Lakota Woman (11 page)

It is perfectly legal for Indians to buy and use peyote as a sacrament in a religious ceremony—to buy it at a price, that is. As peyote is being fenced in, like us Indians, and as it is getting harder to come by, all along the Texas border dealers are selling it at exorbitant prices to the Native American Church people. For the sellers it is something like a gold rush. Peyote has been hit by inflation. It has been subjected to the rule of supply and demand, and selling it has become a business—can you imagine, an herb which grows wild in abundance, which nature has put on this earth for the use of the native peoples since the beginning of time.

Peyote makes me understand myself and the world around me. It lets me see the royalness of my people, the royalness of peyote, how good it can be. It is so good, and yet it can be dangerous if a person misuses it. You have to be in the right mind, approach it in the right way. If people have the wrong thoughts about it, it could hurt them. But peyote has never hurt me, it has always treated me well. It helped me when nothing else could. Grandfather Peyote knows you; you can’t hide from him. He makes the unborn baby dance inside its mother’s womb. He has that power. When you partake of this medicine in the right way, you feel strength surging through you, you “get into the power,” other-world power given specially to you and no one else. This also is common to all Indians whether or not they use peyote, this concept of power.

Peyote is a unifier, that is one of its chief blessings. This unifying force brought tribes together in friendship who had been enemies before, and it helped us in our struggle. I took the peyote road because I took the AIM road. For me they became one path. I have visited many tribes. They have different cultures and speak different languages. They may even have different rituals when partaking of this medicine. They may be jealous of each other, saying, “We are the better tribe. Our men used to fight better than yours. We do things better.” But once they meet inside the peyote tipi, all differences are forgotten. Then they are no longer Navajos, or Poncas, Apaches, or Sioux, but just Indians. They learn each others’ songs and find out that they are really the same. Peyote is making many tribes into just one tribe. And it is the same with the Sun Dance which also serves to unite the different Indian nations.

The words we put into our songs are an echo of the sacred root, the voices of the little pebbles inside the gourd rattle, the voices of the magpie and scissortail feathers which make up the peyote fan, the voice from inside the water drum, the cry of the water bird. Peyote will give you a voice, a song of understanding, a prayer for good health or for your people’s survival. Once I saw a star shining through the opening on top of the tipi. It shone upon the sacred altar and it gave me a song. Many songs have no words, but you can put in words if you want to. It’s up to the peyote to put words into your song. Women always took part in peyote meetings but for a long time they were not supposed to sing. They were not supposed to pray with the staff, because the staff is a man and women should not try to be men. I was one of the first women to sing during meetings. I have a very high voice, and I am told that I sound like a sad little girl. Leonard’s sisters are all fine singers, especially Christine with her deep, strong voice. Now many women sing while holding the staff and shaking the gourd.

Leonard is the best of all peyote singers in the whole country and I am not saying this just because I am his wife. He knows literally hundreds and hundreds of different songs from many tribes. He must have made up at least a hundred songs himself. While his songs are traditional, he puts something new and special into them which is hard to define. At times his voice does not seem to belong to an ordinary human being. At other times it sounds as if two or three people were singing together, not just he alone. He puts birdcalls into his songs. He has made up a few roadrunner songs and while you hear him singing in Sioux, at the same time you can also hear the call of the roadrunner, very fast. You’d swear there was a roadrunner racing through the tipi, around and around, but it exists only in the song.

