Growing Up Native American (14 page)

I took the pitcher and went quietly downstairs. As soon as I was outside the yard, I ran as hard as I could to the spring, glad at the prospect of a chance to see my friend again. Warren and Lester met me as I was coming up the hill.

“Did you see him?” one of them asked.

“No, but I'm going to,” I answered.

“Ask him if we can do anything for him?” said Lester.

Just as I reached the head of the stairs the same big girl appeared. I handed her the pitcher; she took it and was about to enter the room, when I caught her arm. “Just let me take a look at Brush, will you?” I whispered.

“No, Frank, I can't. Superintendent says to let nobody in.”

I heard a cough, then a feeble voice say pleadingly, “Maria, let him in, just a minute!”

The girl looked cautiously around, then said to me, “Come, but don't let anybody see you. Don't stay long, be quick!”

I stepped in, and a thin hand was stretched out to receive me. “I can't talk much, I'm so weak,” said Brush. Overcome with emotion, I could not speak but stood holding his hot hand. The girl at the door moved uneasily.

“Tell the boys I'm all right,” said Brush. “They mustn't worry. Come nearer.” I bent over him and he whispered, “To-night, when everybody is asleep, come down and see me. I want to talk to you when I'm alone.”

As night came on we four sat under the walnut-tree watching Brush's window. A candle was lit, then the curtain was drawn.
Below in the dining-room, the large girls moved quietly to and fro, busy with their evening work. When this was finished, they gathered at the door, and softly sang that beautiful hymn, “Nearer my God to Thee.” We joined in the chorus, the wind wafting the words to the broad skies. The singing came to a close; the dining-room lights were put out, and we were called to bed.

As we knelt by the side of our beds to repeat the Lord's Prayer, I could not keep back the tears that came, thinking of the emaciated little form that I was to see once more that night.

One by one the boys fell asleep, and I alone, among the forty or fifty in that big room, remained awake. The clock down in Gray-beard's room struck eleven; the only sounds that came to my ears were those of the heavy breathing of the boys, the soughing of the wind through the trees, the rushing of the waters in the river, and now and then the calls of the wild geese, migrating in the night.

The clock struck the hour of twelve; I sat up listening. There was a stir and the sound of a voice that startled me. It was only Warren moving and talking in his sleep. I went stealthily to the head of the stairs, then listened again. I could only hear the throbbing of my heart, and the rasping pulsations in my ears. After a pause which seemed interminable, I put one foot down the first step, the board sprang under my weight, and creaked. Again I paused to listen; there was no stir, and I went on. Every little sound in the stillness of the night seemed exaggerated, and I was often startled, but I went on and reached the door of Brush's room. I scratched the panel three times. There was a movement within, and a slight cough. Slowly I turned the knob and opened the door. I entered, closed the door, but left it unlatched.

A candle stood burning in the midst of a number of bottles on a little table near the head of the bed. I knelt by the bedside, and Brush put his arm around my neck. We were silent for a while, finally he whispered in the Omaha tongue:

“I'm glad you came; I've been wanting to talk to you. They tell me I am better; but I know I am dying.”

Oppressed with ominous dread, I cried out, interrupting him, “Don't say that! Oh, don't say that!”

But he went on, “You mustn't be troubled; I'm all right; I'm not afraid; I know God will take care of me. I have wanted to stay with you boys, but I can't. You've all been good to me. My strength is going, I must hurry,—tell the boys I want them to learn; I know you will, but the other boys don't care. I want them to learn, and to think. You'll tell them, won't you?”

He slipped his hand under the pillow, brought out his broken-bladed jack-knife, and put it in my hand, then said, “I wish I had something to give to each one of the boys before I go. I have nothing in the world but this knife. I love all of you; but you understand me, so I give it to you. That's all. Let me rest a little, then you must go.”

After a moment's stillness the door opened very gently, and the floor near it creaked as though there were footsteps. A breath of wind came and moved the flickering flame of the candle round and round. The boy stared fixedly through the vacant doorway. There was something strange and unnatural in his look as, with one arm still around me, he stretched the other toward the door, and, in a loud whisper, said, “My grandfather! He calls me. I'm coming, I'm coming!”

