Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (4 page)

“On August 5, 1881, Crow Dog and Spotted Tail met for the last time. On this day Crow Dog took the seats and wagon box from his buggy to load it up with firewood for the agency. That’s how he made his living. He was then no longer chief of the tribal police. He and his wife delivered the wood and started driving home. Near the council house Crow Dog stopped and got down from the wagon and knelt to tie his moccasins, whose strings had come loose. At this moment Spotted Tail came out of the council house. There had been a meeting, and hot words had been exchanged. Spotted Tail was so angry he jumped on his horse and took off. Two Strikes, He Dog, and Ring Thunder followed a little behind the chief. Farther back, at the tail end, came Turning Bear.

“Spotted Tail came riding down the road and saw Crow Dog tying his moccasins. He said, ‘This is the day when Crow Dog and I will meet as men!’ Grandma called out to warn Crow Dog. Crow Dog got up and drew his gun, which was hanging at the side of the wagon. It was a Winchester. Spotted Tail went for his six-shooter, but Crow Dog was faster. He hit the chief in the chest above the heart. Spotted Tail fell from his horse. But he got up and walked a few steps toward Crow Dog. He was still holding onto his six-gun. But then he fell down once more—dead. My grandmother stood up on the wagon frame and Turning Bear shot at her. He missed. In Rosebud they heard the shots and some of Spotted Tail’s men mounted up to go after Crow Dog. My grandma told Crow Dog to ride one of the team horses, so she had just one horse to pull the wagon. Crow Dog whipped the other horse and made it back to his place. His wife soon came back with the wagon. They hadn’t laid a hand on her. Nobody bothered them for a while. Nobody wanted to go to Crow Dog’s home, because they were afraid he might try to kill somebody.

“It was all very sad. Crow Dog and Spotted Tail were related. As young men they had fought side by side. Without the wasichu coming in, maybe they could have remained friends, instead of becoming enemies.

“The Spotted Tails are still around, just as we are. They have their own way of telling this story. That’s their right. We don’t fight anymore. When we meet we shake hands, talk about the weather or who will be the next tribal chairman. We speak the same language and have the same problems. We are friends now.

“While the killing of a Crow Indian or a white soldier was a brave deed, killing a man of one’s own tribe was the worst thing a man could do. Black Crow, a member of Spotted Tail’s band, was Crow Dog’s close friend. When he heard about the killing he rode to Crow Dog’s place, offering to help. He said to Crow Dog, ‘Cousin, before the white man’s law does anything to you, you must purify yourself.’ So he made a new sweat lodge and the two of them went in. But before they did, Black Crow loaded up Crow Dog’s gun and made Crow Dog shoot it four times into the sacred rocks as they were being heated up for the sweat. That way the spirit of Spotted Tail wouldn’t bother Crow Dog. Then they had a real hot sweat and purified themselves.

“Spotted Tail’s relations painted the dead chief’s face red and put some buffalo fat into his mouth so that he would have plenty to eat on his journey along Tacanku Wanagi, the Spirit Trail. Then they put him on a scaffold after the traditional manner. The agent didn’t like it and told them to take him down and bury him in the Christian way. So they took him from the scaffold and buried him on that hill overlooking the agency and put a marble monument over that spot. A lot of Crow Dogs and Spotted Tails are buried up there, all crumbling in the earth together. And Spotted Tail’s big chief’s house, the one the whites had built for him, also crumbled into dust. Only the rocks and the mountains are forever.

“Black Crow and some others went back and forth between the two families, trying to make peace. It was decided that Crow Dog would pay six hundred dollars in blood money to Spotted Tail’s relations and also give them many horses and blankets. Somehow Crow Dog’s people got the money together, and the thing was settled the old Indian way. But again the whites were not satisfied. The marshals came, arrested Crow Dog, and took
him to Fort Niobrara. They took Black Crow, too, because he happened to be there. From Fort Niobrara they took Crow Dog to Deadwood to be tried. In court Crow Dog did not lie. He told them, ‘I’m the one who killed Spotted Tail.’ He spoke for himself with the help of a translator. His lawyer spoke for him too. They sentenced Crow Dog to be hanged and put him in jail pending appeal. He asked to see the judge. He said, ‘Judge, I’ve got to go back to my place. Prepare myself to die. I’ve got to have a giveaway, give away whatever things I own, my horses, wagons, chickens, things like that.’ The judge asked him, ‘If I let you go, how do I know you’ll come back?’ Crow Dog answered, ‘Because I’m telling you. I am Crow Dog.’

