Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  William was the exact opposite. He was the Earthlodge clan’s exclusive connection to the Creator and the Holy Grandfather. Without the slightest pause he would accept all requests to perform ceremonies. He sang, drummed, and recited prayers for each clan that called him. In that way was his presence powerful. Whenever he presided over these functions, something dramatic always occurred. Subtle but awe-inspiring manifestations were witnessed and experienced by all. Some unfolded elsewhere, like parking lots in faraway cities. In keeping with tribal humor these manifestations were referred to as gifts from spirits on a “need not be present” basis. Once my grandmother saw the eye of a crane wink as its lifeless hide was being unraveled. She stated the crushed feathers and fluffs expanded and trembled like prairie flowers in the wind as the crane appeared to come alive. Others reported hearing nonhuman voices that accompanied the men singing. And then there were the neighbors who saw sparks from the earthlodge fire shoot upward past the smoke portal, changing into balls of fiery light, lifting into the night sky like meteors in reverse.

  Small but testimonial stuff like that made William credible as a spiritual leader. We were all affected in different ways. Sometimes it would even be extremely physical. Being pushed and rolled down a rocky hill by William at the clan feasts was a good but embarrassing thing, people would later attest. The shove prompted their sobriety. As for the gravel-stippled skin, it never healed. And then there was a case of how an alcoholic’s deceased aunt appeared in clothing other than what the original “dressers of the deceased” had chosen and used. These manifestations took place during words, songs, and prayers given by William, “the grandfather of all dream,” as I once poeticized.

  . . . it wasn’t unusual for him to look out

  his window and see families bringing him

  whiskey, bright-colored blankets, assorted

  towels, canned triangles of ham. His trunks

  were full of the people’s gratitude. Through

  the summer and fall he named babies, led

  clan feasts, and he never refused whenever

  families asked him to speak to the charred

  mouths of young bodies that had died

  drunk. He was always puzzled to see

  their life seeping through the bandages,

  the fresh oil of their black hair, the distorted

  and confused shadows struggling to catch up

  to their deaths. He spoke to suicides just as

  he would to anyone who died peacefully.

  He knew it was wrong to ask them to go on,

  but he couldn’t refuse lives that were already

  lost. Everyone counted on him. Each knew that

  if they died within his time, he would be the one

  to hand them their last dream.

  Jake Sacred Hammer, a distant cousin of William Listener and the Bearchild family, saw the last daylight that winter while he was sleeping. Actually, no one knew he was gone until they found him a week afterward. The cold weather was said to have helped. His small-framed single room house acted like an icebox. The community said it was as if he had known all along, judging from the premortuary customs taken.

  From the attic he had pulled down antique trunks containing items collected over a lifetime. On new blankets over the wooden floor he had laid out the traditional-style clothing and mi tta te si ye ni, beaded finery he would wear in the pinebox casket. Standing against a wall was an open suitcase with clothes his living replacement would wear at the Adoption Ceremony. Multicolored plastic hand mirrors, expensive Sioux-made tobacco bags, and extrawide yarn belts made his family belatedly grateful for how smooth everything would go.

  Nearly every item used in the four-day mourning period had been personally preselected. Groceries in dry-good form and loads of firewood had been already bought and stored. Letters addressed to friends and relatives had been written and sealed. In a large glass jar beside the bed was a set of instructions for the funeral and five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills to pay for it. The instructions ended with a postscript: “There is more money in the bank and more will follow to my relatives for years to come. The institutions owe me. See attorney Samuel S. Plakoda for how it will be divided. It is yours, to use and to keep.”

  Jake Sacred Hammer wanted his departure quick and trouble-free, the way it had been for centuries. Very little was known about Jake and his activities. When he wasn’t cavorting with non-Indian visitors, he led them as they flitted from house to house on the Settlement, flaunting their leather shoulder bags that contained notebooks, pencils, and agreements for payment in return for information on the social and religious structures of the clans. What they wanted was known, but according to tribal precept it wasn’t shared on a whim to strangers nor was it for sale.

  However, all that secrecy changed one day.

