by Win Blevins
“The one that knows is me,” says Adeline—kind of mouths it half soft, really.
“There’s been snow, so I can tell,” Grandpa says. I don’t think he was shutting Adeline out or being rude to her, he just didn’t hear or didn’t notice. Now he set out in a high voice and a serious, respectful style. “My family is all Oglala,” meaning Pine Ridge Lakota, not from Big Foot’s band, which was Cheyenne River people. “But Unchee’s family, they were Big Foot people.”
“The one that knows is me,” repeats Adeline, louder. Now her jaw was sticking out, made her look like a bulldog.
Grandpa took notice this time. “That’s true,” he says, “Adeline does know best about your ancestors through Unchee.” And he waited politely for Adeline to take up the story.
“You never paid no attention to me,” says Adeline, giving me a sideways flash. She’d been muting anger her whole life. Now she jutted her chin out again and spoke out the window to the Badlands, not to me. “I am Unchee’s oldest. By her first husband, John Running. He died when I was seven, in the influenza epidemic of 1918. I barely remember him. Atay here, he’s the one raised me. I never forget that, he’s my real dad.” Atay is our word for “father,” and Adeline really did never forget it—that’s why she was here taking care of Grandpa in his old age. Her old age too, for that matter.
“Don’t know what you know. I had a sister, Ainie, was eight, a brother, Robert, was two. They all died of influenza, all on ’em.” She stared out at something no one else could see, at least not anyone in this reality.
“Janey Running, your Unchee, she was born in 1890. Not just in 1890. She was born the day after the massacre.” Adeline looked at me triumphantly.
My head did a loop-de-loop.
“Her mother died in childbirth. That was one killed in the massacre, though she died the next morning. Shot, lost too much blood.”
She sat there and waited to see the impact of her revelation.
Though I was beginning to shake inside, I outwaited her.
“She told me this story, told lots of times. She didn’t tell it to nobody else, she couldn’t stand to. I was the one. ‘You remember,’ she said, ‘someone’s got to. But you keep it inside, don’t gab it around.’ So I didn’t.”
She flashed her eyes at me irritably. “Do you want to hear this story?”
The first time my voice didn’t work. Then I got out, “Yes.”
“Then you listen good.
“Your great-grandfather, Unchee’s father …” She hesitated. It’s not good to say the name of a dead person, better just to point to him with another name—your uncle, or like that.
“You don’t know his name, do you? Unchee never told you.” She paused to give it emphasis. “Blue Crow, he was called Blue Crow.”
I’ll be damned.
“Yah, yah, that’s the name Unchee gave you the day you started white-man school. She told me all about it. Unchee got nothing of her mother and father’s, nothing but that Pipe. Everything else lost. She save that Pipe, give it to the right one.
“You come along, she say, ‘He is Blue Crow, he carries the spirit of my father.’ That’s why you got the name. That’s why you got the Pipe. That’s why you were held aside as a child, away from white people.”
Her tone said, See, you don’t know everything.
Feeling flooded up and carried her along. “I am mad about this fifty years, yes mad fifty years, still mad.” Now she almost glared at me, and threw her voice hard. “My son, that Pipe, it should have gone to him. My son. I was the one my mother shared with, this burden, this strength. She save her father’s Pipe, she think it bring something back, someday. My son, the one to carry that Pipe.”
She stood up abruptly. “I got to do the dishes,” she said. “Two men, sit living room.” In other words, Get outta here.
I stifled my own anger, and Grandpa helped me. He took my elbow, and I steered him to his favorite living room chair, another Salvation Army-style recliner, not as threadbare as the one in the yard.
If I wasn’t going to piss off Aunt Adeline, I needed to calm down. I wandered around the room, looking at the things I’d lived with the first fourteen years of my life. There were old, ceremonial things on the walls or displayed on tables—an eagle-wing fan, an eagle-bone whistle, a drum painted with a featherburst pattern, a rattle made from a buffalo scrotum. Unchee told me about that rattle once. It was used by a yuwipi man and had 405 stones in it, pieces of crystal and agate he gathered from ant hills. These were the talking stones, the tiny rocks that spoke spirit language during the ceremony that only he could understand. But that yuwipi man was not my grandfather—everything was lost but the Pipe, Aunt Adeline said.
