Lakota Woman (18 page)

So the soldiers were chasing the dancers, driving Crow Dog’s band deep into the Badlands, where they sought refuge on top of a snow-covered butte littered with the bones of long-extinct animals. There was nothing to eat. They were cold and hungry. The children were crying and the few ponies had become so thin they could hardly stand up. Crow Dog was dancing in the snow, naked except for a loincloth. He was singing:

They are butchering cows here,

They are killing buffalo cows.

Make your arrows straight.

Make arrows.

He shot a sacred arrow high into the sky. He received a vision that he had to give himself for his people. But the dead and the buffalo did not return. The appointed time had not come yet. The soldiers found Crow Dog and his people in their hideout and Crow Dog surrendered to save the lives which were entrusted to him. They survived. Others were not so lucky. Sitting Bull and his companions were killed in a big shootout with tribal police which left the snow red from the blood of the slain of both sides. Big Foot also surrendered, but he and his people were massacred all the same.

Leonard always thought that the dancers of 1890 had misunderstood Wovoka and his message. They should not have expected to bring the dead back to life, but to bring back their ancient beliefs by practicing Indian religion. For Leonard, dancing in a circle holding hands was bringing back the sacred hoop—to feel, holding on to the hand of your brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity, feel it with your flesh, through your skin. He also thought that reviving the Ghost Dance would be making a link to our past, to the grandfathers and grandmothers of long ago. So he decided to ghost-dance again at the place where this dance had been killed and where now it had to be resurrected. He knew all the songs and rituals that his father Henry had taught him, who himself had learned them from his grandfather. All through the night women were making old-style Ghost Dance shirts out of curtains, burlap bags, or whatever they could find. They painted them in the traditional way and they were beautiful.

On the evening before the dance, Leonard addressed the people. We got it down on tape. This is what he said: “Tomorrow we’ll ghost-dance. You’re not goin’ to say ‘I got to rest.’ There’ll be no rest, no intermission, no coffee break. We’re not going to drink water. So that’ll take place whether it snows or rains. We’re goin’ to unite together, no matter what tribe we are. We won’t say, ‘I’m a different tribe,’ or, ‘He’s a black man, he’s a white man.’ We’re not goin’ to have this white man’s attitude.

“If one of us gets into the power, the spiritual power, we’ll hold hands. If he falls down, let him. If he goes into convulsions, don’t be scared. We won’t call a medic. The spirit’s goin’ to be the doctor.

“There’s a song I’ll sing, a song from the spirit. Mother Earth is the drum, and the clouds will be the visions. The visions will go into your mind. In your mind you might see your brothers, your relations that have been killed by the white man.

“We’ll elevate ourselves from this world to another world from where you can see. It’s here that we’re goin’ to find out. The Ghost Dance spirit will be in us. The peace pipe is goin’ to be there. The fire is goin’ to be there; tobacco is goin’ to be there. We’ll start physically and go on spiritually and then you’ll get into the power. We’re goin’ to start right here,, at Wounded Knee, in 1973.

“Everybody’s heard about the Ghost Dance but nobody’s ever seen it. The United States prohibited it. There was to be no Ghost Dance, no Sun Dance, no Indian religion.

“But the hoop has not been broken. So decide tonight—for the whole unborn generations. If you want to dance with me tomorrow, you be ready!”

For the dance, Leonard had selected a hollow between hills where the feds could neither see the dancers nor shoot at them. And he had made this place wakan—sacred. And so the Sioux were ghost-dancing again, for the first time in over eighty years. They danced for four days starting at five o’clock in the morning, dancing from darkness into the night. And that dance took place around the first day of spring, a new spring for the Sioux Nation. Like the Ghost Dancers of old, many men danced barefoot in the snow around a cedar tree. Leonard had about thirty or forty dancers. Not everybody who wanted to was able to dance. Nurses and medics had to remain at their stations. Life had to be sustained and the defenses maintained.

On the first day, one of the women fell down in the snow and was helped back to what used to be the museum. They smoked the pipe and Leonard cedared her, fanning her with his eagle wing. Slowly she came to. The woman said she could not verbalize what had happened to her, but that she was in the power and had received a vision. It took her a long time to say that much because she was in a trance with only the whites of her eyes showing. On one of the four days a snowstorm interrupted the dancing, but it could not stop it. Later, Wallace Black Elk thanked the dancers for their endurance and Russel Means made a good speech about the significance of the rebirth of the Ghost Dance.

