Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) by Leonard C. Dog

called a canwaksila. The director took the sweet grass up again and began to smoke up all the sick people. As they chewed and swallowed this otherworld meat, they could feel it going down into their bodies and through their veins. After that they felt much better.”
    Near the White River, at the point where one road goes to Rosebud and the other to Parmelee, there my great-grandfather ran a ghost dance. The circle hoop is still there. On a nice summer day you can still make it out. At that spot an old man named Black Bear fell into a vision world of the ghost dance. As Black Bear lay on the ground, the rest of the people continued to dance. After a while Black Bear got up on his feet and faced north with his arms and hands outstretched, and in plain daylight the people saw a little flash of lightning in his hand, like a small looking glass. The ghost dance leader went over to Black Bear and smoked and fanned him off with sweet grass. He saw that Black Bear held a small shining rock, the kind of rock that couldn’t be found on earth. A moon rock. And dancers came out of their trance with spiritual food in their hands—moon flesh and star flesh. There still hovers around that place a smell of burning sweet grass.
    Old Jerome Crow Dog joined the ghost dance. He liked that new way of praying, of relating to the spirits. He became a leader, and many of our people followed him. He told them to make special shirts for all the dancers. So the people who followed Crow Dog made ghost dance shirts painted with pictures of the sun, the half moon, the stars, and also with pictures of birds, such as the eagle and the magpie. These shirts were supposed to make the wearer bulletproof.
    Uncle Dick Fool Bull, who watched the ghost dance when he was a young boy, told me, “There was a man named Porcupine who put on such a shirt and invited people to shoot at him. Laterhe showed them some bullets that had just dropped off upon hitting, without going in.”
    Crow Dog told his people, “The Paiute did not teach us this thing. These shirts cannot stop bullets no matter what is painted on them.” But they did not want to believe him.
    When the soldiers ran all over the reservation, trying to put down the ghost dance, Crow Dog took his people way out into the Badlands where the whites could not follow them. Two Strikes and Short Bull joined him there. Short Bull had firsthand experience of Wovoka’s power and was the fiercest believer in the new religion. Crow Dog started his ghost dance by having a woman shoot four sacred arrows into the sky. They had points made of bone dipped in buffalo blood. In the end as many as three thousand people danced with Crow Dog, Short Bull, and Two Strikes. Besides the ghost shirts they wore striped blankets and upside-down American flags.
    It was hard for them to stay in the Badlands. Winter was coming on. It was cold, with a lot of snow on the ground, and they had only skimpy canvas tipis for shelter. They had no food except for whatever white ranchers’ cattle they could find and butcher. But the Badlands was the only place people could still ghost dance. Up at Standing Rock the agent sent his tribal police to kill our great holy man, Sitting Bull, for protecting the ghost dancers. Everywhere people were running away from the soldiers, who they were afraid might kill them. The government sent soldiers and interpreters to Crow Dog’s and Two Strikes’ camp, telling them to return to the reservation or they would be wiped out.
    Two Strikes said, “They will do it. They have already killed many of us. They have cannons. We have women and children here. I will not see them die. I will take them back to the reservation.”
    But Short Bull and his men pointed their Winchesters at the whites, and even at Two Strikes, shouting, “Kill the wasichus. Kill all who want to go back.”
    So here were Lakota men facing each other with loaded guns, ready to shoot. And the soldiers were ready too. It was only a matter of