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Tatoje Topa Najinwin
While I was in prison, Peggy had moved from our house in Wanblee to a trailer in Kyle, near the center of Pine Ridge. I was so much in love with her and so grateful for her support during my imprisonment that when she said she was ready to start a family, I was eager. She’s a spiritual person, very tradition-minded, and knew that the moon watches over women and controls their time of purification—what whites call the menstrual cycle. Hers coincides with the full moon; she is so attuned to the rhythms of the universe that she could feel when each egg was released inside her. We were able to determine the exact moment of conception.
In March 1980, it was time for our first child to be born. I had to borrow a car from a white woman, a teacher, to take Peggy a hundred miles to a Rapid City hospital. When my older children had been born, fathers weren’t allowed to participate. They had to stay in the waiting room until the child was born, then settle for looking at it through a glass. This time, I shared the whole experience of birth with my wife. It was so phenomenal, such a miracle, that I thought, how could we ever break up? I told that to Peggy and we both believed it. The spirits first named our daughter He Haka Luta, Red Elk Woman.
My daughter’s birth began one cycle, just as another was ending.
For years, my mother had suffered from high blood pressure—or so she was told by the IHS doctors. Periodically, she was induced to enter the hospital for rest to bring it down. Although doctors tried many different drugs on her, they never tried to learn what caused her problem. Nothing, in fact, worked. Early in 1980, when I was in Cleveland for a speaking engagement, I got word that my mother, who had been visiting her brother in Tucson, was hospitalized and not expected to live. Just as Mom had refused to visit me in prison because she didn’t want to see me caged, I wanted to remember her as she had been in my life. I didn’t go to Tucson. When she died that night, I headed for Porcupine. I felt cold and empty.
In my culture, when someone close to you dies, you cut your hair. My brothers and I did it in the traditional way—with a knife. We gathered up Mother’s possessions and, in the Lakota manner, burned her clothes, then gave away everything else except a few family pictures. We held a wake in Porcupine. Mom had asked to be buried in the front yard of Grandma Aggie’s place in Greenwood, so we took her home and held a second wake in the tribal hall. I was amazed. Despite the fierce South Dakota winter, people came from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, and all over the country to show their respect. Her mourners included several important Indian educators whom I had not suspected she had known. One was Lionel Bordeaux, president of Sinte Gleska College, in Rosebud. He had started a movement to encourage Indians to establish colleges on their own reservations. My mother had fostered his early efforts.
When I got up at the wake to speak, I said, “While I was in prison, feeling very low, I wrote my mother a letter condemning her and blaming her for all my troubles. When I rose the next morning and reread it, I felt ashamed. I tore it up, then wrote another in which I thanked her for all the good things she had given me.” When we went through her personal effects, I was surprised to learn that she had made photocopies of that letter and sent them to people she knew all over the country. I drew some comfort from the fact that she had gone to the spirit world knowing I appreciated her lifetime of sacrifice.
In our tradition, we bury the dead after four days of mourning. When the time came, a blizzard was howling across the prairie, so as quickly as decency allowed, we put Mother’s casket in the ground and shoveled earth on it. Then everybody retreated to the shelter of cars. I remained, kneeling at the foot of the grave in the bitter cold with wind-driven snow stinging my face. Thinking I was alone, I finally let it all out, wailing and crying, tears freezing on my cheeks. When I got up and turned around, there was Joe Bat Richards, an AIM brother, waiting for me. It was a wonderful thing for him to do, and from that moment I’ve felt very close to him.
Of all her sons, Ted took our mother’s death the hardest, so I asked him to keep her spirit. For us, hair holds memory. In our tradition, some of the loved one’s hair is used to make what white men would call an altar—a special place of remembrance. The keeper of the spirit does not participate in social events for four seasons, and during that period of bereavement, stays at home, making offerings to the altar. The community also honors the person who has moved on to the spirit world, bringing remembrance gifts to put at the holy place. In that way, we keep our loved one’s spirit within us. At the end of a year, we have a ceremony to observe the releasing of the spirit from the community to make its passage to the next world. We then have a give-away. We distribute all the gifts brought and buy even more to give away.
