“Yes, little bird, but you are of a puny nation, while we are many in number,” Maza said. “We are the people of Oceti Sakowin, the great Sioux nation of seven tribes, as plentiful as the grass of the plains. Our council fires range from the shores of the vast lake Mishi Gami all the way to a land of high mountains where the sun sets each night.”
“But why do you hate the Ojibwe?”
“Why do you hate the Dakota?” Maza laughed. “We are good, peace-loving people, but you Ojibwe are heartless and cruel. Your people drove the Odugamies before them many lifetimes ago, pushing our own people to the west. The place you call home was once our hunting grounds. We have tried to live in peace with you, but you are always pushing us ever westward.”
“But my clan knew little of the Dakota,” Ashagi protested.
“The raiders were led by Secachapa,” Maza said with a shrug. “He has vowed to cleanse the earth of the Cree. Perhaps he thought you were them.”
Even Ashagi knew that the Dakota had long been enemies with the Cree, the people who lived among the lakes to the north and far beyond. But mistaken for the humble Cree? “It seems you have many enemies,” she snorted as she bent to retrieve a branch.
“Yes, but also many friends,” Maza said. “The Dakota are the Sioux of the woodlands, but beyond the forests are our brothers, the Lakota who wear the hides of wolves and hunt great herds of peta, cousins to the woodland bison. It is said they live on the edge of a lake of grass that rolls away farther than a man can walk in the course of two, even three moons.” Maza stood and stretched her back. She looked off into the distance and waved her hand toward the horizon. “Beyond the plains is a great weave of mountains where our western enemies dwell,” she said. “Our cousins have fought the Crows, the Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and Shoshones for longer than the time of our fathers’ fathers’ fathers.” Ashagi shook her head in wonder as Maza went on. “Yet even the Dakota and the Lakota have their divisions, for we are camped among the Mdewakanton, who are members of the Santee Sioux.”
Lakota, Dakota, Santee . . . how could her people ever dream of overcoming such a nation? Ashagi wondered. Grandmother had said that only the five tribes of the Haudenosaunee were as powerful. And yet, those fearful enemies who lived far to the east of the Ojibwe seemed puny in comparison to the Sioux.
3.
THE SUN DANCE
Because the victory over the Ojibwe had been so effortless and conducted with such little bloodshed, the Dakota believed they still had something to prove to Wakan Tanka, the Giver and Taker of all things. In council, the chiefs of the gathered bands determined it was essential to show the All-being that they were strong enough to suffer and sacrifice, else how would the next battle go, and the one after that? They could not afford to be weak in the eyes of the spirits, so they planned a second celebration, this one to be a sun dance. But, as Ashagi discovered, it would not be a sun dance as the Ojibwe knew it. The dance was to be a novelty suggested by their cousins, the Lakota, who lived beyond the Father of Rivers and who presented the idea to the gathered elders.
A company of Lakota holy men proscribed the decorum of the dance, warning against any deviation. The first step was for the Lakota priests to identify a sacred tree and dispatch a troop of virgins to hew it down with obsidian ax blades traded from the mountain tribes far to the west. With only fourteen or fifteen winters behind them, the girls were not strong enough to topple the tree easily. So they chipped at the trunk like beavers, taking two days for the red pine to fall. By the time they had stripped it of its bark, their hands were bloody with blisters and their cheeks stained with tears of pain.
Then the chiefs of the separate bands carried the timber to the encampment and raised it in the gathering ground. Around it, a great circle was lined with the skulls of buffalo, elk, and moose. These were adorned with pipe stones, amulets, medicine bags, and gifts of tobacco to please the All-Being. The spirits of the animals themselves would bear witness to the courage of the Dakota. Truly, the celebration would be something none among the Dakota had ever experienced before. As for Ashagi, she would see wonders she could not even imagine.
