RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  “He also said He has prepared a hole in the ground full of fire and steaming water for all white men and those who don’t believe in the Dance.

  “When he had spoken these words, he commanded me to return to Earth.”

  With this command to Big Lodge, I felt a pleasant, gentle tug inviting me back to my normal world. With perfect confidence I reached out and said, “Sallee.” She took my hand.

  I opened my eyes. The custodial room was dark. A match struck, and Plez’s fingers set a candle next to our clasped hands. I looked into Sallee’s face, and Plez’s face next to it. They were smiling at me.

  “I saw it,” I said.

  “God is good, God is great,” said Plez. I chuckled at his Muslim tease.

  “That trip seemed short.”

  “Journeys exist outside of Time. You got what you asked for?”

  I nodded yes. “I’m getting tired. Tomorrow night …”

  Plez hee-hawed. “Tomorrow night you might run out of energy. Tomorrow night you will see …”

  He stopped and didn’t go on.

  Tomorrow night we would be at Wounded Knee.

  “I want to tell you, both of you, what I saw.” I laid out Big Lodge’s vision for them, every word. I could hardly believe how surefooted my recall was. Whatever I saw on a journey, it was completely clear when I came back. “The part about the shirts that turn away bullets, that bothers me,” I said, and looked pleadingly at Plez.

  “I told you, brother. Visions are truth. Know that. Understanding them, that’s another thing. Sometimes knowing what comes to you from the Spirit world and what comes from the evil in your own heart, that can be tricky. First place, remember that bulletproof shirts, they weren’t part of Wovoka’s vision. You Lakota added that. Second place, there is a place the soldiers couldn’t hurt anybody, can’t hurt us, and you get there by the Dance. It’s the spirit world. Maybe they misunderstood what their visions were bringing ’em.

  “You know, us Shoshones, the Dance started with us. Wovoka’s vision was all peace with the white men. But the Lakota, they began to say things like, ‘If the soldiers shoot at us, they will all fall dead.’

  “You might be upset about the fires the whites were supposed to fall into, too,” he went on. “I think that comes from the hatred in the Lakota hearts. They had a harder time than most any tribe, they were starving bad, they hated the whites. Wovoka’s vision, though, it wasn’t hatred. The old-time Shoshones, they say the Lakota brought Wounded Knee on themselves by corrupting Wovoka’s vision with hatred.”

  I threw hostility at him with my eyes.

  “I don’t say it’s true. But them old-time Shoshones, some of them think so.”

  “Anyhow, the parts the Lakota added, those we gotta doubt. At that time it didn’t come from good hearts.”

  I felt exhausted. “I need to sleep,” I said. “I’m worried about tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, save your energy, brother. You’re gonna rock and roll.” And he cackled. “You’re gonna rock right into the thick of it!”

  To Wounded Knee

  We started out on the morning of Friday, December 28, with a prayer, and a reminder that this day’s ride was dedicated to the spirits of the people buried at Wounded Knee. Each day of this climactic ride was dedicated—the first to the children and orphans, the second to the elderly, the third to the sick (the ill in any way—physically, emotionally, spiritually), the fourth to the imprisoned, the fifth to the women, today to the spirits of the people buried at Wounded Knee, and tomorrow to wiping away the tears of the people.

  A couple of people spoke. “The spirits have been with us all this way,” one said. “They’ll be with us today when we ride into Wounded Knee.”

  Others said there would be TV cameras and print reporters at Wounded Knee when we rode in. “Look proud.”

  “Let the elders and young people see we have hope in our hearts,” someone said.

  “It will be hard. Remember that you’re honoring Big Foot’s people with suffering of your own.”

  It looked like a day for suffering. The sky was mottled with dirty-looking clouds. KILI, the little rez radio station at Porcupine, said it was thirty below, with no prospects for warming up during the day.

  Emile, Plez, and I walked the horses with grim determination. We simply endured the two-hour ride to the little village of Porcupine. There they gave us coffee, we warmed up inside, and we listened to a man tell about his experience at Wounded Knee II.

