Lakota Woman

by Mary Crow Dog

  “My father was hauling freight from Valentine with his ox team. He’d go down there in the morning and camp down there and then he’d come back to Rosebud and unload. We heard there was a Ghost Dance going on, north of us by the falls at an Indian village called Salt Camp. My mother’s youngest brother took sick somehow and he wanted to see the dance, thinking that it might cure him. So they hooked up the team, the buckboard, and I rode over there with my uncle and my mother and my sisters. We got up there and when we got to level ground and could see the village we saw a lot of commotion going on, a lot of people on horseback and running around. When we got closer we could see a big circle of women and men, no children, just men and women clasping hands like they do now in a round dance.

  “They all sing the ghost song, go round and round. I remember one fellow, he has a cartridge belt and a butcher knife, and a woman on each side of him. He acted like he was drunk, weaving back and forth, then he keeled over, falling on his face. Then he turned over. He lay there like dead and two men, the dance leaders, went over to him. One came with a fire, a pan full of glowing coals, and a big eagle wing. He put something on the fire which made a good-smelling smoke and with his big wing he fanned that smoke over that dancer, the one who was lying on his back. As he fanned the man he came to and sat up. The leader asked him what he had experienced.

  “He said: ‘Well, there was a road from here to over there, a ghost road. I could not see it but I knew it was there and I walked on it. I came to a hill and a lone man stood there. When he saw me he sat down and waved to me to sit down beside him. I went up the hill and he showed me a big Indian camp, tipis, buffalo, horses, men hunting, women tanning, like in the old days, and that man told me, “That is your people over there, that’s where you’re going to be. That’s how you shall live. Now you go back. Teach your people. Teach them to live the old way.” ‘ And he gave that dancer a new song to remember when he woke up.

  “And there was another dancer, not from our tribe, an Arapaho I think, and he got into a trance. He was like hypnotized, like not being where he was but somewhere else. In those days they had rifles and they wore shirts that were made out of canvas. And on the back they had the sun and the half-moon painted on each one. And the fringes were painted. They hung up those shirts on posts and they took their rifles and shot at them. And the bullets don’t pierce the shirts but are falling on the ground. And one man puts a ghost shirt on and says, ‘Come on, shoot at me,’ and they do and when the bullets hit the shirt they just fall harmlessly on the ground and the man isn’t hurt. And he tells the people, ‘With that sacred shirt, when you wear it, no bullet can hurt you.’ That’s the way it was.” This is how old Dick Fool Bull remembered it.

  When you go toward Parmelee, in the bed of the Little White River, you come to a place where Leonard’s great-grandfather had a Ghost Dance in 1890. You can still make out the circle made by many footsteps. During that dance an old man called Black Bear swooned and fell down in a trance. He lay like dead for some time. All of a sudden he woke up. They saw this man standing, his arms raised and outspread. And in broad daylight they saw lightning strike and go into his hand, and when they cedared him, and he came to, he had a little rock in his hand, a rock from the stars.

  So the soldiers were chasing the dancers, driving Crow Dog’s band deep into the Badlands, where they sought refuge on top of a snow-covered butte littered with the bones of long-extinct animals. There was nothing to eat. They were cold and hungry. The children were crying and the few ponies had become so thin they could hardly stand up. Crow Dog was dancing in the snow, naked except for a loincloth. He was singing:

  They are butchering cows here,

  They are killing buffalo cows.

  Make your arrows straight.

  Make arrows.

  He shot a sacred arrow high into the sky. He received a vision that he had to give himself for his people. But the dead and the buffalo did not return. The appointed time had not come yet. The soldiers found Crow Dog and his people in their hideout and Crow Dog surrendered to save the lives which were entrusted to him. They survived. Others were not so lucky. Sitting Bull and his companions were killed in a big shootout with tribal police which left the snow red from the blood of the slain of both sides. Big Foot also surrendered, but he and his people were massacred all the same.

  Leonard always thought that the dancers of 1890 had misunderstood Wovoka and his message. They should not have expected to bring the dead back to life, but to bring back their ancient beliefs by practicing Indian religion. For Leonard, dancing in a circle holding hands was bringing back the sacred hoop—to feel, holding on to the hand of your brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity, feel it with your flesh, through your skin. He also thought that reviving the Ghost Dance would be making a link to our past, to the grandfathers and grandmothers of long ago. So he decided to ghost-dance again at the place where this dance had been killed and where now it had to be resurrected. He knew all the songs and rituals that his father Henry had taught him, who himself had learned them from his grandfather. All through the night women were making old-style Ghost Dance shirts out of curtains, burlap bags, or whatever they could find. They painted them in the traditional way and they were beautiful.

  On the evening before the dance, Leonard addressed the people. We got it down on tape. This is what he said: “Tomorrow we’ll ghost-dance. You’re not goin’ to say ‘I got to rest.’ There’ll be no rest, no intermission, no coffee break. We’re not going to drink water. So that’ll take place whether it snows or rains. We’re goin’ to unite together, no matter what tribe we are. We won’t say, ‘I’m a different tribe,’ or, ‘He’s a black man, he’s a white man.’ We’re not goin’ to have this white man’s attitude.

