RavenShadow (38 page)

Sitanka Wokiksuye

T
hey woke us up before dawn in the church basement, the women. Upstairs, there was a mass to celebrate. Down here, there was coffee to make, Styrofoam cups and packets of white sugar and nondairy creamer to set out, packages of donuts to put on the tables in their plastic bags. The women were quiet, and I think they were surprised to see us, though they didn’t let their faces show it, out of politeness.

Plez sat up and looked around cheerfully. “Room service!” he exclaimed.

Chup made grumbling noises from the depths of his sleeping bag.

I sat up next to Sallee and met her eyes. “Today is the day!” I said. I felt … everything on the color wheel of feeling.

Sallee walked up the stairs and saw that mass was being conducted in the sanctuary behind us. I wanted no part of that, even if most of the worshipers were Lakota.
I don’t associate with Christian churches whatsoever
.

We stepped outside, and I gasped. The cold felt like a whack in the face. Somehow I’d thought, when the ride was over … We scurried right back in. Later Ian got the Porcupine
radio station, KILI, in his truck and said they were reporting the high today would be thirty below.

The five of us consumed coffee and donuts like we’d ridden twenty miles in that weather. We went outside. We jumped back in and ate more coffee and donuts. Finally, somewhere after ten, we had to face it.

Emile, Plez, and I headed out. As I walked around the fenced gravesite, I couldn’t help looking down at where the village stood, and seeing what the gunners saw as they sighted. The distance was incredibly short, maybe forty steps to the nearest tipis, and the elevation of about twenty-five feet gave every advantage. I shuddered.

We found our man with the trailered horses below the hill, right where the cavalry pitched their tents a hundred years ago. In a few moments we were bridled, saddled, and ready.

“Where is everybody?” said Plez irritably. We’d had two hundred or so riders. Less than half were here now.

“Pisser,” I said.

“Maybe they’re up there on foot,” said Emile. “Not torturing the horses any more.”

The leaders angled slowly up the hill behind the staff, which had led us all the way, and the rest of us filed behind them. As we came, Bill Horn Cloud gave an invocation over a bullhorn.

When we topped the hill, the harsh wind strengthened. What skin it struck hurt instantly, hurt sharply. We made a complete circle around the gravesite clockwise (sunwise). I was snuffling, I was gasping every time a breath hit my lungs.
It’s going to kill me
.

In anguish I let a tear go. It felt cold, and I reached up to brush it away. It was already ice.

When the riders were in place, the Feeding of the Spirits ceremony began. Four spiritual leaders stood facing the monument. One lifted a Pipe while praying. I could hear his voice but
couldn’t understand the words. Just staying in the saddle seemed hard.

Finally the man with the Pipe signaled, and we rode back down the hill. I tumbled out of the saddle and let the man from Wambli have the horse. One thing I knew—that horse would never let me near him again.

I felt like tearing the flesh off my face to stop it from hurting. Emile and Plez were a step ahead of me getting into the pickup that hauled the trailer. The cab was actually half-warm.

Each of us rubbed his face, unable to speak.

In a few minutes we ran for the warmth of the church and the comfort of hot coffee.

On the way Plez spotted something and led us through the gate to the monument. At its foot, below the names of some of my people who died here a century ago today, laid oranges, bananas, fry bread, apples, pemmican, and tobacco. I beheld these offerings to the spirits of my ancestors. “Be well,” I murmured. Then I fled into the church.

The coffee and donut folks were making a hubbub of talk about one subject. Russell Means had turned George Mickelson, the governor of South Dakota, away from the ceremony.

We got the story in pieces. Some said Mickelson had been invited, was even invited to speak later in the day. Others put in that he was making a gesture, this being his Year of Reconciliation (which most Indian people thought was a joke). Mickelson had arrived in an unmarked car, and walked up toward the gravesite alone. Means and some other AIM guys stepped in front of the governor, and Means said, “You aren’t welcome here.” The governor trudged back to his car.

