Years ago Old Man Henry, Leonard’s father, had some-how gotten hold of an enormous truck tire, as tall as a man. He had put this near the entrance gate and painted on it in big white letters: CROW DOG’S PARADISE. This paradise, Crow Dog’s allotment land, is beautiful. The Little White River flows right through it. It is surrounded by pine-covered hills. In the sky overhead one can see eagles circling. Sometimes water birds, sacred to the peyote people, fly over it with their long necks outstretched. There are horses to ride. Everywhere on this land one is close to nature.
The paradise is not just a one nuclear family place, but rather a settlement for the whole clan, the whole tiyospaye. In 1973, when I moved in with Crow Dog, it consisted of two main buildings. The biggest one was the house in which Leonard’s parents lived. Old Man Henry had built it himself out of whatever odds and ends he had been able to find—tree trunks, rocks, parts of an old railroad car, and tar paper. Some windows were car windows from wrecked vehicles. It was large with a big, old-fashioned iron stove, an old wood-burning kitchen range, and an ancient, foot-powered sewing machine. Herbs, sacred things, and feather bustles hung down from the beams of the ceiling which was held up by two tree trunks. Right at the entrance stood the bucket with cool fresh spring water with the dipper for everyone to use. Coffee was always brewing on the range. On the outside Henry had painted the whole structure sky-blue with red trimmings. Nothing was at a right angle. Everything was bulging or sagging somewhere. There was no other house like Henry’s. It stood for forty years and all Henry’s children and most of his grandchildren were raised in it. It burned down under suspicious circumstances in 1976 while Leonard was in prison. Nothing is left of it now but the memory.
The other building is the one Leonard, I, and our children lived in. It was a flimsy thing, more in the nature of a bungalow than a house—a kitchen—living room and two tiny bedrooms. There was no cellar. The walls were thin and in winter it was hard to keep warm. It looks exactly like a few hundred other houses on the reservation built by the government under the OEO program. We call them “poverty houses.” It is painted bright red and looks nice if you don’t come too close.
There are always a few tipis around with people living in them, and somebody with no place to go who has made the outdoor cook shack his home. A white friend’s camper was totaled a few years ago, and now a couple is using the shell for a home.
I now had a place and a man to stay with, but it was not always paradise in spite of the legend on the huge truck tire. I was in no way prepared for my role as instant wife, mother, and housekeeper. Leonard had three kids from his previous marriage—two girls, Ina and Bernadette, and one son, Richard. The girls were old enough to know that I was not their real mother, old enough to judge my performance. They had it in their power to accept or to reject me. I did not know how to cook. I did not even know how to make coffee. I did not know the difference between weak coffee and strong coffee, the kind that the Sioux like which will float a silver dollar.
Sioux always drop in on each other and stay over—a day or a week, as the spirit moves them. People eat at all times, whenever they are hungry, not when the clock says that it: is eating time. So the women are continuously busy cooking and taking care of the guests. Indian women work usually without indoor plumbing, cook on old, wood-burning kitchen ranges, wash their laundry in tubs with the help of old-fashioned washboards. Instead of toilets we have out-houses. Water is fetched in buckets from the river.
Leonard is a medicine man as well as a civil rights leader. This means that we have ten times more guests than the usual Sioux household. The whole place is like a free hotel for anyone who cares to come through. The red OEO house in which I and Leonard live simply began to come apart from all the wear and tear. When I moved in, the place was a mess. Nobody tried to clean up or help out. They all came to eat, eat, eat, expecting a clean bed and maybe to have their shirts and socks washed. I spent a good many years feeding people and cleaning up after them. It is mostly men who stop by at the house, and only very few women, and you cannot tell men to do anything, especially Sioux men. I even sometimes moved my bed outside the house into the open to get some sleep, because the men stay up all night, talking politics, drinking coffee, and gossiping. Sioux men are the worst gossips in the world. I would wash dishes for the last time at midnight, go to bed, and in the morning all the dishes would be dirty again.
