David went all over me with his eagle tail-feather fan and bone whistle, and he followed it up with a doctoring on the next day, also. When I closed my eyes I saw an eagle flying. I looked down into the glowing embers and saw the eagle there, too. It was beautiful. At one point I looked across that round stone chamber and I could see Leonard sitting there, just the way he does in his meetings. I could not read his face, whether he was frowning or encouraging me. This meeting made me realize that I had been living in the fast lane. It forced me to have a good look at myself. I will be forever thankful for what these friends have done for me.
Back at Rosebud, before I started to go to meetings again, I talked to different people to see how they felt about it. I told Uncle Leslie, who is a road chief, that I felt I could not go back to Grandfather Peyote because I wasn’t with Leonard anymore. He said: “This is your church, you are baptized in it, and so are your children. Come!” After I married Rudi, I was encouraged to bring him, too. Even Leonard visited me and reassured me:
“You can still go to meetings. You can still run sweat lodges. You can still be in this way.” And the kids found feathers in the house, and he made peyote fans out of them, and we had our medicine things around the house, and he said: “I’m not here, but the sacred things are here. Go on, continue.” He even called Rudi “nephew.” And he and Pedro ended up singing a peyote song together.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Peyote Memories
Certain Native American Church meetings have remained vividly in my mind. I remember the first meeting I went to after my car wreck. It was at my uncle Barney’s. I ate a lot of medicine, and it was mush, chopped up like relish. I ate four spoons and passed it on. Every time I tried to relax the medicine would work on me--my mind wouldn’t be on anything. I ended up sitting on my knees all night, paying attention to everything, because if I wasn’t paying attention, the medicine would start working against me--I’d start wanting to get sick, or I couldn’t breathe. If I sat up and listened, everything would be okay. But if I tried to relax, it would work against me. Uncle Barney said: “When I first saw you years ago I understood that you were a nice lady, and that you had a lot of patience, and I understood that you had a heart, and you always liked these ways.” He was glad that I was there, and he said: “It doesn’t matter what anybody says, keep on coming to the meetings.” When I go into meetings I always have dreams and the medicine will show me things. It always gives me more understanding. Peyote can make you gag or vomit when it is dry or chopped up. I like peyote when it is fresh and green. Then it does not have that gagging taste, a taste that makes you feel as if you were eating earth.
In the old days a special ceremony was given for a girl who was on her first moon. A feast was held for her. Horses were given away in her honor, and she got a new, shining deerskin outfit together with many other gifts. Something of this old custom has influenced the Native American Church. I remember a meeting held way out in the boondocks, somewhere on the res, at old Hairshirt’s place. There was a young girl, maybe twelve years old, though she looked younger. The drum went to her before it went to anybody else, and in the morning, when the sacred food was put out, she was served first, and she was also the first to get the morning water. It was obvious to all that she was honored for having her first period--to all, that is, except to her. She was dumbfounded at being served before the elders and never caught on. The morning after, she was laughing and playing the tomboy with some little kids as if nothing unusual had happened.
I remember one birthday meeting for Crow Dog’s oldest son. The roadman was Emerson Spider, and he ran this ceremony in the open, right out on the grass, with nothing above us but the sky. This happened on the day of purification during a sun dance. So many people wanted to take part in this meeting that there was not a tips big enough to hold them. Emerson and his helpers put up his sacred things right around the sun dance altar amid the sweat lodges, near the main fire that burns from purification to the end of the sun dance. Crow Dog put a star quilt around his shoulders, and he started his singing with that quilt on. The singing, on that occasion, was particularly haunting and beautiful. It was a wonderful meeting. Everybody was sitting around the fireplace, and you could see the stars. One girl was acting strangely, waving her fan frantically this way and that way. She called our to one of the singers: “Here, use my fan!” and threw it at him across the circle. The medicine was acting on her in a strange way. Then someone said: “Excuse me, can I go outside?” and we all laughed, because we were already “outside.” This was the only time I had been at a peyote meeting out in the open, without walls and canvas, with the stars looking at us.
