Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (11 page)

At nightfall, the road man opens the meeting with a prayer. You must know how to behave. You never go in front of someone who is taking the medicine or someone who is singing. You should be able to stay in your place for the whole length of the ceremony. The road man places the chief peyote in the center of the altar. It is a big button of sixteen segments that sometimes has been in the road man’s family for generations. The person who puts up the ceremony fills the pipe and gives it to the road
man so that he can start the ceremony by smoking the pipe. After midnight the road man fills the pipe again and gives it back to the sponsor. The road man starts out with the opening song. He sings four songs of four verses. Then he passes on the staff, the fan, and the gourd to the person on his left. That person then starts to sing, holding the staff and fan in his left hand and the gourd in his right. The drummer then comes and hits the drum for him. If a person cannot or does not want to sing, he passes the elements clockwise to his neighbor. At first women did not sing, but now they do. My sisters are both good singers. Sometimes several persons sing along in harmony. We sing four starting songs, four midnight songs, four morning songs, and four quitting songs. Some of the songs have words in them and some do not.

Some of the sounds are like words, an echo from the peyote spirit—ha na ha na ha na; ha na yo yi; na he he he na yo witsi na yo. These are like words coming out of the medicine itself. It means something like “The peyote recognizes you. It is going to give you a voice to use during the night.” When peyote is working on you, it gives you the words and tune you need. I have myself made up many songs. Some songs seem to come out of the peyote, not out of me. You have to be in the right mind to sing, in tune with the medicine. If the peyote spirit is at odds with you, you’ll have difficulties singing. Your words, your songs are going to go out of track.

Of the four songs I sing, the first two are rather slow, but the third and the last I always sing fast. The drummer sees me shaking my gourd. He notices that I am speeding it up, and he keeps pace with me. He flips the drum over to change the sound, making it higher. As the medicine goes around from person to person together with the staff and gourd, so the drummer also goes around, coming to all who want to sing.

At first they did not want women in the meetings at all. But, as I see it, peyote is for all humankind—how can woman be left out? She is the birth giver, she stands for the generations. So for
many years now women have participated, praying and singing, bringing in the morning water, blessing the sacred food. There’s only one difference: Women can pass the staff along to the next person, but they should not hold onto it while singing. Because the staff is a man. As the elders say, “Women should not wear a war bonnet.”

At the time of the midnight water there is a pause. The road man gives a spiritual talk. Everybody else also has the privilege to speak, to say something good, to ask help for his or her troubles. That is also a good time to get baptized, to be married in the Native American Church way, or to be doctored. The peyote way is a from-birth-to-death religion. In order to join the Church you must be baptized into it and then you are a member. A newborn baby can also be baptized with the medicine. When I wanted to get married I went to Uncle Leslie Fool Bull, and he told me that I and my future wife, Francine, should study the sacred medicine and come face to face with it and then we could marry during a meeting. I already knew the peyote and it knew me, but my bride came from a family in which they knew only the pipe. Uncle Leslie did not teach us. He told us, “Grandfather Peyote will be your teacher.” So for a month we attended Native American Church services together. Then we purified ourselves, and Uncle Leslie married us.

When my children were young, just four, five, or six years old, I let them come into the meetings, sitting on Grandpa’s or Grandma’s lap. They felt happy. They already got an understanding when they were under the spiritual power. Little Richard was standing up, holding the staff, and dancing. Ina and Bernadette only smiled. I asked them if they saw anything. They told me that they saw all kinds of little birds, little dolls, and snowflakes. When the snowflakes hit the dolls they turned into raindrops. Some people say not to bring little kids in who don’t know the medicine yet. But I think that it is right to bring the children up in the peyote way and let them sit in on a meeting. They learn something good there, so that later in life they won’t start drinking
and kill themselves in car wrecks on the weekend. Weekends are for ceremonies, for praying inside the tipi and feeding the fire. I like to have the children with me, trying to sing along.

