Authors: Win Blevins
The Second Day, Christmas Eve
O
ver coffee in the morning I felt shy, didn’t want to meet anyone’s eye. I saw Plez and Sallee looking at me like they had thoughts of some kind. We went into the circle for prayers. Emile, Plez, and I stepped out sunwise with all the riders for another day’s journey. Chup and Sallee headed off with the walkers. All I put my mind on was camp tonight. Camp tonight, camp tonight—at a church, we were told.
The wind eased, the temperature rose, the day was not so bad. Of course, the painting kept coming together in my mind. I’d tried to stay blank, just to ride, but my mind …
Silence, seeing, silence, seeing, it was unbearable.
“Okay,” I finally said to Plez. “You can go see the ancestors, talk to them. By choice.”
“By intention,” said Plez.
I took that in and nodded. “See the ancestors by intention. How?”
He beamed like a slow student was finally catching on. He and Emile smiled at each other like they were in cahoots some way.
“Hey, medicine men know how to go into the other world. We’ve done this for thousands and thousands of years.”
“Yeah, but, I mean, how exactly?”
“I’ve done it a lot of ways. Dancing. Drumming. Hungering and thirsting. Praying ceaselessly. But there are easier ways now.”
“Out with it, out with it.”
He grinned. “Well, normally I would beat the drum for you. But when we don’t want to disturb other people, I use a tape.”
“A
what
?”
Emile chuckled out loud.
“A cassette tape.” He reached inside his big capote and fished out a Walkman. “Right here. I carry the other world on audio tape.” He was really enjoying himself, and Emile was enjoying him. It was like Emile knew everything ahead of time, but he didn’t.
“This Michael Harner, he’s a white guy, but he’s a shaman. He learned how to go journeying. He also learned drum beats work really good, really send people into a trance. Put two different beats on opposite sides of a tape, fast and slow. Works great.”
“A white guy.”
“Yeah.”
“On tape, nine bucks and ninety-five cents or something.”
“Yeah. Cheaper than Delta. You don’t get frequent flyer miles, though.” He shook the Walkman. “And I’ll tell you, beginners do well with this. What’s best is going to a Spirit Dance. Sing and dance your way to the Spirit world. The tape is twenty minutes. For people I work with, though, I spliced it into an hour tape.”
“There are still Ghost Dances.”
“Yeah. At my mother’s rez, the Shoshones do one. They say the dance is real old and was originally theirs.”
“You guide people to the other world.”
“Yes. You need a guide. Some people don’t come back easy. Until they learn the way.”
“You do this.”
“My gift is to bring other people blessings of Spirit.” There was a big difference in his tone now.
“A lot of people.”
“People who have the awareness, people who have the desire.”
“God,” I said, “I want
not
to go. Most of me.”
“You know, it’s not easy. No one can do it for you, to you. You gotta concentrate, you gotta commit, you gotta be brave. You have to fly on your own wings. Hey, it’s easy not to go.”
I looked him in the eyes. I didn’t know what to do or say.
“You hungry?” says Plez.
“My stomach’s never gonna speak to me again.”
“Over there,” he says merrily. “I got some soul food.” He motioned with his lips to one of the giant round bales of hay. (Indian people consider it rude to point with your finger.) Me, Plez, and Emile eased the horses to the downwind side.
In the lee of the bale, I says teasingly, “What we gonna do, eat eagle feathers?”
He handed me something, Emile the same. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “Very spiritual,” he says.
I ate two packages, four cups. Ate them very slowly, relishing each bite, licked my fingers, then sucked my fingers.
Emile surprised me by speaking. “I never tasted better food in my life.”
“Nice being out of the wind, ain’t it?”
I nodded. After that trip I will never love Tate, Wind, again. Well, maybe if he stays away from Iya, Wind Storm.
“You know,” Plez says, his voice gentle but his eyes right on me, “you better go journeying. Go to Wounded Knee in spirit. You got to know. See it. Go through it.”
“I’m afraid,” I said. I met his eyes. “I’m really afraid.”
“There’s things to be afraid of. Look, I could give you all
the reasons. I’m not gonna. I’m gonna tell you to look in your heart and see what’s good for you.”
