Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (2 page)

My earliest ancestor was Mato Mani, Walking Bear. He got his name because he was hunting all the time. He had two wives—a Lakota and an Arapaho woman. He had a son and a daughter. The son’s name was Mato, Bear. Just Bear. He took after his father; he did a lot of hunting. He had a charm that brings the animals to you. And there was Mato Kangi, Bear Crow. This one had three wives, who gave him four sons. The first was a Lakota woman, the second a Cheyenne, and the third was from the Pawnee nation. There was always a lot of marrying between the tribes and, in the old days, a lot of capturing of wives from another tribe during a raid. Two of this Mato Kangi’s sons were spiritual, what the white man calls medicine men. We had many of them in our clan, our tiyoshpaye. We are medicine people. Going farther back there was Mato Shunka Manitou, Bear Coyote. He was a great warrior. He was a Tokala, a member of the Kit Fox warrior society. The Tokala had a song:

In battle, the Tokala didn’t care whether they lived or died. That gave them an edge. Still farther back there was Shunka Numpa, Two Dogs. He had two wives, a Lakota and a Cree. And there were the Iron Shells and Two Strikes, famous chiefs and warriors.

My father, Henry, took up where I stopped. He said, “It started with that damned cow. It belonged to a Mormon passing through with a wagon train. That cow strayed. A young man, High Forehead, shot it. Then they butchered it. It wasn’t much of a feast. That cow was nothing but skin and bones and hard chewing. The Mormon went to the soldiers’ fort and made a big stink. He shouldn’t have done it. That cow was sick and ran off to die someplace. There was this Lieutenant Grattan. He was the kind of wasichu who has an Indian for breakfast every day. He said, ‘With thirty men I can ride over the whole Sioux nation!’ That’s what he said. So this fool, Grattan, went to the Indian camp. Conquering Bear, whom they also called Brave Bear, was the chief there. He was my grandfather’s uncle. He belonged to our tiyoshpaye. That’s why it all starts here. Grattan told the chief he must give up the man who shot the cow. Conquering Bear told him he couldn’t give up the man because he was a Minneconjou, not a Brulé. Also, he didn’t want to give up High Forehead to be put in a tiny cell inside prison. Why all that trouble about an old, broken-down cow?

“Grattan came up with his soldiers and two cannons. He shot up the Indians’ camp. One of the cannon balls killed Conquering Bear. Then the warriors got mad and killed Grattan and all his men. The first one named Crow Dog was in that fight and counted coup. He earned eagle feathers. The way I see it, Grattan had it coming. This happened in 1854. So from there it starts—Crow Dog history.”

The white man has a family—papa, mama, two kids, and a poodle—in an apartment inside a high-rise. He puts his parents into a nursing home. He doesn’t know his cousins. He doesn’t want to know them. He’s thinking about whether he can afford a
new car. He has six doormen watching his building so that no poor, or black, or chicano guy can go in there and rob him. That’s a white man’s family. We have the tiyoshpaye, all the people having a common grandfather or great-grandfather: aunts, uncles, granddads, grandmothers, grandkids, cousins, nieces, nephews. Whites call this the extended family. The Crow Dogs, Hollow Horn Bears, Two Strikes, and Iron Shells all come from common ancestors, so we all make up one large tiyoshpaye. And then all these men formed their own, smaller tiyoshpayes. Many of them had several wives, who, in turn, had several kids each. So now we have relatives in the Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, Oak Creek, Standing Rock, and Lower Brulé reservations, at Fort Yates, Fort Belknap, and Fort Peck, in Oklahoma, and even in Canada. There are so many relatives spread far and wide even I am losing track.

Old Man Crow Dog, the first of that name, was a buffalo hunter. He knew the ways of the buffalo and of the animals in the forest. He was born in 1836 and died in 1912. A government paper says he was born earlier, in 1832. Maybe so. Before he took on the name Crow Dog he had six other names. One of them was Mato Sicha, Bad Bear. When Crow Dog was a young man, just at the end of his boyhood, he hunted with bow and arrow. His arrowheads were made of chipped stone. My father, Henry, still had his arrow straightener, a round stone with a hole in it. My father kept it as a souvenir. He was a good bowman, but not as good as his close relatives Hollow Horn Bear and He Dog. The best was Numpa Kahpa, Two Strikes, who got his name from killing two soldiers, riding on a horse, with one arrow. Some say that he shot an arrow clear through a buffalo and it went on and killed a buffalo calf. I don’t know which is true, but Two Strikes sure was a great arrow shooter.

My father still saw his grandfather, Crow Dog Number
One, carry a bow, even though by this time he owned a Winchester. He told my father, “Always take two bowstrings. If one breaks, you still got the other. Always be ready, because anytime you might run into something. Then go for your arrow bag! The wind can turn an arrow. Judge the wind if you want to hit something. Get the right wood for the bow, get the right wood for the arrows. You have to feather them good. By the feathers you can tell what tribe the arrow is from. Go to a good bow maker. Don’t try to make them yourself. The bow maker has a certain power. Maybe it’s an herb he uses, a bow medicine. Often he is a bad hunter. You supply him with good hump meat, he makes you a bow. A fine bow is worth two good horses.”

