Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (10 page)

It takes skill to tie a drum. You take seven round pebbles, wrap the hide around them, and tie them with rope to the kettle. In a crossfire meeting the pebbles stand for the seven sacraments;
in a moon fire they represent the Oceti Shakowin, the seven camp circles of our Lakota Nation. The rope used in the tying should be made of twisted rawhide. After the drum is tied, the rope should form the design of the morning star at the bottom, or, as some say, an “earth crown.” A male deer horn is used to tighten the drum. If a pregnant woman is present at a meeting, the baby inside her will dance to the beat of the drum. It, too, will “be in the power.”

The drumstick represents the stick the government uses to beat the Indian or, in a crossfire, the stick they whipped Jesus with. If the hide is heavy, like hide taken from the neck, we use black wood—that is, ebony. If the hide is thin, we use a drumstick carved from rosewood or black walnut. The drumstick represents the green, growing things, the trees who are our friends. It is said that inside the drumstick are the memories of loved ones who have passed away.

The staff is the staff of authority and unity. In a crossfire they call it Christ’s walking stick. They also say that the staff is to remind us of the spear Christ was pierced with. Our thoughts and prayers travel up that staff, and the vision from above travels down to us, the Grandfather Peyote vision. With the staff you can communicate with the wind and the thunder. The staff is the tree, and the staff is a man who dresses himself nice, in a blanket of beads. Sometimes eagle feathers are tied to the staff. The staff is a bridge, a hot line to the Creator.

The gourd is a rattle. You keep time with it while you sing your songs, keep time with the drum. The gourd itself is the Indian’s head. Our minds are inside this gourd. It is a shelter, a tipi for our thoughts. The red horsehair tuft on the top represents the rays of the sun, because we are all part of this universe. Some say that it is a Lakota war bonnet. Inside the gourd are little stones of different sizes. Some are crystals taken from ant heaps. The stones are the voices of the spirit. Sometimes all these voices unite into one—that’s Tunkashila talking. The gourd is a communicator. It speaks the Lakota language. Good thoughts
travel up and down its handle. The fringe on the handle, made up of twelve strings, in a crossfire meeting represents the twelve apostles. The beadwork around the handle is a rainbow. The finest peyote beadwork is done by the Kiowa. They use the tiniest beads, with the most beautiful colors.

Another of the elements we use in our meetings is the feather fan. It has twelve feathers tied to a handle that is beaded and fringed like the gourd handle. The greatest symbol of the Native American Church is the waterbird. You can see him embroidered on the shawls of women who are members and on the silver jewelry they wear. The eagle and the waterbird have power. They carry our prayers to the spirit above us. The woman who brings in the water for the meeting always uses a waterbird feather to bless the water. We also use an eagle feather or the two center feathers. They represent peace. Only the road man can handle the eagle feather. He fans people off when he is doctoring. The eagle feather symbolizes the sacredness of all birds.

When we move the fan, the feathers waft our thoughts and prayers to Tunkashila. They also catch good songs out of the air. Sometimes the feathers are trimmed in a sawtooth design. For the fan we can use many kinds of feathers—scissortail, magpie, pheasant, red flicker, blue jay, hawk, or macaw feathers. We can use either one kind on a fan or mix them up.

Scissortail feathers we use to honor the mothers of all Indian nations. In Oklahoma and Texas they stand for the sun and the four directions.

Magpie feathers are for doctoring any sickness. Besides the center feathers there are white and black feathers at the edge of the wing. They represent an Indian maiden, with black hair and white buckskin dress. If there’s a dead animal lying in the road, the magpie will pick at it, clean it up. In the same way, he’ll clean up a sick body. My dad heard a magpie sing and he found a song in that: “Look to the spirit, look to the spirit!” So we use this song now. I got a song from the roadrunner. If I sing it to you, you can hear a roadrunner’s cry in between the words.

Then the hawk. This is a powerful bird, a hunter. He is close to the earth. You can tame him. He represents understanding.

We honor the blue jay. The blue jay represents the sky and the day, beauty, everything that looks nice. We also use the woodpecker. One of the road men of the Native American Church had a vision that woodpecker feathers could be used in curing, that they could dissolve gallstones, break up the rock inside the human body. So some use the woodpecker for this. The yellowhammer makes a real fine weed nest; he stands for the family.

If someone takes peyote for the first time, if he does not yet know the medicine, they fan him with nightingale feathers so that he can learn the Native American Church ways, the ritual, and the use of our sacred things.

We don’t use crow feathers in our fans. The crow is for mourners. To remember somebody who died, we pray with these feathers for four days. Then we keep these feathers sacred.

Every road chief would like to have a fan made of macaw feathers, because they are the most beautiful. But now they are very hard to come by. I think they came to us first in 1936. An Indian brought them who could not speak English, but somehow we could understand him. Macaw feathers have been used for dances and ceremonies for more than a thousand years. When archaeologists dug up Pueblo Bonito, in New Mexico, they found thirty macaw mummies, going back eight hundred years. Many ancient pueblos used macaw feathers long before Columbus, which proves that there was communication between our North American tribes and Indian nations two thousand miles south of us. A macaw can learn to talk in any language. That is why a macaw fan is a translator. And because of the colors—red, blue, green—it stands for the rainbow. Holding a macaw feather fan during a meeting, I had a vision. In it the sun was coming up under a rainbow. I saw a man wearing red and blue macaw feathers like a blanket. And on his head he wore a macaw feather war bonnet. I caught songs out of that vision.

Another sacred thing we use is the eagle bone whistle. It connects
us to the sacred four directions of the universe. We use it so that the Creator hears us. The whistle represents the sun. At midnight there is a pause for prayer and some good words. Water is passed around and drunk. Right after the midnight water the road man goes outside the tipi and blows his whistle to the east, south, west, and north. When we hear the whistle we think of our friends and relatives who have passed away. When the road man blows the eagle bone whistle, he may feel the presence of a dream eagle.

