Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) by Leonard C. Dog Read Free Book Online Page A

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’tgo 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.

five

HOLDING HANDS THEY DANCE IN A CIRCLE
    There was no longer hope for us
    on this earth, and the Great Spirit
    seemed to have forgotten us.
    Red Cloud
    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