Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (12 page)

There was a time when I was ashamed of being an Indian because the white man forced me to live after his ways and made me feel small, but peyote blew that away from my mind as with an eagle wing. With peyote I can see things I can’t see with my eyes, I can see the real reality underneath what the white man calls reality. Peyote will make you relive your own birth. It is like a tape recorder; you reverse it back. Something you could not understand as a child, twenty-five years later you can bring it back and understand what happened. Peyote speaks with the
language of your mother’s womb. Peyote is a keyhole through which you can look into another world. My body and my mind can be the key to unlock a door to go into another dimension. Peyote is an old man with white hair. He is listening to you. Peyote is asking me questions. Sometimes I am ashamed to answer. Peyote can make you into an artist. Some of our greatest Native American painters got their gift from the holy herb. You can see it in their work.

Under spiritual power you will see how far you are from the Great Spirit and the roots of Indian medicine and how far you’ve been taken away from nature, but then peyote will make you feel that the spirit is close to you and it will bring you back to nature, to the black-tailed deer and the buffalo. Peyote is something on which you can stand. It is a great power. There are other powers in our beliefs, not bigger and not smaller than peyote—the power of Grandfather’s breath in the sweat lodge, the power of the sacred pipe, the power of the rock in a yuwipi ceremony, the power of the dream during a vision quest, the power coming from the sun dance tree. Peyote is one of these powers that cannot be explained. I was picked inside my mother’s womb. I was born with the shell, the caul, the birth veil. I know how I came to be. I am a road man of the Native American Church. I am my father’s son.

Mato Kuwapi—Chased by Bears

Yuwipi offering song

Yuwipi is a ceremony using the power of the sacred rocks. Peyote is a new, all-over Indian religion that came to us early in this century. I am a road man of the Native American church. I am also a yuwipi man. Yuwipi is a Lakota ceremony as old as the rocks and the mountains. Nobody knows how old. Yuwipi is power from Tunka, the rock, our oldest god. Tunka, or inyan (another word for rock), I work with this. It is taku wakan, something sacred. The yuwipi is part of me. It is inside me. It was already inside my grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Tunka, inyan, the rock. So in a yuwipi ceremony there is the power grounded in Tunka, or inyan, and also the power of lightning, of the buffalo, the eagle, and the black-tailed
deer. Yuwipi is the oldest way. Tunka was here before everything else. He is the foundation. Everything will perish someday, but Tunka, the rock, will never die. He will be there forever. We address the Great Spirit as Tunkashila, Grandfather. The word
tunka
is in there, part of the Creator’s name. Through dreams coming from the rocks we can heal, or find a missing person. There are large sacred rocks people visit to pray over.

There is a circle stone, a buffalo stone, pte hiko. We use him in a ceremony to find buffalo. The stone is round, like the sun and the moon. He is related to the wakinyan, the thunderbirds. We got this stone from Ptesan Ska Win, the White Buffalo Calf Woman. The buffalo stone—I still have it. Right in this stone is the print of a buffalo hoof and there are also sacred designs on it. And in this stone is the power of the wind. In the old days, a powerful medicine man could send such a rock to look for buffalo, and by the wind and by takuskanskan, the power that makes things move, the rock returned and told the people where to find game. The stone makes a sound when the buffalo is near. It shows us where to find survival food. The buffalo are gone now, but we still use this stone in our ceremonies. It helps us to find things.

I have a rock that has a human face. It has eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth. This, too, is sacred. I found it when I was looking for the white medicine, pejuta ska hu; the whites call it locoweed. If you don’t know how to handle this medicine, it can make you crazy. The wagmuha rocks, the little stones in our gourds, are ant power rocks. They soak into the pejuta ska for days and months through rainwater, and then the yuwipi men use these stones and a turtle shell and soak the medicine for many days, and that’s how we use it in the yuwipi ceremony. The stones, the rocks, Tunka, inyan, are sacred because the spirits dwell in them. Giant rocks, like the Medicine Rocks in Montana, where Sitting Bull held a sun dance one week before the battle in which Custer was wiped out, are wakan, sacred. These rocks are covered with ancient designs cut into them by our forefathers.

The round pte hiko stones for finding buffalo, some the size of a baseball or a golf ball, are wakan.

