We had little kittens then, and they were under her feet, getting in the way. She said to me, ‘Grandson, please take these kittens outside.’ I threw them on the roof so they would not chase me back inside.
Uncle Daniel and the other helpers prepared the sacred altar in the center of the room. Four coffee cans filled with dirt were placed on the floor to form a square, each containing a colored piece of cloth representing one of the four directions—white for north, red for east, yellow for south, and black for west.
They connected the cans with strings of tobacco ties, small squares of colored cloth filled with a pinch of tobacco representing the spirit helpers my grandfather would need. Sometimes there would be four hundred of these ties. Grandfather placed his sacred objects on a bed of sage: the eagle bone whistle, his pipe and pipe bag, rattles, and other things. Before sealing the door, Daniel went back outside to retrieve the spirit food, but when he took the plate down, it was empty. Everyone thought the spirits had eaten the food! They went “Aawe! Aawe!” Everyone but Grandmother—she gave me a stern look and said, “Shilasica!” which means “bad little boy.”
Having reached the top of the hill behind where the log house once stood, Vernell stops. “Here is where the garden stretched all the way back alongside this ridge. Corn on this side, cabbage and lettuce over there, and rhubarb along the back. My job was to bring the water up from the creek, sprinkle it all across the garden, and pull out the weeds.”
“That must have been some garden, but I would really like to know more about the yuwipi.”
“Some of these things are private,” Vernell says.
“I heard many things about yuwipi when I lived here. I just want to know what it was like for you.”
“I will tell you parts. Maybe when I feel closer to the call to the Spirit World I will tell you everything, but not now.”
“OK.”
“Yuwipi ceremonies would last all night. The helpers bound Grandfather’s arms behind his back and bundled him in a star quilt tied by a long rope. Laying on a bed of sage, he would sing the songs of the yuwipi, use his sacred objects and powers to contact the spirits, talk to them in a mumbling voice, ask how he might cure the sickness. When I stayed awake, I could hear spirits entering and leaving the darkness, and I sometimes saw flashes of light. It was really scary when the floors and windows began to shake.
“One time I was still awake after they had sung the last song and turned on the lamp. Grandfather was sitting alone in the center of the room; the bindings and star quilt in a pile on the floor. His hands and arms were free.”
“Did Poor Thunder always agree to perform a yuwipi? it seems like such a major commitment of time and energy.”
“Not always. I remember when our neighbor Seymour Rouillard was nearly killed by lightning. His family brought him to us in a wagon for a yuwipi, but my grandfather said they had to take him back to the top of the hill where the lightning had struck him. ‘Once you are there, dig a hole in the ground, and you will find something very unusual; bring it back to me.’ When they dug the hole, they found a large ball of ice, which they brought back. Grandfather boiled it in some water with magic herbs from his medicine bag, gave it to Rouillard to drink. It healed him right away. We had a celebratory feast, and the family went home.”
Sensing my discomfort standing all this time in the same spot, Vernell motions toward the stump of a fallen tree. “Sit. This may take a while.” And then he continues:
“As Grandfather might say, all these memories fill my mind like a tobacco pouch at the beginning of a long journey. I have told you too much, but I need to share some things with somebody or I’ll go crazy.”
Walking back and forth in front of me, Vernell’s eyes seem to be focused far away but he does not stumble. Something I haven’t seen from him before, he gestures excitedly with his arms and hands as if he is drawing pictures in the air around him.
Every morning I would wake up when it was still dark, but my grandparents would already be sitting there talking, drinking coffee. After breakfast, Grandfather and I went to get the team horses, hitch them to the wagon. We came to Kyle many times in that team and wagon. On hot days, sitting in the back, I would pull a tarp over my head to stay cool. We stopped under chokecherry bushes. Grandmother stood up on the wagon seat and picked them. She always let me eat as many as I could.
