Dad wanted to show his appreciation for my helping him with the wood. So he made me a ball out of an old inner tube and a kind of catcher’s mitt from a scrap of deer hide. He taught me how to play throw and catch. He also showed me how to play marbles with oak nuts. In wintertime he carved toys for me out of yellow wood.
Then Dad also taught me how to fix up a bow and arrow. For a bowstring he used rawhide from a female deer. It’s so stretchy you can’t break it. He used ash for the arrows. “These things,” he said, “they used them way back years ago. They don’t use bows and arrows anymore, but you could teach yourself how to play with them.” But he told me, “You should never handle a gun, because your hands are still red with blood.” By this he meant that Spotted Tail’s blood was still dripping on us in the fourth generation. My sons will be free from that guilt.
I had few friends, because I didn’t go to school, and we lived pretty far from the nearest settlement. The only friends I remember playing with as a child were two boys, named Abel Good Lance and William Centers. They lived with us for about a year and a half. I was about six years old then. They were orphans and my father brought them over from Pine Ridge. I learned from them to carve little ponies and buffalo from old cow bones. We also took yellow wood, which is easy to carve, and all winter long made our own toys. I still have some of my Indian toys from those days. It was not until I was ten years old that I got my first store-bought toy—a little car. Later on Dad bought me some real marbles. That was a big event for me. Later I made shooters, something like a slingshot, out of old Model A tire tubes. I never shot at birds or living things, just at targets. As I got older I made my own bows and arrows. Then we were joined by another boy, Vine Goodshield. We also played Sioux fighting Crow or Pawnee. I always wanted to be a Sioux. With time we got less isolated, maybe because some families got old beat-up cars, what we now call Indian cars, not secondhand, but maybe fourth- or fifth-hand. So then we played baseball. At age ten I had my own horse. Its name was Nick and I rode him all summer. The thing I liked best of all was swimming, and I was really good at it.
The only pet I had was a wild skunk. I had been playing in the woods and heard some noise from out of the bushes. I went to investigate and found a little baby skunk, so small he didn’t have teeth yet. When he was about three months old, my father descented him. He was a good little pet, but somehow his scent bag came back and my father said it was time to let him go. But he kept coming back to eat, and then would leave again. Finally he came with his family for a handout. That went on for quite a while but finally they stopped coming.
My dad always hunted, because we were so often out of food. He never used a gun, in order not to offend Spotted Tail’s spirit. He taught us how to smoke out rabbits up on the hills. We’d take some kindling and go looking for rabbit holes. Then we’d smoke them out and stand by with a stick, and when they came out of their holes we hit them over the head. Then we’d have rabbit stew for dinner.
Dad also taught us how to fish. Sometimes we ate mud turtles and sand turtles. The sand turtles we found along the road and the highway, where there is sand under berry bushes. The mud turtles we found down by the river, near our place. Mud turtles are real big, much bigger than sand turtles. They taste good, like chicken. After Dad cleaned out the shells he gave them to us as toys.
When I got into my teens my father taught me how to ride all kinds of horses—yellow, white, and spotted ones. I never used a saddle; that’s not the Indian way. Mostly I rode a gelded stallion. He became my favorite. Then Dad showed me how to use an ax and a sledgehammer, a wedge and a saw. He showed me how to take care of chickens, hogs, cattle, and horses. It was better than going to school, where we learned nothing.
Sometime between age seven and fourteen I learned to dance from a medicine man—the hoop dance, the gourd dance, the eagle dance, and the rope dance, what we call spin roping. These are not good-time dances to have fun. They are sacred ceremonies, like prayers. The hoop dance represents the sacred hoop, the hoop of the universe, the circle without end, the circle of all living things—people, animals, and plants. Before he started teaching me, the medicine man took me into the sweat lodge to prepare me for becoming a dancer.
By the time I was nine years old I could dance with five hoops. I kept them whirling around my arms and legs, as well as around my waist, dancing very fast to the beat of my father’s drum. I formed the hoops into shapes, into a butterfly or a bird. I could jump through the hoops easily, because I was still small and thin. Soon I had the confidence to dance with seven hoops. My father took me to powwows and I won many prizes. But I never forgot that dancing was a prayer and that the hoop was an altar, that it “had a face,” as my father said.