The Oglala holy man Black Elk, who died some fifty years ago, in his book said this about Wounded Knee: “I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

“And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

In that ravine, at Cankpe Opi, we gathered up the broken pieces of the sacred hoop and put them together again. All who were at Wounded Knee, Buddy Lamont, Clearwater, and our medicine men, we mended the nation’s hoop. The sacred tree
is not dead!

CHAPTER 11

Birth Giving

Ho! Sun, Moon, and Stars,

All you that move

In the Sky,

Listen to me!

Into your midst

New Life has come.

Make its path smooth.

—
Omaha prayer for a newborn child

O
n Friday, April 5, Crow Dog left Wounded Knee for about one week. He had been chosen to go on a four-man embassy to Washington in the hope of being able to see the president in order to reach a settlement we could live with. As it turned out, trying to reach a settlement in Washington was just as futile as at Wounded Knee. At this time Crow Dog was not yet my husband and lover, but I had great confidence in him, believing in his powers as a medicine man, and I had hoped he would be around when I had my baby. Now he was leaving just when I was about to give birth and I felt let down. I was very self-centered, or rather belly-centered. Washington and Nixon could have been swallowed up by a flood or an earthquake as far as I was concerned. My baby seemed a helluva lot more important.

The Sioux language has a number of words for pregnancy. One of them means “growing strong.” Another means “to be overburdened.” I felt both strong and overburdened at the same time. I wanted to have my baby at Wounded Knee, but was not sure whether that could be, because sometimes a person would come and say, “Negotiations are coming on real good. We’ll all be out of here in a day or two. We’re all gonna go home.” I always answered, “We’ll either be out of here or we’ll die. Whatever, I’m going to have my baby right here, the Indian way.” But I was a lot less confident than I sounded.

I was determined not to go to the hospital. I did not want a white doctor looking at me down there. I wanted no white doctor to touch me. Always in my mind was how they had sterilized my sister and how they had let her baby die. My baby was going to live! I was going to have it in the old Indian manner—well, old, but not too old. In the real ancient tradition our women stuck a waist-high cottonwood stick right in the center of the tipi. Squatting, holding on to that stick, they would drop the baby onto a square of soft, tanned deer hide. They themselves cut the umbilical cord and put puffball powder on the baby’s navel. Sometimes a woman friend was squatting behind them, pressing down on their stomach, or working the baby down with some sort of belt. They would rub the baby down with water and sweetgrass and then wipe it clean with buffalo grease. I did not think that I was quite that hardy or traditional to do it exactly in that way. And where would I have gotten buffalo grease?

Somebody should also have given me a fully beaded and quilled cradleboard and two turtle or lizard amulets to put the navel cord in—one to hide somewhere in the cradleboard and the other to display openly so that the bad spirits would think the navel cord was in that one, and they would try to bewitch it and would be fooled. Keha, the turtle, and Telanuwe, the sand lizard, are hard to kill. They live long. Their hearts go on beating long after they are dead. So these fetishes protect and give long life. My aunt, Elsie Flood, the turtle woman, would have made such a charm for me, but that was not to be.

I should have found a winkte, that is a gay person, to give my baby a secret name. Winktes were believed to always live to a great old age. If they gave the newborn such a hidden name, not the one everybody would know him by, then the winkte’s longevity would rub off on the little one. Such a winkte name was always funnily obscene, like for instance Che Maza, meaning Iron Prick, and you had to pay the name-giver well for it. Well, I had no money and how was I going to find a winkte at Wounded Knee? I could not very well go to every warrior and ask him, “Are you by any chance gay?” This is not to criticize winktes. We Sioux have always believed that a person is free to be what he or she wants to be. I know a winkte who is incredibly brave. At the Sun Dance he chooses the most painful way of self-inflicted suffering. He pierces at the same time in two places in front and two spots in the back. Then he stands fastened between four poles with little space to move. He cannot tear himself loose by running a few steps and then making a sudden jump. He has to work the skewers through his flesh slowly, excruciatingly. But somehow, I cannot believe in the winktes’ power of longevity. In the old days the winkte lived so long because he wore women’s clothes and was tanning and beading and cooking while the other men went on a war party and got themselves killed. I have a suspicion that nowadays the winktes live no longer than anybody else.

