Some Northwest Coast tribes believed that when going after whale or walrus or bear, some exceptionally brave men could actually use menstrual blood on some things, thus adding the women’s power to their own male one. But this was a rather unique belief.
In most tribes, these customs are not designed to keep women down, but merely to escape from their power. Among the Sioux, a special puberty ceremony, called ishnati awichalowan, used to be held for a girl. The camp crier or herald, the ehayapa, would ride around the tipi circle, announcing that a young winchinchila had now grown up and was ready to assume a woman’s responsibilities. She might be carried triumphantly on a blanket to her father’s tipi. She would be dressed in a new, white buckskin outfit. Many presents would be made to her and horses given away in her honor. Sometimes a special and intricate buffalo ceremony would be held for her, with a buffalo skull altar to show her connection to Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Calf Woman. The girl’s first flow was carefully wrapped up and placed in the crotch of a wild plum tree, where no evil spirits could harm it.
The Cheyenne also had a solemn puberty ritual. The girl’s grandmother would sprinkle white sage, juniper needles, and sweet grass over glowing embers, cedaring her and fanning her off. Sometimes the girl would stand naked, wrapped in a buffalo robe, straddling the smoking coals, sanctifying her womb in preparation for future motherhood.
Among the Navajo, a girl’s coming-of-age ceremony was a very elaborate ritual, called kina’aldah. It lasted four nights, with an all-night singing at the end. A girl’s first moon was something to be proud of, to be announced to all the people. The girl would have her hair washed ceremoniously with yucca suds. Each day at dawn she raced in a sacred manner toward the east. Friends and relatives would race along, but nobody was allowed to pass her. Each day there was a “molding” rite, during which an older woman would knead her body and straighten her hair. This would make her as shapely and beautiful as Changing Woman, which is to the Navajo what Ptesan Win is to us. Also, a huge corn cake was baked in a cornhusk-lined pit. The girl’s possessions, blanket, jewelry, and clothes would be laid out to be blessed. Turquoise and silver bracelets, or maybe a squash blossom necklace, was sometimes given to her as a gift.
With the Apaches, a girl’s puberty feast was a joyous, jubilant event, always attended by a large crowd of celebrants. The girl would, as in other tribes, stay for four days in a special tent. She would emerge dressed in a new, fringed, gorgeous buckskin outfit, the living embodiment of White Painted Woman, the All-mother and culture heroine of the Apaches. During this time she was enabled to bestow blessings, just like the goddess. A male singer supported her every day with sacred songs. At night the masked ghan dancers performed their mountain spirit dance, because the White Painted Woman said: “From now on we will have the girl’s puberty ceremony. When the girls first menstruate, we will have a great feast. There shall be songs for those girls. The masked dancers shall dance in front.” Because this was such a happy, joyous festival, the girl who just became a woman was called “she through whom we have a good time.”
Among us Sioux and other Plains tribes, the ancient taboos connected with the puberty rite are not as strictly adhered to as before. But the belief of a woman having special great powers during her moontime is still widespread, and the fear of what that power might do to a medicine man’s ritual is as strong as ever.
In my mother’s family they ignored such customs because they were such staunch Christians. When I was growing up I didn’t know anything about these matters. We just didn’t talk about menstruation. Nobody ever mentioned it. As young girls growing up with Grandma we were not ever given a hint. And at the Catholic boarding school the priests and nuns discouraged any talk about subjects that had even the slightest connection with sex.
Early on I made a conscious choice. I made up my mind to believe in our old Lakota faith and follow the customs of our people. Therefore I keep the ancient rules pertaining to our moon-time. I won’t let menstruating women into the sweat lodge or the sun dance circle. But when I went to church with my mother, or when I was in the Catholic boarding school at St. Francis, I sometimes wondered if the priests, or even the bishop, or the infallible pope, ever had a short moment of doubt about the immaculate conception, or the transubstantiation that changed the wine and the wafer into the blood and flesh of Christ. And may I not also indulge myself in a little twinge of doubt about whether that rattlesnake really dies if I spit on it while being on my moon?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Land Is Our Blood
Maka ke wakan—the land is sacred. These words are at the core of our being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. We’d become just suntanned white men, the jetsam and flotsam of your great melting pot. The land is where even those Native Americans who live in the wasichu cities, far away from home, can come to renew themselves, where they can renew their Indianness. We have an umbilical cord binding us to the land and therefore to our ceremonies—the sun dance, the vision quest, the yuwipi. Here, the city Indians can relearn their language, talk to the elders, live for a short while on “Indian time,” hear the howl of brother coyote greeting the moon, feel the prairie wind on their face, bringing with it the scent of sage and sweet grass. The white man can live disembodied within an artificial universe without ties to a particular tract of land. We cannot. We are bound to our Indian country.
