Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (14 page)

Pipe song

The most sacred thing for us Lakota is the chanupa, the holy pipe. The pipe and the Indian go together. They cannot be separated. The pipe lifted up in prayer forms a link between man and Tunkashila. It’s a spiritual bridge to the Great Spirit. With the pipe I can communicate with Tunkashila, the Grandfather Spirit, whom we also call Wakan Tanka, the great sacredness. With the pipe I let my mind fly through the air. The sacred pipe is a smoke signal to Tunkashila. The pipe is not a thing. It is alive. You can feel its power as you hold it, power from Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Woman, who brought this great gift to us. Within the pipe dwells the power of Wakan Tanka, male and female power. Man is the stem; woman is the bowl. At Wounded Knee I lifted up my pipe for survival, not for survival of us who had come to that place, but for the survival of all our Indian people.

When I speak of the pipe I speak with an ancient knowledge that lies within me. I was born before my father. By this I mean that my spirit was born hundreds of
years ago. What my ancestors left, whatever the white man has not destroyed, I pick up and continue on. A man without a country, that’s Mr. Indian, but our spiritual country is still there, thanks to the pipe.

I had a vision. It came from the morning star, a star whisper. I heard this voice saying, “Any understanding you ask from the morning star shall be granted you, but ask with the sacred things, the drum, the sacred tobacco, the sacred sweet grass, and, above all, with the sacred pipe.” Our dead sleep not. They tell me what I want to know. I have the power to see through things. I have only limited vision with the eyes I have in my head, but with my spiritual eyes I can see across oceans. The pipe is here to unite us, to remove the fences people put up against one another. Putting up fences is the white man’s way. He invented the barbed wire, the barbed wire of the heart. The pipe is a fence remover. Sitting in a circle, smoking it the right way, all barriers disappear. Walls crumble.

The pipe is us. Inyan sha, the red pipestone, is our flesh and blood. The stem is our spine, the bowl our head, the smoke rising from it is Tunkashila’s breath. There is an old story handed down from grandparent to grandchild, generation after generation. It is the story of a great flood that carried everything before it. The people fled to the top of high mountains, but even there the rising waters swept over them. Their flesh and blood turned to stone, the red pipestone. Only one young woman survived. An eagle carried her to the top of a tree on the highest cliff above the water. The young woman had twins, a boy and a girl, the eagle’s children. These twins are the ancestors of our Lakota nation. The sacred red stone occurs at only one spot in the whole world, at a quarry in western Minnesota. In the old days this was a sacred ground, not only to the Sioux but to many other tribes who came there to get the red stone for their pipes. At that place even bitter enemies became friends, digging the stone side by side. Among whites the stone is known as catlinite, after the painter George Catlin, the first white man to visit the quarry, way
back in 1837. The sacred stone forms a long band sandwiched between layers of other kinds of rock. I have been there many times to dig out the inyan sha. There is little of it left and one must dig deeper and deeper to get at it, even dig under the water that covers the quarry’s bottom.

Pipes for ceremonial use often have their stems beautifully decorated with porcupine quillwork. Sometimes shiny green mallard feathers are tied to it. Some pipes have an eagle feather dangling from them, because the eagle saved the young woman from drowning during the great flood and in this way made human beings survive, and also because the eagle is the grandest and wisest of birds and Tunkashila’s messenger. The pipe bowl is called pahu, meaning head bone. They call the stem ihupa, handle, or sinte, the tail. The mouthpiece is called oyape, and the spot where the stem joins the bowl is oagle, the holding place. Pipes are often very plain, elbow shaped for just the pleasure of smoking, or T-shaped for ceremonial use. Some old bowls were carved in the shape of a horse, a buffalo, or even a human being. Some bowls are inlaid with lead designs. Some are made of black stone—shale, steatite, or calcite. My uncle old George Eagle Elk used to make black bowl pipes. Pipes of all shapes and materials are found in the thousand-year-old tombs of the ancient Mound Builders and in the equally old ruins of southwestern pueblos. Throughout human history, wherever there were Indians there were pipes.