“The judge let him go. Crow Dog had a big giveaway at his place. His wife made him a special buckskin outfit to be hanged in. Then the judge got cold feet. Maybe Crow Dog won’t come back. They sent a marshal to look for him. This man went to Crow Dog’s place and told him, ‘Chief, I’m going to take you in. You must come with me.’ Crow Dog said, ‘No. I promised to come back by myself.’ It was evening. The marshal said, ‘Tomorrow I’ll take you in.’ Before daybreak Crow Dog sneaked off. He had already given his team away but borrowed it back for going to be hanged. He took his wife along. He wore his special white, beaded, and fringed outfit. The two drove more than a hundred miles to Deadwood. When he got there his lawyer was all smiles. Word had come from the Supreme Court that when one Indian kills another on the reservation he won’t hang because the government has no jurisdiction. So Crow Dog was the first Indian ever to win a case before the Supreme Court. The judge told him, ‘Crow Dog, I congratulate you. You kept your word. You came here by yourself and now you and your wife can go back by yourselves. You’re free.’” Somebody translated it for him. That is how my father told it.

This was a landmark case in Indian history. I still have a copy of that paper, “ex parte Crow Dog.” It reads: “The first district of South Dakota is without jurisdiction to find or try an indictment
for murder committed by one Indian upon another in the Indian country, and a conviction and sentence upon such indictment are void and imprisonment thereon is illegal.”

We still bring up this ruling to prove that federal courts and the FBI have no business on the reservation, but it’s no use. Federal law enforcement has been made legal—one-sidedly—on all Indian reservations for what they call the ten major crimes, leaving the tribal courts to handle only such things as drunk and disorderly, traffic tickets, or wife beating. The Crow Dog case is also racist. If Crow Dog had shot a white man he would have been hanged for sure. A saying among the wasichus was always “If a white man kills an Injun, that’s justifiable self-defense. If an Injun kills a white man, that’s murder. If an Injun kills an Injun, that’s one damn Injun less.”

When Crow Dog got home he prayed with the sacred pipe. He asked the Great Spirit to forgive him for what he had done. Black Crow came again, riding on his horse, and built a sweat lodge at the same spot as before. Then Crow Dog’s relatives came to be in on the final purification, and Crow Dog and Black Crow went in and made themselves sacred and smoked the pipe. They made the sweat really hot. They wanted to suffer. When they got out, Crow Dog’s relatives got hold of a big bunch of good sage, the kind they call deer’s ears, and they wiped him with it from head to toe. Then he put on his buckskin outfit. Black Crow advised him: “Cousin, from this day on, whatever you do, you’ll dwell by yourself. You’ll have your own cup, your own dish, your own pipe, all the things you need. When the pipe comes around, if the people don’t understand you, if they have not forgiven you, don’t smoke from that pipe. Use your own pipe. If they invite you, you can smoke with them. When the dipper with the water comes around in the ceremonies, don’t drink from it unless the people say it’s all right. Use your own cup.”

After that Crow Dog dwelled by himself. He had paid the blood money and the white men had let him go free, but the guilt was still upon him. He didn’t go to visit other people. He didn’t
go from house to house, from tipi to tipi. And many people wouldn’t come to his place. So he led a lonely life. All he did was cut poles and sell firewood. Then a white Catholic priest came to see him. He asked Crow Dog to come down to the church one Sunday. There they put up a great feast for him. They asked him if he wanted to go through the white man’s religion. Crow Dog said, “Hou.” So through the white minister he repented. The priest told him that God had forgiven him. This way Crow Dog became a Christian, but he still went to the sweat lodge and prayed to Tunkashila. The main thing was, the Spotted Tails had forgiven him, the Great Spirit had forgiven him, and now Jesus had forgiven him too. The forgiving was complete, but still he kept seeing Spotted Tail’s face in his drinking cup. The blood guilt is still there. Spotted Tail’s blood is still dripping on me. It lasts four generations. My son will be free from it.