  “If one of us gets into the power, the spiritual power, we’ll hold hands. If he falls down, let him. If he goes into convulsions, don’t be scared. We won’t call a medic. The spirit’s goin’ to be the doctor.

  “There’s a song I’ll sing, a song from the spirit. Mother Earth is the drum, and the clouds will be the visions. The visions will go into your mind. In your mind you might see your brothers, your relations that have been killed by the white man.

  “We’ll elevate ourselves from this world to another world from where you can see. It’s here that we’re goin’ to find out. The Ghost Dance spirit will be in us. The peace pipe is goin’ to be there. The fire is goin’ to be there; tobacco is goin’ to be there. We’ll start physically and go on spiritually and then you’ll get into the power. We’re goin’ to start right here,, at Wounded Knee, in 1973.

  “Everybody’s heard about the Ghost Dance but nobody’s ever seen it. The United States prohibited it. There was to be no Ghost Dance, no Sun Dance, no Indian religion.

  “But the hoop has not been broken. So decide tonight—for the whole unborn generations. If you want to dance with me tomorrow, you be ready!”

  For the dance, Leonard had selected a hollow between hills where the feds could neither see the dancers nor shoot at them. And he had made this place wakan—sacred. And so the Sioux were ghost-dancing again, for the first time in over eighty years. They danced for four days starting at five o’clock in the morning, dancing from darkness into the night. And that dance took place around the first day of spring, a new spring for the Sioux Nation. Like the Ghost Dancers of old, many men danced barefoot in the snow around a cedar tree. Leonard had about thirty or forty dancers. Not everybody who wanted to was able to dance. Nurses and medics had to remain at their stations. Life had to be sustained and the defenses maintained.

  On the first day, one of the women fell down in the snow and was helped back to what used to be the museum. They smoked the pipe and Leonard cedared her, fanning her with his eagle wing. Slowly she came to. The woman said she could not verbalize what had happened to her, but that she was in the power and had received a vision. It took her a long time to say that much because she was in a trance with only the whites of her eyes showing. On one
of the four days a snowstorm interrupted the dancing, but it could not stop it. Later, Wallace Black Elk thanked the dancers for their endurance and Russel Means made a good speech about the significance of the rebirth of the Ghost Dance.

  The Oglala holy man Black Elk, who died some fifty years ago, in his book said this about Wounded Knee: “I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

  “And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

  In that ravine, at Cankpe Opi, we gathered up the broken pieces of the sacred hoop and put them together again. All who were at Wounded Knee, Buddy Lamont, Clearwater, and our medicine men, we mended the nation’s hoop. The sacred tree is not dead!

  CHAPTER 11

  Birth Giving

  Ho! Sun, Moon, and Stars,

  All you that move

  In the Sky,

  Listen to me!

  Into your midst

  New Life has come.

  Make its path smooth.

  —Omaha prayer for a newborn child

  On Friday, April 5, Crow Dog left Wounded Knee for about one week. He had been chosen to go on a four-man embassy to Washington in the hope of being able to see the president in order to reach a settlement we could live with. As it turned out, trying to reach a settlement in Washington was just as futile as at Wounded Knee. At this time Crow Dog was not yet my husband and lover, but I had great confidence in him, believing in his powers as a medicine man, and I had hoped he would be around when I had my baby. Now he was leaving just when I was about to give birth and I felt let down. I was very self-centered, or rather belly-centered. Washington and Nixon could have been swallowed up by a flood or an earthquake as far as I was concerned. My baby seemed a helluva lot more important.

  The Sioux language has a number of words for pregnancy. One of them means “growing strong.” Another means “to be overburdened.” I felt both strong and overburdened at the same time. I wanted to have my baby at Wounded Knee, but was not sure whether that could be, because sometimes a person would come and say, “Negotiations are coming on real good. We’ll all be out of here in a day or two. We’re all gonna go home.” I always answered, “We’ll either be out of here or we’ll die. Whatever, I’m going to have my baby right here, the Indian way.” But I was a lot less confident than I sounded.

  I was determined not to go to the hospital. I did not want a white doctor looking at me down there. I wanted no white doctor to touch me. Always in my mind was how they had sterilized my sister and how they had let her baby die. My baby was going to live! I was going to have it in the old Indian manner—well, old, but not too old. In the real ancient tradition our women stuck a waist-high cottonwood stick right in the center of the tipi. Squatting, holding on to that stick, they would drop the baby onto a square of soft, tanned deer hide. They themselves cut the umbilical cord and put puffball powder on the baby’s navel. Sometimes a woman friend was squatting behind them, pressing down on their stomach, or working the baby down with some sort of belt. They would rub the baby down with water and sweetgrass and then wipe it clean with buffalo grease. I did not think that I was quite that hardy or traditional to do it exactly in that way. And where would I have gotten buffalo grease?