There was a sound as of a movement around the room; Brush's eyes followed it until they again rested upon the open door, which swung to with a soft click; then he closed his eyes.

I crept closer to the sick boy; I was quivering with fear. Brush opened his eyes again, he had felt me trembling. “Are you cold?” he asked.

Just then I heard footsteps in the girls' play-room; this time they were real; Brush heard them too.

“Superintendent,” he said with an effort.

 

When I crept into my bed the clock below struck one. For a long while I lay awake. I could hear noises downstairs, Graybeard's door open and close, and the door of Brush's room. I heard a window raised, then everything became still.

 

We did not know how fondly we were attached to Brush, how truly he had been our leader, until we four, left alone, lingered
around his grave in the shadowy darkness of night, each one reluctant to leave.

The Mission bell rang for evening service, and with slow steps we moved toward the school—no longer “The Middle Five.”

J
ohn (Fire) Lame Deer (Lakota/Sioux) was born in 1903, after the Sioux had been settled on reservations throughout North and South Dakota. He pursued a number of interesting occupations, including that of painter and rodeo clown, but his truest and most important vocation was that of a Lakota holy man. Filled with good humor and astute observations, his memorable life story was recorded by Richard Erdoes in 1972
. Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions
offers an adventure-filled life history and a rare glimpse into the world of Lakota beliefs and spirituality
.

This selection contrasts the traditional tribal education under the wise and watchful eyes of grandparents with the forced, ineffectual educational methods of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
.

 

I
WAS BORN A FULL-BLOOD INDIAN IN A TWELVE-BY-TWELVE LOG
cabin between Pine Ridge and Rosebud.
Maka tanhan wicasa wan
—I am a man of the earth, as we say. Our people don't call themselves Sioux or Dakota. That's white man talk. We call ourselves Ikce Wicasa—the natural humans, the free, wild, common people. I am pleased to be called that.

As with most Indian children, much of my upbringing was done by my grandparents—Good Fox and his wife, Pte-Sa-Ota-Win, Plenty White Buffalo. Among our people the relationship to one's grandparents is as strong as to one's own father and mother. We lived in that little hut way out on the prairie, in the back country, and for the first few years of my life I had
no contact with the outside world. Of course we had a few white man's things—coffee, iron pots, a shotgun, an old buck-board. But I never thought much of where these things came from or who had made them.

When I was about five years old my grandma took me to visit some neighbors. As always, my little black pup came along. We were walking on the dirt road when I saw a rider come up. He looked so strange to me that I hid myself behind Grandma and my pup hid behind me. I already knew enough about riding to see that he didn't know how to handle a horse. His feet were hanging down to the ground. He had some tiny, windmill-like things coming out of his heels, making a tinkling sound. As he came closer I started to size him up. I had never seen so much hair on a man. It covered all of his face and grew way down to his chest, maybe lower, but he didn't have hair where it counted, on top of his head. The hair was of a light-brown color and it made him look like a mattress come to life. He had eyes like a dead owl, of a washed-out blue-green hue. He was chewing on something that looked like a smoking Baby Ruth candy bar. Later I found out that this was a cigar. This man sure went in for double enjoyment, because he was also chomping on a wad of chewing tobacco, and now and then he took the smoking candy bar from his mouth to spit out a long stream of brown juice. I wondered why he kept eating something which tasted so bad that he couldn't keep it down.

This strange human being also wore a funny headgear—a cross between a skillet and a stovepipe. He had a big chunk of leather piled on top of his poor horse, hanging down also on both sides. In front of his crotch the leather was shaped like a horn. I thought maybe he kept his man-thing inside to protect it. This was the first saddle I had seen. His pitiful horse also had strings of leather on its head and a piece of iron in its mouth. Every time the horse stuck out its tongue I could hear some kind of roller or gear grinding inside it. This funny human being wore leather pants and had two strange-looking hammers tied to his hips. I later found out these were .45 Colts.

The man started to make weird sounds. He was talking, but we couldn't understand him because it was English. He pointed at my grandmother's pretty beaded moccasins and he took some
square green frog hides from his pocket and wanted to trade. I guess those were dollar bills. But Grandma refused to swap, because she had four big gold coins in her moccasins. That man must have smelled them. This was the first white man I met.

