Ohitika Woman

by Mary Brave Bird

  At the center of the earth

  You stand,

  Looking around you,

  Beholding the people,

  Who stand in awe.

  They wish to live.

  During the purification days you’re asked to get fresh sage. It’s used for the wreaths around the dancers’ heads, wrists, and ankles. They line the sweat lodges with sage, and they also put some under the tree. Whoever is piercing will lie on that bed of sage. So it takes a lot of people to gather all the sage. People get their eagle-bone whistles ready. And they get the last-minute things they need on their sun dance outfits. During purification, sweat lodges are run constantly. So a lot of rocks are needed. Then there’s the water—you usually have to go to the tribal headquarters and get a water truck so there’ll be enough. Also during this time, a lot of people are taken up on the hill to fast. By the time they come down they go right into the dance, so some dancers fast for four days and go into the dance, making it an eight-day ritual. During this time, also, campers are coming in, setting up tipis, and settling down.

  Now the four days of the dance start. If there are many dancers, they’ll start piercing from the first day on. Usually the dancers have made a vow the year before to pierce.

  At the time of the piercing they ask that any women on their moon stay away from the arbor, or the sweat lodges, or any sacred things. Last year they asked women on their moon to leave the camp. When women on their moon come around the dancers, the dancers get real sick. Most women respect the rule, but sometimes there’s young girls who don’t realize this.

  It’s the dancers’ choice how they want to pierce. I’ve seen some that were pierced with eagle claws. I’ve heard men say that they pierce because women have pain during childbirth; so they pierce for their children and their families and the women who’ve suffered bringing the generations into life. It’s an honorable thing to do, to offer oneself in sacrifice. Some people pierce on their chest or on their back, and they’ll pierce not from the tree, but they’ll put the rope through the tree, over the crotch, and the horse will pull them. Women pierce now. Some do flesh offerings, some will pierce with feathers in their arms, some will pierce and drag a buffalo skull. I remember a sun dancer from Pine Ridge, Loretta Whirlwind Horse. Her father was sick and couldn’t move his legs, so she danced for him. He later told in a meeting that while she was dancing for him, suffering, he could move his legs, and feel them, where he couldn’t before.

  When the women pierce with a feather, they pierce their arms and tie the feather on with a piece of sinew. Some will keep it on for four days. On the last day they’ll make their last prayer. Then they’ll have it pulled off. I have old scars where I’ve been pierced on my arms—Bill Eagle Feathers did the piercing, and he cut my arms for flesh offerings. That year I pierced with wooden pegs. Bill is one man that I really miss. At the sun dance he’d always make a coyote yell. Usually eagles come and circle around the arbor and the camp, as if they know they are wanted. They hear the dancers’ eagle-bone whistles. It’s our belief that Tunkashila communicates with the eagle, our relative. When you’re given a whistle you’re supposed to take care of it.

  All of the dancers’ pipes have to be smoked in one day. When one dance round is over, all the dancers face south in rows, and the first row will go and get their pipes from where they put them in the morning on the west side of the arbor, where all the pipes are laid when the dancers first come in. So they go over there and they pick up their pipes from the racks, and they go around the tree, and then back in the row. At the same time there’ll be helpers that will pick out certain people from under the arbor to accept the dancers’ pipes. The dancers will go back and forth four times, and the fourth time they’ll give those people the pipes. When they hand them their pipes, the singing stops. The round is over, and the people who were picked will go back, in formation, to their place under the arbor where they smoke the dancers’ pipes. The dancers have to keep their pipes real clean, so the people who smoke the pipes for them won’t have any problems lighting them. I was sitting under the arbor with Rocky, and she said: “Why are white people dancing this year?” I said: “This is the year for reconciliation.” There are some real sincere, dedicated people there, but I’m worried that once you let them in the door, they might try to take over, or to exploit it.

  Different women will take turns running the sweat lodge. The guys sweat all the time, constantly, at late-night and early-morning sweats. We have children’s sweats, too. The little boys will have sweats. My kids always sweat. June Bug said: “I’m going to sweat, but it’s going to be a man’s sweat. I’m not sweating with any girls.” He was at that age. But it’s really nice to see kids sweating and praying. They run the sweats themselves, and they’ll say their prayers and express themselves. They conduct themselves in a good way.

  After the last round of piercing, when it’s time for the sun dance to end, they’ll put some water on the buffalo skull, our altar. The helper will get the flags from each direction and all the dancers will gather their pipes. The leaders go out first. They dance in formation toward the east door, stopping four times. It’s a beautiful sight. People will gather outside the arbor to shake the dancers’ hands as they leave. The dancers go to the sweat lodge to do their last sweat. During the breaks in the dance there are ceremonies that go on too. Marriages are performed, girls’ ears are pierced. After the dance, the feast begins. During this time, if a family has someone who has danced four years in a row and is finished with his four vows, they’ll have a giveaway in his honor. Sometimes naming ceremonies are going on too, and we have special songs for that. Also during this time, people who want to dance the next year are asked to make their vows. And we honor the singers and drummers. From the time when they bring in the tree to the end of the dance they’ve been singing the songs. And if they do an honoring song, money is donated to them. It’s hard to sit there and sing for four days straight.

