger than any physical bond could ever be. In that case they have a hunka ceremony. When two people are bound by this ceremony they share everything. They will share their last morsel of food. They will care for each other unto death. They will die for each other.

We have been a relation-making tribe from the very beginning. All our ceremonies, a sweat or a vision quest, end with the words “mitakuye oyasin”—”all my relations”—and that means every living being on this earth, down to the tiniest bug or flower. Everything that lives is related. The hunka lowanpi is a part of this life philosophy.

The hunka lowanpi is very old. I was told that about two hundred years ago Bull Bear put all the elements of this ceremony together. I learned to perform it from the
old people. They were natural professors, natural historians, word-of-mouth scientists. As in most other ceremonies, you need a holy man, a wichasha wakan, to perform the hunka lowanpi. Usually, when you require the help of such a man you send him a loaded pipe, but for this ceremony you sent a bag made from a buffalo calf’s bladder, filled with tobacco offerings. If he opened the bag it meant that he would perform the ceremony. If he did not, you had to find another holy man to do it. We do not do it exactly this way anymore. For one thing, a bag made from an unborn buffalo calf’s bladder is hard to come by. But I still perform the hunka lowanpi, in my own traditional way.

For the hunka ritual you set up a ceremonial double tipi—that is, two tipis joined together. You cover the ground inside the tipi with sage. This sacred herb makes good spirits come in and chases bad spirits away. You also need two staffs with hair from a horse’s tail dangling from them. The strands of hair are painted red. These wands are called hunka chanupa, meaning hunka pipes, but they are really wooden wands. They represent the White Buffalo Woman. You also need a stick on which a perfect ear of corn is stuck. We are not corn planters, but maybe a long time ago, when we were still living near the Great Lakes, we raised corn. This plant represents survival and Mother Earth. You also need eagle plumes and two wagmuha, two rattles, made from a buffalo’s scrotum and painted red, as well as two dried buffalo chips and glowing coals to light the pipe. You need red face paint, sweet grass, Indian tobacco, a pipe rack, and the pipe itself. Finally you need a buffalo skull for an altar. All these things have to be smoked up with sweet grass.

The tipi’s door looks toward the sunrise. Opposite, at the west side, in back of the tipi, is the seat of honor. From there the holy man conducts the ceremony. In front of him is an altar made of earth smoothed with an eagle wing or wooden staff. The wichasha wakan has some helpers near him. On his left sits the ate hunka, the older of the two people making the bond. All the relatives of the two hunka are there, the women on the
left, the men on the right. There are usually some hunka present, those who have “made relations” before. Also there are two drummers.

In the old days they pretended that the mihunka, the younger person, was a captive. Somebody would say, “I think there is an enemy nearby. Let’s kill him!” Then some men would “capture” the mihunka and bring him into the tipi. Someone would then say, “Maybe somebody wants to rescue this captive by adopting him.” The ate hunka stood up and said, “I will adopt this one as my mihunka. I will save him. I adopt him as my brother.” Or he might adopt him as his son.

Adoptions of captives happened in real life. Around 1857 the Lakota were at war with the Hohé, the Assiniboin. The Lakota came across a small party of Hohé and killed them all, except a young boy about eleven or twelve years old, and they were about to kill him, too. This young boy was brave. He stood his ground and did not cry. He had a little bow, more a toy than a weapon. He aimed his arrows at our warriors. At this moment Sitting Bull came riding up. He cried, “This boy is too brave to kill. Don’t shoot him! I’ll adopt him as my brother!” They took the Hohé boy back to camp and there they had a ceremony in which the Hohé boy became Sitting Bull’s mihunka. His name was Jumping Bull. In every one of Sitting Bull’s battles Jumping Bull fought at his side. When, many years later, some forty tribal police members surrounded Sitting Bull’s one-room log cabin to arrest and kill the great chief, there was a big shootout. When this fight ended, six of the tribal police members and six of Sitting Bull’s friends were lying dead on the ground, among them Jumping Bull, who went to the spirit world with his ate hunka. He died like a hunka should, faithful to the end. So, adopting a captive is one of our customs.

