by Win Blevins
The song ended. The announcer called for us to take our seats for the Makes-Vow Ceremony. Sitting down felt like suppressing myself.
A man I didn’t recognize introduced the ceremony and said a prayer for those who would come forward and take eagle feathers from the sacred hoop. I should not write down the words of a prayer—sacred things are not to be written, not to be photographed—but here’s the gist of it. He said, “When we take a feather, we vow to make the ride, the same ride Big Foot and his people made it a hundred years ago. We’re honoring them. If we take this vow, we say we’re going every mile. It’s like a Sun Dance. No matter how hard it is, we’re gonna do it. No matter how cold, no matter how much we hurt. We pledge every step, all the way to Wounded Knee. Our pledge will be fulfilled when we stand in the circle around the mass grave on Cemetery Hill. If you are willing to make this pledge, no matter what, step forward and take an eagle feather from the sacred hoop. That eagle feather, it shows you promised.”
Then he begged the help of Wakantanka and the Grandfathers, to give us the strength to keep this vow.
The eight men of the drum raised sticks and started the music. The song, a strong, high, unison melody, raised to the gym roof. Men, women, and children lined up to make their vows.
In the center of the circle stood ten or twelve leaders of the ride, including Tyler and Alex White Plume. One man held the sacred hoop, draped with eagle feathers. It was Arvol Looking Horse, the keeper of the White Buffalo Woman Pipe. In each generation one person in that family is entrusted with the Pipe, the one White Buffalo Woman brought us. Though I didn’t know him then, I recognized him from pictures in the Lakota Times. He had a solemn face, reflecting the weight of the vows being taken. One by one people plucked feathers from the hoop.
I got ready. I was going to make this vow. I’d spent two months preparing my spirit to do this, and I was going through with it. Along the way I’d gotten the willies a dozen times. I’d told myself every bad thing I could think of, I’d shaken every accusing finger I had at me. You’re going back to the blanket. You know better than this. You might as well refuse medicine and blood transfusions—you might as well dance with rattlesnakes. It’s like being a fundamentalist. I’d said all of this. Ain’t it funny how, when you set your feet on a good road, thoughts come and bedevil you. Sometimes I think that’s Iya, the Evil One, Wind Storm, always working at us.
Here I am. I am going to make this vow. I don’t know why. When I make it, I am going to fulfill it.
The fellow of “Pleasant Sunday” stepped in behind me, and grinned in a way that seemed lit especially for me. He said, “I saw that my introduction was confusing. My name is Pleasant Sunday. I’m Cherokee-Shoshone. Call me Plez, rhymes with rez.”
I just looked at him queer. From the front his hair looked like a stick of broccoli, tight to the back of his head, and then a clump of curls. His face was shaven clean as an egg, but everything else was hairy, even the backs of his hands. Hair stuck out above the top button of his shirt, and tufted out of his ears. Nobody should be that hairy. I turned back to the hoop.
I feel shy about telling you the details even now. I waited, my mind on nothing but what I was promising to do. When my turn came, I took a feather. I felt Looking Horse’s grave demeanor without looking at him. I kept my eyes on the hoop of the people, which I hoped to help mend. I looked at the feather which represented my task.
I walked back changed. I walked back scared. I have a big purpose.
I sat down on my rolled-up sleeping bag. Emile said, “For tonight, you want me to tie the feather into your hair?”
I thought, and discovered I did. “Thanks.”
He got down on his knees behind me, and I felt his fingers tug my hair. He stopped. “Up? Down? Sideways? What do you want?”
I remembered Grandpa had said Crazy Horse wore his eagle feather pointed down. Grandpa’s story was, that’s because when the eagle angles its tail down, it’s about to kill. “Down,” I said. I am going to kill the drunken, drifting, self-pitying Blue Crow, and rise a new man.
Emile’s fingers went back to work.
Pleasant Sunday, Chup, and Tyler strolled up. “Call me Plez,” Plez said to Emile, “rhymes with rez.”
I was gonna get sick of hearing that.
Tyler says to me, “This is a good man, this Pleasant Sunday. He knows things, help you maybe.” And walked off.
