Lakota Woman (25 page)

With all that information pouring in upon Merhige, the judge began feeling twinges of conscience. He called us to his court in Richmond. A long trestle table in front of his bench was piled two feet high with petitions on behalf of Crow Dog. The judge pointed to this mass of papers, saying with a grin, “This is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t have enough space in this courtroom to bring them all out. We have letters here from Nigeria, Java, Greece, Japan, Sweden, Peru, and Austria. I just wonder how folks so far away can know more about this case than we do.” Then he said in a low, matter-of-fact voice: “I resentence Crow Dog to time served. I order his instant release.”

One of our lawyers, still oppressed by his bad experiences in South Dakota and convinced that Crow Dog would never get justice, protested loudly: “Your honor, this is the height of cruelty to keep this innocent man in jail!” He went on and on in this vein while we desperately tugged at his jacket. The judge repeated, grinning, “Didn’t you hear me? I ordered Crow Dog’s release.” Finally the good news sank in. It was a big moment for us. The judge invited us into his chambers, saying, “Gentlemen, this calls for a little libation.” He had changed into a very nice, smiling little owl. When we entered his chamber we saw that he had framed some of Richard’s illustrations. He told him, “You are very loyal but don’t try to be a lawyer.” He shook hands all around, commending us for our perseverance. He said, “Do something in return for me. Get my bishop off my back.”

We phoned Leonard in prison, giving him the good news. “You’ll be free in a few days,” we told him. But it did not turn out that way. It still took weeks of red tape, of lawyers traveling back and forth. Once the prison system has somebody in its power it holds on to him like a miser to his money. It actually took almost three months until Leonard walked out as a free man—well, not quite free, because he remained on parole.

The whole tribe turned out to welcome Leonard home. All the medicine men, the tribal chairman and council members, even some missionary priests came to honor Crow Dog. But the most heartwarming were the many poor full-bloods. Slowly, solemnly Leonard directed the circle of dancers while the drums roared and the singers intoned the chief-honoring song. As Leonard passed them by, all the women made the spine-tingling, pulsating brave-heart cry. Even Leonard’s old mother joined in and her cry was like that of a young woman. During this feast they honored me, too. Two medicine men, Wallace Black Elk and Bill Eagle Feathers, led me into the center of the circle, fastened an eagle plume in my hair, and gave me a new name: Ohitika Win, “Brave Woman.” It made me proud and happy.

In the film that was made about Crow Dog’s prison ordeal, Bill Kunstler summed up Leonard’s case in a short speech: “All Indian persecution goes back to those who rule this country and what they are doing, or have done, to our native people. You push them off the land because of human greed and then you fight every attempt, however hopeless, to resuscitate themselves and come back in some form. Like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Crow Dog became a symbol.

“I guess you hate the people most who make the most justifiable demands. Because they go to the heart of our psyche. We know they are right, and therefore we have to destroy them if we can. I think a lot of people are really afraid of justifiable Indian claims to land and resources. They’re most afraid of the fact that the claims are morally right, because when you are confronted with a moral imperative against an immoral imperative on your part, you’ve got to hate the people who assert that moral imperative. And I think there is an irrational, guilt-caused hatred now that is beyond my ability to analyze. We hate them because their claims are totally justified—and we know it.”

It was a very good speech, but I was tired of all speeches, even good ones. All I wanted was to be back in Rosebud in our little shack, having a little privacy, making coffee for Leonard, fondling the kids, tucking them in. Go to bed, turn out the lights, make love, and rest, rest, rest.

CHAPTER 16

Ho Uway Tinkte-My Voice You Shall Hear

It was Ptesan-win, the White

Buffalo Woman, who brought

the pipe to the people and taught

them how to live.

—
Lame Deer

T
he tremendous welcome the tribe had given Leonard upon his release from jail gave us a morale boost. A
few days later came the letdown as we tried to pick up the pieces of our former lives. The square of black, charred earth and ashes on the spot where the old house once stood still gave off a burned, acrid smell. Leonard’s parents and the older children huddled in the little red OEO shack in which I had set up house when I first moved in with Leonard. It was much too small to shelter all of us. It had been vandalized and overused to the point of collapse. Once it had contained a bath and flush toilet and a kitchen sink with tap water, but nothing worked anymore. It looked as if a tornado had swept through it. So Leonard fixed up the old cookshack into a tiny house for his parents. Made up of whatever had come handy, it was not much of a home, rather a flimsy hut like so many others on the res. In the year and a half that we had been away from the place the children had grown, shot up like mushrooms. Ina and Bernadette now looked more like young women, no longer the little girls I remembered from before. They were fresh and wild. The old folks had aged. They had become too feeble to handle the kids the way Leonard and I would have done. We all had become almost strangers to each other. We would have to get reacquainted with them on a grown-up to grown-up basis.

Leonard’s sons, Richard and Quanah, looked at their father with big eyes. Who was this stranger with the sunken cheeks? Could this be their daddy? Suffering had given Leonard a spiritual look. He was rather handsome that way. I felt almost sorry when, due to his craving for glazed doughnuts, he regained the fifty pounds he had lost in prison. We, too, had to get reacquainted. We felt awkward and shy with each other. We had seen each other only about a dozen times while he was in the penitentiary, sometimes through a wire mesh with a guard standing by, more often sitting in a sort of telephone booth, seeing one another only as a blurred image through layers of greenish glass and plastic, the phones distorting our voices.