When I was eleven years old, every time I danced I heard the spirit talk to me. It was a sound like clicking two stones together, and a whistling like from a bird. I was learning all the time. I could make more and more difficult movements—the eagle hoop, the chair hoop, throwing up hoops into the air while jumping through them. This last figure was called the lightning hoop. I could keep two hoops in my mouth and three whirling around my arms, and one going clockwise around my neck. At the same time I was stepping into a spare hoop, drawing it quickly over my body in a nonstop motion.
As I got older, I added more and more hoops, around my ankles, between ankles and knees, and around my chest. By the time I was twelve years old I danced with sixteen hoops at the same time. When I was fourteen I went to a big powwow with my dad and mom. As I was fixing up my costume I saw a big cloud come up over me and out of it I had a vision and heard a voice like a bird’s, but I could understand it. It told me, “Hokshila, boy, this is the moment, the year, the place where you will get a new understanding and a new power.” I told my father about it and he said, “The hoops were your preparation, a way to get ready. From now on you will learn to be a healer and learn how to help your people.”
That day I danced as I had never danced before, with twenty-one hoops. People told me that it was the best dance they had ever seen. It was my last dance. After it I hung up my hoops. They were for a boy, but now it was time for me to become a man.
During the days I did the hoop dance I also performed the gourd dance, and right in the gourd, in the rattle, there was a spirit talking to me. As I was shaking the gourd, the spirits talked to me in little ghostlike voices, encouraging me.
I also performed the eagle dance. I could never do it as well as my father. Nobody could; he was the best ever. When he danced he turned into an eagle before your eyes. When you do the eagle dance you blow on your eagle bone whistle, and through it you communicate with the eagle. This sacred bird is a messenger making a bridge between you and the Creator. When you dance the eagle dance a power gets hold of you.
I did the rope dance, spin rope dancing, which stands for the tying-up ceremony called yuwipi. The rope should really be a rawhide, not just a lasso. My father said, “The rawhide makes a straight road; follow it.”
I also did the stomp dance. Once I practiced it in a little grove of trees. There were some big oak stumps and, dreamlike, they turned into people with long hair and old-time buckskin outfits. I knew that they had long gone to another world and, as I watched, they turned back into oak stumps. Dancing often gave me visions like that.
I was growing up. I had six brothers born before me, but they all died. So I was the only son left, the only root. That put a heavy load upon me.
When I was fourteen years old, a whole string of bad things happened to me. Some boys came up to me and said, “Let’s go for a ride!” I didn’t know they had stolen the car in Colorado and changed the license plate. They didn’t do a good job on it. They tried to put a new color on the car and messed that up too. But I didn’t know anything was wrong. One of the boys suggested that I drive. They did this so that, if they were stopped, it would look as if I had stolen it. Naturally we ran into some police and they spotted that something was wrong with the license plate and that somebody had trie
d to repaint the car. They had us cold. They wanted to see my ID and driver’s license and, of course, I didn’t have any. The other boys said I had stolen the car. They lied and lied. At that time I spoke hardly any English. The police believed them, because I could not make myself understood. I did time in a reformatory in Littleton, Colorado. I learned to be a car mechanic at Littleton, and I am still good at fixing old clunkers. But being in the reformatory was hard for me. I was used to roaming, to riding, to swimming. I suffered from being cooped up. I was in there for one year and one month.
At age sixteen I worked for two months on a farm in Nebraska, for a Japanese man. Then I went back to South Dakota to work on a ranch, for five dollars a day. That was the only kind of work for an Indian then. After that I got into trouble again. Some kids had gotten drunk and rowdy and the police put them in a panel truck. I happened to be there, so the cops got on my case too. It made me mad. The panel truck was still standing there and I managed to creep up and open the door and let everybody out. They ran off in all directions. So they booked me for trying to escape and resisting arrest. But this time I was in for a very short time. It seemed that in those days every kid was in jail sometime. If you were a teenager and an Indian and were found someplace away from home, you had to be guilty of something. That was the attitude of the white police. And you had to go outside to find work. In court you couldn’t understand anything that was going on. You couldn’t understand the language they used. You got a white court-appointed lawyer you couldn’t understand either. He did nothing for you because, win or lose, he got paid. So he spent as little time on you as he could get away with.
