Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  Bliss you can’t understand unless you’ve had a little rough bumps. The person who says, “Oh, I’ve always been happy.” B.S.! If you haven’t known the opposite, how can you know what happiness is? I think I have paradise right now. Despite this messed-up human world that we live in, I think it’s a very interesting world. Remember old Cholly Wendorf, the one-armed soapbox orator? He was saying he died once and was sent up to Heaven. St. Peter said, “Oh, you’re an agitator,” he sent him down to Hell. The Devil says, “I don’t want you!” He says, “You only got one arm. You have to shovel souls into that fire there and you have to toss Christians around in the fire. So I’m going to send you to purgatory.” So here I am, back in purgatory! Existence is a great thing. We hang on to it as much as possible, no matter how rough things are.

  When they celebrate the Day of the Dead, they build their home altars and put offerings for the departed there, and photographs of the recently departed. And on that night they go to the cemetery. First they clean off the tombstone and whitewash it, decorate it with flowers. Decorate it with the marigold, because that’s the one flower that still grows at that time of year. And then they sit down and have lunch with their departed, and spend the night with them. Sometimes you’ll see musical groups out there, mariachi bands. And they spend the night with their departed. This is not only Mexico. I know the cemetery where my wife’s mother is buried here on the northwest side of Chicago, a lot of Greek Orthodox people are there, Russian, Serbians, and what have you. And people will come out and have their lunches with them, sit down by the grave site and have lunch with their departed. Or they’ll be carrying a case of soda—Coke, Pepsi, or whatever—everybody he sees goes and gives them a can of soda because it’s a part of remembering their departed. In Mexico it’s become an annual holiday.

  You see dry twigs and dry branches, and you’re reminded of the impermanence of existence. The Protestants, who settled the northern part of the hemisphere, when they saw the old practices, they said, “Oh, that’s stuff of the Devil. We have to stamp this out.” The Spanish padres said, “Well, wait a minute, this is el día de—the day of St. Gerónimo. From now on this will be the Fiesta of St. Gerónimo.” St. Jerome—Gerónimo, the way the Apache chief was named . . .

  I recently returned from California, where I picked up a lot of silkscreen posters and a lot of these used the image of death. The image of the calaverismo. Calavera means skull or skeleton. It was the practice for thousands of years. You have to consider that in Mexico, people lived next door to earthquakes, volcanoes, pestilences, and bad economic conditions, so death was no stranger. It was something that was accepted philosophically. The poet Octavio Paz says that in the capitals of Paris and London the word “death” gets caught on the tongue, burns the tongue, but in Mexico they embrace it, they play with it, and they celebrate it. It’s illustrated in the toys that are found around the Day of the Dead. Skeletons, little pushcarts with skeletons are given to the children: This is what you’ll become someday. Don’t be afraid of death. What’s more important: Don’t be afraid of life. There’s a verse from a traditional Mexican song. “Nadie debe lamentarse por muerte de sus amores,” “Nobody should lament the passing of one’s loves.”

  I build an altar for my parents or my wife’s parents and for recently departed friends. And of course what interests you is the composition of this altar. You put on things that you associate with the departed’s life, be they cigarettes or a can of beer or a bottle of wine, but always there’s a glass of water. And the idea behind that is the souls, after making the long journey to visit the altar, are thirsty, so they have the water. And of course the water stays there, it evaporates—and so, you know, the souls are drinking it.

  The altar is made out of many things. It’s usually a platform or a table in a corner of the room that you decorate with flowers, candles, and such. I decorate my altar with skulls made out of sugar candy, besides the toys and such. And there are the various breads they make to represent dead people. And pictures of the departed. Friends come over and add their bit to it. I go over to friends and add my bit to their altars. I’ll take a drink and raise it up to them, to the altar, to salute them. Life is a celebration, and death means you’re reminded of the life you no longer have.

  *Maestro Josef Krips, founding conductor of the Salzburg Festival.

  Vine Deloria

  “I’m an old Indian politician, observer of events, and a writer.” His most celebrated book is Custer Died for Your Sins. He taught for many years at the University of Colorado and is now retired, though still writing.