Peyote is also there when a girl is on her first moon. In the old days, when a young girl became a woman they performed ceremonies in her honor, such as the ishna ta awi cha lowan, the for-her-alone-we-sing ceremony, a buffalo ritual, and connected with this the tapa wanka yap, the sacred throwing of the ball. We hardly do these ceremonies anymore, but in the Native American Church, in a half-moon fire, we still honor a girl after she has her first period, because in that state she is sacred. The girl might not even know why she is honored, why she is the first to be given the water to drink, why she is the first to be served the sacred food, but the remembrance of our old ceremonies is there in the sacred medicine.

And, finally, Grandfather Peyote is there at the time of your death. He will take away the fear of dying and fill your mind with wowahwala, with inner peace. Then he will gently take you by the hand to another world.

A meeting ends at daybreak, when the morning star is fading from sight. The roadman says a prayer: “Great Spirit, bless my people, take care of them. Take care of the coming generations. Bless the universe. Remember those who have passed on. Bless the water, bless the ikche wichasha, the natural, human beings,” meaning the Lakota and all other native beings. Then we drink the morning water and partake of the sacred food—the corn, the wasna, the chokecherries. We untie the drum, put the staff away, and clean up the fire. Then, down the line from the first man who drank the water, we shake hands and say “hihane washte,” good morning. We leave the tipi, one by one. Outside we stretch and watch the sunrise with a great feeling of friendship.

Peyote can be your doctor or your psychiatrist. He can analyze you. Sometimes he can cure a sickness through the power of the medicine. There was an old man whom no white doctor could help. So together we took peyote buttons. It transported me into
another world, giving me the power to help this man. The medicine made this old man into a young boy, and at water call, I blew my eagle bone whistle and we prayed for him. At daybreak this man got up and danced around the fire place and everybody got scared, because he seemed to be a different kind of human being from what he had been before. I told my helper to sprinkle some cedar over the fire so that we could pray for the man. We smoked him up and I fanned him off with my eagle wing. And that old man got well and is still living. Of course it does not always work like this. In order to be cured a person has to allow the peyote to help. He or she must have confidence in the medicine. Sometimes the peyote uses me as a tool to cure someone; sometimes it does not. I do not know how this power works. I just accept it. Whatever the medicine wants to do, it does. Some white men call it witchcraft. We had missionaries forcing their way into our meetings, kicking and scattering our sacred things, telling us that peyote is “from the devil.”

Now we have a charter, and the Native American Church is incorporated under the laws of South Dakota and other states. I have a certificate showing that I am a road man. I have a permit from the state of Texas identifying me as a custodian of the church, allowing me to harvest the peyote legally anywhere I can find it.

As I said before, peyote does not grow in North America. South of Laredo, Texas, it grows on a narrow strip on both sides of the Rio Grande and at one point it goes up to the city of Miranda, some thirty miles inside Texas. But that is the northernmost place you can find it. I call the whole area our peyote gardens, because the Creator chose the spot where we could harvest our sacred medicine. In the old days they let you go wherever you wanted to and pick it for free on both sides of the border. Sometimes you gave the owner of the land a small donation. It was still like that when my father took me down there for the first time. But already the second time I went to the gardens things were changed. There was a law that they can sell the peyote
as a sacrament only to authorized members of the Native American church. And the law treats the medicine like a drug or a doctor’s prescription. It must meet “certain standards.” It has to be “pure” in the Food and Drug Administration’s way. So now they have a machine to “sanitize” the peyote. It runs hot and cold water over the plants and shakes the peyote clean so that there is no sand in it, to make it fit for Mister Indian to use. They grade it like eggs—big or small. We must harvest according to the rules. The medicine is pure as the spirit made it, as you find it. But the government says it must be made sanitary, like aspirin or Alka-Seltzer. There are two kinds of peyote, from the same type of plant. One has twelve white spots on top. This peyote can be made into a tea or a mush. The other has ten spots and must be sun dried. After you dry it the button is the size of a silver dollar. When you dry it the right way, the juice, the power, stays in there. But the machine shakes the juice out and some of the power goes with it. Then the medicine is weakened.