In 1991, Chief Spotted Tail came to Crow Dog’s sun dance. He wore his war bonnet. He pierced. He hung from the tree. I prayed together with him. I fanned him with my eagle wing. So now we are friends. The bad feeling is gone. It’s over.

The 1880s were “years of thin grass and little rain” for the Lakotas. In summer there were droughts. Prairie fires ate up the grass and the trees. The winters were so cold that trees cracked apart and men’s bones ached. The snowstorms never stopped. These were hard times for white ranchers and farmers, too. During the great blizzards of those years all their livestock froze or starved to death. The whites could leave and try their luck somewhere else. The Lakota, stuck on their reservations, could not. We had been forced to sign away the bigger part of our reservation. Our sacred Black Hills had been taken over by gold diggers. The land left to us was the kind where nothing grows. On the Cheyenne reservation people were dying of hunger. At Rosebud only half of the children survived. They were too weak to fight the whooping cough and diphtheria the white man had brought. The kids’ legs were thin as sticks, their eyes hollow, and their bellies swollen. Some people died of hopelessness. The government picked this time to cut our rations, the beef issue at Pine Ridge by one million pounds, at Rosebud by two million,
and even part of what little food did arrive was stolen by thieving agents. One commissioner reported that “the Sioux have fallen into a state of consternation, like men on an ice floe that is about to break up.” We were so hard up that men ate up the seed corn and butchered the stud bulls upon which their survival depended in the coming years.

On January 1, 1889, there was a total eclipse of the sun. It caused great fear among the Indians, who thought “that the sun had died” and that the end of the world had come. They were just ready to give up. In Nevada, more than a thousand miles southwest of Rosebud, a Paiute holy man and dreamer named Wovoka had a vision. He told his people that when the sun died he had gone up to heaven and there met God and all the people who had been dead for a long time. And God told him to go back to life and tell the folks on his reservation to be good and love one another and not fight or steal or lie. And he brought with him from heaven a new dance and a new song, which would bring the buffalo back and make everything all right again.

This new dance and new religion was the ghost dance, and Wovoka became its messiah. His message spread like wildfire from tribe to tribe. A man came in the dark of night and told Crow Dog, “A new world is coming. It will roll on top of this one, which the white man has spoiled, like a carpet. Oyate ukiya, Oyate ukiya, a nation is coming!” The man also brought with him a new dance and new songs. The man’s name was Kicking Bear and with him was a friend called Short Bull. They had been with Crazy Horse at the Custer fight.

My father told me, “Kicking Bear and Short Bull had gone far away to a kind of Indian Jesus by the name of Wovoka. He had let them look into his hat, and in it they had seen the whole world, many buffalo, and tipis with meat racks, and their dead relatives whom the wasichu had killed. He also made them die and took them to his new land and had them talking to all these dead people, these ghosts. Then he had them come back to life again and gave them his new dance, and vermilion face paint, and eagle
feathers. ‘Go and teach your people,’ that Paiute man had told them.

“Crow Dog had already heard people talking about this holy man who could make the ghosts of dead people and buffalo return to this earth. So Crow Dog, Low Dog, Two Strikes, and some others had sent Kicking Bear and Short Bull to find out whether it was true. How they could make it all the way to this Indian Jesus, traveling through hundreds of miles of land settled by whites, crossing roads, barbed wire fences, and railroad tracks, and never be caught by soldiers or police, that cannot be explained. It was Indian messiah medicine. Well, they did it, and they came back in one piece and brought the message.”