Most other medicine men do not go all out as Leonard does. They keep their homes tight, a little more to themselves. They do not fall into the trap of making their houses into dormitories and free hotels. Leonard pities people. Whenever we go to town we pick up somebody who is walking, and then usually we have him for dinner, and then breakfast. Some come and stay for days, weeks, or even months. Many Indians have no place to go, no one to feed them, so they come to Crow Dog’s Paradise. If we see somebody who is out of gas, Leonard stops and syphons some off into his tank, and then we ourselves get stuck five miles from home. If Leonard notices someone having car trouble, he stops, takes out his tools, and fixes the car—an automobile medicine man on top of everything else. Money I am supposed to use for food or household things he gives away to anybody who asks. Years ago he got almost four thousand dollars in residuals for a TV commercial he did. That money was to buy a pickup truck. So, of course, there was a big giveaway feast. The friends and relatives—sixth cousins, seventh cousins, people very distantly related, strangers claiming kinship, one hundred and fifty of them—came. They came in rattletrap cars, in buggies, on horseback and muleback, on foot, in trucks. One came on a motorbike. Sides of beef were being barbecued. Women were engaged in an orgy of cooking. People went up to Crow Dog: “Kanji, cousin, I need a headstone for my little boy who died.” “Uncle, I am crippled, I sit at home all day. I need a TV.” “Nephew, my children need shoes.” When the giveaway feast was over, Leonard had two dollars left to buy the pickup with.
Leonard’s great-grandfather had seven wives to do the cooking and tanning and beading for giveaway feasts, and the buffalo meat was free, but those days are gone. Naturally, Leonard is much admired for his old-style Sioux generosity. At the Sun Dance of 1977 they put the war bonnet on him and made him a chief. They call him a wicasha wakan—a holy man—but confidentially, it can be hell on a woman to be married to such a holy one.
Beside being tumbled headfirst into this kind of situation, still in my teens, with a brand-new baby and totally unprepared for the role I was to play, I still had another problem. I was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, trying to hold my own inside the full-blood Crow Dog clan which does not take kindly to outsiders. At first, I was not well received. It was pretty bad. I could not speak Sioux and I could tell that all the many Crow Dogs and their relations from the famous old Orphan Band were constantly talking about me, watching me, watching whether I would measure up to their standards which go way back to the old buffalo days. I could tell from the way they were looking at me, and I could see the criticism in their eyes. The old man told me that, as far as he was concerned, Leonard was still married to his former wife, a woman, as he pointed out again and again, who could talk Indian. Once, when I went over to the old folks’ house to borrow some eggs, Henry intercepted me and told me to leave, saying that I was not the right kind of wife for his son. Leonard heard about it and had a long argument with his father. After that there was no more talk of my leaving, but I was still treated as an intruder. I had to fight day by day to be accepted.
My own family was also against our marriage—for opposite reasons. Leonard was not the right kind of husband for me. I was going back to the blanket. Here my family had struggled so hard to be Christian, to make a proper red, white, and blue lady out of me, and I was turning myself back into a squaw. And Leonard was too old for me. I reminded them that grandpa had been twelve years older than grandma and that theirs had been a long and happy marriage. But that was really not the issue. The trouble was the cultural abyss between Leonard’s family and mine. But the more our p
arents opposed our marriage, the closer became the bond between Leonard and myself.
I came to understand why the Crow Dogs made it hard for me to become one of them. Even among the traditional full-bloods out in the back country, the Crow Dogs are a tribe apart. They have built a wall around themselves against the outside world. For three generations they have lived as voluntary outcasts. To understand them, one must know the Crow Dog legend and the Crow Dog history.
Kangi-Shunka, the founder of the clan, had six names before he called himself Crow Dog. He was a famous and fearless warrior, a great hunter, a chief, a medicine man, a Ghost Dance leader, a head of the Indian police, and the first Sioux—maybe the first Indian—to win a case before the Supreme Court. As Leonard describes him, “Old Kangi-Shunka, he was the lonely man of the prairie. He goes by the sun and moon, the stars and the winds. He harvests from the earth and the four-legged ones. He’s a buffalo man, a weed man, a pejuta wichasha. He sees an herb and he hears the herb telling him, ‘Take me for your medicine.’ He has the kind of spirit and words out of which you create a nation.”
For most people, what their ancestors did over a hundred years ago would be just ancient history, but for the Crow Dogs it is what happened only yesterday. What Kangi-Shunka did so long ago still colors the life-style and the actions of the Crow Dogs of today and of their relations, of the whole clan—the tiyospaye, which means “those who live together.” Sioux and elephants never forget.