After that I did farm and ranch work again for about three years. I did a lot of planting and harvesting beets. When there was no more farm work I got a job at a body shop. I learned from one of my friends by watching him work. He used a torch, a heat torcher. You heat it to a certain temperature and you press it. If you do it right you can’t even see where the dent was. But if you do it wrong, you crush the fender, you wrinkle that tin all up. So I did this to make a living. But it was tiresome and wore me out. I had to work on every car they brought in. Then I learned to cut glass for car windows. When you start cutting that glass, you’ve got to have strong hands and be careful. You can’t mark it too well. You’ve got to use a heat glass cutter. You heat it and you mark the glass with a steel wheel. I was sixteen years old when I began doing that kind of work.
My dad said to me, “You are about ready to get married and have children.” I thought so too. Among the Lakota we get to be fathers and mothers early in life. I took on a new name—Defends His Medicine—which represented our sacred plant, peyote. Sage and peyote are our two great sacred medicines. The Native American Church, the peyote church, has always been under attack by the white man. It needs defending. That’s why I took that name. So I stopped doing farm and ranch work, which kept me from being what had been shown to me in my vision. I became a spiritual man.
ten
THE PIT OF DREAMS
In 1956, when I was fasting,
a spirit told me,
“You will be a tool for the
ikche wichasha, for the simple man.”
I give of myself for the people.
Leonard Crow Dog
A spirit had picked me to be a medicine man. Grandfather Peyote had chosen me to be a road chief of the Native American church. Before I could even begin along that path I had to go down into the pit and be buried in it and come to life again through the power of Tunkashila. And I had to have a vision to point the way. I had to go up the hill, “crying for a dream,” as they call it. But even before that, I had to be purified.
To be purified you have to go into the sweat lodge. My father called on Good Lance, who had the power and the knowledge, to help purify me. He also asked another relative who was a spiritual man, Frank Arrow Sight, to help. They instructed me, “Before you do anything of great importance in your life, you purify yourself in the initi. Going on your first vision quest could be the greatest moment in your life, so preparing you for it must be done right. This sweat bath must be something special. It is sacred.”
We have our sweat lodge at the edge of Crow Dog’s Paradise, close by the stream. Whape washtemna, Indian perfume, grows there. Waterbirds fly over that spot. The way we do a sweat, we stick sixteen willow saplings in the ground in a circle—the number sixteen is sacred to all Indian people, not only the Lakota. So four times four willow wands make the frame, the skeleton of the sweat lodge. You bend them at the top and tie them together so that they form a dome, like a beehive. You cover them up with canvas, a tarp, or blankets. In the old days it used to be buffalo robes, but these are hard to come by now. At every step of making the sweat lodge you pray.
In that little sweat lodge, the whole universe is contained. It is the Creator’s home. In the center we make a hole, a perfect circle. We place the sacred rocks in this hole. Inside we make a carpet of sage to sit on. Sage is a holy herb and makes the spirits come in. The earth one takes out of the center pit you make into a little mound outside the lodge. It represents Unci, Grandmother Earth. And beyond that you make peta owihankeshni, the fire without end. For wood my father used dry branches from the trees. They had to be laid in a certain way—first four sticks running west and east, and seven sticks running north and south. As my father laid the sticks down, he said a prayer.
The door of the sweat lodge always faces west. Only at the home of a heyoka, a thunder dreamer, or “contrary,” does it face east, because a heyoka has to do everything differently from anybody else. Never does the lodge entrance face north. From the door to the Grandmother mound, it runs in a straight line. This is inyan chanku, the path of the sacred rocks. Along it the red hot stones are passed into the lodge.
