TO LIVE IN TWO WORLDS: CROW FAIR AND A SUN DANCE
June. Last night, alone on the ranch, I tried to pull a calf in a rainstorm. While attempting to hold a flashlight in one hand and a six-foot-long winchlike contraption called a “calf puller” in the other, I slipped in the mud and fell against the cow’s heaving flank. I yelled apologies to her over thunder so concussive that friends at a neighboring ranch claimed “it shook the handles loose from the coffee cups.” On my feet again, I saw rain undulate down hay meadows and three theaters of lightning making simultaneous displays: over Red Basin’s tipped-up mesas a thick root of lightning drilled straight down; closer, wide shoals of it flashed like polished car hoods all being lifted at once; and in the pasture where I fumbled with a chain, trying to fasten it around the calf’s emerging front feet, lightning snapped sideways like flowered vines shot from a cannon over my shoulders. In that cadaverous refulgence, the calf was born dead. The next morning, clear and cool after a rainless month of hundred-degree heat, I tightened my lariat around his hocks and, from the rubbery, purplish afterbirth they had impaled, dragged him behind the pickup out of the pasture.
Implicated as we westeners are in this sperm, blood, and guts business of ranching, and propelled forward by steady gusts of blizzards, cold fronts, droughts, heat, and wind, there’s a ceremonial feel to life on a ranch. It’s raw and impulsive but the narrative thread of birth, death, chores, and seasons keeps tugging at us until we find ourselves braided inextricably into the strand. So much in American life has had a corrupting influence on our requirements for social order. We live in a culture that has lost its memory. Very little in the specific shapes and traditions of our grandparents’ pasts instructs us how to live today, or tells us who we are or what demands will be made on us as members of society. The shrill estrangement some of us felt in our twenties has been replaced a decade or so later by a hangdog, collective blues. With our burgeoning careers and families, we want to join up, but it’s difficult to know how or where. The changing conditions of life are no longer assimilated back into a common watering trough. Now, with our senses enlivened—because that’s the only context we have to go by—we hook change onto change ad nauseam.
On a ranch, small ceremonies and private, informal rituals arise. We ride the spring pasture, pick chokecherries in August, skin out a deer in the fall, and in the enactment experience a wordless exhilaration between bouts of plain hard work. Ritual—which could entail a wedding or brushing one’s teeth—goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with the rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
For the fifth consecutive year I helped my neighbors Stan and Mary move their cattle through four 6,000-acre pastures. The first morning we rode out at three. A new moon grew slimmer and slimmer as light ballooned around us. I came on two burly Hereford bulls sniffing the cool breeze through the needles of a white pine, shaded even from moonlight as if the severe sexual heat of their bodies could stand no excess light. All week we moved cows, calves, and bulls across washes of ocher earth blooming with purple larkspur, down sidehills of gray shale that crumbled under our processional weight like filo pastry. Just before we reached the last gate, six hundred calves ran back; they thought their mothers, who had loped ahead, were behind them. Four of us galloped full tilt through sagebrush to get around and head off this miniature stampede, but when we did catch up, the calves spilled through us in watery cascades, back to the last pasture, where we had to start the gather all over again. This midseason roundup lasted six days. We ate together, slept, trailed cattle, and took turns bathing in the big galvanized tub at cow camp. At the end of the week, after pairing off each cow with the proper calf, then cutting them out of the herd—a job that requires impeccable teamwork and timing between rider and rider and rider and horse—we knew an intimacy had bloomed between us. It was an old closeness that disappears during other seasons, and each year, surprised afresh by the slightly erotic tint, we welcomed it back.
July. Last night from one in the morning until four, I sat in the bed of my pickup with a friend and watched meteor showers hot dance over our heads in sprays of little suns that looked like white orchids. With so many stars falling around us I wondered if daylight would come. We forget that our sun is only a star destined to someday burn out. The time scale of its transience so far exceeds our human one that our unconditional dependence on its life-giving properties feels oddly like an indiscretion about which we’d rather forget.
The recent news that astronomers have discovered a new solar system in-the-making around another sun-star has startled us out of a collective narcissism based on the assumption that we dominate the cosmic scene. Now we must make room for the possibility of new life—not without resentment and anticipation—the way young couples make room in their lives for a baby. By chance, this discovery came the same day a Kiowa friend invited me to attend a Sun Dance.