I nodded stupidly.
Plez asks, “You with me on this, Emile?”
“Absolutely,” said my best friend.
“You got a lot of help right now,” says Plez. “I don’t mean me. I mean what you saw on the mountain, whatever it was. I mean your emotion around this trip. Your spirit is big now. Yeah, you’re afraid, ’cause you’re close to a big step. You can feel your connection to your ancestors. You sense a sweeping change in your life.” He swept his arm like a clock.
“These six days you’re walking in the very footsteps of your ancestors, right where they walked. At Wounded Knee you will stand where they stood. Where they died, you’ll do a ceremony for healing.
“Between you and them, any day of your life, there’s only a thin membrane. But normally it seems like a lot to us, like they’re a long way away. Now they’re close. Now they’re here with us. Last night riding in the dark, especially, I could feel them.
“Let me tell you a story. My first ride was the second one, 1987. That year we had thirty-six riders. The third night, it was just like last night, riding way late into the dark. Tyler, he told me this when he finally got into camp. He and Alex White Plume, once in a while they would set up at the head of the line and count the riders as they came. Somebody might have fallen, or maybe his horse took off on him—you never know. Just making sure all thirty-six was still with them, not lost in that bad night.
“One time they counted, right away, Tyler, he noticed something was different. More of the riders looked like they were wearing hides, or real old-style clothing. Some of them were carrying staffs and lances. Blue sparks danced around the horses’ hoofs. Sometimes blue lights seemed to hover around people’s ears, or the tops of their heads.
“Tyler counted eighty-six riders.
“Time he was done, all the hairs on the back of his neck and head were standing up, wiggling.
“He looked across, and Alex looked as scared as Tyler. ‘How many’d you count?’ asked Tyler.
“‘Eighty-six,’ said Alex, soft-like.
“‘Me too,’ says Tyler.
“When they come into camp an hour later, there was only thirty-six riders.”
Plez looked around at us one by one. His eyes were lit by an inner fire.
“Those spirits, though, they were good. They crossed over to help.
“Sometimes the membrane, it’s thin, and crossing over is easy. You could do it now. I’ll help you. I bet Sallee will help. Cross over, see, hear, smell, feel. Come back.”
I wondered what Sallee could do.
“It’s healing, I promise. It hurts, yeah. The more it hurts, the more you need it. The sharper the hurt, the greater the healing.”
I looked at him. I had the willies in my knees, like I was standing on the edge of rimrock and my knees felt like I might jump.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe.” I heeled my horse toward the other riders.
When we got to the church, only a half hour after dark this time, the little building was padlocked and dark. Someone said the landowner would be glad for us to sleep in the church, but he was in the hospital, beyond asking. We ate another supper of buffalo soup and fry bread. I spent dinner looking at the empty church, the empty sky, and the empty plains and thinking how cold it was gonna be tonight, especially without shelter.
The walkers came in after us. Sallee’s hands were almost
frosted, and she let me rub them for a long time. Even when the ceremonies started, we sat that way. There were speeches, good ones—Alex White Plume and Arvol Looking Horse spoke. There were honoring songs. And finally there was a talking circle.
Our custom goes, the person who has the talking stick talks until he’s finished. No cross-talk. That’s also the way we do it in AA, which is kind of nifty. You say all you’ve got to say, then you pass the talking stick. Other people, they speak for themselves, they don’t quarrel with you.
At this first talking circle mostly Indian people spoke. Some voiced bitterness toward whites for Wounded Knee, most expressed a desire for reconciliation. Been no whites there, maybe more anger would’ve come out. It’s rude to talk hostile to guests.
I was listening with some attention, not a lot, and then Tyler spoke, and said words that were good for me. He says it’s okay for me to set his talk down here. “I know whites who want to learn traditional Lakota ways. Releasing of the Spirits, like. A Ph.D. from Harvard, other academics in psychology, they want to. I showed them the Releasing the Spirits ceremony. They cried and cried, said they want us to teach that ceremony for all people.
“But here it is. We can’t teach it
until we forgive
. I myself can’t forgive, not yet, what got done to
my
ancestors at Wounded Knee. Nope, not yet. I have to heal myself before I can teach others. This ride, that’s what I come here for, learn to forgive.”