We’d be coming by No Flesh Creek, getting close to the Broken Rope camp; someone would shout out “George!” We would go over there, and they would feed us, give us coffee. At Little White Man’s camp, it was the same thing. Two Crows’s as well. By the time we got to Kyle, we were stuffed like white people on Thanksgiving. Sometimes at these stops we would pick up kerosene jars to get filled at the store in Kyle. We’d drop them off and go to my mom’s house. Before we went back, we’d pick up the full jugs so we could return them. When we got home, Grandmother would go into the house, light the lamp, cook something. Our job was to take care of the horses, come back to the house, eat, go to bed.
Pointing now to where the log house once stood, Vernell says, “Grandfather’s bed was on the side of the house, right about there. Above his bed on a windowsill he had an old set of ceremonial drums. Sometimes he would take one down and sing to us. He also told stories, not short stories like the iktomi [spider] stories you probably know; these were very long stories—buffalo hunts, war parties, and creation stories.
“Like Grandpa, I tried singing the old songs, telling stories to my children. Sometimes they listened, but not always. No one tells stories today; they are being lost. Today kids watch TV, play video games … they cannot be still long enough to hear an old story.”
“Vernell, you were lucky to have lived with your grandparents, learn about the old ways. But it is too bad Poor Thunder died when you were so young.”
“Well, I was young, but he was ninety-eight.”
“Do you remember when he died?”
“My little brother, Anthony, and I came to Kyle with Grandfather on a brown-and-white Paint horse named Happy Jack. We were going to the store for kerosene. On the way back, my grandfather and Anthony got on the horse. It was my turn, but for some reason, I did not want to. When I finally did, Happy Jack bucked all three of us off. Anthony and I were OK, but Grandfather got hurt. He had internal injuries from this fall.
“Everybody was mad at Happy Jack, but not Grandpa. He said it could not have been the horse’s fault. He was right. When my uncle Norman took the saddle off, there was a nail stuck in it that must have poked the horse. The nail caused it to buck.”
Vernell pauses for a moment to fish out a small pocketknife from his blue jeans; he opens it and starts digging out some of the tar-like dirt from under what’s left of his obsessively chewed fingernails.
“I take it you got him home, Vernell. What happened next?”
It was the night before the Fourth of July, and people knew that Grandfather might not recover. My stepsister Theda came to stay with us. The Broken Rope and Dull Knife families camped next to this house. Us kids were throwing those popper things in the campfire. I remember hearing him getting up before dawn to go to the bathroom, and then he went back to bed. A little while later, Grandmother got up, and then my sister got up; they were crying. My sister came over to me. “Wake up, brother,” she said. “Grandpa is dead.”
Someone made a coffin out of some lumber. First, they put blankets and sage in the box, and then my grandfather. Next, they moved all the furniture out of the house and put a whole tub of ice under the window where he had slept. They put the coffin on top of the ice to keep him cool. All this time more and more people were coming. My mom and dad came, and I was mad at them because they were drunk. The elder women sat in the house with my grandmother. The men were all outside. Everyone was wailing and weeping; this went on for four days.
I remember us kids would steal the ice.
Our little dog, Mickey, laid next to Grandfather and did not move except once when he stretched and made a whiny soun
d like dogs do. The women jumped up and in Lakota said, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” They ran out the door. When we realized it was the dog, everyone started laughing.
Next morning, they took Grandpa by wagon to be buried in Norris, near where he was born on the Rosebud. I did not get to go, but plenty of people stayed around the house. That night we sat at the campfire. It was the first time I ever ate roasted marshmallows. I remember throwing some over the hill to feed the spirits. My grandfather would have wanted me to do this.
A few days later, my parents brought me back to Kyle while my grandmother and her friends were burning my grandfather’s possessions so that they would travel with him to the spirit world. A few days later my parents burned down the house for the same reason, a practice that is seldom done today. Grandmother moved to Kyle, and you already know the rest. Soon they took me to boarding school.
