Joseph M. Marshall III (10 page)

There was no choice but to go along with the new ways to save what was left of the culture. It was necessary and acceptable to learn English so long as the Lakota language wasn’t forgotten, for example. Even today, many Lakota practice both Christianity and traditional religion, and there are enough bilingual Lakota - people to insure that the core of our culture is still intact. Smiling and nodding has its rewards.

For me there are positive links between Lakota boyhood in the 1950s to Lakota boyhood in the 1850s. For example, I learned to hunt and make bows and arrows from my maternal grandfather. His other male relatives or contemporaries were mentors for me as well. I learned the meaning of patience and gentleness (among other things) from my grandmother and - every other “grandma” I came into contact with. I was nurtured and taught and indulged much the same way Light Hair was. Childhood for me was wonderful and I’m certain Crazy Horse felt the same about his. Yet it is at times necessary to examine the differences between my boyhood and his.

The state of the Lakota nation as Light Hair entered his teen years was much different than it was during that same period in my life a hundred years later. In the late 1850s the Lakota nation was still strong and maintained a vast territory and the lifestyle of nomadic hunters living in buffalo-hide dwellings. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was the first treaty to establish static borders not of our choosing. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty redefined those borders and identified what is now the western half of South Dakota as the Great Sioux Reservations for “as long as the grasses grow.” In the 1950s, we were scattered across the state of South Dakota on eight reservations, the consequence of a series of “agreements” that whittled our traditional territory—then our “treaty lands.” The discovery of gold prompted the first “agreement” in 1875, and several others followed that resulted in the eight reservations.

By the time Light Hair was ten or eleven, Euro-Americans were a consistent presence and an increasing annoyance. The Oregon Trail cut across the southern part of the territory, and beginning in the late 1840s it became a steady stream of white emigrants moving east to west from late spring to midsummer. Tens of thousands of people, thousands of oxen, mules, and horses, and hundreds of wagons passed through every summer for twenty years. Those people carried with them many things new to the Lakota, some beneficial such as iron knives and cooking pots, and some destructive such as liquor and disease. Most of all, however, they brought change.

The concerns of the old Lakota leaders of the time are the realities that we contemporary Lakota live with today. Throughout the 1850s the growing Euro-American presence certainly impacted Light Hair and the Lakota who lived near the emigrant trail, derisively dubbed the “Holy Road.” Many of the older Lakota leaders of the time worried that the assurances of the white peace commissioners that all the emigrants wanted was safe passage through Lakota territory and space wide enough for wagon wheels were empty promises and a portent of the future.

They were right. In 1868, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota returned to Fort Laramie for more negotiations. The Powder River, or Bozeman Trail, War had just ended. The federal government allowed the Lakota to think the soldiers were abandoning the forts along the Bozeman Trail—from south-central Wyoming north to the gold fields of Montana—because they had “lost” the conflict. In truth, they could afford to abandon the Bozeman Trail because they were developing an east-west rail line across Montana, a more direct route to the gold fields. Negotiating from the position of “loser,” the government’s peace commissioners successfully convinced the Lakota that, as “victors,” they had won what is now the western half of South Dakota. Furthermore, portions of the current states of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska were designated as “ceded territory” where the Lakota could hunt. In reality, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was the beginning of the end of the free-roaming, nomadic hunting life.

The late 1950s found us living in square houses in scattered communities across the reservations. Our lifestyle was largely indefinable and on the dole of the United States government. The buffalo-hide
tipestola
or pointed dwellings (more commonly referred to as
tipi
) were only memories. We were virtually powerless politically. But those circumstances were irrelevant to me as a child. My grandparents and I lived in a log house on a plateau above the Little White River, which my grandfather referred to as
Maka Izita Wakpa,
the Smoking Earth River. He never ever referred to the river by its new name. Perhaps it was his way of staying connected to the past.

That past came alive in the stories both he and my grandmother told. I can’t recall precisely at what point I realized that those stories were much more than just entertainment. There were, of course, the more whimsical stories of
Iktomi,
the Trickster, but even those always had a lesson to offer. Other stories were about people and events, many of which did not find their way into the history books of the interlopers nor coincide with their versions of the same people and events. The information in those stories were our history—family, community, and national history. The impact and the value of those stories, for me, are summed up in something my grandfather said one late summer afternoon when I was five or six. We had been walking along the Smoking Earth River a few miles from our house and came to the top of a hill. We stopped to rest and he grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me so that I could look back along the trail we had walked.

“Look back at the way we came,” he said. “Remember the trail we have walked. Someday I might send you down that trail by yourself. If you don’t remember it, you will be lost.”

That sentiment is why the medicine men smiled and nodded when the Indian police ransacked their homes and confiscated their pipes and medicine bundles. You can take away the things but you cannot take away the knowledge, the awareness. That sentiment is why, in spite of everything, the first generation of Lakota to live on the reservations clung to their ways. That sentiment is why, in spite of the intensive and extensive efforts of the government and parochial boarding schools, there is still a Lakota language, still a Lakota identity. We haven’t forgotten the trail we have walked. Hopefully enough of us have heeded Crazy Horse’s message and we will never forget that he was here.