When I sit in the circle with Poncas, Otos, Winnebagos, or Cheyennes, I feel as if I am among my own people. We cannot understand each other except by talking English, but through peyote we speak one tongue, spiritually. The ceremony might change a little from tribe to tribe, but not much. Essentially it is always the same. The Navajos might use cornhusk cigarettes during their ritual, while we use the pipe and can-shasha, Indian willow bark tobacco. The Navajos form their main altar in the shape of a half-moon; another tribe may shape it another way. In some places they have their meetings inside the house in an ordinary room, cleared and purified for the purpose. Somewhere else they prefer to meet in a tipi. When Navajo people visit Leonard, he runs his ceremony Navajo style. If we go down to Arizona, the Navajos might put up a meeting for us in the Sioux manner. The differences are minor. Always the meeting lasts from sundown to sunup, always you have the songs, the staff, the gourd, the fan, the drum, the smoking, the fire, the drink of cold water. It is only when you travel below the border that peyote is worshiped in a markedly different way. In 1975 Leonard held a Ghost Dance at his place and to our great surprise a couple of Mexican Indians showed up—Yaqui, Huichol, and Nahuatl. How they knew about the Ghost Dance and what exactly had made them travel this long distance to Crow Dog’s place was something of a mystery. One, a guy from Oaxaca, came in his typical Mexican Indian outfit and told us that his Nahua name was Warm Southwind. The Sioux, with their peculiar kind of Lakota humor, immediately named him “Mild Disturbance.” We found out that these Indian brothers from Aztec and Maya country also were peyote people, but from what they told us their rituals were not at all like ours, going back to the dawn of history.

The peyote staff is a man. It is alive. It is, as my husband says, a “hot line” to the Great Spirit. Thoughts travel up the staff, and messages travel down. The gourd is a brain, a skull, a spirit voice. The water drum is the water of life. It is the Indians’ heartbeat. Its skin is our skin. It talks in two voices—one high and clear, the other deep and reverberating. The drum is round like the sacred hoop which has no beginning and no end. The cedar’s smoke is the breath of all green, living things, and it purifies, making everything it touches holy. The fire, too, is alive and eternal. It is the flame passed from one generation to the next. The feather fan is a war bonnet. It catches songs out of the air. Crow Dog’s father, Henry, had a fan of magpie feathers and the magpie taught him a song. Magpie feathers are for doctoring. Water bird feathers are the road man’s companions. The water bird is the chief symbol of the peyote religion. A fan made from its feathers is used by the road man to bless the water. Hawk feathers are for good understanding. A scissortail fan represents the Indian mothers, Indian maidens with black hair wearing white buckskin dresses. Everybody would like to own a macaw feather fan, but these are hard to come by. The macaw speaks all tongues and unifies the tribes. You can see good things in a macaw parrot fan. The strange thing is that in prehistoric Indian ruins going back a thousand years, in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, the feathers and remains of macaws have been found. I have also seen many centuries-old rock paintings depicting parrots. The feathers, mummies, and paintings of these macaws are found some fifteen hundred to two thousand miles north from the nearest place where these huge parrots occur in the wild. It proves that the North American pueblos were in communication with the Aztecs and Toltecs. I often wonder whether the prehistoric Anasazi were peyote people and imported their macaws to use the feathers during their rituals. Maybe someday I will find out.

The first adherents of the Native American Church were harassed by missionaries and government agents, not because they used peyote as a sacrament, but because all Indian rituals were outlawed as standing in the way of “whitemanizing” the native peoples. In many states, until fairly recently, many who prayed with the sacred medicine had to go to jail. My husband’s family were early victims of this sort of harassment. The Crow Dogs were among the first on our reservation to join the Peyote Church. That was about 1918 or 1920. Leonard’s father, Henry, had a little boy before my husband was born. During the early thirties the family was living in St. Francis, a town dominated by Catholic priests who have their big mission and parochial boarding school there. One winter night one of the priests heard the sound of the peyote drum. It was traced to Henry Crow Dog’s place where a ceremony was in progress. The BIA police received orders to drive Crow Dog from the town. He was the heathen rotten apple who spoiled the barrel of good Christian, submissive apples. The police piled Crow Dog’s belongings, his wife, and children onto his old, horse-drawn buggy and told him to get out of St. Francis or go to jail. A blizzard was raging, and South Dakota blizzards are beyond anything an Eastern city dweller could imagine. Henry drove his buggy to his piece of allotted land some ten miles away. From his own land, he thought, nobody could drive him away. He was traveling in the face of the storm all the way, sometimes through deep snowdrifts. It took him all night. When he reached his land in the wee hours of the morning, they all had to sleep in the wagon. It was the only shelter they had against the icy winds. There was no house there at the time. Shortly after it got light the little boy died from exposure. He was two years old—a big brother whom Leonard never knew. A faith you have suffered for becomes more precious. The more the Crow Dogs and other traditional families were persecuted for their beliefs, the more stubbornly they held on to them.