The message was one of hope. The white world could be buried or, as some said, rolled up. And underneath, or on top of it, would reappear the beautiful world of the grandfathers. This message was rain for thirsting souls. One of Crow Dog’s relations was Howard Red Bear, who, about 1969, died at the age of one hundred and two. He had been a ghost dancer. I remember what he told me about the ghost dance as it was in the old days.

“A man called Woman’s Dress had been performing the dance and when the sun reached the center of the universe he ran into the middle of the dance circle, where the director was standing, and knelt down. Then he laid his body flat on the ground, facedown. He was lying there for a long time, like sleeping, and then, with the people still dancing, he woke up. The dance leader burned some sweet grass and smoked Woman’s Dress up. When Woman’s Dress stood up he was asked what he had seen and heard. Woman’s Dress said, ‘I went to another world. It was beautiful and filled with good things. From there I brought back some wasna.’ Then the ghost dance leader told all the sick dancers to come to the center of the hoop.

“Woman’s Dress was standing in the same place before he fell into the spiritual world of his vision. He stood there like a tree that has taken root. He stood there holding hands with the people
on either side of him. Then the circle of dancers opened up to allow the sick to come in and eat of this vision meat. There were many sick people to eat the medicine, and what was left was placed in a special wooden bowl called a canwaksila. The director took the sweet grass up again and began to smoke up all the sick people. As they chewed and swallowed this otherworld meat, they could feel it going down into their bodies and through their veins. After that they felt much better.”

Near the White River, at the point where one road goes to Rosebud and the other to Parmelee, there my great-grandfather ran a ghost dance. The circle hoop is still there. On a nice summer day you can still make it out. At that spot an old man named Black Bear fell into a vision world of the ghost dance. As Black Bear lay on the ground, the rest of the people continued to dance. After a while Black Bear got up on his feet and faced north with his arms and hands outstretched, and in plain daylight the people saw a little flash of lightning in his hand, like a small looking glass. The ghost dance leader went over to Black Bear and smoked and fanned him off with sweet grass. He saw that Black Bear held a small shining rock, the kind of rock that couldn’t be found on earth. A moon rock. And dancers came out of their trance with spiritual food in their hands—moon flesh and star flesh. There still hovers around that place a smell of burning sweet grass.

Old Jerome Crow Dog joined the ghost dance. He liked that new way of praying, of relating to the spirits. He became a leader, and many of our people followed him. He told them to make special shirts for all the dancers. So the people who followed Crow Dog made ghost dance shirts painted with pictures of the sun, the half moon, the stars, and also with pictures of birds, such as the eagle and the magpie. These shirts were supposed to make the wearer bulletproof.

Uncle Dick Fool Bull, who watched the ghost dance when he was a young boy, told me, “There was a man named Porcupine who put on such a shirt and invited people to shoot at him. Later
he showed them some bullets that had just dropped off upon hitting, without going in.”

Crow Dog told his people, “The Paiute did not teach us this thing. These shirts cannot stop bullets no matter what is painted on them.” But they did not want to believe him.

When the soldiers ran all over the reservation, trying to put down the ghost dance, Crow Dog took his people way out into the Badlands where the whites could not follow them. Two Strikes and Short Bull joined him there. Short Bull had firsthand experience of Wovoka’s power and was the fiercest believer in the new religion. Crow Dog started his ghost dance by having a woman shoot four sacred arrows into the sky. They had points made of bone dipped in buffalo blood. In the end as many as three thousand people danced with Crow Dog, Short Bull, and Two Strikes. Besides the ghost shirts they wore striped blankets and upside-down American flags.

It was hard for them to stay in the Badlands. Winter was coming on. It was cold, with a lot of snow on the ground, and they had only skimpy canvas tipis for shelter. They had no food except for whatever white ranchers’ cattle they could find and butcher. But the Badlands was the only place people could still ghost dance. Up at Standing Rock the agent sent his tribal police to kill our great holy man, Sitting Bull, for protecting the ghost dancers. Everywhere people were running away from the soldiers, who they were afraid might kill them. The government sent soldiers and interpreters to Crow Dog’s and Two Strikes’ camp, telling them to return to the reservation or they would be wiped out.