  When I danced, I suffered for my children, for the Lakota people, for my Diné friends facing relocation at Big Mountain. They cut my flesh from where I had pierced, and I put it in a little tobacco pouch and offered it to the tree, to the spirit. After having pierced for the first time, I was asked to speak. I spoke about my friends who had gone to another world, about Annie Mae Aquash, who had sun danced, who believed in the pipe and the sacred medicine.

  I wanted to dance last summer at the Paradise but was still too weak from my car accident. I went to the drum to sing along in the wicaglata way, echoing the male singers, and I grew faint and had to sit down, but I am sure that, sometime in the future, I will dance again.

  Good things happen during the sun dance, you could maybe call them spiritual. There were two men who had been bitter enemies some twenty years ago, and one of them had shot the other and nearly killed him. Then two years ago, in the spirit of the sacred dance, they not only forgave each other, but became friends and even pierced each other. It really touched my heart.

  There is a Chicano who walks hundreds of miles on foot, all the way from Mexico, to come to the sun dance. They call him “So Happy.” Years ago, he was a survivor of that horrible incident where a train car full of wetbacks were tricked out of their money and left in the car to suffocate.

  At the last sun dance, in 1991, they flew the Stars and Stripes right-side up for the first time. That came as a shock to me. The only way I had ever seen the flag used by AIM people was upside down, the way ghost dancers used to wrap themselves in the flag as a sign of distress and mourning, and the way AIM used it as a sign of protest. But things are changing and getting more mellow. They flew the flag the right way to honor our own veterans who have fought in every war the United States was involved in—World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. Sioux men were fighting in all those faraway places, though some who had been in Nam said later that they felt like the Crows and Arikaras scouting for Custer, scouting for the whites against non-white people. Still, many Sioux gave their lives i
n distant lands and so now we have a respect for the American flag. In a way it’s good to come to an understanding, particularly as those flags last year were flown to honor Francis Primeaux, an old veteran and roadman of the Native American Church, who had died a short time before.

  Also at the last sun dance, Archie Fire Lame Deer allowed some heyokas, the contrary, “forwards-backwards thunder dreamers.” to dance. That was the second time they came and pierced. Being heyokas, they dress different than the other dancers. One was painted with black and white polka dots; another had his face hidden by a shawl; a third had a sort of fantastic many-colored outfit on and a bunch of feathers from various birds on his head. Everyone dressed according to his vision. They were very strong dancers.

  And at last year’s sun dance people encouraged me: “Sister, hold your head up!” We embraced and laughed and cried together. And there was the cry: “All you Wounded Knee veterans, stand up!” And so we stood there—Clyde and Crow Dog, Carla and Ron and Carter and myself—and they sang the honoring song for us. They say the movement is dead, but it isn’t. We’re still working for the people; we are still here. You can’t stop us now. When they sang the honoring song for me and my sisters and brothers, I felt really good.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Big Mountain

  I am still part of the movement. I’m still involved in Indian causes and will stay involved until I die. But I’ve slowed down. I have given birth to five children. I am a thirty-six-year-old grandmother, and I have grown tired of the old roaming gypsy life, have grown tired of having to camp out for weeks in a tipi during a long South Dakota winter.

  For a number of years after Wounded Knee, and after I moved in with Crow Dog, we took part in the fight for Big Mountain. It is an area within Arizona’s huge Navajo reservation, which is so large that it takes almost a whole day to drive from end to end. Within the southwestern part of the Navajo reservation lies the smaller Hopi reservation. Some of the Big Mountain area lies in Navajo land and another part is within the Hopi reservation. The boundaries were not made by either the Hopis or the Navajos, but, in 1891, by some white government types who, as they always do, took a map of Arizona, drew a big square on it with the ruler, and said: “Okay, what’s inside the square is Hopi, and what’s outside is Navajo.” Then they probably slapped each other on the back and went to the nearest bar to have a drink. As long as no white rancher or farmer had any use for country that was looked upon as a wasteland, this “boundary” stuff didn’t matter.

  Big Mountain was called a “Joint Land Use Area” and the people of both tribes pastured their sheep on it, side by side, as friendly neighbors. They probably didn’t know about these white man-made boundaries and where they run. Things changed when certain outfits, like the Peabody Coal Company, became aware of all the coal and uranium buried in the land and decided to reap the profits from it. That started the so-called “Navajo-Hopi land conflict,” which really never existed as far as the traditional people were concerned. Tribal politicians were bought off and phony suits were started. Peter MacDonald, the dictatorial and very wealthy Navajo tribal president, had a hand in the business. That’s why many Navajos call him Peter MacDollar. He was once hailed as the “most powerful Indian in the world.” I hear that he’s doing time now on various corruption charges.