Before we get back into the White Thunder Ranch pickup, Vernell reaches down to pull a few sprigs of a plant with small brown flowers that I recognize as ragweed. It is still dry and brittle because there has not yet been enough spring weather to bring it back to life. As he pulls a stem between his thumb and forefinger and rubs the dry leaves into a powder, Vernell says, “We even had our very own Lakota pharmacy. This plant we called poipiye, which means ‘to cure the swelling.’ You put some crushed leaves into a small amount of hot water to form a paste to reduce inflammation. I used it recently when I twisted my ankle jumping off a horse. Pregnant women make tea out of poipiye to stop them from vomiting. They say you can even use this for diarrhea, but then it has a different name, canhlogan onzipakinte, which means ‘weed to wipe the rear.’”
“You must be kidding!”
“Not kidding, and if we had more time I could show you many other plants we use for traditional healing. But we should go—there is one more place I want to take you before darkness comes.”
I am reluctant to leave this little spot of land in Yellow Bear Canyon, this unexploited Lakota habitat, safely wrapped as it is in the hills and ridges, the arms of Mother Earth. A return visit unlikely, I want to sit here quietly, feel the presence of Poor Thunder, the comfort of his peaceful, contented spirit. Vernell’s grandfather lived much as he would have if Anglo-Europeans had never invaded his lands, never discovered gold in He Sapa. Ignoring the admonishments and laws of missionaries and agency officials, he ministered to the physical and spiritual health of his people according to the traditional ways as they were practiced by his forbearers.
What a far richer world this would be if my ancestors had only had the wisdom to honor the treaties, the foresight to let native people live their lives as they had been living them. What lessons we could have learned! How ironic to have destroyed their ability to live freely off the land, and then complain about lazy Indians on food stamps. How blind not to have appreciated the pageantry of their rituals, the poetry of their songs, the rhythm of their dancing, the exquisiteness of their craftsmanship and their artistry, the power of Tunkashila. How crazy not to have visualized a thriving partnership instead of this lopsided domination. How ignorant to not have understood the will and inevitable triumph of a people who have survived every imaginable deprivation. The Sacred Hoop is no longer broken. The revenge of the red man is coming, I swear it is, and hopefully I will be alive to welcome it.
But we are on the road again, headed back in the direction of White Thunder Ranch.
RETURN OF THE BUFFALO
DANCING WITH JANE FONDA
As we rumble along the crunchy asphalt road, the soft breeze is fragrant with the sweetness of early spring wildflowers, there’s a mellow country ballad on KILI Radio, and both of Vernell’s powerful hands grip the steering wheel, his eagle eyes steady ahead, an easy smile on his face. I think he enjoyed our time in Yellow Bear Canyon, the storytelling, and memories of when life for him was less complicated. I’m happy too, daydreaming about his grandfather, the yuwipi ceremonies, when across the unmowed side of the road I catch sight of mountainous dark forms looming through the bare branches of dying pine trees and a stand of chokecherry bushes—not deer or antelope or cattle but buffalo, mighty humpbacked Bison americanus, with their huge walnut-shaped heads, short but lethal hooked horns, and penetrating, protuberant eyes. They have not yet molted, the luxurious thickness of their dark nappy coats a sure sign there is still cold weather to come.
These buffalo know no fear because nothing threatens them. Fiercely painted warriors no longer charge up on horseback to unleash the deadly sharp spears and arrows that once sliced through their heavy carcasses, and they are no longer slaughtered by the thousands from great distances by the bone-shattering bullets of hidden white buffalo hunters firing large-caliber rifles. Imperturbable, these buffalo deliberately saunter up the hill. All but one. He looks back at me, and from his size, I can tell he is a bull.
“Over there, Vernell, are those your buffalo?”
“Yes. I’ve had buffalo since you and I went into business. Do you remember that?”
“My God, how could I ever forget?”
My mind snaps back to a bicycle ride I took one cheery Sunday in the early 1990s during a happy time when my publishing ventures were throwing off cash faster than I could spend it. Mindlessly riding through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, I glided past the Victorian aggregate of wood and glass known as the Conservatory of Flowers, the Roman gladiator statue near the historic band shell where both Pavarotti and the Grateful Dead once performed, and onto John F. Kennedy Drive, closed that day to vehicular traffic. Near Spreckels Lake, distracted by attractive rollerblading girls with ponytails, I spotted something out of the corner of my eye that nearly caused me to crash into a curb. Standing in a fenced-off meadow as if their presence were no more peculiar than a sighting of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence on Castro Street, was a small herd of shaggy buffalo.