My grandparents and their generation were not too different from Light Hair’s parents and grandparents. The elderly Lakota of the 1850s, in the face of the white incursion and the changes brought by them, were telling stories and reminding their children and grandchildren to remember the trails they had walked.

Handcrafting a bow out of ash is almost a lost art for the Lakota. My grandfather taught me because his father, White Tail Feather, and second father (stepfather), Henry Two Hawk, taught him to make bows and arrows. They learned it from their fathers and grandfathers. And the methods and process are the same as those that were taught to Light Hair—exactly the same. Each time I’ve had the opportunity to make a bow, a thought invariably passes through my mind:
This is the way it has been done for hundreds of generations.

I make my bows the same way Crazy Horse did.

That is only one of many connections he and I have as Lakota boys.

Part II

The Rites of Passage

Seven

Memory is like riding a trail at night with a lighted torch, some of the old ones liked to say. The torch casts its light only so far, and beyond that is the darkness.

There were, among the Lakota, young people who couldn’t remember a time without white men. For some young men, making arrows meant looking for the white man’s barrel hoop iron to be chiseled into points, rather than finding the right kind of chert or flint—the stones that had been chipped and flaked into arrow heads for generations untold. Now, most of the young men did not have the skill to make stone arrow points. Likewise, after Grattan and his soldiers were so soundly defeated, the Lakota who lived near the fort—the Loafers—were already complaining that the Long Knives would take away their annuities permanently. Surely there was darkness of a kind, some of the old ones said sadly at hearing about the complaining. How is it that a people whose life path for countless generations has been hunting have forgotten how to hunt and make meat? Living in the shadow of the fort waiting for the annuity cattle was easier than finding and chasing buffalo. But that was not life in the opinion of those who shunned the easy influences of the whites and stayed away from the fort.

At the southern edges of Lakota territory near the rolling hills close to the Blue Water River, which flowed into the Shell, was a new death scaffold. Four poles supported a platform holding a hide-wrapped body. From the platform hung the accoutrements of a warrior’s life, a painted shield and eagle feathers. This was the final earthly abode of Conquering Bear.

The passing of the old man left a hole in his family and uneasiness for the Sicangu Lakota—uneasiness born of the new hard times that came with the white man. Someone among the Long Knives at the fort, perhaps the one called Fleming or perhaps on the orders of the “great father” far to the east, had labeled Conquering Bear as the spokesman for the Sicangu. Respected as he was in his own camp and by many Sicangu, other leaders had bristled that the old man seemed to accept the white man’s authority in this matter. Others said the old man was simply doing what he would have done in a sensitive situation. Nonetheless, there was disagreement and uneasiness because some blamed him for the Grattan incident.

After the days of mourning, the Crazy Horse lodge and a few other Oglala lodges visiting among the Sicangu departed for the Powder River country. There, they rejoined the Hunkpatila encampment. Light Hair was happy to see Lone Bear and his new friend He Dog.

The playfulness of boyhood was gone now. The concerns of the three boys were now more and more tied to the issues facing their people. They stayed near the council lodge in the evenings hoping to catch as much as they could of the earnest conversations of the old men as they talked of recent events at Fort Laramie. News about the fort was never lacking. According to the latest messenger, the Long Knives were still staying near the fort. They had been so afraid that Grattan and the other dead had been left unburied for days, until the French trader Bordeaux was paid to gather them up for burial. Many of the old men laughed, amazed that the bluster and loudness exhibited by most whites seemed to be nothing more than fog before the persistent sun.

But that didn’t mean they were any less of a problem; if anything they would be much more so because they would simply wait until other soldiers came. There was something very strange about a group of people who paid men to do their killing, an old man said. And by all accounts, and especially if the wagons on the Holy Road were any indication, there seemed to be an endless supply of whites. Which meant they had plenty of soldiers. The “great father” needed only to say how many should be sent to avenge Grattan.

Many men came to talk with Crazy Horse as well. Light Hair’s father was not only a thinking man, but, as a holy man, he cared deeply about the spiritual balance that every person should carry. Much had happened in the past few years that affected the essence of being Lakota. Most who came to seek his insight were worried most about the effect the white intruders were having on the Lakota way of living. Some thought the best way to react was to stay away from the whites in order not to catch their illnesses or subject themselves to their ways. Others were in favor of taking direct action to drive them away and prevent them from entering Lakota territory. But all were concerned with how quickly many Lakota became attached to the material goods so easily offered by the whites. Trading for a wool blanket was easier than days of hard work to scrape and soften an elk hide.

Change was a part of life, Crazy Horse advised. Yet it is wise to hang on to the things that make us all happy and worthwhile as Lakota. In the days of the far past the lance gave way to the bow and arrow as a hunting weapon, yet the essence of being a hunter didn’t change. Trading for a blanket or a length of blue cloth didn’t have to change the person trading for or using the blanket or the cloth, Crazy Horse was certain. Anything in the hand didn’t have to be given the power to change what was in the mind and the heart. And that, he understood, was at the root of many fears, that the essence of being Lakota could be so easily changed by new and different
things.
It made no sense.