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

place, but Dad was out in the woods cutting timber. So they took him to Winyan Tanka, John’s sister. She was living a mile from where we are now, on Crow Dog’s land. For the longest time Jerome, the first Crow Dog, would not accept his allotment because he didn’t think land, Grandmother Earth, should be cut up into little pieces and owned by single men or families. He didn’t accept land until 1910, twenty years after everybody else did. So my older sisters found Dad cutting wood. They held a wake for Grandpa John. He had never been baptized. He belonged to no church. He wasn’t Christian, just an old-time Indian. Uncle Dick Fool Bull said that since he wasn’t baptized, he had no place to go. He was right. The missionaries wouldn’t have him in their cemeteries. He also couldn’t be buried in a Native American churchyard. So my father was sad. One Santee from Grass Mountain, Roy Vessor, said, “Well, we have land right here. Let’s dig a hole for him.” So they did that. Henry himself buried him. They took him up to the place across the hills where I always fast, and they dug his grave. That’s exactly what John had wanted. He got his wish. At the time I was eight years old. I didn’t think too much about my grandfather being buried on his own land. But when I was under the power of peyote I felt that my grandfather needed help, needed the prayers. So I told my father that I would make it good for him, and I think that my son will make it that much better for me, like what Jerome Crow Dog did for the Brulé Sioux. Henry went often to John’s grave and always placed a rock there. Each Veterans Day we put up a flagpole for him and, wherever John is, he knows that we remember him as a son and a grandson. I want all this put down. I want my children to have a legend. It is important that they know the history of the Crow Dog generations.
    My grandmother’s name was Ta Mahpiya Washte Win, Mary Good Cloud Woman. Grandma could hardly speak English, but she understood some. She could do some reading and writing. She read the government letters and explained them. That was aStrange thing for an Indian woman to do then. Some relations made fun of her for this, but she really helped. My grandmother was a hardworking woman, lending a hand with anything. She’d chop wood, haul water, do the gardening, dig wild turnips and dry ‘em up, plant corn, do the washing, bead moccasins, fix up clothes for the whole family. She was a woman who did everything every day. I look at the girls coming up now; they don’t do it anymore, they haven’t got the strength. Grandmother Good Cloud Woman was strong-hearted.

seven

LET ME TELL IT IN MY OWN WORDS
    I am the last true aborigine.
    I am the last real Sioux left.
    Henry Crow Dog
    My father, Henry, loved to recount his life’s story. I have it on tape. He said, “Let me tell it in my own words. Don’t put it in fancy language! My mother’s name”—John’s wife’s—”was Jumping Elk. John’s father-in-law put this poshta, this hood, on Jumping Elk. They made the marriage by praying with the pipe in the four directions. They put the pipe in the hands of John and his woman. They tied their hands together with a strip of red cloth. They put a blanket over them. They took a turtle shell and put charcoal from the pipe in it and let the two of them touch it. The medicine man told them, ‘Someday you’ll turn into dirt and ashes, but the pipe will hold you together.’ Then the medicine man gave them the staff. After they were married a while my mother told John that there was going to be a baby.
    “I wasn’t born in a hospital. I was born in the old way. John called on four older women, fifty to sixty years old, who no longer had their moon time. They gave my mother nine small red sticks, like from a matchbox, and she put them in a little parfleche. An older lady makes this. Every month you put one of those little sticks inthere. They already know whether it’s going to be