  From the earthlodge sanctums, rumors arose that someone had been providing numbingly detailed diagrams and descriptions of our ceremonies, prayers, songs, and stories. The recipients? Those aforementioned flies from academia. Thus was paved another inroad. Ironically, this purported transgression was discovered by a handful of Black Eagle Child academic types. While the elders generally had a low regard for educated Black Eagle Childs, calling them “degreed good-for-nothings,” they had decided to listen to them. Somewhere, they reported, were tens of thousands of pages collected at three cents a page in the late 1880s that had yet to be translated into English. Their nameless grandfathers were the main informants. In the 1930s another generation of informants, their sons, came onto the scene. These epic archival contributions rekindled the ancient fires of prophecy.

  Jake Sacred Hammer, for being more than an endeared academic acquaintance, was suspected as the ringleader. Jake, along with a number of other notable clan informants, committed a major affront to the Holy Grandfather—and the tribe. Everything on the informant’s end was tranquil until someone figured out the rationalization of keeping food on the table for a family was also a foreboding sign that money could sway a person’s mind and values.

  Finally, in 1962, the Tribal Council was forced to intervene when Jake began offering excursions to Cottonwood Hill for profit. Every four years in a miraculous cycle stretching back to 1911, lightning had struck the giant cottonwoods. They were not completely destroyed, but they always bore astounding burn scars, and branch splinters were embedded in the ground. 1911. That was the year Francis Marie, Jake’s fellow informant, allegedly sold a sacred mat, bringing the vengeful rains—and the historic flood of the Iowa River. Jake, along with an entourage of well-dressed whites lugging picnic baskets, cameras, and umbrellas, became a familiar sight. The trash, however, was a gut-wrenching eyesore. After thirty years of his profiting off the tribe’s name, a clear, indirect message was sent by the Tribal Council to Jake Sacred Hammer.

  For over half his life Jake had served as an unofficial Settlement guide. His self-serving actions epitomized the coming-to-fruition of the Black Eagle Child apocalypse. To counter that overt threat, “NO TRESPASSING” signs were posted on the Settlement’s two thoroughfares. Everywhere the visitors had been taken, traipsing through the dark green valleys, frolicking over the golden prairies and along the sandy riverbottoms, huge gaudy signs hugged the path-riddled landscape.

  Thanks to Jake the sixties proved to be a decade in which the traditional ethic of respect began to diminish. From the second generation of informants were born the first cases of public dissension and verbal confrontation in a tribal society that once thought of itself as invincible.

  In retrospect it’s funny how we had nearly been inured by these so-called “demonstrations of neighborly interest.” That’s the term Jake Sacred Hammer used in his written reply in the Black Eagle Child Quarterly to justify the guided tours. It was addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” Meeting hordes of whites on a Sunday afternoon was pretty common. Like the noisy white fishermen who gathered at the Indian Dam on weekends to camp out or the nervy women from the Why Cheer Preservation Club
, tourists could be expected.

  As youngsters, some of us eagerly took part in posing for tourist photographs at twenty-five cents a flashbulb shot: Wearing a Cleveland Indians Chief Wahoo mascot-type rubber mask at the annual Cherry Hill Mansion Halloween Ball, I once made seventy-five cents and later got photos by mail of myself in long johns and a black breech-cloth. Another time I was Joseph, clutching the pink plastic doll known as the baby Jesus Christ, for which I made three dollars. All this cash on our trek by foot to town. “Don’t be like Jake, Edgarsky Sacred Ham!” my uncles would taunt.

  All along the hilly crowns of the Settlement, there were footpaths that led to hallowed and forbidden areas. When the spring and summer clan ceremonies were in session, the paths were congested with gleeful, unrestrained tourist chatter. If Jake was unavailable, white people slipped money under the door of his house for the pamphlets that were stacked on the rocking chair. The mimeographed pamphlets mapped out trails and shortcuts to places that were thought to be blessed—or cursed. And sure enough, you’d meet them with maps in hand bypassing the new housing areas and spying down upon the earthlodges from the hilltops. As the pamphlet instructed on the “Watching Indians,” they tried to “be as still as whitetail deer.”

