RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  Other people began to fall into trances, journeys to see their relatives of the near or distant past. The dancers closed the circle behind them, the singers lifted one song after another, repeating each many times, the ceremony circled on and circled on around us, those who traveled the circle of time dancing around those who visited the still center point of eternity.

  The old woman came back to consciousness from her journey. Someone threw a blanket over her shoulders. She sat by the Tree of Life for a while, and then rejoined the singing dancers.

  I added my spirit to the Dance, and that seemed good.

  I will not set down all the songs for you, nor do I remember how many they sang, or what all the words were. I don’t know how many people went into trances, though at times there seemed to be a score or two on the ground. I sat in the circle of the Dance for long hours, far into the night, and for me the time could as well have been moments or infinities. I let my spirit mingle with the spirit of the words lifted to Wakantanka, felt the hearts of the people devoted to the spirit of the Spirit Dance.

  I have almost nothing more to say about it. I joined the ceremony my people believed in, I saw them commit their spirits to it, I saw them give their lives to it, and I knew that it was good.

  I knew that back in the other world, the normal world, I could wonder whether it was good. I could wonder whether the Dance itself had led my ancestors to Wounded Knee and to their deaths, or if not, what forces had led them. I could wonder how so much good could come to so much evil. In this world I was comfortable with the ceremony.

  When the Dance ended, they feasted. But I, a spirit, needed no feast. I felt ready to go back to the world.

  Wondering where Raven was, I realized he was perched on my shoulder, and had been all along. He said without words, The same way Raven can be Creator of all things and the bringer of Death.

  I accepted that peaceably.

  I saw myself gliding upward toward the hole in the bottom of the altar, swam into it, and like a diver broaching the surface from a deep dive, came to consciousness in the ordinary world.

  I opened my eyes.

  I reached for Sallee’s hand, and she took mine.

  In calm I sat up and looked into her eyes. She poured me some coffee from Plez’s thermos, and I took it gratefully.

  The Third Journey

  The morning of Thursday, December 27, I felt like I’d forgotten something. We were riding and walking to Wounded Knee physically. We couldn’t float through a hole in the Earth, we had to do it one step at a time in bitter, bitter cold. Like Big Foot’s people did it a hundred years ago, only colder.

  A British guy by the name of Ian gave us a ride to Red Water Creek in his van. This guy, he came all the way across the big water for this pilgrimage, and he’d taken a role of helping more than journeying. He stayed and cleaned up camps after we left them, drove behind the riders and picked up anyone who had trouble, got to camp early and built fires and helped put up tipis—he was really making a servant of himself. I admired him.

  Tyler came and stuck his head in through the window Ian was rolling down. “The horses got away,” he said. “Somebody left a corral gate open. Maybe two dozen gone, who knows? Take a while to get started.”

  Didn’t affect Sallee or Chup, who jumped out and strode straight over to the other walkers. The fasters had broken their fasts yesterday, feasted in fact, and I noticed they looked better, their faces not so pinched and gaunt.

  Ian left the motor of the van running and hustled out to do whatever work was in store for him. I was glad to stay by the heater, and I know Emile and Plez felt the same. Because Waziya, the mean giant of the North, and Iya, Wind Storm, were throwing cold at us in big winds, storm winds—hell, typhoons.

  About midmorning, finally, we formed a circle, prayed, and headed out behind Ron McNeill, who carried the staff. Now there were nearly two hundred riders. In this weather we stuck together pretty well, the staff leading and Tyler and Percy White Plume, Alex’s brother, bringing up the rear and herding stragglers. Up a rutted path toward the crest of a hill we rode, and then followed the crests that cupped Red Water Creek. Wi, Father Sun, was bright, but Waziya’s wind had the upper hand today. It felt like he was slapping us. When we hit the blacktop and turned toward Kyle, the country was all flat to the north and west. That meant the wind began to howl for sure. I screwed everything tight around my head, bandannas, scarves, collars, and parka top, but they couldn’t keep the wind out, or the snow it whipped up and threw in my face, sharp and cutting. I squinched my eyes as near closed as I dared and retreated into a private world.