It is no wonder that we love it so, because it is beautiful. There are majestic mountains, granite spires, rolling hills of buffalo grass studded with pines, and magic places where spirits dwell. It has badlands—moon landscapes of fantastic shapes looking like the towers of long-gone cities or strange, many-masted ships sailing across haunting deserts. It is strewn with the bones of long-extinct animals, of woolly elephants with gigantic tusks, huge dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and Unktehi—the great water monster. In the gullies and dry washes you can stumble upon large, seventy-million-year-old seashells, their mother-of-pearl skins glistening in rainbow colors. Here also are wondrous caves, their walls covered with crystals. Yet our country’s greatest attraction, at least as far as I am concerned, is its vast, dreamlike emptiness, the prairie, the “Ocean of Grass,” where there “is nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence.” When Mom was a girl there were no fences. But that magic emptiness is now being filled and our land is forever shrinking.
Ten years ago we were fighting to keep the feds from driving our traditional Navajo brothers and sisters, the Dine elders, from their ancestral pastures on Big Mountain. From now on we will have to fight for our Lakota land, which means fighting for our survival.
There have been 341 treaties between Indian tribes and the American government that guaranteed us eternal ownership of our land “as long as the sun will shine and the rivers flow,” and all of them have been broken. Our famous chief, Red Cloud, once said: “The white man has made us many promises, but he has kept only one. He said: ‘We will take your land,’ and he took it.” In 1929 or 1930, in my grandmother’s day, they were holding a sun dance. It was a secret dance in a hidden place, far from wasichu eyes, because at that time our religion was still outlawed and you could be arrested and jailed for putting on an Indian ceremony. On that occasion, the holy man, Hollow Horn Bear, of my own Ashké clan, spoke to the dancers, saying: “A day will come, and it is not far off, when Unchi, our Grandmother Earth, will weep bitter tears, asking you to save her for our unborn generations. If you fail to summon up your strength and power to defend her, then our people will die like dogs.” That’s heavy talk, and a heavy task that we must fulfill.
It was Sitting Bull who said: “You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
“You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.
“You ask me to cut grass
and make hay and sell it, and be rich like the white man. But how dare I cut my mother’s hair?”
Our land is now threatened as never before. After, as the wasichus put it, “the West was won, wresting virgin soil from blood-thirsty red savages,” they at least left us the land they looked upon as worthless: land with little water, unsuited to farming, or deserts where nothing would grow. But then they discovered that this land had coal, copper, oil, natural gas, and uranium, and the wasichus suddenly discovered, or rather invented, “a patriotic need to develop these energy sources.” Our res has become “a potential pay zone.”
The history of the great wasichu land grab that robbed us of our ancient hunting grounds is a very sad one. In 1858, the government made a number of treaties with the tribes both east and west of the Missouri River. The chiefs were made to “touch the pen,” to make their thumb marks on these treaties. They believed what the white man told them, that these strange pieces of paper would protect their land. They were lied to. At that time we still owned the western plains. In 1861, the Dakota Territory, also known as the Great Sioux Reservation, was established. It comprised a huge land area of what is now North and South Dakota, all of Nebraska north of the Platte River, and vast chunks of Montana and Wyoming east of the Great Divide. At the same time, our brothers, the Sioux tribes living east of the “Big Muddy,” the Missouri, owned most of Minnesota. Their country was overrun by hordes of land-hungry Europeans, mostly Swedes and Germans, and they were forced, at gunpoint, to surrender much of the land they owned. In return they were promised rations to make up for what was taken from them. But the rations were stolen by their white agent and his pals and the people faced starvation. The agent said: “Let them eat grass.” In 1863, the Minnesota Dakotas rose in rebellion, killing the agent and stuffing his mouth with grass. This was called the Great Sioux Uprising. I have seen an old newspaper with the headline THE SIOUX MUST BE EXTERMINATED AND NOW IS A GOOD TIME TO DO IT. The article went on: “They have forfeited all rights to property and life. Extermination, swift, sure, and terrible, is the only thing that can satisfy us.” The army acted accordingly. The Sioux were driven out of Minnesota, across the Missouri. At Mankato, there was a mass hanging of thirty-eight Sioux warriors, a better show, I’m sure, than a TV spectacular of today. The warriors met their fate singing their death songs.
In 1867, the whites began building the transcontinental railroad through Sioux land. At the same time they built a wagon road, the so-called Bozeman Trail, to reach the newly discovered gold fields in Montana. We called it the Thieves Road. We wanted no war with the whites. All we wanted was to be left alone. But they forced us to defend our land, and Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and our Cheyenne allies fought the army along the Bozeman Trail. A certain Captain Fetterman swore that with eighty men he could ride over the whole Sioux Nation. He had exactly eighty men with him when we wiped them all out to the last man. The army was forced to give up the Thieves Road—for a while.