Pipes are kept in special bags called chantojuha, heart bags, because the pipe stands at the heart of our existence. Usually fringed, the pipe bags are beautifully decorated with beadwork and quillwork. When pipes are not being smoked, the bowl and stem are kept separate. They are just too powerful to be joined together for any length of time. Together with the pipe a man may also keep a poker, ichasloka, for tamping down the tobacco in the bowl. It is often also beautifully decorated. Sometimes as a tamper they use a wooden skewer with which a friend has pierced himself during the sun dance.

Chanshasha, the tobacco used for smoking the pipe, is also sacred. It is not like the stuff in a white man’s cigarette that gives you lung cancer and makes you an addict, something used only to make you feel good. It contains no nicotine. Chanshasha is made from the inner bark of a dogwood or red osier dogwood, which grows along the Little White River, right near our place. Some tribes use red willow bark, but we prefer the dogwood. Sometimes we mix it with sweet-smelling herbs, such as chanli ichahiye, snakeroot, which keeps poisonous snakes away. We also mix our tobacco with arrowroot. Some people say that what we are smoking is kinnickinick, but that is not a Lakota word but one used by northeastern tribes.

The pipe should always be treated with great respect, even awe. Never walk in front of people who are smoking it. Never step over it. A pipe should never be lent out. No menstruating woman should come near the pipe, because at that time her power fights with the power of the pipe. When she is not on her moon, a woman can smoke the pipe during a ceremony. Hold the pipe with the bowl in the left hand and the stem in the right, across your chest, not sticking way out. With the pipe in your hand you cannot lie; you can speak only the truth. When you load up the pipe with tobacco, you pray, you sing the pipe-filling song. You must smoke it in the right way, always going clockwise from one person to the next and everybody taking four puffs, because four is the sacred number. That’s why we sing,

As the pipe goes around, every puff is a prayer. As you inhale the smoke, all humankind smokes with you. Your breath mingles with the breath of all other living beings. The spirit is in the pipe.
It is there.
Smoking in a circle you hear voices coming out of nowhere. Spirits may appear and talk to you, and they speak every language in the world. There is a purpose and a reason for
using the pipe this way, the way Tunkashila wants it. The pipe is like a human being, it is not a thing. It is our flesh and blood. Without the pipe there can be no ceremony. It stands at the center of all our seven sacred rites. It unites us and makes us one. Smoking in a circle we renew the sacred hoop of the nation. The pipe breaks down the concrete walls that separate us. With the pipe you must concentrate, think only good thoughts, and pray for understanding.

April 16, 1968, was the most awesome day of my life. That day I was allowed to behold, to touch, and to pray with the Ptehinchala Huhu Chanupa, the Buffalo Calf Pipe. It is the most holy thing we Lakota possess. Maybe this is the most sacred object for all the red nations on this continent. This is the pipe that Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Woman, brought to our people so long ago. Some say this pipe is eight hundred years old, some say it’s a thousand years. The pipe was there when the Lakota people were born, when understanding was given to the human being, when the holy woman with this pipe taught our people how to live in a sacred manner.

