In the end we came to love each other. A lot of women would always come to Grandma Crow Dog for advice. After all, she was an elder and she always knew what to say, even if it was just common sense. She was really down on drinking but had no luck in keeping other people from the stuff. Before the old folks’ home burned down, early in the morning I’d get up and cook—I’d usually make fresh bread or pancakes or muffins—and I’d bring them over something while it was still hot. Then we’d all sit down and they’d talk about relatives, and just gossip. It was always lively, especially at breakfast time, drinking coffee and talking. Grandma often took to talking Sioux, oblivious to the fact that I could only understand half of what she said. It didn’t matter. I got the drift. I never saw her idle. She was always busy with her moccasins, which every so often she took to town to sell.
My mother and Grandma Crow Dog went together to the Catholic boarding school at St. Francis. Mom told me: “Mary Gertrude was a strong, traditional woman, even when we were just kids. Her English was not too good. She went to the old ways, and I to the new.”
Of Leonard’s sisters, Christine was always friendly to me. She is a fine peyote singer with a mellow, deep, resonant voice. Leonard stood up for me most of the time but I sometimes wondered whether he had been attracted to me because of my looks and personality, or because I had at Wounded Knee given birth to Pedro, upon whom he looked as a symbol of renewal, as a rebirth of the Lakota Nation, and whom he groomed to be his successor.
Life at the Paradise was like a twenty-four-hour three-ring circus. There was never a quiet moment. We were never alone. Privacy was a strange white man’s notion that was never taken into account. People would come asking for money all the time, thinking that because Leonard was a chief and medicine man he should be their sugar daddy. The remarkable thing was that Leonard thought so too. No, I am wrong because from his point of view it was unremarkable. In his traditional way it was the custom to expect a chief to be generous, to make gifts to all and let himself be stripped of all possessions. And so he gave money away that should have been used to buy food for the family. Sometimes he would give away the food itself, leaving us hungry and dinnerless. I admired him for that, but I was eventually the mother and stepmother of seven children, and never having any money sometimes drove me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Leonard was in many ways a truly great man but he does not know what money means. I can’t handle money either, but I was a little better than he in managing it. Some people would come and bring him a few dollars to perform a ceremony and he would immediately give it all away.
People came to Leonard with all their troubles. I kidded him, saying that he was the tribal psychiatrist. Like certain specialist doctors, he was always on call. People dropped in night and day to discuss tribal politics, religion, reservation economics, family tragedies, treaty rights, and a hundred other subjects. Because most of the visitors are full-bloods, short on reading and writing skills but brought up in the great oral tradition of our people, such talks tend to be long, wonderfully flowery, and poetic. But when they go on and on into the wee hours of the morning, speechifying can tire you out.
There is Indian time and white man’s time. Indian time means never looking at the clock. It means doing what you want when you want it. In the case of some people it means having dinner at midnight or going to sleep at noon. In the old days we had no clocks or wristwatches. Nature was our clock. If we wanted to get up early, we drank a little more water the night before--then our bladders would wake us up in the morning. The sun, the moon, and the seasons were our timekeepers and that way of looking at time is still in our subconscious. There is not even a word for time in our language. Even the sophisticated, city-bred AIM leaders, great speechmakers who can twist the media around their little fingers, sometimes still move on Indian time. I remember, during the Wounded Knee crisis, some of our top men wanted desperately to get on TV to tell our side of the story. One network invited them to speak for an hour on prime time, on a Tuesday evening, I think. They never showed up. They arrived the next evening, on Wednesday. The TV people were livid with rage. “Never, ever, try to get on a show with us!” they told our leaders. “You put us in a horrible situation. We had to take whoever was willing to take your place at a moment’s notice. It was a real bummer. You embarrassed us.” Our men couldn’t understand. What was all the fuss about? Tuesday or Wednesday, what did it matter? Who could understand white folks making such a stink about dates? White man’s time and Indian time are just two entirely different concepts.
