Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (15 page)

When a woman is on her moon time she has sacred power. Her power at that time is so strong that it overcomes a medicine man’s power. If a woman on her moon should be present at a ceremony, that ceremony would be ineffective. If a menstruating woman should be present at a curing ritual, the sick person wouldn’t get well. This is power from the moon.

When a girl has her first period her father gives a feast in honor of her entering into womanhood. This is one of the seven sacred rites. It is called ishnati lowanpi, meaning “singing over the first moon time.” When a girl experiences this for her first time, she wraps up her moon flow and puts it up high in a wild plum tree where the coyotes and evil spirits cannot get at it. If a coyote should eat it, this animal would get an evil power over the girl. If a bad person with some magic knowledge should get hold of it, he could make a love medicine from it to get power over a certain woman. So you hide this.

In the old days a woman used to stay alone in a tipi for four days, with female relatives feeding her. The word for menstruating, ishnati, means dwelling alone. We don’t do this anymore, but we are still very strict about a woman on her moon time not participating in a ceremony or being anywhere near a sun dance. Formerly, when a girl was “dwelling alone” for the first time, her mother or some other wise older woman spent much time with her in the moon time tipi. She was taught everything she needed to know about being a woman, such as how to purify herself after her monthly period, what to expect upon becoming a wife and mother, and how to bead and how to do porcupine quillwork. I think this passing on of woman wisdom from mother to daughter in a solemn, ceremonial way is very important. The white man’s system has taken away a mother’s power to instruct her daughter in the right way to live and given it to the teacher, the missionary, the social worker, the bureaucrat. In the same way they have taken over much of what a father should do raising his son. The old ceremonies held the families together. So I am trying to be a guitar—the people are the strings while I try to be the tune that unites us.

When a girl’s four days of dwelling apart are over, the ishna ta awi cha lowan ceremony is performed. It is also a tatanka lowanpi, a buffalo ceremony, because this sacred animal is the protector of young womanhood. You need a new tipi, made ready for the ceremony, and a new, beautifully beaded buckskin dress for the girl. You also need the following:

The girl is seated at the chatku, the place of honor, in back of the tipi. Between the chatku and the fire place is a mound of earth representing Unchi, Grandmother Earth. A wichasha
wakan, a spiritual man, performs the ceremony. He has prayed earlier for a vision and, during the ceremony, reveals and interprets it. He tells the girl what her mother already has told her: “You are no longer a child. You are a woman now, capable of becoming a mother.” The girl still wears her hair loose, like a child’s, rather like mourning the passing of her childhood. Now her hair is braided like that of a grown-up woman and the wichasha wakan paints a red stripe along the line where her hair parts in the middle. He tells her not to sit like a child, with her legs stretched out or tucked under her chin, but to sit modestly, with her legs to one side. He tells her that when getting up she should do this gracefully, not push herself up with two hands.

In the days of my grandfather and great-grandfather, the spiritual man performing the ritual wore a buffalo headdress with horns and a buffalo tail on his back. He bellowed and snorted like a buffalo and behaved like a buffalo bull during the rutting season. This symbolized the close relationship between the Lakota people and the buffalo, the bond made by the White Buffalo Woman binding us together. The medicine man nudged the girl lightly while her mother put sage in her daughter’s lap and under her arms to ward him off. This symbolized that the girl would soon be old enough to get married and bear children.

Today we do not do it this way. Maybe we should do it exactly as it was done a hundred years ago, but somehow our ceremonies have been watered down. Fewer and fewer fathers want to have a special feast to honor their daughters’ first moon time. I still perform a meaningful ceremony for this. I want my children to have a legend.

I try to keep much of the old ishnati alowanpi when I perform it. I burn dry cottonwood sticks to please the buffalo spirit and to chase away evil spirits, such as Anung Ite, the double-faced woman. I sprinkle sweet grass on the fire. I cedar the girl. I make red cloth offerings to the buffalo. I fill my special wooden bowl with water mixed with chokecherries and give it to the girl to drink. Sometimes I use a turtle shell for this. After that the father
drinks and then the bowl goes around clockwise and everybody takes a sip. This chokecherry drink represents the color red—the color of the buffalo, the color of our blood. I have a drum going. I sing a song to go with this ritual and all the women join in. Then we smoke the pipe. Finally I have the girl escorted out of the tipi—no longer a winchinchala, but a full-fledged winyan. After that we have a giveaway.

