Lakota Woman (26 page)

Leonard told me about his first vision seeking. He was just a boy then, in his early teens. A spirit had told him to hanbleceya. Old Man Henry and an uncle helped him. They put up a sweat lodge for him and purified him in it. His oldest sister had made a flesh offering, having someone cut little pieces of skin from her arms and putting them into a gourd rattle which he took with him into the pit. It comforted him that she had made this sacrifice. They put him in there for two days and nights, not an easy thing for a young kid to undergo. He received a great vision. He told me that he heard someone walking around above him, that he heard a voice. It was telling him: “We are taking you to a place where you will be taught.”

Suddenly he was not in the pit anymore. He was standing in front of a sweat lodge and all around him were tipis and horses, as in the old days. He saw flowers, deer, herds of buffalo. He had been transported into a beautiful ghost world. A man in a buckskin outfit was talking to him. He told Leonard that whatever he was experiencing his elders would interpret for him. He was not to add anything to his vision but should also not leave anything out. The strange man then gave Leonard a small medicine bundle. When Leonard finally came out of his vision, he found an oddly shaped pebble in his clenched fist. He carries it in his medicine bag. When he went on his first hanbleceya after getting his freedom he also received a vision, but a smaller one.

Some people crying for a dream for four days and nights do not receive a vision. It does or does not happen. Also not all vision seekers use a pit. Uncle Bill Eagle Feathers used to pray for a dream by just hunkering down on top of a hill. The spot he had chosen must have been used for this purpose for a long, long time because the whole hilltop was covered with ancient sacred things—animal skulls, rattles, medicine bags, disintegrating tobacco bundles, cloth offerings. It was a place of mystery and whenever I was up there I felt unseen presences. There was always a sharp wind blowing on that place and I wondered how Uncle Bill could have stood it, fasting and praying on that exposed, stormswept spot.

One thing that impressed me, living at Grass Mountain, was that for the people among whom I lived, every part of daily life had a religious meaning. Eating, drinking, the sight or cry of an animal, the weather, a beaded or quilled design, the finding of certain plants or certain rocks, had spiritual significance. I watched, listened, and learned. The process was odd. On the one hand I was still the same footloose half-breed girl who once had ripped off stores in many big cities; on the other, I was becoming a traditional Sioux woman steeped in the ancient beliefs of her people. I was developing a split personality. But so were all the modern Sioux around me, I think.

It touched me deeply to see medicine men and elders include even small children in their ceremonies, to watch the love and patience with which they were taught to participate. I remember little Pedro sitting in on his first yuwipi ceremony. He was still so small and the spirits whirled him around and he was yelling to me out of the darkness that they had shown him a glowing, many-colored bird.

I also remember one of the first peyote meetings Leonard ran for me. There were only five of us, and I still did not fully understand the ways of peyote. I just ate it up like candy. I took about fifteen spoons and after a few hours got silly, started to giggle, and could not stop. I really peyoted up I forgot everything around me. I closed my eyes and found myself in a tropical land full of fantastic, wonderful creatures. Something was happening to my mind. I plucked a strange, shimmering fruit from a golden tree and knew that this was the forbidden fruit of knowledge. But this was an Indian Eden. There was no snake and no angry angel with a sword chasing me away. And I saw for the first time peyote in the light of knowledge. Next to me sat a pregnant woman. She told me that the sacred medicine had gone into the baby inside her, making it dance to the rhythm of the water drum. I did not believe her. Later, when I was pregnant again, I felt my own baby dancing in my womb in harmony with the drumbeat. Leonard lets little children come into these meetings, lets them sit in his lap and listen to the songs. At the age of four little Pedro could already sing many Native American Church songs and use the gourd rattle.

At last came the time for me to sun-dance. One pledges at the end of one Sun Dance to take part in the following one. Standing right by the sacred tree I made my vow: “Next summer I shall sun-dance. I will do it so that Indian prisoners dear to me should go free.” A year had gone by and I had to fulfill my promise.

