At the ghost dance, there were eagles flying overhead in formation. And when we were resting in the circle and Leonard’s father was praying, and the spirit really moved everybody and they were almost like in a trance, Jerry Roy said: “Look, there’s eagles.” And we all looked up and there was a flock of eagles. I never knew they traveled like that, but they were in a formation that was almost like an AIM symbol. We took that as a good sign, that we were doing something good. Also at the ghost dance, I wanted to see my ancestors, talk to them—like my grandpa. When you hear the wind blowing through the pines, you can hear people, you can hear spirits during the dance. The spirits are in harmony with the dance, and they’ll sing and talk with us. That’s the closest I came to experiencing anything like that.
One time, at Crow Dog’s Paradise we had a tame bald eagle. It just walked in one day as if it had always been a member of the family. It had a broken wing, which was drooping a little. It was always walking all over the place—slowly, like an old man, with a faraway look on him. Now Leonard’s daughter, Ina, had a bad ear infection and, during a ceremony, was crying with pain. The eagle waddled over to her and scratched her ear, and immediately she got well. The eagle stayed with us for months, eating meat from our table, and then suddenly he was gone. I guess his broken wing had mended itself.
For whites, the most awesome of our ceremonies is the yuwipi. It is a finding-out ritual—finding a missing person, or object, or the cause of a sickness. It is also a dog feast and a celebration of Inyan, the rock, who is unchanging and forever. A yuwipi ceremony is put on at the request of a sponsor who wants the spirits to give him the answer for what he wants to know. At the core of the ritual is the yuwipi man, the interpreter, who will translate to the sponsor and the other participants what the spirits have told him.
For the yuwipi you need chanli—tobacco ties, tiny tobacco bundles tied into a long string that represent offerings and prayers. There are 405 tobacco ties, and they are laid out in a square. There is an altar with its red and white staff to which an eagle feather and a deer tail are tied. There are the staff with the eagle head, and the four direction flags at the corners of the square. And there is the sacred food.
Whoever has sponsored the ceremony will sit behind the altar, right next to the medicine man’s wife, who will sit with the pipe. The altar is made, and there’s a bed of sage. When the medicine man is filling the pipe, he sings the pipe song. There’s also a drummer that sings and fills the pipe. During this time a helper brings forward the sweet grass and the medicine man will fan the pipe down with sweet grass. When that’s finished he’ll pray with it in each direction and he’ll give the pipe to the lady who is going to hold it. That’s when the prayers start and the ceremony begins. Then the medicine man, or interpreter, will go back inside the square of tobacco ties. His hands are tied behind his back, and his thumbs and fingers are tied together. He’s wrapped in a blanket, which is then bound with leather ties. He is made into a mummy, into a large, living medicine bundle. He is wrapped into a star quilt. The medicine man is then placed facedown on the sage-strewn floor. He’s lying facedown with his head by the altar. They’ll put sage on each of the seven knots he’s tied with. Then they smoke everything with sweet grass. After this the helpers go out, leaving the medicine man inside. They close the altar with the ties. The ties are never walked on or stepped over. If there’s light bulbs, they’ll put sage by them. If there’s a mirror, they’ll cover it. Before the ceremony starts they make sure that not a speck of light can enter. Yuwipi has to be performed in complete darkness. The helper will have a bundle of sage, and the first person will put some sage behind her ear and hand the bundle to the next person, so that each person will have some sage behind their ear. This will make the spirits talk to them. Everybody takes their place and the lights are shut off. Gourds are placed in the four directions around the medicine man. The singing and drumming starts. During the singing the medicine man prays. Four songs are sung. When the fourth song is sung the spirits enter the square. They’ll make a loud noise. The rattles will start shaking. Sometimes you can hear an eagle in there. Sometimes you hear little voices from the gourds, and there are lights coming from the gourds, sparks that travel around the altar real fast, at lightning speed, and it’s all in rhythm with the drum. Whatever happens, and whatever you see, comes through the power of the ceremony. There are always the spirit lights flickering through the air, rushing back and forth across the ceiling like tiny shooting stars. And spirit voices are whispering in your ear in a spirit language that only the yuwipi man can understand. The gourd rattles are flying through the air, sometimes touching you, speaking to you through the power of Inyan, the rock, talking to you through the gourd’s tiny little crystal rocks picked up from the ant heaps. And I’d see things during these ceremonies. One time we were smoking the pipe at the end of the ritual, and when it got back to the oldest man there, and he started smoking it, the smoke rising from the bowl was bright red. I had beautiful visions, such as you only have during meetings of the Native American Church. Once I saw a campground as it was hundreds of years ago, as if painted by an artist-magician. It was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. I have often had visions during yuwipi rituals that are much like the ones I’ve had at peyote meetings after taking a lot of medicine. But you do not take medicine during a yuwipi. While they are singing, the gourds are still shaking, rattling, talking. There are special yuwipi songs for the ceremony, and when these are sung, it’s really breathtaking because everybody’s in the spirit, in one mind. Everybody feels united in prayer. The feelings are real strong, real intense, and while the singing is going on the gourds are flying through the air, and they’ll come up to certain people, and the lights go all over. There’s been times when the spirits have taken the drum from the circle and lifted it up in the air.