  I GREW UP in a border town of about seven hundred people in Martin, South Dakota, right on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I had classmates die, get run over by tractors, drown. A good friend of mine died in those polio epidemics.

  On the prairies, death was a quite a big event. When I was a child, we had wakes, and they would last quite a while—maybe a couple of days before the actual burial service. A custom they started to do was very comforting: to have a giveaway a year after the funeral. They recognized that you can’t observe all that grief in a two- or three-day period. So people set themselves aside for a whole year, and go out of their way to be helpful to other people, and people come in to comfort them. About a year after the person died, they have this big giveaway. They hold a big feast and they give things to everybody in the community. That’s to mark the end of the mourning period. They recognize that losing a mate or a family member, a child, is very traumatic. In the old days, they used to cut their hair and gash their skin and go into mourning. Today, they announce that they’re going to be mourning for a certain period of time. During that period, you’re not supposed to talk harshly to them. Usually, the people in the community will help the grieving family to start accumulating things so they can have a big feast and giveaway a year afterwards. Some people very severely affected by a loss will have giveaways four years in a row.

  That was the most comforting thing for me when my father died, looking forward to having a giveaway—that I could feed the people in that community, give them blankets and jackets and scarves and things like that. During the giveaway, I had to pass muster from the medicine man that I knew enough about the culture and language, that I was sincere in what I wanted to do. He used the anniversary of my father’s death as an opportunity to tell all of the people what life meant and what death meant. He didn’t spend his time talking about my father, so he didn’t pull me back into the grief at all. He made me feel like my father, as all the other people who died on that reservation, had moved on. And we should move on too.

  The women up there loved these little blue porcelain, blue enamel bowls. So I just bought all kinds of ’em, handed ’em out. [Laughs] You accumulate goods, but all of your friends also contribute a quilt or a blanket. You basically are celebrating the life of the person who died, and you’re thanking the community for their support during this whole year. You’re really celebrating the life. [A gentle chuckle] You’re a year away from the immediate shock of losing someone. At these giveaways, they always tell funny stories about funerals, or about someone dying, but they enable you to feel very good that you’ve really accomplished something by doing this. There’s feasting, of course. They cook turkeys, hams, buffalo, whatever.

  My family converted to Christianity. My grandfather was a very famous missionary, and he really forced my father to follow his footsteps. He was a chief of the Yankton Sioux. He was an Episcopal missionary. My great-grandfather was a very famous, very powerful medicine man. He had this dream about our family. So he encouraged my grandfather to not become chief but to become baptized and become a priest. So he turned Christian, and now I’m turning the family pagan again. [Laughs] My grandfather was then reelected chief by this band, and he was chief right up till he was so infirm he couldn’t do anything.

  He wasn’t abandoning beliefs so much as looking at where would the leadership possibilities be once you’re confined to the reservation. He said you’ve g
ot to get an education because they are now outlawing the traditional religion. So if you’re going to fulfill the vision I have of our family as religious leaders, you’re going to have to do it in this other religion. I’ve talked to modern medicine men who say in their visions they’re offered a choice: you can be a Christian minister, you can be a peyote. You can be a traditional Sioux, or you can be something else. The spirits say you can choose any of those. We work in all of them.

  I grew up as an Episcopalian. Everything’s changed quite a bit for me, and I do a lot with traditional people now. Most of them will go right back to the medicine man when they’re in a crisis and find out what to do. He performs in many ways like a priest or a minister. A lot of times, he makes up the ceremony by watching the grieving people and adapting their statements and feelings. They sometimes use a sweet grass to smudge everybody and put smoke on them. They use a pipe sometimes. There’s a lot of visitations by spirits.