For many generations the Calf Pipe was kept by the Elk Head family. From them it passed to the Looking Horses. Arvol Looking Horse is at this time the pipe keeper. On that day in 1968, I was allowed by my father and other elders and spiritual men to travel to Eagle Butte, where the sacred bundle in which the pipe is kept was to be opened. This happens only on very special occasions, maybe not even once in twenty years or even within one’s lifetime. So then we traveled more than a hundred miles to Eagle Butte, to the Greengrass community on the Cheyenne River reservation, one of several Sioux reservations in South Dakota. The people there are mainly Minneconjou, one of our seven Lakota tribes. There was my father, Henry, and myself, and one of my grandpas, Old Man Little Dog. He was eighty-seven years old and didn’t do much of anything anymore, but he said that he had to be there to pray with the Calf Pipe. The others in our group were Abel Stone, Joe Black Tomahawk, Laura Tomahawk, John
Williams, Noah Eagle Deer, Joe Eagle Elk, Uncle Moses Big Crow, and Jeff LaBuff Baker. We all met at the house of Stanley and Celia Looking Horse. Stanley had just named his son, Arvol, as the keeper of the Calf Pipe. He was a young boy then, even younger than myself. The old Looking Horses were like a strange horse that shies off when you come near it. By this I mean that they kept to themselves, away from white folks, living in the old Indian way.

We purified ourselves. We prayed. We walked barefoot to the shed where the pipe bundle was kept at that time. There were twelve of us. We put up an altar. We had a ceremony. We smoked up the bundle with sweet grass. We made offerings of tobacco ties, colored cloth, and Bull Durham. Then, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, we started to unwrap the bundle. I was trembling and breathing hard. I started to weep. I felt the power coming out of the bundle, a power so strong it scared me. I sensed the presence of spirits. All of us experienced this.

First we untied the frayed strings holding together an old army canvas. Then came another old canvas. Then what we call a crazy blanket, with designs all mixed up. Then came an ancient star quilt. Then a buffalo hide and next a deer hide of great age. Then some old Hudson’s Bay trade cloth, then some four direction materials of different colors. Thus we unwrapped the bundle, layer by layer. Within, we came upon a ball of some eight hundred tobacco ties, some eagle feathers so old that almost only the quills remained. We found also some small round pieces of skin with hair on them. I believe that these were human scalps. There were also two flat pieces of carved bone like the ones they used in the old days to handle glowing coals from the fire during ceremonies. And, finally, there was the Ptehinchala Huhu Chanupa, together with an ancient tribal red stone pipe, also sacred, but not as sacred as the holy Calf Pipe. After we had unwrapped the bundle, my father went outside and started a fire. Inside the house we smoked up the room with sage and sweet
grass. The twelve of us were privileged to pray with the Calf Pipe and to touch it. We could not smoke it. It is too old for that. It is brittle with age and very fragile. It has to be handled with the greatest of care. Its stem is made from a buffalo calf’s legbone. We were allowed to smoke the companion pipe with the red stone bowl.

I have no words to describe the great power of the Calf Pipe. As I touched it I felt its heart beating. Power flowed up my arms as, very lightly, I put my hands upon it. The power flowed into me like ocean waves. It overwhelmed me. I was crying; I felt as if I were enfolded by a black cloud. Outside there was thunder and lightning. It lit up the house. We all felt as if the lightning was coming from the inside of the room. I heard the pipe speaking. It was Tunkashila’s voice: “This pipe I am giving you—for life, for good understanding.” Tears were streaming down my face. I sobbed, “Tunkashila, we hear you.” We all sat still for a long time without moving or talking.

My father and Joe Eagle Elk tied up the pipes and rewrapped them. Arvol Looking Horse picked up the bundle and took it to the place where it was kept. We followed him. We walked four times around the place. Then we went back inside the house and ate. Arvol told me that there were designs on the pipe, wakan designs, which change from time to time in a magical manner. I told Arvol, “You have a great sacredness here, the soul of the nation. With it the people will follow you. Pass it on to the next generation. It is a great responsibility. You carry a heavy burden.”

Often I have gone hungry. Often I have been in trouble. But always the pipe was there to help me. It is the one thing they can never take away from us.

