For the hundred dancers who have volunteered to dance this year (the vow obligates them to dance four times during their lives) Sun Dance is a serious and painful undertaking; called “thirsty standing,” they eat no food and drink no water for four days. This year, with the hundred-degree heat we’ve been having, their suffering will be extreme. The ceremonies begin before dawn and often last until two or three in the morning. They must stay in the Lodge for the duration. Speaking to or making eye contact with anyone not dancing is forbidden, and it’s considered a great disgrace to drop out of the dance before it is over.
Sun Dance was suppressed by the government in the 188os, and its full revival has only been recent. Some tribes practiced the ceremony secretly, others stopped. George Horse Capture, a Gros Ventre who lives near me and has completed one Sun Dance, has had to read the same sources I have—Dorsey, Kroeber, and Peter Powell—to reeducate himself in his tradition.
“Did you sleep here last night?” an old man, one of the elders of the tribe, asked. Shrunken and hawk-nosed, he wore a blue farmer’s cap and walked with a crudely carved pine cane. “No, I drove from Shell,” I answered, sounding self-conscious because I seemed to be the only white person around. “Oh … you have a very good spirit to get up so early and come all this way. That’s good … I’m glad you are here,” he said. His round eyes narrowed and he walked away. On the other side of the shed where the big drum was kept he approached three teenage girls. “You sober?” he asked. “Yes,” they replied in unison. “Good,” he said. “Don’t make war on anyone. If you’re not drunk, there’s peace.” He hobbled past me again out into the parched field between the circle of tents and the Lodge. Coleman lanterns were being lighted and the tipis behind him glowed. He put both hands on top of the cane and, in a hoarse voice that carried far across the encampment, sang an Arapaho morning song: “Get up, Everyone get up …,” it began, followed by encouragements to face the day.
The sky had lightened; it was a shield of pink. The new moon, white when I had arrived, now looked blue. Another voice—sharp, gravelly, and less patient, boomed from the north, his song overlapping that of the first Crier’s. I looked: he was a younger man but bent at the shoulders like a tree. He paced the hard ground as he sang, and the tweed jacket he wore, which gave him a Dickensian look, hung from him and swayed in the breeze. Now I could hear two other Criers to the south and west. The four songs overlapped, died out, and started again. The men, silhouetted, looked ghostlike against the horizon, almost disembodied, as though their age and authority were entirely in the vocal cords.
First light. In the Lodge the dancers were dressing. Over gym shorts (the modern substitute for breechclouts), they pulled on long, white, sheath skirts, to which they fastened, with wide beaded belts, their dance aprons: two long panels, front and back, decorated with beads, ribbons, and various personal insignias. Every man wore beaded moccasins, leaving legs and torsos bare. Their faces, chests, arms, and the palms of their hands were painted yellow. Black lines skittered across chests, around ankles and wrists, and encircled each face. Four bundles of sage, which represents healing and breath, were tucked straight up in the apron fronts; thin braided wreaths of it were slipped onto the dancer’s wrists and ankles, and a crown of sage ending in two loose sprays looked like antennae.
Light begets activity—the Lodge began filling up. It’s a log arbor, forty yards across, covered with a thatchwork of brush. Its sixteen sides radiate from a great center pole of cotton-wood—the whole trunk of a hundred-year-old tree whose forked top looked like antlers. A white cloth was tied with rope around the bark, and overhead, on four of the pine stringers, tribal members had hung bandanas, silk cowboy scarves, and shawls that all together form a loose, trembling hieroglyph spelling out personal requests for health and repair.
Alongside the dancers, who stood in a circle facing east, a group of older men filed in. These were the “grandfathers” (ceremonially related, not by blood) who would help the younger dancers through their four-day ordeal.
The little shed against which I had leaned in the pre-morning light opened and became an announcer’s stand. From it the drum was rolled out and set up at the entrance to the Lodge.