I remember the people who came over the years to Crow Dog’s Paradise, who went to the meetings, and how the medicine affected them. In May 1975, many of the AIM people who had been at Wounded Knee knew that they would be facing arrest and trials on political charges, particularly Leonard Crow Dog and his closest friends. They asked Richard Erdoes to fly out, saying that we had something to tell him. He came. Leonard told him: “We’ll all be arrested and tried. We know nothing about the law. We don’t even understand the language they use in court.” Richard said: “I’m an artist. I don’t know anything about the law either.” Leonard did some arm-twisting: “You’re white. You live in New York. You’ll handle it for us, get us a good lawyer. Raise some money.” Richard answered: “I don’t know any lawyers. I never tried to raise money.” Leonard said: “I know you can do it.” So Richard gave in: “Okay, I’ll try.”
Richard, at that time, was a magazine illustrator and he had to hand in a certain double-page drawing for Life magazine the following week and he had to fly home on Saturday in order to make the deadline. Now, all our peyote meetings are held from Saturday night to Sunday morning, but Leonard said: “We must have a meeting for him on Friday night. He must take medicine and be blessed so that he’ll do a good job for us.” So we had this meeting on a Friday night. All day Friday Richard drove around in his rented car, together with Alex One Star, who was supposed to teach him four peyote songs. Then we had a good sweat to purify ourselves, and then, at nightfall, the meeting started.
Richard had been in a number of meetings before and had taken medicine, but it had never really worked on him. He had always been sitting there, a little dreamy like, and contemplative, but peyote had never really taken hold of him, but this time, suddenly, the drumming and singing stopped, and everybody was staring at Richard, and Leonard proclaimed: “At last, Richard’s in the power!” And he sure enough was. When the drum came around to him and it was his turn to sing, he sang only the one song he knows. . . . “Heciya ya ya, wichoni ye yelo . . .” and then stopped. He’d forgotten all the songs Alex had taught him. And he was clearly hallucinating. He told us later that Leonard had appeared to him in the shape of a red horse, and that people were gunning for it, laying out traps for this horse. The strange thing was that we had such a horse at the Paradise and Richard had ridden it. Its name was Big Red, and a few months later, when the marshals and COINTELPRO men raided Crow Dog’s place, they shot and killed Big Red, out of sheer spite and meanness. After morning water, Richard said: “Well, I’ve got to make tracks. My plane leaves this afternoon and it’s ninety miles to the airport at Pierre. I don’t know how I’ll manage it. My legs don’t obey me. I see everything in glow-colors. My hearing is off, and that red horse won’t leave me.”
Leonard just said: “You’ll be all right.”
So Richard took off. He told us later that the red horse was always in front of the car. Finally he just opened the door and let this imaginary horse climb into the backseat. He had to drive real slow. When he got to the airport the plane was just taxiing on the runway. He ran like crazy and caught it. The horse climbed with him into the plane. As soon as he was in the air, all the forgotten peyote songs came back to him with a vengeance, together with an irresistible urge to sing. He was chanting loudly and all the wasichu passengers looked at him as if he had gone crazy, excep
t one old Sioux who said: “Hau, kola,” and sat down in the seat next to him and joined in with the songs. Richard had to change planes in Minneapolis and was still singing. A Sioux lady, Velma One Feather, happened to be in the lounge, and she sat down beside him and helped him sing. The horse was there too. He phoned his wife Jean and told her: “Maybe I’ve gone mad, but there’s a red horse with me in the booth, and he won’t go away. Maybe I’m just dreaming this, but maybe you should get hold of a bale of hay. If this critter is for real, we’ll have to stable him in the bathroom.” When he finally got to La Guardia and stepped out of the plane onto New York soil, the horse vanished instantly along with the power and the songs. New York will do this to you.