Inside the tipi the mihunka sits next to his ate hunka. Two helpers then wave the two wands with the strands of horsehair over them. This wand waving, called hunkakazopi, is a chief part of the hunka lowanpi. Some old people told me that this symbolizes the capture of the mihunka. It also stands for strength and
power. The horsetails mean that the two hunka will always have fast horses. An eagle plume fastened in the mihunka’s hair stands for bravery. They also wave the stick with the corn over the two hunkapi. The wichasha wakan then paints their faces with red stripes, leading down from the forehead to the chin. By these stripes the spirits will know and respect them.

The wichasha wakan goes to the buffalo skull altar. The skull’s eye sockets are stuffed with balls of sage. The skull is painted with designs according to the holy man’s visions. He approaches the skull howling like a wolf. He smokes up the skull with sweet sage. The buffalo spirit also comes to the skull. His presence is felt by all. The holy man burns sacred tobacco and blows the smoke into the skull’s nostrils. The drums and the rattles are going. Hunka songs are being sung. One of the older hunka who have come to take part in this ceremony stands up and makes a speech, instructing the two new hunka in their duties. He might tell them, “Your hunka’s friends are your friends. His enemies are your enemies. Should he become a captive you must not rest until you have freed him. Should he die in battle you must avenge him. You must never be stingy. You must always be generous.”

Toward the end of the ceremony the holy man covers the two hunkapi with a large buffalo robe. When the robe is lifted, it will be seen that the two are tied to each other with rawhide thongs. The left arm of the ate hunka is tied to the right arm of the mihunka. In the same way their legs are tied together. The holy man tells them, “You are now tied together forever. You are inseparable. You are as one.” There is a rack in the tipi with roasted buffalo meat. The mihunka cuts a chunk off and puts it in his mouth. The holy man says, “I am hungry, but I have no food.” The mihunka takes meat from his mouth and gives it to the holy man. The holy man says, “I am cold, but I have nothing with which to cover myself.” The mihunka gives him the buffalo robe. The holy man says, “I am naked, but I have no clothes.” The mihunka gives him his beautiful decorated buckskin shirt. The holy man says,
“My feet are sore and bleeding because I have no moccasins.” The mihunka takes off his moccasins and leggings and hands them over. In this way the wichasha wakan is rewarded for running the ceremony. The mihunka is now stripped down to his breechcloth. He cuts up the rest of the meat and distributes it among those present. The mihunka keeps the horsetail wand and the corn stick. If the mihunka is a woman, she does not strip but just gives presents. At the end of the ceremony there is a feast and a big giveaway.

You start out with your friendship with the land and then you understand the meaning of the hunka ceremony. You have to get along with yourself before you can get along with others. That is hard. It means peace, wolakota. It means choosing a relation rather than inheriting one. The whole tiyospaye is involved, the whole “extended family,” as the white man calls it. So we made the sacred four directions at the center of our lives. Our ceremonies represent the whole life cycle—birth, growing up, parenthood, and death. And then it begins all over again. It represents the hoop without end. We remember things from way back, all the way to our beginnings. We pass it on from generation to generation. Some people have forgotten it. But no matter what, there will always be one man or woman to keep the flame going, a tiny glowing spark deep underneath the ashes, and all of a sudden it will flare up and there will be the sacred fire again that is never extinguished. We have to take care of that light. Let there always be a person who wants the flowers and the rocks to tell him their secrets, who keeps the old people’s wisdom in his heart sack. So many ceremonies have been buried, wiped away like chalk from a blackboard. The horse dance used to bring rain and heal sick minds, but it has not been performed in more than fifty years. They say that there is no one left who knows how to run it. But I know. My father knew, his father told him. Two old holy men told me. This dance is written on my heart. Someday I will bring it back. Our ancient sacred rites, we are not just part of it, we are all of it.