During the first part of 1980, while my mother’s presence remained strong, we held a ceremony at the home of Rick Two Dogs, a medicine man. There my mother’s spirit gave her name, Tatuye Topa Najinwin, to my infant daughter. It means “Woman Who Stands Strong in the Four Winds.” That described my mother perfectly. As she turned out, it was also most appropriate for my daughter.
I continued to commune with the spirits as a frequent participant in Rick Two Dog’s yuwipi ceremonies. At one of them, the spirits said a period of chaos and confusion was coming and the Iktomi—a being personified by the spider, who imparts wisdom through trickery—would soon return. Every indigenous people in the world has such a teacher to show them that life is tricky. Christians, unfortunately, think it is the devil and refuse to consider his wisdom.
Not long after that yuwipi, the Iktomi paid me a visit. About forty miles south of Rapid City, in the southeastern corner of the Black Hills, lies Wind Cave. Relying on our oral tradition, some Lakota elders say our ancestors first emerged from the underground world there to live on the earth. Late in the spring of 1980, I helped to organize a temporary return of my people to our Paha Sapa, and my brother Bill handled most of the negotiations with officials at Wind Cave National Park. Although we circulated posters throughout Indian country and made provision for hundreds of Indian people to attend, only about fifty or sixty Pine Ridge AIMsters came to camp out.
I hadn’t yet been to the Black Hills to cry for a vision, so I decided to do it then. Rick Two Dogs put my son Scott, Kenny Kane, and me on the mountain above the cave. Scott pledged to stay two days and nights, and Kenny and I would stay four. Kenny came down the first night, but Scott fulfilled his vow. Naked and alone, with only a buffalo robe to sit on inside an altar bound with colored tobacco ties, I faced the east. While crying for a vision, we neither eat nor drink. Hunger never bothers me much, but by the time Scott left, I was mighty thirsty.
Sitting and praying, I noticed legions of crawling and flying insects. I saw a tremendous variety of flies—different kinds, sizes, and colors. I must have nodded off, because suddenly I was staring at the iridescent green head of a colossal fly. It was so big I felt as if I were in the first row of a movie theater, looking up at the screen. The fly said, “I am your medicine. From now on, flies will protect you.” It added that since I had had my vision, I could go back down the mountain and break my fast.
Then I woke up. I was happy—only two days and I was finished! I cleaned the site, gathered up the robe—and suddenly stopped. I thought, wait a minute—that’s too easy. And I thought some more. I’m Russell Means, big-time tough guy—and I’m going to go down and tell my people that my medicine is the fly? The fly eats shit! I said, no way. I put everything back and returned to my prayers. I knew the Iktomi had tried to trick and shame me. It was a close call. I still get the shudders when I think about it. If I had told everybody my medicine was the fly, it would be so to this day. All the traditional people would snicker whenever my name was mentioned.
As I stood praying on the fourth day, I looked abruptly to my left, to the north, to see a huge pronghorn antelope with a white rump. It was far larger than any antelope I had ever seen or heard about—at least the size of a mule deer. It ran away and vanished in the trees. I sat down, and as I meditated, my head drooped. Then I looked up again. To the northeast, a little more than a hundred yards away across the clearing, was a big old black buffalo bull, pawing the ground, snorting and staring at me through red-rimmed eyes. For the first time in my life, I was almost petrified. I grabbed my pipe from the robe by the altar and started to pray.
Within minutes, the bull calmed down and walked slowly to the west. I watched him for quite a while. Periodically, he stopped to gaze at me for what seemed like a long time, then resumed his progress down the slope and into the trees. I prayed a little more, then decided to check on the bull’s progress. That side of the mountain, above the AIM camp, was very steep, so there was no way a buffalo could descend quickly. I moved to the edge of the cliff and peered down. The bull had disappeared! There was no way he could have gotten down the mountain that quickly. Although I saw people moving around in the camp below, none seemed to have noticed him. Later, when I asked, none said they had seen him.
Doubters and rationalists will say the huge antelope and the buffalo were figments of my imagination, that after nearly four days without food or water, I was hallucinating—or that they were mere passersby, dumb beasts with nothing on their minds. But I have no doubt they were real, and they were sent in answer to my prayers. By recognizing one another’s spiritual powers, we were joined together. The antelope and the buffalo will be my medicine as long as I live in this world. In my prayers, I thanked the Great Mystery for sending them, and for helping me to recognize the Iktomi.