Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (5 page)

The second Crow Dog’s name was John, Henry’s father. He, too, was something of a loner. As Henry told me, “Johnny Crow Dog doesn’t worry about anything, just himself and his family. He doesn’t worry about who’s big chief, or who eats plenty peyote, or who smokes too many pipes. He keeps out of tribal politics. He’s a First World War vet. He’s that kind of man. Dad’s life was really hard after Old Crow Dog killed Spotted Tail. They made him suffer for what his old man did. He didn’t talk much. He was a quiet man. John tried peyote once, in Macy, Nebraska. That was in 1920. But he didn’t join the Native American church. He told them, ‘You eat peyote. That’s good. But I am a rough man. I do things my own way. I am not a man who goes to meetings and mingles.’”

John Crow Dog lived by himself. He had no education. During Prohibition, he was a moonshiner—another reason why he lived way out by himself. One time he went east with the big circus, together with two brothers. He was a spin roper. They had to playact the Custer fight and attack the Deadwood stage coach. They had to play cowboys
and Indians. Among the other Indians in the show were Thunder Hawk, Standing Soldier, and Iron Eagle. John said that Buffalo Bill had been a fair man who paid them well and was friendly to the Indians. He drank a lot of whiskey out of an extra-big glass. He told John that Sitting Bull had once been in his circus and, in New York City, right on Broadway, had given nickels and dimes to poor white children who had been begging. Grandpa John brought back a poster with a picture of all the Indians riding around on their horses. Somebody read the headline to me. It said the Indians were the “wildest, most wondrous riders on naked steeds.” I remember that much but nothing else.

When John went east he met a white woman there. She came out to Rosebud with him. He took her to the mountains and stayed there with her for a while. She hung around for close to a year, but life on the reservation was too hard for her. So John left her and she left him, but before she went away he gave her five hundred dollars from his lease money.

John lived like a badger, alone, but he had his pipe to pray with. He wasn’t cut out to be a model family man. He always said that when he died, not to put him in a cemetery but to bury him someplace on his own land. He lived at the old Orphan band camp, at Upper Cut Meat. He trapped beaver and got prairie chickens for food. He dug the charming medicine. Use it and the deer come right up to you. A hunter is quiet, lets other people do the talking. If you talk too much, you spook the game.

Two holy men told John never to eat dog, that it was bad medicine for him. John listened, but one day he went with a half-breed friend, Sam David, a World War I vet like John, to Crookston, Nebraska. They both liked the moonshine and they were drinking. There was some food there that had been lying around for some days and they ate it. It was dog. John got sick right away. Later some guys came and made a big party. Nobody knows what happened. John Crow Dog was in the best health that night, and in the morning he was dead. He looked as if he had passed out, but when they tried to wake him they found out
that he had been dead all the time. They brought him to my father’s place, but Dad was out in the woods cutting timber. So they took him to Winyan Tanka, John’s sister. She was living a mile from where we are now, on Crow Dog’s land. For the longest time Jerome, the first Crow Dog, would not accept his allotment because he didn’t think land, Grandmother Earth, should be cut up into little pieces and owned by single men or families. He didn’t accept land until 1910, twenty years after everybody else did. So my older sisters found Dad cutting wood. They held a wake for Grandpa John. He had never been baptized. He belonged to no church. He wasn’t Christian, just an old-time Indian. Uncle Dick Fool Bull said that since he wasn’t baptized, he had no place to go. He was right. The missionaries wouldn’t have him in their cemeteries. He also couldn’t be buried in a Native American churchyard. So my father was sad. One Santee from Grass Mountain, Roy Vessor, said, “Well, we have land right here. Let’s dig a hole for him.” So they did that. Henry himself buried him. They took him up to the place across the hills where I always fast, and they dug his grave. That’s exactly what John had wanted. He got his wish. At the time I was eight years old. I didn’t think too much about my grandfather being buried on his own land. But when I was under the power of peyote I felt that my grandfather needed help, needed the prayers. So I told my father that I would make it good for him, and I think that my son will make it that much better for me, like what Jerome Crow Dog did for the Brulé Sioux. Henry went often to John’s grave and always placed a rock there. Each Veterans Day we put up a flagpole for him and, wherever John is, he knows that we remember him as a son and a grandson. I want all this put down. I want my children to have a legend. It is important that they know the history of the Crow Dog generations.

