Read Online Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) by Leonard C. Dog - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Leonard C. Dog
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a boy or a girl. If the moon opens up like a sickle, toward the left, it’s a girl. If it’s curling up a little downward, it’s a boy. If it’s a half moon, that means twins.
“Now it’s birthing time. Two elder women watch Jumping Elk. They have a tanned deer hide and two crutches, about a foot long, and two small stakes. The medicine woman wraps a rawhide belt around the birth giver, wraps it around her waist. There are holes in the rawhide to tighten it like a belt. Jumping Elk pushed herself. She’s not lying down like a wasichu winyan, she’s kind of squatting. The medicine woman has an herb. She puts it around Jumping Elk’s shin. That helps. Then the older women press with the belt. Before the pains come, one woman has four sticks. Every pain she cuts a short stick. My mother grabs onto a large birthing stick and holds on. She pushes three times. The fourth time the baby comes out. They catch me on a tanned white hide. There’s a bowl, and water, and sage. They wash me and scrape the gook off me with a bone knife. The old lady sticks a finger into my mouth and pulls it out. Then I begin to cry. If I had not cried the woman would have slapped me on the back until I did. That’s how I was born. That’s how we all were born. Now they go to the hospital. The old way made you feel good.
“The world I was born in, it was the wasichus’ world. I wished I had been born a hundred years earlier. There were no buffalo anymore, no game, nothing to be happy about. We were starving. The people lived on timpsila—wild turnips, berries, roots, and drank water. That was all. As for meat, we ate anything we could catch—gophers, muskrats, squirrels, anything. The family that ate medicine roots had power. If a man dreamed of an eagle, he had to follow that faith. Eat gray grass. If you eat that, chew that, you feel better. You could find that gray grass and drink water after. That filled you up. You could make your way with it.
“They gave us all the meat parts to eat that the white folks would not touch. Once I got a chicken’s onze [anus] with a littlemeat around it. And that way we lived. The old Indian food was mostly gone. The government issue lasted two and a half, maybe three weeks. The last part of the month was always hard. So to get food we sold our old decorated tipi to a white man for five dollars. We had nothing.
“The tipis were all gone. Some people lived in dirt huts, and some fixed up shelters almost like sweat lodges, bent sticks covered with hides. We were lucky to have my grandfather’s little log cabin. We had matches already. If we ran out of matches, in wintertime, we had to watch the fire so that it didn’t go out. People were starving. We were having a hard time. At that time, when I was a boy, there were twelve thousand Sioux left, and then, suddenly, there were only six thousand Brulé. At one time Rosebud was down to maybe five hundred full-bloods and two thousand, five hundred mixed bloods—all kinds of races, mixed together, but they called themselves Indians. People talking Indian became few. Yankton, Sisseton, to the east, they start speaking English and forgetting their own language. I speak only broken English. They call me a good-for-nothing because I talk so much but, nowadays, if I talk for long I get tired. I talk myself to sleep.
“We used to go to the creek and hunt two kinds of rabbits. The little one, the cottontail, and out on the prairie the big one, the jackrabbit. We’d kill it, cook it, and have a big feast. I hunted, go someplace to find something to eat, anything to fill the pouch. We have forgotten how buffalo meat tasted. I once saw some buffalo that got away from the Black Hills herd, from Custer State Park. They advertised in the papers that anybody who saw a buffalo someplace should report to the agency. There was a reward out. Somebody got a hundred-dollar reward. Not me. I wouldn’t snitch on the buffalo. They are relations.
“My father and
“Now it’s birthing time. Two elder women watch Jumping Elk. They have a tanned deer hide and two crutches, about a foot long, and two small stakes. The medicine woman wraps a rawhide belt around the birth giver, wraps it around her waist. There are holes in the rawhide to tighten it like a belt. Jumping Elk pushed herself. She’s not lying down like a wasichu winyan, she’s kind of squatting. The medicine woman has an herb. She puts it around Jumping Elk’s shin. That helps. Then the older women press with the belt. Before the pains come, one woman has four sticks. Every pain she cuts a short stick. My mother grabs onto a large birthing stick and holds on. She pushes three times. The fourth time the baby comes out. They catch me on a tanned white hide. There’s a bowl, and water, and sage. They wash me and scrape the gook off me with a bone knife. The old lady sticks a finger into my mouth and pulls it out. Then I begin to cry. If I had not cried the woman would have slapped me on the back until I did. That’s how I was born. That’s how we all were born. Now they go to the hospital. The old way made you feel good.
“The world I was born in, it was the wasichus’ world. I wished I had been born a hundred years earlier. There were no buffalo anymore, no game, nothing to be happy about. We were starving. The people lived on timpsila—wild turnips, berries, roots, and drank water. That was all. As for meat, we ate anything we could catch—gophers, muskrats, squirrels, anything. The family that ate medicine roots had power. If a man dreamed of an eagle, he had to follow that faith. Eat gray grass. If you eat that, chew that, you feel better. You could find that gray grass and drink water after. That filled you up. You could make your way with it.
“They gave us all the meat parts to eat that the white folks would not touch. Once I got a chicken’s onze [anus] with a littlemeat around it. And that way we lived. The old Indian food was mostly gone. The government issue lasted two and a half, maybe three weeks. The last part of the month was always hard. So to get food we sold our old decorated tipi to a white man for five dollars. We had nothing.
“The tipis were all gone. Some people lived in dirt huts, and some fixed up shelters almost like sweat lodges, bent sticks covered with hides. We were lucky to have my grandfather’s little log cabin. We had matches already. If we ran out of matches, in wintertime, we had to watch the fire so that it didn’t go out. People were starving. We were having a hard time. At that time, when I was a boy, there were twelve thousand Sioux left, and then, suddenly, there were only six thousand Brulé. At one time Rosebud was down to maybe five hundred full-bloods and two thousand, five hundred mixed bloods—all kinds of races, mixed together, but they called themselves Indians. People talking Indian became few. Yankton, Sisseton, to the east, they start speaking English and forgetting their own language. I speak only broken English. They call me a good-for-nothing because I talk so much but, nowadays, if I talk for long I get tired. I talk myself to sleep.
“We used to go to the creek and hunt two kinds of rabbits. The little one, the cottontail, and out on the prairie the big one, the jackrabbit. We’d kill it, cook it, and have a big feast. I hunted, go someplace to find something to eat, anything to fill the pouch. We have forgotten how buffalo meat tasted. I once saw some buffalo that got away from the Black Hills herd, from Custer State Park. They advertised in the papers that anybody who saw a buffalo someplace should report to the agency. There was a reward out. Somebody got a hundred-dollar reward. Not me. I wouldn’t snitch on the buffalo. They are relations.
“My father and
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