  In another hour, or one small eternity, I decided I had to have one big breath, freezing or not. I cracked my defenses, heaved air in, and cast my sight out and about. Riders were almost invisible in the ground blizzard, like shadows against the white, flat-blowing snow. The breath I took pained in a way I’d never imagined air could hurt human lungs. Retying the bandanna, I found it crusted hard with ice from my own exhalations.

  The water tower at Kyle stuck up on the horizon. Kyle, Kyle, Kyle, it was all around me on this trip. I’d spent two nights in the school already, and would spend tonight there. I was about to eat lunch there. After the years in boarding school, I still hated Kyle.

  Now, though, I set my eyes on that water tower and tried to draw myself toward it, like it was a giant magnet. Lunch, lunch, lunch, I kept saying. That tower didn’t get a bit closer, and for a while I swear it was farther.

  Ten miles, three hours.

  When we dismounted, I started to speak to Emile. My jaw made a loud cracking noise right in front of my ear, and that was the only sound that came out. I didn’t dare try to speak again.

  Buffalo soup yet one more time. And an hour in the cafeteria, in the warmth.

  While we were eating, the walkers came in. They’d started before us, walked a longer route because they stuck to the roads, and finished after us in those terrible winds. The way Sallee looked scared me—her clothes were caked with ice, her steps wobbly as a drunk’s, her eyes red, her fingers frosted. I put my arm around her and guided her to our table, then stood in line and got soup for her and Chup.

  That was an afternoon of mystery and magic. Thank godamercy, the wind eased off. Riders opened the bundles around their faces enough to actually smoke. People talked. The afternoon was comfortable—ridiculous word!—compared to the morning. Which was a damn good thing, because we had sixteen more miles to go to Red Owl Springs, where the Big Foot people camped the last night before they met the soldiers. There were jokes about us making the same mileage as the guy who ran the first marathon in Greece a couple of thousand years ago. Someone said he dropped dead when he got there, but Plez said he was a soldier and made the run to bring home news of a great victory for the Athenians over somebody. Lots of us thought we might get a great victory and drop dead, both.

  The mystery was the unpleasant kind, a guy who kept leapfrogging us in a nice new pickup. He would cruise past nice and slow, stop up ahead, and watch us ride by. He was an Anglo, not much hair on his head but plenty on his lip. As we passed, he fussed with something in his lap.

  Said Plez, “FBI don’t mean Full-Blooded Indian.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I imagine we are watched, our movements duly noted, and the records thereof preserved in the vaults of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.”

  “You’re paranoid.” I didn’t feel as sure as I sounded.

  He lit up. “Hell, yes, and that don’t prove no one’s after me.” He chuckled. “Shee-it, I been on every list they got for forty years. They was keeping files on me when Russell Means was in diapers. Boy, I can smell them agents, and I know all their mean tricks.”

  “You checked out your file under the Freedom of Information Act?”

  “They wouldn’t send it, on account of the federal treasury couldn’t hack the trucking costs.”

  He was enjoying himself now.

  We said no more about it. The g
uy in the new pickup kept cruising by, doing something in his lap as we passed one by one, and cruising by again.

  I saw this old movie, Harvey. In it Jimmy Stewart had an imaginary friend, Harvey the Rabbit, who was essential to his life. The FBI has imaginary enemies, essential to its life.

  The magic came at the end of the day’s ride, the last strides of the marathoners to Red Owl Springs. For once we made good time, because the afternoon wasn’t harsh. When we topped the hill above the campsite, Wi the sun was about to touch the horizon. Support people like Ian moved around the camp, fires were lighted, tipis erected. The staff bearer stopped, and slowly all two hundred riders filed to the top of the hill. We sat our horses stirrup to stirrup for moment. I looked up and down the long file of the riders, the display of eagle feathers, and thought of the commitment represented here. With the sun fading, we each were tall shadows, like the feathers floating up from our heads, so that the hill itself seemed to wear a vast war bonnet of human beings devoted to a single cause, wiping away the tears of our people. In the last light of Father Wi, Emile and I looked into each other’s eyes, and Wi made our skins redder even than they were.