When I got home I had a new surprise waiting for me. My grandpa was butchering something that I had never seen before, an animal with hoofs like a horse and the body of a dog. Maybe somebody had mated a dog with a horse and this funny creature was the result. Looking at its pink, hairless body, I was reminded of scary old tales about humans coupling with animals and begetting terrifying monsters. Grandpa was chopping away, taking the white meat and throwing the insides out. My little puppy was sure enjoying this, his first pig. So was I, but the pig smelled terrible. My grandpa said to save the fat for axle grease.

Most of my childhood days weren't very exciting, and that was all right with me. We had a good, simple life. One day passed like another. Only in one way was I different from other Indian kids. I was never hungry, because my dad had so many horses and cattle. Grandma always got up early in the morning before everybody else, taking down the big tin container with the Government-issue coffee. First I would hear her roasting the beans in a frying pan, then I would hear her grind them. She always made a huge pot holding two gallons of water, put in two big handfuls of coffee and boiled it. She would add some sweetener—molasses or maple syrup; we didn't like sugar. We used no milk or cream in our
pejuta sapa
—our black medicine.

Before anything else Grandma poured out a big soup spoon of coffee as an offering to the spirits, and then she kept the pot going all day. If she saw people anywhere near the house she called out to them, regardless of who they were, “Come in, have some coffee!” When the black medicine gave out, she added water and a lot more coffee and boiled the whole again. That stuff got stronger and stronger, thicker and thicker. In the end you could almost stick the spoon in there and it would keep standing upright. “Now the coffee is real good,” Grandma would say.

To go with the coffee Grandma got her baking powder each morning and made soda bread and squaw bread. That squaw
bread filled the stomach. It seemed to grow bigger and bigger inside. Every spring, as the weather got warmer, the men would fix up Grandma's “squaw-cooler.” This was a brush shelter made of four upright tree trunks with horizontal lodge poles tied to the top. The whole was then covered with branches from pine trees. They rigged up an old wood burner for Grandma to cook on, a rough table and some logs to sit on. In the summer, much of our life was spent in the squaw-cooler, where you could always feel a breeze. These squaw-coolers are still very popular on the reservation.

Grandma liked to smoke a little pipe. She loved her
kinnickin-nick
—the red willow-bark tobacco. One time she accidentally dropped some glowing embers into an old visitor's lap. This guy still wore a breech cloth. Suddenly we smelled something burning. That breech cloth had caught fire and we had to yank it off and beat the flames out. He almost got his child-maker burned up. He was so old it wouldn't have made a lot of difference, but he still could jump.

One of my uncles used to keep a moon-counting stick, our own kind of calendar and a good one. He had a special staff and every night he cut a notch in it until the moon “died”—that is, disappeared. On the other side of his staff he made a notch for every month. He started a new stick every year in the spring. That way we always knew when it was the right day for one of our ceremonies.

Every so often my grandparents would take me to a little celebration down the creek. Grandpa always rode his old red horse, which was well known in all the tribes. We always brought plenty of food for everybody, squaw bread, beef, the kind of dried meat we called
papa
, and
wasna
, or pemmican, which was meat pounded together with berries and kidney fat. We also brought a kettle of coffee, wild mint tea, soup or stuff like that. Grandfather was always the leader of the
owanka osnato
—the rehearsal ground. He prepared the place carefully. Only the real warriors were allowed to dance there—men like Red Fish or Thin Elk, who had fought in the Custer battle. With the years the dancers grew older and older and fewer and fewer. Grandfather danced too. Everybody could see the scars
all over his arm where he had been wounded by the white soldiers.

Some women had scars, too. Grandpa's brother, White Crane Walking, had three wives. They were not jealous of one another. They were like sisters. They loved one another and they loved their husband. This old man was really taking it easy; the women did all the work. He just lay around the whole day long, doing nothing. Once in a while some men called him lazy, but he just laughed and told them, “Why don't you get a second wife?” He knew their wives were jealous and didn't want them to get a second one. When this old man finally passed away, the two wives who survived him buried him in the side of a hill. They took their skinning knives and made many deep gashes in their arms and legs to show their grief. They might have cut off their little fingers too, but somebody told them that this was no longer allowed, that the Government would punish them for this. So they cut off their hair instead. They keened and cried for four days and nights; they loved their husband that much.

