Lakota Woman (10 page)

I took apart a pair of scissors and taped one half to a broken-off chair leg and went outside to join the security. My brother was one of the guards. He saw me and laughed. He had been four years in the marines and had taught me to take apart, clean, and fire a .38. Seeing me with my measly weapon broke him up. “What are you going to do with that thing?” “Get them in the balls before they can hit me!”

At last the police were withdrawn and we were told that they had given us another twenty-four hours to evacuate the building. This was not the end of the confrontation. From then on, every morning we were given a court order to get out by six
P.M.
Came six o’clock and we would be standing there ready to join battle. I think many brothers and sisters were prepared to die right on the steps of the BIA building. When one of the AIM leaders was asked by a reporter whether the Indians were not afraid that their women and children could get hurt, he said, “Our women and children have taken this risk for four hundred years and accept it,” and we all shouted “Right on!” I don’t think I slept more than five or six hours during the whole week I was inside the BIA.

Every morning and evening was crisis time. In between, the negotiations went on. Groups of supporters arrived, good people as well as weirdos. The Indian commissioner Lewis Bruce stayed one night in the building to show his sympathy. So did LaDonna Harris, a Kiowa-Comanche and a senator’s wife. One guy who called himself Wavy Gravy, who came from a place in California called the Hog Farm and who wore a single enormous earring, arrived in a psychedelically decorated bus and set up a loudspeaker system for us. At the same time the police cut all our telephone wires except the one connecting us with the Department of the Interior. A certain Reverend McIntire came with a bunch of followers waving signs and singing Christian hymns. He was known to us as a racist and Vietnam War hawk. Why he wanted to support us was a big mystery. Cameramen and reporters swarmed through the building; tourists took snapshots of our guards. It was as if all these white people around the BIA were hoping for some sort of Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

For me the high point came not with our men arming themselves, but with Martha Grass, a simple middle-aged Cherokee woman from Oklahoma, standing up to Interior Secretary Morton and giving him a piece of her mind, speaking from the heart, speaking for all of us. She talked about everyday things, women’s things, children’s problems, getting down to the nitty-gritty. She shook her fists in Morton’s face, saying, “Enough of your bullshit!” It was good to see an Indian mother stand up to one of Washington’s highest officials. “This is our building!” she told him. Then she gave him the finger.

In the end a compromise was reached. The government said they could not go on negotiating during Election Week, but they would appoint two high administration officials to seriously consider our twenty demands. Our expenses to get home would be paid. Nobody would be prosecuted. Of course, our twenty points were never gone into afterward. From the practical point of view, nothing had been achieved. As usual we had bickered among ourselves. But morally it had been a great victory. We had faced White America collectively, not as individual tribes. We had stood up to the government and gone through our baptism of fire. We had not run. As Russel Means put it, it had been “a helluva smoke signal!”

CHAPTER 7

Crying for a Dream

The white man’s reality are his streets with their banks, shops, neon lights, and traffic, streets full of policemen, whores, and sad-faced people in a hurry to punch a time clock.

But this is unreal. The real reality is underneath all this. Grandfather Peyote helps you find it.

—
Crow Dog

Y
ou should know that the movement for Indian rights was first of all a spiritual movement and that our ancient religion was at the heart of it. Up to the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Indian religion was forbidden. Children were punished for praying Indian, men were jailed for taking a sweat bath. Our sacred pipes were broken, our medicine bundles burned or given to museums. Christianizing us was one way of making us white, that is, of making us forget that we were Indians. Holding on to our old religion was one way of resisting this kind of slow death. As long as people prayed with the pipe or beat the little water drum, Indians would not vanish, would continue to exist as Indians. For this reason our struggles for Indian rights over the past hundred years came out of our ancient beliefs. And so, under the impact of AIM and other movements, more and more native people abandoned the missionaries and went back to the medicine men and peyote road men.

I went that way, too. Hand in hand with my radicalization went my going back to Indian traditions. To white people this may seem contradictory, but for me and for my friends it was the most natural thing in the world. This process had already begun when I was still a child. I felt that the kind of Christianity the priests and nuns of St. Francis dished out was not good for my digestion. Jesus would have been all right except that I felt he had been coopted by white American society to serve its purpose. The men who had brought us whiskey and the smallpox had come with the cross in one hand and the gun in the other. In the name of all-merciful Jesus they had used that gun on us. Our sacred pipe and Grandfather Peyote had not been coopted and so I was instinctively drawn to them. Not that I could have put it in these words at the time.

