Lakota Woman

by Mary Crow Dog

  Periodic meetings were held between our spokesmen and various government negotiators to arrive at a peaceful settlement. These usually took place inside a tipi in no-man’s-land. Always an altar was set up and the pipe smoked before the discussions started. Some government people could not relate to this. One of them said, “Imagine having to sit on the earth around a buffalo skull in order to talk to those people.” The talks always came around to which came first, the chicken or the egg. The government negotiators said: “Disarm and surrender, then we’ll consider your grievances.” Always we replied: “Let’s talk about our grievances first, then we’ll disarm and come out.” Crow Dog proposed a compromise. Instead of surrendering our arms outright, we would stack them all inside the tipi while the negotiations went on. The tipi entrance would be barred by the sacred pipe, then nobody would touch these weapons. The government people rejected this proposal. They had no faith in the pipe. As a matter of fact, there was little that was sacred to them. They had no strong beliefs of their own, except a faith in naked power, numbers and paragraphs. And so the siege continued.

  Some of the most memorable events at the Knee were the two air-drops. The first airlift dropped four hundred pounds of food into the perimeter—powdered milk and Similac for the children, dried beans, flour, rice, coffee, tea, sugar, baking soda, and cigarettes, as well as bandages, antibiotics, and vitamins. The single plane came in very low. It almost got caught on a telephone wire, but managed to duck under it and come in for a hard landing on the road close to the trading post. As soon as it touched down, everybody ran up and unloaded it. To me it seemed as if it was done in a minute or less. It all happened so fast that the plane took off before the feds had a chance to react. The airlift came as a complete surprise to them. We saw them running about, gesticulating, shaking their fists at the sky. The pilot and copilot were both Vietnam vets. The copilot had been one of our medics for almost a month and he could show the pilot the way by picking out landmarks. He was white with a tiny bit of Mohawk in him. He had made a Sioux-style flesh offering before going on this mission.

  The second air-drop was carried out by three planes, Piper Cherokees, which was sure a good name for planes flying in support of Indians. Each plane carried four parachutes; each chute had two heavy duffel bags of food attached to it. Altogether the planes dumped one ton of supplies. They came in at first light on April 17. The men who flew these small machines were very brave. They flew very low through night and bad weather, expecting at any moment to be intercepted by government jets. One of the chutes did not open. I watched it hit the ground. It was full of flour, so when it hit there was a big white cloud and some overexcited people screamed that we were being bombed. The whole drop lasted about five minutes and then the planes vanished. The day of this air-drop was the day Clearwater was killed.

  Two of our men were killed at Wounded Knee and many were seriously wounded. On the other side no one was killed and only one marshal badly wounded. For all I know he might have been caught in the feds’ own crossfire. The marshals reacted very, quickly to the second airlift. A helicopter flew over in no time and from it a sniper opened fire on a few of our people still busy carrying food to the trading post. Our men shot at the copter and that started a firefight which lasted almost two hours. Frank Clearwater had arrived the day before with his pregnant wife Morning Star. She was Apache and he was Cherokee. He was resting on a bed inside the church when a bullet crashed through the wall and smashed into his head. When it became known that one of our brothers had been badly hurt we used the two-way radio to ask the marshals for a cease-fire. They promised to hold their fire and two of our men and some nurses went up the hill to get him. They were waving a white flag. The nurses wore arm bands and had a red cross painted on their helmets, but they were immediately shot at by the marshals and pinned down for two hours until it was dark and the firing ceased. Three brothers from a nearby bunker finally managed to get Clearwater on a blanket and carry him down. They came under fire all the way. Clearwater was brought up to the roadblock and, after some negotiations, the feds made a helicopter available which flew him to Rapid City where he died a few days later without ever having regained consciousness. His wife was kept overnight in jail. She wanted him buried at Wounded Knee, for which he had given his life, but Wilson and the government would not allow it “because he was not a Pine Ridge Sioux.” In the end Crow Dog buried him on his own land in the Indian manner, with the pipe and Grandfather Peyote.