Uncle Bill Eagle Feathers, who died a few years ago, was the intercessor, the living bridge between the people and the Spirit. As he called it, the Sun Dance was the granddaddy of all Indian ceremonies. He was right. Wi-Wanyang-Wacipi, the Sun Dance, is the most awe-inspiring of our rituals, occurring every year at the height of summer. In 1883 the government and the missionaries outlawed the dance for being “barbaric, superstitious, and preventing the Indians from becoming civilized.” The hostility of the Christian churches to the Sun Dance was not very logical. After all, they worship Christ because he suffered for the people, and a similar religious concept lies behind the Sun Dance, where the participants pierce their flesh with skewers to help someone dear to them. The main difference, as Lame Deer used to say, is that Christians are content to let Jesus do all the suffering for them whereas Indians give of their own flesh, year after year, to help others. The missionaries never saw this side of the picture, or maybe they saw it only too well and fought the Sun Dance because it competed with their own Sun Dance pole—the Cross. At any rate, for half a century Indians could go to jail for sun-dancing or for participating in any kind of tribal ceremony.

For this reason, white historians think that there was no sun-dancing among the Sioux between 1883 and the 1930s, but they are wrong. The dance simply went underground. During all that time, every year some Sioux, somewhere, performed the ceremony. Henry and other old men still bear the deep scars on their chests from Sun Dances performed illegally in out-of-the-way places during the 1920s. All through our valley along the Little White River you can find traces of old, well-hidden dance circles. For half a century a handful of medicine men and elders kept the dance alive, passing on the songs that go with it and the knowledge of how to perform this ceremony, down to the smallest detail. Nothing was lost.

Leonard’s chest is a battleground of scars from more than a dozen piercings. Since 1971 he has put on the ritual every summer on our own land. This happened in the following way: Many traditional people had become disgusted with the commercialization of the Sun Dance at Pine Ridge, with entrance fees and payments for picture taking, hot dog stands and ferris wheels, which made this sacred ceremony into a tourist attraction. So in 1971 a few medicine men, among them Leonard and Uncle Bill, Wallace Black Elk, and John Lame Deer, decided to perform the Sun Dance in the good old way instead of in a circus atmosphere. For their site they chose Wounded Knee where so many of our ancestors had been massacred by the army in 1890. They put up the arbor and the sweat lodge and after the preparation they began to dance. Then everything went wrong. A car drove up full of tribal police. Their chief told Uncle Bill and Leonard that they were forbidden to dance at Wounded Knee because “it was inflammatory and might draw people away” from their commercial Pine Ridge Sun Dance.

Leonard told the police boss, “Don’t you know about freedom of religion? You’re an Indian. How can you interfere with a sacred ceremony while it is going on?” The dancers, meanwhile, ignoring the police, continued dancing and blowing on their eagle-bone whistles. The police boss did not like the job he was sent to do. He was embarrassed and drove off.

On the second day the dancers were making flesh offerings when the sound of police sirens again drowned out their songs. This time the tribal police came in force with three squad cars. Their chief said, “I hate to do this but I’m ordered to arrest you.” Bill Eagle Feathers wept. “I am the bad luck guy. Great Spirit, what did I do wrong?”

Leonard had a hard time keeping the dancers in line because it was a near-killing situation. Among the dancers was a group of young people calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes.” They came from San Francisco where they had taken part in the occupation of Alcatraz Island. They wanted to fight the police. It took a great effort by Leonard and Uncle Bill to prevent bloodshed. Everybody was hauled off to court and fined. After a few hours the dancers were released but police occupied the dance ground to make sure that the ceremony could not be continued.

The dancers asked Leonard, “What are we going to do now?” One could not leave a Sun Dance half done. Not finishing it to the point of piercing was unthinkable. Leonard said, “We have made a vow to the Great Spirit and we must keep it.” Somebody suggested continuing the dance at Rosebud, on Crow Dog’s private land, where nobody could interfere with it, and all agreed that this was a good idea. But there was the problem of the tree. The sacred Sun Dance pole standing at the center of the Sun Dance circle is always a two-forked cottonwood tree. Men are sent out to scout for the most perfect tree they can find. They count coup upon it as in battle. A young maiden who has never been with a man makes the first symbolic cut with the axe. The tree must not touch the ground when falling but must be caught by the men who will carry it to the dance ground.

Leonard was disturbed. The Crow Dog place was over eighty miles distant. How could men carry the heavy tree that far? The tree is sacred. At the height of the dance sick persons lie beneath the tree to be cured. Looking at it, some dancers had already received visions. How could it be transported?