Two Strikes said, “They will do it. They have already killed many of us. They have cannons. We have women and children here. I will not see them die. I will take them back to the reservation.”

But Short Bull and his men pointed their Winchesters at the whites, and even at Two Strikes, shouting, “Kill the wasichus. Kill all who want to go back.”

So here were Lakota men facing each other with loaded guns, ready to shoot. And the soldiers were ready too. It was only a matter of seconds before the blood of many men, women, and children would be painting the snow red. It was then that Crow Dog did a great thing, maybe the greatest in all his life. He sat right in the middle between the two rows of men screaming at each other and pulled a blanket over himself. There he was, a little heap in the snow, singing softly to himself. They all, whites and Indians, kept staring at this blanket with the man under it. They did not know what to make of it, but they all calmed down. They lowered their guns. They kept staring at that little heap, wondering what Crow Dog was going to do. At last Crow Dog threw his blanket off. He said, “I will not see Lakota kill Lakota. I will not see my people butchered by the soldiers. You can kill me if you want to. The soldiers or Short Bull, it is all the same to me. I am not afraid to die. But while I live I will try to save these women and babies. I will take them back to the agency.”

Then Crow Dog and Two Strikes marched their people peacefully back toward Pine Ridge. Short Bull’s band went with them. In the end only Short Bull was left standing there, clutching his Winchester. Then he went too. Thus Crow Dog saved the lives of a thousand people. In the same month, of December 1890, the soldiers massacred hundreds of Sioux men, women, and children of Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee, leaving women with babies nursing at their breasts dead in the ditch. They had no Crow Dog to save them.

Old Henry told me, “My grandfather was a ghost dance leader. He didn’t dance often himself. Mostly he sat back and watched and listened. He supervised the dance. He was teaching them the songs and the sacred language to get the power. They were dancing in three circles. The earth is still trampled down there. Nothing has grown at that spot for years. But the songs and words are still growing in my heart, because he taught me everything about this Wanagi Wacipi, and I taught you, my son, so this ghost dance will never die.”

After the ghost dance, my great-grandfather lived quietly by himself with his wife. He went back to the tipi rather than live in the tiny log cabin he had built years ago. One day, in September 1912, when Crow Dog was going toward Rosebud, he got sick all of a sudden and died. From that day his wife lived alone, but she and Crow Dog had already prepared. She had asked him where he wanted to be buried. And he had answered wherever they would accept him. After he died, the Catholic priest came and accepted Crow Dog. He had a good funeral. His wife had told him, before he passed away, “Old man, when you die and get buried, I’ll tell them to leave a space next to you, so when I die we’ll lie there together as we did in life. After all the hardships that you went through, I will follow you. I’ll do that much for you.” And when the old woman died, they put her right next to him.

When Frank Good Lance started in as a medicine man he told us, “Your grandfather was buried in the Catholic religion. Now, in the white man’s religion, if a man killed someone, they don’t bury him in the regular cemetery when he dies. They have outside graveyards for those men. But in the Saint Francis cemetery your great-grandfather is buried right in the center, in hallowed ground. Old Crow Dog had been forgiven. By white law he was supposed to be hanged, but the high court freed him. He went into death and came out of death. So here you have something to talk about, something to be proud of. You never have to be afraid to speak up. So let’s not be afraid to be among the people.” And he prayed for us with the sacred pipe and the eagle wing. Then he smoked us up with sage and sweet grass and purified us. We still have our sweat lodge at the same spot where he put one up for us, and we pray there. These are the sacred things that we’re doing now.

Henry summed it up: “Jerome Crow Dog was a great man. He was always using what the white people call symbols. And we have taken after him in this. He wore an old coat a missionary had given him, but over his shoulders he always had an Indian blanket. This meant he had to walk the white man’s road while
remaining a Sioux in his mind. And he also wore a white man’s hat with a visor, a woolen hat, something like a beanie, but he stuck an eagle feather on its top. He told me, ‘This cap means that we live under the wasichu now, but the eagle feather means that we won’t be whitemanized, that we’ll be Indians forever.’”