Lakota Woman (20 page)

As Old Man Henry tells it, Crow Dog got his name in this way: He was taking his people to Hante Paha Wakan, to Cedar Valley, to hunt. Before riding out he had a vision. He saw a white horse in the clouds giving him the horse power, and from then on his horse was Shunkaka-Luzahan, the swiftest horse in the band. And he heard the voice of Shunk-Manitu, the coyote, saying, “I am the one.” Then his horse suddenly raised its two ears up and the wind got into the two eagle feathers Crow Dog was wearing, and the feathers were talking, the feathers were saying, “There is a wichasha, a man up ahead on that hill, between the two trees.” Crow Dog and his companions saw the man clearly. The man raised his hands and suddenly was gone. Crow Dog sent out two scouts, one to the north and one to the south. They came back saying that they had seen no one. Had this man on the hill been a wanagi, a spirit, trying to warn Crow Dog?

Crow Dog told his men to make camp near a river. He said, “Put the tipis close to the bank, so that the enemy cannot surround us.” They did this. During the night Crow Dog could hear the coyote howl four times. Shunk-Manitu was telling him, “Something bad is going to happen to you.” Crow Dog understood what the coyote was saying. Crow Dog got the men of his warrior society together, the Kit Foxes. They were singing their song:

I am a fox.

I am not afraid to die.

If there is a dangerous

deed to perform,

That is mine to do.

They painted their faces black. They prepared themselves for a fight, for death.

At dawn the enemy attacked—white settlers led by a white and many Crow scouts, with many Absaroka warriors helping them. With Crow Dog were many famous warriors. Numpa Kachpa was there, Two Strikes, who got his name when he shot down two white soldiers riding on the same horse with one bullet. Kills in Water was there, and Hollow Horn Bear’s son, and Kills in Sight. Two Crows had wounded Kills in Sight and unhorsed him. Crow Dog came in on a run, killed the two Crows, and put Kills in Sight on his horse. He whipped the horse and it took off with Kills in Sight hanging on to it. The horse was fast and got Kills in Sight safely home.

Crow Dog was looking around, hoping to catch himself one of the riderless Crow horses, when he took two enemy arrows, one high on his chest right under the collarbone and the other in his side. He broke off the arrows with his hands. Hollow Horn Bear’s son and two others of his men came to help him. They were wounded, and their horses all had at least one arrow stuck in them. Crow Dog told them, “I am hurt bad. I cannot live. No use bothering with me. Save yourselves.”

They rode off. Crow Dog managed to get hold of a horse and got on it, but he weakened soon. He became so weak he fell off this pony. He was lying in the snow. He had hardly strength to sing his death song. Suddenly two coyotes came, hooping gently. They said, “We know you.” They kept him warm during the night, one lying on one side and one on the other. They brought Crow Dog deer meat to make him strong, and they brought him a medicine. One of the coyotes said, “Put this on the arrow points.” Crow Dog did what the coyote told him. The medicine made his flesh tender and caused it to open up so that he could take the arrowheads and what was left of the shafts out. They almost came out by themselves.

The medicine the coyotes gave him cured Crow Dog. The nourishment they brought him made him strong. The coyotes brought him home to his camp. A crow showed the way. Crow Dog said, “I was already walking on Ta-Chanku, on the Milky Way, on the road to the Spirit Land, but the coyotes led me back.” And so he took on his seventh and last name, Kangi-Shunka, Crow Dog. Of course, it should have been Crow Coyote.

Years later, he was on his way to join Sitting Bull in Canada, and near the sacred Medicine Rocks he and his men were jumped by white soldiers. Crow Dog was hit by two bullets. His companions tied him to his horse and managed to get him home. This time a medicine man by the name of Sitting Hawk saved him. He told Crow Dog, “I will put my wound medicine into you. But I will not take the bullets out. One day you will die and go back to Mother Earth and the bullets will still be in you. Your human body will dissolve but the bullets will remain as evidence of what the wasičun have done to us.”