In many an outlandish tale, her adopted sister from home, Bapakine, had claimed the men of the south, known as the Arikara, rode on large dogs at four times the speed of the fastest running man, but Ashagi had laughed and dismissed this as a tale for children. At best, she thought, the Arikara must be very small men, riding very large dogs, or possibly they rode astride the backs of elk or moose, which everyone knew was a ridiculous notion. But now, in the days before the sun dance, Ashagi wandered through the Arikara camp and was astounded to find a collection of beasts nearly as large as elk cows. They were painted with red and white circles around their eyes and zig-zagging designs across their muscled chests. The beasts were neither dogs nor deer, and their tails were as long and decorous as her own raven hair. As she stood gaping, a young man of the Arikara tribe emerged from a tipi, dressed in leggings and a breastplate of bones. He smiled and said something to her, but she did not understand his words. He shrugged and leapt astride one of the creatures, gripping the hair on its neck as he turned its head and rode away.
“Truly, it is a time of wonders,” Ashagi said to Bapakine that night as the huddled together by the river. “Did you see the creatures brought by the Arikara?”
“Eya, there is much to see in the world, and we are only a small part of it. I heard the creatures are to be roasted, but also that they are the same beasts the Arikara ride upon. Why would they eat such useful creatures?”
“I don’t understand, sister. The world grows larger, yet I grow smaller, and sometimes I feel lost.” Ashagi shivered at the vastness of the unknown. “We must never leave each other. You are all I have now. It is only we two.”
“We will swear by it,” Bapakine whispered. They joined hands and held each other close, alone in the darkness beyond the tumult of the gathered tribes.
The next day Ashagi crept behind a wall of her captors to the thunder of drums. To her surprise and that of her captive sisters, the women of the Dakotas greeted them with smiles and outstretched arms, inviting them to join in a dance.
It was the first sign that the Anishinaabek were to be fully adopted as sisters by the enemy after the endless days of coarse treatment. Hesitantly, Ashagi and her sister-cousins joined the circle of dancers in the hop-step, soon finding themselves lost amid the hundreds of Dakota women and a cloud of dust that turned the morning sky a billowing cloud of gold above the camp. Ashagi danced half the morning, giddy with relief and acceptance, her heart lifting as if she had been a bird released from its noose.
Then came twelve men of the Dakota, clad in skins and masks to perform a wolf dance. They circled round the sun dance pole, loping and crouching low, sniffing and howling as if on the trail of prey. The leader of the wolves took them on a winding path from the pole as they lost the track of a phantom deer, then found it again. Off to the side, an orchestra of drummers sang the wolf song as the dancers circled toe-to-heel to the base of the sacred tree for a final howl with their arms stretched to the sky.
But all this was prelude to the coming of the sun god, with the orb itself rising hot in a sapphire sky. Ashagi and the multitude watched as a company of Lakota warriors emerged from the council lodge to begin the ritual of mortification.
“You see their own chests are scarred,” Bapakine murmured in Ashagi’s ear as they watched. “The Lakota believe that a man must endure the sun dance to show that he is a true warrior.”
“How is this?” Ashagi did not understand, though she saw that the men of the Lakota all had ragged scars across their pectorals.
“You will see,” Bapakine said. “It is said that the Lakota tie themselves with leather thongs to a tree and lean back under the eyes of the sun until they rip the bonds from their flesh. It proves that they are worthy to join the raiders.”
“My father would have thought this foolish.” Ashagi shook her head in disgust. “But he was never a r
aider, nor cared to be one. We were friends with the Cree, and the Sioux were far from our village. For him, the hunt was everything.”
“Everything?”
“We ate well, never lacking.”
“Yes, but that is why he is dead and we are here,” Bapakine said, tired of Ashagi’s glib talk of her father, especially as she herself had been captured from her home by Ashagi’s clan.
Ashagi turned to Bapakine, stunned by her harsh words.”Aaniin? How is this?”
“Because he was no warrior.”
“Don’t step on the grave of my father.” Ashagi bristled. “He was a brave man, he was kind, and we were happy.”
“I mean no offense, sister. It is true, he treated me well. He and your mother made me welcome in her lodge. He was my father, too.”
“I will have a husband like my father,” Ashagi whispered, her voice hard with grim determination.
Bapakine glanced sideways and smirked. “Sister, your husband has been chosen for you. He is the old snail-eyed pot of beaver fat.”