Light begets activity begets light. The sky looked dry, white, and inflammable. Eleven drummers who, like “the grandfathers,” were probably ranchers sat on metal folding chairs encircling the drum. A stream of announcements in both Arapaho and English flooded the air. Friends and relatives of the dancers lined up in front of the Lodge. I found myself in a group of Indian women. The drumming, singing, and dancing began all at once. It’s not really a dance with steps but a dance of containment, a dance in place. Facing east and blowing whistles made of eagle wing bones in shrill unison, the men bounced up and down on their heels in time to the drumbeat. Series after series of songs, composed especially for Sun Dance, were chanted in high, intense voices. The ropey, repeating pulse was so strong it seemed to pull the sun up.
There were two important men at the back of the Lodge I hadn’t noticed. That their faces were painted red, not yellow, signified the status of Instructor, Pledger, or Priest. The taller of the two held a hoop (the sun) with eagle feathers (the bird of day) fastened around it. The “grandfather” standing in back of him raised the hoop-holding hand and, from behind, pushed the arm up and down in a wide, swinging arc until it took flight on its own.
I felt warmth on my shoulder. As the sun topped the horizon, the dancers stretched their arms straight out, lifting them with the progress of the sun’s rising. Songs pushed from the backs of the drummers’ throats. The skin on the dancers’ chests bounced as though from some interior tremor. When the light hit their faces, they looked as if they were made of sun.
The sunrise ceremony ended at eight. They had danced for nearly two hours and already the heat of the day was coming on. Pickups rambled through camps, children played quietly everywhere. Walking to a friend’s camp, I began to understand how the wide ampleness of the Indian body stands for a spirit of accommodation. In the ceremony I had just witnessed, no one—dancer, observer, child, priest, or drummer—had called attention to himself. There was no applause, no frivolousness. Families ambled back to their camps as though returning from a baseball game. When I entered my friend’s brush arbor (already a relief from the sun) and slid behind the picnic table bench she handed me the cup of coffee I’d been hoping for. “They’re dancing for all of us,” she said. Then we drained our cups in silence.
Though I came and went from the Sun Dance grounds (it was too hot to stand around in the direct sun) the ceremonies continued all day and most of each night. At nine the “runners” drove to the swamp to cut reeds from which they fashioned beds for the dancers. The moisture in the long, bladelike leaves helped cool the men off. At ten, special food eaten by the dancers’ families was blessed in the Lodge, and this was surely to become one of the dancers’ daily agonies: the smell of meat, stew, and fry bread filling the space, then being taken away. The sunrise drummers were spelled by new ones, and as the songs began again those dancers who could stood in their places and danced. Each man was required to dance a certain number of hours a day. When he was too weak or sick or reeling from hallucination, he was allowed to rest on his rush mat.
“What happens if it rains during Sun Dance?” I asked my Kiowa friend. “It doesn’t,” she answered curtly. By eleven, it was ninety-nine degrees. We drove west away from the grounds to the land she owned and went skinny-dipping in the river. Her brown body bobbed up and down next to my white one. Behind us a wall of colored rock rose out of the water, part of a leathery bluff that curved for miles. “That’s where the color for the Sun Dance paints comes from,” my friend’s husband said, pointing to a cave. He’d just floated into view from around an upstream bend. With his big belly glinting, he had the complacent look of a man who lords over a houseful of women: a wife, two daughters, a young tutor for his girls. The night before, they’d thrown an anniversary party at this spot. There were
tables full of Mexican food, a five-piece Mexican band whose members looked like reformed Hell’s Angels, a charro with four skinny horses and a trick-riding act, two guests who arrived from the oil fields by helicopter, and a mutual friend who’s Jewish and a Harvard professor who popped bikini-clad out of a giant plywood cake.
The men in the Rabbit Lodge danced as late as the party-goers. The next morning when I arrived at four-thirty the old man with the cane walked directly to me. “Where’s your coat? Aren’t you cold?” he asked gruffly, though I knew he was welcoming me. The dancers spit bile and shuffled back and forth between the johns and the Lodge. A friend had asked one of them how he prepared for Sun Dance. He replied, “I don’t. There’s no way to prepare for pain.” As the dancers began to look more frail, the singing became raucous. The astounding volume, quick rises in pitch, and forays into falsetto had an enlivening effect on all of us. Now it was the drummers who made the dancers make the sun rise.