This is the legend of Crow Dog, which Old Man Henry has told me many times. The first Crow Dog was a great warrior though he never took part in a big battle, such as the Little Big Horn. He preferred to do his fighting as a member of a small war party made up of warriors from his own Orphan Band. He fought the wasičun and Pawnee and Crow warriors.

Crow Dog had been a close friend of Crazy Horse. Together with Touch the Clouds, White Thunder, Four Horns, and Crow Good Voice, he accompanied Crazy Horse when this Great Warrior surrendered himself at Fort Robinson in 1877. After Crazy Horse was treacherously murdered, it was Crow Dog’s cool head and bravery which prevented a general massacre. As the enraged Sioux faced the soldiers who were only waiting for a pretext to start the killing, Crow Dog rode back and forth between them, pushing back the over-eager warriors and soldiers with the butt end of his Winchester.

Crow Dog was most famous for his having shot and killed Spotted Tail, the paramount chief of the Brule Sioux. They were cousins and when they were young, they had been friends. Later, their paths diverged. Spotted Tail said, “It’s no use trying to resist the wasičun.” He cooperated with the whites in most things. Crow Dog was like Sitting Bull; he stuck to the old ways. The so-called “friendlies” gathered around Spotted Tail, and the so-called “hostiles” around Crow Dog. This led to rivalry and rivalry led to trouble, big trouble that was slowly building up between the two men.

On August 5, 1881, Crow Dog was hauling wood in his buckboard with his wife beside him when he saw Spotted Tail coming out of the council house and getting on his horse. Crow Dog handed his wife the reins, took his gun, which was hanging beside him out of its scabbard, got down from his seat, and faced the chief. Spotted Tail saw him. He said, “This is the day we settle this thing which is between us like men.” Spotted Tail went for his six-shooter. Crow Dog knelt down and fired, beating Spotted Tail to the draw. He hit the chief in the chest. Spotted Tail tumbled from his horse and died, the unfired six-gun in his hand. Turning Bear shot at Crow Dog’s wife, but missed. Crow Dog drove back to his home with his wife. A man called Black Crow prepared a sweat lodge to purify Crow Dog. He loaded up the Winchester and shot it into the sacred rocks four times, saying, “Now Spotted Tail’s spirit won’t bother you.” They then purified themselves with water.

A judge in Deadwood sentenced Crow Dog to be hanged. He asked leave to go home to prepare himself. The judge asked, “How do we know that you will come back?” Crow Dog said, “Because I’m telling you.” The judge let him go. For a month Crow Dog prepared for his death. He made up a death song and gave all his things away. What little he had, his horses, wagon, chickens, he gave to the poor. His wife prepared a white buckskin outfit for him, plain, without beads or quillwork. He wanted to be hanged in this. When all was ready he hitched up his last horse to an old buggy and with his wife drove the one hundred and fifty miles to Deadwood for his own execution.

When he arrived at Deadwood his lawyer was waiting for him with a big smile: “Crow Dog, you are a free man. I went to the Supreme Court for you and the Court ruled that the U.S. government has no jurisdiction over the reservation and that there is no law for punishing an Indian for killing another Indian.” Crow Dog said, “You’re a damn heap good man. I have driven a hundred and fifty miles for nothing.” Then he went home with his wife.

Black Crow told Crow Dog: “Cousin, the blood guilt will be upon you for four generations. From now on you will not smoke the pipe with other men. You will smoke a small pipe of your own, and you will smoke alone. You will not eat from a common dish; you will eat alone from your own bowl. You will drink from your own cup. You will not drink water from the dipper when it is handed around. You cannot eat from other people’s dishes and they will not eat from yours. You will live apart from the tribe. Cousin, yours will be a lonely life.”

