RavenShadow by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online

came down to, I was picked out.
    Selected for what? To be raised to carry the old ways. To be raised by my grandparents, not my parents. To live away from town, away from white people, even away from Lakota who were white in their ways. I spoke Lakota, no English. Instead of learning the ways of the grocery store and the refrigerator, I learned the ways of the hunter of animals and gatherer of plants. Instead of learning the ways of television and the automobile, I learned the ways of the sweat lodge, the vision quest, the Sun Dance, and the yuwipi .
    We grandparents’ children, that’s what they call us, we are held apart exactly to be carriers of the old ways. White people call us back-to-the-blanket Indians, backward people, people to be left behind by time. In fact we are the keepers of our people’s spirits.
    It was a hard way to grow up, serious and dedicated to a great mission, without the normal time for play and other childish things.
    What was even harder was to learn that way of living, then to learn the ordinary rez way—you gotta be one of your own people—then to learn the white way, which is the way of the world.
    That’s how I come to have four voices.
    You’ve heard my jock voice, a hepped-up personality I put on for my radio show. Then there’s my college-educated, white-man voice, a different mask I wear in restaurants, at the grocery store, and to write this book. Then there’s my rez voice, Indi’npatter. The last voice is the one I was raised with, the voice of the traditional Lakota in touch with the old ways. Some days I can own it. Here’s how I would tell you about Emile and me in that voice.
    Hanh, of those held away ,
    The grandparents’ children, we are two .
    Of those who live close to Earth ,
    And who remember the old ways of our people ,
    The way of the Pipe ,
    And the seven sacred rites of the Lakota ,
    We are two .
    For as long as these ways are known to some ,
    And kept by some ,
    The people live .
    When the Pipe is forgotten ,
    And no man cries for a vision ,
    The sacred hoop will be broken forever ,
    And the flowering tree will wither and die .
    To get by, I’ve needed all my voices. One for my show. College-educated white-man talk for most of the world, because it gets respect from you white folks. Rez talk to be a regular guy, someone my buddies can hang with. It means saying “he don’t” and “them cows,” and even more speaking in a kind of soft slur that’s hard to describe. I use my traditional voice for …
    Well, the truth is, I need it for my sanity, but I haven’t used it much in a long time. More than twenty years.
    I need to find it, and you need to hear it. The traditional voice is for speaking of sacred things. In truth, I can speak of these only in my own language. English does not serve. But since you understand no Lakota, I will make something like it in English, as I did above, and I will speak to you sometimes in that.
    I don’t claim Lakota is only a poetic language, or only asacred language, like the Latin of the Catholic liturgy. It is an everyday way to talk, usable for everything human beings do—you can call a dog, curse your wife, or gamble away your life savings in it. But it is also the language of the knowledge of the wakan , the mysterious. It is the knowledge my people are perishing without, and your people are perishing without, and the world will perish without.
    If in English it has the cast of an older and higher wisdom, that is what I intend.
    Does it confuse you that I am a man of many voices?
    Then think how it confuses me.
    Not only many languages of the tongue but languages of the body. When I am in the white world, I hold my body one way, in the rez world another. A Lakota speaking to a group of Indians does not take the posture or the tone of, say, a white professor addressing a class, or a white politician addressing a crowd.
    One example: We traditional Lakota do not look our elders in the eye. To us that is disrespectful.