Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143)

by Dog, Leonard C.

  “Woman’s Dress was standing in the same place before he fell into the spiritual world of his vision. He stood there like a tree that has taken root. He stood there holding hands with the people on either side of him. Then the circle of dancers opened up to allow the sick to come in and eat of this vision meat. There were many sick people to eat the medicine, and what was left was placed in a special wooden bowl called a canwaksila. The director took the sweet grass up again and began to smoke up all the sick people. As they chewed and swallowed this otherworld meat, they could feel it going down into their bodies and through their veins. After that they felt much better.”

  Near the White River, at the point where one road goes to Rosebud and the other to Parmelee, there my great-grandfather ran a ghost dance. The circle hoop is still there. On a nice summer day you can still make it out. At that spot an old man named Black Bear fell into a vision world of the ghost dance. As Black Bear lay on the ground, the rest of the people continued to dance. After a while Black Bear got up on his feet and faced north with his arms and hands outstretched, and in plain daylight the people saw a little flash of lightning in his hand, like a small looking glass. The ghost dance leader went over to Black Bear and smoked and fanned him off with sweet grass. He saw that Black Bear held a small shining rock, the kind of rock that couldn’t be found on earth. A moon rock. And dancers came out of their trance with spiritual food in their hands—moon flesh and star flesh. There still hovers around that place a smell of burning sweet grass.

  Old Jerome Crow Dog joined the ghost dance. He liked that new way of praying, of relating to the spirits. He became a leader, and many of our people followed him. He told them to make special shirts for all the dancers. So the people who followed Crow Dog made ghost dance shirts painted with pictures of the sun, the half moon, the stars, and also with pictures of birds, such as the eagle and the magpie. These shirts were supposed to make the wearer bulletproof.

  Uncle Dick Fool Bull, who watched the ghost dance when he was a young boy, told me, “There was a man named Porcupine who put on such a shirt and invited people to shoot at him. Later he showed them some bullets that had just dropped off upon hitting, without going in.”

  Crow Dog told his people, “The Paiute did not teach us this thing. These shirts cannot stop bullets no matter what is painted on them.” But they did not want to believe him.

  When the soldiers ran all over the reservation, trying to put down the ghost dance, Crow Dog took his people way out into the Badlands where the whites could not follow them. Two Strikes and Short Bull joined him there. Short Bull had firsthand experience of Wovoka’s power and was the fiercest believer in the new religion. Crow Dog started his ghost dance by having a woman shoot four sacred arrows into the sky. They had points made of bone dipped in buffalo blood. In the end as many as three thousand people danced with Crow Dog, Short Bull, and Two Strikes. Besides the ghost shirts they wore striped blankets and upside-down American flags.

  It was hard for them to stay in the Badlands. Winter was coming on. It was cold, with a lot of snow on the ground, and they had only skimpy canvas tipis for shelter. They had no food except for whatever white ranchers’ cattle they could find and butcher. But the Badlands was the only place people could still ghost dance. Up at Standing Rock the agent sent his tribal police to kill our great holy man, Sitting Bull, for protecting the ghost dancers. Everywhere people were running away from the soldiers, who they were afraid might kill them. The government sent soldiers and interpreters to Crow Dog’s and Two Strikes’ camp, telling them to return to the reservation or they would be wiped out.

  Two Strikes said, “They will do it. They have already killed many of us. They have cannons. We have women and children here. I will not see them die. I will take them back to the reservation.”

  But Short Bull and his men pointed their Winchesters at the whites, and even at Two Strikes, shouting, “Kill the wasichus. Kill all who want to go back.”

  So here were Lakota men facing each other with loaded guns, ready to shoot. And the soldiers were ready too. It was only a matter of seconds before the blood of many men, women, and children would be painting the snow red. It was then that Crow Dog did a great thing, maybe the greatest in all his life. He sat right in the middle between the two rows of men screaming at each other and pulled a blanket over himself. There he was, a little heap in the snow, singing softly to himself. They all, whites and Indians, kept staring at this blanket with the man under it. They did not know what to make of it, but they all calmed down. They lowered their guns. They kept staring at that little heap, wondering what Crow Dog was going to do. At last Crow Dog threw his blanket off. He said, “I will not see Lakota kill Lakota. I will not see my people butchered by the soldiers. You can kill me if you want to. The soldiers or Short Bull, it is all the same to me. I am not afraid to die. But while I live I will try to save these women and babies. I will take them back to the agency.”