And the tiny crystal and agate stones we pick up from the ant heaps to put into our gourd rattles are all wakan. Big or small, there is a power in them. There is a reason we use the tiny ant rocks, some not bigger than a pinhead, in our gourds. The ant is sacred too. That little bug works in mysterious ways. He makes his ant heaps. He forms a family, like a tiyoshpaye. Inside the ant lives a spirit. It makes the ant look for shiny little crystals and agates to put on top of his house, as if that tiny living thing had a sense of beauty. If you turn a red ant on its back, you find a wigh-munge on the belly, a medicine web. Wablushka, the ant, doesn’t have a heart. He doesn’t need it. He lives by the universe. At some time the tiny agates were wood, pine trees. Over millions of years they turned to stone. The Great Spirit changed them from wood into rock, into rock power, wa inyan sicun. It is the rebirth of the thunder and the lightning. Tunkashila has given the tree the power to be reborn as a rock. The medicine man has to use the little stones in a spiritual way. He puts four hundred five of them in a gourd rattle. With the sound of the gourd he can talk to Wakan Tanka. Talking stones, I call them, not only the tiny ones from the anthills but also the larger ones that people keep among their own sacred things. Crazy Horse carried a sacred pebble tied in his hair behind the ear, which made him bulletproof.

Yuwipi is for healing, it is a finding-out ceremony—to find a missing person, find something lost, find the reason for some grief, find the cause of a sickness, find the identity of your future. A yuwipi man is a stone dreamer who has been going on many vision quests to renew his powers. The spirit picked me to be a yuwipi man when I was still a boy. The yuwipi ceremony itself is a child, a child of life born in the generation of dreams.

A yuwipi ceremony takes place when somebody with a problem asks for it. You must ask in the right way, with the pipe. The medicine man, the yuwipi wichasha, does not accept pay for his help, but the one who wants to be helped, the sponsor, has to
provide the food for all who want to participate. Like other ceremonies, this one begins with a sweat. While those who will partake in the yuwipi purify themselves in the sweat lodge, the women prepare the sacred food. Inside the medicine man’s house a room has been made ready for the ceremony. All furniture has been taken out. All the windows have been covered with blankets so that not even the tiniest bit of light can enter from the outside, because the ceremony has to be performed in total darkness. Everything that could reflect light is taken down from the walls or covered up—mirrors, pictures, photos, anything made of glass or having a shiny surface. People coming into the room even take off their wristwatches. Now the room is empty, waiting to be made sacred, waiting for the spirits. Blankets are folded up and put along the walls for the people to sit on. The floor is covered with sage.

Many elements are used in the yuwipi ceremony—tobacco ties, eagle feathers, eagle wings, an eagle bone whistle, deer tails, drums, gourd rattles, and, most of all, the chanunpa, the sacred pipe.

First, a square is laid out inside the room, made of chanli wapahta, tobacco ties. The chanli are made this way: You cut a little square of colored cloth, maybe an inch and a half across. On this you put a little pinch of tobacco. Then you fold it into a tiny bundle that you tie into a long string. Four hundred five chanli are tied on that string. They stand for all the different kinds of animals, for all the kinds of plants in the universe. They also represent the spirits that might come in to help. So you form this string into a square. The medicine man is on the inside. The sponsor, the drummer, the singer, and all others who want to be cured or have their problems solved sit on the outside of the space made by the string of tobacco ties. In the old days the chanli, the little bundles, were tanned deer hide filled with chanshasha, red willow bark tobacco, but now somehow it is changed and we use colored material and Bull Durham.

In my ceremony, we place large cans at the four corners of
the sacred square. They are filled with earth, and into each we put a peeled willow stick, to the top of which are tied strips of colored cloth offerings, the waunyanpi. These colored flags represent the sacred four directions—black for the west, red for the north, yellow for the east, and white for the south. They also stand for the generations. It means that the sacred square now stands for the whole universe. Between the black west flag and the red north flag, at the top of the sacred space opposite the door, we place the center staff. Its upper half is painted red, the lower half is black. In between is a narrow yellow stripe. The red represents the day, the black stands for the night. The thin yellow stripe is the dawn or the sunset. To the top of the staff we tie a single center eagle feather. It represents wanblee, our sacred bird, the Great Spirit’s messenger, the go-between from Tunkashila to the human being. This feather is also for the spirits to come in. Then I put another eagle wing feather under the other one. That represents all the flying relatives, the winged ones. This feather creates a good spirit, good understanding.