There is another ceremony that is done when a girl reaches womanhood. It is called tapa wakayapi, meaning “throwing the ball.” It also is one of the seven sacred rites and likewise it is a buffalo ceremony. We have a legend of how it started. Long ago a man had a vision sent to him by Ptesan Win. In it he saw a buffalo calf changing itself into a human girl. She had in her hand a ball made of buffalo skin stuffed with buffalo hair and she threw it up into the air toward a small herd of buffalo and, immediately, these, too, turned themselves into humans. The man who received this vision understood that he was to start a new ceremony, and so the tapa wakayapi was born.

This ceremony is hardly ever done now. As in the ishnati lowanpi, the girl is instructed in the duties of womanhood. She gets a beautiful new buckskin outfit. She is given a buffalo skin ball painted red to represent the universe. She is brought into the midst of the people who have come to be part of this ceremony. These people form groups standing at the corners of the sacred four directions. The girl throws the ball first toward the west, then toward the north, the east, and the south. After someone catches the ball he throws it back to the girl. Every time the ball is caught, the girl’s father gives away a horse in the girl’s honor. Having these rites performed after a girl’s first moon can make even a rich man very poor.

I performed this ceremony for my daughters Ina and Bernadette when they became twelve years old. I still have the tapa luta, the red ball, handed down in the Crow Dog family from generation to generation. I did it at the rising of a new moon, but I performed it somewhat differently from the way it was done in
the old days. I had an elderly person throw the ball for the girls at a buffalo robe. If the ball hits the left side of the robe, the girl’s first child will be a girl. If it hits the right side, it will be a boy. If it hits in the middle, it will be chekpapi, twins. I gave the girls holy food—wasna, chankpa (chokecherries), corn, wojapi. I burned sage in a turtle shell and, with my eagle wing, fanned the smoke over them. And, naturally, I gave away things. The ball that I have, I am told, was made from the skin of an unborn buffalo calf, a calf fetus.

All our people, whether traditional or not, are still very strict about a woman on her period not coming into a ceremony or even being near it, because her power at this time is so overwhelming. But this power is not, as in some other cultures, unclean. On the contrary, the power is sacred. Once a woman gets to an age when she no longer has her monthly time, she not only can participate in all ceremonies but can become a medicine woman.

In 1964, I went to Allen, South Dakota, to perform a ceremony. There I met a medicine woman named Bessie Good Road. She had a little altar and she used a buffalo skull in all her ceremonies. And always a buffalo came into her meetings. You could see him like a shadow. She used the buffalo spiritual power. She invited me to help her and I took my drum and sang for her. I had never met a medicine woman before. I was twenty-two years old then. Every time the buffalo spirit moved his legs I saw lightning. Every time the buffalo talked you saw a little flame. When the buffalo swung his tail it made a flaming circle. Bessie told me, “Nephew, someday I won’t be here anymore. I want to leave this for my son, for my people to stand on. We are losing things, sacred things, but to this place the buffalo spirit still comes.”

That we look upon a woman’s moon time as sacred is shown by our legend of We Ota Wichasha, the Blood Clot Boy. So how was this first man born? We Ota Wichasha was born from the Sun and from the woman. This woman was all alone on the earth after it had been created. She was the only human being in the whole
world. She was beautiful and no man had touched her. Then she met a spirit, a power from the sun, the moon, and the winds, a shadow of the generations, a buffalo spirit. And it worked on her so that she began to bleed after a woman’s nature cycle. And she took yellow bark powder and rabbit fur and put it between her thighs to stop the flow and to contain it. But a tiny drop of her moon blood fell to the earth. And the woman heard a voice talking to her: “Respect the sacred cycle of the earth and respect the sacred cycle of your moon time. From your blood a boy, a man, will grow and start the generations. You will be blessed by takushskanskan, the power that moves and quickens. And I will give you peta owihankeshni, the fire without end. I will strike the earth with lightning, which will turn into wahin, into flint. And you will strike two flints together and the spark will kindle dry weeds, very small and thin. In this way you will light the flame of generations.”

And mashtinchala, the rabbit, came across the little clot of blood and kicked it into life through the power that moves. The blood clot turned into a human boy, who grew up to be We Ota Wichasha, the first male of the Lakota tribe. This is the way the story was told to me by my father and by two holy men, Frank Good Lance and Jesse White Lance, after a ceremony at a sun dance held at Corn Creek when I was a young boy. They also told me that the woman’s monthly cycle was given to her by the moon and by Mother Earth, who also has such a cycle, bringing forth the green, growing things.

Henry Crow Dog in the sweat lodge, 1969.

Henry Crow Dog and his granddaughter Colleen making a fire for the sweat lodge.

Leonard Crow Dog in the sweat lodge.