In 1868 we made the famous Treaty of Fort Laramie, with the government still promising us the vast plains known as the Great Sioux Reservation. It was broken before the ink was dry. It was just a little piece of paper for the white man to wipe his ass with. The Black Hills, our sacred Paha Sapa, are at the heart of what was the Great Sioux Reservation, given to us for all eternity. This was We Maka Ognaka Ichante, or Ichantognaka, the heart of the earth that is our blood, the heart of existence, the place from which, according to our legends, the Lakota people originated, the home of the wakinyan, the legendary thunderbirds. In 1874, in defiance of the treaty, General Custer led an army expedition into the Black Mills. He reported that “there was gold in the grass roots.” Red Cloud said: “We knew that there was yellow metal in little chunks up there, but we didn’t bother with it, because it was not good for anything.” The whites did not think so and in no time gold-crazy prospectors overran our sacred hills. We never got those hills back, but at least we made Custer pay for what he had done. He had boasted that with his Seventh Cavalry he could ride over all the Indians on the Plains. At the Little Big Horn we proved him wrong. In the end we were defeated. We were outnumbered a hundred to one and we had no Gatling guns or cannon. The Montana and then Wyoming territories were established and each time we lost more land. The crooks in Washington handed over forty-seven million acres of Indian land to the railroads—the greatest land grab ever. In 1889, the government divided the Dakota Territory into the states of North and South Dakota, opening them up for settlement by homesteaders. The Lakota people were squeezed into five different reservations, but our Rosebud res still covered some six or seven million acres, bound by the Missouri River in the east, the Big White River in the north, and the Nebraska line in the south. Some of our people were forced to accept land allotments, usually about six hundred acres per family, often less. This was something new. We always thought the earth belonged to all the people and could not be “owned” by a single person, or even family. Also, suddenly you did not have to be a full-blood anymore to get an allotment. Having one- sixteenth Indian blood would do. Land could now be bought and sold.
One after another, Gregory, Tripp, and Mellette counties were opened to settlement. “Unallotted” land was given to white homesteaders. Indians were offered land to buy provided they had money. They didn’t. Mom still has a little of the original Brave Bird land allotment left. The wasichus will probably find a way to steal it. By 1970, our once mighty reservation had shrunk to some 975,000 acres. Wow, you might think, those damn Indians still have too much land left. Think again. Most of the res is now a checkerboard of red- and white-owned parcels of land. Most of the Indian owned property is leased out to white ranchers. Lease money can be as little as twenty-five cents per acre or as high as a dollar and a half. The price is determined by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “on behalf of the Indians,” but mostly for the profit of the whites who run their cattle on our land. Often you wait for your lease money until your hair turns white.
More and more land is falling under state jurisdiction. Bit by bit the state has encroached upon our land. White residents and landowners have always fought for state jurisdiction over parts of our reservations. They are convinced, and rightly so, that state courts and law enforcement officers would better look after their interests in case of conflicts with our people than would either the federal government or tribal councils. Always in the back of their minds, but seldom publicly admitted, is the hope that state jurisdiction will eventually lead to state property taxes on Native Americans. As most Indian owners are too poor to pay taxes, they are bound to become delinquent in their payments and would be forced to sell their allotments for a pittance to eager white buyers. Over the years a number of jurisdiction bills have been passed by the South Dakota Legislature over the violent opposition of the tribes. Particularly during the term of the AIM-hating Governor Bill Janklow, more and more of the reservations fell under state jurisdiction. These bills were of course enacted “for the good of the Indians,” who would be better off under the state than under our quaint tribal governments. We resisted. We won a few cases in federal courts but could not stop the steady nibbling at our rights and lands.
So now we are fighting the last Indian war to hold on to the little of what we have left. Some years ago, Akwesasne Notes published an article: “It is becoming clearer and clearer why AIM has been targeted by groups like the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration as one of the ‘five most dangerous groups in the United States.’ It is because of an intensive effort under way by powerful elements in U.S. society to obtain energy, water, and mineral resources that are now on Indian land.” So, of course, they went after us with a vengeance. The movement was infiltrated by gangs of undercover agents, sowing dissension.
Most of our leaders were kept neutralized by new trials and indictments, with most of us being in jail at one time or other. Still AIM kept fighting for our land. But AIM is not what it used to be. Many of its leaders are dead, or burned out, or too old to fight. Still we must d
o what we can. All the confrontations I was involved in—the Trail of Broken Treaties, Wounded Knee, and Big Mountain—were fights for our land.
Our troubles are shared by the other Lakota reservations—Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Oak Creek. And they are shared by Native Americans all across the country.
After somehow surviving the first twenty or thirty years of reservation life, a time of starvation and utter misery, many families within our wider Ashké clan had gained their economic independence by becoming cattle owners and breeders of fine saddle horses. On Pine Ridge and Rosebud they had communal cattle herds and some Indians were becoming ranchers in a small way. But the government was quick to destroy our budding economy. World War I broke out and in 1917 the white superintendent sold off our cattle “because it was needed for the war effort.” The land was then leased to white ranchers, who still run their livestock on our tribal land. It does not help much that the tribal governments on our Sioux reservations and elsewhere are mostly run by “apples"—red on the outside and white on the inside—that is, by the most assimilated, with the least Indian blood. They have little desire to defend our land. At a hearing on tribal sovereignty, my friend Agnes Lamont testified: “Nowadays, the tribal councils get a big board together and they don’t let the people know what’s going on. Well, it’s just like when Chief Red Cloud got with the white people, they got him drunk . . . they say they got him drunk on firewater so he signed this land to them.”
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