Some of the Crow Dogs trace their origin back to a certain Jumping Badger, a chief famous in the 1830s for having killed a dozen buffalo with a single arrow, for having counted fourteen coups in war, and for distinguishing himself in fifteen horse-stealing raids. It is certain that the first Crow Dog belonged to a small camp of about thirty tipis, calling themselves the Wazhazha or Orphan Band, which followed a chief called Mato-Iwa, Scattering Bear, or Brave Bear. Kangi-Shunka was born in 1834 and died in 1911. He was raised in the bow-and-arrow days when the prairie was covered with millions of buffalo and when many Sioux had still to meet their first white man. He died owning a Winchester .44 repeating rifle with not a single buffalo left to use it on. He lived long enough to ride in a car and make a telephone call. At one time he was a chief of the Orphan Band. He played his part in the proud history of our tribe.
As Old Man Henry tells it, Crow Dog got his name in this way: He was taking his people to Hante Paha Wakan, to Cedar Valley, to hunt. Before riding out he had a vision. He saw a white horse in the clouds giving him the horse power, and from then on his horse was Shunkaka-Luzahan, the swiftest horse in the band. And he heard the voice of Shunk-Manitu, the coyote, saying, “I am the one.” Then his horse suddenly raised its two ears up and the wind got into the two eagle feathers Crow Dog was wearing, and the feathers were talking, the feathers were saying, “There is a wichasha, a man up ahead on that hill, between the two trees.” Crow Dog and his companions saw the man clearly. The man raised his hands and suddenly was gone. Crow Dog sent out two scouts, one to the north and one to the south. They came back saying that they had seen no one. Had this man on the hill been a wanagi, a spirit, trying to warn Crow Dog?
Crow Dog told his men to make camp near a river. He said, “Put the tipis close to the bank, so that the enemy cannot surround us.” They did this. During the night Crow Dog could hear the coyote howl four times. Shunk-Manitu was telling him, “Something bad is going to happen to you.” Crow Dog understood what the coyote was saying. Crow Dog got the men of his warrior society together, the Kit Foxes. They were singing their song:
I am a fox.
I am not afraid to die.
If there is a dangerous
deed to perform,
That is mine to do.
They painted their faces black. They prepared themselves for a fight, for death.
At dawn the enemy attacked—white settlers led by a white and many Crow scouts, with many Absaroka warriors helping them. With Crow Dog were many famous warriors. Numpa Kachpa was there, Two Strikes, who got his name when he shot down two white soldiers riding on the same horse with one bullet. Kills in Water was there, and Hollow Horn Bear’s son, and Kills in Sight. Two Crows had wounded Kills in Sight and unhorsed him. Crow Dog came in on a run, killed the two Crows, and put Kills in Sight on his horse. He whipped the horse and it took off with Kills in Sight hanging on to it. The horse was fast and got Kills in Sight safely home.
Crow Dog was looking around, hoping to catch himself one of the riderless Crow horses, when he took two enemy arrows, one high on his chest right under the collarbone and the other in his side. He broke off the arrows with his hands. Hollow Horn Bear’s son and two others of his men came to help him. They were wounded, and their horses all had at least one arrow stuck in them. Crow Dog told them, “I am hurt bad. I cannot live. No use bothering with me. Save yourselves.”
They rode off. Crow Dog managed to get hold of a horse and got on it, but he weakened soon. He became so weak he fell off this pony. He was lying in the snow. He had hardly strength to sing his death song. Suddenly two coyotes came, hooping gently. They said, “We know you.” They kept him warm during the night, one lying on one side and one on the other. They brought Crow Dog deer meat to make him strong, and they brought him a medicine. One of the coyotes said, “Put this on the arrow points.” Crow Dog did what the coyote told him. The medicine made his flesh tender and caused it to open up so that he could take the arrowheads and what was left of the shafts out. They almost came out by themselves.
The medicine the coyotes gave him cured Crow Dog. The nourishment they brought him made him strong. The coyotes brought him home to his camp. A crow showed the way. Crow Dog said, “I was already walking on Ta-Chanku, on the Milky Way, on the road to the Spirit Land, but the coyotes led me back.” And so he took on his seventh and last name, Kangi-Shunka, Crow Dog. Of course, it should have been Crow Coyote.