I have Indian neighbors all around me—Crow and Cheyenne to the north, Shoshone and Arapaho to the south—and though we often ranch, drink, and rodeo side by side, and dress in the same cowboy uniforms—Wrangler jeans, tall boots, wide-brimmed, high-crowned hats—there is nothing in our psyches, styles, or temperaments that is alike.
Because Christians shaped our New World culture we’ve had to swallow an artificial division between what’s sacred and what’s profane. Many westerners, like Native Americans, have made a life for themselves out in the raw wind, riding the ceremony of seasons with a fine-tuned eye and ear for where the elk herd is hidden or when in fall to bring the cattle down. They’ll knock a sage hen in the head with a rock for dinner and keep their bearings in a ferocious storm as ably as any Sioux warrior, but they won’t become visionaries, diviners, or healers in the process.
On a Thursday I set off at two in the morning and drove to the reservation. It was dark when I arrived and quiet. On a broad plain bordered in the west by mountains, the families of the hundred men who were pledging the dance had set up camps: each had a white canvas tipi, a wall tent, and a rectangular brush arbor in a circle around the Lodge, where for the next four days the ceremony would take place. At 5 A.M. I could still see stars, the Big Dipper suspended in the northwest as if magnified, and to the east, a wide band of what looked like blood. I sat on the ground in the dark. Awake and stirring now, some of the “dancers” filed out of the Lodge, their star quilts pulled tightly over their heads. When they lined up solemnly behind two portable johns, I thought I was seeing part of the dance. Then I had to laugh at myself but at the same time understood how the sacredness of this ceremony was located not just in the Lodge but everywhere.
Sun Dance is the holiest religious ceremony of the Plains tribes, having spread from the Cheyenne to the Sioux, Black-foot, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, Arapaho, Bannock, and Shoshone sometime after the year 1750. It’s not “sun worship” but an inculcation of regenerative power that restores health, vitality, and harmony to the land and all tribes.
For the hundred dancers who have volunteered to dance this year (the vow obligates them to dance four times during their lives) Sun Dance is a serious and painful undertaking; called “thirsty standing,” they eat no food and drink no water for four days. This year, with the hundred-degree heat we’ve been having, their suffering will be extreme. The ceremonies begin before dawn and often last until two or three in the morning. They must stay in the Lodge for the duration. Speaking to or making eye contact with anyone not dancing is forbidden, and it’s considered a great disgrace to drop out of the dance before it is over.
Sun Dance was suppressed by the government in the 188os, and its full revival has only been recent. Some tribes practiced the ceremony secretly, others stopped. George Horse Capture, a Gros Ventre who lives near me and has completed one Sun Dance, has had to read the same sources I have—Dorsey, Kroeber, and Peter Powell—to reeducate himself in his tradition.
“Did you sleep here last night?” an old man, one of the elders of the tribe, asked. Shrunken and hawk-nosed, he wore a blue farmer’s cap and walked with a crudely carved pine cane. “No, I drove from Shell,” I answered, sounding self-conscious because I seemed to be the only white person around. “Oh … you have a very good spirit to get up so early and come all this way. That’s good … I’m glad you are here,” he said. His round eyes narrowed and he walked away. On the other side of the shed where the big drum was kept he approached three teenage girls. “You sober?” he asked. “Yes,” they replied in unison. “Good,” he said. “Don’t make war on anyone. If you’re not drunk, there’s peace.” He hobbled past me again out into the parched field between the circle of tents and the Lodge. Coleman lanterns were being lighted and the tipis behind him glowed. He put both hands on top of the cane and, in a hoarse voice that carried far across the encampment, sang an Arapaho morning song: “Get up, Everyone get up …,” it began, followed by encouragements to face the day.
The sky had lightened; it was a shield of pink. The new moon, white when I had arrived, now looked blue. Another voice—sharp, gravelly, and less patient, boomed from the north, his song overlapping that of the first Crier’s. I looked: he was a younger man but bent at the shoulders like a tree. He paced the hard ground as he sang, and the tweed jacket he wore, which gave him a Dickensian look, hung from him and swayed in the breeze. Now I could hear two other Criers to the south and west. The four songs overlapped, died out, and started again. The men, silhouetted, looked ghostlike against the horizon, almost disembodied, as though their age and authority were entirely in the vocal cords.
First light. In the Lodge the dancers were dressing. Over gym shorts (the modern substitute for breechclouts), they pulled on long, white, sheath skirts, to which they fastened, with wide beaded belts, their dance aprons: two long panels, front and back, decorated with beads, ribbons, and various personal insignias. Every man wore beaded moccasins, leaving legs and torsos bare. Their faces, chests, arms, and the palms of their hands were painted yellow. Black lines skittered across chests, around ankles and wrists, and encircled each face. Four bundles of sage, which represents healing and breath, were tucked straight up in the apron fronts; thin braided wreaths of it were slipped onto the dancer’s wrists and ankles, and a crown of sage ending in two loose sprays looked like antennae.
