Crazy Horse Weeps: The Challenge of Being Lakota in White America
120
Crazy Horse Weeps: The Challenge of Being Lakota in White America
120Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781682750254 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2019 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Sales rank: | 501,630 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Where Is the Village Now?
Although I did not grow up in the physical and social environment of a pre-reservation Lakota village, there is an enduring image in my mind because of my grandparents' stories and descriptions of them. And it is more than a visual image because their descriptions also brought to life the kind of social structure that existed to ensure the comfort and safety of families and community. According to them, it was the best environment for children to grow, and learn, and flourish.
Over the harsh winter months, villages were smaller and located close to water in areas sheltered from winter winds. Smaller villages meant fewer people, lodges, and horses, and that meant less of an impact on the natural environment. By late autumn enough meat had been laid in to last through the winter, so there was less of a need to hunt. A winter village could be anywhere from ten to twenty lodges and fifty to a hundred people — and usually more horses than people. However, winter villages were not located so far from each other that they were totally isolated. If weather permitted, people traveled to visit relatives and friends, or provide aid if necessary.
Once the weather broke in the spring, several villages came back together until late autumn or early winter. Then everything tripled or even quadrupled — 30 to 40 lodges, a 150 to 200 people, and, of course, more horses. The summer, or good-weather villages relocated several times from spring to late autumn simply because a bigger village and more people and horses had a bigger impact on the environment. Frequent moves allowed the environment to restore itself.
There was one constant factor, however, with villages at any time of the year: each lodge occupied the same place. Lodges in winter villages were erected closer together and usually in a half-circle configuration, or sometimes in two. Since villages were composed of family units, or tiwahe (tee-wah-hay) that formed the community or tiyospaye (tee-yohshpah-yeh), it was important to reinforce the concept and function of families and the community. Therefore, lodges were placed accordingly, meaning, for example, a couple's married daughter and her family's lodge was adjacent to or directly behind them, and so on. So, while the locale of the village did change, the lodges were always in the same location.
Summer villages were usually arranged in circles, and concentric circles were often necessary, depending on the number of lodges. A very large village would therefore have three or four circles with an open area in the center. A council lodge was usually in the very center. Even in this arrangement, family lodges were located adjacent or close to one another. This design ensured an orderly arrangement, and it also enabled children to be close to their extended family, meaning maternal grandparents were always nearby, as were aunts and uncles and cousins.
Village arrangement was not random, and there were reasons for it, with most being practical. A circular village was easier to defend in the event of attack because it was not scattered randomly. Another important reason was to acknowledge the connection to the reality of the total environment, in this case the circle. In Lakota philosophy and reality, life is a circle because it begins with something new and helpless and concludes with something old and helpless. The stages are infancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age.
Villages were composed primarily of a few or many extended family units. In Lakota the word is tiospaye, meaning a community, or families living in groups, derived from tiwahe, meaning family, and ospaye (oh-shpah-yeh), meaning a group or band. The ex officio, if you will, leader or headman of the village, was usually the oldest patriarch in the sense that he was looked to for advice because he didn't have any day-to-day authority. He, in turn, would go to other elders in the community for their insight if and when a situation or problem arose.
Villages in the summer and winter existed to provide security and comfort for all occupants, but focused primarily on two groups — the young and the old. Those two groups were regarded as oicihipi sni (oh-ee-chee-hee-bee shnee) meaning "helpless ones" or "those who cannot help themselves." (Third syllable, first word is a plosive, and the p in the ending syllable is an integrated sound in that it is harder than the basic p and softer than the basic b.) This did not mean those two groups were in any way invalids, but they were regarded as the most vulnerable in the community. Therefore, in any emergency or crisis or prolonged activity, such as a village moving, it was expected that the adolescents and adults in the village would see first to the comfort and safety of "the helpless ones," the very young and the elderly. In this group were also those who were ill or infirm or otherwise debilitated in any way, temporarily or permanently.
Of course, the care of, concern for, and attention to "the helpless ones" occurred on a daily basis as well, not just in emergencies and crises. Members of the community provided whatever assistance the elderly might need, such as hauling water for them, or cooking, or taking down and putting up their lodges when the village moved. The responsibility fell on immediate family members but was consistently shared by everyone. Sons and grandsons of elderly couples, widows, and widowers would hunt for them, but so did all men in the village. This concern for and care of the elderly was not only because they were old and infirm, but also because they were the repository of knowledge and wisdom. While they were not able to contribute as much physically as they did as adults, their life experiences contributed just as much, or more, to the strength and well-being of the community. So they were relieved of their physical burdens to enable them to give of their knowledge and insight.