What with taking care of the children as well as visitors, I got little rest, or even sleep. Even when Leonard was away people came, expecting me to take his place handing out money or providing a meal and a place to sleep. Whenever Leonard stayed for any time at the Paradise there would be ceremonies--sweats, yuwipis, and the regular meetings of the Native American Church. Yuwipi rituals usually lasted throughout the night, and peyote meetings went from sunset to sunrise or even longer. That always meant one to three dozen people coming to the Paradise to participate. After a night ritual most people did not want to drive home, so they stayed to sleep it off and get fed. On such occasions the floor was covered with bodies, the scene resembling a seal island. I sometimes did not dare to go to the privy for fear of stepping on someone. There was simply no space left to put my feet. Some visitors were old friends, some were total strangers. They came from all walks of life--Indians, whites, blacks, Asians. They came from Mexico, Europe, and Japan. Many were curiosity seekers wanting to meet the “great shaman” and to learn about Indian spirituality. Many were groupies, hippies, and most of all New Age people. Some stay for a few hours, some for months, some a few years, becoming part of the household. We even had Buddhist monks settling in, with one of them, Junji, becoming a friend and sun dancer.
I became totally worn out and freaked out by constantly being overwhelmed by crowds of visitors. It got to the point where I yearned to go for a ride just to escape for an hour and get some peace and quiet. When Leonard was in jail at Lewisburg, I grabbed little Pedro and went to New York to live with my coauthor, Richard Erdoes and his wife. I went there not only to be closer to Leonard, but also to get away from the wear and tear at the Paradise. What a relief it was to be able to take a hot bath, to get a good night’s sleep, and to eat something other than frybread, fried potatoes, and greasy hamburgers.
When I got back the misery started again. I got pneumonia from sheer exhaustion. Henry was away, which meant that I was “the man of the house.” In other words, chopping firewood was upi to me. I got a chain saw, cut wood for the night, and then stacked it up. One night I was so tired I could hardly move. I lay down and covered myself with a blanket but it was icy cold and I couldn’t get warm. My teeth were chattering. One moment I was hot and sweating, the next I was freezing and shivering. I hitchhiked into town the next day and went to the hospital. They said I had pneumonia. As usual when I am in deep trouble I went to my mom’s place. For a week I didn’t go back to the Paradise. I couldn’t handle going back down there. Mom nursed me back to health. So this was a ten-day “vacation.”
Back at the Paradise we didn’t have a house to live in. There was just the old cookshack that leaked, with a dirt floor. Eventually we rented a trailer house in Antelope, and it was nice at first. It was hard finding a place that would rent to us with as many kids as we had. So we rented a trailer at the edge of the community from this Indian lady. It was all right--I got along with the neighbors. We had cable TV and a phone, but we didn’t have hot water there because the place was in need of new plumbing. In the spring and summer people would come by bringing tobacco, wanting advice, wanting to visit and talk. People would come to hock things, too. In fact there were these young boys that hocked us a microwave oven for thirty dollars. I thought it was great, until the police came about a week later and said that it was stolen and that if we didn’t give it back we’d be charged with receiving stolen property. We gave it back, and about a month late
r we got our money back from the boys. After that we were more careful. The trailer had three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. The trailer rested on cinder blocks, about two feet from the ground. The floor was rotten and I fell through. I could have broken my hip. Eventually, we went back to the Paradise and camped out in two tipis like in the days of long ago.
Leonard is a medicine man. Performing ceremonies is all he can do. He cannot read or write because Henry kept him out of school, fending off the truant officers at the point of a double-barreled shotgun. The old man claimed that school would “spoil his sacredness and bury his Indian mind under the white man’s learning.” They knew that he was destined to be a medicine man because of certain dreams and visions he’d had in his childhood. So he makes his living, if you can call it that, by performing Indian rituals all over the country. As he does not charge for his healing and cedaring, he has to hustle and scrounge around, trying to find a foundation or some sympathetic individuals to support his work.