To be an Indian I had to go to the full-bloods. My mother and grandmother were Indians, but I am a half-breed and I could not accept this. The half-breeds, the iyeskas, I thought, never really cared for anybody but themselves, having learned that “wholesome selfishness” alone brought the blessings of civilization. The full-bloods have a heart. They are humble. They are willing to share whatever happiness they have. They sit on their land which has a sacred meaning for them, even if it brings them no income. The iyeskas have no land because they sold theirs long ago. Whenever some white businessmen come to the res trying to make a deal to dig for coal or uranium, the iyeskas always say, “Let’s do it. Let’s get that money. Buy a new car and a color TV.” The full-bloods say nothing. They just sit on their little patches of land and don’t budge. It is because of them that there are still some Indians left. I felt drawn to my stubborn old full-blood relatives, men like my Uncle Fool Bull who always spoke of a sacred herb, a holy medicine which was the Creator’s special gift to the Indian people. He told me the legend of an old woman and her granddaughter who were lost in the desert and on the point of dying when they heard a little voice calling to them, a voice coming out: of a tiny herb which saved their lives, and how the women brought this sacred medicine to their tribe and to all the native people of this hemisphere. I listened to these stories and one day I told my mother, “I’m gonna grow up to be an Indian!”

She did not like it. She was upset because she was a Catholic and was having me brought up in her faith. She even had me confirmed. I sometimes try to imagine how I must have looked in my white outfit, with veil and candle, and it always makes me smile. I was then white outside and red inside, just the opposite of an apple. It was old Grandpa Dick Fool Bull who took me to my first peyote meeting. It was not until I was grown-up that I really got to know him and found out that he was a close relative. The last peyote meeting I had with him he was already over a hundred years old. He stood up and he talked for nearly three hours. He was preparing himself for his death. He was talking about going into the happy hunting grounds, the Milky Way, the great ultimate road to meet with all his old friends, with Carl Iron Shell and Good Lance. He talked about being with them again and being again with his kind of people, the sort who have all died out, the people who themselves had been a hundred years old when Grandpa Fool Bull was still young, who would be waiting for him with a drum and, maybe, a kettle full of steaming buffalo hump. He was really anxious to go. And he remembered and recalled all kinds of things, like being in an old-style saloon one time, leaning against the bar behind which there was a wall with just kegs and kegs of beer and whiskey stacked up to the ceiling. And these two white men came in. They got into a fight and started shooting at each other. Grandpa Fool Bull managed to crawl behind a barrel of Old Crow. He barely got himself settled when a bullet came in and it landed right close to his head, knocking a hole in that keg, and all the good red-eye started pouring out and his open mouth was right underneath that hole and he was having himself a high old time in his hiding place going on a happy drunk while those crazy white sons of bitches took a full hour to kill each other. And he talked about how he wanted to be buried in the old Indian way, wrapped in his star blanket with Crow Dog praying for him and burning sweetgrass. He was not sad at all. He was even joking about it and he still had all his wits about him. He was not feeble or sickly either. He just thought that it was about time for him to travel that road. And a short while later he died. I wished I had made an effort to know him better while I still had the chance. He was the last man among us who knew how to make and play the siyotanka, the old Sioux courting flute. A year ago as I was walking near the tribal office I had a vision. It was very real. I saw Fool Bull standing there with one of his flutes in his hand. I wanted to go up to him and say, “How wonderful, Grandpa Fool Bull, you aren’t dead after all,” and then he changed into somebody else and was just another idle old man leaning against the wall of the tribal office waiting for God knows what.

Well, Grandpa Fool Bull took me to my first peyote meeting and I sat close by him the whole night. Even though I was a young girl I took a lot of medicine. I saw a lot of good things, and I suddenly understood. I understood the reality contained in this medicine, understood that this herb was our heritage, our tradition, that it spoke our language. I became part of the earth because peyote comes from the earth, even tastes like earth sometimes. And so the earth was in me and I in it, Indian earth making me more Indian. And to me Peyote was people, was alive, was a remembrance of things long forgotten.

The medicine was brought to me four times during the night by a man I did not know. It came to me before it came to Grandpa Fool Bull because I was sitting on his right. The man said something to me in Indian, very fast. I could not speak Sioux at the time, but it seemed to me that I could understand what he said, take in the meaning of his words. I was in the power. I heard my long-dead relatives talking to me. It was a feeling, a message coming to me with the voice of the drum, coming down the staff, speaking in the whirr of the feathers, breathing in the smoke of the fire, the smell of the burning cedar. I felt the drumbeat in my heart. My heart became the drum, both beating and beating and beating. I heard things. I did not know whether to believe what the voice told me, what Grandfather Peyote told me. Even now I cannot explain it.

When the sun rose, after we had eaten our morning food and drunk the ice-cold water from the stream, I felt as I had never felt before. I felt so happy, so good. When I got home I blurted out to my mother that I had been to a Native American Church meeting. Mom was hurt. In the end she shrugged her shoulders: “Well, it’s up to you. I can’t tell you what to do!” But she also added something that I liked: “Remember, whatever, the Indian is closest to God.” I understood what she meant.

