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

by Dog, Leonard C.

  “I met Henry when I was twenty-one years old. I met him at Saint Francis, at some doings there. But before that I already knew him. Well, that was June 26, 1921. First we stayed over at my mother’s place and then we went to live at Ironwood. Then we went back to my mother’s place again, and my father told me, ‘Now you are married. So you have to have a house and make a living, the two of you.’ So Henry brought me here, on the other side of the Little White River. We lived in the log house Henry built himself, right at this place here on Crow Dog’s allotment land, right under those hills. Henry made the house large, because we were having kids. He used anything he could find to build this house. He was good with his hands and could make anything, build a house or make himself a dance costume or a war bonnet. He used tree trunks to support the ceiling. He painted the whole works sky blue with a yellow trim. He also built two outhouses a little away from the big house, and also a cook shack for hot summer days. So we lived in there with plenty of room, not only for us, but to have plenty of space for ceremonies—peyote meeting, yuwipi, dog feast, giveaway, any kind of ceremony. The house was always full of guests. When people came for meetings they slept on the floor. Whenever there was a ceremony the whole floor was covered with bodies.

  “And cooking went on all the time, twenty-four hours almost. Indians are not like whites, who eat and sleep always at the same time according to the clock. We sleep and feed whenever we feel like it. So it was cook, cook, cook all the time. But it was nice, so nice. We stayed there for a long time, until the house burned down, and with all the troubles we had, it was still a good time of much friendship and laughter. The house burned down in 1976. We think somebody did it on purpose. The goons, maybe, who hated us because of AIM and Wounded Knee and who saw their chance when Leonard was away in jail. Well, we had no gas, no well, no electricity. We had nothing, but we managed. We got the water from the river. We had a stove to keep warm in winter, we had a cookstove. We lived there for over forty years. First, while Henry was building the house, little by little, we lived in a big tent. So we lived, sometimes hot and sometimes cold.

  “Henry was a good worker. He was always cutting and hauling wood. He sold it. My mother gave us two horses and a wagon. We got a little lease check every December. We leased land to ranchers to run their cattle on, but we always had to wait until December or January until we got our money. The government fixed the amount the ranchers would have to pay us, but they fixed it way too low. Mister Indian always gets the wrong end of the stick.

  “Left Hand Bull, my father, and the other Left Hand Bulls, they kept the pipe. They all smoked it together and prayed that way. My mother told me, ‘That’s holy in the Lakota way. Never forget, you’re a Lakota. So if you sit there and pray quietly the Indian way, that’s good.’ My mother taught me how to pray with the pipe. Leonard’s first wife, Francine, was a Left Hand Bull too. She gave him children, but they parted ways. They had a reason, I guess. Henry’s father, I knew him. He and his wife were parted, but he was a nice, good man. We stayed with him for a while, but he never stayed for long in one place. He moved around, stayed by himself.

  “There are women around here, old ones, who are bashful. They’re afraid to talk, afraid to open their mouths. Some younger ones are that way too. I tell them, ‘Speak up! You can talk. English or Indian, don’t hold back!’ I never was bashful. Maybe that’s why Henry liked me. He isn’t bashful either. I went to school as far as the sixth grade. I learned what I needed to know and made a living.

  “Leonard had an older brother. During the war he worked in a cement factory and he breathed in all that cement. They didn’t give them masks and all that. And when he came back, he was coughing all the time. He got worse, so they took him to the hospital for a while. When he came back again he told me, ‘Mom, I can hardly breathe. I am drowning for air.’ They took him to Rapid City and kept him there for a while. And he came back again and seemed better. But soon he was coughing once more, and the coughing never stopped. Then he died, from all that cement. At that time the war was still going on, though coming to an end. And nobody was back around here. We had no men to help us. So I had just my sister and my mother to help me. We buried him at Saint Francis. His name was Cleveland, Cleveland Crow Dog. He took peyote. He belonged to the Native American Church. He was a good singer. He had a soft, sweet voice, not like Leonard’s. He knew every song. Everyplace we went, people wanted him to sing. He was that good. He was a nice boy, and even after all those years I still miss him real bad. He was a good boy. He was so young. And he died.