After Wounded Knee, when I became Crow Dog’s wife, I started to go down south with him to what he called his “peyote gardens.” This always involved a round trip of some three thousand miles and staying with various tribes along the way. I have to admit that in the beginning I had the typical Sioux prejudice against some of the southern tribes. To me they seemed at first to be too peaceful and self-contented, not “committed to the struggle,” the Pueblos especially. They did not have the Plains tribes’ aversion to farming and were growing their corn and squash on fields which they had tended for hundreds of years before the first white man set foot on this continent. In time I recognized that they had an inner strength that we Plains people lacked, strength without macho, without bragging about what great warriors they were, or had been. I had to admire the way they kept the government at arm’s length, kept tourists and photographers out, and managed to hold on to their old ways without theatricals or confrontations. They worked and kept themselves busy. They had, on the whole, fewer problems with alcoholism than we did. Of course, they had been farmers since the dawn of history, great potters, and nowadays also jewelry makers. Through their farming and craftwork they had been able to adapt to the system without being overrun by it.

They lived a lot better than we northern tribes. Their beautiful traditional adobe houses were comfortable, with modern bathrooms and kitchens. They sat by cozy fireplaces. Fine Indian rugs covered their floors; strings of red chilis hung from their rafters. Outside, the family car was always new and shiny, not like our old Sioux jalopies with one headlight out and a window smashed. I could not help noticing the great role women played in Pueblo society. Women owned the houses and actually built them. Children often got their mother’s last name, not their father’s. Sons joined their mothers’ clans. It made me a little jealous. Of course, the Pueblos were lucky. Unlike us poor Sioux who were driven into fenced-in reservations, they still lived in their ancient villages which had already been old when the Spaniards came. Even so the Pueblos have many of the same problems facing us Sioux. They have to protect their land and water from developers, strip miners, uranium seekers, and dam builders. I sometimes think that in their quiet way they might be doing a better job at this than we flamboyant Lakotas. Traveling and meeting many tribes we learned a lot. At least I did.

Having our certificates and other documents proving that we are acting on behalf of all the Native American Church people in the Dakotas, and that Leonard is an official as well as priest of that church, it is now legal for us to go down into Texas and Mexico to harvest our medicine. Leonard only has to show his papers to get all the peyote he wants—if he has the money to pay for it. It took some tough court battles to bring this about. One of the funniest court cases he won arose from an incident on the Navajo reservation. Leonard had been invited to a peyote meeting by some Navajo friends. It was run by a Navajo, but they gave Leonard the job of fire chief. At the beginning an Indian woman came in with a white man. She explained, “He is my husband. That makes it all right for him to partake.” This white guy was dressed like a hippie. He had long hair and beads all over him. He was dressed like an Indian. He took some medicine and seemed to be affected by it. He acted drunk. Halfway through the meeting he suddenly got up to take a leak outside. As he stumbled back into the tipi he did not bend down low enough to clear the entrance hole. His long hair got caught and came off. It was a wig. Underneath he had a crew cut. At once he said, “I am the sheriff of Holbrook, and I arrest the whole bunch of you.” All the Indians burst into laughter, it was so grotesque.

When the trial came up, one of the charges was that the Indians had let a white man participate. Of course, Leonard had only been a guest. It had not been up to him to let or not let the white man participate. When it was Leonard’s turn to speak, he said: “Judge, if it is illegal for a white man to take this medicine, then the sheriff has broken his own law. We did not break it, because we have been allowed to use this herb as a sacrament for a long, long time. But I think the sheriff has not broken any law, because this was a religious meeting and even a white man has the right to participate—if we let him—as long as it is a strictly conducted ceremony. Freedom of religion doesn’t stop at the door of a peyote tipi. Also, the sheriff had no jurisdiction on Indian land in the first place. Inside the reservation he was just a tourist. Only the tribal police would have had the right to make an arrest. This is all I have to say.” We won that case and it was a landmark decision in favor of the peyote church.