I was the
takoja
—the pampered grandson—and like all Indian children I was spoiled. I was never scolded, never heard a harsh word. “
Ajustan
—leave it alone”—that was the worst. I was never beaten; we don't treat children that way. Indian kids are so used to being handled gently, to get away with things, that they often don't pay much attention to what the grownups tell them. I'm a grandfather now myself and sometimes I feel like yelling at one of those brash kids, “Hey, you little son of a bitch, listen to me!” That would make him listen all right, but I can't do it.

When I didn't want to go to sleep my grandma would try to scare me with the
ciciye
—a kind of bogeyman. “
Takoja, istima ye
—Go to sleep, sonny,” she would say, “or the
ciciye
will come after you.” Nobody knew what the
ciciye
was like, but he must have been something terrible. When the
ciciye
wouldn't work anymore, I was threatened with the
siyoko
—another kind of monster. Nobody knew what the
siyoko
was like, either, but he was ten times more terrible than the
ciciye
. Grandma did not have much luck. Neither the
ciciye
nor the
siyoko
scared me for
long. But when I was real bad, Grandma would say, “
Wasicun anigni kte
”—the white man will come and take you to his home,” and that scared me all right.
Wasicun
were for real.

It was said that I didn't take after my grandpa Good Fox, whom I loved, but after my other grandfather, Crazy Heart, whom I never knew. They said I picked up where he left off, because I was so daring and full of the devil. I was told that Crazy Heart had been like that. He did not care what happened to other people, or to himself, once he was on his way. He was hot-tempered, always feuding and on the warpath. At the same time he saved lots of people, gave wise counsel, urged the people to do right. He was a good speech-maker. Everybody who listened to him said that he was a very encouraging man. He always advised patience, except when it came to himself. Then his temper got in the way.

I was like that. Things I was told not to do—I did them. I liked to play rough. We played shinny ball, a kind of hockey game. We made the ball and sticks ourselves. We played the hoop game, shot with a bow and arrow. We had foot races, horse races and water races. We liked to play
mato kiciyapi
, the bear game, throwing sharp, stiff grass stems at each other. These could really hurt you and draw blood if they hit the bare skin. And we were always at the
isto kicicastakapi
, the pit-slinging game. You chewed the fruit from the rosebush or wild cherries, spit a fistful of pits into your hand and flung them into the other fellow's face. And of course I liked the Grab-Them-by-the-Hair-and-Kick-Them game, which we played with two teams.

I liked to ride horseback behind my older sister, holding onto her. As I got a little bigger she would hold onto me. By the time I was nine years old I had my own horse to ride. It was a beautiful gray pony my father had given me together with a fine saddle and a very colorful Mexican saddle blanket. That gray was my favorite companion and I was proud to ride him. But he was not mine for long. I lost him through my own fault.

Nonge Pahloka
—the Piercing of Her Ears—is a big event in a little girl's life. By this ceremony her parents, and especially her grandmother, want to show how much they love and honor her. They ask a man who is respected for his bravery or wisdom to pierce the ears of their daughter. The grandmother puts on a
big feed. The little girl is placed on a blanket surrounded by the many gifts her family will give away in her name. The man who does the piercing is much admired and gets the most valuable gift. Afterward they get down to the really important part—the eating.

Well, one day I watched somebody pierce a girl's ears. I saw the fuss they made over it, the presents he got and all that. I thought I should do this to my little sister. She was about four years old at the time and I was nine. I don't know anymore what made me want to do this. Maybe I wanted to feel big and important like the man whom I had watched perform the ceremony. Maybe I wanted to get a big present. Maybe I wanted to make my sister cry. I don't remember what was in my little boy's mind then. I found some wire and made a pair of “ear rings” out of it. Then I asked my sister, “Would you like me to put these on you?” She smiled. “
Ohan
—yes.” I didn't have the sharp bone one uses for the ear-piercing, and I didn't know the prayer that goes with it. I just had an old awl but thought would do fine. Oh, how my sister yelled. I had to hold her down, but I got that awl through her earlobes and managed to put the “ear rings” in. I was proud of the neat job I had done.