So I could not be quite as traditional as all that. When I say that I was determined to have my baby the Sioux way, I simply meant with an Indian prayer and the burning of sweetgrass and with the help of Indian women friends acting as midwives, having it the natural way without injections or anesthesia. I did intend to have my baby inside the ceremonial tipi, but was persuaded not to. It was too exposed and often under fire.

I did not always have lofty thoughts about traditional birth giving on my mind during the last week before I went into labor. More often I was preoccupied with much more earthly things such as getting safely to the toilet. Being in my ninth month I had to urinate frequently. The women had cleaned out a garage and with the help of some men made it into a four-way ladies’ room. It was really weird. You always met a number of girls lined up, waiting their turn. Seeing my big belly they usually let me go ahead. Some-times tracers were all around us like lightning bugs as the bullets kicked up the dust at our feet. Somehow or other this shooting did not seem real. The girls remained standing in line, chatting and giggling. There was never any panic. Somebody would come and shout, “Is everybody all right? Anybody need tranquilizers?” Imagine being in a place where you needed tranquilizers to go to the can! We did not take them anyway. My problem was that in my condition I had to go two or three times as often as the others, and I was in more of a hurry.

One evening I was inside the trading post. I had just cleaned up when that Pine Ridge man came in and sat down. He kept looking and looking at me and finally said, “Are you gonna have your baby here?”

I told him, “Yeah, if I have to. Are you going to stay to the end?”

He said, “No. I got work to do on the outside.”

“Gee,” I told him, “you’re an Oglala. This is your land. You’re supposed to stick it out. I’m from the next reservation, Rosebud, a Brule woman and pregnant. But I’m staying. You’re not going to accomplish much.”

He gave me a long look. “Wow! You’re gonna have your baby here the Indian way. That’s pretty heavy.” I had to agree with him.

On another occasion my brother told me, “You shouldn’t be here, pregnant as you are. I should put you across my knee and spank you for having come.” I told him to mind his business, and did he have a cigarette.

There was another pregnant woman with me at the Knee, Cheryl Petite. She also planned to have her baby inside the perimeter. She was a great big woman. Some of the guys were betting which of us would pop first. She went into labor on Sunday, three days before I did. Her husband was a loudmouth and he came to tell me, “She beat you. We’re gonna have our baby first.”

I answered him that I did not care who was having her baby first. This was no sports event. I wasn’t in a race. But he kept on bragging all over the village that Cher was going to beat me to it. She was in labor for two hours. When her pains were about ten minutes apart he started worrying: “Maybe it would be better to go to the hospital. Maybe she’s too small. Maybe he’s not in the right position. Maybe it’s gonna be a breach baby.” So they got themselves all worried and he started negotiating at the roadblock, and the marshals let them through to have their baby at the Pine Ridge Hospital. The people inside the village felt bad. Many came to me saying, “Mary, you’re our last chance now to have a baby born at Wounded Knee.” I did not want to disappoint them.

Shortly before Crow Dog left for Washington, he put on a peyote meeting. I was glad to be able to participate in it just when I was on the point of giving birth—exactly a week before I went into labor, as it turned out. I took medicine. When the sacred things were passed around I took hold of the staff and prayed with it, prayed that my child and I would come through it all safely. And at the time of midnight water Leonard stood up and said, “It’s gonna be all right. Good things will happen to you.” And I told him how much strength the meeting was giving me. While I was praying it had rained, a sort of foggy, misty-white rain. But then it stopped and when the meeting ended the sky was clear. I left confident, feeling good.

Monday, just as the morning star came out, my water broke and I went down to the sweat lodge to pray. I wanted to go into the sweat but Black Elk would not let me. Maybe there was a taboo against my participating, just as a menstruating woman is not allowed to take part in a ceremony. I was disappointed. I did not feel that the fact that my water had burst had made me ritually unclean. As I walked away from the vapor hut, for the third time, I heard that ghostly cry and lamenting of a woman and child coming out of the massacre ravine. Others had heard it too. I felt that the spirits were all around me. I was later told that some of the marshals inside their sandbagged positions had also heard it, and some could not stand it and had themselves transferred.