I reached up and took the rattle off the wall. Even the bone plug that kept the stones inside was missing. I felt the old hide, then raised it and shook it in the air, empty. No sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping? And the rattle didn’t speak to me. It struck me that this rattle was like a lot of what we have from the old days, a remnant of something that was good, but with the essential part missing, the voices of the spirits.
“Adeline,” cried my grandfather in his high, weak, old man’s voice, “Make us another pot of coffee.”
So he intends to patch things up.
Anyway, my great-grandfather’s things, they were lost. Like most of our ways. Like the old power.
Aunt Adeline brought us each a mug of coffee, hot and steaming, then joined us with another cup.
I waited. She waited. Finally I said, “Aunt Adeline, will you tell us what you know about my great-grandfather Blue Crow?”
For a while I thought she wasn’t going to answer. When she did start, her voice was mild.
“He was a good man, Blue Crow, respected, and a yuwipi man. He had a pte hiko, buffalo stone. True, he was young, only twenties, but people saw, he was a wichasha wakan. He found a missing child. Parents were haying on a white man’s ranch, child got into the mother ditch, swept away. No one saw it. Time they missed her, too late. Your great-grandfather saw with the inside eye where the body was, took people to it.
“This story, it comes from the people who raised your Unchee.
“Blue Crow, he had two children already, your great-grandfather, with his first wife. Your great-grandmother, I don’t know her name, she was his second wife, Unchee was the third child.
“The day of the massacre, I don’t know much about it. You could look it up in them books they got, maybe, if they ain’t all lies.”
She gave a harsh look, like the books in the libraries came from me.
“This is what Unchee told me. She was in her mother’s belly the day of the killing. Blue Crow and the two wives, they was Ghost Dancers. Not everybody in that band was, they was divided on it, but your great-grandparents was, big ones. Regardless what anybody tells you, the Ghost Dance was a peaceful way.
“Oh, you don’t want to hear all this. You ain’t never cared.”
“Adeline,” Grandpa said gently. He was still her atay.
She waited. She sniffed. “I don’t actual know more,” she said.
“Tell him about Lucky.”
She sniffed a couple of times, and I realized Aunt Adeline was teary.
“Lucky was my last-born, my baby.”
She waited so long I thought she’d gotten lost, maybe in the past or maybe in her sadness or misery.
“He was smart. Everybody saw it, he was smart. I asked your Unchee to hold her father’s Pipe for Lucky, until he was old enough. Right quick Unchee says no. He’s smart, she says, but he don’t have the spirit for this, the spirit that’s right. She was sure she’d know the spirit when she saw it.”
Sniff.
“The white people thought Lucky was so smart, they wanted him to go away on the railroad to school. That Carlisle. I argued against it. My husband, he was for it. Thought on it long and hard but came down for it.
“Lucky didn’t even last till Christmas. Then he could have come home for vacation a
nd I’d have kept him. He hung himself in the boys’ toilet, hung himself by the neck.”
She stood up, swinging her empty coffee cup in such a way I thought maybe she’d throw it. “I’m clear about this, Joseph Blue Crow, have been for a long time. You got my boy’s name, you got my boy’s Pipe.
“Here’s what else I’m clear on. You throwed the name in the mud, with your drinking. You throwed the Pipe away, with your drinking.
“It’s you deserves be dead, my boy alive.”
She stomped into the kitchen, rude as a Lakota can be.
I looked at Grandpa, but he didn’t look back, probably too embarrassed.
There was nothing to say.
Over the next weeks I thought a lot about Aunt Adeline’s stories about Blue Crow. I don’t know what I did with her accusation about me dishonoring the Pipe. I’d been a drunk for ten years, for sure. I guess maybe I put her words in a place where I didn’t have to look at them. Every day I knew real clear what they said, and I held them in cold storage, until the day came when I could throw each word on the hard ground of truth and it would break.
