by Win Blevins
Ben Running Hawk took Elk Medicine’s hand.
She shrieked and tried to run away.
Running Hawk grabbed her by the shoulders.
She fell to the ground, screaming, kicking, beating her hands in the air, weeping. He didn’t understand her words—they were in English.
He addressed her respectfully in Lakota, “Sister, I come to help you.”
Her hands slowed and her feet grew still.
“Sister, I come to help you.”
Maybe it was the language that soothed her, for now her breathing eased. When she spoke, it was in Lakota. She said, “I’m having a baby.”
In a few minutes Running Hawk had Elk Medicine out of the ravine and on the back of his horse.
A half mile away from the fighting, toward Pine Ridge, he stopped to bandage her wound. He was embarrassed, this good man, because of where the wound was. He told her what he was going to do. “You have lost too much blood already,” he said.
“Save my child, please,” said Elk Medicine, “my first-born.”
When Benjamin Running Hawk lifted the skirt and moved the leg, the bright blood started flowing again. He knew the danger, so he did what was necessary. He tore his uniform shirt and bound the wound tightly. Then, as fast he could, yet gently, he spent all afternoon carrying my great-grandmother home to a cabin near Pine Ridge, to the help of his own wife and daughter. On the way she told him her story, and she asked him to take her husband’s body off the battleground and bury it, and save his Pipe for the unborn child.
I recognized the name Running Hawk, but had never met the family. I wondered if Unchee’s name, Janey Running, was a shortening of Running Hawk. I made a mental note to go to them after the ceremony, yes, a hundred years later, and to bear them gifts in thanks for their ancestor’s courage and kindness. Except for Benjamin Running Hawk, I would have died at Wounded Knee, too.
Lakota women know how to bring children into the world. The old way was to form a tall X out of stout sticks. Before this X the woman would squat. When the pains came, she would cling to the bars and push the newborn downward. It was a better way, I believe, than bearing a child in bed, especially a hospital bed.
But Elk Medicine didn’t have the strength even to squat. When her husband brought the woman in, Mouse thought she would die any moment. Mouse and her oldest daughter got the wounded Mniconjou into bed and spooned some broth into her.
“What happened?” Beatrice asked her father. Beatrice had been away to boarding school and had some training as a nurse.
Benjamin said slowly, “Everybody went crazy at Wounded Knee Creek, by the store, and started shooting each other.” He kept his head down. “Everybody shot each other.” He raised his face to his wife, and she saw it was running with tears.
Beatrice made a shushing noise and concentrated on tending the wound. What her father said was already more than she wanted to know.
She looked at the pallid figure on the bed with a nurse’s eye.
I looked at my great-grandmother with admiration. You have come this far to accomplish one thing, I know that.
Through the evening dark Mouse and Beatrice coached the mother-to-be: “Push! Push! You must help!”
Usually Elk Medicine made a good effort, but she was weakening, fading toward the other side.
Elk Medicine, thank you for your woman’s courage.
The labor went on all night. The child struggled toward life. The mother struggled to keep her hold on life a little longer, enough longer.
Finally, in the last of the darkness before dawn, Beatrice said, “It’s no good. We have to cut the child out.”
Mouse gave a little shriek. “We’ll kill the mother!”
“The mother is dying! If we don’t act, they’ll both die!”
Beatrice got a butcher knife from the wood stove.
“Let’s heat the blade!” whimpered Mouse nervously. This much she had learned from her daughter.
Beatrice gave her mother a menacing look. She pulled Elk Medicine’s skirt up above her waist. For an instant she stared at the distended belly. Then, firmly, as she had watched surgeons do, she cut.
I could not bear to watch.
After an infinity, after bloodletting and grunting and struggles of hands inside my great-grandmother’s belly, Beatrice lifted up a small burden in hands that were as bloody as any at Wounded Knee.
My grandmother, Janey Running.
Mouse took the child to the bucket to wash her off.
Beatrice checked Elk Medicine’s eyes.