When the last four songs are finished, the gourds are still rattling and talking. Then the spirits themselves will leave—they’ll go back where they came from. Then the interpreter prays, and after he is finished, he’ll explain what the spirits have told him, he’ll give the people their answers. Then the lights come on and that part of the ceremony is over. When the lights come on, you discover the tobacco ties are all wrapped up in a ball tightly, and so are the leather ties that were used to tie up the medicine man—the work of the spirits before they left. Then the pipe is smoked. The pipe is passed all the way around the circle and everybody takes four puffs. Then it goes back to the medicine man, who still sits in the altar, and he smokes the pipe. When he’s finished, he’ll hand the pipe back to his wife, and she’ll empty it, take the pipe apart, and clean the bowl. She’ll put the ashes at one of the direction flags. Then the water will be given to her. She’ll drink some of it, and bless herself with it, and she’ll say: “Mitakuye oyasin.” Then the water goes around and everybody will drink some.
The medicine man, the interpreter, will talk to the people. The spirits talk through him, and through him they will answer the question the sponsor, and other participants, have asked. After that comes the sacred food, which includes the dog soup. There are also dishes set out with wasna—wagmiza wasna, papa wasna, and chanpa wasna. Wasna is pemmican: kidney fat pounded together with corn, jerked meat, and chokecherries. There’ll also be wojapi (a kind of chokecherry pudding), frybread, and chayaka—Indian tea. This is the traditional yuwipi food.
The dog soup is always waiting inside the altar, that is, inside the square formed by the tobacco ties. The dog is a ritual sacrifice. It is usually painted with a red stripe from the tip of its nose down to its tail. They face the dog toward the west and choke it with a rope, which kills it almost instantly. It is usually a well-kept puppy, not just a mongrel off the street. The dog brings the spirit that comes into the ceremony. At the feast, everybody is served in the circle. There is one helper who will bring the soup, and another one who will bring the frybread or the wasna. It will all be passed around clockwise. The head of the dog is given to the medicine man. Late
r, it will be placed outside where nobody walks, where nobody will bother it. During the feast, people talk and visit. They’re still in the circle, and people are happy and they have good feelings. Then after everybody has eaten, a helper will light his sweet grass again and fan everybody off in the circle. Then the ceremony’s complete. The medicine man starts putting away his wope, his sacred things, his medicine bundle. The flags will, be taken up. The flags and the ties are taken to another place and, like the head, put somewhere where nobody will bother them. From there everybody is excused. Sometimes these yuwipis will go until four in the morning. It depends on how many people are there and how long the prayers take. Some ran real late because they start late at night. There’s usually a sweat before the ceremony.
I learned a little about the yuwipi from Leonard’s mother. She was always making tobacco ties. The same with her sister Nellie. Nellie was Moses Big Crow’s wife. She’s still alive. Laura Black Tomahawk, who passed away this past winter, was an elder, and these three were the main older women who were real strong in the yuwipi. They’d have their dog feasts. Laura always had a dog ceremony right in St. Francis. She lived in a traditional log house. I liked her dog feasts the best, because she always singed the dog real good, and she was real clean, and the meat was always tender.