When it was over, the people fasting retired to their own tent. Fasting seemed an awesome sacrifice to me, more than I would ever be able to do.
I said to the group at large, “We’re gonna freeze.” Except for Sallee’s presence, I would have added “to death.”
She said, “Some people are going to the schoolhouse in Interior,” a nearby town. “You want to go?”
My heart leapt up like she’d asked me to bed her. I looked at Plez, Emile, and Chup. They nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “And
I want you to help me go journeying to the Spirit World. Will you?”
“Of course,” she said, and her eyes looked softer in my direction than I had seen them. “What do you want me to do?”
“We gotta ask Plez.”
The First Journey
“W
here do you want to go?” asked Plez. “What do you want to see? You gotta name your intention very exactly. Journeying is walking the razor’s edge.”
The floor of the Interior school gym was already crowded, and the whole room buzzed low with conversation. All those people made me nervous. Didn’t want witnesses to my veer into … whatever. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
They’ll think I’m insane
.
I was stretched out full on my sleeping bag. Plez was sitting on one side of me, Sallee on the other. Emile and Chup were talking quietly to each other.
Where do I want to go? What do I want to see?
This
is
insane
.
“I want to see a Spirit Dance.”
“Good. How about the Stronghold? It’s nearby, on that tableland we saw to the south. The dancers were there a hundred years ago today. They were the most passionate dancers, the real believers. You’ll see a good one.”
“Okay.”
“Sallee, you willing to help?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Plez asked.
“I want to come close to that world. I want to hear whatever Blue is willing to tell about it. I want to help him with this important undertaking.”
Plez nodded. He handed me the cassette player. I put the earphones on.
“Here’s what you do. Take Sallee’s hand. Then say your intention out loud three times. Be very specific. Then let go Sallee’s hand, push the
PLAY
button, and close your eyes. When the drum starts, go to someplace you know that opens into the earth, a hole, a cave, a spring, something like that. Go down through that. You may see a guide. Ask it to take you to the Stronghold a hundred years ago so you can see a Spirit Dance. If you don’t see a guide, just go on your own. Let your mind go with the drum beat, you’ll find it pushes you right along. I’ve put it on the slow beat side the first time.
“Sallee will be right here the whole time. So will I. If you want to come back early, come to the hole and reach for Sallee, or just reach. She’ll take your hand and bring you back. Otherwise, in twenty minutes the drum will tell you when to come back. Return to the hole where you went down, come up, and reach for Sallee. She’ll take your hand.
“Any questions?”
I looked at Sallee and saw in her eyes that it was all right. I took her hand. It felt warm, comforting, human. “No questions.”
“Remember, the Spirit World isn’t harmful to us, it’s good for us. As long as you come back, you’ll be fine. Will you come back?”
“Yes.”
“By the way, it’s Christmas Eve. Have a good trip.”
I took a deep breath, let it out, and began.
“I want to go to the Stronghold a hundred years ago and see a Spirit Dance.” Big breath in, then out.
“I want to go to the Stronghold a hundred years ago and see a Spirit Dance.” Big breath in, out.
“I want to go to the Stronghold a hundred years ago and see a Spirit Dance.” Big breath in, out.
I let go of Sallee, pushed the
PLAY
button, closed my eyes, and the drum started banging in my ears.
At first I only listened. Surprising how big and restless that drum felt, like a mountain lion pacing in my mind.
Then I remembered. A place came to me, along Medicine Root Creek when I was a kid. It was an outcropping shaped like an arrowhead, facing the creek, maybe fifteen feet high and ten feet across. The altar, I called it. When I was a kid, I went to the outcropping to say my prayers. Later, when I hardly prayed any more, I sat there and watched the creek and the birds and the day. Always on the altar was a lot of coyote dung, like that trickster guy hung out there a lot, maybe howling his prayers. In the middle of the altar was a hole, maybe big enough for a ten year old to worm his way into. It squiggled, and I couldn’t see the bottom. I was fascinated by the hole, and imagined it went to the center of the earth, but I was scared to crawl in.