  “Just like my daughter Delphine. She was nice too, but she had no luck. A drunken policeman beat her to death. He broke her arm and left her lying there in the road. It was snowing and so cold. They found her dead, her tears frozen on her cheeks. When he sobered up, that policeman asked my forgiveness. What can you do? I had twelve children, but they’re all gone except three. They died so young. All gone, gone, gone.

  “Leonard had an older brother whom he never got to know. We named him Earl Edward. In 1934 he was about two years old. We were living in Saint Francis at the time, near the church. Henry was working for the WPA, putting out square chunks of compressed hay for cattle and picking beets. What the whites called Indian work. John Black Tomahawk came over to visit us. He was singing powwow songs and Henry did the drumming. We were having a good time. Somebody heard it and thought we were having a peyote meeting. So he went and told the priests in Saint Francis. The priests ran things there. They said, ‘Crow Dog is a heathen. He contaminates the flock, leading them to damnation.’ They sent the tribal police to arrest Crow Dog. They told Henry, ‘The missionaries don’t want your kind here. You have two hours to get out of town, two hours or else.’

  “Henry ran over to Uncle Dick Fool Bull. He asked, ‘What shall I do? My little boy is sick with a cough.’

  “Fool Bull told him, ‘What can you do? They have the police. They have the power. You have your own allotment near the river. They can’t chase you from there. Go there and pray.’

  “So Henry packed up. He took down the tent that was our home and fixed up the wagon, hitched up his team. He loaded up everything we owned and put us all in the wagon. There was a blizzard. You couldn’t see your hand before your eyes. And it was so cold! So Henry drove the team all the way to our allotment, with the snow and icy wind in his face. It was dark and you couldn’t see. The horses were all iced over. There was hardly any road. It was slow going. And somewhere between Saint Francis and our land, our little boy died. Of the cold. Of the wind. His name was Earl Edward. Weeping, we made camp across the river from where the house is now. There was no house then. There was nothing. Henry and his friend Ed Red Feather went to the BIA office and got a coffin and all the things needed for the funeral. It was such a little coffin. Henry did not know where to bury our son. At Saint Francis they wouldn’t have him, because their cemetery was for ‘good Christians only.’

  “Ed Red Feather told my father, ‘You have been to the Native American church and you are welcome to return. You have a seat there. You can bring your son to be buried in our cemetery.’ Sky Bull told the members of the church, and they made our dead son a member of the Native American Church and buried him that way.

  “I was so sad. I went to a meeting and took peyote for the first time. And in my vision I saw the spirit with my dead children, and was encouraged, even though I couldn’t stop crying. Grandfather Peyote comforted me and Henry through his spiritual power. One year later, on the memorial day of our little son’s death, Henry and I were baptized in the Native American Church. We were baptized by Ed Red Feather. Whoever was Catholic in our family then left the Church. They said it was the priests who killed our little child.

  “Henry went to a Native American Church meeting one time and didn’t come home that night. My mother told me not to say anything about that, not to let those missionaries hear about it. It could cause trouble. My mother was a good woman. She never talked down any church or religion, white or
Indian. She was raised a Catholic, but, at the same time, she prayed with the pipe and prayed in the Lakota way. From that time on, Henry always went to the peyote meetings.

  “I was sick at the time, very sick. I had lost a lot of weight, but the white doctor had not helped me. Dick Fool Bull said to me, ‘Sister-in-law, you ought to eat peyote, eat the holy medicine. You’ll be all right, because you’ve got some kids and you are still young. That medicine can help you.’ I went down-river to Dick Fool Bull’s place and he gave me a cup of peyote tea. At that time I knew little about the peyote church and the sacred medicine, so I went to the meeting. I ate peyote all night and began getting well the next day. The herb made me feel so strange, so very different. I didn’t think I could get well, so I prayed as hard as I could. The woman next to me said, ‘Watch me praying. Do like me.’

