My second child was also a boy--Anwah. He was born in 1979, during a month’s vigil for Leonard Peltier in Washington, D.C. We were holding candlelight demonstrations in front of the FBI Building, and John Trudell, a friend and AIM leader, ceremonially burned an American flag on its steps. That very same night John’s house burned down and his family, including his pregnant wife, perished in the flames. John Trudell wanted to bury his family in the traditional way and so he, Leonard, and Roger Eagle Elk left the vigil for a few days to fly to Nevada to perform the funeral ritual while I stayed with the vigil in Washington. During our demonstration for Leonard Peltier a howling blizzard struck the town, the first such blizzard they’d had in twenty-three years or so. Nine months pregnant, I slipped and fell on some ice. During the vigil Steve Robideau’s wife at that time, Tico, who was a Clallam (a people from a Northwest tribe), said: “Mary, you’d better go on to the hospital.” I said: “I don’t want to go to the hospital.” She said: “You’d better go, because nobody here knows how to deliver a baby.” Tico took me to D.C. General, located right in the ghetto, and all the patients there were black people. I was in and out of labor. Finally they tried to induce labor but that didn’t work. John Trudell called me at the hospital and said: “Mary, you go ahead and have a nice baby--I really care for you and what you’re doing for Leonard Peltier.” And he said what happened to his family had been done by the government and it was a setup. After they buried John’s family Leonard and Roger Eagle Elk flew back into Richmond and took a bus to D.C. When they got to the hospital the doctors were ready to do a cesarean because the baby seemed stuck inside me. Roger Eagle Elk was a member of the Native American Church, so Leonard asked Roger to pray for me. Roger made me four peyote medicine balls that he gave to me. He then prayed for me and fanned me off with his eagle-tail fan. Within an hour I had Anwah. There was an intern there who didn’t think the baby was coming because my blood pressure and everything was normal, so he sat down to eat. I asked if Leonard could be in the room because I knew the baby was coming. Sure enough the baby came. He didn’t have a name then, he was just “Baby,” or “Baby Crow Dog.” I had him on a Thursday night.
It was the first time I had been among black people and they treated me really good, like a family member. When Anwah was born I felt really sad. They said: “Aren’t you happy?” I said: “No, I feel sad,” because I was thinking about what had happened to John Trudell’s family. Then that Saturday Leonard’s sister, Berta, was killed in a car accident. So from the hospital we had to fly home for the funeral. Before we left we went to the place where the Japanese monks stayed. They had a big feast and an honoring ceremony. It was really nice. Leonard did a ceremony and Roger was right there being his helper. The monks had never seen a newborn baby. They greeted us with drumming and chanting.
The monks were going to make a plate of food for my newborn baby who was only two days old, and I had to explain to them that I was nursing, and that the baby was too young to eat solid food, because they didn’t know anything about children. After that we flew back for the funeral. At that time Leonard’s mother and father were still alive. Henry gave Anwah his name. His full name is Anwah Tokakte, something like Warrior Killing Enemy. So that was how Anwah was born.
My third child, also a boy, was born at the Paradise in 1981. He is a sun dance baby because he came into the world during the sun dance, on July 30, the first day of purification. I had him in the red transitional house’s upper floor, which Roque Duanes had helped us build. I knew already the night before that I would give birth the next day. I was supposed to lie down and breathe rhythmically, but I felt like walking around outside in the fresh air, and when my labor pains would start I’d just stand still until they passed. Some guys were making coffee, and I said: “Let me have some!” But they told me: “Get back in the house, you have a job to do.” Roque and some young men were pacing back and forth in front of the house and they were also heating up fifty gallons of water--for me. Men always think that when a woman is in labor they have to heal: up bathtubs full of water. Why, I don’t know. I guess they have seen it in the movies. I didn’t want the big crowd at the dance to know that I was going to have a baby, but Leonard was running through the whole camp yelling: “Anybody got a pair of scissors? We need them to cut the umbilical cord. Mary’s in labor!” So there was a big excitement when word got around that there would be a birth at the sun dance.