Now I went in, used that as my entrance to the other world. At first it was hard to squeeze through, then I wiggled through fluidly, and then I fell, drifted, floated weightless through space to the … earth, if the name for it is earth.
I stood on barren ground in a place like the Badlands. I looked exactly like me, except I was wearing a breechcloth, moccasins, and nothing else. Though a hundred years ago it would have been a winter day, I had no sense of cold, or warmth, or any kind of weather. The sky was bright and cloudless, but no sun was visible.
I looked around and saw rough, broken country in every direction, white cliffs jutting out madly, a rugged, wild, uninhabited land, like where I grew up, yet not a place I recognized. Next to my feet was something like a dry creek bed, except that
it moved. It turned, corkscrewed, and seemed to flow away from me, leading me downstream.
Near my left hand on a boulder sat Raven. With my mind only, I asked immediately,
Will you lead me to the Stronghold?
Yes
, said Raven without words. We could send each other thoughts without speaking, which seemed natural and simple.
We started, Raven flying slowly ahead of me.
This time I’m not afraid of you
.
You’ve always had a thing about me
, said Raven in a matter-of-fact way.
He flew slowly, or came back and glided at my shoulder, or hovered in the air. We didn’t speak again.
Soon I recognized the big mesa on our left, the one called Cuny Table. And beyond that, on the north, projected a much smaller mesa which I’d never seen, perhaps a couple of miles long, a natural fortress guarded by huge rock walls. What the history books called the Stronghold. Where my dancers were.
Soon I started up a steep, rocky side hill toward a saddle. I noticed that when you’re a spirit, physical exertion isn’t exertion. You do it easily, no push of muscle, no heave of breath. Quickly, I glided up to a pickup-width land bridge between the big mesa and the little one. This was why they chose it—so narrow it was easy to defend.
Raven settled on my left shoulder. I felt a faint shudder inside, but let it go. I could hear Raven think,
I’m not going to reassure this man, he’s supposed to know
.
We walked onto the Stronghold openly, past two lookouts who saw nothing. Strange, being there but not being there in body.
Raven flapped off toward a lookout point, an outcropping above the flat-topped table. From the top I saw lodges everywhere in small circles. Horses and cattle were grazing here and there, no reason to keep them close-herded. Plenty of grass, though it was brown, and grass meant springs.
About five hundred lodges
, said Raven without words.
Plenty of cattle—they won’t starve.
Took the cows from the tribal herd on the way here, without paying
.
Five hundred lodges, four, five, six people to a lodge—a lot of people, more than I’d realized.
We stepped lightly down the rock, through the grazers, past the circles of lodges, and toward the dance circle. I felt exactly like myself, yet I did not seem to inhabit a body in the usual way. I wondered again how I could be perfectly comfortable in nothing but a breechcloth on a winter day. No one noticed us.
Raven said wordlessly,
They have spent the morning sweating and painting and dressing for the dance. It will begin soon
. Yet Raven did not need to say this, because I found that I knew what had been going on this morning without being here to see it, or having to ask. I knew to some extent what was in people’s minds, and in their hearts.
Men and women alike showed faces painted with circles, crescents, and crosses, representing the Sun, Moon, and Morning Star. Mostly the color was red, color of Wi, the Sun.
They wore the Ghost Shirts that Wovoka called for—loose, sacklike, cotton or muslin garments ornamented with more circles, crescents, and stars, and with paintings of birds, especially Raven and Crow. The shirts bristled with feathers, mostly Eagle but also Raven, Crow, Magpie, Sage Hen, and other birds.
Raven is patron bird of the Spirit Dance?
I asked Raven without words.
Yes
.
Who is Raven?
I asked, looking at him. I felt a pang with the question, for the first time in my life wanting to understand my nemesis.
I saw his black eyes gleam, as in mischief. Suddenly he flew to the dance circle and lit at the top of the sapling at its center. From it hung an American flag, which puzzled me. Yet I saw that some dancers wore, over their Ghost Shirts, an upside-down American flag. I understood that the sapling was the Tree of Life, and on its summit perched my messenger of Death.