Then the nurse sent up the ancient wail, my people’s mourning for the dead.
I stood at attention, raised my eyes to Wakantanka, and sang inside myself, Elk Medicine, thank you for your warrior spirit.
My heart tried to look at once at the dead past and the living future. It split in two. It gushed tears and blood.
I heaved in great racking sobs, and my own heaves blew my heart and soul into …
I don’t know where I am.
Suddenly, I felt panic. I am lost between the spirit world and the world of time.
Lost!
I flailed wildly for helping hands.
They grabbed me, each hand.
“Blue, come back. Blue, come back.” It was Plez’s voice.
Slowly the ordinary world assembled itself through my sense of touch. I felt Plez and Sallee’s hands. I felt the cold air on my face. I felt the solid floor beneath my butt and back. I pictured what I would see when I opened my eyes. Then I let the lids come up gently.
I looked from Plez to Sallee to Plez to Sallee. His face was grave. Hers was tender, inviting.
“We are alive,” I said.
Sign-off
A couple of days after the last ceremony, I drove up to Red Scaffold to see Plez. He had a little farm, didn’t grow a thing, said he just liked to watch the rocks bask in the sun. It was a pleasant winter day, so we spent the afternoon walking the fences and ditches of his farm.
“Help me,” I asked him. “I’ve seen the spirit world. That’s where I want to be.”
Plez looked at me with kind of a twinkle. “That’s good,” he said. “You don’t ever want to lose what you saw, the world beyond, and how close it is to us, and how it’s part of our lives.”
He turned and walked backward in a smooth glide, placing his feet blind like he knew every inch of the bumpy ground. “You remember, though, what you said when you came out of that last journey? ‘We’re alive’? Being alive means you have a life here to live. However much you journey in the spirit world, your life, it walks across a certain time and place on this earth. You got things to do, got to make a life. That’s what you’re here for.”
He turned back around, and walking forward flung his arms wide at the sky. “What to do? Ain’t that the question? It’s different for every man. Emile, easy for him, paint-paint-paint. Maybe he has a little romance sometimes, good, but really, just paint.
“You? Hmmm? I say, maybe find a woman and make a way of living satisfies the heart. I say, maybe learn to make a living without letting that run things. Maybe make a home and fill it with children. Take care of your family, especially the old ones, make sure they got what they need. Hang with your friends. Act like a neighbor to your neighbors, you know, feed the dogs when they’re gone. Look out for the people in your community. Root for your high school basketball team.
“I tell you this, I tell you this. The eye of your heart knows, it does. That’s enough. The eye of your heart knows.”
We walked in silence for a moment. I mumbled, “Seems flat, compared to the spirit world.”
He turned those shiny buck teeth on me. “You walk the earth, you look at the stars, you fall flat on your face. You look at this earth. Take care of your life here. You want to know my advice? Set your attention here. Then you come back, I’ll help you see the other world, I will.”
So we made a deal for me to drive over the next Sunday, spend the day journeying.
He flipped a
round and did his trick of gliding backward again. “Remember, for this stuff you gotta stay sober. Got to. Then you get to see it all, feel it, live it.”
Now Plez strutted out a preacher’s style. “Life is a gift of the gods. It can be traversed as a black road, full of difficulty and strife, or it can be walked as a red road, in harmony with blood family, with community, family, and with big family—Earth, Sun, Moon, Sky, Winds, and Waters.” I reflected again that it’s funny how we call the bad road black. Road that turned out bad for us was white.
Now he put a little dance into his glide. “It doesn’t come at us, though, like something grand. It comes, maybe it’s a kid crawling into your lap with a book. Maybe it’s a friend calling with, ‘Let’s go fishing.’ It’s your woman chuckling in bed when you pleasure each other. It’s making pitcher of lemonade on a hot, dusty day and draining that sucker down-down-down.”
He looked at me and wrapped it up with, “So, Joseph Blue Crow, you got a lot to take of. And sometimes you come here and learn. You got the gift. You got something to contribute. Just get your feet on that red road first.”