“I will not have him,” Ashagi said with a bitter laugh. “I will never have him.”
“Ah, but he will have you,” Bapakine said, but Ashagi had turned away.
They watched the preparation of the lesser offerings among the warriors. Small cuts were administered to the arms, chests and backs of twenty or so of those who had been deemed the bravest in battle against Ashagi’s village. So many pieces of flesh were incised that their painted bodies streamed as red as the sundown, and the slavering dogs of the village had to be shooed and kicked from the blood-soaked ground.
“They are demons,” Ashagi gasped as the drums rose, and the bloody men began to dance in a circle around the pine, staring at the sun as their arms lifted to the sky.
“No, only men making themselves pure,” Bapakine said. “My sisters among the Dakota tell me a single warrior will be chosen for the highest honor.”
“Why only one?”
“It is, how is said? A show-how dance, with only one man chosen to fly to the sun. He killed two men and three women in the raid, more than any other warrior.”
Ashagi imagined the killer would be some bloody-eyed hulk, leering with violence, but when the killer appeared from the main lodge, naked except for a leather thong around his waist, she mused that he was no more than nineteen summers and the most handsome man that she had ever seen.
The warrior’s eyes scanned the crowd as he was painted scarlet and black. His eyes flared as they locked on those of Ashagi before passing on with the onyx gaze of a hawk. She sensed a trembling amid his bravado. He was to be the most honored warrior among all the thousands gathered along the river, yet still, he was no god.
“He is afraid,” she said.
“No, he is not afraid,” Bapakine replied. “He forbids his fear. He cannot be afraid, not with all eyes watching.”
“He might swallow his fear, but still he is afraid.” It had only been an instant, but she had caught the flicker of his fear when their eyes met.
But as if to offer a rebuke, the warrior gave a broad smile and lifted his arms skyward to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. With every muscle of his painted body glistening like life itself beneath the sun, he seemed a young god in Ashagi’s eyes. And she was not the only one, for every woman in the collected hundreds groaned at the sight of him, forsaking modesty for cries of longing.
Yet, with another wave, the man-killer stumbled sideways.
“They have drugged him.” Bapakine pointed. “See? His legs give way.”
“What is ‘drugged’?”
“It is medicine, a drink made with maize, that gives men courage and helps them through their pain,” Bapakine said. “It makes them fearless, though mostly it makes them foolish.”
Ashagi watched as the hero’s legs twisted like willows, but he mastered his weaving and pulled himself up, staring into the sun as the dust of the dancers rose over the clearing.
He was sleek, slender, and gleaming with oil and paint, each half of his face a perfect mirror of the other. For the first time in her sixteen summers, Ashagi felt an aching in her chest unlike anything she had ever known. She longed to touch him, to run her fingers through his hair. She, too, joined the maidens in singing his name, pushing against the line of laughing warriors who held them back from the clearing.
Strong arms seized the weaving youth from behind and held him down on a scaffold covered with deer hide as the Lakota priests came forward. Wielding an obsidian knife and an awl of buffalo horn, they went to work on his chest, crouching over his body and hiding him from the view of the craning crowd.
The operation took a long time, with many exasperated gestures and exclamations from the priests. Even at a distance, Ashagi caught glimpses of the supplicant’s face through the wall of cutters. Gone was the bravado. His face was rigid, a mask of stone from which his eyes darted wildly, as uncertain as a dog about to receive the gelding cut.
Then with a flourish, the priests rose, revealing that the muscles of the warrior’s bloody chest had been pierced and threaded with thongs of braided buckskin.
He joined the dancers, stepping as he had been instructed by the Lakota priests. Round and round they danced to the drums as the sun rose higher in the sky and a look of ecstasy settled over the warrior’s face.
“He is becoming one with the sun,” Ashagi murmured. More than ever her arms ached to reach out and hold his bloody chest to her bosom. He was like the Ojibwe’s own sun god, a dazzling young man who walks on the wind.
“Ah, but now comes the time for the sacrifice to prove his worth,” Bapakine said.
