Lakota Woman (22 page)

Leonard is also a yuwipi man. Yuwipi is one of our oldest, and also strangest, ceremonies. I had never been to a yuwipi until I met Leonard. It is an unexplainable experience. How can you explain the supernatural for which there is no rationalization? When the first yuwipi ceremony that I took part in was being prepared, I became apprehensive, and once it was in progress, I was even scared. I was still reacting like a white woman.

A yuwipi is put in motion when a man or woman sends a sacred pipe and tobacco to a medicine man. That is the right way to ask for a ceremony. Some person wants to find something—something that can be touched, or something that exists only in the mind. Maybe a missing child or the cause of an illness. The yuwipi man is a finder. He is the go-between, a bridge between the people and the spirits. Through him people ask questions of the supernaturals, and through him the spirits answer back. The person who sent the pipe is the sponsor. Yuwipi men do not get paid for their services, but the sponsor has to feed all comers who want to participate and take advantage of the ritual.

A dog feast is part of the yuwipi ritual, and dog meat is the holy food that is served at the end of the ceremony. This did not bother me. I had eaten dog many times as a child—not in a sacred way, but simply because we were so poor that we ate any kind of meat we could get our hands on—dog, gopher, prairie dog, jackrabbits—just about anything that walked on four legs. The dog feast is an almost human sacrifice. In the old days, young men from the warrior societies would go through the camp selecting dogs for a dog feast. Sometimes they would pick the dog of a great chief or famous hunter. It would have been very bad manners for the owner to object or let his face betray his feelings. It was an honor bestowed upon the owner as well as the dog. Whether they always appreciated the honor is another matter. It is because we are so fond of our dogs that the feast takes on the character of a sacrifice. They scent the dog, paint a red stripe on its back, and strangle it so that its neck is broken and it dies instantly.

I remember a funny incident. We were all staying at: a white friend’s home in New York. Somebody had a strange dream, and that called for a yuwipi ceremony. We had everything necessary for it except the dog. Henry was standing at a window overlooking Broadway. He pointed out to our host a man walking a young, plump dog. “Just the right kind,” said Henry. “Go get him!” “No way,” said our friend. “Go, tell the man,” urged Henry, “what a great honor it is. Also tell the dog that it is a very great honor and that he won’t feel a thing.” “New York dogs have no sense of honor,” replied our friend and we all had to laugh. So we used beef.

The way I remember my first yuwipi, young girls started it by making tobacco ties, tiny squares of colored cloth, each containing a pinch of Bull Durham tobacco, that were being tied into one single string more than thirty feet long. They made four hundred and five of these little tobacco bundles, one for each of the different plants, “our green brothers,” in our Sioux world.

While the girls made tobacco ties, others prepared the biggest room in the house for the ceremony. All furniture was removed, the floors swept and covered with sage. All pictures were taken from the walls. Mirrors were turned around because nothing that reflects light is allowed to remain during the ceremony. For this reason participants must remove jewelry, wristwatches, even eyeglasses before entering. All windows were covered with blankets because the ritual takes place in total darkness. Blankets and bedrolls were placed all along the four walls for everybody to sit on.

The string of tobacco ties was laid out in a square within the room. Nobody was allowed in this sacred square except the yuwipi man. All others remained outside. At the head of the square, where the sponsor and singer with his drum had taken their seats, were put a large can filled with earth and two smaller cans on each side. Planted into the big can was the sacred staff. It was half red and half black, the colors separated by a thin yellow stripe. To the top half of the staff was fastened an eagle feather and to the lower half, the tail of a black-tailed deer. The red of the staff stands for the day; the black, for the night. The eagle feather represents wisdom because the eagle is the wisest of all birds. An eagle’s center feather will make the spirits come into the ceremony.