  My mind was back a hundred years, on what happened to our ancestors—my ancestors—near here, before the village existed. Big Foot’s people ran into four troops of the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army. The Mniconjou tied up the tails of their horses for war and rode them back and forth to get them into their second wind. The troops formed a skirmish line and unlimbered the Hotchkiss revolving cannons.

  Big Foot intervened. He ordered the wagon where he laid, coughing and spitting up blood, to be rolled forward with a white flag. He and the cavalry commander shook hands. On the advice of a breed interpreter, the commander agreed to forego disarming the Indians until a time when everyone was calmer. The Lakota agreed to go to the basin of Wounded Knee Creek four miles away and camp with the bluecoats. From there …

  At Porcupine we got word that the temperature outside was fifty below. We started the four last miles to Wounded Knee like a funeral cortege.

  As we rode out of town, I couldn’t help but wonder, What would it be like to work for KILI? FM, no power. Hardly any money for programming, so local stuff, music the jocks like, interspersed with public service announcements, interviews, and programs about issues. And next to no money to pay the staff. It made me shudder even worse.

  Along the road Indian people sat in their cars and trucks and watched us pass. Some rolled down the windows, even in the awful cold. Some made small salutes. Most simply looked at us with solemn, honoring faces.

  Somehow the riders and their mounts survived to the crest of the hill above the wide, shallow bowl that is the basin of Wounded Knee Creek. I stopped my horse and ran my eyes from horizon to horizon, east, south, west. Emile reined up beside me. I looked for his face but his expression was concealed behind the thick wraps, kerchiefs, scarves, and the hood of his parka drawn into a tight arc around what must have been his nose and eyes. Behind us I heard a voice, low and muffled but not a whisper, Plez’s deep voice. “Behold the sun,” he said formally. “Wi is not a fiery ball today but a solid disc, pale, like a worn-out coin. Across his face blow clouds driven by the North wind, and in them the Spirit eye sees truth, truth of a hundred horseback shapes of fantastic warriors, the men of a hundred years ago marching south, their heads bristling with eagle feathers, honors earned in war. Among them are women dragging travois, driving wagons, the women who have always been the strength of the Lakota nation. And children, the seed of seven generations to come.

  “Wi appears weak today, as the hoop of the people was that day weak, frayed, ready to break. Today, by joining with the spirits and coming to Wounded Knee, by the ceremonial Feeding of the Spirits tomorrow, by the ceremonial Wiping Away the Tears, we make the hoop of the people strong again.

  “The seventh generation is here, my friends. We ride to Wounded Knee bearing hope in its name.”

  In Plez’s words we found the inspiration to urge the horses downhill toward the church, yet a couple of miles away, and the gravesite.

  Ahead we heard shouts. “Walkers! You walkers! Heyupa! Heyupa! Heyupa! Heyupa!”

  Riders were passing the walkers. Some walkers lifted their fists in salutes. Others shook hands with passing riders. Emile, Plez, and I kicked our horses to a trot. We have been separated from the walkers when we should have been together! Crowded to the left side of the road, the first walkers we came to held their hands up toward us, rigid. I slowed my horse to a walk, leaned left in the saddle, and as I passed, touched each extended hand with my own stiff fingers, like playing a glissando on the piano. Emile and Plez did the
same. Now I saw the line was swelled with children, with walkers who joined in only today, even with veterans in wheelchairs. I touched every hand. Soon I came to Sallee and Chup, reaching up eagerly, and last, at the front, to the monks and nuns. As we touched, the Japanese never stopped their chanting, harmony and rhythm for the melody of our hands.

  I have separated myself from the people I should have weaved my being into.

  Suddenly, at the end of six days of effort, we arrived.

  I have made my pilgrimage to Wounded Knee. Thank you, Grandfathers.

  Emile and I looked at each other. My eyes were too cold to tear. My body was too cold to permit much emotion.

