CROW
DOG
FOUR GENERATIONS OF
SIOUX MEDICINE MEN
LEONARD CROW DOG
and RICHARD ERDOES
Contents
Cover
Title Page
one: I AM CROW DOG
two: THE BUFFALO HUNTER
three: TWO BULLETS AND TWO ARROWS
four: THE KILLING
five: HOLDING HANDS THEY DANCE IN A CIRCLE
six: HE WENT WITH BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST SHOW
seven: LET ME TELL IT IN MY OWN WORDS
eight: A STRONG-HEARTED WOMAN
nine: THE SPIRIT PICKED ME
AND MADE ME WHAT I AM
ten: THE PIT OF DREAMS
eleven: THE HOLY HERB
twelve: ROCK DREAMERS
thirteen: THE GHOSTS RETURN
fourteen: A HOT LINE TO THE GREAT SPIRIT
fifteen: SOUL KEEPING
sixteen: BECOMING A WOMAN
seventeen: THEY WILL DIE FOR
EACH OTHER
eighteen: I GAVE MYSELF TO
THE MOVEMENT
nineteen: A HELL OF A SMOKE SIGNAL
twenty: THE TOWN WITH THE GUNSMOKE FLAVOR
twenty-one: THE SIEGE
twenty-two: A GOOD DAY TO DIE
twenty-three: THE BIG RAID
twenty-four: WHITE MAN’S JUSTICE
twenty-five: IRON DOOR HOUSE
About the Author
Also by Richard Erdoes
Copyright
About the Publisher
one
I AM CROW DOG
Look at things not with the
eyes in your face but with the
eyes in your heart.
Leonard Crow Dog
I am Crow Dog. I am the fourth of that name. Crow Dogs have played a big part in the history of our tribe and in the history of all the Indian nations of the Great Plains during the last two hundred years. We are still making history. I am talking this book because I don’t read or write. I never went to school—where they try to make Lakota children into whites, where it takes them eight years to teach you to spell cat. Talking and listening, not writing, that’s in our tradition. Telling stories sitting around a fire or potbelly stove during the long winter nights, that’s our way. I speak English as it forms up in my mind. It’s not the kind of English they teach you in school; we don’t use five-dollar words. I always think up the story in my mind in my own language. Then I try to put it into English. Our Lakota language is sacred to me. Even now, as I am talking, our language is getting lost among some of us. You can kill a language. The white missionaries and teachers in their schools committed language genocide. We are trying to bring our old language back. Trying to purify it. So now I’m telling my own story in my own way—starting at the beginning.
It’s a medicine story. White historians say that we came over from Asia, when ice covered the Bering Strait so that one could walk over it. We don’t believe this, not only us Lakotas, but nearly all the Native Americans on this turtle continent. If there was any crossing of people on the Arctic ice it was the other way around, from Alaska to Asia. We were always here; we came from this earth. We were put here for a purpose, by Wakan Tanka, the Creator. We were put here in the center of the world, and at the center of these United States. Look at a map. Rosebud, our reservation, is smack in the middle. My story is a spiritual winter count of our people.
It was Ptesan Win, the sacred White Buffalo Woman, who made our people holy and taught them how to live. She was the spirit of waonshila, mercifulness. She was grace. She was beauty. When she appeared, the people were starving. There was no game and nothing to eat. The chiefs sent out two young hunters to look for game. But these scouts found nothing. They saw neither buffalo nor deer. Then the winyan wakan, the woman sacredness, appeared to them in the morning. Ptesan Win came out of a cloud. The cloud turned into a hill. Ptesan Win walked the hill in the shape of a white buffalo calf who turned itself into a beautiful maiden dressed in white buckskin. In her hands she carried sage and her great gift to our people, chanunpa, the sacred pipe. Four days before she appeared, the hunters had foreseen her coming in a dream.
The sacred woman spoke to these two young men: “Go back to your people. Tell them to get ready to receive me, to prepare the sacred tipi. Prepare the sacred sweat lodge. Do all these things. You already have the fire, peta owihankeshni, the fire without end. Light this fire for me. Igluha. Act well. Perform all I told you. In four days I will come to your camp.”