The deer is very sacred. Each morning, before any other creature, the deer comes to the creek to drink and bless the water. The deer is medicine. It is a healer. It can see in the dark. If any doctoring is to be done, the deer’s spirit will enter. Leonard uses a certain kind of medicine from behind the animal’s ears to cure certain diseases. It is very powerful. So that is what the deer tail stands for.

In the smaller, earth-filled tin cans were planted sticks with colored strips of cloth, like flags, attached to them. These represent the sacred four directions, red for the west, white for the north, yellow for the east, and black for the south. In front of the staff was put the buffalo skull, serving as an altar. There was also a small earth altar, representing Grandmother Earth. On it was placed a circle of tobacco ties. Inside this circle, with his finger, Leonard traced a lightning design, because on this occasion he also wanted to use lightning medicine. It is believed that if a spirit comes in and then backs away from a person, that person cannot be cured.

Against the horns of the buffalo skull rested the sacred pipe. Also used were two special, round finding stones and three gourd rattles. Out of the tiny rocks inside the gourds come the spirit voices. These rocks, not much bigger than grains of sand, come from ant heaps. They are crystals, agates, and tiny fossils. They sparkle in the sunlight. Ants are believed to have power because they work together in tribes and don’t have hearts but live by the universe.

Everybody then received a twig of sage to put behind their ears or into their hair. This is supposed to make the spirits come to you and to enable you to hear their voices. Then the yuwipi man was brought into the center of the square. His helpers first put his arms behind his back and tied all his fingers together. Then they wrapped him up in a star blanket, covering him completely. A rawhide thong, the kind once used to make bowstrings, was then wound tightly around the blanket and secured with knots. Then the yuwipi man was placed face down on the sage-covered floor. On this occasion it was Leonard who had been tied up. He lay there like a mummy. I could not imagine how he could breathe. Then the kerosene lamps with the big reflectors were extinguished, leaving us sitting in absolute, total darkness. For a short while we sat in utter silence. Then, with a tremendous roar, the drum started to pound, filling the room with its reverberations as the singers began their yuwipi songs. It sent shivers down my spine.

Almost at once the spirits entered. First I heard tiny voices whispering, speaking fast in a ghostly language. Then the gourds began to fly through the air, rattling, bumping into walls, touching our bodies. Little sparks of light danced through the room, wandered over the ceiling, circled my head. I felt the wing beats of a big bird flitting here and there through the darkness with a whoosh, the feathers lightly brushing my face. At one time the whole house shook as if torn by an earthquake. One woman told me later that in one of the flashes of light she had seen the sacred pipe dancing. I was scared until I remembered that the spirits were friends. The meeting lasted almost until the morning. Finally they sang a farewell song for the spirits who were going home to the place from which they had come.

The lamp was lit and revealed Leonard sitting in the middle of the sacred square—unwrapped and untied. He was weeping from emotion and exhaustion. He then told us what the spirits had told him. Then we ate the dog, and afterward wojapi, a kind of berry pudding, drank mint tea and coffee, and of course smoked the pipe, which went around clockwise from one person to the next.

The white missionaries have always tried to suppress this ceremony, saying it was Indian hocus-pocus and that the yuwipi men simply were mountebanks after the manner of circus magicians. They tried to “expose” our medicine men, but the attempt backfired. During the 1940s the superintendent at Pine Ridge had Horn Chips, our foremost yuwipi man, perform the ceremony in full daylight in the presence of a number of skeptical white observers. He had Horn Chips tied and wrapped by his own BIA police. To the disappointment of the watching missionaries, the mystery sparks appeared out of nowhere and the gourds flew around the superintendent’s head. The result was that many Christian Indians went back to the old Lakota religion.