My grandmother’s name was Ta Mahpiya Washte Win, Mary Good Cloud Woman. Grandma could hardly speak English, but she understood some. She could do some reading and writing. She read the government letters and explained them. That was a
Strange thing for an Indian woman to do then. Some relations made fun of her for this, but she really helped. My grandmother was a hardworking woman, lending a hand with anything. She’d chop wood, haul water, do the gardening, dig wild turnips and dry ‘em up, plant corn, do the washing, bead moccasins, fix up clothes for the whole family. She was a woman who did everything every day. I look at the girls coming up now; they don’t do it anymore, they haven’t got the strength. Grandmother Good Cloud Woman was strong-hearted.

My father, Henry, loved to recount his life’s story. I have it on tape. He said, “Let me tell it in my own words. Don’t put it in fancy language! My mother’s name”—John’s wife’s—”was Jumping Elk. John’s father-in-law put this poshta, this hood, on Jumping Elk. They made the marriage by praying with the pipe in the four directions. They put the pipe in the hands of John and his woman. They tied their hands together with a strip of red cloth. They put a blanket over them. They took a turtle shell and put charcoal from the pipe in it and let the two of them touch it. The medicine man told them, ‘Someday you’ll turn into dirt and ashes, but the pipe will hold you together.’ Then the medicine man gave them the staff. After they were married a while my mother told John that there was going to be a baby.

“I wasn’t born in a hospital. I was born in the old way. John called on four older women, fifty to sixty years old, who no longer had their moon time. They gave my mother nine small red sticks, like from a matchbox, and she put them in a little parfleche. An older lady makes this. Every month you put one of those little sticks in
there. They already know whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl. If the moon opens up like a sickle, toward the left, it’s a girl. If it’s curling up a little downward, it’s a boy. If it’s a half moon, that means twins.

“Now it’s birthing time. Two elder women watch Jumping Elk. They have a tanned deer hide and two crutches, about a foot long, and two small stakes. The medicine woman wraps a rawhide belt around the birth giver, wraps it around her waist. There are holes in the rawhide to tighten it like a belt. Jumping Elk pushed herself. She’s not lying down like a wasichu winyan, she’s kind of squatting. The medicine woman has an herb. She puts it around Jumping Elk’s shin. That helps. Then the older women press with the belt. Before the pains come, one woman has four sticks. Every pain she cuts a short stick. My mother grabs onto a large birthing stick and holds on. She pushes three times. The fourth time the baby comes out. They catch me on a tanned white hide. There’s a bowl, and water, and sage. They wash me and scrape the gook off me with a bone knife. The old lady sticks a finger into my mouth and pulls it out. Then I begin to cry. If I had not cried the woman would have slapped me on the back until I did. That’s how I was born. That’s how we all were born. Now they go to the hospital. The old way made you feel good.

“The world I was born in, it was the wasichus’ world. I wished I had been born a hundred years earlier. There were no buffalo anymore, no game, nothing to be happy about. We were starving. The people lived on timpsila—wild turnips, berries, roots, and drank water. That was all. As for meat, we ate anything we could catch—gophers, muskrats, squirrels, anything. The family that ate medicine roots had power. If a man dreamed of an eagle, he had to follow that faith. Eat gray grass. If you eat that, chew that, you feel better. You could find that gray grass and drink water after. That filled you up. You could make your way with it.

“They gave us all the meat parts to eat that the white folks would not touch. Once I got a chicken’s onze [anus] with a little
meat around it. And that way we lived. The old Indian food was mostly gone. The government issue lasted two and a half, maybe three weeks. The last part of the month was always hard. So to get food we sold our old decorated tipi to a white man for five dollars. We had nothing.

“The tipis were all gone. Some people lived in dirt huts, and some fixed up shelters almost like sweat lodges, bent sticks covered with hides. We were lucky to have my grandfather’s little log cabin. We had matches already. If we ran out of matches, in wintertime, we had to watch the fire so that it didn’t go out. People were starving. We were having a hard time. At that time, when I was a boy, there were twelve thousand Sioux left, and then, suddenly, there were only six thousand Brulé. At one time Rosebud was down to maybe five hundred full-bloods and two thousand, five hundred mixed bloods—all kinds of races, mixed together, but they called themselves Indians. People talking Indian became few. Yankton, Sisseton, to the east, they start speaking English and forgetting their own language. I speak only broken English. They call me a good-for-nothing because I talk so much but, nowadays, if I talk for long I get tired. I talk myself to sleep.