The young men treated Ptesan Win with awe and respect. They honored her. They went back to their village without meat, but bringing with them spiritual food. Their nourishment was the wind, and it filled up the people’s bellies as if they had eaten buffalo hump. And the hunters told their chiefs, who ordered everything prepared for Ptesan Win’s coming. The people at that time were not what they became. The men knew a little about hunting. They had stone axes and wooden spears whose sharpened points were hardened in fire. They hunted the mammoth and other animals that have long since died out. They killed mammoths and buffalo by chasing them with burning branches over high cliffs to fall to their deaths. The women gathered wild fruits. The people’s language was still rude. They did not know how to pray. They did not even know that there was a Tunkashila, a Grandfather Spirit, the Creator.
At daybreak, just as the sun rose, the sacred woman arrived at the camp, as she had promised the two young scouts. She wore her hair loose, on the right and tied with buffalo hair on the left. She was carrying the sacred pipe, carrying the stem in her left hand and the bowl in her right. As she approached she was singing her song:
Niya taninyan With visible breath
mawinaye I am walking.
oyate le Toward this nation
imawani. I am walking.
Her voice was sweet, and the men, women, and children who had assembled to greet and honor her saw that she was beautiful beyond words. Besides the chanunpa, she carried a sacred stone into which seven circles had been carved. These circles represented the seven sacred rituals of the Lakota nation. She brought with her chanshasha, red willow bark tobacco. The chief led her inside the sacred lodge, where sage had been spread to sit on at the place of honor. The chief’s name was Tatanka Woslal Nazin, or Buffalo Standing Upward.
Ptesan Win told the people that she had been sent by the Buffalo Nation to instruct them in the ways of Wakan Tanka, the Creator, whom she also called Tunkashila, the Grandfather Spirit. She taught them how to use the sacred pipe and how to pray with it. She taught them the sacred songs. She taught them how to perform the seven great ceremonies. She instructed them how to make offerings to Wakan Tanka. She told the men to protect and nourish their women and children, to be kind to them and to share their wives’ sorrows. She told the women that without them there would be no life. She taught them the manner in which to bear children, how to do quillwork, and to stay away from men and sacred things during their moon time. She taught the people how to live like human beings, how to put things together, and to understand Tunkashila’s holy ways. She made the Lakota into the people of the sacred pipe. After she had done all this, the woman took leave of the people, promising to return after four years. As she walked away, the people saw her turning into a ptesan ska win, a white buffalo calf, and also into a tahca win, a deer woman, and a hehaka win, an elk woman. They also say that she turned herself into buffalo of four different colors—black, dark brown, light yellow-brown, and, finally, white—as she disappeared into the clouds. The Creator had given her the power to carry the
pipe to the Lakota people. She was a woman sacredness, a spirit of the spirit. When the descendants of Chief Tatanka Woslal Nazin had died out, the pipe was passed on to Chief Hehaka Pa, Chief Elk Head. The Elk Heads were the pipe’s keepers for generations. After that the pipe passed to the Looking Horse family at Eagle Butte, on the Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota. The present keeper is Arval Looking Horse. The sacred pipe is made from a buffalo calf’s leg bone. Age has made it so brittle that it can no longer be smoked, but when you touch it, power flows into you like an electric current. The power is so strong that you burst into tears.
Now here is something that has never been told. The way they tell the story of Ptesan Win today, when this sacred woman appeared to the two young hunters one of them had impure thoughts and stretched out his hands to touch her, to possess her body. Lightning struck him and burned him up until only a little heap of bones and ashes was left. But this is not true. Both young men were respectful of Ptesan Win. Nobody was burned up. This untrue story was made up a hundred years ago by missionaries who always tried to make our beliefs look savage and nasty. When they put the story into books, everybody started to repeat it this way. That’s one kind of religious genocide.
