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

by Dog, Leonard C.

  “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.

  fourteen

  A HOT LINE TO THE GREAT SPIRIT

  Oyate yanka po People, behold me.

  channupa wa wakan There is a pipe that is sacred,

  yuha chewaki yelo he therefore I pray with it.

  oyate yanipikta cha Our nation will live,

  lechi mu welo. that is why I do this.

  Pipe song

  The most sacred thing for us Lakota is the chanupa, the holy pipe. The pipe and the Indian go together. They cannot be separated. The pipe lifted up in prayer forms a link between man and Tunkashila. It’s a spiritual bridge to the Great Spirit. With the pipe I can communicate with Tunkashila, the Grandfather Spirit, whom we also call Wakan Tanka, the great sacredness. With the pipe I let my mind fly through the air. The sacred pipe is a smoke signal to Tunkashila. The pipe is not a thing. It is alive. You can feel its power as you hold it, power from Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Woman, who brought this great gift to us. Within the pipe dwells the power of Wakan Tanka, male and female power. Man is the stem; woman is the bowl. At Wounded Knee I lifted up my pipe for survival, not for survival of us who had come to that place, but for the survival of all our Indian people.

  When I speak of the pipe I speak with an ancient knowledge that lies within me. I was born before my father. By this I mean that my spirit was born hundreds of years ago. What my ancestors left, whatever the white man has not destroyed, I pick up and continue on. A man without a country, that’s Mr. Indian, but our spiritual country is still there, thanks to the pipe.

  I had a vision. It came from the morning star, a star whisper. I heard this voice saying, “Any understanding you ask from the morning star shall be granted you, but ask with the sacred things, the drum, the sacred tobacco, the sacred sweet grass, and, above all, with the sacred pipe.” Our dead sleep not. They tell me what I want to know. I have the power to see through things. I have only limited vision with the eyes I have in my head, but with my spiritual eyes I can see across oceans. The pipe is here to unite us, to remove the fences people put up against one another. Putting up fences is the white man’s way. He invented the barbed wire, the barbed wire of the heart. The pipe is a fence remover. Sitting in a circle, smoking it the right way, all barriers disappear. Walls crumble.

  The pipe is us. Inyan sha, the red pipestone, is our flesh and blood. The stem is our spine, the bowl our head, the smoke rising from it is Tunkashila’s breath. There is an old story handed down from grandparent to grandchild, generation after generation. It is the story of a great flood that carried everything before it. The people fled to the top of high mountains, but even there the rising waters swept over them. Their flesh and blood turned to stone, the red pipestone. Only one young woman survived. An eagle carried her to the top of a tree on the highest cliff above the water. The young woman had twins, a boy and a girl, the eagle’s children. These twins are the ancestors of our Lakota nation. The sacred red stone occurs at only one spot in the whole world, at a quarry in western Minnesota. In the old days this was a sacred ground, not only to the Sioux but to many other tribes who came there to get the red stone for their pipes. At that place even bitter enemies became friends, digging the stone side by side. Among whites the stone is known as catlinite, after the painter George Catlin, the first white man to visit the quarry, way back in 1837. The sacred stone forms a long band sandwiched between layers of other kinds of rock. I have been there many times to dig out the inyan sha. There is little of it left and one must dig deeper and deeper to get at it, even dig under the water that covers the quarry’s bottom.

  Pipes for ceremonial use often have their stems beautifully decorated with porcupine quillwork. Sometimes shiny green mallard feathers are tied to it. Some pipes have an eagle feather dangling from them, because the eagle saved the young woman from drowning during the great flood and in this way made human beings survive, and also because the eagle is the grandest and wisest of birds and Tunkashila’s messenger. The pipe bowl is called pahu, meaning head bone. They call the stem ihupa, handle, or sinte, the tail. The mouthpiece is called oyape, and the spot where the stem joins the bowl is oagle, the holding place. Pipes are often very plain, elbow shaped for just the pleasure of smoking, or T-shaped for ceremonial use. Some old bowls were carved in the shape of a horse, a buffalo, or even a human being. Some bowls are inlaid with lead designs. Some are made of black stone—shale, steatite, or calcite. My uncle old George Eagle Elk used to make black bowl pipes. Pipes of all shapes and materials are found in the thousand-year-old tombs of the ancient Mound Builders and in the equally old ruins of southwestern pueblos. Throughout human history, wherever there were Indians there were pipes.

  Pipes are kept in special bags called chantojuha, heart bags, because the pipe stands at the heart of our existence. Usually fringed, the pipe bags are beautifully decorated with beadwork and quillwork. When pipes are not being smoked, the bowl and stem are kept separate. They are just too powerful to be joined together for any length of time. Together with the pipe a man may also keep a poker, ichasloka, for tamping down the tobacco in the bowl. It is often also beautifully decorated. Sometimes as a tamper they use a wooden skewer with which a friend has pierced himself during the sun dance.