Two weeks later I was staying at my grandmother’s and a dream came to me. It was in the nighttime, toward morning. I tried to wake up but could not. I was awake and not awake. I could not move. I was crying. I opened my eyes once and saw my grandmother sitting by my bed. She was asking whether I was all right, but I could not answer her. In my dream I had been going back into another life. I saw tipis and Indians camping, huddling around a fire, smiling and cooking buffalo meat, and then, suddenly, I saw white soldiers riding into camp, killing women and children, raping, cutting throats. It was so real, much more real than a movie—sights and sounds and smells: sights I did not want to see, but had to see against my will; the screaming of children that I did not want to hear, but had to all the same. And the only thing I could do was cry. There was an old woman in my dream. She had a pack on her back—I could see that it was heavy. She was singing an ancient song. It sounded so sad, it seemed to have another dimension to it, beautiful but not of this earth, and she was moaning while she was singing it. And the soldiers came up and killed her. Her blood was soaked up by the grass which was turning red. All the Indians lay dead on the ground and the soldiers left. I could hear the wind and the hoofbeats of the soldiers’ horses, and the voices of the spirits of the dead trying to tell me something. I must have dreamed for hours. I do not know why I dreamed this but I think that the knowledge will come to me some day. I truly believe that this dream came to me through the spiritual power of peyote.

For a long time after that dream I felt depressed, as if all life had been drained from me. I was still going to school, too young to bear such dreams. And I grieved because we had to live a life that we were not put on this earth for. I asked myself why things were so bad for us, why Indians suffered as they did. I could find no answer.

Crow Dog always says: “Grandfather Peyote, he has no mouth, but he speaks; no eyes, but he sees; no ears, but he hears and he makes you listen.” Leonard does not read or write. He tells me: “Grandfather Peyote, he is my teacher, my educator.” When he was in jail for having been at Wounded Knee, the prison psychiatrist visited him in his “house"—that’s what they call their tiny cells. Crow Dog told him: “I don’t need you. Peyote, he is my psychiatrist. With the power of this holy herb I could analyze you.” The shrink did not know what to make of it. To a judge, Leonard said: “Peyote is my lawyer.”

Crow Dog is a peyote road man. He is showing the people the road of life. Only after I married Crow Dog did I really come to understand this medicine. Leonard has the peyote, which we call peyuta or unkcela, and he has his sacred pipe. He is a peyote priest, but also a traditional Lakota medicine man, a yuwipi, and a Sun Dancer. Some people criticize him, or rather all of us who take part in Crow Dog’s ceremonies. They say we should be one or the other, believe in the peyote or in the pipe, not in both. But Leonard cannot put his beliefs into separate little cubbyholes. He looks upon all ancient Indian religions as different aspects of one great overall power, part of the same creative force. Grandfather Peyote is just one of the many forms Wakan Tanka, Tunkashila, the Great Spirit, takes. The peyote button, the pipe, a deer, a bird, a butterfly, a pebble—they are all part: of the Spirit. He is in them, and they are in him.

Dreams and visions are very important to us, maybe more important than any other aspect of Indian religion. I have met Indians from South and Central America, from Mexico and from the Arctic Circle. They all pray for visions, they are all “crying for a dream,” as the Sioux call it. Some get their visions from fasting for four days and nights in a vision pit on a lonely hilltop. Others get their visions fasting and suffering during the long days of the Sun Dance, gazing at the blinding light in the sky. The Ghost Dancers went around and around in a circle, chanting until they fell down in a swoon, leaving their own bodies, leaving the earth, wandering along the Milky Way and among the stars. When they woke up they related what they had seen. Some found “star flesh” in their clenched fists, and moon rocks, so it is said. Still others receive their dreams out of the flash of lightning and the roar of thunder. Some tribes get their visions with the help of sacred mushrooms or jimsonweed. Not a few experience insight in the searing steam of the sweat lodge. Crow Dog receives what for lack of a better term I call sudden flashes of revelation during a vision quest as well as during a peyote meeting.

The Aztec word for the sacred herb was
peyotl
,
meaning caterpillar, because this cactus is fuzzy like the hairs on a caterpillar. Our Sioux word for medicine is pejuta. Peyote, pejuta, that sounds very close. Maybe it is just a coincidence. It is certain that peyote came to us out of Mexico. In the 1870s the Kiowas and Comanches prayed with this medicine and established what they called the Native American Church. By now the peyote religion is common among most tribes all the way up to Alaska. Since peyote does not grow farther north than the Rio Grande, we must get our medicine from the border region. It is in the Southwest that we have our “peyote garden.”

Peyote came to the Plains Indians just when they needed it most, at a time when the last of the buffalo were being killed and the tribes driven into fenced-in reservations, literally starving and dying of the white man’s diseases, deprived of everything that had given meaning to their lives. The Native American Church became the religion of the poorest of the poor, the conquered, the despoiled. Peyote made them understand what was happening and made them endure. It was the only thing that gave them strength in those, our darkest days. Our only fear is that the whites will take this from us, too, as they have taken everything else. I am sure there are some people at this moment saying, “This is too good for those dumb Indians. Let us take it away from them and get high.” Sometimes whites come to Leonard to “see the medicine man,” like somebody at a country fair come to see the calf with two heads, and often the first words they say are, “Hey, got any peyote, chief?” Already I have seen white people misusing peyote, using it just like another drug to get stoned on. Already our sacred medicine is getting scarce.