I wasn’t sober long enough for that, not yet. I didn’t know when I would be, or what I had to do.
What I did was get ready for the Big Foot Memorial Ride. I don’t mean ready physically, gear in order, horse rented, that sort of stuff. I mean spiritually ready. I went to a meeting every day. I talked to Chup about how to stay straight and about how to do the ride in a good way. I went to Pete’s every Sunday and sweated.
I prayed, too, using the Pipe handed down to me from my great-grandfather Blue Crow. I’d never prayed that much. I asked for the ride to teach me. I asked for the ride to show me how to help the people. I asked for the ride to wipe away the people’s tears. To make the sacred hoop whole again. To make the tree flower.
I prayed to the Grandfathers, I prayed to Wakantanka, and I prayed to Blue Crow. Yes, to my great-grandfather, Blue Crow. I apologized to him. I spent my whole life running from you. All that time I am you.
I spent my whole life running from my dead, when I should have made friends with you.
PART SIX
The Big Foot Memorial Ride
Pleasant Sunday
Emile and I lurched out of the darkness and cold through the doors of the Takini School, December 22, 1990. I hate cold. I was miserable and scared. Even after two months of getting ready spiritually and emotionally, I was in a funk. Tomorrow I was going to start riding a horse six days through below-zero weather—that’s in the daytime—toward a place my relatives didn’t want to go and where the U.S. cavalry killed them. I was going to travel with people who were obsessed with a past that had been deadly to their forebears and still seemed to hold them paralyzed. I would be miserable the whole time, and angry at myself for coming. Talk about a fool’s errand.
I’d never been to this schoolhouse on the Cheyenne River Reservation, and I didn’t like it. It was ponderous and ugly, looked like a place of dead concrete, not of live minds. A glance at Emile told me he didn’t like it either. As an artist he is a kind of Indian elf, all light and airy, not one for heavy places.
We hauled our sleeping bags and packs down the hall and across the gym floor to some bleachers. Lots of people were already nestled down here, snugged into the foot places between the seat places. I gave the world a scowl. These foot boards weren’t big enough for a full-sized man, in fact none bigger than Emile. I hitched my gear higher on my back and headed for the end of the bleachers, and Emile followed without a word. I gave an audible hmmpff!
I looked around for reasons to be grumpy and found them. There were a lot of white people here, many of them carrying cameras and notebooks. I remembered something Tyler had said—“We decided to use the media to broadcast our message far and wide.”
Beyond the bleachers was some room in a chaos of sleeping bags, packs, and horse tack. I threw my stuff on the floor, and then spotted more reasons to be grumpy. A dozen or so Japanese monks and nuns sat on their bedrolls, heads shaven, all smiling, all facing the center of the gym, and all drinking something out of identical cylinders. What the hell are the Japs doing here? I speculated irritably that they would all drink their tea or whatever at the same instant with the same motion, like in a store window of mechanical toys.
What are the Japanese doing here? And all the white people? I asked myself more seriously. Isn’t this our problem? Isn’t the broken hoop ours to mend?
Two tall Indians walked past us looking for a place for their sleeping bags. They looked about fifty, and the gray was beginning to show. They also looked familiar.
“Who’s that?”
Emile glanced up and said, “Russell Means and Dennis Banks.”
“Oh, shit.” To me, if the names meant leadership—Wounded Knee II and a hundred other protests—they also meant grandstanding for cameras and microphones. I’m here to do personal spiritual work.
“Which is which?”
“The one with an expression like he’s looking for someone to snarl at is Means.” So Banks was the one who looked like he found the world quirky and funny.
Emile arranged his blankets and sleeping bag neatly, and folded his parka for a pillow. I looked at him and thought, Banks and Means and the media and everything else is a distraction. Keep your mind on why you’re here.
A microphone man in the middle of the floor announced something, I didn’t hear what. As I turned toward him, I almost bumped into Chup, who was reaching to touch my sleeve. He grinned. “Great start, freezing our asses!”