  Then Crow Dog and Two Strikes marched their people peacefully back toward Pine Ridge. Short Bull’s band went with them. In the end only Short Bull was left standing there, clutching his Winchester. Then he went too. Thus Crow Dog saved the lives of a thousand people. In the same month, of December 1890, the soldiers massacred hundreds of Sioux men, women, and children of Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee, leaving women with babies nursing at their breasts dead in the ditch. They had no Crow Dog to save them.

  Old Henry told me, “My grandfather was a ghost dance leader. He didn’t dance often himself. Mostly he sat back and watched and listened. He supervised the dance. He was teaching them the songs and the sacred language to get the power. They were dancing in three circles. The earth is still trampled down there. Nothing has grown at that spot for years. But the songs and words are still growing in my heart, because he taught me everything about this Wanagi Wacipi, and I taught you, my son, so this ghost dance will never die.”

  After the ghost dance, my great-grandfather lived quietly by himself with his wife. He went back to the tipi rather than live in the tiny log cabin he had built years ago. One day, in September 1912, when Crow Dog was going toward Rosebud, he got sick all of a sudden and died. From that day his wife lived alone, but she and Crow Dog had already prepared. She had asked him where he wanted to be buried. And he had answered wherever they would accept him. After he died, the Catholic priest came and accepted Crow Dog. He had a good funeral. His wife had told him, before he passed away, “Old man, when you die and get buried, I’ll tell them to leave a space next to you, so when I die we’ll lie there together as we did in life. After all the hardships that you went through, I will follow you. I’ll do that much for you.” And when the old woman died, they put her right next to him.

  When Frank Good Lance started in as a medicine man he told us, “Your grandfather was buried in the Catholic religion. Now, in the white man’s religion, if a man killed someone, they don’t bury him in the regular cemetery when he dies. They have outside graveyards for those men. But in the Saint Francis cemetery your great-grandfather is buried right in the center, in hallowed ground. Old Crow Dog had been forgiven. By white law he was supposed to be hanged, but the high court freed him. He went into death and came out of death. So here you have something to talk about, something to be proud of. You never have to be afraid to speak up. So let’s not be afraid to be among the people.” And he prayed for us with the sacred pipe and the eagle wing. Then he smoked us up with sage and sweet grass and purified us. We still have our sweat lodge at the same spot where he put one up for us, and we pray there. These are the sacred things that we’re doing now.

  Henry summed it up: “Jerome Crow Dog was a great man. He was always using what the white people call symbols. And we have taken after him in this. He wore an old coat a missionary had given him, but over his shoulders he always had an Indian blanket. This meant he had to walk the white man’s road while remaining a Sioux in his mind. And he also wore a white man’s hat with a visor, a woolen hat, something like a beanie,
but he stuck an eagle feather on its top. He told me, ‘This cap means that we live under the wasichu now, but the eagle feather means that we won’t be whitemanized, that we’ll be Indians forever.’”

  six

  HE WENT WITH BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST SHOW

  The Sioux are the wildest,

  most wondrous riders

  on naked steeds.

  Buffalo Bill

  The second Crow Dog’s name was John, Henry’s father. He, too, was something of a loner. As Henry told me, “Johnny Crow Dog doesn’t worry about anything, just himself and his family. He doesn’t worry about who’s big chief, or who eats plenty peyote, or who smokes too many pipes. He keeps out of tribal politics. He’s a First World War vet. He’s that kind of man. Dad’s life was really hard after Old Crow Dog killed Spotted Tail. They made him suffer for what his old man did. He didn’t talk much. He was a quiet man. John tried peyote once, in Macy, Nebraska. That was in 1920. But he didn’t join the Native American church. He told them, ‘You eat peyote. That’s good. But I am a rough man. I do things my own way. I am not a man who goes to meetings and mingles.’”