Native American Church people are always visiting each other across the country, men and women from many tribes holding meetings together, teaching each other new songs, talking about things concerning their religion. We frequently stayed with our Navajo friend and road chief, Leo Harvey, who lives at Lukachukai, Arizona, right out in spectacularly colorful desert country. He got acquainted with Crow Dog at a peyore church convention in South Dakota. I first met Leo in 1977 while traveling through the vast Navajo reservation with the Red Nations caravan. There were quite a few carloads of us. We arrived at night and camped near Leo’s home. The next morning our friends made a big feast for us—mutton stew and frybread, Navajo style, with a lot of hot, red chili sauce, which I love. That evening we had a ceremony and prayer meeting. There were so many of us that they made one huge tipi out of two smaller ones and set up a half-moon fireplace. This happened to be a little girl’s birthday and special prayers were said for her. The Navajo ladies had all come in their traditional crimson and olive green velveteen blouses with silver buttons. Squash blossom necklaces dangled from their necks and turquoise bracelets encircled their wrists. Many had silver concho belts around their waists. They were beautiful to look at. The whole scene remains vivid in my mind, as if it were on a large canvas. The soft singing of the women mingled with the coyotes howling at the moon. Then during a terrific thunderstorm, with rain pelting down into the tipi through the smoke hole, my son Pedro was baptized in the Native American Church. The Harveys acted as godparents. The roadman running the meeting put the chalice at the altar next to the Grandfather Peyote and used an eagle feather to fan Pedro off He also blessed the tipi with the morning water. We also held meetings at Big Mountain for our Navajo friends, particularly women, who wanted our prayers whenever they were in trouble, such as being threatened with relocation.
We had one peyote meeting where the wind was so strong that it lifted the whole tipi up, and lightning was hitting the ground everywhere around us. It was like an earthquake. A lightning bolt struck the tipi of our friend Rod Skenandore while he was inside. A fireball was rolling around on the floor and he was quite shaken up. Our meeting went on all the same though a few people camping out got scared and made a run for the house. The next day we set out in the caravan for California. We went through Denver and, while there, joined the Crusade for Justice, led by Corky Gonzales. In Oakland we stayed at the survival house, performing ceremonies, making speeches for the cause. Next we set out for Santa Barbara in a big truck followed by ten or twelve cars. Fifty miles out of Oakland I noticed that little four-year-old Pedro was missing. We thought he had been sleeping in the truck. It was so full of people, jammed together like sardines in a can, that nobody noticed he was missing. I counted noses, as I always do when traveling, and he wasn’t there. So we turned around and went back to Oakland, where we found him with some people sitting on a park bench. He had not missed us, either. In Santa Barbara we had a big meeting on top of a mountain for a girl named Alice. She was living with her kids in a tipi, and the welfare people were giving her a hard time because, as they said, living in a tent was “unsanitary.” They wanted to take her children away to a foster home but we managed to prevent that with the help of one of our movement lawyers. Unfortunately she was killed a year later when a drunken driver plowed into her car.
While we were living in Phoenix, we took part in the life of the peyote people there. I used to go to peyote meetings on the Salt River Reservation, or to rituals at Fort McDowell, along the river. I went to a meeting run by a Chicano named Mendoza, half Pima and half Hispanic, where some of the songs were chanted in Spanish.
For a while Brad, my sister Sandra, and their baby daughter lived in New Mexico. Brad was employed to do construction work, such as building fences, for a man named Ray who had a big place some fifteen miles southwest of Santa Fe. Ray is a dealer in gemstones who had lived for years among the Huichol Indians in Mexico. He has a fireplace and Leonard ran a meeting there, partly in the Huichol style. Ray had all kinds of Huichol and Tarahumara paraphernalia, beautiful woven sashes and bags in which peyote is carried. The Huicholes’ name for the sacred medicine is hikuri. Every year they make a solemn and arduous two-hundred-mile pilgrimage north from their home country in Jalisco to San Luis Potosí and Chihuahua to harvest the peyote. The pilgrimage lasts fifteen days and during this time the men and women taking part in it fast and abstain from sex and salt. Upon coming back, a great feast is given that includes dancing, singing, and eating deer meat. Tobacco plays a great role in these ceremonies. The Huicholes also pray to the God of Fire and use the peyote medicine for curing all kinds of diseases, for snakebite, and for healing broken bones. Occasionally they use it to ward off witchcraft. Their singing is very different from ours. Instead of the water drum, they have a bowstring, which they play by pressing it against their stomach and holding a gourd against it, playing it real fast with a stick. They move the gourd around so that it makes different sounds. Traveling with Leonard, I learned a lot of the peyote ways of other tribes.