Kangi-Shunka paid blood money. He gave the Spotted Tail family many horses and white-man dollars. That made peace between the families, but not between the Crow Dogs and the spirits. They suffered their ostracism with a certain arrogance. They were weighed down by Crow Dog’s deed, but at the same time they were proud of it. Theirs was a proud sort of shame. The first Crow Dog was an outcast but also something of a hero. The Crow Dogs wrapped themselves in their pride as in a blanket. They turned guilt into glory. They began speaking of the royalness of their bloodline. The first Crow Dog had shown them the way. As a chief he had the right to wear a war bonnet, but he never did. Instead he found somewhere an old, discarded white man’s cloth cap with a visor and to the top of it he fastened an eagle feather. And that he wore at all times—the lowest and the highest. He used to say: “This white man’s cap that I am wearing means that I must live in the wasičun’s world, under his government. The eagle feather means that I, Crow Dog, do not let the wasičun’s world get the better of me, that I remain an Indian until the day I die.” In some mysterious way that old cap became in the people’s mind a thing more splendid than any war bonnet. And it was into this clan that I married.

The shock of having to deal at the same time with the myth and the reality, with trying to break through the Crow Dog buckskin curtain, and having to take care of the needs of so many people as well, was too much for me. I broke down. I got sick. I was down to ninety pounds. My body just collapsed. I could no longer stand up. If I tried, my legs would cramp up and hurt. My joints ached. I told Leonard, “I don’t feel good. I can’t sleep, and if I do I dream about people who have died, my dead friends and relations. Every time I close my eyes I see those who have been killed. I am sad, always. I think I am going to die too.”

Leonard said he would do a doctoring meeting for me. He put up the peyote tipi for me. Another road man, Estes Stuart, came to help him. I ate the sacred medicine. I kept eating and eating. I was so weak I could not sit up. They made me lie down on a blanket. Leonard gave me some peyote tea to drink. It was old tea and very strong. I drank two whole cups of it. At midnight Estes prayed, and he talked while the water was going around. He said that since he was a peyote man he had X-ray vision, X-ray eyes which could see into my body, and he could not detect any sickness in me except one—love sickness. I felt so bad that tears came to my eyes. I thought, “Here I am, sick unto death, and they are making fun of me.” I think I was a little paranoid. Estes had not been making fun at all. He explained later that what he meant was that mine was not a sickness of the body, but of the mind. That I felt that nobody loved me, not Leonard, not his family, not the people I cooked and washed for. I was sickening for want of love.

Suddenly people were all around me, talking to me, comforting me. Old Man Henry was patting my cheek, calling me “daughter.” All those present were praying for me. All through the night I ate peyote. And Grandfather Peyote was calling me daughter.

When the sun rose, I rose too. I suddenly could sit up, even walk. I stepped outside the tipi and all around me I could see strange tropical birds flying, birds of metallic, fluorescent rainbow colors leaving trails of gold and silver. I went inside the house to lie down. I went to my bed, drew aside the blanket, and my legs turned to water. In my bed lay a strange woman, her hands crossed over her breast, her face stiff and white, her eyes unseeing. She was dead!

I got very scared. All of a sudden my whole body stopped. My heart quit pumping. My blood froze. I could not breathe.

Then I saw that the strange woman lying dead in my bed was me. Myself. And a great weight was lifted from me. I could breathe again. My heart was beating. I felt good. What was dying, what had died, was my former self, but I would go on living. Leonard came in and asked how was I doing. He put his arm around me and kissed me. He told me to lie down in the bed. As I did, the dead woman disappeared. The peyote power got hold of me. I started laughing. I kept on giggling and giggling. My ribs were sticking out, I had grown so skinny. I was all bones. But I kept on laughing for an hour. I would be all right.

CHAPTER 13

Two Cut-off Hands

They won’t let Indians like me live. That’s alright.

I don’t want to grow up to be an old woman.

—
Annie Mae Aquasb

N
obody could ever say anything bad about my friend Annie Mae, because she never did anything bad in her life. She never walked into my home, she always burst in, full of energy. She was a small woman, hardly more than five feet tall, but she dominated those around her by the force of her personality. She was pretty, too, with her wide, smiling mouth, her Indian eyes and cheekbones, her flowing black hair.