Chup says to me, “This man, I’ve been wanting you to meet him. He … like Tyler said.”
Pleasant Sunday grinned at me. What is this, a conspiracy? There was something about him like out of Alice in Wonderland—the Cheshire Cat?
He turned to Emile. “Want me to tie your feather in?” he says, touching the crown of Emile’s head.
“Yes, thank you,” said Emile, “tip up.”
“I’ll tie yours,” says Chup to Pleasant Sunday.
So there we were, four men doing each other’s hair, or having it done. I would have made a circle and tied in Chup’s, but it was already tied to the button of his baseball cap. This cap was fully beaded on the brim, and the crown said in big letters, FBI, and below, “Full-Blooded Indian.”
“Next is an honoring song for Sitting Bull,” called the announcer.
“I’ll just tie this off temporary-like,” said Plez, and jumped to his feet.
Emile finished my feather in a jiffy. I’d never worn an eagle feather before. Had never been entitled to. It felt good.
The voices of the drum group seemed to me very beautiful in this song: high, heroic men’s voices, giving honor to one of our great ones. A man who himself was a poet, a songwriter, a seer, a lover of the old ways, that’s what I heard about him. That’s why we gave him an honoring song, and stood while they sang it.
When the song ended, Plez said to me, like in the middle of a conversation, “He loved the old ways, you know, way loved them.” Lot of folks completing my thoughts around here. “That scared the agent on his reservation, and he marked Sitting Bull down as one of them backward ones, a force for ‘savage’ ways. Which put him on the government’s list of conservatives to be silenced. Indian policemen rode out one cold morning and murdered him on the steps of his own house. The agent didn’t order the killing, but he set it up.”
I stared at him. Who is this Cherokee-Shoshone telling me my own history? Of course, I’d just learned it myself.
Tyler pitched in. “He didn’t go for the Ghost Dance, Sitting Bull, or go away from it neither. He was sitting the fence when they killed him.”
A woman I didn’t know, Celene Not Help Him, had started a talk about Wounded Knee, what it really was. She was the granddaughter of Dewey Beard, a man also known as Iron Hail, the best-known of the survivors of the massacre. Our stories about that fight don’t always match the white-man stories, and I believe our people. Unlike the white soldiers, they didn’t have anything to cover up.
I listened carefully to Celene. Though I’d read the white-man books, I wanted to hear a Lakota tell it—sounded like she’d researched it deep. She started with Wovoka, way over in Nevada. That Paiute medicine man had a vision of a better world. The Indian people’s ancestors were alive again, the buffalo were back, and the white people were gone. Indians from a lot of different tribes made the journey to Mono Lake to hear Wovoka tell his vision. They took it back to their people, with the dance he told them to do, the Ghost Dance, and the Ghost Shirt he told them to wear.
From there it was the basic story of Big Foot. How Big Foot’s people took off from Cheyenne River across the Badlands toward Wounded Knee. How Indians from the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations were doing the Ghost Dance day and night up in the Stronghold, a far corner of the Badlands. That had the whites bad scared. But Big Foot wasn’t going to them, he was headed for Pine Ridge.
The army chased all over hell and gone, looking for Big Foot, but never found him until he sent word to Pine Ridge where he was, and that he would arrive the next day. Then they intercepted him and made him camp at Wou
nded Knee, guarded close by the Seventh Cavalry. The idea was to take all his guns away. That was a hard, strict order.
Everybody was tense the next morning. All the men were gathered at a council, all in one place, with troops all around them. The young men didn’t want to give up their rifles, good repeating Winchesters. They needed those guns to feed their families. The soldiers insisted, and were searching them, one by one. One Indian’s rifle went off accidentally, straight up in the air. The soldiers had been ordered to fire at the first sound of shooting. Two troops of cavalry fired point blank into the grouped-up Indian men, and the killing was on.
But that was only the beginning, Celene Not Help Him insisted. Then the soldiers fired the fast-shooting cannons straight into the Indian village, mostly women and children. After those left alive fled the village, they tried to hide in the ravine. The soldiers shot their rifles and their Hotchkiss guns down into the ravine, slaughtering people at random, warriors, old men, women, children, everyone, not caring who.