On the other spectrum of the "helpless ones" were the very young, from infants to (usually) twelve-year-olds. By the age of twelve, both girls and boys had learned basic skills that would enable them to survive on their own if it was necessary, and as they consistently demonstrated those skills to the satisfaction of their families, teachers, and mentors, they were relied on more and more as contributing members of the community. But until that point, the adolescents and adults looked out for their safety and well-being at all times, especially those from infancy to about five or six years of age.
At about five years of age, both girls and boys entered the period of their lives that involved learning physical skills and behavioral norms (or codes of conduct), and this was through a system of one teacher/mentor at a time, sometimes for each skill or norm. This training and learning process continued until about the age of sixteen, at which time the community had another young woman or young man who had learned all the necessary skills and knowledge to become an adult capable of contributing to the welfare of their families and the community. From that point, it was a matter of acquiring the experience.
For girls, the teachers/mentors were usually mothers and grandmothers — for one day or a particular skill, such as sewing, it might be Mom, and for another day or another skill, it might be Grandma. Other teacher/mentors were aunts and close family members. Learning began with the most basic skills and moved on to those more involved and intricate as the girl became older and/or demonstrated the requisite confidence and mastery. By the middle-teen years, girls were capable of caring for children and taking care of the dwelling and home, which included actually sewing together the buffalo-hide lodge coverings. They also learned the role of family nurturer, the behavior required for women, and the community's (and the larger society's) expectations of them as a women. They learned that their societal role as women was no less than the societal role for men. And in some ways it was more critical because women were the first teachers of all children, until about the age of five or six.
The process for boys was much the same, although the skills were obviously different, such as crafting weapons, horse training, tracking, and hand-to-hand combat. By the age of twelve, most boys were skilled hunters and thus could help pro- vide for their families and others, and they could survive alone if necessary. By the time they were sixteen or seventeen, they had more than adequate skills as fighting men. Everything a boy learned was geared toward providing for and protecting home and family.
For both girls and boys, the validation of what they were taught came from the community at large, from the adults using the skills and demonstrating the behavior and values they espoused.
From infancy to young adulthood, everyone was taught by word and deed that he or she had a place in the group, beginning with the immediate family, to the extended family, and then to the community, society, and nation. For anyone to reach young adulthood without a sense of identity was a rare exception.
Everyone had a role in providing for the safety and welfare of children. The whole village raised the child.
Lakota children grew from a life of being indulged by parents, grandparents, and all adults into young men or women who knew their place in the society that nurtured and taught them. They were prepared to perpetuate the process that gave them their purpose and identity. Because of this process, aberrant behavior in adolescents and adults was the exception rather than a common occurrence. In the instances when it did occur, judgment by the community was swift, to the point of recompense for any injury that might have been caused.
Aberrant behavior was rare for two very strong reasons: everyone had a sense of place and purpose, and everyone knew who they were and where they came from. In other words, a strong sense of family, community, and identity is the best preventive for bad attitude and behavior. Or, to put it another way, how children were nurtured, raised, and taught was the foundation for strong families, strong communities, and a strong nation.
I was raised by grandparents who learned parenting skills from the way they were raised as well as by raising my mother and my uncle. For the most part, they indulged me when it came to where I played and what I tried to do. They showed me the things in my environment that could harm me, such as cactus needles, poison ivy, and mean-tempered badgers. They also showed me the things that could kill me, such as rattlesnakes and deep water. I learned early on that they knew what they were talking about when a badger chased me. I took refuge high in an oak tree, where I spent the better part of an afternoon until it finally went away. I stayed in the tree for a while longer because I remembered my grandmother telling me that a badger often circles back around on intruders to its territory. So when they told me that even grown men had drowned in the deep, fast current of the Little White River in the spring, I took it as the truth, because my grandmother was right about the badger.