She was always the first up in the morning, making sure that everybody got fed. She saw to it that all the men had clean clothes. She often took dirty clothes to the river and washed them herself. She combed and braided all the men’s hair. Whenever she saw young girls just sitting around and gossiping, doing nothing all day but lying on a couch putting on makeup, she would tell them to get off their asses and start doing something worthwhile. She was happy to clean house, have everybody sweeping up and mopping. She was a good cook. She taught me and a lot of other women some good Indian recipes. Once she danced into my kitchen, danced around the table with a whole basket full of frogs she had caught in the river and killed. She cooked us up some frog’s legs French-Canadian style. She would do fine beadwork for you. All you had to do was ask her. She learned how to make Sioux moccasins from Leonard’s mother. She was gifted and had a flair for designing clothes, for creating very imaginative Indian fashions. She even modeled them for white customers. She was a natural-born leader. She had held responsible positions as director of Indian youth and antialcohol programs. She played a very active role within the Indian movement, both at national AIM headquarters in Minneapolis and on the West Coast. For me she was a rock to lean on, a rock with a lot of heart. She did not deserve to die.

Annie Mae was a Micmac Indian, born and raised on a tiny reservation in Nova Scotia, not far from Halifax. Though she lived in Canada, two thousand miles from Rosebud, her life was almost a copy of mine, or of that of thousands of other young Indian girls and women. Instead of on a reservation, she lived on a reserve. Instead of a Bureau of Indian Affairs regulating and interfering with her existence, it was a department. The white boss lording it over the Micmacs was an agent, not a superintendent. The men who harassed her were mounties, not state troopers. Otherwise everything was the same north of the border. She lived in the same kind of tar paper shack that I did. She too had to do without electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, running water, and paved roads. She too was often hungry, down to one meal a day, eating anything she could find. Her mother had the same name as I—Mary Ellen. All she could tell me about her father was that he was a good fiddler who one day vamoosed. Her mother then married a good, hardworking, sober-minded man, but he got sick and died. Her mother then came apart, did hardly anything but gamble and smoke, and took off to marry again, abandoning her half-grown children, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Annie Mae had two sisters and one brother. One of the sisters, Mary, was especially close to her. She told me that Mary was very much like herself. The kids helped each other, Annie Mae having to take the part of her absent mother. Annie Mae could live off the sea, clamming and fishing. She worked as a berry picker and spud picker at one dollar per hour. Spud picking was back-breaking work. When she was seventeen she decided there was nothing to hold her on the Micmac reserve. She was eager and determined to make something of herself, to find out things. For many Micmacs, Boston was the mecca, the big city with a capital B, and to Boston she went.

She had met a young Micmac, Jake Maloney, and married him. They had two daughters. For a while she lived like a white middle-class housewife in a middle-class home. She was a sharp dresser, even wore dyed beehive hairdos, but she wanted to remain an Indian. She wanted her daughters to grow up as Indians. Jake’s and her beliefs conflicted. They started to quarrel. He beat her. She left and divorced him. She had to fight him for the custody of her daughters. In the end she won. Her own children, at one time, told her that they preferred living with their father because he could give them the many things they wanted, things Annie Mae would not be able to give them if they lived Indian style on Boston’s skid row. They preferred their white stepmother to their real one. Annie Mae grew into a Native American militant. She got into the same kind of fights that Barb and I had fought. She gave herself to the cause and that meant giving her children to her sister Mary to care for. That was hard and heart-wrenching. It was the sacrifice Annie Mae made to the movement—her motherhood. One thing she got out of her marriage: her husband was a martial arts freak and a professional karate teacher. Annie Mae became his sparring partner and learned some good chops and kicks. She knew when and on whom to use them.

Annie Mae met her first AIM people on November 26, 1970, when Russel Means and two hundred militants buried Plymouth Rock under a ton of sand, as a “symbolic burial of the white man’s conquest.” Among the tribes represented were New England Wampanoags, Narraganset, and Passamaquoddy, as well as a group of Micmacs, Annie Mae among them, calling themselves the “first victims of the wrath of the WASP.” Later Annie Mae was among those who with war whoops boarded
Mayflower
II
, the replica of the vessel that had brought the pilgrims to the New World. She watched Russel climb up the rigging, waving a pirate’s blunderbuss, shouting: “Don’t let us pick this up! We don’t want to take up the gun again. But if you force us to, watch out!” This first meeting with AIM had on Annie Mae the same effect my first encounter had on me. It decided her fate. It decided when and how she would die.