Light begets activity—the Lodge began filling up. It’s a log arbor, forty yards across, covered with a thatchwork of brush. Its sixteen sides radiate from a great center pole of cotton-wood—the whole trunk of a hundred-year-old tree whose forked top looked like antlers. A white cloth was tied with rope around the bark, and overhead, on four of the pine stringers, tribal members had hung bandanas, silk cowboy scarves, and shawls that all together form a loose, trembling hieroglyph spelling out personal requests for health and repair.
Alongside the dancers, who stood in a circle facing east, a group of older men filed in. These were the “grandfathers” (ceremonially related, not by blood) who would help the younger dancers through their four-day ordeal.
The little shed against which I had leaned in the pre-morning light opened and became an announcer’s stand. From it the drum was rolled out and set up at the entrance to the Lodge.
Light begets activity begets light. The sky looked dry, white, and inflammable. Eleven drummers who, like “the grandfathers,” were probably ranchers sat on metal folding chairs encircling the drum. A stream of announcements in both Arapaho and English flooded the air. Friends and relatives of the dancers lined up in front of the Lodge. I found myself in a group of Indian women. The drumming, singing, and dancing began all at once. It’s not really a dance with steps but a dance of containment, a dance in place. Facing east and blowing whistles made of eagle wing bones in shrill unison, the men bounced up and down on their heels in time to the drumbeat. Series after series of songs, composed especially for Sun Dance, were chanted in high, intense voices. The ropey, repeating pulse was so strong it seemed to pull the sun up.
There were two important men at the back of the Lodge I hadn’t noticed. That their faces were painted red, not yellow, signified the status of Instructor, Pledger, or Priest. The taller of the two held a hoop (the sun) with eagle feathers (the bird of day) fastened around it. The “grandfather” standing in back of him raised the hoop-holding hand and, from behind, pushed the arm up and down in a wide, swinging arc until it took flight on its own.
I felt warmth on my shoulder. As the sun topped the horizon, the dancers stretched their arms straight out, lifting them with the progress of the sun’s rising. Songs pushed from the backs of the drummers’ throats. The skin on the dancers’ chests bounced as though from some interior tremor. When the light hit their faces, they looked as if they were made of sun.
The sunrise ceremony ended at eight. They had danced for nearly two hours and already the heat of the day was coming on. Pickups rambled through camps, children played quietly everywhere. Walking to a friend’s camp, I began to understand how the wide ampleness of the Indian body stands for a spirit of accommodation. In the ceremony I had just witnessed, no one—dancer, observer, child, priest, or drummer—had called attention to himself. There was no applause, no frivolousness. Families ambled back to their camps as though returning from a baseball game. When I entered my friend’s brush arbor (already a relief from the sun) and slid behind the picnic table bench she handed me the cup of coffee I’d been hoping for. “They’re dancing for all of us,” she said. Then we drained our cups in silence.
Though I came and went from the Sun Dance grounds (it was too hot to stand around in the direct sun) the ceremonies continued all day and most of each night. At nine the “runners” drove to the swamp to cut reeds from which they fashioned beds for the dancers. The moisture in the long, bladelike leaves helped cool the men off. At ten, special food eaten by the dancers’ families was blessed in the Lodge, and this was surely to become one of the dancers’ daily agonies: the smell of meat, stew, and fry bread filling the space, then being taken away. The sunrise drummers were spelled by new ones, and as the songs began again those dancers who could stood in their places and danced. Each man was required to dance a certain number of hours a day. When he was too weak or sick or reeling from hallucination, he was allowed to rest on his rush mat.
“What happens if it rains during Sun Dance?” I asked my Kiowa friend. “It doesn’t,” she answered curtly. By eleven, it was ninety-nine degrees. We drove west away from the grounds to the land she owned and went skinny-dipping in the river. Her brown body bobbed up and down next to my white one. Behind us a wall of colored rock rose out of the water, part of a leathery bluff that curved for miles. “That’s where the color for the Sun Dance paints comes from,” my friend’s husband said, pointing to a cave. He’d just floated into view from around an upstream bend. With his big belly glinting, he had the complacent look of a man who lords over a houseful of women: a wife, two daughters, a young tutor for his girls. The night before, they’d thrown an anniversary party at this spot. There were tables full of Mexican food, a five-piece Mexican band whose members looked like reformed Hell’s Angels, a charro with four skinny horses and a trick-riding act, two guests who arrived from the oil fields by helicopter, and a mutual friend who’s Jewish and a Harvard professor who popped bikini-clad out of a giant plywood cake.