Most Lakotas in the room were incensed at Means’s behavior. “He had no right!” “He ain’t from here anyway.” “Who the hell does he think he is?” “Don’t even speak Indian.” “This was a healing ceremony for everybody, people of all colors.” The
controversy carried over into the newspapers the next week.

Myself, I didn’t want to talk about Russell Means, or the governor, or anything else. I felt overwhelmingly sleepy. My sleep had been spotty all week, and now I was incredibly drowsy. Tonight’s big ceremony, Wiping Away the Tears, was set for the gym at Little Wound School. “How about the custodial room again?” I asked Plez. “I gotta sleep.”

He grinned. “You got a journey to make.”

The Quest for Unchee

I
slept in the back of Plez’s king cab on the way to Kyle, and by the time we got there, I was keen to go journeying. One idea throbbed in my mind.
I have to find Unchee, I have to find Unchee
.

We hurried to the custodial room. I wrapped myself in a blanket and laid down below the buffalo head, Sallee next to me. At Plez’s urging I stated my intention three times. “I seek to find my great-grandmother and my grandmother near Wounded Knee a hundred years ago today, and to know what happened to them.”

Plez reached out, the cassette player clicked. The drum
pong
ed again, and again and again.

Holding fear cold in my throat, I descended once more.

I floated toward the killing ground, tumbling slow somersaults on the way. I landed feather-light and saw that I was standing on the edge of the ravine. I was east of most of the fighting, and carefully did not look in that direction. When I last saw her, Elk Medicine was stumbling along this ravine further to the east, toward where Sun lives, bearing in her belly the infant Janey Running, my Unchee. My great-grandmother was darting everywhere
and nowhere, crazed by pain, stunned by terror. Half by luck, she staggered away from the fighting, not back into the fray.

Some distance away, a man in uniform walked toward her, but they could not see each other. By my gift I knew his story. This man, Benjamin Running Hawk, broke ranks with his detachment of scouts five minutes before. He ran east to escape the shelling, which was far too close. There, out of sight of the commanding officer, Lieutenant Taylor, he got off his horse, slipped to the edge of the ravine, and looked around. Running Hawk hesitated, trying to understand where he was and what on earth he was doing. In the ravine was pandemonium—Hotchkiss shells exploding, cavalrymen shooting—all hell was busting loose down there.

Running Hawk hesitated. He was beyond the firefight, well to the east, out of danger.

Lakota men, women, and children were dying in that ravine.

Running Hawk was wearing the blue coat of the enemy. How could he go in and help? His own people might shoot him!

Benjamin Running Hawk clambered down into the ravine and walked toward the shooting. He called in Lakota, “I am Oglala, I come to help! I am Oglala, I come to help!”

Two or three Mniconjou women wandered by him, one at a time, looking dazed but not hurt. Running Hawk plunged on toward the fighting. The dust rose harsh in his nose, the smoke acrid. Then came a woman who looked stunned. She was staggering, zigzagging. Below the knee one leg, a foot, and its moccasin were drenched in blood.

Ben Running Hawk took Elk Medicine’s hand.

She shrieked and tried to run away.

Running Hawk grabbed her by the shoulders.

She fell to the ground, screaming, kicking, beating her hands in the air, weeping. He didn’t understand her words—they were in English.

He addressed her respectfully in Lakota, “Sister, I come to help you.”

Her hands slowed and her feet grew still.

“Sister, I come to help you.”

Maybe it was the language that soothed her, for now her breathing eased. When she spoke, it was in Lakota. She said, “I’m having a baby.”

In a few minutes Running Hawk had Elk Medicine out of the ravine and on the back of his horse.

A half mile away from the fighting, toward Pine Ridge, he stopped to bandage her wound. He was embarrassed, this good man, because of where the wound was. He told her what he was going to do. “You have lost too much blood already,” he said.

“Save my child, please,” said Elk Medicine, “my first-born.”

When Benjamin Running Hawk lifted the skirt and moved the leg, the bright blood started flowing again. He knew the danger, so he did what was necessary. He tore his uniform shirt and bound the wound tightly. Then, as fast he could, yet gently, he spent all afternoon carrying my great-grandmother home to a cabin near Pine Ridge, to the help of his own wife and daughter. On the way she told him her story, and she asked him to take her husband’s body off the battleground and bury it, and save his Pipe for the unborn child.