“We used to go to the creek and hunt two kinds of rabbits. The little one, the cottontail, and out on the prairie the big one, the jackrabbit. We’d kill it, cook it, and have a big feast. I hunted, go someplace to find something to eat, anything to fill the pouch. We have forgotten how buffalo meat tasted. I once saw some buffalo that got away from the Black Hills herd, from Custer State Park. They advertised in the papers that anybody who saw a buffalo someplace should report to the agency. There was a reward out. Somebody got a hundred-dollar reward. Not me. I wouldn’t snitch on the buffalo. They are relations.

“My father and grandfather had learned the old way. They could still use the bow. They could make a fire with flint and tinder. They still had all the survival skills. If the dogs start to bark, or even if they are too silent, what does it mean? You had to be trained. You had to exercise, to be able to run a long distance. Go
a long time without food or water. But not too long, for then you get weak. If you don’t learn those things, you gamble with your life. If you don’t learn the signs on the ground, or the sounds in the air, or some tiny movement someplace, you could have an arrow or a bullet in your gut. And you had to learn the herbs, the hunting medicine, so you wouldn’t be easy to target at.

“Well that’s the kind of education my father and grandfather got, but not me. When I was a kid most everybody had horses. We learned to ride almost before we could walk. Now there aren’t enough horses left to go around. I’m over eighty, but I still ride, I still drag wood behind my horse. You’ve got to breathe into a horse’s nostril, let him smell under your armpit to make him know you. You got to know how to gentle a horse, how to break him nicely without spooking him, without force. In the old days you depended on your pony.

“Everybody was afraid of school. In my grandparents’ days they took the kids all the way to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. They took them by horse and buggy to the railroad station, some fifty miles away, and there put them on the train. Their parents and relatives went along by wagon, or on horseback, to the station. Then they watched the train disappear with their children. The little boys and girls in the carriages wept, and their families, left behind along the tracks, wept too. You can imagine the shock it must have been for those kids, who had come from tipis and tiny log cabins out on the prairie, to find themselves on that rattling, smoking, whistling train, being carried away at a terrifying speed. And the shock at the many stops along the way, in the ant-heap cities, with a thousand faces of curious wasichus looking at them, gaping at those ‘cute little savages.’ My uncle Jake Left Hand Bull had to stay at Carlisle for seven years without being allowed to go home or see his folks, not even on Christmas. They cut his hair real short, just like stubble. He had to wear a dark, heavy uniform with a stiff collar, like being a soldier in the army, and heavy shoes going up over his ankles. They hurt so that he could hardly walk. The kids were beaten for every little thing. They
weren’t told to become doctors, or lawyers, or teachers, but to be carpenters, or shoe repair men.

“I had trouble in school. I didn’t speak a word of English, and the teacher didn’t speak a word of Sioux, so how could we learn? We were not allowed to speak Indian, or pray Indian, or sing Indian. They treat us bad, hit us if we speak our language. I didn’t care for their kind of food, either. Also they went only to the fourth grade, so I was in fourth grade for a few years. There were white kids and mixbloods and they harass me all the time. So I fight back. Then they say, ‘That Indian boy’s always fighting.’ It was never the white boy’s fault. Then the school superintendent said, ‘Crow Dog’s always fighting. So we better send him away as far as we can.’ So they sent me to Pierre, a hundred miles from home.

“My father taught me everything I need to know. He didn’t talk much. He just did it and made a motion—you saw me doing this, now you try it. He taught me how to use white man’s tools, saws, drills, crowbars. I worked for a while for the railroad, laying track. From 1934 to 1950 I worked in Nebraska harvesting grain, digging spuds, and picking beets. I made two or three dollars a day. They call it migrant labor now. I was camping near Saint Francis doing WPA work, but the priests heard me having an Indian ceremony, heard the drumming and singing, and chased me away. On our allotment there was nothing. First we lived in a tent. I built my own house with my own hands. Without money. Nobody helped. I built it from wooden crates, logs, packing paper, old car windows, pieces of corrugated sheet iron. I found a big iron stove that a white man had thrown away, found an old door from a wrecked place, but it was a cozy home. I took care of my own.