Noon. In the hottest midday sun the dancers were brought out in front of the Lodge to be washed and freshly painted. The grandfathers dipped soft little brooms of sage in water and swabbed the men down; they weren’t allowed to drink. Their families gathered around and watched while the dancers held their gaze to the ground. I couldn’t bring myself to stand close. It seemed a violation of privacy. It wasn’t nudity that rendered the scene so intimate (they still had their gym shorts on), but the thirst. Behind me, someone joked about dancing for rain instead of sun.
I was wrong about the bathing scene. Now the desolation of it struck me as beautiful. All afternoon the men danced in the heat—two, eight, or twenty of them at a time. In air so dry and with their juices squeezed out, the bouncing looked weightless, their bodies thin and brittle as shells. It wasn’t the pain of the sacrifice they were making that counted but the emptiness to which they were surrendering themselves. It was an old ritual: separation, initiation, return. They’d left their jobs and families to dance. They were facing physical pain and psychological transformation. Surely, the sun seared away preoccupation and pettiness. They would return changed. Here, I was in the presence of a collective hero. I searched their faces and found no martyrs, no dramatists, no antiheroes either. They seemed to pool their pain and offer it back to us, dancing not for our sins but to ignite our hearts.
Evening. There were many more spectators tonight. Young Indian women cradling babies moved to the front of the Lodge. They rocked them in time with the drums and all evening not one child cried. Currents of heat rose from the ground; in fact, everything seemed to be rising: bone whistles, arms, stars, penises, the yeast in the fry bread, the smell of sage. My breasts felt full. The running joke in camp was about “Sun Dance Babies.” Surely the expansive mood in the air settled over the tipis at night, but there was more to it than that. Among some tribes a “Sacred Woman” is involved in the ceremony. The sun is a “man power” symbol. When she offers herself to the priest, their union represents the rebirth of the land, water, and people. If by chance a child is conceived, he or she is treated with special reverence for a lifetime.
Dawn. This morning I fainted. The skinny young man dancing in front of me appeared to be cringing in pain. Another dancer’s face had been painted green. I’m not saying they made me faint—maybe I fainted for them. With little ado, the women behind me picked me up. Revived and feeling foolish, I stood through to the end. “They say white people don’t have the constitution to go without water for so many days,” a white friend commented later. It sounded like a racist remark to me. She’d once been offered a chance to fast with a medicine man and refused. “I think it has more to do with one’s concepts of hope and fear,” I mumbled as she walked through the field to her car.
Afternoon. At five, only two dancers were standing. Because of the heat, the smell of urine had mixed with the sage.
Later in the evening I stood next to two teenage boys from Oklahoma. Not realizing I was old enough to be their mother, they flirted with me, then undercut the dares with cruelty. “My grandmother hates white tourists,” the one who had been eyeing my chest said to me. “You’re missing the point of this ceremony,” I said to him. “And racism isn’t a good thing anywhere.” They walked away, but later, when I bumped into them, they smiled apologetically.
When I had coffee in a friend’s brush arbor during a break in the dancing, the dancer’s wife looked worried. “He looks like death warmed over,” she said. A young man with black braids that reached his belt buckle was dangling a baby on each knee; I’ve never seen men so gentle and at ease with children. A fresh breeze fanned us. The round-the-clock rhythm of drumbeats and dancing made day and night seem the same. Sleeping became interchangeable with waiting, until, finally, there was no difference between the two.
Sunday. Two American flags were raised over the Lodge today—both had been owned by war veterans. The dance apron of a man near me had U.S. Navy insignias sewn into the corners. Here was a war hero, but he’d earned his medal far from home. Now the ritual of separation, initiation, and return performed in Vietnam, outside the context of community, changes into separation, benumbment, and exile.