I had the baby early in the morning. Leonard’s sister Christine was supposed to act as midwife, with his daughter Bernadette to help her. At the last moment, Christine lost her nerve. So Bern did the whole job alone, cutting the navel cord, helping with the delivery. She was only fifteen at the time and had never done it before, but she handled the whole matter like a professional. The tiny human being’s first cry was high-pitched and piercing, like an eagle-bone whistle. He had long black hair with three little “whirl-wind” curls in it. All the time it had been raining, raining, raining. The house was leaking very badly and the whole floor was wet, so I put him in a laundry basket together with the clean clothes. Francis Primeaux, a peyote man and World War II veteran, who died in 1991, named the newborn Warrior Boy.
That year the prison wardens had let out a number of Indian prisoners so that they could sun dance, so they were having all kinds of ceremonies outside my leaking room, for these inmates as well as for my baby. I couldn’t join them, however, since they had the pipe there and all the sacred things, and for four days after giving birth you are like a woman on her moon, you can’t be in a ceremony. Instead I watched from the house.
The baby’s English names were Leonard and Eldon, after a relative, Eldon Low Moccasin, but I got to calling him Junior, and then June, and finally June Bug. So everyone now calls him that. It just stuck.
June Bug’s birth caused almost as much joy and excitement as Pedro’s had at Wounded Knee. The sun dance is a ceremony of life renewal, the lives of our people and the buffalo who gave them-selves so that the tribe could survive. So a new life at this, our most sacred ritual, was received as a good omen.
Next came Jennifer. Hers was the most “normal” of my births so far. I was watching a soap opera when I felt the first pains of labor. I could feel the pains starting and I knew it was time to go to the hospital, but I had to finish The Young and the Restless. When it was over at noon, I told Leonard it was time to go. He took me to the emergency room, where they examined me and rushed me into the delivery room because I was already fully dilated. Leonard left me there in the delivery room. The nurse asked me: “What do you want it to be?” I told her: “I know it’s going to be a boy, because I already have three boys.” She said: “But what would you like?” I said: “I’d like a girl.” The baby was born, and she said: “Guess what? You have a little daughter.” I felt really happy, and I was looking at her, and I couldn’t believe I had a baby girl. I didn’t even have a name for her, because I had been expecting a boy. My mother named her Jennifer Louise. She’d had a grandma named Jennifer, and her own mom was named Louise.
I married my new husband, Rudi, on August 24, 1991, in Santa Fe, and immediately got pregnant, though I didn’t know it. After I had my big car wreck, the doctors at the hospital told me that I would never be able to conceive again. “Relax,” they said, “let others do the work.” From Santa Fe we went to Arizona for three months and then went back to the res. I went to the tribal hospital for a checkup, to see how my recovery from the big accident was going, and found out that I was three months pregnant. Rudi said that when I came out of the examination room, I seemed to be in shock. I had trusted the doctors who had told me that I could never have a baby again. It shows you what they know. I did not think I could handle another pregnancy. I had four kids already. I had not yet fully recovered from my injuries from the car wreck. My one arm, separated from the shoulder blade, was acting up. I was in pain. I felt old and worn out. I thought: Oh, no, not again! But already there was a new life forming in my belly.
I conside
r myself a feminist. So you might ask why, under the circumstances, I didn’t terminate my pregnancy. Well, there is a difference between white and Indian feminists--we think that abortion is all right for everybody else, but not for us. There are only one and a half million tribally affiliated Native Americans left. For centuries, we have been the victims of physical and cultural genocide. Whole tribes have been wiped out by bullets or by smallpox, introduced by Europeans. We have been dying of ‘benign neglect.” So there is within us the subconscious urge to reproduce, to make sure that we are not a “vanishing race.” I would carry my baby to term.