My father remembered those things and he taught me. Later, my great-grandfather had iron-tipped arrows and, during the 1850s, got his first trade gun, a muzzle loader with a silver dragon mounted on its stock. Without the dragon you wouldn’t accept such a gun, because without the dragon it wasn’t good. They made those guns until 1860. Henry had it before I was born. He said it shot straight. He sold it to a trader for two dollars for food.

When my great-grandfather was young he kindled a flame with a fire stick of sharpened hardwood. You twirl it around in some soft wood with a little heap of tinder about so big. I can still make a fire that way for a ceremony where you’re not allowed to use matches. Later, he carried a “strike-a-light” in a quilled bag around his neck—a U-shaped piece of steel, some flint, and tinder in a little box to keep it dry. He also had a knife made from buffalo bone with a very sharp point, a real man-killer. He lived in a tipi made of buffalo skins.

From a white man’s point of view, Old Man Crow Dog was still living in the Stone Age—savage and uncivilized. In the white man’s view you are civilized when you have a flush toilet and a microwave. But that’s not how we look at it. I think that the first Crow Dog was a lot more civilized than a white man of today, watching wrestling on TV. He lived in a time of change, lightning-swift
change. My father, Henry, said, “Old Man Crow Dog jumped from inside the body of a Stone Age aborigine into the body of a modern man.” Henry spoke English badly but liked to use a few five-dollar words that had come his way.
Aborigine
was one of them. Old Man Crow Dog lived long enough to ride in a train. He never rode in a car, but might have seen one of the earliest kinds. Henry was the first to own an automobile, an “Indian car”—that is, an old rattletrap. After he was put on the reservation, the first Crow Dog was told that he must have a Christian first name. “Pick any one you like,” said the census taker. “You pick it” was the answer. “How about Jerome?” said the census taker. Jerome it was. Henry thought it might also be possible that a missionary baptized his grandfather without his knowing what was going on. So from then on he was Jerome Crow Dog. He moved from a tipi of buffalo skins into a canvas tipi, because by then all the buffalo were gone. An old photograph shows Jerome with his wife, Catches Her, standing in front of that tipi. Later he moved into a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor and a kerosene lamp for light. Just before he died, someone in Rapid City showed him how to make a phone call. By then they had electric light in that town. I would have liked to know what an old bow-and-arrow man would have thought about all this, the sudden jump from one age into another.

Jerome was a Brulé. We are all full-blood Brulés. The word is French, meaning “burned.” In English we are the Burned Thighs, or Sichangu in the Lakota language. We got this name because of a fight during which enemies set the prairie around our camp on fire, so our people’s leggings and moccasins burned.

Jerome was a good rider, a horse master. An old photograph shows him riding bareback. He didn’t need a saddle. He loved his luzan (fast) horse. He could tame a wild pony. He could doctor a sick one, blow into its skin or use shunka wakan tapejuta, the horse-curing herb that shines like silver. He cured limping or a lump somewhere, any horse sickness at all.

He also was a great horse stealer. He raided far and wide, got
horses from the Pawnee and Crow. “He had that way with horses,” my father told me. “He had that power, a horse medicine. He went on a raid, and he crept up and put a halter on that pony and just walked off with it. The horse never made a sound, it just went along. None of those Crow or Pawnee, sleeping in their tipis, woke up. His medicine was that strong.” My father still knew his grandfather’s horse-raiding song:

Getting horses when raiding an enemy tribe got a man war honors. It was like counting coup. It earned a man eagle feathers. In Crow Dog’s vision, he saw a strange thing in the clouds. There was thunder and lightning, and all of a sudden he had this vision. It was as if he were blindfolded, like having buckskin covering his eyes. He peeked through it, lifted it up, and saw an Indian riding his horse. In him he recognized himself. And he recognized the sacred horse power given to Crow Dog. So he became a horse dreamer through the power of Wakan Tanka. He was given the gift of putting on a horse dance. He had four times four riders doing it, riding horses of the same color. The men wore black masks. There were no holes for their eyes in those hoods, so the horses did all the dancing. They never bumped one another. They knew this was sacred. The masks had horns on them and the riders used no saddles, or blankets, or bridles. Both men and horses were painted with lightning designs. They called the horse dance pejuta wacipi, medicine dance. It brings rain and cures sick minds.

Crow Dog also put on the shunka alowanpi, a horse parade for warriors who are going out to fight an enemy. And he put on warrior honoring dances. Crow Dog taught all these things to the
people. He taught them the songs, so that when he was no longer around they would remember them and how to perform those ceremonies. Thanks to him we still know them today.