One of the strangest yuwipi ceremonies took place in New York when Leonard was visiting there. Dick Cavett some-how got wind of a yuwipi man being in town and asked for a ceremony in the proper ritual way. Cavett was born and raised in Nebraska, close to the Pine Ridge Reservation, and he believes in the power of yuwipi. As usual Leonard had all his sacred things with him, but he had no drummer or singer and, of course, no dog meat. The dog could be dispensed with, but having neither drummer nor singer was a problem. Leonard solved it by getting hold of a tape recorder and taping his own drumming and singing before the ceremony. He instructed one of the New York Indians to turn the recorder on the moment the lights went out. He had timed the whole ceremony on his watch. He also taught some Mohawk Indians how to tie him up. He told Cavett and the Indians who had come to participate that he doubted very much that the spirits would come in under such unusual circumstances, but they did appear and it turned into a very good meeting. As Leonard used to say: “I am a guitar and the spirits are the strings who make the music.”

In May 1974, Old Henry and Leonard put on a Ghost Dance. After the one at Wounded Knee this is only the second time during this century that the dance has been performed. We held it on a lonely mesa which has served the Crow Dogs as their sacred place and vision-quest hill for generations. It was supposed to be a ritual for Sioux only, but somehow, through the “moccasin telegraph” which always spreads news among Indians in a mysterious way, everybody seemed to know about it, and many native people from as far away as Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Arizona suddenly appeared in order to participate. Strange things happened. Observation planes flew over the sacred dance ground. One of our young security men pointed his gun at them to drive them away. The pilots finally took the hint. Two FBI agents were discovered hiding behind some nearby trees. They wore very stylish, mod clothes and told us they were insurance agents. Though we were angry at their desecration of our ceremony, we had to laugh. It was so ridiculous. There is no house for miles up there, and no road. The only living things to sell life insurance to on that pine-studded hill are coyotes and porcupines. We made a citizens’ arrest and took the two snoopers to tribal court, where they were put on bail for peddling on Indian land without a license. They bailed themselves out with hundred-dollar bills which they peeled off from a fat roll of green frogskins that they carried in their pockets. It was funny, but the presence of the planes and the agents gave me premonitions of bad things to come.

The weather was fine throughout, with the sun shining all the time. We had a great many dancers, among them a sixteen-year-old white girl, the daughter of friends from New York. We also had two Mexican Indians taking part, one a Nahua from Oaxaca, the other a Huichol from Chihuahua. They had come in their white campesino outfits. The Huichol brother said that his name in Indian was Warm Southwind. So, of course, we renamed him “Mild Disturbance.” About a dozen dancers got into the power and received visions. One young Navajo with a red blanket wrapped around him suddenly began to dance with the movements of a bird. It seemed almost as if an eagle had taken possession of his body. The best thing that happened was the appearance of a flight of eagles toward the end of the dance. Nobody had ever seen so many of these sacred birds together at one time. They circled with outspread wings over the dance ground and then flew off in an undulating line, like a long plumed serpent gliding through the clouds. It made us happy.

The Crow Dogs have always believed that they are under a kind of curse on account of the first Crow Dog killing Spotted Tail over a hundred years ago. They see the face of the dead chief in their drinking bowls. Leonard always says that Spotted Tail’s blood is still dripping on him, loading him down. He says that the guilt lasts for four generations, that only his sons will be free from it. Thinking of all the bad things that happened in the months following the Ghost Dance, one could almost believe that Spotted Tail’s anger is still unappeased. (At a give-away feast in 1989, Crow Dog put a war bonnet on the present chief Spotted Tail, and both families decided to be friends forever from that day on.)

CHAPTER 15

The Eagle Caged

Grandfather, I pray to you.

Grandfather, don’t let me be

taken away.

My people need me,

as I need them.

Grandfather, I ask you,

don’t let them put me

in a penitentiary.