The long months of Leonard’s incarceration had changed us both. Mostly the change was good, but we had to get used to the fact that we had become different persons. At times it seemed to me as if I had never left Grass Mountain; at other times, I felt as if I had been absent for an eternity. I had spent almost one year in New York with little Pedro. There I had enjoyed my private room with a private bath, with all the amenities of a big modern city. People had made a big fuss over me, treating me like a celebrity. Now it was back to outdoor privies, to getting water from the river and doing the laundry in a tub with the help of an old-fashioned washboard.

Most of the New York women who had supported us had been feminists. On some points I had disagreed with them. To me, women’s lib was mainly a white, upper-middle-class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman. With all their good intentions some had patronized me, even used me as an exotic conversation piece at their fancy parties. I disagreed with them on their notions of abortion and contraception. Like many other Native American women, particularly those who had been in AIM, I had an urge to procreate, as if driven by a feeling that I, personally, had to make up for the genocide suffered by our people in the past. But my white women friends had also taught me a lot which had influenced me in many ways. I was no longer the shy Sioux maiden walking with downcast eyes in the footsteps of some man. I was no longer an uncritical admirer of our warriors, heroes when facing death at Wounded Knee, but often six-foot-tall babies at home. Facing death or jail they had been supermen, but facing life many of them were weak. Many of them could not take responsibility for their actions. A lot of women got hurt and were left raising children without a father. Once it had been the traditional role of an Indian man to take care of and protect his family as well as old widows and young orphans. Now they said to our women, “Let’s you and me make a little warrior,” after which they got lost, making little warriors somewhere else. That was the reason Crow Dog was always stuck with caring for so many outsiders, young and old.

Before New York I had taken certain things for granted, almost as a normal part of daily life. But after I had been away for almost a year it no longer seemed quite so normal to me that so many Sioux men habitually beat their wives. My sister Barb came to cry on my shoulder. She was living with a boy at Porcupine. “When that boy is sober,” she told me, “he’s good, a right guy, but when he’s drunk he becomes a monster. He beat me up. He was off drinking last weekend. He came home and vomited all over me. I told him I was going for some clean clothes for myself. He said, ‘No, you’re not going anywhere.’ I said I could not stay like this with puke all over me, and started to leave. He ripped off a two-by-four from the fence and used it on me. He started beating me with this chunk of wood and messed up a couple of my ribs. So I left him for good.”

I grinned and told Barb, “For a little thing like that, most Sioux women wouldn’t leave their men.”

My sister said, “Indian women are stronger than the men because they have to put up with all that shit, but I’ve had it.”

I answered her: “Barb, we’ve been away for too long. We don’t see things the way we used to.”

Leonard was going through a similar phase of readjustment. He was feeling a lot of bitterness for what prison had done to him, and had to work it out of his system. His trials had made him famous among many Indians and whites alike. We both had to deal with innumerable letters, demands for help, money, spiritual comfort, and the performance of all kinds of ceremonies. Indian prisoners wanted him to visit them with his pipe and set up sweat lodges in their prison yards. Even white and black inmates asked for his assistance. He felt so strongly for everybody doing time that he turned them down only rarely. Wherever Indians tangled with the law, Leonard would travel there to help and I would travel with him. On top of it all he was still on five years’ parole. As he put it: “They can put me back in jail just for spitting on the sidewalk.” It was a great strain on both of us.

I noticed soon that Leonard was becoming more tolerant as far as women were concerned. He exhibited fewer of his old Sioux macho habits toward me and showed great understanding for my struggle to once again fit myself into reservation life, especially
his
life. I knew that it would take time before he could shake off his prison hangups. You cannot tell a person who has been fucked over for so many years just to shrug it off with a smile. We quarreled less than before. Leonard can be self-righteous, playing the holy man toward me. So I told him at the beginning of that new life of ours, “Hey, as soon as you get over your righteousness I’ll get over mine. If you get mad at me, just calm down and I’ll calm down too. I won’t take my troubles out on you and you won’t take yours out on me.” He laughed and said that was all right.

I asked him, “What do you expect of me?”

He said, “You are a medicine man’s wife. You are the water, you are the corn. You are the growing generation that you carry in your womb. I have a role and so have you. At the next Sun Dance you will stand there with the pipe representing Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Woman.”

Leonard tried to make me feel good by telling me about the role women play in Lakota legends and religion. Unlike in the Christian Bible where Eve is made from Adam’s rib, in one of our ancient tales woman came first. As Leonard told it in his medicine talk, this First Woman was given power by the Spirit. She was floating down to the world in a womb bag and, as Leonard put it, she was four-dimensional—all the Creation rolled into one human being. She came into the world with a knowledge and with a back-carrier and in it she had all our people’s herbs and healing roots.