It was like in the days of the ghost dance. There was a whispering in the air, a faint drumbeat, a hoof beat. It became a roar carried by the four winds: “A nation is coming, the eagle brought the message.” What was coming called itself AIM, the American Indian Movement.

White people call me a medicine man or spiritual leader. They think that my job is just to pray and to perform ceremonies. But that’s only part of it. A medicine man lives among his people. He has to experience life, all of it. He must be higher than an eagle and, sometimes, lower than a worm. He exists for the people and he has to fight for them if necessary. He must even turn himself into a politician if a politician is what his people need.

The American Indian Movement is something new, but it is also something very old. It was born when the white man killed the first Indian and stole some of his land. AIM was founded inside a Minnesota prison by young men who had been abused, mistreated, and
starved in boarding schools, orphanages, and foster homes, who had been taken away from loving parents whom white bureaucrats called unfit because their homes had no electricity or indoor plumbing. When they came out of these foster homes and boarding schools they were angry, and because they were angry they got into trouble and wound up in a penitentiary. A group of these men, including Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, began talking inside prison walls. They were all Ojibway born on various Minnesota reservations. Out of these talks an idea was born. After their release they founded an Indian civil rights organization. During one of their first meetings in Saint Paul somebody proposed that they call themselves Concerned Indian Americans, but abbreviated that would have been CIA. Then one woman said, “You men always aim to do this or to do that, why don’t you call yourselves AIM, the American Indian Movement?” After that nothing was ever the same again.

AIM was an organization of Indians living in big-city ghettos. Most of them no longer spoke their tribal languages. Many had never seen an Indian ceremony performed. They started out the right way, keeping Indians from drinking, protecting them from police brutality, founding an Indian Way School for Native kids, demonstrating against racism and injustice. But for over a year we on the reservation didn’t know about them.

Even so, I was already involved in the struggle. I want to say up front that I am not against the white man as a person, but I am against his system, under which I am forced to live. So from early on I fought against it. I try to educate my people. I am like a magnet, I pull the people to me, pull them together. I went to the full-bloods who live way out on the prairie and in the hills, the neglected and forgotten folks living in tar paper shacks without indoor plumbing.

I told them, “Listen, I’m speaking to you. I want to tell what is happening to you and to your lives. I’m concerned for you. I’ve seen how much hardship you’ve endured. I don’t want you to be left out. I don’t want to see you in old folks’ homes. I don’t want
to see you poor and hungry. You are the real Indians, the real Lakota, the backbone of the nation. You know the language and the ways of our people, but your voice has not been heard. We must stop letting the government and the tribal council talk for you. We must stop letting them tell you how to run your lives. I will talk to you in our language so you can understand. We’ll be talking about our land, because we are its caretakers. I’m talking to you, elders, to you, grandfathers and grandmothers, who have the wisdom. We must plant a seed and we must watch it grow.

“You are my people. I’ll stand by you. The carpet of the universal earth is still here for us. It’s a web of sunrises and only we traditionals can walk on this web. And we must never accept money for the Paha Sapa, our sacred Black Hills. That’s our Earth. She wears Wakan Tanka’s ornaments and jewels—the pines, the aspens, the cottonwoods. The Black Hills are not for sale. The government stole them from us. Now they want to ease their bad conscience by paying us a little money. No! The Hills, the home of the sacred thunderbirds, are not for sale.”

The BIA—the Bureau of Indian Affairs—is better than it was twenty years ago; it now has some real honest-to-goodness Indians at the top. But at the time I’m talking about it represented all that was wrong with the government’s Indian policy. So I told the people, “We are not the BIA’s wards anymore. Enough, enough, enough!”