After that nothing happened until Tuesday morning when some stuff came out of me. At four o’clock in the afternoon I began having spasms at intervals of half an hour. They made me lie down then. At nine o’clock at night the cramps became severe. The pains lasted all night. On Wednesday morning they became harder. A firefight started, but I was too preoccupied to pay it any attention. My friends kept me strong. Pedro Bissonette, who was later killed by BIA police, was pacing the floor, pacing and pacing. Every now and then he would look in on me to see how I was doing, trying to reassure me: “An ambulance is waiting for you. Just in case anything should go wrong. It’s ready to take you through the roadblock to the hospital. Just give the word.”

“No,” I said, “it’s all right.” But it wasn’t. The pains were bad and they lasted so long. And they were so real, blotting out everything else. I was too tired to push, too tired to live. Then I got lonesome. I missed my mother with whom I had never gotten along, missed my sisters, missed Grandma. I wished that there had been a father waiting for me and the baby. And yet I was so lucky in having such devoted women friends standing by, helping me. Josette Wawasik acted as the chief midwife. She was a seventy-two-year-old Potawatomy lady from Kansas who had been at the Knee from the very beginning and had also taken part in the BIA building takeover half a year before. Ellen Moves Camp and Vernona Kills Right were assisting her, and naturally Annie Mae Aquash was there, too. Mrs. Wawasik had delivered thirteen babies before and Ellen Moves Camp had delivered three or four, so they knew what they were doing. Ellen’s case was tragic; she was such a strong-hearted woman, and later had to see a son turn into an informer against us. Their hands were gentle. I had no injections, or knockout medicine, just water. I gave birth inside a trailer house. As I said, I had wanted to deliver inside the tipi but that would have been risking all our lives. Well, my labor lasted until 2:45
P.M.
and then it went zip, easy, just like that.

A couple of hours before Pedro was born a cow gave birth to a calf. The old-style Sioux are proverbial gamblers and they had been betting which would come in first, the cow or me. And the cow had beaten me by a length.

When the baby was born I could hear the people outside. They had all come except the security manning the bunkers, and when they heard my little boy’s first tiny cry all the women gave the high-pitched, trembling brave-heart yell. I looked out the window and I could see them, women and men standing there with their fists raised in the air, and I really thought then that I had accomplished something for my people. And that felt very, very good, like a warmth spreading over me.

Dennis Banks came in and hugged me, saying, “Right on, sister!” and he was crying, and that made me cry, too. And then Carter Camp and Pedro Bissonette came in with tears streaming down their faces. All those tough guys were weeping. And then my girl friends came in, taking turns holding the baby. Grandma Wawasik went to the window and held up the baby and a great cheer went up. They were beating the big drum and singing the AIM song. And that led to another song, many songs, and my heart beat with the drum. They wrapped my baby up and laid him beside me. They brought in the pipe and we prayed with it, prayed for my little boy whom I named Pedro. I am glad I did because this way Pedro Bissonette’s name is living on. And right away after my son was born he lifted up his little, soft head and so I knew that I had a strong child, because they don’t do that until they are two weeks old. And the macho Sioux men said, “For sure, that’s a warrior.” As I looked at him I knew that I was entering a new phase of my life and that things would not, could not ever be the same again. More and more people crowded in, pumped my hand, and snapped my picture, and I wasn’t even done yet. Grandma Wawasik and Ellen Moves Camp had to throw them all out so that I could have my afterbirth. Out of the window I could see smoke. The feds were burning off the sagebrush to deprive our guides of cover. The whole prairie around Wounded Knee was burning. Vernona said, “They’re sending up a smoke signal for you.” I was very, very tired and finally slept a little.

The drumming and singing and cheering had gotten the marshals excited. As was usual with them, they thought we were getting ready for a banzai charge. They were running in all directions, waving their M-16s about. Soon half a dozen
APC
s came lumbering up, closing in on our positions, and started a firefight. Luckily nobody got hit. That would have taken the joy out of the day, April 11, a good day for all of us. And so, though I was hardly grown-up myself, I had become a mother.

A few days after the baby was born came the air-drop, and among other things, I got an onion. I was so happy, after two months inside Wounded Knee, to see a fresh, real-life onion again. My good mood did not last long, however. Over the two-way radio I heard a guy saying, “A man got hit in his head. He’s bleeding. He’s not going to make it. Hold your fire so we can get him to some facility, we got to get him to a hospital.” I felt so sad then, but at the same time I felt that: in some mysterious way I had given a life to replace the one that had been lost. The fatally wounded brother was Clearwater, a Cherokee.