We have to go all the way south to the Rio Grande to get medicine, to what Leonard calls his peyote gardens. Sometimes we harvest south, and sometimes north of the border, usually near a town called Miranda. You can also order medicine if you can produce papers and show that you have a charter from the Native American Church and that you are enrolled in a tribe. You can show your papers to a dealer and order however much you want. Then he sends somebody to harvest medicine for you.
The first time I went to pick medicine, to harvest it, I did it the hard way. I found my first peyote under a big, spiny cactus and I got its needles all over me. Leonard told me to say a prayer first. I did, and then saw that the whole landscape was covered with peyote plants. I couldn’t see it before. After I prayed it was easy pickings.
I have been to the peyote gardens twice. We went to a lady I’ll call Amanda Cardenas. She is half Indian and half Chicano. She donated her land, which is full of peyote, to the peyote church. She calls it the holy land because of the medicine growing there. Besides peyote, her land is dotted with cedar, juniper, sage, and large saguaro cacti which, silhouetted against the sky, look like giants with outstretched arms. Some have big holes in them in which tiny owls and other birds are nesting. Amanda lets us pick peyote on her land for free. She told me that she has been using medicine since she was young and that it brought her health and good luck. She has opened her home to many tribes and holds meetings there. Amanda has a real nice place with a beautiful mural of a peyote meeting painted on one wall of her living room. She has a peyote altar and people come to pray, to touch the medicine, and to make offerings to it. The last time we were down there an untimely frost killed a lot of medicine on her land. So we had to go to a dealer to get peyote. There are a number of dealers down there. They own land and they treat the harvesting as a business. You might have to shell out as much as two hundred dollars or more for a thousand buttons. The price goes up every year. There is also a black market in medicine coming up from south of the border. You can buy the peyote fresh or sun-dried. When we harvest medicine we cut off and use only the top so that the root can grow new buttons. We never use the whole plant.
One time, back in the 1970s, we went down there to harvest medicine, a whole bunch of us in a big caravan.
We had Arapaho, Cheyenne, Mandan, and Sioux guys with us, and some Arikara women. I had Pedro along, who was two years old at the time. That’s where I met a young woman called Joanie Sue Young Bull. We had kids of about the same age. The men were gone for a couple of days and Joanie Sue and I got restless at the motel. It was a nice day, so I said: “Joanie Sue, let’s cross the border and check out Mexico.” So we got our sons and we went down to Nuevo Laredo. And we bought the boys some little trinkets there. In the late afternoon, we decided to go back to the motel. As we were coming to Customs, I realized I didn’t have a driver’s license. The only ID we had were some Native American Church membership cards. As we sat in a long line, looking around the car for these, I all of a sudden started finding peyote, fresh buttons of all different sizes. I didn’t know if it was legal for us to bring peyote into Texas and was afraid they’d arrest us and seize the medicine. We had no choice but to eat the peyote. We sure ate a lot of medicine. I looked over at the Customs and prayed that everything would be all right. When we finally got to the station, the agent asked what we’d bought, which we showed him. Then he asked where we were from. I said: “W’re from South Dakota, see our license plate?” He said: “Okay, you can go.” He didn’t even ask for any kind of identification. By that time the medicine had started working on us. When we got back to the motel, we opened up the car trunk, and there were about a thousand buttons of peyote in there that we hadn’t known about. That was a close call, We were both peyoted up. We took the kids to the carnival. It was a cloudy day, but the clouds had taken on pastel colors As I looked at them I saw tropical birds flying in the trees, but it was the medicine that was working on me. Later we went for an evening swim, and that sobered us up.
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