  “I said, ‘There is something strange going on inside me, in my mind. Something wrong, maybe.’

  ‘“No, that will help you. That’s the medicine working on you.’

  “And they prayed over me, and feathered me, and they were singing. I got to feel well, like soaring. My body, and my thoughts, and my mind, they felt good. It was a new kind of good feeling. Like looking down into myself from the outside. I felt good, and warm, and contented, and comforted. Toward morning, I felt well, better than I ever had in my whole life. I was light-headed, clearheaded, and my sickness was gone. All those germs had got out of me. So, from that time, I was never sick.”

  My mother died in 1987 of cancer. As long as her husband was alive she remained strong, but when my father died she lost heart. She lost the will to live. I wept for a long time. We miss her.

  nine

  THE SPIRIT PICKED ME

  AND MADE ME WHAT I AM

  My son Leonard had the

  power from birth. Even before.

  When my wife was pregnant,

  when we’d drum and sing,

  he’d dance in there. In her womb.

  From this I knew what he was going to be.

  So I knew he shouldn’t go to school.

  He could go to the white man’s school,

  be a surgeon or anthropologist,

  but that was not what the

  spirit had in mind for him.

  Henry Crow Dog

  How far can people remember their childhood? How far back can you remember it? Can you remember being born, being in your mother’s womb? Can you recall a dream that you were in another world? Can you understand it? I remember it. I could not see, but in the eye of the mind, the eye of the heart, I can see it. During a ceremony, or when taking sacred medicine, I reexperience it. I can recall it. When I was born I experienced earth joy, universe joy, happiness of the world. I could feel air filling my lungs, on August 18, 1942. I was born spiritually. With the gourd. The medicine man Horn Chips was shaking it. For a day and a night I could not see, but I heard people talking, heard a drum and a gourd, heard a song. And when I was so little I remember the joy that I could crawl. I remember the places that I wanted to reach and couldn’t reach. And the first thing I held in my hand was a ball, tapa they call it, and a round stone. During a yuwipi ceremony, in the darkness, when the spirits come, I remember this.

  As I grew up they saw that I was different. Tunkashila picked me from among the other boys to become a pejuta wichasha, a spiritual man. When I was about five years old I was walking with some other boys and I saw that my shadow was not like theirs; it was the shadow of a grown man. That was one of the first visions I had. I was a dreamer. And when it was time for me to go to school, my father would not let me, because going to a white man’s school and learning the white man’s way would spoil me for becoming a medicine man. And when the truant officers came to get me, my father chased them off with his shotgun. When I was seven years old my father purified me in the sweat lodge. Four medicine men helped to initiate me. My father made an altar. The spiritual power was in it. It entered all of us. My father taught me the right prayers and songs. We all went into the sweat lodge, inikagapi wokeya, we went in together. Within the circle, inside the sweat lodge, that’s where they gave me the power—the inyan, the Tunka. Tunka, that’s the sacred stone we use, the yuwipi wa sicun, the oldest god.

  Then I was given this power. I saw the spirit go by, but I did not hear any voices yet. My father told me, “Before a ceremony, before doing anything important, always purify yourself in the sweat lodge. In the old days a man always purified himself in the sweat lodge after making a kill, after killing an enemy or a royal eagle.”

  One of the people who taught me from the earliest days was Good Lance. He was one of the few who still at that time wore their hair in long braids. He was a famous spiritual man among my people. He taught me the sacred ways, the prayers. I remember clearly, when I was about five years old, my Grandpa John, my father, and Good Lance showed to me, and explained, the four wopiyes, the four medicine bags that are kept by the Crow Dog family. One had belonged to Black Crow, Jerome Crow Dog’s friend. And this wopiye he gave to Good Lance, saying, “You are the only one I trust. This sacred bundle is looking to be kept in the Crow Dog tiyoshpaye.” Good Lance was a Crow Dog, but a vision had given him a spiritual name. One of these bundles got seven hoops. In another were eighty sticks with porcupine quill designs on them. My elders introduced me to these four wopiyes. They opened them up and taught me the meaning of all the things inside them. “Remember this,” they told me, “it is sacred. In the future your grandsons will inherit this.”