  This was the last camp where the Big Foot people were free. The next night, at Wounded Knee, they were under heavy military guard.

  I felt the moment instead of seeing it. The staff bearer started down the hill. One by one the riders walked behind him in perfect silence, in perfect order. It was like we all heard the same muffled drum, and marched to it in a rhythm we all sensed as one, an army of spiritual warriors. Maybe the drum was our hearts, beating right together for this one time.

  The women below, making the food, saw us and raised the high trills, the old-time greeting women gave to their men returning from battle. Men ran out of tipis and banged drums. The last of the sunlight rested gentle on us, a blessing, and the wind stilled.

  I looked at my brothers, my fellow riders, and knew inside what it is to be part of a people. Holding the reins, my left hand shook so much I put it on the saddle horn. Tears streaked down Emile’s face. Togetherness …

  Brothers, we come to more together than alone.

  And we are all related. Mitakuye oyasin.

  That evening, after the council fire, riders and walkers and support people littered the floor of the gym at Little Wound School in their sleeping bags. Russell Means came around and announced that there would be an AIM meeting in ten minutes in the lunch room.

  Rez talk about Means, Banks, Wounded Knee II, and all the rest of it, you couldn’t get away from it during the seventies for and against. But I missed the rebellion at Wounded Knee, just went to school every day. Partly it was because Grandpa and Unchee disapproved, thought it was a bunch of outsiders stirring things up. Mostly it was because February and March 1973 were the climax of the basketball season, I was a star, and counting coups on the other schools had me hot. So I didn’t know anything about Means and Banks and AIM, not personally. That’s why I went with Sallee and Emile to the meeting. Why didn’t Chup and Plez go? Because Russell Means is a guy Indians like or they don’t, strong both ways.

  Understand, most rez people don’t think of him as one of us. Maybe he was born at Pine Ridge, but he grew up somewhere in California. He doesn’t speak Lakota, and he has no damned idea of Lakota courtesy. I was going to the meeting to behold an oddity, not hear a comrade.

  Means started off with the sort of speech that turns a lot of traditional Pine Ridge people off—belligerent, defiant, in-your-face. I hope you have seen by now that we aren’t like that. Still, what he talked about was okay. The governor of South Dakota, George Mickelson, had christened 1990, which was the anniversary of Wounded Knee, the Year of Reconciliation in South Dakota. Means ripped into that as a contemptible fraud, and then ripped a lot of other things that need ripping.

  I just observed. One of my observations was that a lot of the white riders and walkers and media people were here, and most of the Indians were out in the gym.

  Dennis Banks, though, is hard not to like. His approach is sly. He tells a story, lays in a joke, and slips up on an idea like, We gotta get the Black Hills back. They belong to the Lakota people by treaty. They were taken illegally. No, hell no, we can’t accept payment for them. We want the land.

  Yeah, yeah, he’s an Ojibway, and they’re enemy. That name “Sioux” you call us by, instead of “Lakota,” Sioux is the Ojibway word for enemy. Still, he’s lived at Pine Ridge a while now, and I like Dennis Banks.

  The meeting? AIM? I left shrugging my shoulders. I came on this ride to see, to understand, to accept, and to heal. Not to rattle political sabres.

  “What’s your intention tonight?” asked Plez.

  We were back in the custodial room at the Kyle School. Plez and Sallee sat on each side of me, Sallee holding my hand. This place was my Cape Canaveral launch pad.

  I said, “I want to return to the Stronghold and hear some dancers tell what they saw in the Spirit World.” I uttered the same words twice more, Plez punched the tab on the tape recorder, and the drum whanged me on my way.

  To the altar, down the hole, tumbling out the other side. This time I didn’t see Raven. I did float to the ground right in the Stronghold.

  It was morning. People were eating and just starting to get ready to dance. I wandered around, tipi to tipi, watching mothers feed their children, their men, and themselves, watching dancers begin to paint their faces and make their minds and bodies ready for the trip to the other world.