I recognized the name Running Hawk, but had never met the family. I wondered if Unchee’s name, Janey Running, was a shortening of Running Hawk. I made a mental note to go to them after the ceremony, yes, a hundred years later, and to bear them gifts in thanks for their ancestor’s courage and kindness. Except for Benjamin Running Hawk, I would have died at Wounded Knee, too.

Lakota women know how to bring children into the world. The old way was to form a tall X out of stout sticks. Before this X the woman would squat. When the pains came, she would cling
to the bars and push the newborn downward. It was a better way, I believe, than bearing a child in bed, especially a hospital bed.

But Elk Medicine didn’t have the strength even to squat. When her husband brought the woman in, Mouse thought she would die any moment. Mouse and her oldest daughter got the wounded Mniconjou into bed and spooned some broth into her.

“What happened?” Beatrice asked her father. Beatrice had been away to boarding school and had some training as a nurse.

Benjamin said slowly, “Everybody went crazy at Wounded Knee Creek, by the store, and started shooting each other.” He kept his head down. “Everybody shot each other.” He raised his face to his wife, and she saw it was running with tears.

Beatrice made a shushing noise and concentrated on tending the wound. What her father said was already more than she wanted to know.

She looked at the pallid figure on the bed with a nurse’s eye.

I looked at my great-grandmother with admiration.
You have come this far to accomplish one thing, I know that
.

Through the evening dark Mouse and Beatrice coached the mother-to-be: “Push! Push! You must help!”

Usually Elk Medicine made a good effort, but she was weakening, fading toward the other side.

Elk Medicine, thank you for your woman’s courage
.

The labor went on all night. The child struggled toward life. The mother struggled to keep her hold on life a little longer, enough longer.

Finally, in the last of the darkness before dawn, Beatrice said, “It’s no good. We have to cut the child out.”

Mouse gave a little shriek. “We’ll kill the mother!”

“The mother is dying! If we don’t act, they’ll both die!”

Beatrice got a butcher knife from the wood stove.

“Let’s heat the blade!” whimpered Mouse nervously. This much she had learned from her daughter.

Beatrice gave her mother a menacing look. She pulled Elk Medicine’s skirt up above her waist. For an instant she stared at
the distended belly. Then, firmly, as she had watched surgeons do, she cut.

I could not bear to watch.

After an infinity, after bloodletting and grunting and struggles of hands inside my great-grandmother’s belly, Beatrice lifted up a small burden in hands that were as bloody as any at Wounded Knee.

My grandmother, Janey Running.

Mouse took the child to the bucket to wash her off.

Beatrice checked Elk Medicine’s eyes.

Then the nurse sent up the ancient wail, my people’s mourning for the dead.

I stood at attention, raised my eyes to Wakantanka, and sang inside myself,
Elk Medicine, thank you for your warrior spirit
.

My heart tried to look at once at the dead past and the living future. It split in two. It gushed tears and blood.

I heaved in great racking sobs, and my own heaves blew my heart and soul into …

I don’t know where I am
.

Suddenly, I felt panic.
I am lost between the spirit world and the world of time
.

Lost
!

I flailed wildly for helping hands.

They grabbed me, each hand.

“Blue, come back. Blue, come back.” It was Plez’s voice.

Slowly the ordinary world assembled itself through my sense of touch. I felt Plez and Sallee’s hands. I felt the cold air on my face. I felt the solid floor beneath my butt and back. I pictured what I would see when I opened my eyes. Then I let the lids come up gently.

I looked from Plez to Sallee to Plez to Sallee. His face was grave. Hers was tender, inviting.

“We are alive,” I said.

Sign-off

A
couple of days after the last ceremony, I drove up to Red Scaffold to see Plez. He had a little farm, didn’t grow a thing, said he just liked to watch the rocks bask in the sun. It was a pleasant winter day, so we spent the afternoon walking the fences and ditches of his farm.