  Without fail we were rattled into remembering our local landmark every four years by a thunderous electrical display. The giant lightning-shredded cottonwoods stood smoldering under the black rainclouds. Precisely one week before the cataclysmic weather ensued, the tourists wound their way unaccompanied through the Settlement trails. Like the lightning that sent children under the table with hands covering their ears, they always arrived on schedule and Jake couldn’t keep up with the demand.

  We always knew when to avoid Cottonwood Hill: whenever the nightly cattle bellowing began on nearby farm pastures. Rumbling and crackling over the valley, the thunderstorms held a stationary position over the valley until the fires were set. In school you always knew which classmates had been lightning-frightened by strands of copper beads they wore on their wrists.

  Regardless of how many pleas were made through the Principal Religion ceremonies, the Well-Known Twin Brother kept sending earth-pounding thunderstorms. Among the elders it was believed sorcerers still held a victory dance for the sacred mat that once belonged to Me si kwi-Ne ni wa, Ice Deity. This mat was the one on display in an overseas museum in Belgium. Along the walls of the earthlodges the other sacred mats could be heard weeping for their “younger brother.”

  According to our Creation rrtyth, after the War of the Supernatural Beings obliterated the First Earth, Me si kwi-Ne ni wa, Ice Deity, had agreed to put away the icy storms in a sacred mat. In the form of water his words were blended with a dark red herbal dye and drawn out as a picture. This was then rolled up, tied together with sinew in elaborate star patterns, and set aside for the Black Eagle Child people as evidence of their tenuous earthly standing. In it was a symbol of trust. As long as Ice Deity’s pictures were kept warm and dry by its earthlodge keepers, they would never know the wrath of earth-splintering hail and bolts of cottonwood-seeking lightning.

  But even the grandest plans fail.

  From a faraway, dingy, chandelier-illuminated Hall of the Aboriginal Collections of North America in Belgium, the Ice Deity began sending well-timed electrical storms—Tama County’s meteorological quirk.

  Jake Sacred Hammer did not think these paid tours to Cottonwood Hill were harmful or intrusive. His stance, as he wrote in the BlackEagle Child Quarterly, was that if the tribe could tolerate the fenced-in memorial of the “cultural disfiguring barns,” where the 1890 runaways were jailed as a first step to ensure education, then he had every right, like the Why Cheer Women’s Preservation Club, to commemorate the past. “If the whites risk electrocution on Cottonwood Hill, then by golly let them do it!” was how he concluded the “RE: In Defense of Guided Tours” published letter.

  The tourists came from all regions of the globe. Through their European connections they gloated over the pathetic history in old buildings and delighted in artifacts, like mossy-covered bridges, Indians, and things that went “moo” or “oink” while fouling the air, earth, and ourselves. This was prompted by the management of the Red Barn Premises the Why Cheer Women’s Preservation Club. In their homage to the virtuous past, they recognized their membership and dues could grow if they—the idea repulsed them—contacted every tourist who came to “see the Indians.” This started in 1928 with promotion of “HOME OF THE WHY CHEER INDIANS” via their absurd postcards, the ones that are now highly sought after as collector’s pieces.

  The Preservation Club consisted of the wives of small-rural-community, middle-class society types who met once a month for tea and biscuits at Kling Kower’s Restaurant. They were one-half of whatever made Why Cheer and Gladwood function—law enforcement, the courts, medicine, schools, church, and properties. The wives’ husbands peered from the background, whispering on occasion guarded but fruitful instructions into their wives’ netted ears. In their straw hats, suspenders, and sunglasses, the influential men lagged behind their womenfolk and their guests on a hike to Cottonwood Hill. The sheriff walking like Barney Fife of Mayberry, with hands on hips near the revolver loaded with a single bullet. Behind him marched the county judge and attorney, doctors, teachers, school administrators, bankers, preachers, barbers, merchants, and a bevy of semisuccessful farmers. In addition to advising their wives, they cleaned the cabins and stalls of the Red Barn Premises, where haircuts, clothes, Jesus, A-B-C-D-Z, and Christ were introduced to our grandparents’ parents.