  John Crow Dog lived by himself. He had no education. During Prohibition, he was a moonshiner—another reason why he lived way out by himself. One time he went east with the big circus, together with two brothers. He was a spin roper. They had to playact the Custer fight and attack the Deadwood stage coach. They had to play cowboys and Indians. Among the other Indians in the show were Thunder Hawk, Standing Soldier, and Iron Eagle. John said that Buffalo Bill had been a fair man who paid them well and was friendly to the Indians. He drank a lot of whiskey out of an extra-big glass. He told John that Sitting Bull had once been in his circus and, in New York City, right on Broadway, had given nickels and dimes to poor white children who had been begging. Grandpa John brought back a poster with a picture of all the Indians riding around on their horses. Somebody read the headline to me. It said the Indians were the “wildest, most wondrous riders on naked steeds.” I remember that much but nothing else.

  When John went east he met a white woman there. She came out to Rosebud with him. He took her to the mountains and stayed there with her for a while. She hung around for close to a year, but life on the reservation was too hard for her. So John left her and she left him, but before she went away he gave her five hundred dollars from his lease money.

  John lived like a badger, alone, but he had his pipe to pray with. He wasn’t cut out to be a model family man. He always said that when he died, not to put him in a cemetery but to bury him someplace on his own land. He lived at the old Orphan band camp, at Upper Cut Meat. He trapped beaver and got prairie chickens for food. He dug the charming medicine. Use it and the deer come right up to you. A hunter is quiet, lets other people do the talking. If you talk too much, you spook the game.

  Two holy men told John never to eat dog, that it was bad medicine for him. John listened, but one day he went with a half-breed friend, Sam David, a World War I vet like John, to Crookston, Nebraska. They both liked the moonshine and they were drinking. There was some food there that had been lying around for some days and they ate it. It was dog. John got sick right away. Later some guys came and made a big party. Nobody knows what happened. John Crow Dog was in the best health that night, and in the morning he was dead. He looked as if he had passed out, but when they tried to wake him they found out that he had been dead all the time. They brought him to my father’s place, but Dad was out in the woods cutting timber. So they took him to Winyan Tanka, John’s sister. She was living a mile from where we are now, on Crow Dog’s land. For the longest time Jerome, the first Crow Dog, would not accept his allotment because he didn’t think land, Grandmother Earth, should be cut up into little pieces and owned by single men or families. He didn’t accept land until 1910, twenty years after everybody else did. So my older sisters found Dad cutting wood. They held a wake for Grandpa John. He had never been baptized. He belonged to no church. He wasn’t Christian, just an old-time Indian. Uncle Dick Fool Bull said that since he wasn’t baptized, he had no place to go. He was right. The missionaries wouldn’t have him in their cemeteries. He also couldn’t be buried in a Native American churchyard. So my father was sad. One Santee from Grass Mountain, Roy Vessor, said, “Well, we have land right here. Let’s dig a hole for him.” So they did that. Henry himself buried him. They took him up to the place across the hills where I always fast, and they dug his grave. That’s exactly what John had wanted. He got his wish. At the time I was eight years old. I didn’t think too much about my grandfather being buried on his own land. But when I was under the power of peyote I felt that my grandfather needed help, needed the prayers. So I told my father that I would make it good for him, and I think that my son will make it that much better for me, like what Jerome Crow Dog did for the Brulé Sioux. Henry went often to John’s grave and always placed a rock there. Each Veterans Day we put up a flagpole for him and, wherever John is, he knows that we remember him as a son and a grandson. I want all this put down. I want my children to have a legend. It is important that they know the history of the Crow Dog generations.

  My grandmother’s name was Ta Mahpiya Washte Win, Mary Good Cloud Woman. Grandma could hardly speak English, but she understood some. She could do some reading and writing. She read the government letters and explained them. That was a Strange thing for an Indian woman to do then. Some relations made fun of her for this, but she really helped. My grandmother was a hardworking woman, lending a hand with anything. She’d chop wood, haul water, do the gardening, dig wild turnips and dry ‘em up, plant corn, do the washing, bead moccasins, fix up clothes for the whole family. She was a woman who did everything every day. I look at the girls coming up now; they don’t do it anymore, they haven’t got the strength. Grandmother Good Cloud Woman was strong-hearted.

  seven

  LET ME TELL IT IN MY OWN WORDS

  I am the last true aborigine.