I’ve seen yuwipi doctoring ceremonies where the person who’s going to be doctored will stand with the pipe by the altar, and by a flag that’s chosen—the spirit will say: “Stand at the north.” They’ll stand there with the pipe while the songs are being sung, and during that time the spirits and the gourds will go over the area where that person is sick. If the person is sick in his stomach, the gourds will touch his stomach. After the songs are sung, the medicine man will ask: “Where did the spirits touch you? Is that where the sickness was?” And they’ll say: “Yes.” So that’s how the spirit works. Then the medicine man, who knows about herbs, will tell him what plants to use, like a prescription. The medicine they’re given is always kept in a certain place, and they are told that while taking this Indian medicine, they have to stay away from any woman on her menstrual cycle. And a woman with her period can’t go anywhere near the medicine, or even in the room where it is kept. That would interfere with the power of the medicine.
There can also be a yuwipi for a wopila, a thanksgiving for something good that happened, for a person getting a good job and wanting to have a ceremony to thank Grandfather in the hope that things will continue to go well. I’ve also seen people get married in a yuwipi, making their vows and being blessed. It can also be a naming ceremony, hunkapi. Many ceremonies have been conducted through this yuwipi.
Crow Dog once ran a yuwipi for a man who was trying to find a missing relative. Through Crow Dog acting as interpreter, the spirit indicated that the missing man had been murdered and described the spot where the body had been buried. The body was found through the power of the yuwipi. During a yuwipi among Oneida Indians the spirit dumped a whole bucket of water on a man who had made fun of the ritual.
We also have medicine women in many tribes, usually older ones. There is one Lakota woman who runs sweats in Phoenix, and there’s a middle-aged lady running women-only sun dances for an organization called Women of the Red Nations. I know a Navajo woman who runs peyote meetings where she doctors the sick by pulling and sucking the sickness out of them. I met a Shasta medicine woman who uses crystals in her curings the ancient way, not like the white New Age people. My grandmother told me of the “double-faced dreamers,” powerful shamanesses of the old days. I think she was talking about women who had dreamed of Anung-Ite, the two-faced supernatural whose face is beautiful on one side and horrifyingly ugly on the other. Double-faced dreamers were powerful sorceresses. Dreamers possessed any man they met and caused men to go mad. One could hear them singing in the night. They inspired fear, but they were also great healers and the most skilled of all in doing fine bead- and quillwork; everything they made was beautiful. That’s what Grandma told me. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of fake female shamans, pretending to be Indian, ripping off the gullible. For me our Lakota ceremonies are as necessary as breathing. When I take part in them I am at peace with the universe and all living things.
CHAPTER TEN
The Granddaddy of Them All
I knew an old medicine man who called the sun dance the grand-daddy of all our ceremonies. It is the foremost, the most solemn, the most sacred of all our rituals. It is a celebration of life, of the sun, the buffalo, the eagle. It is a self-sacrifice, a suffering for someone you love, to take his or her pain upon yourself. It is not an initiation rite or a way to prove one’s courage as was shown in the movie A Man Called Horse. That was a misrepresentation of what the dance is about. I don’t want to talk here about the innermost meanings and details of rituals of the sun dance. That should be for a respected medicine man to do (or not to do). I want to talk about the basics as I have experienced them, year after year, at Crow Dog’s Paradise, such down-to-earth aspects as the part I played as a woman and wife of the sun dance director. I’ll start with the everyday things going on during a sun dance, the work and the never-ending tasks, and not the things directly involved with the ritual. First of all, people going to the sun dance, even if they are not dancers themselves, should refrain from sexual intercourse, drinking, smoking weed, and from all common pleasures. They should refrain from all worldly things for two weeks before the dance until four days after it is over.