Of course there were instances when I tested their patience, such as the time I tried to walk across an encrusted snowbank and broke through into deep snow — after my grandfather had told me that would happen. But for the most part, my child- hood was idyllic because I was free to explore. As I grew more and more confident, my excursions took me farther and farther from our log house on the plateau above the river. Those years in my early childhood taught me independence and that solitude was a good thing. Of course I also had chores, such as gathering and hauling wood and keeping the bins by our stoves full, especially in the winter, and helping to haul water from the spring throughout the year. I have vivid memories of watching my grandfather walking behind a team of two large draft horses pulling a single bottom plow, and then a harrow to tear down the large dirt windrows. I can still see the plow blade shining like silver from the friction of tearing through an acre of soil. After the harrow made small furrows in the newly plowed dirt, we planted rows and rows of sweet corn, beans, and potatoes. One corner of the garden was reserved for pumpkins, squash, and watermelon. Of course, once the new plants emerged it was the continuous task of watering. This involved carrying buckets of water to the garden and slowly pouring it down each row. Then it was weeding and cultivating, and later picking potato bugs off the leaves.
We had a garden every year for the few years that we lived on the plateau above the Little White River, and there was a lot of work for all of us until everything was harvested and sold, stored, or canned. Not once did either of my grandparents tell me to help them. They always said, "We need your help," or, "It would be good to have your help." Back then, it did not matter how much or little I did — and because I was five, six, and seven when this occurred, I obviously could not do as much as either of them. Nevertheless, they always thanked and praised me for my efforts.
Looking back, even at this moment, the one reality that always resonates with me is that my grandparents did not interact with me the way they did simply because they were gentle souls. They were doing what the Lakota village did with the children in it, with patience and love and positive reinforcement. And even though that village no longer physically existed in the early 1950s, it was still there in a functional sense in much the same way as pre-reservation communities. Any time relatives came to visit — and most of them were of the same generation as my grandparents — uncles and aunts and other grandparents bolstered my self-esteem through positive interaction of their own. Of course, my grandparents never told of my missteps, only about the positive things I had done, and those remarks brought praise from my relatives and now and then with gifts as rewards. As I said, I did not live in a village with circles of lodges with relatives and families next door. Nevertheless, my grandparents and other relatives provided a glimpse into how a village raised a child.
My grandmother was born in 1900 and my grandfather in 1888, and their parents were born in the 1860s. My grandfather's father (my great-grandfather) was in his late teens when he fought at the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) in 1876. Afterward, the Lakota were moved from Fort Robinson to the Great Sioux Reservation (all of what is now western South Dakota) in 1877, for the most part into the areas where the current reservations are. They moved about in those areas until they took up permanent residence on allotments of land around 1910. As landowners they lived miles apart from one another, and the village, as a consistent cultural entity, was no more.
In spite of that, the function of the village as a community persisted because many people fifty years of age and older had experienced the physical, functional, and social dynamic of the village — the close-knit community of families — in their lifetimes, and carried that strong memory with them. So the function of the village was still operative for them and from that generation, especially insofar as children were concerned. There- fore, while my grandparents did not live in a village, their parents had. Consequently, my grandparents, as children, experienced the interaction with aunts, uncles, and the gamut of grandparents from both sides of the family. The only thing lacking was the physical proximity of families living in the same place.
The downside of the process was that this family dynamic occurred less and less frequently with each succeeding generation, and there were two reasons. First, the village, the mechanism for physical proximity of and for families, as in the pre-reservation era, was gone. The closeness afforded by the village had enabled almost daily and certainly regular interaction in and among families. Second, and most damaging, was the influence of white culture through the government, churches, and especially through boarding schools. Consequently, the function of the village — the extended family — diminished to the point of near extinction.
It is probably basic human nature that when someone or some force tries to take something away from us, we resist as much as we can. Thankfully, that was the case with indigenous people here on Turtle Island. In many ways, our culture went underground and became less obvious to the missionaries and the government, although they were insidious enough to recognize that reaction and took measures to mitigate it. On Lakota reservations in the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, the government police were used to stop medicine men from conducting ceremonies. Those police forces employed Lakota men who, for the most part, informed on their own people, intentionally or not. It was common for those police, called the Indian Police, to arrest medicine men and confiscate their ceremonial objects. The most notorious use of Indian Police occurred when they were dispatched to arrest the Hunkpapa Lakota leader and medicine man, Sitting Bull, in December of 1890. That incident resulted in the murder of Sitting Bull by Indian Police, some of them his own relatives.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crazy Horse Weeps"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Joseph M. Marshall III.
Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface, vi,
Introduction, xxiv,
Essays,
Where Is the Village Now?, 3,
To Influence the Actions and Attitudes of Others, 29,
Yesterday's Hero, 37,
You Must Help Others Before You Think of Yourself, 47,
On Authenticity, 75,
Hope, 103,
The Pipeline Protests: Their Insignificance to Mainstream America, 121,
The Ones Who Came to Dance, 139,