  At the foot of Cemetery Hill the leaders turned us into a single great circle. Boys came around with bags of tobacco, and every rider took a pinch and held his over his head with his left hand. A harsh wind rose. A medicine man prayed aloud, but the words were carried away with the spumes of blowing snow. Finally he cried loudly, “Mitakuye oyasin!” We all flung the tobacco into the wind, which swept it away to the uttermost ends of the Earth. To Earth.

  Emotion tried to lift me, but I was too heavy. With huge relief, I dismounted. The man who rented us the horses appeared, and Emile and I handed him the reins. “Hear the riders are gonna make a circle at the gravesite tomorrow morning.”

  We nodded yes.

  “You wanna join ’em? Be part of it?”

  Emile and I looked at each other. We’d spent all we could afford on the horses.

  “No charge,” he said. “I’m staying over for the ceremony.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

  “See you here in the morning.”

  The wind whipped and lashed at us. Let’s get out of here.

  I turned to my friend. Is it really over? Have I really done it? Have we done it together? In a shaky voice I said to Emile, “Mitakuye oyasin.”

  Then I turned my back to the wind.

  “The buffalo is resurrected!” cried Chup. In other words, it was buffalo soup again. Everybody was gathered into the high school in Manderson.

  We ate while people made speeches. We were all speeched out—tribal president, congressman, hell, we didn’t care. I went through the soup line three times.

  Finally, while that Indian congressman was rambling on, I scooched next to Sallee and took her hand. She didn’t resist, but hers felt kind of dead. We looked each other in the eyes. She knew what I was telling her. Finally, she squeezed back, and we watched the ceremony that was starting.

  It was a feather ceremony for the very youngest Big Foot Memorial Rider, an eight year old named Joshua Moon Guerro. Alex White Plume gave the eagle feather. Arvol Looking Horse himself, the Pipe Keeper, prayed over it. One of the original nineteen riders tied the feather into Joshua’s hair.

  Suddenly a drum I couldn’t see hammered wildly, and twenty-five chosen riders started circling Joshua, coming to him from three different directions. Each rider danced ceremonially to Joshua three times, and touched his hair each time.

  I never saw a kid look so proud.

  Said Plez, “That there’s the seventh generation.”

  “Where you gonna sleep? Where you gonna do your journey?”

  We shrugged. “The gym floor, I guess.”

  “Tradition!” sang Emile, to the tune of the song from Fiddler on the Roof.

  “I know the caretaker for the church,” said Plez. “I already asked him.”

  I pictured Sacred Heart Catholic Church, silhouetted on the brow of Cemetery Hill.

  “Special to be there,” said Plez, “right there. Right where it happened.”

  I nodded.

  The five of us trooped to Plez’s king-cab truck.

  I said to Plez, “Plug me in.” He grinned and rolled his eyes and dug into his pack for the cassette player and tape.

  We were in the basement of the little church, Plez, Sallee, Emile, Chup, and I. In the basement, in a meeting room, not in the church proper, where the altar was. The Spirit Dance brought me all the Messiah I needed.

  He handed me the equipment, and I put the headset on. “Sallee will be right next to you,” he said, “the whole time.”

  I gave him a look of gratitude. Strange journey—earphones, wisps of wire, a box I didn’t understand and a skinny strip of brown tape—all these were my road into a world I’d never known.

  I laid back on my sleeping bag. “Say your intention,” said Plez. “Say it out loud three times.”

  I murmured to myself, “I want to go to this night a hundred years ago, with my people. I want to see them come to Wounded Knee. I want to see everything that happened that night. I want to feel everything that happened to the people, and especially to my relatives.”

  I considered what else I should say. Maybe I should ask to come back. That seemed cheap somehow. My people didn’t come back, most of them. Their bodies ended up strewn all over this valley, and beyond. Snow covered them the next night. Not for several days did a burial detail move the corpses up the little hill and stack them in the mass grave.

  I repeated the words. “I want to go to this night a hundred years ago, with my people. I want to see them come to Wounded Knee. I want to see everything that happened that night. I want to feel everything that happened to the people, and especially to my relatives.”

  I pondered. I’d said enough, and to hell with the rest. I would take my chances. Once more I said the words.