The white people say about a hundred and fifty of Big Foot’s people died. The Lakota’s estimate, and they know better, is about three hundred.
When she finished, people started crawling into their sleeping bags. Emile, Plez, Chup, and I untied each other’s eagle feathers. Ever helpful, Plez stitched them onto our hats for tomorrow, with needle and thread. We put the hats on top of our packs, well off the ground. You don’t let an eagle feather touch the ground.
Then Plez and Chup stretched out on either side of me without a word. Plez tucked his broccoli hair to one side and lay on his back. My sponsor on one side, good—but this new guy between me and my oldest friend? Seemed odd.
After lights out, I felt restless. Soon comes this whisper. “You ’sleep?” It’s Chup.
“Hell, no,” I said.
“Let’s go somewhere,” says Plez. “I got a thermos of coffee still hot.”
“You go,” says Emile. He was halfway asleep already.
We went up to a far, high corner of the bleachers where no one else was. Looking down on the gym floor was eerie. People left candles on so kids could go the bathroom and such, and it looked like a big tapestry, circles of glow and caverns of darkness. I wished Emile was seeing it.
Plez handed the plastic top of the thermos around. The coffee tasted strange but good. “What’s that in it?” I says.
“Sweetgrass,” says Plez.
Hadn’t tried that before; liked it.
Chup says, “Watch this.” He sets one of those big six-volt flashlights on its base, and fixes his riding wristlet around it with the rawhide thongs he uses on his forearms. When he turns it on, a dramatic-looking cone of light shoots up into the dark depths of the rafters. In the half-light, half-shadow around it, our faces look gobliny.
Chup grinned at us. “Like that?”
“Yeah,” says I.
We looked at each other conspiratorially. I felt like giggling like a kid. I slugged on the sweetgrass coffee. Let’s whisper, like kids after lights out.
Chup says—it seemed real sudden, real abrupt—“Blue, you found anything on your great-grandfather at Wounded Knee?”
“No,” says I, miffed that he would bring it up in front of a stranger.
Chup goes on, “Try Plez.”
Uncomfortable silence. Three goblins fidgeting in the otherworldly light and sort of smiling at each other.
“Kola, what’s happenin’?”
I didn’t answer.
Chup looked at me expectantly.
Plez sighed. “I think I can help you. I have that sense. I got it when I first heard about you from Chup and Tyler.”
“Tyler?”
“He said you went to Cemetery Hill with him, never been there, fell down unconscious, give him a scare.”
I looked hard at Chup. My friends’ve been gossiping about me.
Chup says, “Your sponsor, I can’t talk about some things to other people. But you came to here to get help—we all did. Get help for ourselves, give help to the people. I’ll tell you, Plez is your man. I know him a long time.”
I had this trembling in my throat. I was afraid it showed, afraid the skin was wobbling. I decided to stop it. “I don’t know what happened that day,” I said to Plez. “I kind of passed out. I saw things….” I looked up into the rafters, asking the dark reaches to help me. “It was like a dream, only brighter and stronger.”
Plez chuckled, “Oh, you’re a good one. That’s easy to sort out, in a general way. You got a glimpse of the other side.”
I waited and sort of nodded.
Plez gave me a canny look. “That happen to you before?”
I nodded bigger. “When I went on the mountain, coupla months ago.”
“So you had it before, you know that’s what it was. What was so different?” He grinned, “Oh, yeah, on the mountain you were looking for it.”
“Yes.”
“At Wounded Knee it jumped up and bit you. Scared you.” He cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Yes.”
“Anything you want to tell me about it?”
I waited a long time. He must have thought I wasn’t gonna answer, but he never stirred. Finally I says, “I saw a guide. Raven.” I looked up at his lighted face and down at my shadowed knees. “A special raven. Now I tell myself to call him Spirit Bird. Scares hell out of me, always has. I didn’t go.”
Plez nodded slow several times. “You know much about Spirit Bird?”