—
Crow Dog

A
fter the Ghost Dance of 1974, Leonard was in a good mood for a while. He watched sacred water birds flying over Crow Dog land and was happy seeing eagles circling in the sky. He liked to go for rides on Big Red, his favorite horse, and went tearing off at a gallop, enjoying the wind in his face, the sense of freedom one experiences flying on horseback over the prairie. But already he felt prison walls closing in on him. After Wounded Knee he was free on borrowed time. He could not understand why the government was after him. He did not consider himself a radical. He was not interested in politics. He never carried a gun. He thought himself strictly a religious leader, a medicine man. But that was exactly why he was dangerous. The young city Indians talking about revolution and waving guns find no echo among the full-bloods in the back country. But they will listen to a medicine man, telling them in their own language: “Don’t sell your land, don’t sell Grandmother Earth to the strip-mining outfits and the uranium companies. Don’t sell your water.” That kind of advice is a threat to the system and gets you into the penitentiary.

The main charge against Leonard stemmed from the occupation of Wounded Knee. Four government agents in the guise of postal inspectors tried to sneak in during a truce period. They were stopped by some of our young security guards. Afraid of being found out and roughed up, they immediately identified themselves as agents carrying badges, handguns, and handcuffs. Our young men disarmed them and took them to Leonard, who was in the museum building. They asked him, “What shall we do with them?”

Leonard said, “Well, it’s breakfast time. Let’s give them coffee and something to eat.” He then lectured them for half an hour on the reasons for Wounded Knee and Indian civil rights in general. Then he had them politely escorted out of the perimeter.

For this he was charged with “interfering with federal officers during performance of their duties” (spying on us) and with “armed robbery” (the taking away of the agents’ guns and handcuffs). The prosecutor said that the occupation of Wounded Knee was illegal, a conspiracy and a crime. That Crow Dog was a leader and therefore responsible for everything that happened during the occupation, even if he himself did not do it, or even witness it. On this ground Leonard was sentenced to thirteen years.

The government was not altogether happy because Leonard had gotten a suspended sentence, putting him on probation. He was still free. So they had to do something about that. In March 1975, Leonard and I came home late and found a bunch of white strangers in our house. One, a man called Pfersick, said he had come to see the Indian guru. He was high on drugs, actually using them in front of us. Leonard told him that drugs were not allowed in Crow Dog’s home. Pfersick said: “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can or cannot take or smoke?” A little later he made very crude sexual advances toward me, using foul language, patting me on the bottom. Leonard stepped between us, pushing him away. At that he went ape and attacked Leonard with a chain-saw blade he took from the wall. Leonard dodged it and got in a few good licks on his own. Some skins came to the rescue. They subdued the madman. Pfersick and his hangers-on were told never to come back and were thrown off our land. They brought a charge against Leonard for assault and battery. After a trial of only a few hours an all-white South Dakota jury found Leonard guilty and he got another five years. We used to say at that time that even Jesus Christ would have been found guilty in the State of South Dakota for every imaginable crime if he were an AIM Indian.

On September 2, 1975, still another incident happened. Two men named Beck and McClosky crashed their car through a wooden barrier, driving right into our yard. It was 1:30
A.M.
and both were drunk. Of the two Beck was the heavy. He was a violent, murderous half- or quarter-blood. He had a long criminal record. Much later, when it no longer had an effect upon our lives, Beck murdered an inoffensive, middle-aged man called No Moccasin before witnesses and was sent to jail for it. The other man, McClosky, was comparatively harmless, simply Beck’s drinking partner. They came into Crow Dog’s place, making a big racket, boasting of just having savagely beaten a sixteen-year-old nephew of Leonard. Leonard was sleeping soundly and it took some time to rouse him. When he finally had put on his pants and stepped into the yard, he found some of the relatives who are always staying with us fighting off the intruders. McClosky got his jaw cracked in the process. Again someone, and you can guess who, induced Beck and McClosky to bring charges of assault and battery against Crow Dog and his relatives. We knew nothing about it.