The first time we got to hear the baby was through ultrasound, when I was four months pregnant. They put this little contraption on my stomach and we were able to see the baby taking shape. We could hear the heartbeat. That was pretty exciting. We didn’t know whether what we were seeing on the screen was a boy or a girl, and we didn’t care. We were concerned about complications. After all, I had my thirty-sixth birthday behind me. Years of a hard life, drinking, and injuries had taken their toll. Then on New Year’s Day I started spotting and was rushed to the hospital. The doctor thought that I might lose the baby and they kept me there for two days, but I came out of it all right. They told me: “Stay off your feet and relax.” Easier said than done. I got bigger and bigger. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: Could this be me? I was a grotesque sight. I no longer walked--I waddled like a dopedup, drunken duck.
Throughout my pregnancy, Rudi was a total wreck. It seemed that he was the one who was pregnant. He suffered from morning sickness. My ankles swelled up, his swelled up even more. My back hurt, he said: “My backache is killing me.” I threw up, he threw up twice. I got mad. Here I was, big as an elephant, and he was having worse symptoms than I had. I said: “Who is going to have the baby, you or me?” We got on each other’s nerves sometimes.
It was late May and I was a week overdue. I was worried. On Saturday the thirtieth we were all at my mom’s place--Rudi and I, my sister Barb, and her Jim--having a barbecue, when my water broke. Everybody was excited--“Here comes the baby!” They rushed me to the Rosebud hospital, but the pediatrician wasn’t there. He had quit. He’d had his license revoked in the city but was good enough for the res; not fit to treat white people, but good enough for us redskins. Then he got his license back and lost no time in getting back to civilization and better-paying patients. It pissed me off. To guys like him we are just guinea pigs to practice on. Here I was on the verge of giving birth and in that whole goddam hospital there was no physician competent to deliver my baby. They told us J would have to be flown almost two hundred miles to Yankton, which has a good hospital. We had to wait the whole night for the plane. It was a little medical plane, a two-seater, really. I still don’t know how they crammed us all in there--the pilot, myself, a nurse, and Rudi. The one-and-a-half-hour flight was awful. We were jammed against each other. The nurse was practically sitting on my belly. I could hardly breathe. There was a storm and the winds whipped our tiny plane around so that it was bouncing up and down. Sometimes I had a feeling like falling from a two-story window. An ambulance picked us up at the Yankton airport and rushed us to the hospital. They put me on a gurney and wheeled me into a cubicle next to the delivery room. The doctor told me: “I have to give you something to induce labor. You’re not dilating.” He also reassured me: “Sit tight. You’ll have a baby by dinnertime.” They hooked me into an IV to make me dilate. Rudi was biting his fingernails. He hadn’t slept a wink, so I told him to go outside to the lounge and find himself a sofa to stretch out on. Soon after he left the pains started and I sent a nurse to call him back. I was hyperventilating. I told Rudi: “I can’t handle this. Tell the doctor to give me something to knock me out!” He tried to calm me down, telling me to breathe deeper. He talked to me. He had a washcloth and was sponging me off. For the first time I had a husband at my side when giving birth.
The doctor came back, had a look at me, and told the nurses to wheel me into the delivery room. Rudi asked: “Could I go in there, too?” They said: “Sure,” and made him put on a set of greens and a mask and told him to scrub up. I was in the stirrups with my legs in the air, and the doctor said: “Okay, go ahead and push!” So I pushed. He said: “Stop, stop, I can see the head. Okay, push again!” And that was it. We had been in the delivery room less than five minutes. The baby just came sliding out, like toothpaste out of a tube. I saw right away that it was a girl. Mom had already told me a few days before: “You’re going to have a girl.” She was right, as usual. My newborn had a lot of hair already. The doctor grabbed the baby from me and handed her to Rudi. She still had the umbilical cord on her and Rudi was in an absolute panic, not knowing what to do, holding this screaming and squirming baby. She was twenty-one and a half inches long and weighed eight pounds, seven ounces.
The doctors hooked up a suction apparatus and started sucking fluids out of my baby’s nose and mouth. They said that she had fluid in her lungs and that they were concerned because she might develop pneumonia. The nurses cleaned her up and took her into intensive care. Rudi, a sentimental and overprotective worrybird, started crying when he saw this poor little thing hooked up to all those IVs in her arms, and all those little monitors on her chest. He said: “It’s so sad seeing her lying there like that, with her breath real wheezy,” and he cried some more. I tried not to let him see that I also was concerned. We prayed the Indian way and just hung in there.