I also tried to educate the white people. I told them, “Hey, white America, listen to me. Before you came here we had no lawyers, no penitentiaries, no foster homes, no old age homes, no mental institutions, no psychiatric clinics, no taxes, no TV, no telephones. We had no crime or madness or drugs. Look at these wonderful things you brought us. You call it ‘civilization,’ but we had a culture long before you came. You call us ‘Indians’ because a stupid and greedy man called Columbus thought he was in India when he landed here. He did not discover America. We had been here for tens of thousands of years. We are the landlords and one day we’ll come to collect the rent.” When I was young I
was afraid to talk in front of a white man, but I’m not that way anymore.

The white man is very clever, but our elders are wise. There’s a big difference between cleverness and wisdom. Our elders have an orbit mind. We had a religion and history before Columbus arrived. The Great Spirit planted us here and planetized us. They used to call us “hostile” and “unregenerate.” Now they call us “militants.” I guess I am a militant, a militant on behalf of the tree, the earth, the river, all living things. The white man does not respect Mother Earth. He has a barbed wire mind. We first have to cut through this wire before we can begin to talk to each other.

We were nursed at the breast, not at the bottle. You gave us the cow for a mother and also the condom. We don’t need it. We are not over populated. Thanks to you we are underpopulated, victims of genocide. You have a Holocaust Museum in Washington to remind us of a genocide that happened far away in Europe. What about having a museum about the holocaust that happened right here, the Native American holocaust? We used to put our dead in the burial tree, to give their bodies to the winds and the universe. We are not allowed to do this anymore. We must plant them six feet underground in a casket. But Crazy Horse was not buried in a casket. Beneath our reservations lie coal, oil, uranium, gold, silver, all the elements. It should make us the richest people in the world, but we are the poorest. There are more than three thousand counties in the United States and out of all of them the county covering Pine Ridge, the Oglala Sioux reservation, is the poorest, and my own Rosebud reservation isn’t far behind.

There are thirty million blacks and fewer than two million of us. African-Americans live in big cities and have a lot of voting power, forming one big power bloc. We are divided into some three hundred tribes scattered all over the continent. If we want to talk to one another we have to do it in English. We live far from the centers of power where decisions are made. So we cannot make our influence felt.

Whites say not to blame them, they aren’t involved. It’s their ancestors who did wrong. But they should be involved. They are living on our land. We are still third-class citizens. We are still invisible. Indians are in jail. Indians are starving. You should take some responsibility, not for what was, but for what
is.
We can’t put all of you back on the
Mayflower.
So we’ve got to live with one another as best we can. I look upon my white friends who have for so long supported me as brothers and sisters. I don’t look at the color of their skin. Many young wasichus have come to Crow Dog’s Paradise, often staying for weeks or months. I feed them and give them shelter. There are many good, understanding white men and women. The only trouble is, there’s not enough of them.

In 1970 a man came to Crow Dog’s place. His name was Dennis Banks. He was an Ojibway from the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota and a co-founder of AIM. He knocked at our door. My dad opened it and invited him in. Dennis said, “I’ve come because you people have got something that we city Indians lost. We have an Indian organization that is doing fine, but it needs not only a political philosophy but also a spiritual meaning in order to be complete. That is why I have come.”

My father asked him, “Have you ever gone on a vision quest?” Dennis said no.

My father asked, “Are you a sun dancer?” Dennis said no.

My father asked, “Have you ever purified yourself in a sweat lodge?” And again Dennis said no.

My father told him, “Then I don’t know why you have come.” Dennis said, “I live close to Pipestone. I can make red stone pipes.”

My father said, “Then we have something to talk about.”

My mother fried up some meat and brewed some coffee. They all had something to eat. Then my father and Dennis talked for a long time. After that my dad took Dennis in back of our place where we have our sweat lodge. It was just the skeleton of the lodge, the little dome of willow sticks. It was winter and there
was a lot of snow on the ground. My father had Dennis shovel away the snow inside and around the lodge. He made Dennis chop some wood. They made a fire and heated the rocks in it. The buffalo skull was already there. My dad brought some tarps and blankets to cover up the lodge. He had a sweat with Dennis and purified him. It made Dennis into a new kind of man. My dad told him, “Come again. We have lots to talk about.”