I think there must be a reason why Ptesan Win came to the center, to our people, to the spirit of this continent. After her, the nation split up into seven tribes, the Oceti Shakowin, the Seven Council Fires: the Sichangu or Brulé, also known as the Burned Thighs, that’s my own tribe; then the Oglala, the Scattered Ones; the Hunkpapa, Sitting Bull’s people; the Mnikowoju, the Planters Beside the Water; the Itazipcho, the Without Bows; the Oohenunpa, the Two Kettles; and finally, the Sihaspa, the Blackfeet (who are not the same as the Blackfeet of Montana, who are not Sioux). So these are the seven western Lakota tribes, the Tetonwan. Sioux is a word that’s part French and part Ojibway, a white man’s word for us. We are Lakota. We full-bloods also call ourselves the ikche wichasha—the wild, natural human beings.
My father told me that after Ptesan Win came four chiefs—a medicine man, a man of knowledge, a warrior, and a hunter. They dwelled together in the Black Hills. The White Buffalo Woman had taught the people sacredness. The four chiefs taught the people how to survive, how to live in this world, when to sleep and when to get up, how to make bows and arrowheads, and the different ways to make a fire. They taught them their language.
They told the people, “You will see the waters flow, the thunder coming, and you’ll have the winter, the spring, the summer, and the fall, the four seasons of the human mind, the four sacred directions. Go back into yourself and dream it. Go by the four winds. Snow falls from the north, rain from the west, the sun rises in the east, warmth comes from the south. Above the sky, between the earth and the moon, the Great Spirit roams. There’s nothing between our world and the stars but the Great Spirit. Pray to the clear sky. Drink clear water from the spring and it will clear your mind.” This the four chiefs taught the people.
We Lakota didn’t come from another nation or country. We came from across the Missouri, from three daybreaks and three nights away, from the east. And we Lakota claimed this land; it belongs to us. Before that, so long ago that we can hardly remember it, we came from the land of the Great Lakes. We were then a lake and woodlands people. Then the French gave guns, matchlocks, to the Ojibway. We had only bows and arrows. So we were pushed toward the west. And they had horses and we had not gotten them yet. It was not the Ojibway’s fault. It was the white man who started the fighting among the tribes, who pushed Ojibway onto Lakota land, and Crows onto Cheyenne land, Crees on Blackfoot land, always pushing the tribes westward to make room for himself, pushing them with guns and cannons, piling one tribe onto another, stopping only when they reached the western ocean. So for a while, the great prairie became our hunting grounds and we turned into a prairie people, a nation of the Great Plains. We need space to roam, to ride. We are a tipi people. But we are not drifters. We try to stay on our own ground. We are Tunkashila’s people. He chose this sacred land for us. Our grandfathers chose it. When the grandfathers had the buffalo and owned this land—the Great Dakota Reservation, as the whites called it in 1868 in the Treaty of Fort Laramie—all our dreams and beliefs and sacred sites were centered here. The wasichu, the white man, always talks about those murderous Sioux, always on the warpath, killing settlers, burning and scalping. But that is not true. We were, and are, a peaceful people. Wolakota means “peace.” We even welcomed the wasichu. Only when we saw them building roads through our land, wagon roads at first, and then the railroad, when we watched them building forts, killing off all the game, committing a buffalo genocide, and when we saw them ripping up our Black Hills for gold, our sacred Paha Sapa, the home of the wakinyan, the thunderbirds, only then did we realize that what they wanted was our land. Then we began to fight. For our earth. For our children. That started what the whites call the Great Indian Wars of the West. I call it the Great Indian Holocaust.
It began with some of our eastern Dakota cousins, the Sisseton, Santee, Wahpeton, and Yankton. They lived in Minnesota, where they had been put on a reservation. The government, which had taken their land, had promised to feed them. But corrupt white agents stole the food and other supplies. The Dakota were starving to death. The white superintendent told them to eat grass. That started what the whites called the Great Sioux Uprising, the revolt of a desperate, dying people. Out of the prisoners the army took, thirty-eight Dakota warriors were condemned to death and hanged. They sang their death songs. Then the last of our eastern tribes were chased across the Missouri and beyond.
It was a killing time. Many hundreds of our people and of the Cheyenne were exterminated, most of them old people, women, and children. They were easy to kill. As one colonel, who was also a clergyman, told his soldiers, “Kill ‘em all, big and small, nits make lice.”