  I am the last real Sioux left.

  Henry Crow Dog

  My father, Henry, loved to recount his life’s story. I have it on tape. He said, “Let me tell it in my own words. Don’t put it in fancy language! My mother’s name”—John’s wife’s—”was Jumping Elk. John’s father-in-law put this poshta, this hood, on Jumping Elk. They made the marriage by praying with the pipe in the four directions. They put the pipe in the hands of John and his woman. They tied their hands together with a strip of red cloth. They put a blanket over them. They took a turtle shell and put charcoal from the pipe in it and let the two of them touch it. The medicine man told them, ‘Someday you’ll turn into dirt and ashes, but the pipe will hold you together.’ Then the medicine man gave them the staff. After they were married a while my mother told John that there was going to be a baby.

  “I wasn’t born in a hospital. I was born in the old way. John called on four older women, fifty to sixty years old, who no longer had their moon time. They gave my mother nine small red sticks, like from a matchbox, and she put them in a little parfleche. An older lady makes this. Every month you put one of those little sticks in there. They already know whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl. If the moon opens up like a sickle, toward the left, it’s a girl. If it’s curling up a little downward, it’s a boy. If it’s a half moon, that means twins.

  “Now it’s birthing time. Two elder women watch Jumping Elk. They have a tanned deer hide and two crutches, about a foot long, and two small stakes. The medicine woman wraps a rawhide belt around the birth giver, wraps it around her waist. There are holes in the rawhide to tighten it like a belt. Jumping Elk pushed herself. She’s not lying down like a wasichu winyan, she’s kind of squatting. The medicine woman has an herb. She puts it around Jumping Elk’s shin. That helps. Then the older women press with the belt. Before the pains come, one woman has four sticks. Every pain she cuts a short stick. My mother grabs onto a large birthing stick and holds on. She pushes three times. The fourth time the baby comes out. They catch me on a tanned white hid
e. There’s a bowl, and water, and sage. They wash me and scrape the gook off me with a bone knife. The old lady sticks a finger into my mouth and pulls it out. Then I begin to cry. If I had not cried the woman would have slapped me on the back until I did. That’s how I was born. That’s how we all were born. Now they go to the hospital. The old way made you feel good.

  “The world I was born in, it was the wasichus’ world. I wished I had been born a hundred years earlier. There were no buffalo anymore, no game, nothing to be happy about. We were starving. The people lived on timpsila—wild turnips, berries, roots, and drank water. That was all. As for meat, we ate anything we could catch—gophers, muskrats, squirrels, anything. The family that ate medicine roots had power. If a man dreamed of an eagle, he had to follow that faith. Eat gray grass. If you eat that, chew that, you feel better. You could find that gray grass and drink water after. That filled you up. You could make your way with it.

  “They gave us all the meat parts to eat that the white folks would not touch. Once I got a chicken’s onze [anus] with a little meat around it. And that way we lived. The old Indian food was mostly gone. The government issue lasted two and a half, maybe three weeks. The last part of the month was always hard. So to get food we sold our old decorated tipi to a white man for five dollars. We had nothing.

  “The tipis were all gone. Some people lived in dirt huts, and some fixed up shelters almost like sweat lodges, bent sticks covered with hides. We were lucky to have my grandfather’s little log cabin. We had matches already. If we ran out of matches, in wintertime, we had to watch the fire so that it didn’t go out. People were starving. We were having a hard time. At that time, when I was a boy, there were twelve thousand Sioux left, and then, suddenly, there were only six thousand Brulé. At one time Rosebud was down to maybe five hundred full-bloods and two thousand, five hundred mixed bloods—all kinds of races, mixed together, but they called themselves Indians. People talking Indian became few. Yankton, Sisseton, to the east, they start speaking English and forgetting their own language. I speak only broken English. They call me a good-for-nothing because I talk so much but, nowadays, if I talk for long I get tired. I talk myself to sleep.