  When Jake was laid to rest that winter at O’Ryan’s Cemetery, only then did the Settlement trails become noticeably quiet. Eight years had passed since the “NO TRESPASSING” signs were posted by the Tribal Council. Unimpressed by the signs and feisty, Jake continued his motley intercourse with outsiders by going underground and doing lectures in neighboring towns. Right up to his graveside Jake Sacred Hammer referred to his ill-intentioned admirers as people who intended only to “demonstrate neighborly interest.”

  Around this period I became fascinated with stories Jake Sacred Hammer had helped collect years before. In terms of bolstering my interest in mythological intricacies, Jake was influential. At the University of Iowa, shortly after my return from Pomona College, I met a graduate student who was doing a dissertation on these “legends and folktales.” Naturally, since Grandmother had recited some in my youth, I could tell where changes had been made to hide the mysteries lurking within the words themselves. Even Jake was tribal law-abiding enough to reveal only the basic and not the whole. But no one knew that. Not even the expert team of linguistically trained ethnologists.

  In a way, by being a “word-Collector” I had subconsciously followed the same diplomacy by choosing less intimate symbols for my poetry. Even in my naïveté I knew enough to incorporate misleading themes.

  (Later, literary critics and experts would classify my cryptic work as the “most puzzling” among the pantheon of emerging or established tribal-affiliated writers. It would bother me that these self-appointed critics of Native American literature would overlook circumspection as the light source that refracted, rearranged, and hid me for reasons pertaining to safety. Essays were published to that regard: that I was one confusing mother. Ironically, flocking to my defense were writers whose claims to Indian blood later became questionable. There was never a doubt in my mind they were who they said they were, figuring there was a sense of honor in being Indian, never thinking people would go to deceitful means to claim my ancestors as theirs. Because of this duplicity I equated both critics and imposters as part of the master mouse-catching cat race that sadistically maimed its aboriginal prey for entertainment. Perverted romanticism, if you will, before decapitation.)

  Anyway, the graduate student published his commendable but unsuccessful efforts in a book entitled Wolf That I Iz. In an era when Black Eagle Child society was perhaps in a semipristine state, a good portion of what was held most sacred had alrea
dy been documented by academic flies. Like my own verse, it was cryptic. Once the codes were laboriously deciphered, I was thoroughly amazed at the fearlessness shown by the informants. For such acts of sacrilege, “there should have been repercussions—to self and the immediate family,” I noted in my journal. Except for Francis Marie, the person held accountable for selling the Ice Deity mat and whose children committed a string of mystifying suicides, there were none evident. Nor was there a succession of disappearances. No reports of vengeance. Enough for me to contemplate working with the graduate student to revise and update the old stories.

  As the “maybe” answer edged closer to becoming an affirmation, my grandmother said, “Me tte na-ka ta-a se miiye ka ni nay. Ni ha wi ta ki-ke ko-i tta wi ya ni. You just as well not help him. So nothing will happen to you.”

  She sensed my disappointment and right away gave examples of what had befallen informants. Something horrific happened to each family. In the past before I was born. There were different, often inconspicuous levels of retribution, advised Grandmother. Stray bullets fell from the sky, finding their mark in the unsuspecting eyes of spouses. Cars unbraked themselves and rolled over playing infants. People who were last seen mildly intoxicated were found hours later in unrecognizable mangled pieces strewn across the railroad tracks, packs of hungry canines defending mangled pieces of their flesh.

  It was enough to make me reconsider my role as research assistant. I told Grandmother that I wouldn’t pursue the idea. Undeterred, I continued to read the Sacred Hammer translations. When I should have been painting for my neurotic art professor, I dove into the musty book stalls and read. Whenever possible, I would double-check the credibility of the contents with my grandmother and parents. More times than not the contributions bore a semblance of truth. When the art professor cussed me out for the few pieces I had completed, I didn’t mind it one bit, knowing his class time had been used wisely.