“I have white friends. They are good people. Man to man I can relate, but white Americans as a whole, that’s different. The white man made me a surplus Indian. I couldn’t digest the white man’s ways. They made me sick. I am a truant from school, a truant from life. I am a truant from the white man’s life into the spiritual
life. They cut me in half—a white man’s half and an Indian half. Now, when I’m old, I try to put the halves together, because, though I’m a full-blood, I have to live in the white man’s world. Under that system I need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, a judge, a psychiatrist, a pill, and lots of money. We didn’t need such things when I was a kid. To tell the truth, now I need only my pipe. To hell with all the other stuff!

“The buffalo’s gone. He was something! Now we have the holsteins, the Angus. Us buffalo people can’t get used to the holstein. That’s a surplus buffalo. Babies used to go to sleep on milk from the two natural milk bottles of their mother. Now it’s pasteurized stuff from the holstein. But even the holstein milk is gone. Now it’s powder, and formula. Old-time fellows used to go to sleep on cougar milk, on white lightning, the hard stuff. Slept like babies. Now we have insomnia. It used to be hump meat, raw buffalo liver, kidney. Now it’s milk, cheese, powdered eggs, bread like cotton wool. It made me lose all my teeth. Maybe that was the plan: Make Mister Indian lose his teeth so that he can savor that soft white man’s chesli [shit].

“Why did the white man come here? Why did Custer steal the sacred Black Hills from us? White men are crazy about gold. They have gold-rimmed glasses, gold watches, gold teeth. They were always rooting around, tearing everything apart, digging, digging, digging. They tore up the whole Black Hills to find gold, silver, and precious stones. They still work the huge gold mine, the Homestake mine, up there. Now they’re after gas, coal, oil, and uranium. You can see the big trucks with the nuclear stuff coming through here from the Black Hills. We got to civilize the white man because he has gone crazy.

“They call us bloody savages, but when they have a war, suddenly we’re good Indians. ‘Here, take a gun, fight for your country!’ So, okay, our young boys went over there to Vietnam, went to war, and some of them died there. But for whose country? We were fighting the last war against aborigines. That was like Crow and Rhee scouting for Custer. The white man has eyes, but he
does not see. He has ears, but he does not hear. The clock of the universe, the spirit clock, has already struck twelve. It is time to set this clock right, time to stop and think. Let my voice be heard. Stop making weapons! Make relatives! Make a worldwide alowanpi, the relation-making ceremony. If you don’t watch out, a time will come when the bullets won’t work, the bomb won’t work, the spaceships will fall into the ocean. The generals, the senators, the president himself won’t know what to do. They’ll end up eating snakes, nothing but snakes.

“The Great Spirit of the wasichu gave the white folks the Bible and the dictionary, because they always forget. The Ten Commandments—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t covet—they always forget. They have to look up that don’t kill, don’t rob, don’t lie all the time. We don’t have to be reminded, so we don’t need a book to tell us.

“I have no education, but the spirits talk to me. I listen, and I learn about relationship, I learn about spirits. Over the hills there, one time, there were two antelopes, a buck and a female. Someone says, ‘Go over there and shoot them and bring the meat.’ But nobody could find them or shoot them. They were spirit antelopes. So they call that place Antelope Creek. You hear the noise sometimes, something like a hoofbeat. It couldn’t be a bear, it couldn’t be a coyote. You hear them, but you can never see them. Hooves, hooves, something strange. People hear it and think there must be some antelopes there. No, nothing. Just something spiritual with a hoof. I myself encountered it. One morning I looked for some horses. I went up that hill about half a mile. I went down to the creek. The horses were there. They were snorting and stamping with their ears pointing ahead, looking at something, smelling something, but there was nothing. Just air. Then suddenly I saw them, something like a ghost, you could kind of see through them. That was the first time that antelope buck and his female came back. They just sort of dissolved into air. I saw it, many years ago. The wasichu can’t handle a thing like that.

“When I was young, Indian ceremonies, even a sweat lodge, were forbidden. They called it an Indian offenses act. So you talked and listened to the yuwipi spirits at night, in the darkness. By day you put up a good front, toting your Bible around, crossing yourself—that was a shield behind which a medicine man could hide. And we also kept our medicine bundles hidden where the missionaries couldn’t see them.

“White people depict us in their books and movies as stony-faced folks with the corners of our mouths turned down, always looking grim. But we are not like that. Among ourselves we joke and laugh. With all that suffering and poverty our people can survive only by laughing at misfortune. That’s why we have the sacred clown, heyoka, the hot-cold, forward-backward, upside-down contrary. He makes us laugh through our tears. And we have Iktomi, the spider man. He’s a trickster, a no-good, but also an inventor, a creator.