Throughout the afternoon’s dancing there was a Give-Away, an Indian tradition to honor friends, relatives, and admirers with a formal exchange of gifts. In front of the announcer’s stand there was a table chock-full of food and another stacked high with Pendleton blankets, shawls, and beadwork. The loudspeaker overwhelmed the drumming until all the gifts were dispersed. Pickups streamed through the camps and a layer of dust muted the hard brightness of the day. After his first Sun Dance one old man told me he had given nearly everything he owned away: horse, wagons, clothes, winter blankets. “But it all comes back,” he said, as if the day and night rhythm of this ceremony stood for a bigger tidal cadence as well.
Evening. They’ve taken the brush away from the far side of the Lodge. Now the dancers face west. All hundred men, freshly painted with a wild dappling of dots, stripes, and crooked lines, bounced up and down vigorously and in short strokes waved eagle fans in front of their bodies as if to clear away any tiredness there.
When I asked why the Sun Dance ended at night, my friend said, “So the sun will remember to make a complete circle, and so we’ll always have night and day.” The sun drained from the dancers’ faces and sank into a rack of thunderclouds over the mountains. Every movement coming from the Lodge converged into a single trajectory, a big “V” like a flock of birds migrating toward me. This is how ritual speaks with no words. The dancing and whistling surged; each time a crescendo felt near, it ebbed. In the southwest, the first evening star appeared, and the drumming and singing, which had begun to feel like a hard dome over my head, stopped.
Amid cries of relief and some clapping I heard hoarse expulsions of air coming from dancers, like whales breaching after being under water too long. They rushed forward to the front of, the Lodge, throwing off the sage bracelets and crowns, knelt down in turn by wooden bowls of chokecherry juice, and drank their first liquid in four days.
The family standing next to me approached the Lodge cautiously. “There he is,” I heard the mother say. They walked toward the dancer, a big, lumbering man in his thirties whose waist, where rolls of fat had been, now looked concave. The man’s wife and father slid their arms around his back, while his mother stood in front and took a good look at him. He gave her the first drink of sweet water from his bowl. “I tried to be there as much as possible today. Did you see me?” his wife asked. He nodded and smiled. Some of the young children had rushed into the Lodge and were swinging the flattened reeds that had been the dancers’ beds around and around in the air. One of the drummers, an energetic man with an eccentric, husky voice, walked up to a group of us and started shaking our hands. He didn’t know us but it didn’t matter. “I’m awfully glad you’re here,” he kept saying, then walked away laughing ecstatically. The dancer I had been watching was having trouble staying on his feet. He stumbled badly. A friend said he worked for Amoco and tomorrow
he’d be back in the oil fields. Still supporting him with their arms, his family helped him toward their brush arbor, now lit with oil lamps, where he would vomit, then feast.
It’s late August. Wind swings down the hay meadows from high cornices of rimrock above the ranch like guffaws of laughter. Since Sun Dance several images recur: the shaded, shell-like bodies of the dancers getting smaller and smaller; the heated, expanding spectators surrounding them. At the point of friction, a generosity occurs. The transition to autumn is a ritual like that: heat and cold alternate in a staccato rhythm. The magnetizing force of summer reverses itself so that every airplane flying over me seems to be going away. Heat lightning washes over and under clouds until their coolness drops down to us and then flotillas of storms bound through as though riding the sprung legs of a deer. I feel both emptied and brimming over.
A week later. I’m camped on a hill next to an anthropologist and his wife. He’s Indian, she’s white, and they drove here on what he calls his “iron pony”—a motorcycle—to attend Crow Fair. “You see I had to marry one of these skinny white women so we could both fit here,” he explained as they squeezed onto the seat. He was as round and cheerful as the chrome gas tank his belly rested on. Surrounding us were the rolling grasslands that make up the middle Yellowstone Valley, site of the summer councils held by the warring Crow, Sioux, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne. The Wolf Mountains to the south step up into pitched rises, crowned with jack pines. The dark creases in the hills are dry washes, now blackened with such an abundance of ripe chokecherries they look clotted with blood. On a knob nearby, recently singed with fire, is Custer’s battlefield. “If there was any yellow hair left on that sonofabith, it’s gone now,” a Crow friend who had fought the fire said. The Crows, of course, were the ones scouting for Custer, but it seems to have been a temporary alliance, having more to do with their animosity toward other tribes than a love for any white man.
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 10