  My older sister Christine told me that I was not like other babies. It seemed to her that I knew more than a baby should know, that I grew up right away. I was thirteen years old when I became what the whites call a medicine man, a wichasha wakan. It is not often that boys start out that young, but it happens. There are others besides me who were kept out of school, as I was, and who became spiritual people when still very young, especially those who perform the yuwipi, the tying-up ceremony, which I do.

  At thirteen I went to the sweat lodge, the initipi, and had my first grown-up sweat. For four times a day for four days I did it. I came out very light-headed and I told my mother, “Mom, somebody spoke to me. They talked to me. They told me to prepare a place to communicate with them.” So my mother said, “Son, that’s sacred. You’re going where, a long time ago, your grandfather was. You are going into manhood now. You’ve got to do what your voices tell you.”

  At about that time I also went on my first hanbleceya, my first vision quest. I stayed on our vision hill for four days and nights. I neither ate nor drank. A big shadow again stood behind me. On the third day he spoke to me: “I am the life of the generation, and I am the tree. I am the medicine, I am the things you experience. I will always speak to you. I will give you an altar. When you put up this altar, you must remember me. You must use the pipe and the four winds of the earth. So this is the message I am carrying to you. From now on you will be an interpreter for your people. Open your heart to them. Your grandfather is speaking to you now. I will be in you, and my spiritual words will grow inside you. That is the message.”

  From the age of twelve to eighteen that spirit power continued. A voice kept on saying, “My name is Sitting Rock. This is your Indian altar I am giving you. You will speak to each other through the eagle and you will speak to the eagle. Now you have come far enough to handle the two center feathers. I am Flying Eagle. I will interpret for you.”

  At the age of twenty-four I went on another vision quest and again a spirit man spoke to me: “I am Stand on the Earth Man. I have been chosen to teach you medicine. To give you herb power. That’s why I am here.”

  At the age of twenty-nine, I went crying for a dream once more and again the spirit talked to me: “I am Lightning Man. I am speaking to you within the lightning power of the spirit. So that’s the power I am giving to you, a new understanding.” When I heard this my hair stood up and I heard a sound like knocking two flintstones together.

  When I was thirty-two I again went up th
e hill. That time the voice said, “I am the spirit man. I am going to teach you understanding of human beings.” From time to time I still hear the voice.

  On the nonspiritual side, in everyday life, when I was five years old, I remember my father going through the valley, through the woods. Before he left, we always had breakfast, but before we ate, he always went out and prayed to Tunkashila, the Grandfather Spirit. And he always put out a morsel of food and spilled some coffee for the spirits of dead friends and relatives, to give them something to eat too. After that my father said, “Son, come along, hiyupo!” So I always went with him. We had horses and a wagon. Hardly anybody had a car in those days. I liked to ride in the wagon, beside my father. Later I learned to drive it. From early on I helped him get wood. We got a wagon load every day. Dad sold firewood. That was a part of how he made a living. He taught me how to gather up dry wood. “Oak is the good one, and you can burn it for ash. But you can’t burn red elm or white elm. And look for good, dry pine.”

  He told me, “In this valley here, your great-grandfather, your relatives used to live. In different places. But when Grandfather Jerome killed Spotted Tail, they thought they should change their camp. So they sold everything and scattered. Everybody moved. But remember this valley. It’s part of us. It speaks to us.”

  Then we’d bring the wood back, unload it, and have lunch. Dad cut logs for people, and tipi poles. Old Walking Crow had a sawmill. Dad helped him cutting boards. He and I also cut fence posts. He cut about a hundred fifty a day and I cut seventy-five. We’d sell the poles and with the money buy food and on Saturday we’d go to a ceremony and help put it on. We lived like that.