My father told me, “Old Crow Dog Number One was a fighting man. In battle he made the bear sound: ‘Hrrrnh, watch out! Crow Dog is coming!’ He had the right to carry a chief’s staff, shaped like a white man’s sheepherder’s stick, crooked at the top. He counted many coups with it. He also had a bear claw necklace. He had to kill the bear himself before he was allowed to wear it. He always wore a blanket around his shoulders. So the missionaries called him an ‘unregenerate hostile nonprogressive aborigine’ or a ‘blanket Injun.’ He liked that. He was proud of it.”

Jerome was a loner. He lived way out on the prairie, as far out as he could. He went by the sun, the moon, the stars, and the wind. He had his campfire. He knew how to strike a spark without matches. He harvested from the earth and the animals. He was a buffalo man, an herb man, a pejuta wichasha. He saw an herb and, in his mind, the herb told him how to use it.

My father remembered the old man telling him stories, rocking back and forth, sometimes stopping to hum a little song, “Always moving, I was, from place to place, always moving. Following the buffalo, going to the sacred Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, roaming as far up as the Big Horns, and east all the way to the Missouri but never as far as the Mississippi. Ah, hokshila, son, that was a life for a man to live. For a woman and a kid, too. On a horse, after buffalo, buffalo covering the earth as far as you could see, the thunder of their hooves ringing in your ears. The great rumbling sound of the herds. The smell of roasting meat, the laughter, the drums going, the dancing. And nothing to spoil it. Ho, hokshila, you can never know what you’re missing.” Then he would stop and look sad. He dreamed of his youth when the country was still wild and beautiful, without fences, telephone poles, or pig farms.

Jerome didn’t meet a white man until he was nearly grown up. White beaver men and traders had been around since about 1810 or so, but they always came up the Missouri, bringing
whiskey and the smallpox to the Mandan, almost wiping out that tribe, but they didn’t come as far west as Crow Dog country. There was just one little fur trading post at what is now Chadron, Nebraska. But somehow Jerome never was there. He grew up as an ikche wichasha, a wild, natural human being.

Old Man Crow Dog had the power to see things coming. He saw it in his mind. He would say, “Tomorrow will come bad weather for some time.” And that would happen. He told the people, “Soon there will be no more buffalo and people will starve. Make wasna! Make wasna!”—that is, pemmican. And it was as he said; the buffalo were being killed off by the whites. He foretold such things. He could say to a person that he was going to die unless he ate a certain medicine, and that person would go out looking for that herb. And soon enough he found that root and got the medicine to make him well. Jerome told them to go south or east, this way and that, for an hour, or a day, or a week, to stop at a certain tree or rock, and they’d find food or water. Or he told them how to find a spot where they could find and kill a weak animal, and butcher it, and be hungry no more. He saw these places in his mind. He told the women where to find timpsila (wild turnips) and chokecherries when there was no meat. He could always foretell the weather. His four wounds helped with this. It was the bullets inside his body that told him what kind of weather it would be.

My father was fourteen years old when Jerome died. So he knew him well. He told me, “When my grandfather was alive we had to get our drinking water from the creek. We got our water like the animals, like the deer and elk. My grandfather, when he was young, didn’t even have a pail. He carried his water in a bladder bag. Every woman had a skin bag then. Getting water from the creek, first thing in the morning, was women’s work. When they met at the creek, that was a time for them to chat, to gossip. It was not only that he had no pail, he had only a few of the white man’s things. He once traded some skins for a miloglas, a mirror
for his wife. In his old age, of course, he had to live pretty much like a wasichu.

“Before he had to go to the reservation, my grandfather had been a great hunter. He was open-handed and had a generous heart. He gave feasts for the hungry, even if he himself was starving. He always shared his meat with the old and the sick. He was a giver. He always told me, ‘You must follow my trail. Don’t be stingy. Tunkashila has made this earth for us to live on, so that our people should live forever. So the half-starved must share with those who are altogether starving.’ He said this whenever our government rations ran out. He sometimes said things that were hard to understand, like ‘The pain you have to learn like the animal learns it. The herb itself gets sick. The thunder gave thirst to the earth!’ It took me a long time to figure him out. He liked us to think for ourselves, to guess at what was in his mind.

“When he was young, my grandfather was very good-looking. He had the love power, the elk power. Women who met him had that love light in their eyes. In his earliest photograph he looks very young, smooth skinned, with strong cheekbones. He was close to fifty when that picture was taken, sometime around 1880. He looked about twenty years younger. His eyes were keen like a hawk’s always looking for things to be seen. When he was old, the way I knew him, his face had broadened and his mouth was like a gash. He looked like the chief he was. His hair grew white, but not totally, and began to curl a little. He tried to raise a mustache, but we Indians don’t have much body hair. And he was a full-blood. All he could do was two tiny tufts at the sides of his upper lip. He was a good man, a loner, living way out on the prairie, far from other folk.”