Years later, he was on his way to join Sitting Bull in Canada, and near the sacred Medicine Rocks he and his men were jumped by white soldiers. Crow Dog was hit by two bullets. His companions tied him to his horse and managed to get him home. This time a medicine man by the name of Sitting Hawk saved him. He told Crow Dog, “I will put my wound medicine into you. But I will not take the bullets out. One day you will die and go back to Mother Earth and the bullets will still be in you. Your human body will dissolve but the bullets will remain as evidence of what the wasičun have done to us.”
This is the legend of Crow Dog, which Old Man Henry has told me many times. The first Crow Dog was a great warrior though he never took part in a big battle, such as the Little Big Horn. He preferred to do his fighting as a member of a small war party made up of warriors from his own Orphan Band. He fought the wasičun and Pawnee and Crow warriors.
Crow Dog had been a close friend of Crazy Horse. Together with Touch the Clouds, White Thunder, Four Horns, and Crow Good Voice, he accompanied Crazy Horse when this Great Warrior surrendered himself at Fort Robinson in 1877. After Crazy Horse was treacherously murdered, it was Crow Dog’s cool head and bravery which prevented a general massacre. As the enraged Sioux faced the soldiers who were only waiting for a pretext to start the killing, Crow Dog rode back and forth between them, pushing back the over-eager warriors and soldiers with the butt end of his Winchester.
Crow Dog was most famous for his having shot and killed Spotted Tail, the paramount chief of the Brule Sioux. They were cousins and when they were young, they had been friends. Later, their paths diverged. Spotted Tail said, “It’s no use trying to resist the wasičun.” He cooperated with the whites in most things. Crow Dog was like Sitting Bull; he stuck to the old ways. The so-called “friendlies” gathered around Spotted Tail, and the so-called “hostiles” around Crow Dog. This led to rivalry and rivalry led to trouble, big trouble that was slowly building up between the two men.
On August 5, 1881, Crow Dog was hauling wood in his buckboard with his wife beside him when he saw Spotted Tail coming out of the council house and getting on h
is horse. Crow Dog handed his wife the reins, took his gun, which was hanging beside him out of its scabbard, got down from his seat, and faced the chief. Spotted Tail saw him. He said, “This is the day we settle this thing which is between us like men.” Spotted Tail went for his six-shooter. Crow Dog knelt down and fired, beating Spotted Tail to the draw. He hit the chief in the chest. Spotted Tail tumbled from his horse and died, the unfired six-gun in his hand. Turning Bear shot at Crow Dog’s wife, but missed. Crow Dog drove back to his home with his wife. A man called Black Crow prepared a sweat lodge to purify Crow Dog. He loaded up the Winchester and shot it into the sacred rocks four times, saying, “Now Spotted Tail’s spirit won’t bother you.” They then purified themselves with water.
A judge in Deadwood sentenced Crow Dog to be hanged. He asked leave to go home to prepare himself. The judge asked, “How do we know that you will come back?” Crow Dog said, “Because I’m telling you.” The judge let him go. For a month Crow Dog prepared for his death. He made up a death song and gave all his things away. What little he had, his horses, wagon, chickens, he gave to the poor. His wife prepared a white buckskin outfit for him, plain, without beads or quillwork. He wanted to be hanged in this. When all was ready he hitched up his last horse to an old buggy and with his wife drove the one hundred and fifty miles to Deadwood for his own execution.
When he arrived at Deadwood his lawyer was waiting for him with a big smile: “Crow Dog, you are a free man. I went to the Supreme Court for you and the Court ruled that the U.S. government has no jurisdiction over the reservation and that there is no law for punishing an Indian for killing another Indian.” Crow Dog said, “You’re a damn heap good man. I have driven a hundred and fifty miles for nothing.” Then he went home with his wife.
Black Crow told Crow Dog: “Cousin, the blood guilt will be upon you for four generations. From now on you will not smoke the pipe with other men. You will smoke a small pipe of your own, and you will smoke alone. You will not eat from a common dish; you will eat alone from your own bowl. You will drink from your own cup. You will not drink water from the dipper when it is handed around. You cannot eat from other people’s dishes and they will not eat from yours. You will live apart from the tribe. Cousin, yours will be a lonely life.”
Lakota Woman Page 17