“What I see around me. He’s a capital-R Raven, and ravens feed on death. And what I see in my dreams. Raven is black shadows.”
He nodded slow several more times. “Yeah, you want to work on this Raven, things are there for you. Maybe I can help you a little. For sure I can point a way toward help. Meanwhile, how do I say … ? Why are you on this pilgrimage to Wounded Knee?”
“To seek healing for myself and to wipe away the tears of the people.” I was surprised at how easy it came out.
“That’s good, but … you have relatives there?”
My hands felt like drumming on my knees, and at the same time felt frozen. I looked and saw they were shaking. I knit my fingers together.
“Yeah. My great-grandfather was there, name Blue Crow. Anybody heard of him, I’d like to know. My grandmother was born the day after. That’s all I know.”
“Don’t know anything about your great-grandfather, great-grandmother?”
“I don’t know what happened. Unchee never talked about it. Would never. Hard would never.”
“Oh, kola,” says Plez. Then he surprised me. “I’m so glad you came. I can help you.”
I looked at the two of them. For some crazy reason a memory flashed into my mind, me sitting, legs crossed like this, with my dad and his brother, playing that silly game where you clap your knees and then clap against another’s guy’s hands, and clap your knees, all in a certain pattern and rhythm.
“It’s true, Blue, I don’ have any ancestors at Wounded Knee, being Cherokee and Shoshone, you know. But my wife, she is Mniconjou, she had relatives there. So I started with the second ride, three years ago. Between rides I been out putting together the story behind the story.” He smiled. “Reading the books, going around gathering up people’s stories, what’s been handed down in their families, and the best way. Journeying there in spirit, seeing it for myself.”
He said it so easy.
Something in my belly lurched. All those demons leapt at me with their sweet voices of reason—See, this pilgrimage stuff is looney tunes. Back to the blanket, back to the nuthouse. The demons had ninety-nine choruses of such stuff to sing, but I cut them off. I saw miracles on the mountain.
I looked up at his eyes. Even in the weird light his face was sweet and kind of simple. “So I can help you, you wanna know,” he said, his voice gentle. “What happened to your relatives, what hold it has on your spirit.”
“Part of me doesn’t want to know.”
Silence, while he thought this over.
“What was yo
ur grandmother like?”
“How would I know? She kept herself closed off. Mad. Mad inside all the time, I think. She gave me my name, didn’t tell me it was my great-grandfather’s. Gave me his Pipe, told me nothing about him.”
“Kola, you need to know.”
I didn’t answer. My stomach felt like a pot being stirred.
“You’ve needed to know your whole life.”
They Ride
The next morning at Bridger, South Dakota, where the Big Foot people started running south, the corral was chaos. Riders tried to move gently among the horses, twitching their lariats and then floating them over the necks of their mounts. But the horses spooked, dashed from one side of the corral to another, reared and pranced. When the riders got saddled and mounted, the horses reared and crow-hopped. Lots of riders had to start again from the ground up.
Emile and I looked for a two-horse trailer with a four directions wheel painted on the side. This would be a guy from Wambli Mom knew, who had promised to rent us horses. Right away we found it and got them unloaded, a sorrel mare and a dun gelding, both young-looking. When I hauled out the saddles, I got a nice surprise. Mom apparently had saved my old saddle from Grandpa’s. Since my bottom hadn’t changed much in twenty years, it would still fit. I looked at the horses with a hard eye. Would they hold up for a week of riding in this cold? Word was, the high today would be ten below or the like, and no change in sight. Would we end up hoofing it and carrying our saddles over our shoulders? I checked their hooves. I checked the way they moved. They looked sound.
Emile paid the guy and reminded him to meet us at Wounded Knee on the twenty-eighth. That place was what I was trying not to think about.
Emile said gently, “May I ride the sorrel?” He went to the muzzle, held his nose to the horse’s nostrils, and exchanged frosty breaths.
I mounted, noted that the dun didn’t move off. The saddle felt good. I pulled on the reins and said, “Back!” and it even backed a few steps. It seemed to have a soft mouth. It might do. We would get to know each other.