  The government finally decided that all the Navajos on the “Hopi side” had to be driven from their ancient lands and relocated somewhere else, mostly in white off-reservation towns like Holbrook and Winslow. The Hopis on the “Navajo side” were also to be relocated. The whole relocation plan was really just a scheme to clear the area for exploitation by the energy mafia.

  I recently got a printed brochure from the Hopis that put the whole matter in perspective. It reads in part:

  The recent division of our land with the Navajos, which the United States enforces through its courts and police, is clearly a means to seize total control, even of that land supposedly granted to the Hopi. Those Hopis who are relocated onto new areas are only allowed to lease that land from the Hopi Tribal Council.

  With the discovery of mineral resources in that area came the passage of Public Law 93-531, which was not requested by the true Hopi leaders, but promoted by lawyers through the Hopi Tribal Council, creating the illusion before the world that the Hopis have traded certain areas of their land over to the government on approved mineral leases.

  We want everyone to know that the Navajos are not the ones taking our land, but the United States. The Hopi and the Navajo made peace long ago and sealed their agreement spiritually with a medicine bundle.

  For generations more than ten thousand traditional Navajo people have lived on Big Mountain, supporting themselves by sheep raising and rug weaving. They lived in old-style hogans, moving with their herds from pasture to pasture. They had little contact with the outside world. Their forced evacuation has been going on for several years and “relocation” is supposed to be finished in 1995. Already over eight hundred families have been driven off their ancestral land and “resettled” in Winslow, Holbrook, or Flagstaff, many without ever getting their relocation money. They are penniless and desperate. Some got a little money and some miserable house to live in, but they are desperate too. They were used to living in self-built hogans. Now they have to pay rent. They used to heat their hogans with old-fashioned wood stoves and the wood they gathered cost them nothing. Now they have to pay for gas and electricity. They used to run their sheep and weave their own clothing. Now they are unemployed ghetto dwellers in a strange, hostile, and frightening environment. All this happened to the Navajos before, in 1863, when Kit Carson and the army laid waste to their land. He and his men destroyed crops, cut down fruit trees to make their country uninhabitable, and forcibly herded thousands of Navajos to a place in the desert hundreds of miles away called Bosque Redondo, where most of them died of disease and malnutrition. It is still remembered with horror as “The Longest Walk.”

  The Navajos on Big Mountain, facing relocation, called for help. That is where we came in. In 1980 Larry Anderson, an old friend and leader of Navajo AIM, contacted us. He was with us at Wounded Knee during the siege in 1973. He and some Navajo elders brought a pipe and asked Leonard to hold a sun dance at Big Mountain. They sought to attract support from other tribes throughout the country, and a sun dance would serve as a focusing point, a signal for help and for tribal interdependence. The elders told us: “We don’t want to pick up the gun, or have any kind of bloodshed. We want to handle this with spiritual power. We need your prayers. We think your ceremonies might reinforce ours.”

  That’s how we got involved supporting the cause of the Diné people on Big Mountain, spiritually, physically, and politically. Navajo is a white man’s word. The people there call themselves Diné, and their country Dinétah. We drove out there. I got there with a group a few days ahead of Leonard, who had to finish the sun dance at Rosebud. That first year we went to Big Mountain we set up camp close to the sweat lodges and the arbor. Howard Bad Hand and Leli Takoja were supposed to sing. But that first morning there were no singers, just myself, Fred Wapapah, and another guy. And they didn’t know any sun dance songs. So I had to lead the singing. It’s hard work to keep that pace up, and about the second or third round Howard and Leli showed up. All that time they were lost in Black Mesa.

  The sun dance circle was part of a large survival camp. The people there had collected a lot of cedar and sage for the ceremonies. Different support groups had come—"rainbow people” from different countries, black, white, yellow, Orientals, Latinos, and, as always, a few Buddhist Japanese monks. Some people had to set up a cookshack and brush shelter. They had an arbor and fire pits. Women joined together to do the cooking and there was a great deal of food donated by various organizations and individuals. Wherever you looked people were working, chopping wood, bringing in rocks for the sweats. Leonard arrived in good time with Jerry Roy and his family. They are old and true friends and always help out when there’s work
to be done. Navajos formed the security guard at the gate. There was a tremendous feeling of unity between all these different groups, though it was not shared by everybody. A few of the Diné objected to the sun dance, feeling that it was not one of their ways and did not belong in their country. But the Big Mountain elders persuaded them otherwise. One year Ernie Peters came from L.A. with his Chicano wife, Jessie, and insisted that white people stay out of the ceremonial area, which included the arbor. During the sun dance there was a big conflict over that. It was decided that the white people could stay under the arbor but couldn’t participate in the dance. So Ernie Peters got up with all his people, his whole support group, and left. He said he was a sun dance chief and he was never going to support Big Mountain because of that decision.