After the Lakota and Cheyenne had wiped out Custer, the soldiers swarmed over our land. So many buffalo were killed that they became almost extinct. They had been our main food. Then we were driven onto the reservations and fenced in.
I can trace my ancestry back for nine generations. We Crow Dogs had always had the “earth ear,” maka nongeya, having the whole earth for an ear. It means you know what’s going to happen before it happens. And you can also listen backward, way back, know the generations gone by. And I have my spirit computer, Inyan Tunka, the ancient rock computer, a finding stone. So I have the rock spirit in me. And I have the wakiksuyapi, a special memory, a hot line to the spirits, the remembrance of long-dead relatives, the understanding of signs. Also I can speak the Lakota language as it was spoken hundreds of years ago. In my dreams I can speak to my ancestors. I carry our history inside me.
Before we were put on the reservation, and before the census takers got hold of us, sons had names different from their fathers. So Chief Iron Shell’s son was called Hollow Horn Bear. You got a childhood, name and, after your first vision quest, maybe a dream gave you your grown-up name. And later, maybe you performed some great deed and were honored with still another name. Men could have different names during their lifetimes. But sometime after 1870 the missionaries and census takers made us all take Christian first names, like Tom, Dick, and Harry, while our Indian names became our last names and were frozen in time. So in the five generations since, we have all been named Crow Dog. Before that, each ancestor had a different name, according to his or her vision. I have seen a trail. I walked it backward. I saw the footprints of our ancestors.
My earliest ancestor was Mato Mani, Walking Bear. He got his name because he was hunting all the time. He had two wives—a Lakota and an Arapaho woman. He had a son and a daughter. The son’s name was Mato, Bear. Just Bear. He took after his father; he did a lot of hunting. He had a charm that brings the animals to you. And there was Mato Kangi, Bear Crow. This one had three wives, who gave him four sons. The first was a Lakota woman, the second a Cheyenne, and the third was from the Pawnee nation. There was always a lot of marrying between the tribes
and, in the old days, a lot of capturing of wives from another tribe during a raid. Two of this Mato Kangi’s sons were spiritual, what the white man calls medicine men. We had many of them in our clan, our tiyoshpaye. We are medicine people. Going farther back there was Mato Shunka Manitou, Bear Coyote. He was a great warrior. He was a Tokala, a member of the Kit Fox warrior society. The Tokala had a song:
Tokala kin hemacha I am a fox,
Taka yakapi channa I am supposed to die.
Iyatan michila. Whatever is dangerous, let me do it.
In battle, the Tokala didn’t care whether they lived or died. That gave them an edge. Still farther back there was Shunka Numpa, Two Dogs. He had two wives, a Lakota and a Cree. And there were the Iron Shells and Two Strikes, famous chiefs and warriors.
My father, Henry, took up where I stopped. He said, “It started with that damned cow. It belonged to a Mormon passing through with a wagon train. That cow strayed. A young man, High Forehead, shot it. Then they butchered it. It wasn’t much of a feast. That cow was nothing but skin and bones and hard chewing. The Mormon went to the soldiers’ fort and made a big stink. He shouldn’t have done it. That cow was sick and ran off to die someplace. There was this Lieutenant Grattan. He was the kind of wasichu who has an Indian for breakfast every day. He said, ‘With thirty men I can ride over the whole Sioux nation!’ That’s what he said. So this fool, Grattan, went to the Indian camp. Conquering Bear, whom they also called Brave Bear, was the chief there. He was my grandfather’s uncle. He belonged to our tiyoshpaye. That’s why it all starts here. Grattan told the chief he must give up the man who shot the cow. Conquering Bear told him he couldn’t give up the man because he was a Minneconjou, not a Brulé. Also, he didn’t want to give up High Forehead to be put in a tiny cell inside prison. Why all that trouble about an old, broken-down cow?
“Grattan came up with his soldiers and two cannons. He shot up the Indians’ camp. One of the cannon balls killed Conquering Bear. Then the warriors got mad and killed Grattan and all his men. The first one named Crow Dog was in that fight and counted coup. He earned eagle feathers. The way I see it, Grattan had it coming. This happened in 1854. So from there it starts—Crow Dog history.”
Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) Page 1