  Chanshasha, the tobacco used for smoking the pipe, is also sacred. It is not like the stuff in a white man’s cigarette that gives you lung cancer and makes you an addict, something used only to make you feel good. It contains no nicotine. Chanshasha is made from the inner bark of a dogwood or red osier dogwood, which grows along the Little White River, right near our place. Some tribes use red willow bark, but we prefer the dogwood. Sometimes we mix it with sweet-smelling herbs, such as chanli ichahiye, snakeroot, which keeps poisonous snakes away. We also mix our tobacco with arrowroot. Some people say that what we are smoking is kinnickinick, but that is not a Lakota word but one used by northeastern tribes.

  The pipe should always be treated with great respect, even awe. Never walk in front of people who are smoking it. Never step over it. A pipe should never be lent out. No menstruating woman should come near the pipe, because at that time her power fights with the power of the pipe. When she is not on her moon, a woman can smoke the pipe during a ceremony. Hold the pipe with the bowl in the left hand and the stem in the right, across your chest, not sticking way out. With the pipe in your hand you cannot lie; you can speak only the truth. When you load up the pipe with tobacco, you pray, you sing the pipe-filling song. You must smoke it in the right way, always going clockwise from one person to the next and everybody taking four puffs, because four is the sacred number. That’s why we sing,

  Channupa kite wakan yelo This pipe is sacred,

  tanyan yuzo yo. hold it in a good way.

  As the pipe goes around, every puff is a prayer. As you inhale the smoke, all humankind smokes with you. Your breath mingles with the breath of all other living beings. The spirit is in the pipe. It is there. Smoking in a circle you hear voices coming out of nowhere. Spirits may appear and talk to you, and they speak every language in the world. There is a purpose and a reason for using the pipe this way, the way Tunkashila wants it. The pipe is like a human being, it is not a thing. It is our flesh and blood. Without the pipe there can be no ceremony. It stands at the center of all our seven sacred rites. It unites us and makes us one. Smoking in a circle we renew the sacred hoop of the nation. The pipe breaks down the concrete walls that separate us. With the pipe you must concentrate, think only good thoughts, and pray for understanding.

  April 16, 1968, was the most awesome day of my life. That day I was allowed to behold, to touch, and to pray with the Ptehinchala Huhu Chanupa, the Buffalo Calf Pipe. It is the most holy thing we Lakota possess. Maybe this is the most sacred object for all the red nations on this continent. This is the pipe that Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Woman, brought to our people so long ago. Some say this pipe is eight hundred years old, some say it’s a thousand yea
rs. The pipe was there when the Lakota people were born, when understanding was given to the human being, when the holy woman with this pipe taught our people how to live in a sacred manner.

  For many generations the Calf Pipe was kept by the Elk Head family. From them it passed to the Looking Horses. Arvol Looking Horse is at this time the pipe keeper. On that day in 1968, I was allowed by my father and other elders and spiritual men to travel to Eagle Butte, where the sacred bundle in which the pipe is kept was to be opened. This happens only on very special occasions, maybe not even once in twenty years or even within one’s lifetime. So then we traveled more than a hundred miles to Eagle Butte, to the Greengrass community on the Cheyenne River reservation, one of several Sioux reservations in South Dakota. The people there are mainly Minneconjou, one of our seven Lakota tribes. There was my father, Henry, and myself, and one of my grandpas, Old Man Little Dog. He was eighty-seven years old and didn’t do much of anything anymore, but he said that he had to be there to pray with the Calf Pipe. The others in our group were Abel Stone, Joe Black Tomahawk, Laura Tomahawk, John Williams, Noah Eagle Deer, Joe Eagle Elk, Uncle Moses Big Crow, and Jeff LaBuff Baker. We all met at the house of Stanley and Celia Looking Horse. Stanley had just named his son, Arvol, as the keeper of the Calf Pipe. He was a young boy then, even younger than myself. The old Looking Horses were like a strange horse that shies off when you come near it. By this I mean that they kept to themselves, away from white folks, living in the old Indian way.

  We purified ourselves. We prayed. We walked barefoot to the shed where the pipe bundle was kept at that time. There were twelve of us. We put up an altar. We had a ceremony. We smoked up the bundle with sweet grass. We made offerings of tobacco ties, colored cloth, and Bull Durham. Then, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, we started to unwrap the bundle. I was trembling and breathing hard. I started to weep. I felt the power coming out of the bundle, a power so strong it scared me. I sensed the presence of spirits. All of us experienced this.