In the beginning of 1972, or thereabouts, Annie Mae found herself a lover, Nogeeshik Aquash. Nogeeshik was a Canadian Indian who, Annie Mae told me, came from an island in the Great Lakes area. He looked and acted like an Indian, but at the same time was unlike any other Indian I knew. He was good-looking in a sinister way. His face was very pale with a sort of Fu-Manchu mustache and a tiny, scraggly goatee. He was very slim, elegantly emaciated. He had the movements of a cat, or maybe a spider. Paleness contrasting with his black hair, he sometimes reminded me of a handsome ghost. He is a good artist and lithographer. He dressed Indian, but again in a strange, unique way. He always wore a special sort of little, flat black hat with a feather stuck in it. Together they worked in the movement. On the side they started Indian fashion shows and became involved in exhibiting and sponsoring Indian crafts and jewelry. Annie Mae took part in the takeover of the BIA building and later she and Nogeeshik went to Wounded Knee. Right after Annie Mae helped me give birth, she and Nogeeshik were married in the Indian way. As Leonard was then with Russel Means in Washington trying to arrange a cease-fire, our friend the medicine man Wallace Black Elk performed the ceremony. They were joined together with the pipe and the star blanket. They were cedared up and smoked the sacred tobacco while four men and four women made a flesh offering for them. “A marriage like this,” Black Elk told them, “lasts forever.”

It did not work out that way. Their relationship turned sour. For a while they lived in Ottawa and that town was not good for them. Nogeeshik did a lot of barhopping and sometimes took Annie Mae along. He was moody to begin with, but when drunk he became abusive. Annie Mae told me, “He was torturing my mind. He did not treat me right.” White women were attracted to him and he flaunted them in Annie Mae’s face. Once or twice, she said, he beat her, or at least tried to. She could take care of herself if it came to physical confrontations. They split up a few times but always got together again until finally she got to a point where she could not take it anymore. She told me, “We had a quarrel and he broke the pipe, the sacred pipe we were married with at the Knee. For no reason at all. Then I knew that it was all over and I left him for good.”

After that she stayed on and off with us at Crow Dog’s Paradise. She got very high up in the councils of AIM, to the extent of helping set movement policies. She had no luck with men. She was a very strong-hearted woman and that made some men uncomfortable. In the months before her death she got really close to Leonard Peltier. She admired him, and could not do enough for him. I still think that he would have been the ideal man for her, but things turned out tragically for both of them.

Annie Mae came to us to take part in the 1974 and 1975 Sun Dance. She came alone. She put up a tipi in back of our house and there she lived. She liked being with us Sioux. She tried learning to speak our language. She started making Sioux arts and crafts. Tough in a fight, she was gentle and comforting to any of the people who were sick or in despair. Everybody liked her, and many depended on her. She pared her existence down to the very basics, to the simplest way of tipi living.

At that time many other people besides her were camping on our place, and someone stole a necklace and earrings she had, worth about five or six hundred dollars. She said, “I have no need of such things anymore. Whoever took them is welcome to the stuff. I am only sorry that skins are ripping off skins.” She came over to the house and dumped all her clothes and possessions on the table, telling me, “Keep these. This is for you. I’d rather not have anything at all, just whatever I have on my back. That’s good enough for my execution.” Ever since Wounded Knee she had had premonitions of approaching death. “I’ve fought too hard,” she said. “They won’t let Indians like me live. That’s all right. I don’t want to grow up to be an old woman.” She talked that way often, almost cheerfully, without a trace of sentimentality. All she was left with then were her jeans, ribbon shirt, and Levi’s jacket. That was all.