Halfway down the staff we fasten the tail of a black-tailed deer. The deer is fast and has a powerful spirit. If there is any person present who is sick and wants to be doctored, the deer will come in, go around, and walk through. If it turns back to where someone sits and turns its back on him, you can’t cure that person. Early in the morning the deer comes to the creek to drink. He can smell and hear a human being from half a mile away. If somebody is far behind him he knows. He can see in the darkness of the night. On his eyes you see a yellow part and a white part. And in the morning the sun comes up, yellow and white shining upon all living beings. The white is your bone, and the yellow is for when you get into the spiritual power and you see little golden sparks in front of you. On the horns you see the four colors, because the deer horn has four colors. In the beginning, when the deer horn is growing, it is pink, or redlike, then it turns a little bit whitelike, then yellow, and then black. So there are the four direction colors. There is a powerful medicine we get from
behind the deer’s ear. It’s some kind of fat. You use this medicine to find healing herbs and roots and to pray with it. For this reason we have the blacktailed-deer medicine to help cure people during the yuwipi. Together with the center staff I have four smaller willow sticks with cloth offerings tied to them.

Sometimes I also use a buffalo skull altar. Tatanka, the buffalo, is sacred. He stands for the four winds of the universe. He is our brother. During a yuwipi ceremony I took part in, a buffalo spirit came out of the earth into the meeting. He rumbled and bellowed, and his hooves made the ground shake beneath us.

In front of the center staff we make an earth altar. This is most sacred when made from gopher dust, from earth taken from a gopher hole. Gophers have power. It is a medicine. Before going into battle, Crazy Horse always sprinkled gopher dust over his horse’s back. The altar is round. It is made smooth with an eagle feather or a sprig of sage. The medicine man traces a design on it—maybe an Iktomi design, a spider, a thunderbird, wakinyan, design, or a wicite, a human face. It is up to the yuwipi man to pick his own design. This altar represents Unci, Grandmother Earth. Around it I always place a circle of chanli.

On each side of the altar I place a wagmuha, a gourd rattle. The gourds are made of tanned deer or buffalo hide, just like a ball filled with the little ant rocks. Sometimes feathers are attached to them. Often during a yuwipi ceremony these gourds fly through the air all by themselves. When the spirit enters, he picks up the gourd and makes a noise with it, makes it talk. He may hit your body with it to make a cure. Sometimes there is a spark, a tiny flash of lightning at the point where the gourd makes a hit. Bad spirits do not like the sound of the wagmuha. They run away from it. If you put a sprig of sage behind your ear, if you are lucky you can understand what the gourd is saying. The gourd travels around the room or tent so fast that you can never catch it. The sound of the rattle is not music; it is the sound of spirit voices. Tunkashila put the spirits into the yuwipi ceremony. They are visiting spirits, soul spirits. When the wagmuha,
or the eagle feather, touches a person, that’s a gift of power from the spirits. The spirit is a nest touch. Someday everybody should be a nest, a nest builder for the future. Good things happen when you have a son or daughter. Tunkashila sees it. So he touches you like that. The spirit talks in his own language, hanbloglaka, dream speaking. Only the yuwipi man can understand it. He is the interpreter.

Before getting to the heart of the ceremony we smoke up the room with wachanga, smoldering sweet grass. Its good scent drives away evil spirits and adds to the sacredness of what is going to take place. Someone could make a flesh offering at that time. Then the medicine man takes off his shoes and shirt and stands ready to be tied up. We use rawhide for the tying. We take a big hide and cut it all in a circle. We cut it about an inch wide, for bowstrings as well as the yuwipi. We use the skin from the back of the animal, opening it up on top where the bone is covered by a white gut. It makes a string as strong as nylon. You roll and twist it together to make a long rope. The rawhide represents itazipe ikan, the bowstring. The spirit strikes with a bow.

There are two helpers standing with the medicine man, the yuwipi wichasha. They first tie his hands and fingers together behind his back. The finger ties represent the wakinyan, the thunderbirds. Next the helpers cover the yuwipi man with a star blanket. They cover his head and his face, all of him. In the old days they used a buffalo robe, but now it’s a quilt. They make him into a bundle, wrap him up like a mummy. They tie him with the long rawhide thong, tight around his neck and then down and all around his body, using seven knots to do the job. They follow an ancient vision. They have to do everything right. A mistake could endanger the yuwipi wichasha’s life. They make the string tight to unite the man with Tunkashila, the Everywhere Spirit. The one who is bundled up senses what the people feel. The tying is for concentration. People have one or two minds, but in this ceremony everybody is going into one mind. It pulls together the medicine man, the spirits, and all who have come to the ceremony.
The helpers lift the medicine man up and lay him facedown upon the sage-covered floor. All this is called wichapahtepi, meaning “they tie him up.” Hokshila unpapi, the cradle bundling, the little baby ceremony, that’s one of the meanings of the yuwipi. They cradle bundle each other. We have performed this since the beginning of time. It symbolizes the baby wrapped in its cradleboard. While all this is taking place the yuwipi man prays to the four winds of the earth.