First Woman had a dream and in her vision the Grandfather Spirit advised her: “On your left side, where your hand is, there is a stone.” And when she awoke she found a piece of worked flint in her hand, the first tool ever. And then she had another vision in which a voice told her: “To the right there are some bushes. Go there! You shall bring up the generation!” She did not know what it meant but she did as she was told. First Woman went into her moon time and as she was walking a drop of her moon blood fell to the earth. Rabbit saw it. He started to play with this tiny blood clot, kicking it around with his foot, and through the power of Tkuskanskan, the quickening, moving spirit, the blood clot firmed up and turned into We-Ota-Wichasha—Blood Clot Boy—the First Man.

First Woman was given the power to create the things necessary for survival, the knowledge to plant corn, the knowledge to make fire with a flint and keep it going with the help of seven sacred sticks. She was given seven rocks to heat up in the fire to a red glow. She was given a buffalo paunch to use as her first soup kettle by filling it with water and dropping the red-hot rocks into it together with meat and some herbs. First Woman was the center of the earth and her symbol was the morning star. “Maybe she came from a star,” Leonard finished his story.

Many times he also told us the story of the White Buffalo Woman who brought to our people the most sacred of all things, the ptehincala-huhu-chanunpa, the sacred pipe around which our faith revolves. This woman taught our people how to use the pipe and how to live in a sacred manner. After she had fulfilled her mission she bade farewell to the tribe, and as she wandered off the people saw her turning herself into a white buffalo calf. Then they knew that she had been sent to us by our relatives, the Buffalo Nation.

The Buffalo Calf Pipe still exists. It has been kept for many generations by the Elk Head family who passed it on to the Looking Horses who take care of it now. They live at Eagle Butte on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. The pipe’s stem is made of a buffalo legbone. It is so old that it can no longer be used for smoking. It is kept in a medicine bundle together with another ancient pipe whose bowl is made of red pipestone. The bundle is unwrapped very rarely on very solemn occasions. Leonard was privileged to pray with it on several occasions.

The way he told it to me, he was strangely scared at its unwrapping. All through the ceremony there were dark clouds drifting overhead amid thunder and lightning. This made Leonard look up and say, “Grandfather, we hear you!” All present made tobacco and cloth offerings to the pipe. Old Henry Crow Dog made a fire and burned sweetgrass and cedar for incense, fanning the bundle with these herbs’ fragrance. Leonard made an altar. He said that he was trembling doing this. They slowly unwrapped the bundle, layer by layer, until they beheld the holy pipe. As Leonard touched it he felt something like an electric shock, and when he took hold of it to pray he felt a great flow of power in his arms and veins filling his whole being. He wept. There were twelve men at that particular unwrapping and they all had a similar experience.

Leonard also told me that among many tribes the peyote people have a legend that the holy herb was found by an old woman and her granddaughter. They had become lost while gathering wild berries and nuts hundreds of years ago and could not find the way back to their village. Then they heard a voice saying: “Come over here!” Following it, they came upon a green round plant with a star design on it. This was Grandfather Peyote. He told them: “Eat me!” As they partook of this sacred food their minds cleared so that they found their way home. They brought the knowledge of how to use peyote to their tribe and to all the native people of this continent.

While Leonard stressed the importance of women in Indian religion, he was careful never to blur the role of men and women in traditional Indian life. When a number of AIM women formed an organization called Women of All the Red Nations, the first native feminist movement ever, he welcomed it. But when these women put on their own Sun Dance, excluding men from participating, he was angry. He said that our religion was all-inclusive. Neither men nor women should be prevented from taking part or going off by themselves. The only exception was that menstruating women should not take part in ceremonies because a woman’s period is considered so powerful that it wipes out any other power and renders rituals ineffective. When, recently, a small group of women wanted to put on a lesbian Sun Dance, Leonard just freaked out. That was too much for him. Leonard has always protected the role of women in our rituals, but he has also been opposed to women doing things which can traditionally be performed only by a man. A lot of changes in thinking had occurred during his absence and he had to deal with that.

As always when facing a new turn in his life, Leonard went on a vision quest called “Crying for a Dream” in Lakota. The Crow Dogs’ vision pit is situated on a high hill from which one can see for many miles in all directions. Surrounded by pines and sagebrush, it is a lonely but beautiful place where eagles nest and coyotes howl at the moon. The vision pit has been up there for many generations. It is an L-shaped hole leading into total darkness. Somehow it always reminded me of a grave. In a way the vision seeker is dead while crying for a dream, the more so because the Crow Dogs, once somebody is praying in the pit, cover the hole with a tarp strewn with sage, seemingly burying the vision seeker alive.

A vision quest lasts for four days and nights. Inside the pit you lose all sensations of having a body. Going into the earth womb, you are light-headed from the sweat bath to start with. You feel nothing but the damp earth at your back and the bed of sage under your sitting bones, and after a day or two, you feel not even that. You feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, because during a hanbleceya you do not eat or drink. It is scary to cry for a dream, to be entirely thrown upon yourself, not knowing whether you are awake or asleep, or even alive. As a woman I go on a vision quest for a day and a night or, at most, two days. I don’t think I could stand it for longer, imagining the earth walls closing in on me.