The men in the Rabbit Lodge danced as late as the party-goers. The next morning when I arrived at four-thirty the old man with the cane walked directly to me. “Where’s your coat? Aren’t you cold?” he asked gruffly, though I knew he was welcoming me. The dancers spit bile and shuffled back and forth between the johns and the Lodge. A friend had asked one of them how he prepared for Sun Dance. He replied, “I don’t. There’s no way to prepare for pain.” As the dancers began to look more frail, the singing became raucous. The astounding volume, quick rises in pitch, and forays into falsetto had an enlivening effect on all of us. Now it was the drummers who made the dancers make the sun rise.
Noon. In the hottest midday sun the dancers were brought out in front of the Lodge to be washed and freshly painted. The grandfathers dipped soft little brooms of sage in water and swabbed the men down; they weren’t allowed to drink. Their families gathered around and watched while the dancers held their gaze to the ground. I couldn’t bring myself to stand close. It seemed a violation of privacy. It wasn’t nudity that rendered the scene so intimate (they still had their gym shorts on), but the thirst. Behind me, someone joked about dancing for rain instead of sun.
I was wrong about the bathing scene. Now the desolation of it struck me as beautiful. All afternoon the men danced in the heat—two, eight, or twenty of them at a time. In air so dry and with their juices squeezed out, the bouncing looked weightless, their bodies thin and brittle as shells. It wasn’t the pain of the sacrifice they were making that counted but the emptiness to which they were surrendering themselves. It was an old ritual: separation, initiation, return. They’d left their jobs and families to dance. They were facing physical pain and psychological transformation. Surely, the sun seared away preoccupation and pettiness. They would return changed. Here, I was in the presence of a collective hero. I searched their faces and found no martyrs, no dramatists, no antiheroes either. They seemed to pool their pain and offer it back to us, dancing not for our sins but to ignite our hearts.
Evening. There were many more spectators tonight. Young Indian women cradling babies moved to the front of the Lodge. They rocked them in time with the drums and all evening not one child cried. Currents of heat rose from the ground; in fact, everything seemed to be rising: bone whistles, arms, stars, penises, the yeast in the fry bread, the smell of sage. My breasts felt full. The running joke in camp was about “Sun Dance Babies.” Surely the expansive mood in the air settled over the tipis at night, but there was more to it than that. Among some tribes a “Sacred Woman” is involved in the ceremony. The sun is a “man power” symbol. When she offers herself to the priest, their union represents the rebirth of the land, water, and people. If by chance a child is conceived, he or she is treated with special reverence for a lifetime.
Dawn. This morning I fainted. The skinny young man dancing in front of me appeared to be cringing in pain. Another dancer’s face had been painted green. I’m not saying they made me faint—maybe I fainted for them. With little ado, the women behind me picked me up. Revived and feeling foolish, I stood through to the end. “They say white people don’t have the constitution to go without water for so many days,” a white friend commented later. It sounded like a racist remark to me. She’d once been offered a chance to fast with a medicine man and refused. “I think it has more to do with one’s concepts of hope and fear,” I mumbled as she walked through the field to her car.
Afternoon. At five, only two dancers were standing. Because of the heat, the smell of urine had mixed with the sage.
Later in the evening I stood next to two teenage boys from Oklahoma. Not realizing I was old enough to be their mother, they flirted with me, then undercut the dares with cruelty. “My grandmother hates white tourists,” the one who had been eyeing my chest said to me. “You’re missing the point of this ceremony,” I said to him. “And racism isn’t a good thing anywhere.” They walked away, but later, when I bumped into them, they smiled apologetically.
When I had coffee in a friend’s brush arbor during a break in the dancing, the dancer’s wife looked worried. “He looks like death warmed over,” she said. A young man with black braids that reached his belt buckle was dangling a baby on each knee; I’ve never seen men so gentle and at ease with children. A fresh breeze fanned us. The round-the-clock rhythm of drumbeats and dancing made day and night seem the same. Sleeping became interchangeable with waiting, until, finally, there was no difference between the two.