  When I was a kid, a young Indian boy got bucked off a horse—he hit the corral and broke his neck. They had a big wake for him. This was summertime. It was a log cabin, and they had opened part of the wall to let the breeze through. In the middle of the wake, this horse stuck his head in the cabin. He was foaming at the mouth, and the water from his mouth was dripping down on the floor. One of the men said, “That’s the horse that bucked this kid off and killed him.” And so they said, “Let’s capture that horse!” So they ran out and they got on their horses with their lariats and it was pretty close to dark, so they had lanterns. They chased that horse about five miles into the badlands. In a box canyon, they had the horse trapped—it couldn’t get out. And there was the horse laying dead, and it had been dead for about three days, same time as the boy. But we had people back at the cabin wiping up where the horse’s saliva was. This was a real visitation. You have that quite frequently. Instead of saying that the world is material and it evolves into spiritual, what the Indians say is that the world is spiritual and it manifests itself in the material. So if there’s a strong spirit, the spirit can take on physical form.

  Just in the last four or five years, people on the reservation have been wanting to be buried up on a scaffold, like the Plains Indians did. They would wrap the body up very carefully and put it up on a scaffold. It would be just a little higher than a person’s head. They would let the body disintegrate until it was just bones. They’d visit it every year, make sure that the thing hadn’t fallen over. When it was just bones, then they would take the bones and hide them. This comes from the old belief that we are high on the food chain, and all our lives we’ve benefited from the bodies and lives of everything below us. So then we have to return our bodies to the dust, so that the buffalo can feed off us. Scaffolding is coming back among reservation Indians who are reasonably well educated. They see the spiritual connection.

  There definitely is a hereafter. There have been numerous near-death experiences, visions, which tell people about the hereafter, with valleys and game and everything. It’s painted as a very pleasant place. It’s not radically different than the life we have here. You just continue on. Your relatives who have gone before you come and visit. You can stay there for a while and visit them, but you can’t drink any of their water and you can’t eat any of their food. If you do, you have to stay.

  Right now, there are studies going on that Indians were reincarnation people: they believed they would come back. Every now and then, a rumor will go through one of the reservations that one of the famous chiefs will be reborn and will lead the people. At funerals sometimes, if there’s an unusual disturbance, people say, “This person must have been the reincarnation of someone else.” One of my very best friends, who had been chairman at Standing Rock, died and it rained and thundered for five days—you could hardly go out. It scared all the people on the reservation. They said, “He had the power of the thunders. They’re welcoming him home.” It was very moving to a lot of people. The most common figure for God is this very old Indian man. I don’t think it’s God in the Western, European sense at all. It is power in everything that is alive.

  In the old days, when they used to kill their favorite horses and dogs to go along with them to the next world, it wasn’t just a sacrifice. What they were saying is that the horse and dog are so much a part of me that we all have to go on together. I would be incomplete without them, and they would be incomplete without me. It was a rare occasion because your favorite horse was probably a well-trained buffalo hunter. Your son would get the horse. You wouldn’t kill an animal that valuable.

  I hope I’m rational right until the last minute, that I understand what’s going on around me. I had a terrible staph infection about four years ago—I thought I was going to die. My son videotaped as much as I could tell him. I was like the old man in Little Big Man. I laid down on the floor in our rec room. [Laughs] I got my cigarettes, and my wife made me a big thing of coffee, and I got my little tape recorder, I put on my Hank Snow tape and I listened to that for a while and smoked a cigarette, and I thought, All right, I’m ready to go. But I wasn’t ready to go. [Laughs] I didn’t go. I got to a point where I was just totally paralyzed, and then they called an ambulance and took me to the hospital. I almost waited too late, but I really thought, Well, I’ve done the best I could . . . I’ve done some bad things and I’ve done some good things. It’s a toss-up. If there’s a big judgment day, I’ll say, “Look, if I’d had more information, I would have done better, but you didn’t give me a very good shot.” [Laughs]