Sallee stood behind him, kind of backing away.
“Hi, good to see you.”
“Hi,” she answered. “I’m glad you came.” She seemed, well, grave about it.
I touched my hat and tried for a devil-may-care grin. “Really glad to see you. Ride along with Emile and me.”
“I’m walking,” she said. “Like them.” She nodded at the Japanese. “They’re wonderful people. I met their leader, June San, the one standing.” A woman of rimless glasses and forbidding aspect. “I’m hugely impressed that they come halfway around the world to wipe away our tears.”
“There are walkers?”
She nodded. “Some of them are fasting, too. I’d be nervous about that.”
“Unbelievable.” It didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, as awe and admiration.
Sallee turned gracefully and walked to join the Japanese. Never will be able to suit that woman.
“Don’t try,” said Chup, and I laughed at how he always read my thoughts.
Emile tugged my sleeve and pulled me toward the center of the floor. Now I understood what the announcer was saying—a ceremony called Shaking of the Hands. Easy. We were going to say hi to everybody.
Everybody meant several dozen Indian people and several dozen white Americans, Europeans, and Japanese. Tyler had talked excitedly about numbers. “Scads of people, I bet over a hundred riders to start with, and more every day of the ride.” Now I looked at them as they gathered on the gym floor, these people I would ride with for six days. Some of them would pledge to ride or walk the entire distance, in honor of the dead. Some would drive cars, haul wood and water, and do whatever else was needed. Others would come back and forth to support family members who were riding. We had, maybe, the beginning of a common purpose.
Half the time I don’t know what my purpose here is.
The drum struck up the beat, the singing voices rose high, and we started walking. We stepped in an Indian double circle, a sort of coil of two rows of people facing each other and walking opposite directions. We shook hands and kept moving, but there was courtesy in it, an ease that allowed for human contact. I didn’t focus on how many people were non-Indians, and I let my eyes speak white-man body language, lingering, making real contact with each face. The faces were open, the eyes joining with mine. We said a word or two of greetings, warm greetings, and moved on, circling, circling.
I came to the Japanese and now was struck by the imperi
al beauty of the woman in rimless glasses. She nodded her head to me, a kind of bow. Yes, severe, and her face seemed to reserve her beauty for a higher purpose.
I came to Banks and Means. Banks looked tickled about something, and Means seemed to convey the high seriousness of the occasion with his great dignity.
I was getting into the spirit of the thing. People had come from everywhere for a high purpose. They were here to release the spirits and wipe away the tears of seven generations. Me too. Something in my heart eased.
“Hau, kola,” said the next face circling. It was Tyler, grinning big at me. I shook his hand a little tentatively, remembering the day I fell down at Wounded Knee.
Right behind Tyler came a big, shaggy, Indian-looking guy, maybe sixty, with wild, bushy gray hair down his back and the friendliest face you ever saw. “Pleasant Sunday,” he said, “Cherokee and Shoshone,” and moved on, saying the same words to everyone. For a moment, though, he held my eye, and I thought I saw a special glint for me.
Pleasant Sunday, Cherokee and Shoshone? What the hell is that? On a Saturday?
Now the song rose higher and stronger, the fervor grew intense, and I began to feel the rhythm of the moving lines. Whether we were clumsy as individuals or not, the arcing lines glided across the floor in stately fashion, with a sexy, sinuous beauty. I began to feel myself as part of a whole of many parts, subtly interlocking, smoothly gliding in and out of one another. And our lives individually were difficult, maybe unattractive, but we created a new life together, serpentine and majestic.
I stopped seeing individual faces and introductions. I listened to the song and felt the beat of the drum throb up from the floor into my feet and through my body. I reached out and gave the beat to another human being with every handshake.
People were smiling now, and weaving a dance motion into their sideways steps, their reaching for hands, the bobs of their heads.
I laughed. This is FUN. Sallee and Chup approached. After shaking Sallee’s hand, I twirled her gently in a full spin. She laughed. Chup made like he was tapdancing. I let out a whoop. I danced right through until …