Now it is a sad fact that on any given weekend innumerable drunken brawls take place all over the reservation. Men in a drunken stupor senselessly maim each other. Arms are broken, eyes gouged out, but this sort of thing is never investigated. On the adjacent Pine Ridge Reservation they had a civil war situation. Over a hundred people had been murdered and not a tenth of these cases was ever looked into, and then only if the police thought they had a chance of pinning the killing on some AIM member. That this endless violence was totally ignored by the government made what happened next unreal and unexplainable—at least at that time. At the break of dawn on September 5, 1975, four days after Beck and McClosky provoked the fight in our yard, I was awakened when somebody kicked our door in and shouted: “This is the United States marshal, this is the FBI, come out or we’ll shoot!”

Next thing I felt the muzzle of an M-16 pressed against my head. They came one hundred and eighty-five men strong, marshals, agents, SWAT teams, making an Omaha Beach–type assault on the home of a single medicine man. It was like a newsreel from Vietnam, like seeing a bad movie in a dream. Out through the broken-down door I could see an observation plane circling over us. Choppers were landing in the yard. Across the Little White River, flowing through our property, guys in camouflage outfits came paddling rubber rafts. Some men with flak vests were aiming submachine guns at us. It was as if we were a Vietcong village overrun by a hundred and eighty-five Rambos. It would have been funny had it not destroyed our lives. Through the window I could see the SWAT team coming down the hill in extended battle line. They were actually laying down some sort of smokescreen. I heard them singing: “We’ve come to take you away.”

Two Rambo types broke the window and climbed in. They pointed at little Pedro who was still half asleep and asked, “Is this the kid who was born at Wounded Knee?” They threw him across the room so that he hit his head against the wall. He was crying. I wanted to rush to him but one of the feds said, “One more step and I blow you away, right into the Happy Hunting Grounds!” He, too, put his gun against my temple. So now I had two M-16s on each side of my head. If these two had pulled their triggers they would not only have killed me, but also each other. A third FBI man threw a gun at my feet, saying, “Go on. Pick it up. I’m told you’re such great warriors. Go on. Do it. Let’s have a nice shootout!”

I saw that one of their headmen had walked in. I told him, “Yeah, you better watch your boys before they kill somebody.” His face got red and he walked out. In the door he turned around and said, “I’m from Minneapolis,” as if that explained the whole insane scene. He nodded to his men and they put their guns down. But they ransacked the whole place, trampled upon and broke our sacred things, and hauled men, women, and children half-naked out of their beds. They forced them to sit outside on the ground on that raw morning with hardly anything on. Out of pure meanness they shot and killed Big Red, Leonard’s favorite horse, and then blasted away at a little black colt. I asked them to show me their search warrants. They didn’t have any, just a few blank arrest orders against “John Doe” and “Jane Doe.”

They dragged Leonard away in handcuffs together with a few of his friends and relatives, among them my friend Annie Mae Aquash. On the ninety-mile trip to Pierre, the state capital, the agents had their fun and games with Leonard. When he had to leave the car to answer a call of nature, they put a gun at his feet, too, telling him, “You’ll rot in prison for the rest of your life. We’ll make you a sporting proposition. You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance. Take the gun and run!”

Leonard ignored them. The handcuffs they had put on him were of a special kind which tightens and tightens with every slightest movement. They cut off the circulation in his arms and made his wrists bleed. In Pierre they handcuffed him to a chair and kept at him for twenty-four hours, not letting him sleep, asking over and over again: “Where is Peltier? Where is Peltier?” This question made absolutely no sense to Leonard. The whole nightmarish event made no sense. Why the hundreds of agents? The helicopters? The rubber rafts? The only charge against him was McClosky’s broken jaw, broken not by Leonard but by one of his nephews. All that was needed would have been a single tribal policeman telling Leonard, “Cousin, there’s that complaint about a brawl. Why don’t you come to the tribal council and clear the matter up?” That would have been the customary approach had anybody bothered at all. Why this Omaha Beach kind of
assault? The question bothered us for years. It was not until 1979 that we found out the reason for this madness. Leonard went to jail for over a year simply because the FBI had goofed and then had to justify its action in some way.