  I had nothing to do but wait until the ceremony started. I knew from Plez and the books that sometimes people who crossed over and returned testified about what they had seen. I studied faces. Some I remembered from the center of the Dance space, some from the circle of dancers, some not at all. I noticed that some spirit travelers marked their journey by adopting new emblems for the Dance, different feathers, or feathers worn in a certain way, what they’d seen one of their ancestors do.

  I felt a pang. Right now I wasn’t looking for my own ancestors. At Wounded Knee—just tomorrow night—I would.

  After a while the dancers assembled and the medicine people prepared to start the ceremony. One of the leaders thanked the spirits for answering our prayers and helping some of us to the other world. Then he invited dancers of the previous day to tell everyone what they saw when they crossed over. I will set down for you what three of them said.

  “I saw a great eagle come,” said one man, “a messenger from Tunkashila. He flew directly to me, and I understood that he would take me to see Wakantanka himself. I reached out my hand to him, and somehow … he disappeared. He disappeared, and I could not find him again.”

  Then a man named Two Bulls, a man of medicine, told what he saw. He mounted a ladder of clouds and passed through the sky to the spirit land. There Wakantanka greeted him, and showed him wonderful things. He saw the lodges of kindred and friends long dead. He saw infinite prairies of wild grass, and infinite herds of buffalo grazing on them. For three days he watched the people live happily in the old way, cooking buffalo meat and eating plenty.

  Then Wakantanka took him into a big tipi filled with the spirits of the departed.

  Suddenly the village was enveloped in fog, and Two Bulls could see nothing. When the fog lifted, the village was gone. A man covered with short hair all over his body, and of evil appearance, came up and spoke to Wakantanka. “I demand you give half the people in the world to me.”

  “No!” Wakantanka answered, and answered no again and again to the evil man’s repeated demands, until finally Wakantanka compromised. “All Indian people will be mine,” he said to the evil man, “and all white men will be yours.”

  Wakantanka then declared his intentions to Two Bulls. He would cover the Earth with new soil five times as deep as the height of a man, and thus bury all white people. Then He would cover the new Earth with grasses and running water, and make all oceans around it impassable.

  With these promises Wakantanka sent Two Bulls back to the ordinary
world.

  A man named Big Lodge had crossed over and spoken to his ancestors.

  “As I fell into the trance, I was carried away by a great and grand eagle. We flew over a big hill and saw a village like in the old times, tipis made of buffalo hides, and bows and arrows in use. The people had nothing of the white man’s making in this beautiful country, and no whites were permitted to live there. Fertile fields and great forests stretched in every direction, and their beauty brought me joy.

  “I was taken into the presence of the Messiah. His countenance was beautiful. I wept, for he bore scars on his hands and feet, where the whites once nailed him cruelly to a cross. In his side was also a scar, but he covered this with a mantle of beautiful feathers.

  “He spoke to me. ‘My child, I am glad to see you. Do you want to see your relatives and children who are dead?’

  “When I answered yes, the Messiah called my friends. They rode toward us on the finest horses I ever saw, dressed in splendid garments, and looking very happy. Recognizing even the playmates of my childhood, I rushed to embrace them, tears of joy on my cheeks.

  “We went together to another village to see Wakantanka. He had women bring us a meal of meats, wild fruits, and pemmican. We smoked a Pipe ornamented beautifully with feathers and porcupine quills. We went together into a big valley where thousands of buffalo, deer, and elk were feeding. As we talked, Wakantanka said that Earth is now worn out, and that Indians need a new dwelling place where we won’t be bothered by the whites. So he instructed me to return to the people bearing this message: ‘Be faithful in the Dance and pay no attention to the whites. Soon I will come to help you. If the spiritual leaders make dance shirts and Pray over them, they will protect the wearers. If the whites shoot bullets at dancers wearing these shirts, the bullets will fall to the ground harmlessly, and the shooter will drop dead.’”

  I felt a twist of anguish at this part of the vision.