The dancers formed a circle of perhaps two hundred people, sitting. In the center stood about a dozen men and women, and
I understood them to be leaders, medicine people. One was Short Bull, the Rosebud medicine man who traveled to Nevada to hear Wovoka and then taught the Dance passionately to all Lakota who would listen. He addressed the dancers.
“The day the Messiah brings the new world, I told you this day will come in two seasons. However, since the whites have interfered so much, I will advance the time from what my Father above told me.” He paused dramatically—he was an effective preacher. “At the end of one moon the earth will shake and the wind will blow and we will go among our departed relations.” Suddenly he declaimed like thunder. “Now for one moon we must dance the Spirit Dance with all our hearts!”
His voice ran like horses. “If the white man comes here, we must not let him interfere with the Dance. We are dancing to bring a new world! If the soldiers press close around you, pay no attention to them, continue the dance. If the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you upon whom I have put holy shirts will sing a song, which I have taught you, around them, when some of them will drop dead, then the rest will start to run, but their horses will sink into the earth; the riders will jump from their horses, but they will sink into the earth also; then you can do as you desire with them. Now you must know this, that all the soldiers and that race will be dead; there will be only Indians left living on the earth. My friends, this is straight and true.”
I watched the people as Short Bull preached, and with my power as a spirit felt of their hearts. They believed truly. Their zeal for the dance was impeccable. They were willing themselves passionately toward the future utopia. Their dedication virtually transported them to the world they sought.
Another leader now prayed. Though my translation isn’t word for word, he said roughly this. “Wakantanka, now we begin the dance you gave us. Our hearts are good, and we seek to do all that you ask. In return we implore you, Give us back our hunting grounds, and the animals that live upon them. O Wakantanka,
transport those dancers who are sincere to the Spirit World and there let them see their ancestors.”
This last sentence thrummed my heart like fingers on guitar strings—
that’s what I’m doing!
Suddenly I heard consciously the drum beat, the heart of a wildcat inside me that bore me on this journey. I flung my mind back to the scene at the Stronghold.
The leader went on. “Show them the good life you are making ready for us, and then let them return to this world. O hear my cry, Wakantanka!”
Now the people stood and raised hands their hands high to the West, where the Messiah would come from. Two young women rose at the base of the Tree and held up objects, one a Pipe, the other a hoop whose significance I did not know. Following a lead voice, all lifted up the first song of the Spirit Dance.
The father says so
, eyayo!
The father says so
, eyayo!
My heart swayed. I recognized the melody and words from the mountain, from my seeing beyond.
The father says so
,
The father says so
.
You will see your grandfather
—eyayo!
You will see your grandfather
—eyayo!
The father says so
,
The father says so
.
You will see your relatives
—eyayo!
You will see your relatives
—eyayo!
The father says so
,
The father says so
.
This song began again. It was long and mesmeric, the voices light, floating on air, and the repetition seduced the mind deeper
into its world. I knew that in the words
father
and
grandfather
the singers meant both the father and grandfather in blood and the father and grandfather in Spirit, the Messiah.
The song rose again. “The father says so, the father says so,” lulling in its repeating of the words, of the words, its melody lifting yet infinitely gentle, infinitely drawing the heart and mind to …
Beyond the song I was hearing something.
A low rumbling, or mumbling. Like rockfall, or an avalanche, heard from afar. Like the clouds rubbing against one another in low voices. Like people moaning. A low, restless sound, writhing in the currents of air, twisting, twisting, turning, churning, over and over and over and over, moaning, groaning, howling, mumbling
.
I recognized this—
the sounds of the night on Bear Butte when I saw beyond. Again I live in that low chorus of sound forever
.
The singers cycled back to the beginning—“Says the father”—for the fourth time, or sixth. The two songs waved me like a blade of grass in a stream, the first song of the Spirit Dance and the moaning, eternal moaning. The two singings were the fluid I lived in, my water and my air in one. Gently, rhythmically, I waved to the liquid sounds of a low, distant …
Of the singers I was one, of the moaners one.
The song surged, and the moans surged, around me, inside me. Both song and moans, bubbling within me like hot springs, bursting forth upon my face, tears scalding and soothing, salt and sweet at once. I did not know why I cried.
You will see your relatives
—eyayo!
You will see your relatives
—eyayo!