His being a medicine man meant that we were traveling all the time, like a caravan of gypsies, with the whole kit and caboodle, the kids and, nearly always, an entourage of relatives or hangers-on. Leonard is a chief, and chiefs do not travel alone. He also felt that it was easier to raise money for a big group than for two or three people. We always traveled in two or three cars that just loved to break down. He’s always surrounded himself with people. He’s always been that way. It was not enough that we took off in a bunch of six or eight people, but he would also pick up hitchhikers, often rather suspicious-looking characters, some of whom I suspected of being federal agents checking up on us. We traveled all winter long. With the kids. They did not get much schooling that way, but, like his father, Leonard doesn’t believe in book learning or :he three Rs. I will admit that he took the boys along in order to teach them the rituals and raise them in the traditional way, but it seemed to me that we were spending our lives in moving cars.
We would go someplace to perform a ceremony, like Texas or California. They’d send him maybe a hundred dollars for gas, which did not get us very far, so we made stops wherever we had a friend or acquaintance and hit them up for gas money to get us a little bit farther. We always had to hustle all the way and it was a drag because often I didn’t know whether we would eat. Always the cars were overcrowded, like that little VW beetle in the circus that stops in the center of the ring and thirty guys come out. We should have performed that trick for money. One day we would have to sleep in the cars, or spread our bedrolls by the side of the road; the next day we might live it up in the mansion of some wealthy admirer, to be treated to a huge gourmet dinner in a fancy restaurant. We met more people than I can remember--Indian and white, good and bad, rich and poor, some conventional and some oddball types. Many of them were really very nice, sympathetic, with an understanding of what we were doing. Some went to extremes, and a lot of inconvenience, to put us up and feed the whole gang. I learned much and gained a lot of insights, but still the raggle-taggie gypsy life got me down. As a runaway teenager I had roamed from city to city with gangs of radical AIM kids, but it is different when you are ten or fifteen years older with kids on your hands.
Some people looked upon Leonard as a sort of magician who could fix just about anything. Some years ago they had a drought in Ohio. It seemed it had hardly rained a drop there for twenty-four months and the farmers were desperate. They contacted Leonard to do a rain ceremony for them. They flew him out and escorted him in a limousine, and they had a Hopi elder come, too, to help, two medicine men being better than one. But Leonard had the lead part. He did the ceremony and it rained, and rained, and rained. The whole area was flooded out. It was shown on nation-wide TV. That Ohio town is even putting up a fountain in Leonard’s honor with his statue on top. They paid him some two thousand dollars to come, but he had five or six people with him, besides our son Anwah, who was nine at the time. So it cost him more than he made, as usual.
At some time or other we had met Oliver Stone and he said that he could use us in the movie he was doing then--The Doors. So the whole caravan traveled to San Francisco. We were in a back-ground scene of hippies clapping hands and music blasting away at the same time, so loud that I thought my ears would fall off. Leonard, Pedro, and I were all dressed up Indian style. They wanted one Indian to dance and then fly up in the air. At the same time we were supposed to be dancing around him and singing. Oliver was busy directing the crew and the cast, and he came over to us, and he said: “Don’t just stand there like Ma and Pa Kettle, move around--do anything you want to do.” In the background there were nude women dancing. And there was the actor playing Jim Morrison, and then Leonard, and an Indian woman, all dancing around a fire, a big fire. The concert was going on full blast. When Oliver came onstage, I could see he was under pressure and kind of stressed out, but he kind of yelled at us. He has his nice side, but he has his business side too. I got mad and said: “I don’t have to stand here and take this.”
That scene was the last part of the movie to be filmed in San Francisco, and when it was over they had a party for the cast and the crew at the Holiday Inn. It was pretty good. There was a big buffet laid out, all kinds of food. The bar was open and people were milling around. Then this guy walked in with a stereo, with the Doors on full blast. Then he set it on our table. Pedro, who was seventeen at the time, was sitting up there with Val Kilmer, the actor who played Jim Morrison. So Pedro gets up and goes to the tape player, and he takes the Doors music off and puts on Indian powwow songs and an Omaha round dance, blasting it.
I was going up to the bar, and Leonard and Oliver were talking, and Leonard was telling him off, saving that he was just another white man and that he had a John Wayne attitude for the way he treated us on the stage area. Then I got two triple shots of Jack. Some guys from the crew were talking about a party, and they said: “Follow us.” I did, and went into one of the rooms, and partied some more, and I fell asleep in a bathtub. This was on Fisherman’s Wharf. So one of the guys took me back to the Sheraton, and somebody took me to my room. I took a bath and fell asleep in the tub, full of warm water.