We have seven sacred ceremonies given to us by Ptesan Win, the White Buffalo Woman:

I have already talked about the vision quest and the sweat lodge. These two ceremonies have come back strong. And the sun dance, too, is getting stronger. Every summer more and more people come to Crow Dog’s Paradise to dance, to pierce, to suffer in the sacred way.
All over the Lakota reservations they are sun dancing now. But the other four sacred rituals are hardly being performed anymore. Now that some of the old spiritual men have died, I think I am the only one left who can run these ceremonies in the right way. People don’t ask anymore to have these ceremonies performed for them. It seems to me that there is only a handful of people left who want them done. Some people in our tribe have not even heard of the ball-throwing ritual or the women’s puberty ceremony. This is sad, because these sacred rites bound us to one another, kept our families together, and preserved a way of life that now is disappearing. The ceremonies were given us for a purpose. I still perform them. I want them to live. Yuwipi is not one of the seven rituals. It is as old as the others, maybe even older, but it was not inspired by a vision from the White Buffalo Woman, but by the rock spirit. The ghost dance and peyote are also not part of our ancient seven rites. They came to us from other tribes some hundred years ago.

Nagi uhapi, the keeping of the soul, is a very important ceremony. For many generations our people have been keeping the soul of someone they loved who died. In former times they lived with nagi, the soul, the spirit, the shadow, the essence, the ghost of him who passed away. So the soul knows them and understands them.

If you miss a dear one, the soul can be kept for four years. Most people keep it for only one year, but it should be four. You start the soul keeping by having a holy man cut off a strand of hair from the head of the one you loved. Before cutting off the lock of hair he purifies the knife with sweet grass. The smoke makes a hoop around the whole earth and is breathed in by every living being. The holy man makes three motions as if he were cutting it, then the fourth time he does it. You wrap the hair in red trade cloth. The eyahapa, the crier, or herald, as the whites call him, goes around and weeps over the dead one’s spirit. And everybody shows sadness, everybody cries. The name for the spirit keeper is wanagi yuhapi. Usually he is the
dead one’s father. He has a cottonwood stick and ties the spirit bundle to it; they call it wichaske. After four days the keeper takes three sticks and forms them like a tipi and ties the whole bundle to that. This is the wanagi tipi, the soul’s home. He smokes and cedars it up with wachanga. This is for the spirit to live in. The spirit keeper and his family behave as if somebody alive dwells inside the spirit lodge. For them the soul is alive. They show respect and have only good thoughts. They act friendly toward everyone. They take the soul tipi inside their home when the weather is bad, when it rains or snows. They have a special wooden dish to feed the soul.

There is something else they keep separately—the dead person’s navel cord. The umbilical cord was put in a beaded or quilled pouch in the shape of a lizard or turtle at the time the child was born. This chegpagnaka, the navel bundle, is made in the shape of a lizard, because this little creature can flatten itself on the ground and play dead, but it is alive and can run off once the danger has passed. So that means telanunwela, dead but alive. Sometimes they make the pouch in the shape of a turtle, because turtles stand for long life. A turtle’s heart will keep on beating long after the animal itself has died. This navel cord bundle is tied to a child’s cradle board. An exact duplicate of this lizard or turtle pouch is made, but there is no navel cord in it. This one they hang up in a tree to fool the evil spirits. They think the umbilical cord is up there and vent their anger on the empty pouch without doing harm to the child. The umbilical cord, the chekpata, is the vein of the divine human being. Before you finally release the soul from the keeping, put the chegpagnaka away in a spot that only the soul keeper knows. Then the soul will come back to visit there.

You have to keep a soul in a sacred way. You have to remember constantly the one who died. You have to walk in a sacred manner. You have to love in the old traditional way. You don’t socialize. You don’t make speeches. You don’t tell people what to do. You don’t hack, and spit, and scratch yourself. You live out in
the woods. Every bit of the time you keep a soul you must do things right. You watch your language. You are careful how to talk to people. In public you wear dark, simple clothes. You don’t show off. There must be no fighting, no using of a knife while a soul is being kept. The keeper must pray often and smoke the pipe. He should stay much of the time by himself, close to the spirit bundle.