“Help me,” I asked him. “I’ve seen the spirit world. That’s where I want to be.”

Plez looked at me with kind of a twinkle. “That’s good,” he said. “You don’t ever want to lose what you saw, the world beyond, and how close it is to us, and how it’s part of our lives.”

He turned and walked backward in a smooth glide, placing his feet blind like he knew every inch of the bumpy ground. “You remember, though, what you said when you came out of that last journey? ‘We’re alive’? Being alive means you have a life
here
to live. However much you journey in the spirit world, your life, it walks across a certain time and place on this earth. You got things to do, got to make a life. That’s what you’re here for.”

He turned back around, and walking forward flung his arms wide at the sky. “What to do? Ain’t that the question? It’s different for every man. Emile, easy for him, paint-paint-paint.
Maybe he has a little romance sometimes, good, but really, just paint.

“You? Hmmm? I say, maybe find a woman and make a way of living satisfies the heart. I say, maybe learn to make a living without letting that run things. Maybe make a home and fill it with children. Take care of your family, especially the old ones, make sure they got what they need. Hang with your friends. Act like a neighbor to your neighbors, you know, feed the dogs when they’re gone. Look out for the people in your community. Root for your high school basketball team.

“I tell you this, I tell you this. The eye of your heart knows, it does. That’s enough. The eye of your heart knows.”

We walked in silence for a moment. I mumbled, “Seems flat, compared to the spirit world.”

He turned those shiny buck teeth on me. “You walk the earth, you look at the stars, you fall flat on your face. You look at this earth. Take care of your life here. You want to know my advice? Set your attention here. Then you come back, I’ll help you see the other world, I will.”

So we made a deal for me to drive over the next Sunday, spend the day journeying.

He flipped around and did his trick of gliding backward again. “Remember, for this stuff you gotta stay sober. Got to. Then you get to see it all, feel it, live it.”

Now Plez strutted out a preacher’s style. “Life is a gift of the gods. It can be traversed as a black road, full of difficulty and strife, or it can be walked as a red road, in harmony with blood family, with community, family, and with big family—Earth, Sun, Moon, Sky, Winds, and Waters.” I reflected again that it’s funny how we call the bad road black. Road that turned out bad for us was white.

Now he put a little dance into his glide. “It doesn’t come at us, though, like something grand. It comes, maybe it’s a kid crawling into your lap with a book. Maybe it’s a friend calling
with, ‘Let’s go fishing.’ It’s your woman chuckling in bed when you pleasure each other. It’s making pitcher of lemonade on a hot, dusty day and draining that sucker down-down-down.”

He looked at me and wrapped it up with, “So, Joseph Blue Crow, you got a lot to take of. And sometimes you come here and learn. You got the gift. You got something to contribute. Just get your feet on that red road first.”

So I set out to take care of things.

I went first off to find the Running Hawk family outside of Pine Ridge. They confirmed it—the family name got bobbed off to Running for a while, but they’d reclaimed the old form. I took them a big sack of groceries, and I sat in the kitchen two straight afternoons and listened to what they knew about my Unchee. Actually, I taped it—I have some good equipment—and the way it turned out, that was a good story.

Beatrice, the nurse, kept the baby. She’d been married but had no children, and lost her husband. She took Unchee for her own.

The trader came and took the child and gave her to one of the officers from Wounded Knee. That officer wanted to give “that unfortunate offspring of the battlefield a better chance in life.”

Beatrice snuck over to the wet nurse’s home, stole the kid, and went out into the Badlands where they wouldn’t find her. She raised Janey Running by herself.

The Running Hawks didn’t know a whole lot more than that, ’cause they didn’t see Beatrice much any more. Janey Running, they knew she ran off with a rodeo rider as a kid herself, made some kids with him, lost him to the influenza, married her near neighbor, my grandpa, had some more kids.

I felt deeply grateful for the story, and plenty glad I had it on tape.

I thought about it, and it told me some things. No mother, no real family because she was hiding out there in the Badlands—Unchee
came to be a loner honestly. Lived in ravenShadow, and the shadow was cast by her parents’ death in the massacre.