Good Lance told me, “Let yourself see the generations as you set the wood on fire. Think of passing the sacred flame from generation to generation.” When the fire had gone down my father placed the first twelve rocks on the glowing embers. They represent the twelve sacred eagle feathers handed down from grandfather to grandson. I had to go down on all fours to crawl into the lodge. “That is to teach you to be humble,” said my father, “to show that you are no better than your four-legged relatives.” We were naked as we were born, because the sweat lodge is Grandmother’s womb, the earth womb, and I was to be reborn in it. We entered the sweat lodge clockwise. My father sat at one side of the entrance, Good Lance at the other. My cousin brought in the heated rocks, one by one, on a forked stick. My father grabbed them with a pair of deer antlers and put them into the center pit. He placed the first seven rocks, which represent the four sacred directions, the center of the universe, the sky above, and the earth below. They also represent the wakichagapi—if you have loved ones who died, you remember them by this. My father sprinkled sage and cedar over the rocks. As it burned it made a whispering sound, like a spirit voice. Then more rocks were placed in the pit. Finally, my cousin passed a pail of water into the lodge and lowered the entrance flap over the door.
Inside we were huddling in total darkness. All I could see was a red glow from the heated stones. I could feel their warmth. Now I knew that I was truly in Grandmother’s womb, in the darkness of the womb, the darkness of the soul. In the warmth and moisture, I felt that this was myself before being born.
My father said, “The inipi uses all the powers of the universe. The fire, the water, the earth, the air are here, within the sweat lodge. Feel the power of inyan wakan, the sacred rock. All living things are in here.” The scent of burning sweet grass and sage was around us like a blanket. I tried to catch this smoke with my hands and rub it all over me. My father prayed. He sang the songs. Then he poured cold water over the red, hot rocks.
All at once the initi was filled with white steam. It curled around us and enfolded us. It was very hot, so hot that I thought the steam would burn me up. My lungs seemed to be on fire. But I knew that this was a blessing, that it was the breath of the Creator purifyin
g me. And out of the hot whiteness I heard my father’s voice: “Immersed in this cloud, you will be cleansed. You will be prepared.”
I prayed to Tunkashila as I had never prayed before, and I felt the spirits coming in, talking to me in spirit talk, touching me. Then the flap was opened. Good Lance sang, “Grandfather, you are the light of the world. Take care of us. Teach us, Grandfather, each morning, each evening. We ask you to have pity on us. Prepare our minds for this purification.”
More rocks were brought in. Then the flap was lowered over the entrance. More water was poured over the rocks, and again Grandfather’s breath enfolded us. And again I heard my father’s voice: “Cultivate your mind, for all medicine goes there. Center the mind on the spirit. Ask the sweet grass to show you the way. Your vision will tell the rest.”
This was a four door sweat, meaning that the flap was opened and closed four times, and each time everything was repeated. I had the privilege to talk every time the flap was lifted, but what we talked then I’ll keep to myself. After the fourth door we were given cold spring water to drink. And my father said, “The moment we drink the sacred water of life, we receive its blessings. The moon brought all the waters together, from a tiny drop, to a lake, to a river. Let your mind flow like the water.”
We finished by smoking the pipe. It united us as if we had been one body. The pipe bowl of red stone coming from the sacred quarry, the only place in the world where you can find it, that is the flesh and blood of the Indian. The smoke coming from the pipe is the Creator’s breath. Then it was over. I had been made ready for the vision quest. I had been reborn.
While I had been in the sweat lodge, my older sister Delphine made a flesh offering for me. My aunt was cutting forty tiny squares of skin from her left arm. As I passed her, I saw a tiny trickle of blood making a red line from her shoulder to her elbow. She was making a sacrifice to help me get through being alone on the hilltop for four days and nights without eating or drinking. The tiny squares of her flesh were carefully wrapped in red cloth, which was tied to my sacred pipe. I would take this with me on my hanbleceya to comfort and encourage me, to make me know that someone had suffered to help me get my vision.
Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) Page 8