On June 23, 1975, there had been a shootout at the tiny hamlet of Oglala on the Pine Ridge Reservation, over a hundred miles from our place. The FBI had invaded the place because it was rumored to be an AIM stronghold. A firefight erupted. One Indian and two FBI agents were killed. Hundreds of people had been killed on that reservation during these troubled days and nobody had given a damn, but two dead FBI agents were a different matter. Somebody had to be tried and convicted for their death—somebody, anybody. The FBI combed Pine Ridge for likely suspects but did not come up with anything. So-called witnesses were suborned, threatened, and browbeaten. One slightly feebleminded woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, was shown a photograph of someone’s mutilated body and told, “You’ll be like this unless you testify the way we tell you.” The government admitted later that their witnesses had not been “believable” and that the agents had put unlawful pressure on them. In the end they picked upon Leonard Peltier, an Indian from Fort Totten, as a likely perpetrator, not because there was a good case against him, but because he was a radical AIM leader and a thorn in the government’s flesh.

Crow Dog and his people were not involved. We had not even known about the events in Oglala. Crow Dog was at home when it happened, running his ceremonies. The FBI knew that very well. But someone had given the FBI a tip that Peltier was hiding out on Crow Dog’s place, and they believed it—which doesn’t say much for their intelligence as Peltier was half a continent away, in Oregon actually. The FBI had staged the whole Beck-McClosky incident from beginning to end, possibly threatening Beck with long jail terms for his various crimes unless he cooperated. Later they tried to justify their assault on Crow Dog’s place by pressing phony charges. We found all this out much later by reading some of the briefs coming out of the Peltier case.

After the last of the agents with their rubber rafts and ‘copters had disappeared, we were left stunned. Leonard’s old parents, myself, the kids—we were all in a state of shock. For a year afterward the children ran to hide themselves whenever a car backfired or a plane was flying overhead, screaming, “The FBIs are coming.”

The government made Leonard into a criminal for having defended his home and family against some drunken punks. To them my husband was more dangerous than Peltier because moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force. I felt unspeakably lonely. How could I go on without him? How could I handle the responsibilities which had now fallen on my shoulders? I was still so inexperienced and so very young, still in my early twenties. Leonard had taken care of all things for all the people in the Grass Mountain district, not only the healings and ceremonies but also the little everyday problems which are so important. How could I have filled the void? Leonard’s parents were old and in bad health and now, when they needed their only son to run the home and help them, he had been taken away.

I went through my daily chores in a daze. Any moment I expected Leonard to walk in the door. Sometimes I imagined hearing his voice calling me, and then I remembered where he was. The children asked, “Where is daddy, why is he in jail?” and I had no answer for them.

The trials were a farce. The government had not had much luck trying Indians in Wounded Knee–related cases up to that time. Whenever there had been a proper trial outside South Dakota, under a change of venue, whenever we had voir dire—that is, the right to question prospective jurors to find out whether they were prejudiced against Indians—whenever we had proper time to develop our case before an unbiased jury, the trials ended in acquittal. The government learned from this. They forced Leonard’s trial to be held in South Dakota—the state, as Annie Mae always said, where Jesus Christ himself would have been found guilty of inside trading and child molesting had he been an AIM Indian.

Leonard’s trials were rushed through in a day, without voir dire and without giving the defense a chance to make their point. Leonard had no illusions. During the trial he whispered to me, “They’ll find me guilty at two o’clock.”

I said, “Why two o’clock?”

He gave me a sad, knowing smile. “They want their free steak and beer lunch at the court’s expense. Figure it out for yourself. They go to lunch at twelve. It takes them half an hour to get there and back. They’ll take an hour to eat their steaks. After they come back they’ll sit around for half an hour to make it look good, as if they were deliberating. Then they’ll come in with their ‘guilty’ verdict.” And that’s what happened—at two o’clock sharp.