Dennis left and came back with Clyde Bellecourt, another of the AIM founders. They and Dad became good friends. Finally I met Dennis Banks. He told me about AIM and what it stood for. This is what I had been waiting for. After listening to Dennis I really believed that the American Indian Movement could bring about a rebirth of our people. I believed it could unite all the Native Americans in the United States.

Later I got a telegram to go to Rapid City and meet all the AIM leaders. Dennis was there, and Russell Means, Lee Brightman, and Clyde Bellecourt. I talked to them for a very long time. I spoke to them as a spiritual man. They asked me what I thought about the Black Hills and the government offering us some chickenfeed money in exchange for the sacred land they had stolen from us. I said that we’d never accept money for our land. Dennis agreed and said that AIM and all the tribes would take a stand.

Then I went to Denver to meet some more AIM leaders—Vern Bellecourt, Clyde’s brother, Eddie Benton, John Trudell, and Stan Holder. Dennis Banks told me that AIM had enough political leaders, but they needed spiritual guidance. He asked me to be AIM’s medicine man. I answered, “I will give myself to the movement.”

When the traditional Lakota and the city militants got together, that was the moment AIM took off. Suddenly men wore their hair long or in braids. They threw away their neckties. Everybody started wearing bead or bone chokers. They began wearing ribbon shirts. They wore Levi jackets with AIM patches and buttons reading,
INDIAN POWER
or
INDIAN AND PROUD
. They had eagle feathers tied to their hair or stuck into their hatbands. We became warriors again. In 1970, Dennis Banks, Russell Means,
and Clyde Bellecourt pledged to pierce themselves in the sun dance. In 1971, at Pine Ridge, they offered their pain to the people. The American Indian Movement spread like wildfire.

On a Saturday night, in February of 1972, at Gordon, Nebraska, close to the Pine Ridge reservation, a couple of rednecks grabbed fifty-one-year-old Raymond Yellow Thunder, an Oglala Sioux, and dragged him into an American Legion hall that was hooked up to a bar. There, before a crowd of drunken, grinning cowboys and cowgirls, they stripped Raymond naked from the waist down and forced him to dance at gunpoint. They beat and kicked him. They had nothing personally against Raymond. They didn’t even know him. They just wanted to have themselves some fun. They stuffed him into the trunk of a car and he died. The men who had grabbed him first, a pair of brothers called Hare, were arrested, charged with second-degree manslaughter, and released without bail. Second-degree manslaughter meant that the murderers would not serve a single hour in jail.

I had known Raymond Yellow Thunder since 1959. At that time we both worked on farms in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. He was a humble and kind man. He did not drink. He worked hard for as little as eighty cents an hour. He had no enemies, only friends. He had no car and I used to drive him where he wanted to go. He was from the Pine Ridge reservation and had been killed for no reason. What were we going to do? How could we get justice? Raymond’s relatives went to the police, to the FBI, to the BIA, and to the tribal council for help. Nobody gave a damn. Then we called the American Indian Movement for help. A man called Severt Young Bear, a representative of the Porcupine community, who had some AIM friends, called Russell Means. Virgil Kills Right called Dennis Banks. The whole Yellow Thunder family asked AIM to come in. I called everyone I could think of. So there was the war cry: “We’re going to Gordon!”

Dennis Banks called for a thousand people to join the march. Sixteen thousand came. A caravan of more than two hundred cars drove to Gordon. Members of fifty-one tribes were represented.
It was the biggest Native American civil rights march ever. It was like a thunderstorm, a hurricane blowing across Nebraska. Before we set out we had a big meeting at Porcupine, on the Pine Ridge reservation. The main question was this: Should we go armed or without arms? Russ Means stood up and said, “This is a serious matter. We have a lot of people involved here who are not prepared for what might be coming down on us. Gordon police and white vigilantes could be lying in wait for us. There could be a bloodbath. We could get killed. This is a matter for our spiritual leader, Crow Dog, to decide. I am asking him now to perform a ceremony for us.”