  On April 27, Buddy Lamont, a thirty-one-year-old Oglala Sioux, an ex-marine Vietnam vet and only son, was shot through the heart and died instantly during a heavy firefight. Buddy was shot in an abandoned house next to the community center. I guess a sniper in one of the fed bunkers had pinned him down. He lost patience and ran out of the building, drawing more fire, possibly so he could shoot back, and just when he was coming out of the building he was hit. Again the medics were shot at. Again the relatives coming out with his body were arrested and wound up in Pine Ridge jail. Buddy received his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps just about the time a government bullet killed him. He is buried on the hill by the ditch, joining the ghosts of all the other Sioux killed at Wounded Knee. His headstone says: “Two thousand came to Wounded Knee in 1973. One stayed.”

  Rosebud Sioux reservation, South Dakota. A typical house.

  Leonard Crow Dog at Wounded Knee in 1973.

  Mary Crow Dog’s son Pedro, who was born at Wounded Knee during the siege in 1973.

  Clash with police at Custer, North Carolina, where demonstrators were manhandled when they protested the murder of Bad Heart Bull, a Sioux. (Photo by Ken Norgar.)

  Leonard Crow Dog talking to Mary’s son Pedro during visiting hours in jail.

  Rally for Leonard Crow Dog in 1976.

  “The Longest Walk” in Washington, D.C., in July 1977.

  Mary Ellen Crow Dog ,née Brave Bird, 1976.

  Ina Crow Dog being cured in a curing ceremony.

  The church at Wounded Knee, April 1973. (Photo by Owen C. Luck.)

  Saloon at Scenit, South Dakota, with sign “No Indians Allowed.”

  Leonard Crow Dog and friend in front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., during the takeover in 1972.

  Mary Ellen Crow Dog catching a nap during her husbands trial in 1976.

  Leonard Crow Dog, with Mary and her son Pedro, after his release from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, prison in 1977.

  Leonard Crow Dog praying.

  Revival of the Ghost Dance at Rosebud Reservation in 1974.

  Piercing during the Sun Dance ceremony at Leonard Crow Dog’s place.

  Leonard Crow Dog preparing for vision quest in 1973.

  Sun Dancer Merle Left Hand Bull blowing on eaglebone whistle during Sun Dance.

  Henry Crow Dog in sweat lodge, 1969.

  Henry Crow Dog before vision quest.

  Leonard Crow Dog in Sun Dance regalia, 1973.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Ghosts Return

  Eighty-five years ago

  the ghost dancers thought

  that by dancing

  they could change the earth.

  We dance to change ourselves.

  Only when we have done this

  can we try to change the earth.

  —Crow Dog 1974

  It was the Ghost Dance religion which was at the core of the first Wounded Knee, and Indian religion as much as politics was also at the heart of the second Wounded Knee in 1973. By common consent, Crow Dog was the spiritual leader inside the Knee, and together with medicine man Wallace Black Elk he performed all the ceremonies. Crow Dog’s influence upon the spiritual and physical well-being of the occupiers was very, very strong. Outside, and not far from Wounded Knee, the oldest and most respected Sioux holy man, Frank Fools Crow, acted in support of us from his place at Kyle, doing as much for the Sioux people outside as Crow Dog did inside. All the medicine men of the Sioux Nation visited and supported us, but it was Crow Dog who revived
the Ghost Dance, outlawed for over eighty years, right at Wounded Knee, during the siege.

  Leonard did so many things. He performed the rituals and prayers, took a major part in all negotiations, operated upon gunshot wounds, healed the sick, and even took over for a while as chief engineer. The fires for the sweat lodge were kept going twenty-four hours a day, and almost every night we had a ceremony, such as a yuwipi or, on a few occasions, a peyote meeting. On solemn occasions men and women made flesh offerings by cutting pieces of skin from their arms, just as Sitting Bull had done in 1876, a few days before the Custer battle. Some of the leaders pierced their breasts as is done during a Sun Dance, thinking their suffering could help the people through spiritual power.