Buffalo in San Francisco! I saw no sign explaining why, and there was no park ranger to ask. The buffalo were just hanging around chewing their cud like so many cows in an Iowa cornfield; only they were much bigger than cows, magnificent and regal. Straddling my bike, I stood watching them. How had they gotten there? Why did I not know about them? While living on the reservation in the early 1970s, I never saw a single buffalo. Plenty of buffalo skulls, beautifully painted buffalo hides, a few robes and artifacts made from parts of buffalo, but no live, breathing tatanka.
Believing that strange encounters happen for a reason, I instantly became obsessed with these particular buffalo and buffalo in general. Like a doped-up cyclist in the Tour de France, I madly pedaled back through the park, up the Panhandle and Fell Street to the Civic Center, where I parked in front of the Main Library. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. I knew, of course, that buffalo had been vital to the Native American ecosystem, that most had disappeared, but I did not know that their numbers were rebounding. Sitting at a large oak library table behind a pile of books and magazine articles, I discovered that buffalo are technically not buffalo at all; they are bison, as distinguished from water buffalo that live in Africa and Asia. However, the word “buffalo” has been misused so often to describe them, the two terms are interchangeable.
Similar to indigenous people, bison wandered to North America from Asia about ten thousand years ago, crossing the land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska. Weighing up to five thousand pounds with horns that spanned more than six feet, the first to arrive must have been scary as hell. The little herd in Golden Gate Park and larger herds in Yellowstone Park and Custer Park had become major tourist attractions. A handful of ranchers in Wyoming and South Dakota were raising bison instead of cattle for food, and the prospects looked very promising because their meat tastes similar to beef but has less saturated fat. The more I read, the more excited I got. It was early in this game, and with Vernell’s help, I figured we could raise buffalo and, as entrepreneurs like myself liked to say in those halcyon days, “catch the wave.” We could be part of something transformational, hasten t
he return of the American bison, and perhaps get rich at the same time.
Having no change in my pocket for the pay phone in the lobby (cell phones had not yet been invented), I had to wait until I got home to call Vernell. Luckily, he was in his house and not out in one of his pastures. I breathlessly asked him if we could raise buffalo on his ranch. As inscrutable then as he is now, he answered my question with silence, and after waiting a long time I was about to hang up, thinking the line was dead, when Vernell finally replied, “We’ll have to build a nine-foot-high fence around my pasture.”
“A nine-foot-high fence! Why nine feet?”
“Buffalo may look like clumsy defensive linemen,” he replied, “but they run and jump like champion wide receivers.”
“What do you mean?”
“A two-thousand-pound buffalo can run forty miles an hour and jump eight feet in the air. If we put them in my pasture without a taller fence, they’ll be gone by morning. I’ll be spending all my time chasing after them.”
“OK, let’s build a fence.”
I came up with the funds, and once Vernell had the fence in place, we purchased a dozen buffalo from a rancher who lived near Pierre, South Dakota. Ten cows and two bulls, which Vernell promptly named Jimi Hendrix and Dennis Rodman because, like Hendrix and Rodman, they sported impressive Afros.
I don’t know why we needed two bulls, but this turned out to be our first major mistake. Our buffalo liked their new home—they made no attempt to knock down the fence, didn’t get nervous around people or horses, and required very little of Vernell’s attention. That is, until mating season, around mid-July, when Hendrix and Rodman started knocking the shit out of each other. For two weeks, instead of humping the cows, our testosterone-crazed bulls spent all their time viciously head-butting. Vernell suspected that Jimi Hendrix had a broken rib, but he couldn’t get close enough to be sure. When the mating season ended, the boys calmed down, but there would be no calves the following April. We would have to get rid of one of them, which turned out to be Dennis Rodman. We shipped him off to be butchered, and donated his meat to the tribe for an upcoming powwow.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 17