She wanted to take Leonard and me to the Micmac country, to Nova Scotia, to Shubenakadie, to Pictou’s Landing, to all the tiny Micmac reserves which, as she jokingly said, are not much larger than a football field—the king-size ones. She told me that her Micmac people were losing their culture and their language. She said that every year her people go to an island and have ceremonies there, but that these rituals are becoming Christianized. She wanted to take Leonard to her tribe to teach them, to let them see that the old Indian ways still exist.

Leonard taught her the way of Grandfather Peyote. She liked to come to the meetings and was learning the songs. During a half-moon ceremony she had a vision. She was sitting beside me when it came to her. She said that she saw the moon turn into a prison, a jail with round walls, and inside it she saw the tiny figures of Indians leaving this prison, walking toward a big fire, walking right into the flames. And inside the fire was a man beckoning to her. And so she also walked into the flames. She told me: “I have experienced pain and the ecstasy and the glory of the fire which will consume me soon. A fire that will make me free.”

Annie Mae still traveled a lot. Wherever Indians fought for their rights, Annie Mae was there. She helped the Menominee warriors take over a monastery. She told me that she was packing a gun. She said, “If any of my brothers are in a position where they’re being shot at, or being killed, I go there to fight with them. I’d rather die than stand by and see them destroyed.” No matter how often Annie Mae left us, she always showed up again at our place.

I read somewhere in an anthropology book that we Sioux “thrive on a culture of excitement.” During the years from 1973 to 1975 we had more than enough excitement for even the most macho warrior, more than we could handle. Wilson, the tribal chairman at Pine Ridge, had established a regime of terror. Being shot at or having one’s house fire-bombed were daily occurrences Pine Ridge people had to live with. Pine Ridge and our own reservation have a common border, and the violence spilled over onto Rosebud. Many people who either opposed Wilson, belonged to AIM or OSCRO, or had been at Wounded Knee were brutally murdered. Some estimate that as many as two hundred and fifty people, women and children among them, were killed during this time—out of a population of eight thousand! Between forty and fifty of these murders have been listed in official government files. The vast majority of these killings were never investigated. Among the victims was one of our best friends, Pedro Bissonette, leader of OSCRO, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization. He was shot to death by tribal police on a lonely road, “resisting arrest” as they claimed. One of his relatives, Jeanette Bissonette, was shot and killed driving home from the burial of another victim. Byron De Sersa was shot to death on account of an article critical of the Wilson regime his father had written in a local Indian newspaper. Wallace Black Elk’s brother was killed in a mysterious explosion when entering his home and turning on the light. Our oldest and most respected medicine man, Frank Fools Crow, was firebombed and had his horses killed and his sweat lodge with all his sacred things destroyed. Leonard’s family suffered too. His niece, Jancita Eagle Deer, was killed in an unexplained “accident” after having been savagely beaten. She had last been seen in the car of her lover, who later turned out to be an informer and who had brutally mistreated her many times before. Jancita was then suing a high South Dakota official for rape. Her mother, Delphine, Leonard’s older sister, wanted to take up the suit, but was beaten to death by a BIA policeman who claimed “drunkenness” as his excuse. Her battered corpse, her arms and legs fractured, was found in the snow, the tears frozen on her cheeks. A nephew went up into the hills and never came back. His body was found with a bullet in it. And so it went, on and on.

It came to a point where nobody felt safe anymore, not even in their own homes. Once, when a car backfired near our house, all of our children immediately took cover under beds and behind walls. They thought the goons had arrived. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the movement became an object of attention for the FBI’s Cointelpro and Cablesplicer projects. AIM was infiltrated by a number of informers and agents provocateurs. I hardly think that AIM deserved that much attention. This infiltration, together with the never-ending violence, brought on a general state of paranoia. The agents stirred up mistrust among us until nobody trusted anybody anymore. Husbands suspected their wives, sisters their brothers. Old friends who had fought many civil rights battles together began to be afraid of each other. Those inside prisons suspected those who remained free. Men sentenced to longer terms suspected those who were released sooner. Even some of the leaders began doubting each other—and by then Annie Mae was a leader.