Not all our travels ended in such a spectacular way. Frequently we traveled south across the Mexican border, to gather our sacred medicine, peyote. It doesn’t grow in Sioux country. It never cornes farther than some ten miles north of the border. It is legal for us to get it, provided we have a license and can prove that we are tribally enrolled Indians and members of the Native American Church. The people owning ranches along the border have made a commercial crop out of our wild-growing sacred medicine. We have to pay big bucks in order to be allowed to harvest it. On the way down we usually stopped and found shelter with other peyote roadmen, particularly a Navajo friend at Lukachukai, in Arizona.
Our longest treks were the so-called “walks” and “runs”: the Trail of Broken Treaties, the Walk for Survival, the Longest Walk, the many runs for Native American rights, for Red Power, and what have you. These walks went all over the country, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, winding up usually in New York or Washington. We traveled in large caravans of cars, but people took turns running. Once we traveled to New York State on a Walk for Leonard Peltier, who was doing two lifetimes for allegedly killing two FBI agents during the great shoot-out at Oglala in 1975. I say “allegedly” because we all know that he was railroaded on a phony charge. We caravanned first to the Mohawks, to Rooseveltown, where they put out Akwesasne Notes, probably the best Native American newspaper in the country. Then we went on to Onondaga County, also in upstate New York. Both Mohawks and Onondagas are part of the Iroquois League of the Six Nations. We were treated very well, housed and fed. They took us into their longhouses, the men sitting on one side, the women on the other. That was the first time I met the clan mothers, who looked upon Leonard as a spiritual man and vied with each other to massage him, or knead his feet.
One time we went to Attica, after the big riot there, during which many inmates were kill
ed. In the end only one man was still imprisoned for this uprising--a Native American, of course. His name was Decajawiah Hill. His relatives wanted our support. They thought it was unjust that he was being made the scapegoat for the Attica riot. We were not allowed inside the prison to hold a ceremony there. The warden would not permit Leonard to enter even though he was a medicine man. They did not even let us send a pipe in. The best we could do was to hold a big rally outside the prison walls. We had an overnight vigil and kept a fire going. People were drumming and singing, and we smoked a pipe for Decajawiah Hill. We hoped that maybe he could hear the drum, and through it find strength.
On the Long Walk for Survival, we had more white “walkers” than Indians. One white girl insisted that she was a witch. She chanted and danced in the moonlight all night through, covered with veils, keeping everybody awake. She made so much trouble that I got into a fight with her, giving the witch a bloody nose.
Often we ran out of money and had to camp by the roadside. We did not know from one day to the next at what place we would wind up for the evening, or where the gas money was coming from to get there. But something always turned up. Maybe it was the spirit working for us. Occasionally we stayed in luxurious homes along the way and I have to admit that, at times, I found myself envying the people who owned them. I am not materialistic, and I am used to being poor, but I started thinking about having a nonleaking roof over my head, and a little security. We roamed around the country so much, helping other people, that we never paid attention to ourselves. Leonard and I never settled down. As long as the old folks lived we had a home base, but after they died, it didn’t seem the same anymore--it seemed empty. I was weary of the everlasting gypsy life, with no real home to return to.
While I lived at the Paradise, so many people came and went that I remember only a blur of many faces. Some, however, stayed for long periods, became friends, and had an influence on our lives. One of them was Cy Griffin. We met him at Richard Erdoes’s place in New York. He dropped in to borrow a T square, had one wide-eyed look at the assembled Crow Dog tribe, left his family, and joined the wandering Sioux. That was over twenty years ago. At that time, Cy had a magnificent, shoulder-length bright orange-red jungle of hair and a huge beard of the same color. It made him look like St. John the Baptist. He had been in advertising, a Madison Avenue type, but when he saw Crow Dog he was born again. He became a faithful friend, stayed for long periods at the Paradise, and made himself useful, chopping wood, doing errands, helping Grandma Gertrude. He later became involved in almost all the AIM confrontations and was inside Wounded Knee for most of the siege.
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