Just about that time a large truck with long-haired young white people arrived. They had come all the way from the East Coast to learn about Indian ways. One of them told Leonard, “We overheard what you said. We’ll put your tree on our truck and drive it all the way to your place.”

Leonard objected. The tree had to be carried on foot in a sacred manner. To put it on a truck would be very bad. But then Bill Eagle Feathers, twice as old as Leonard and a sun-dancer many times over, stepped in. He thanked all those, Indian and white, who were present. He pointed to the young, long-haired people. “Great Spirit, look at them. They are poor like us. Look at their clothes. Look at their shoes. They call me a lousy Indian. They call them lousy hippies. We travel the same road. Grandfather, Tunkashila will understand. The Sacred Tree will understand. What: we are doing is good.”

He smoked up the young hippies with cedar and sweetgrass. And then the Sun Dance pole was loaded on top of the truck with all the offerings still attached to it, the four direction flags streaming from it in the wind. The truck was followed by a whole caravan of decrepit Indian cars. For a few miles it was escorted by a tribal police car and in it the unhappy police chief was standing up, praying to the sacred tree with his pipe.

After arriving at Crow Dog’s place the dancers planted the tree in a hole filled with buffalo fat. Henry made two figures of buffalo hide, one figure of a man and the other of a buffalo bull. They stood for the renewal of all life, human and animal, because that, too, is an aspect of the Sun Dance. In the old days these figures always had huge male organs symbolizing what the dance was about—more people and more buffalo to feed them.

Everybody pitched in to smooth down the dance circle, put up the shade cover of pine boughs, and make everything holy. It took them the whole day to get everything ready to continue the dance. The next morning, at sunrise, Bill Eagle Feathers raised his pipe and blew on his eagle-bone whistle, praying for an eagle to come in as a sign that the dance v/as blessed. Within minutes, an eagle flew in low over the hills from the east, circled slowly over the dance ground, then disappeared in the west. They then finished the dance among the grass and pines, without loudspeakers or electric floodlights, in the old, traditional way. At this dance Leonard for the first time revived the old custom of dragging buffalo skulls embedded in the flesh of his back. He told me, “I took five steps with those skulls and it felt as if my heart was being torn out through my back.” From that day on, every summer there has always been a Sun Dance at Crow Dog’s place, and always the person acting as intercessor prays for an eagle to come in to bless the dancers and always the eagle appears. I was only a teenager when that took place.

I have sun-danced myself. I did not pierce until the second year after I began living with Leonard. At first I did not understand the whole ritual, but I felt it deeply. I understood it with my heart even though not yet with my mind. I saw the tree, the people sitting under the shade, the dancers with their wreaths of sage, their red kilts, medicine bundles dangling on their chests. I heard the many eagle-bone whistles making the sound of a thousand birds. It made me feel good because I sensed the strong feeling between the different people and tribes. I looked at the men with their long, flowing black hair and at the women in their white, beaded buckskin dresses. It was so beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to be part of this, I wanted to feel it, spiritually and in my flesh. It was real compared to what I had known, not a hand-me-down belied but a personal re-awakening which stirred a remembrance deep inside me. So I made a vow to sun-dance for four years, and the first time I found it hard to fulfill my commitment.

I began my dance by making a flesh offering. Leonard told me, “I’ll cut the skin from your arm. That’s a sacrifice. Your prayers go out for those suffering in jail, for friends who are sick. I will put the pieces from your arm into a square of red cloth, make a little bundle of it, and tie it to the sacred pipe. That way you’ll remember this always.” I made my flesh offering thinking of all the brothers and sisters who had died, who, I felt, had somehow died for me.

When the Sun Dance came out into the open again in the 1930s and ‘40s, and until recently when Leonard started the dance on our land, the piercing was comparatively tame. Just a small piece of flesh on the chest, over the heart, was pierced with a short skewer or eagle claw. To this was fastened a rawhide thong hanging from the top of the sacred pole, and the dancer then tore himself loose with comparatively little trouble. But under the influence of Leonard and the medicine men Pete Catches, Fools Crow, and Eagle Feathers, the self-inflicted pain has become more and more severe until now it is just like in the old Catlin and Bodmer paintings depicting the ritual of a hundred and fifty years ago. This has spread from Crow Dog’s place to other dance sites and other Sioux reservations.