In the old days, when many people kept souls, there were no bad spirits, no wakan sicha, the missionaries’ devil. Crow Dog and his people had the knowledge and understanding for this ceremony. Many people don’t understand that anymore. In the ancient days people lived to a very old age. Death was not always around, stepping on your heels. People didn’t die from drunken driving, from AIDS, from crack, from all those white man’s diseases. You didn’t die before your time. Life was hard but natural and in many ways better than now. The soul was among the people all the time. You saw that spirit with the eye that’s in your heart. The old people used to talk to that spirit. They could feel its presence. Once in a while, when they slept, the spirit showed itself in their dreams. My dad and I were the only ones left to perform this ceremony. And I am still performing it, inside the tipi and outside it. Inside the tipi we speak with the soul, within the hearth fire and within the mind. Sometimes that soul talk is not very clear, so you have to interpret it spiritually. The soul keeper has to be generous. He has to invite many people and feed the hungry and give many gifts. He has to give away many of his possessions to the poor. People respect the man who keeps a soul; they look up to him as to a chief.

In the old days, when a soul was bundled up and put into the ghost tipi, its physical body was put up on a scaffold or a tree. It was given back to nature, to the earth and the wind and the birds, to the sacred four directions of the universe. But the soul lived on in its keeper’s charge. We Crow Dogs always had a burial tree, putting the bodies of our dead in the crook of one of the branches. Our relations the Two Strikes, the Iron Shells, the
Hollow Horn Bears all had their own burial trees. That’s why the mountains and hills are sacred, because the burial trees were up there. You were not supposed to go near these places. We never crossed the ancient burial grounds. Now you have those cemeteries and have to put your dead ones there. But I still bury some relations wherever I see fit.

At one time, about a hundred years ago, the missionaries and government people forbade us to own ghosts and souls. But we kept doing it in secret. The white man could order people around, but he could not command a ghost to obey him. He can’t enforce his law upon a soul.

There comes a time when you have to let go, when you have to release the soul. After four years, or even after one. The soul finally wants to be free to go to the spirit land, just as a child becomes an adult and leaves its parents. That does not mean that the bond is broken. The time comes to tell the soul, “Takoja, today you will go. This is the moment. Tunkashila, have pity on this soul.” The releasing is a fulfillment. It is a great thing. The soul keeper does not do this. It is done by the ataya itanchan, the universal everything chief. This medicine man runs the releasing ceremony. He puts on his best rawhide outfit. The soul keeper and his wife do the same. In this way you honor the hokshi chantkiya, the beloved departing one. There is holy food—papa, wasna, wojapi—as the soul is fed for the last time. The ataya itanchan sets up the spirit post, called wanagi glepi, made from the sacred cottonwood. At the top of the post is painted a human face. And the post is clothed with a beautiful girl’s dress or boy’s outfit. It is put up inside the tipi and the women hug it and cry over it. You place the special wooden dish with the food before the wanagi glepi. The holy man lights his pipe with a glowing buffalo chip, a dried patty of buffalo dung. Everyone sings over the soul. They smoke. The soul keeper speaks to the spirit post figure that represents the departing spirit: “Takoja, grandchild, see your people standing around you for the last time. Now we let you go out of the tipi. With visible breath you will walk. We loved
you. Now we must part, but your lock of hair we shall keep forever.”

The moment the wanagi wapahta, the spirit bundle, is brought out of the tipi the soul is released and everybody is happy. The soul keeper gives away everything he owns to the poor; he does not worry about tomorrow. The soul travels along the Tachanku, the Milky Way, to the spirit world. As the soul has been freed, so also the spirit keeper has been set free. He and his wife can now resume a normal life. They have fulfilled their task.

I want the generations to continue the sacred ways. Ceremonies such as soul keeping come from the springs of generations of our Lakota people. I have run this ceremony. I have acted the part of the ataya itanchan. I have done this. Hechetu. This ceremony will not be forgotten.