  Every evening I went to a ceremony. These rituals were quiet, very quiet. One evening, after a ceremony, I was walking back to the other side of Wounded Knee where I stayed, and all along the creek I heard women crying, babies screaming, cannon shots, and the hooves of horses drumming on the earth. I was walking along Cankpe Opi Wakpala where our women and children had been killed in 1890. It was so strange, reliving this tragedy in a half dream, this recurring of a vision I had as a young girl after a peyote meeting. I still do not know what to make of it. Is it the vision of a tragedy still to come, of history repeating itself?

  Every evening all the warriors took sweat baths to purify themselves. Leonard put his friend Wallace Black Elk in charge of most of these inipi ceremonies. One night Leonard himself was running the sweat, and when he and the others came out of the lodge the feds opened up on them, hitting the lodge and the tipi with their M-16s. Some men jumped into the shallow bunker nearby, but Crow Dog got stuck between the fireplace and the bunker and had to lie there, very exposed, for about two hours before he had a chance to make a dash for shelter. It was a miracle nobody got killed that day.

  Before we had our first meeting with the government representatives trying to negotiate a settlement, everybody asked Leonard to perform a sunrise ceremony at Big Foot’s grave. He set up an altar and said: “Our most sacred altar is this hemisphere, this earth we’re standing on, this land we’re defending. It is our holy place, our green carpet. Our night light is the moon and our director, our Great Spirit, is the sun.”

  Leonard was our chief doctor and all the white medics and volunteer M.D.s deferred to him. The white doctors had come to the Knee expecting to treat children’s and respiratory diseases. They had not thought that there would be firefights. They had no surgical equipment. So Leonard did all the operating. When Buddy Lamont got killed there were three other men with him in the bunker. One of them was hit four times, three times in the arm and once in the foot. The second man was shot in the hand and the third, Milo Goings, got a bullet in his knee. Leonard doctored them all. It took him less time than it would have a white doctor to take a bullet out and there never were any infections. He was using Indian medicine to treat the wounds. To take a bullet out, he first used porcupine quills and an herb, redwood, to make the flesh numb. Once this kind of Indian anesthesia began working—and it acted very fast—he went in with the knife, the same knife he uses to pierce the Sun Dancers. He sewed the wounds up with deer sinew and stopped the bleeding with sacred gopher dust, a medicine Crazy Horse had preferred above all others. To prevent infections and speed up the healing process, he used taopi tawote, wound medicine, I think in white botany it is called yarrow. He employed an herb called wina wazi hutkan, burr root, to stop internal hemorrhages. He treated respiratory diseases with the sweat bath and with teas made of several varieties of sage, and reduced fever with hehaka pejuta, the elk herb which the whites call horsemint. This is also a powerful love medicine. These were some of the Indian herbs which Leonard used. Pat Kelly, a white doctor from Seattle who came to the Knee to help us, had complete faith in Leonard. He always said that wounds treated by Crow Dog healed twice as fast as those treated by the white medics with their modern medicaments.

  Rocky Madrid, a chicano medic, was hit in the stomach. It was a miracle that he did not get his guts blown out. He managed to walk back to the hospital and Crow Dog took the bullet out. Luckily it had not penetrated all the way into the stomach. Rocky said that Leonard was in and out with his knife almost before he knew it and that with Indian anesthesia he did not feel a thing. Leonard taught the white medics how to use his natural medicines and to say the proper prayers before treating a patient.

  It was strange that Crow Dog was called upon to doctor machines as well as men. After Bob Free resigned as chief engineer, Leonard took over his job, too. When things broke down he fixed them. He had a real gift for that kind of work. As a kid he had learned how to repair cars. At the Knee he repaired the gas pumps and kept the electricity going. During the last few weeks it was cut off and we had to make do with kerosene lamps which we had found in the store. Part of Leonard’s job as chief engineer was to put up defense works. He supervised the building of bunkers, all of which had individual names, such as the Strong Heart or the Sitting Bull bunker. He engineered a defensive circle of mines. He put some boys to work pounding a hundred pounds of coal from the store into charcoal. Also from the store he got about a thousand light bulbs. These he filled with charcoal and battery acid. He put all these tiny light bulb bombs on one fuse, all the way around the perimeter, connected to a battery. They were strung on a wire and when one of the feds touched that it set off a spark which exploded the bulbs. Individually his tiny mines could not do much damage but they served well in keeping the marshals at a respectful distance. One thing Leonard did not do was to take up a gun and shoot. His being a medicine man forbade it.