So I set out to take care of things.
I went first off to find the Running Hawk family outside of Pine Ridge. They confirmed it—the family name got bobbed off to Running for a while, but they’d reclaimed the old form. I took them a big sack of groceries, and I sat in the kitchen two straight afternoons and listened to what they knew about my Unchee. Actually, I taped it—I have some good equipment—and the way it turned out, that was a good story.
Beatrice, the nurse, kept the baby. She’d been married but had no children, and lost her husband. She took Unchee for her own.
The trader came and took the child and gave her to one of the officers from Wounded Knee. That officer wanted to give “that unfortunate offspring of the battlefield a better chance in life.”
Beatrice snuck over to the wet nurse’s home, stole the kid, and went out into the Badlands where they wouldn’t find her. She raised Janey Running by herself.
The Running Hawks didn’t know a whole lot more than that, ’cause they didn’t see Beatrice much any more. Janey Running, they knew she ran off with a rodeo rider as a kid herself, made some kids with him, lost him to the influenza, married her near neighbor, my grandpa, had some more kids.
I felt deeply grateful for the story, and plenty glad I had it on tape.
I thought about it, and it told me some things. No mother, no real family because she was hiding out there in the Badlands—Unchee came to be a loner honestly. Lived in ravenShadow, and the shadow was cast by her parents’ death in the massacre.
On the weekend I drove to Oglala, walked unannounced into the house, hugged Sallee Walks Straight, and cooked steaks for her and Chup. Late that night, sitting on the front stoop in below-zero cold, I asked her to be my wife. We’ve been married for about a year now. Sallee’s seven months along.
How to make a living and sure not let it run things, hey, that’s been harder. Sallee is painting, and she got some pieces in a juried show in Rapid last summer. But her sales about pay for her art supplies. My unemployment and severance pay, they’ve been supporting us.
After I taped the story of Beatrice Running Hawk and Unchee, I went and taped Grandpa and Adeline. I taped Chup’s wife. I taped some members of the Crazy Horse family, and descendants of Black Elk. Their stories, I got them down, griefs, triumph, prides, everything. I am a good interviewer. Sometimes I can get the shames, too. Sometimes I can get a lot of the truth.
I have looked at these truths myself. I know there’s a price, and there’s a reward.
Right along I’ve made myself go to meetings. As of the day I’m writing this, I have 472 days of sobriety. I still take them one day at a time, and I always will.
After a while it struck me that those stories I was taping, they’re valuable to the people. If people knew the stories, what has happened to their families and friends and neighbors, they would see more. They would see how we’re all the same. Mitakuye oyasin. They would see we can learn from each other, teach each other, help each other. So I ate my pride, went over to KILI, the tiny, insignificant radio station on our rez, and asked for a show. Stories of the People, it’s called, on the air every Thursday, two in the afternoon, one hour.
I have good response to that show. KILI wants me to work there full time. A publisher in fancy New York City, he says he’s interested in bringing the stories on the tapes out in book form. I said audio form. Guess we’ll end up doing both.
That’s after he publishes this book.
I’d like to do another show, too. The Old Ways. Interview spiritual leaders, people who’ve kept alive the old ceremonies, Sun dance, Yuwipi, sweat lodge, vision quest, all those. Get them to tell about it. Let others know. Mostly people need to know it’s still here, it’s still working.
Some traditional people will object. “Our sacred ways aren’t to be recorded, book, photo, tape, anything.”
I’ll just tell them, “Times change. We know things, hey, save the world. We open them to everybody, make human life on this earth, make it better.”
Maybe I can make a living doing this taping work. It’s healing. That’s what I want to do, heal my people, heal myself.
For a while I’d get down every week or two and bemoan my fate. “Oh, hell,” I’d tell Sallee, “maybe I’ve set my feet on the red road now, but look at all the years I wasted. Why didn’t I follow the path of the Grandfathers from day one?”
She would say, ‘What matters is what you do today, the path you walk today. It’s the only day you have.”