On the weekend I drove to Oglala, walked unannounced into the house, hugged Sallee Walks Straight, and cooked steaks for her and Chup. Late that night, sitting on the front stoop in below-zero cold, I asked her to be my wife. We’ve been married for about a year now. Sallee’s seven months along.

How to make a living and sure not let it run things, hey, that’s been harder. Sallee is painting, and she got some pieces in a juried show in Rapid last summer. But her sales about pay for her art supplies. My unemployment and severance pay, they’ve been supporting us.

After I taped the story of Beatrice Running Hawk and Unchee, I went and taped Grandpa and Adeline. I taped Chup’s wife. I taped some members of the Crazy Horse family, and descendants of Black Elk. Their stories, I got them down, griefs, triumph, prides, everything. I am a good interviewer. Sometimes I can get the shames, too. Sometimes I can get a lot of the truth.

I have looked at these truths myself. I know there’s a price, and there’s a reward.

Right along I’ve made myself go to meetings. As of the day I’m writing this, I have 472 days of sobriety. I still take them one day at a time, and I always will.

After a while it struck me that those stories I was taping, they’re valuable to the people. If people knew the stories, what has happened to their families and friends and neighbors, they would see more. They would see how we’re all the same.
Mitakuye oyasin
. They would see we can learn from each other, teach each other, help each other. So I ate my pride, went over to KILI, the tiny, insignificant radio station on our rez, and asked for a show.
Stories of the People
, it’s called, on the air every Thursday, two in the afternoon, one hour.

I have good response to that show. KILI wants me to work
there full time. A publisher in fancy New York City, he says he’s interested in bringing the stories on the tapes out in book form. I said audio form. Guess we’ll end up doing both.

That’s
after
he publishes this book.

I’d like to do another show, too.
The Old Ways
. Interview spiritual leaders, people who’ve kept alive the old ceremonies, Sun dance, Yuwipi, sweat lodge, vision quest, all those. Get them to tell about it. Let others know. Mostly people need to know it’s still here, it’s still working.

Some traditional people will object. “Our sacred ways aren’t to be recorded, book, photo, tape, anything.”

I’ll just tell them, “Times change. We know things, hey, save the world. We open them to everybody, make human life on this earth, make it better.”

Maybe I can make a living doing this taping work. It’s healing. That’s what I want to do, heal my people, heal myself.

For a while I’d get down every week or two and bemoan my fate. “Oh, hell,” I’d tell Sallee, “maybe I’ve set my feet on the red road now, but look at all the years I wasted. Why didn’t I follow the path of the Grandfathers from day one?”

She would say, ‘What matters is what you do today, the path you walk today. It’s the only day you have.”

I think that’s true. But after a while I started thinking something else. Those twenty years weren’t wasted. School. College. Seattle. Radio. Probably I didn’t have to pair with Delphine on her slide into blackness. Probably I didn’t have to spend that many years doing AM in Rapid City. For sure I didn’t have to drink as much as I did. But the years weren’t wasted. I have strengths now to bring, strengths I wouldn’t. I know things. I might even be bold and say it right out. I know how to bring the white man’s knowledge of
things
and use that to broadcast our knowledge of the heart, and of the spirit.

Maybe I wasn’t far from the path my grandfathers intended all along, maybe not.

I believe writing this book has been part of the path. It’s been my big work the last year and more, writing the pages you’re reading, telling my truth.

That publisher in New York City, he says he’ll print my words and put them in people’s hands.

Healing. I mean these words to be one of the ways I do healing.

I send them now to you, every human being of you, don’t matter man, woman, red, white, old, young, and I invite you to partake of whatever healing is here for you.

One nation of us has been a people defeated in war, crushed in spirit, a terrible fate.

Another nation of us has been a people who destroyed other human beings and the way of living they loved for no good reason, also a terrible fate.

One nation of us has been slaves, another masters of slaves. One nation of us has been conquered, another conquerors, all conditions that yearn for healing.

Take here whatever will help, my friends.

Mitakuye oyasin
.