  The most memorable thing Leonard did was to bring back the Ghost Dance. I think he did this not only for us, the living, but also for the spirits of those lying in the mass grave. As I mentioned before, the Ghost Dance tradition has always been strong in our family. Leonard’s great-grandfather, the first of the Crow Dogs, was not only one of the earliest Ghost Dancers among the Sioux, but also one of their foremost leaders.

  Back in 1889 a man came and told Crow Dog: “A new world is coming. A new power will strip off like a blanket this world which the wasičun has spoiled, and underneath will be the new world, undefiled and green. Walking on it we will meet our dead relatives whom the wasičun has killed, come to life again, coming to greet us. The buffalo, who have all disappeared into a great hole in a mountain to get away from the wasičun, will come out from their caves beneath the earth to fill up the prairie again with their countless herds. The father says so.” That man was Short Bull from our own Brule tribe, a famous warrior who had fought Custer.

  Many men were soon traveling silently at night, on foot, on horseback, hidden in cattle trains, wandering hundreds of miles across the new railroad tracks and over the barbed-wire fences, traveling ghostlike, unseen and unheard by the wasičuns, spreading the same message from tribe to tribe.

  Short Bull and his friends Kicking Bear and Good Thunder had received this message from Wovoka himself, the Paiute holy man to whom the Ghost Dance religion had been given in a dream on the day the sun had died. Wovoka had let them look inside his black Uncle Joe hat. In it they had seen the universe. They had looked into the hat and understood. The Piute dreamer made them die and walk on the new world that was coming. Then he made them come to life again. Wovoka had given them a new dance, new songs, and new prayers. He gave them a sacred eagle feather, an eagle wing, and scarlet face paint. Of the four songs he gave them, the first brought fog and white mist, the second brought snow and icy cold, the third, gentle rain, and the fourth, sunshine and warmth.

  Life was so hard for our people—starving, fenced in, without horses or weapons. The message brought them hope. And so they began to dance and sing, to bring back the buffalo, to bring back the old world of the Indians which the wasičun had destroyed, the world they had loved so much and for whose return they were praying.

  Crow Dog, together with his friends and relatives Two Strikes and Yellow Robe, joined Short Bull’s camp o
f Ghost Dancers, bringing all his followers along. They moved to Pass Creek where a sacred tree stood, which was good to dance around. They were dancing, too, at Sitting Bull’s camp at Standing Rock, at Big Foot’s place near Cheyenne River, even at Pine Ridge right under the wasičuns’ noses. The Ghost Dance was a religion of love, but the whites misunderstood it, looking upon it as the signal for a great Indian uprising which their bad consciences told them was sure to come. The whites were afraid, and the agents called in the army to put this new religion down.

  At Pass Creek, Crow Dog’s people danced in a circle holding hands, wrapped in upside-down American flags symbolic of the wasičuns’ world of fences, telegraph poles, and factories which would also be turned upside down, as well as a sign of despair. They also dressed in special Ghost Dance shirts painted with star and moon designs and with the images of eagles and magpies. These shirts, the people believed, would make them bulletproof. Whirling in a circle for hours and hours, some dancers fell down in a trance, “died,” and in death wandered among the stars, spoke with their long-dead relatives, and experienced wonderful things which they described afterward.

  Grandpa Dick Fool Bull was a child when he witnessed the Ghost Dance, but he remembered it well. A few years before he died over a hundred years old, Leonard taped him. This is what Dick Fool Bull said on his tape: “To start with I’ll tell you what I remember started the trouble, the big trouble. I happened to be at Rosebud, camping at Rosebud under guard—soldiers, cavalry—they rounded up all the fathers and grandfathers to make sure they don’t get away and mix up with that hostile bunch.