The hard thing for me was maintaining the kitchen and caring for the people who would come around and camp. Some of them would stay to help build the arbor and get things ready for the sun dance. So I’d have to get wood, cook outside, haul water, feed them, do all the dishes, and fry bread over the hot fire. I was constantly getting that black soot all over my clothes. It took a pretty good toll on me—by the time you got one meal finished and got things cleaned up, it was already time for the next meal. This went on from sunrise to sundown. That took up all my time. On top of it I had to take care of the kids, getting their hair brushed, getting them cleaned up for the day. People would come and bring Crow Dog tobacco, or the pipe, and they’d want to talk to him, so whatever I was doing I had to put off, just to accommodate the people. There were always people arriving and you had to offer them coffee. Then I had to go to town, check the mail, run to the store, all these little things that took up my time. Crow Dog’s daughter Bernadette was always helpful. I think she was as old as Jenny is now when I first met her. So we kind of grew up there together in the kitchen. She was usually the one who kept the coffee going, and she was always there when I needed help. I could always depend on her. Sometimes different women would come over and offer to help, but then we would have too many people in the kitchen and it would get to be a mess—people cooked different ways, which led to arguments. Every day we’d make two big old pots of soup, and we’d put beef in one pot and vegetables in the other. And every day we’d feed everybody in the camp. We’d make frybread over the open fire constantly. So the sweating was going on constantly, and the eating, too. The kitchen was constantly open. Sometimes I’d have the morning meals done when the sun was up. We’d cook on an open fire and make things like cornmeal, or pancakes. Just when you thought you were through, somebody would show up from a long way off, so you’d have to cook for them.
Then I had to care for the sick. A lot of people drink from the little river that runs through the Paradise and they come down with a tremendous case of the shits. They think because they are on Indian land the water must be pure, but it was already polluted from way upstream outside the res. Others wander off into the woods and they get a bad case of poison ivy. We always have a case or two of sunstroke to deal with. Last summer a white woman went to the outhouse and there was a big, fat rattlesnake coiled up on the seat. That was one encounter the lady could have done without. There’s never a dull moment.
There’s a lot of preparation for the sun dance. A lot of work goes into making the arbor, which is built arou
nd a circle, with a door to the east where the people come and sit, and usually on the west side there’s a place where the dancers rest. Then we have to put up the sweat lodges, which are made out of fresh willows. There are at least two main lodges—one for the men and one for the women. Another major task is bringing in a lot of firewood. The main fire is lit before sunrise on purification morning. There’s always someone there, the main fire person, to watch it and to keep it burning until the last day, the last sweat lodge. Then there is the sun dance tree, which is sacred. It is the tree of life. In the old days scouts were sent out to pick a flawless cottonwood. The scouts would count coup upon it as if it were a brave enemy.
Then there is the ceremony of putting up the tree. The way I know it, the tree, which has been left standing for a year, is taken out of its spot to be replaced by a new tree. They put the old one in a place where nobody will bother it, because it still has the offerings from the previous year on it.
On the last day of purification—the sun dance usually starts on a Sunday and ends on Wednesday—the old tree is taken out and the dancers are asked to clean inside and under the arbor and to get their things ready. Then the dancers go and get another tree, sometimes accompanied by their families. The only people who stay behind are the old people. So they go and get a tree, which is usually picked ahead of time by a medicine man or elder, who then marks it with the four directions, with wasé, red paint A young girl, who has to be a virgin before her puberty, is given an axe, and she’ll cut the tree, to mark it, in each direction. After that each sun dancer takes a turn chopping, with one swing each, until it comes down. Usually the men do this. It goes pretty fast. When the tree is down, they catch it and make sure it doesn’t touch the ground. Then they trim it just a little bit from the bottom. When the tree is ready to go up they carry it with the leaves toward the front to the sun dance ground. When the dancers enter the camp, there is usually a warrior who will make a yell, the ageesha, and he’ll do it four times by the time they get to the arbor. Then they bring the tree in, and that’s the only time it is set down, very carefully. Then somebody puts the chokecherry branches in the crotch of the tree, along with the figure of a man and a buffalo made out of buffalo hide. From there they’ll put on the flags in the Four Direction colors. Then the dancers all put their offerings on the tree. Before they bring the tree in they sing songs to greet its arrival. When all this has been done, they put the spiritual food into the hole in the ground into which the tree will be planted. We feed the tree with water, corn, papa, and chokecherries. Some use buffalo and kidney fat in the papa. Then they place the tree in the hole and the dancers raise it by pulling on ropes attached to its top. They have to steady the tree with the ropes, because it is big. In the old days a song was chanted after the tree had been raised:
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