  Somebody should also have given me a fully beaded and quilled cradleboard and two turtle or lizard amulets to put the navel cord in—one to hide somewhere in the cradleboard and the other to display openly so that the bad spirits would think the navel cord was in that one, and they would try to bewitch it and would be fooled. Keha, the turtle, and Telanuwe, the sand lizard, are hard to kill. They live long. Their hearts go on beating long after they are dead. So these fetishes protect and give long life. My aunt, Elsie Flood, the turtle woman, would have made such a charm for me, but that was not to be.

  I should have found a winkte, that is a gay person, to give my baby a secret name. Winktes were believed to always live to a great old age. If they gave the newborn such a hidden name, not the one everybody would know him by, then the winkte’s longevity would rub off on the little one. Such a winkte name was always funnily obscene, like for instance Che Maza, meaning Iron Prick, and you had to pay the name-giver well for it. Well, I had no money and how was I going to find a winkte at Wounded Knee? I could not very well go to every warrior and ask him, “Are you by any chance gay?” This is not to criticize winktes. We Sioux have always believed that a person is free to be what he or she wants to be. I know a winkte who is incredibly brave. At the Sun Dance he chooses the most painful way of self-inflicted suffering. He pierces at the same time in two places in front and two spots in the back. Then he stands fastened between four poles with little space to move. He cannot tear himself loose by running a few steps and then making a sudden jump. He has to work the skewers through his flesh slowly, excruciatingly. But somehow, I cannot believe in the winktes’ power of longevity. In the old days the winkte lived so long because he wore women’s clothes and was tanning and beading and cooking while the other men went on a war party and got themselves killed. I have a suspicion that nowadays the winktes live no longer than anybody else.

  So I could not be quite as traditional as all that. When I say that I was determined to have my baby the Sioux way, I simply meant with an Indian prayer and the burning of sweetgrass and with the help of Indian women friends acting as midwives, having it the natural way without injections or anesthesia. I did intend to have my baby inside the ceremonial tipi, but was persuaded not to. It was too exposed and often under fire.

  I did not always have lofty thoughts about traditional birth giving on my mind during the last week before I went into labor. More often I was preoccupied with much more earthly things such as getting safely to the toilet. Being in my ninth month I had to urinate frequently. The women had cleaned out a garage and with the help of some men made it into a four-way ladies’ room. It was really weird. You always met a number of girls lined up, waiting their turn. Seeing my big belly they usually let me go ahead. Some-times tracers were all around us like lightning bugs as the bullets kicked up the dust at our feet. Somehow or other this shooting did not seem real. The girls remained standing in line, chatting and giggling. There was never any panic. Somebody would come and shout, “Is everybody all right? Anybody need tranquilizers?” Imagine being in a place where you needed tranquilizers to go to the can! We did not take them anyway. My problem was that in my condition I had to go two or three times as often as the others, and I was in more of a hurry.

  One evening I was inside the trading post. I had just cleaned up when that Pine Ridge man came in and sat down. He kept looking and looking at me and finally said, “Are you gonna have your baby here?”

  I told him, “Yeah, if I have to. Are you going to stay to the end?”

  He said, “No. I got work to do on the outside.”

  “Gee,” I told him, “you’re an Oglala. This is your land. You’re supposed to stick it out. I’m from the next reservation, Rosebud, a Brule woman and pregnant. But I’m staying. You’re not going to accomplish much.”

  He gave me a long look. “Wow! You’re gonna have your baby here the Indian way. That’s pretty heavy.” I had to agree with him.

  On another occasion my brother told me, “You shouldn’t be here, pregnant as you are. I should put you across my knee and spank you for having come.” I told him to mind his business, and did he have a cigarette.

  There was another pregnant woman with me at the Knee, Cheryl Petite. She also planned to have her baby inside the perimeter. She was a great big woman. Some of the guys were betting which of us would pop first. She went into labor on Sunday, three days before I did. Her husband w
as a loudmouth and he came to tell me, “She beat you. We’re gonna have our baby first.”

  I answered him that I did not care who was having her baby first. This was no sports event. I wasn’t in a race. But he kept on bragging all over the village that Cher was going to beat me to it. She was in labor for two hours. When her pains were about ten minutes apart he started worrying: “Maybe it would be better to go to the hospital. Maybe she’s too small. Maybe he’s not in the right position. Maybe it’s gonna be a breach baby.” So they got themselves all worried and he started negotiating at the roadblock, and the marshals let them through to have their baby at the Pine Ridge Hospital. The people inside the village felt bad. Many came to me saying, “Mary, you’re our last chance now to have a baby born at Wounded Knee.” I did not want to disappoint them.

  Shortly before Crow Dog left for Washington, he put on a peyote meeting. I was glad to be able to participate in it just when I was on the point of giving birth—exactly a week before I went into labor, as it turned out. I took medicine. When the sacred things were passed around I took hold of the staff and prayed with it, prayed that my child and I would come through it all safely. And at the time of midnight water Leonard stood up and said, “It’s gonna be all right. Good things will happen to you.” And I told him how much strength the meeting was giving me. While I was praying it had rained, a sort of foggy, misty-white rain. But then it stopped and when the meeting ended the sky was clear. I left confident, feeling good.