To the left of the road man sits the cedar man. He has the rawhide bag of dry cedar. At certain times he sprinkles cedar over the glowing embers. This is our incense. It is pleasing to the spirits. It connects us to all the plants in the universe. We inhale the incense, smoke ourselves up, and rub that smoke on our bodies. The cedar is the blood vein of the generations. During a peyote meeting, one among us has to go to another world and come back. The cedar stands for everlasting life. All other trees change their colors and lose their leaves in fall, but the cedar stays green. We smoke up not only the people but also all the instruments we use in our ritual. We “cedar” them. Besides cedar we use sage for incense and, sometimes, sweet grass.

When a family walks in the peyote way we say “they have a fire place.” Fire—the great power of the sun, the fire without end, the spark passed on from generation to generation—is central to the peyote ritual. Fire is everlasting life. Fire is Tunka, the rock, our oldest god. It is inyan, the stone. It is the spark coming from flint hitting on flint, which lit the fire of generations past. When we light up the sacred pipe and smoke it, we make “fire talk.”

The fire in the center of the tipi is a bed of glowing coals. It is easy to have it in a tipi because there is an earth floor. In a house it is not so easy. You can build it on a tray filled with earth or on a not-too-heavy U-shaped slab of concrete. There are different ways to do this. The sacred number four plays a big role in a peyote ceremony. The night is divided into four parts. At the beginning of a meeting the fire man uses the poker to shape the coals
into a half-moon design. It represents the generations, and also the woman power, because the chief peyote on top of the half-moon altar stands for the first peyote picked by the woman in the legend. It also stands for night, because all meetings last from sundown to sunrise.

At midnight, the fire chief shapes the coals into a heart, because you should believe in this sacred medicine with all your heart, soul, and mind. That heart is alive. It pulsates. Then, at about four
A.M
., you form the coals into a morning star, because the Anpetu Wichapi is a sacred spirit in ancient Lakota belief. In a crossfire meeting they have this design because in the Bible Christ says, “I am the bright morning star.” If a person wants to convert to the peyote religion, this is the right moment, the moment of light, of enlightenment. Then, at daybreak, we put the coals into the shape of a cross. That represents the sacred four directions of the Indian religion. In a crossfire ritual it is, of course, Christ’s cross of the Crucifixion.

I still have my grandfather’s fire flints. With those and powdered cottonwood for tinder I can make a fire for a special ceremony. I can still do that. Then I use seven kindling sticks. When I get a spark and a little flame, I let the wind and the flint power start the fire. Hardly anybody can do that anymore. And we don’t take just any wood for our fire but what has been chosen for our meetings. Red elm, ash, cottonwood are the ones we use.

The water represents the water of life, the sea that was there before anything else, out of which Maka, the earth, our turtle continent, arose. The moon pulls the water, making it ebb and flow. That is woman power, and for that reason the water carrier is always a woman.

The tipi also has many symbols. In some tribes people pray and walk around the tipi before entering it. Sitting inside, forming a medicine wheel, they represent the sacred hoop, the circle without end. In this way the tipi represents unity. The tipi floor connects us with Unchi, Grandmother Earth. The walls stand for the sky, the poles all reaching up to the Creator. To the top of the
center pole we sometimes tie an eagle feather. Because the tipi is like a mother giving shelter to her children, it also honors women, who in the old days made the tipi and put it up and took it down. The tipi also represents the buffalo, because before the coming of the white man tipis were made of buffalo hides.

The entrance of the tipi is shaped like a horseshoe. The concrete slab that serves as the fire place when a meeting is held inside a house also is often shaped like a horseshoe. Horses are gone now, but their spiritual hoofprint is still there. My dad told me, “If you lift up the hoof and look, there is a design there. You see a star, and a cross, and at the back a little half-moon.” I didn’t believe him and wanted to see for myself. I got hold of a horse and looked, and sure enough the designs were there. After the tipi has been put up, if you look from underneath, you see that the tipi poles have formed a twelve-pointed star. So, this is what I can tell you about the elements we use in the Native American Church and their meaning.

Peyote is our spiritual power. Peyote makes us relate to Grandfather, the Creator. When you partake of the medicine, you know that you are in the power, you do not see things that are wrong, you see things that are right. It’s like a mirror. You can’t
evade it. It scares you because you have to face yourself. When I take part in a meeting I feel that I matter, that the universe couldn’t go on without me.

Peyote and I got to know each other from early on. When I was a kid the missionaries used to tell me that I’d be nothing but a no-good savage if I prayed the Indian way. And the same thing happened to my four sisters. The priests at the mission school at Saint Francis told them that peyote comes from the devil. We all had a hard time holding onto our beliefs.

I was six or seven years old when I first took peyote. The medicine affected me. I was thinking real old thoughts and singing a very old song. Every weekend I’d go with my father with the team and wagon to a meeting. When I was seven I really started to sing. A man called Chasing Hawk was hitting the drum and I was catching on to those songs. I never forgot them. After learning to sing I learned to “feed the spirit,” feed the fire outside. Then I learned to poke the fire inside a house or tipi, forming it up into a half-moon or cross. In time I became a road man, running meetings.

Peyote is not a “substance” or chemical gimmick. It does not create addicts. It is a natural plant, a kind of cactus. You don’t take it for recreation. You wouldn’t want to, because it doesn’t taste good. As white Christians go to church on a Sunday, so members of the Native American Church go to meetings once a week, usually on Saturday night. They do not partake of the medicine except at that time, performing the ceremony in the traditional way.