The crowd of thousands held its breath as the cord of braided leather was tossed over a notch at the top of the sacred pole. With a loud “Hey-ya!” the bloody dancer was lifted high overhead, suspended by his riven pectorals beneath the blazing sun.
A great shout rose up, and Ashagi felt her legs go weak as she, too, roared her admiration. The gleaming, painted warrior had become the red sun himself, a shining god, hanging from a tree by the cords through his chest. As if in answer, the sun seemed to pulse hotter, brighter above them from a cloudless sky.
Although the lips of the man-killer were twisted in a crook of agony, it was as though a peace had come over his face as his brothers danced on below. Ashagi wondered if he was still with them. Could he hear them? Only years later did she understand that the stillness of the warrior on the tree was the result of shock from a great wound.
“O, he’s a pretty one!” Bapakine exclaimed.
“Truly,” Ashagi answered, spellbound at the sight of the pale, brave face hanging low between the thongs that tore upward from his chest. “But he is also a killer of my clan and my enemy.”
To this, Bapakine gave a little laugh. “This is your clan now, sister, and he is your brother,” she said. “Just as I was taken by your father to live in your lodge, so have you become my people’s adopted sister. You will love them as your own in time.”
Perhaps, but Ashagi did not think so. Adoption by the Dakota was her only option. She fell into a daydream of the handsome young warrior on the tree taking her from Kesamna’ista and claiming her as his own. That would be a fate she could endure. She would caress his chest where the scars had been cut and make him babies to be proud of.
But then came a loud groan from the pole and the bloody man-boy pissed down his leg and began waving his arms, his fingers begging where he could not. The dancers had not yet made three circles around the tree when an older man and his wife pushed into the center and began making signs to cut the sacrifice down. They were backed by several frowning chieftains of the Dakota.
“The sun will not be happy with this,” Ashagi said. “His father and mother have come to his rescue.”
“It is a bad sign,” Bapakine agreed. “People will say that his sacrifice has been spoiled.”
The Lakota priests raised their hands in protest and there were angry gestures indicating that it would be a dishonor to cut the
warrior down before he had endured the full sacrifice to the sun. But at his second wail, louder now, and with a cutting edge of anguish, the priests threw their pipes and rattles down in disgust and turned their backs on him. He was lowered to the ground and carried into the main lodge as the bleeding dancers continued circling to the drums, offering bewildered looks in his direction.
Out of the brilliant blue sky, a small cloud passed over the sun and lingered there, where there had been no clouds whatsoever. Although the crowd of spectators continued to sing, it was to the accompaniment of a nervous murmuring.
“What are they saying?” Ashagi asked, still uncertain of her words.
“They are wondering if the sun will be angry. They think the warrior did not hang long enough to make a proper sacrifice. It is said that some men of the Lakota hang from the pole half a day or more. There will be trouble for him for not riding the pole longer; people will say he is weak.”
“But surely they will not say it to his face,” Ashagi said. “He is a man-killer, and he will have more to prove if he is insulted.”
“No one will confront him. They will speak behind his back, and that is much worse.”
But if there was bad-mouthing at his heels, the sun dancer never heard it. Although a healing balm of herbs was applied to his chest soon after he was laid to bed, the wounds turned thornapple green within two days, and then black with a bubbling puss. It was the same black rot that could consume a man, sometimes born from even a tiny scratch, yet alone the torment of the sun tree.
The blackness spread beneath his skin, across his chest and belly, down his legs and over his shoulders. A skein of black veins covered his pale flesh, which had gone white as the belly of a fish. After several days, the handsome hero of the raid on the Ojibwe took one last shallow breath and died in his mother’s lodge.
The priests of the Dakota concurred that the broken dance had angered the sun. Possibly, Wakan Tanka was angry at them all, and not just the dead man. When the delegation of Lakota accused their cousins of weakness and girlish behavior, the Dakota spat back in anger and a fight broke out, resulting in a Lakota’s death. Finally, the Lakota made a ramshackle departure to the west, catcalls trailing behind them. To show their contempt for those who remained, they feathered three of the Arikara’s strange creatures and left their carcasses to rot.
Windigo Moon Page 4