  When I was about nine years old, there was a very famous Indian who lived about nine miles west of us, Billy Fire Thunder. He woke up one morning and he said to his wife, “I’m going under the earth tonight at midnight, so I want you to fix my favorite breakfast. And then I want you to take me to town to say good-bye to my friends.” He had a nice breakfast and sat and smoked his pipe with a coffee. He went to town and said good-bye to storekeepers and some of the Indians who lived in town. He was very energetic. He didn’t say he was going to die, he said, “I’m going on a trip, so I want to say good-bye to you in case I don’t come back.” Then he went back home and they fed him a real nice meal, and he just took little bites of it, just to get the taste of all these things he liked. Friends from the community came in, and finally, about ten-thirty, he said, “Now I just want my family around because I’m ready to go.” He planned out this whole day. It was the talk of the reservation for weeks and weeks and weeks. People just kept saying, “How could a guy know all of this?” Then old-timers came and said, “Unless you were killed in the war, this is the way you did it. You knew that your end had come.” So you made all these last-minute good-byes and “Give my horse to this person”—like that. They said that’s the way you’re supposed to do it.

  Almost all the tribes taught their young people that this is a hard world. You have to be brave in spite of what happens. But you can’t have a false courage about things, or a bravado. So they weren’t really afraid of death. They like to tell the old stories over and over again. An Osage chief, his son killed some white man and the soldiers came for him. “We’re going to take him and execute him.” The father says, “If all you want is a life for a life, why don’t you take me? I’ve lived most of my life and this young person might have made a mistake, but he still has a whole life to live and he could do something with it.” Here you have the elder saying, “Well, if you really want to kill somebody, go ahead and kill me.” You have people who, when they’re outnumbered, sing their death song. A song summing up their life: This is the way I live. A lot of times they said it’s far better to die in battle or to be killed by someone than to get so old you can’t do anything.

  I thought that was a general attitude of Indians for a long time. And then we held a conference in Arizona. We asked this ninety-year-old Navajo medicine man, “What do you attribute your long life to? Explain your life to us.” He said, “Our people taught the rank and file that it’s good to die on the battlefield. But if you were a brave war
rior and you lived through that, as you got older, you began to understand more and more. By the time you’re in your eighties, you understand that you’ve been one of the people who’s been blessed,” he said, “because you’re gonna live to your nineties and you’re gonna know what prayer really means before you die.” So we’ve got two levels of interpretation. Now there’s no battlefield. They took that away, and so you lost a lot of the focus on that higher thing: that you could live to be very old and you would understand what prayer was. That’s why you have such confusion on Indian reservations. There’s no way that young men can measure themselves against anything. Tribes valiantly try and reinterpret it: go get an education, or learn a skill. That’s the equivalent of going on the warpath. But deep down, people know it isn’t the equivalent. They’re trying to make, in this hundred years, that transition. That it’s just as important to live for a long time and take care of your family as it is to die on some battlefield.

  When I did my father’s memorial, he had left me this beautiful pipe, which is a sacred ceremonial pipe. It had a red buffalo carved on it, with a nice stem and a beaded bag. I had about three pipes, and you’re supposed to give the medicine man a pipe when he does the memorial. I’d feel chintzy if I didn’t give him the best pipe, my father’s. He made this speech and then I gave him this pipe. He’s holding the pipe with the bag and he said, “I want to tell people what this means.” He said, “When I first looked at it, the bag looked a little familiar.” He said, “I made that pipe thirty-two years ago, and I gave it away in a ceremony.” And he said, “Look . . . this pipe has never been used.” And he said, “This pipe has passed from ceremony to ceremony all these years and now you’re giving it back to me, a pipe I made when I was a young man.” I thought it was incredible that no one had ever smoked that pipe, and it had just been a present from one person to another. He’s gone, I don’t know who has it now—he died this summer. I’m sure he gave it to somebody else. In those ceremonies, those Indians always give the best they have, they don’t hold back. [Wistfully] ’Cause it was a beautiful pipe . . . While you’re giving it away over here, someone’s tapping you on the shoulder to give it to you. It just kept getting given away, all those years. Each time, the person said, “I don’t want to give this away, but I can’t be a slacker, I can’t hold back.” So they gave it. No one ever took it out in public and bragged about themselves, “Look at my beautiful pipe,” and smoked it. They all treated it with dignity. My father got it—and you’d think once a Christian minister has a pipe, you’re never gonna see it again. And then I got the pipe, and I gave it back to the man who made it. The circle of life and death.