We had still another problem. When we had first gone to the Rosebud hospital we had expected the baby to be born there. Rudi came in just a pair of old Levi’s and a T-shirt. We had brought no money, not expecting to need any. Now here we were in Yankton, with no money for Rudi to go to a hotel, or even for a bite to eat. The doctor was nice. He had a cot put into my room and let Rudi sleep there, and even eat the hospital meals. This doctor became a real friend. He later drove all the way to Rosebud, during his vacation time, to see how my baby was doing.
Well, they came to me with the birth certificate and said: “We need a name for the baby.” We didn’t have a name for her yet, so they hung a card on her: “Baby Girl Olguin-Brave Bird.” My sister Barb was sterilized and can’t have a child, and so, to honor her, I thought she should have the privilege to name her. I was thinking that Summer Dawn would be a nice name. We called Barb, who said: “Call her Summer Rose.” We had been on the same wave-length. Summer Rose it was.
Barb made a beautifully beaded umbilical turtle fetish from the baby’s navel cord. She said: “This will give Summer Rose a good, long life. I will keep her on a good path, and she won’t stray, and she’ll always come back 1:0 her roots and be a true Sioux.” Actually, there is more to this than just what Barb said. In the old days, until recently, when a child was born someone made two identical beaded or quilled turtle fetishes for the newborn. One of them contained the umbilical cord, and that one was hidden inside the baby’s cradleboard. The other one was hung up in a tree or some other place where the evil spirits could see it. It was believed that these spirits always tried to get possession of the navel cord and thereby gain power over the child. Not knowing that this fetish did not contain the navel cord, they vented their fury and evil magic on it to no effect. The little amulet is made in the form of a turtle, because this animal represents longevity. For days after you kill a turtle, its heart keeps on bearing and beating.
Summer Rose did not stay long in intensive care. She turned out to be a healthy and fat baby. She was only a few days old when, lying on her stomach, she raised herself up on her tiny arms as if she were trying to do push-ups, The doctor said: “See how strong she is.” Summer Rose looks very Indian, much more than I do. She looks like a genuine little full-blood. I like that. She almost makes me feel like having more kids, but I keep my fingers crossed that she is the last. If somebody had told me a year ago that I’d be married and pregnant: again, I would have laughed. I felt strange bringing new life into the kind of world we have but the spirit moves in strange
ways. Maybe there’s a reason for babies to be born. Maybe this generation is not vanishing or dying. Maybe the earth will still renew itself as the ghost dancers of old had hoped for.
The kids are growing up developing their own personalities. Pedro, my oldest, is twenty now. In 1972, my mother was in summer school at the college in Vermillion, South Dakota. During a visit there I was introduced to Pat Spears, a half-blood and a sort of Indian hippie--he had long hair, smoked grass, and had big college parties in his trailer house by the Missouri River. He was unlike anybody I had met before, different from the reservation kids I knew. He fascinated me and turned me on. I was not yet seventeen, innocent, and very naive. I didn’t know anything about sex at all. I ended up staying with Pat for a while, out there by the river.
When Mom found out I was pregnant she was horrified. Myrl, my stepfather, was mad. He said: “That’s the last thing I expected from you, getting pregnant.” Grandma Flood was embarrassed and read me the riot act: “How could you do such a thing?” I could have told her that getting pregnant was the easiest thing in the world, but said nothing. I was the ornery, radical black sheep of the family and had disgraced them. In Parmelee and He Dog people gossiped about me. At that time having a child out of wedlock was still looked upon as being very shameful among the so-called respectable, churchgoing half-bloods. I was ostracized and felt unwanted at home and so I turned to the movement. The AIM became my family where I found my brothers and sisters. I went to Wounded Knee and Pedro was born.
From the beginning, Crow Dog accepted him as his own. He groomed him to be his successor, to become a medicine man.
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