  I hit PLAY. The drum started its fast beat. I went to the hole in the altar and began the descent. A bluebird flittered around my head on the way down, unnaturally bright, and then I fell past it, and fell and fell and came to …

  The sun was setting as the people walked, rode, and rolled down the road from Porcupine Butte into the valley of Wounded Knee Creek. The shallow bowl looked like a place that counted for a little something. The post office and store run by Mousseau huddled near the bridge over the creek. There one feeder road slanted off to the northwest, and a quarter mile down, another road headed the same direction. Beyond the bridge the main road ran north and south, the way the creek ran.

  The people moved slowly, and their bodies showed their hearts and minds. They were exhausted from six days of desperate travel. They were hungry. They were cold. They were angry at the soldier chief’s demand that they give up their guns. They were angry at being treated like prisoners. They were afraid, under the guns of all these soldiers. They didn’t trust any soldiers, and this bunch, the outfit of Yellow Hair Custer, least of all.

  The interpreters barked the soldier chief’s order to go on past the store, past the straight, tidy lines of cavalry tents, and make camp. Most people went, tired and uncaring. A few ignored the soldiers and went into Mousseau’s store to buy small items they needed, coffee, sugar, candles.

  Where the church stood in the modern world, a knoll overlooked both camps. I walked up for an overview and saw a cabin crouched there. I wondered whose it was. It looked empty. East of the hill the soldiers’ tents were set up in their white-man ruler lines. The village was assembling south of the hill, more than a hundred long steps from the soldiers, just this side of a ravine and spread on both sides of a spur road.

  Looking at the ravine and knowing, it made my guts clench, and I refused to look that way again.

  In the last of the light I could see the village rising, tents and tipis in the shape of a fat crescent moon. In the women’s movements erecting their homes, pounding down stakes, unloading wagons, in the way the men staked the horses, I could feel their fear, their fatigue, and a curdle of anger. The ponies felt it too—they stomped and whickered nervously. The dogs slunk around.

  Then I noticed the effect of journeying again, more real than real—even in the darkness of a moonless night I could see, like in those weird night shots you see in the movies, everything looking dark but clear at the same time. Strangely, like everything in a spirit journey, it felt natural, normal to see in the dark.

  A darkness inside me hinted it might be be
tter to be blind.

  Something odd—the soldiers pitched a tent for Big Foot at the edge of the soldier camp. I saw them carry the sick chief in, and then a big wood stove, and chunks of firewood that must have come by wagon. Though Big Foot was on their enemies list, for tonight they meant to keep him alive. He had promised to give them what they wanted, the weapons. And when you give a man a licking, you want him to feel it.

  Suddenly I saw horses coming up toward me, pulling two of the Hotchkiss guns. I felt uneasy and moved halfway down the hill toward the villages. The soldiers arranged the gun muzzles so they pointed over my head and straight at my people’s lodges.

  Pictures of tomorrow’s mayhem began to whirl in my mind. But I told myself, Let it come tomorrow. I will feel more than I want to then.

  I slipped down into the village, uneasy that I could walk this ground untouchable, when so many of my people were about to …

  You are here in spirit only. See, hear, feel, and bring back what is good for you, and good for the people.

  At the edge of the village I saw the soldiers establishing watch posts circling the people all the way around. An officer ordered a corporal to have patrols march between the posts constantly, back and forth. “No one gets out of this camp tonight,” he commanded.

  I decided to wander through the village looking for women who were big with child, who appeared to be in the ninth or tenth moon. (You call the time of gestation nine months. We call it ten moons.) How would I find Blue Crow? How many big-bellied women would there be? Would I feel a special connection? Surely my heart will tell me when I near my own great-grandfather, my own great-grandmother.

  If I saw them, knew who they were, I would have to be with them tomorrow, I would have to go through whatever they did. Maybe this would heal the hole in my heart. More likely, watching them die would give me a wound I would carry back to my own life, and I would live forever in ravenShadow.

  By now people had eaten what food they had, and were sitting around shivering, waiting, enduring, maybe wanting their lives to end, surely wanting this kind of life to end.