White doctors and chemists are forever fooling around with our holy herb. Even the army and the CIA have experimented with it. They analyzed it chemically, put tiny bits under the microscope, distilled it into powder, made it into squares like sugar cubes, trying to “find its secret.” And they photographed different kinds of peyote plants. I told them, “It’s no use. You can photograph the plant, but you can’t photograph its spirit.”

Going to harvest peyote is like a sacred pilgrimage. Before you start the harvesting, at sunrise, you must say a good, strong prayer to the four directions of the universe, to the sky above, and to Mother Earth below. Whenever you find a Grandfather Peyote, you say a prayer. You never cut the whole plant. You don’t cut clear to the root. You cut off only the top, the button, and the plant grows again. After six months, when you go there again, you will find a pink flower. And after another six months, there will be a fresh green peyote there. It seems that women are better at finding the medicine than men. Peyote likes women on account of the grandmother and her little granddaughter who
found the first peyote in the legend. It is a long, hard drive from Rosebud to get to the peyote garden and back, maybe two thousand miles altogether. But we don’t mind it. Getting the medicine is part of our lives.

We do not go to meetings to get high. You partake of the medicine to understand the Creator and yourself. You do not expect to get a vision, and most of the time you don’t. You have no craving for peyote as such. You use it as a means to come close to the spirit and to one another, because it is a medicine that unifies. But visions and dreams are at the center of what we believe in. We are dream people. You can have a vision during a vision quest, or in a sweat bath, or in a yuwipi ceremony, or just walking in nature. And you can experience a vision through the power of peyote.

I still remember the first great vision the medicine gave me. I saw a worm that time, a caterpillar, because peyote means caterpillar in the Aztec language. It was all made out of a puzzle, and it was the drum hide, and its head was inside the drum kettle. It had a whistle, and each time I hit the drum it whistled, just like the voice of a roadrunner. At morning I saw a man’s head in the drum kettle. He had seven eyes and they were the seven knots around the drum, and the circle of eyes was the rawhide and it was a rainbow. The hide became a cloud. All the time it was a good tune, a good sound coming up, and with the water spray coming up from the drum as I was beating it, I felt it was Life. I heard voices in the water—a man, a woman, a child, and a deer. Toward morning I heard it. And the staff was the leader, taking care of the herd, of the people. And the gourd—somebody a long way off could hear its voice, calling, like bringing sheep to water. So I stood up with the staff and all the sheep were coming, and their faces were men’s skulls, all black with no features.

The fan was the sweeper, bringing blessings. The fire, right in the fire, whatever we do or say, there’s a man with a green buckskin outfit. I could see his blood veins—that was the cedar, grains of red in the wood—and I heard the voice: “Wana cekiya,
it’s now time to pray.” That man said it four times. But then it was a woman’s voice. The cedar smoke went straight up. “Wana, here, now, here is the greatest power! He is listening to you.”

And the altar was the map of this continent. I saw a man and a woman lying down, saw everything there—good health, death, sickness, everything between life and death. That man, on one side, one half of him was flesh, the other side bones. From his knees down he was all foggy, like smoke. I sat there praying. He was kicking one leg fast, with the drum. I heard a sharp little voice: “It should be done the right way!” I still think about what it means.

I see something every time I go to a meeting. During a crossfire ceremony, I saw a light shining on the sacred medicine. And I saw a man in the cloud, when I was under the power, a man with long hair and a red and blue peyote blanket, holding up his hands, and he was singing a song. I was looking up and down. I saw the words. I can’t read or write, but all of a sudden this voice went into me and let me catch that song. It was a big butterfly. He was wearing a costume with peyote buttons and that butterfly’s eyes were shining, and the butterfly turned into a blue jay and went straight up and I heard a voice: “Hecetu welo—you learn.” I took some buttons and learned that song. And the man next to me was singing that same song through the power of the medicine. With this power I can be in two places at the same time. Through the songs coming out of the medicine, I could hear my dead sister’s voice.