I think that’s true. But after a while I started thinking something else. Those twenty years weren’t wasted. School. College. Seattle. Radio. Probably I didn’t have to pair with Delphine on her slide into blackness. Probably I didn’t have to spend that many years doing AM in Rapid City. For sure I didn’t have to drink as much as I did. But the years weren’t wasted. I have strengths now to bring, strengths I wouldn’t. I know things. I might even be bold and say it right out. I know how to bring the white man’s knowledge of things and use that to broadcast our knowledge of the heart, and of the spirit.
Maybe I wasn’t far from the path my grandfathers intended all along, maybe not.
I believe writing this book has been part of the path. It’s been my big work the last year and more, writing the pages you’re reading, telling my truth.
That publisher in New York City, he says he’ll print my words and put them in people’s hands.
Healing. I mean these words to be one of the ways I do healing.
I send them now to you, every human being of you, don’t matter man, woman, red, white, old, young, and I invite you to partake of whatever healing is here for you.
One nation of us has been a people defeated in war, crushed in spirit, a terrible fate.
Another nation of us has been a people who destroyed other human beings and the way of living they loved for no good reason, also a terrible fate.
One nation of us has been slaves, another masters of slaves. One nation of us has been conquered, another conquerors, all conditions that yearn for healing.
Take here whatever will help, my friends.
Mitakuye oyasin.
Author’s Note
Though this is a work of fiction, the two worlds in which it exists, 1890 and 1990, are drawn with great care to tell both fact and truth. One of my primary goals is to draw an honest picture of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre a century ago; another is to offer to the world the remarkable acts of devotion made by the Big Foot Memorial Riders, which began in 1986, came to a high point on the centennial of the massacre, and continue today.
Joseph Blue Crow, Sallee, Plez, Chup, Unchee, and the rest of Blue’s family and friends are children of my imagination; however, they are based on Indian people I know, and I believe they are true to the reality of contemporary Indians.
In the part of the book set a century ago, the depiction of th
e Ghost Dance, white and Indian attitudes at the time, the journey to Wounded Knee, the interaction of the Indians and soldiers, the massacre and its aftermath—all this is intended seriously, and I believe it to be scrupulously historical. Except for Blue and his ancestors, everything is actual—the Ghost Dance songs are real ones; the teachings of Wovoka, the preachments of Short Bull, the visions of Ghost Dancers, the statements of Indians about the dance, the living circumstances of the Lakota in 1890—all this comes from the record. Big Foot, Yellow Bird, the Horn Cloud family, senior Horn Cloud’s advice to his sons on the morning of the fighting, Black Coyote, the circumstances around the first shot fired, the awful slaughter that followed, the acts of Iron Hail and other combatants on both sides—none of this is invented Colonel Forsyth and the other officers named, and their interpreters, are shown as the record shows them, doing what they did and saying what they said.
I hope Americans of all colors find it appalling.
My portrayal of the Big Foot Memorial Riders is also intended seriously. Alex White Plume, Jim Garrett, Birgil Kills Straight, Ron McNeill, Curtis Kills Ree, Percy White Plume, Arvol Looking Horse, June San and the other Japanese nuns and monks, Celene Not Help Him, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Joshua Moon Guerro—these are real people, and I have sought to be faithful to what they actually did and said. The rides exist on film, in books, and in works of journalism. I talked to some of the principals, and traveled to Wounded Knee to witness the centennial ceremonies. Conger Beasley, Jr.’s We Are a People in This World is a remarkable documentation of the rides, and I recommend it as the best starting point for any serious student. To me the Big Foot Memorial Rides show what heights human beings can reach when we seek the guidance of Spirit and act from love for self, family, and people.
In recreating the events of 1890 I have relied on sources that are well known, especially the Ricker interviews and Robert Utley’s Last Days of the Sioux Nation (using the facts but not the underlying attitudes). I have also sought the knowledge and oral traditions of living Lakota people. The old records alone are at best facts deprived of their meaning, their living truth.