Sunday. Two American flags were raised over the Lodge today—both had been owned by war veterans. The dance apron of a man near me had U.S. Navy insignias sewn into the corners. Here was a war hero, but he’d earned his medal far from home. Now the ritual of separation, initiation, and return performed in Vietnam, outside the context of community, changes into separation, benumbment, and exile.
Throughout the afternoon’s dancing there was a Give-Away, an Indian tradition to honor friends, relatives, and admirers with a formal exchange of gifts. In front of the announcer’s stand there was a table chock-full of food and another stacked high with Pendleton blankets, shawls, and beadwork. The loudspeaker overwhelmed the drumming until all the gifts were dispersed. Pickups streamed through the camps and a layer of dust muted the hard brightness of the day. After his first Sun Dance one old man told me he had given nearly everything he owned away: horse, wagons, clothes, winter blankets. “But it all comes back,” he said, as if the day and night rhythm of this ceremony stood for a bigger tidal cadence as well.
Evening. They’ve taken the brush away from the far side of the Lodge. Now the dancers face west. All hundred men, freshly painted with a wild dappling of dots, stripes, and crooked lines, bounced up and down vigorously and in short strokes waved eagle fans in front of their bodies as if to clear away any tiredness there.
When I asked why the Sun Dance ended at night, my friend said, “So the sun will remember to make a complete circle, and so we’ll always have night and day.” The sun drained from the dancers’ faces and sank into a rack of thunderclouds over the mountains. Every movement coming from the Lodge converged into a single trajectory, a big “V” like a flock of birds migrating toward me. This is how ritual speaks with no words. The dancing and whistling surged; each time a crescendo felt near, it ebbed. In the southwest, the first evening star appeared, and the drumming and singing, which had begun to feel like a hard dome over my head, stopped.
Amid cries of relief and some clapping I heard hoarse expulsions of air coming from dancers, like whales breaching after being under water too long. They rushed forward to the front of, the Lodge, throwing off the sage bracelets and crowns, knelt down in turn by wooden bowls of chokecherry juice, and drank their first liquid in four days.
The family standing next to me approached the Lodge cautiously. “There he is,” I heard the mother say. They walked toward the dancer, a big, lumbering man in his thirties whose waist, where rolls of fat had been, now looked concave. The man’s wife and father slid their arms around his back, while his mother stood in front and took a good look at him. He gave her the first drink of sweet water from his bowl. “I tried to be there as much as possible today. Did you see me?” his wife asked. He nodded and smiled. Some of the young children had rushed into the Lodge and were swinging the flattened reeds that had been the dancers’ beds around and around in the air. One of the drummers, an energetic man with an eccentric, husky voice, walked up to a group of us and started shaking our hands. He didn’t know us but it didn’t matter. “I’m awfully glad you’re here,” he kept saying, then walked away laughing ecstatically. The dancer I had been watching was having trouble staying on his feet. He stumbled badly. A friend said he worked for Amoco and tomorrow he’d be back in the oil fields. Still supporting him with their arms, his family helped him toward their brush arbor, now lit with oil lamps, where he would vomit, then feast.
It’s late August. Wind swings down the hay meadows from high cornices of rimrock above the ranch like guffaws of laughter. Since Sun Dance several images recur: the shaded, shell-like bodies of the dancers getting smaller and smaller; the heated, expanding spectators surrounding them. At the point of friction, a generosity occurs. The transition to autumn is a ritual like that: heat and cold alternate in a staccato rhythm. The magnetizing force of summer reverses itself so that every airplane flying over me seems to be going away. Heat lightning washes over and under clouds until their coolness drops down to us and then flotillas of storms bound through as though riding the sprung legs of a deer. I feel both emptied and brimming over.
A week later. I’m camped on a hill next to an anthropologist and his wife. He’s Indian, she’s white, and they drove here on what he calls his “iron pony”—a motorcycle—to attend Crow Fair. “You see I had to marry one of these skinny white women so we could both fit here,” he explained as they squeezed onto the seat. He was as round and cheerful as the chrome gas tank his belly rested on. Surrounding us were the rolling grasslands that make up the middle Yellowstone Valley, site of the summer councils held by the warring Crow, Sioux, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne. The Wolf Mountains to the south step up into pitched rises, crowned with jack pines. The dark creases in the hills are dry washes, now blackened with such an abundance of ripe chokecherries they look clotted with blood. On a knob nearby, recently singed with fire, is Custer’s battlefield. “If there was any yellow hair left on that sonofabith, it’s gone now,” a Crow friend who had fought the fire said. The Crows, of course, were the ones scouting for Custer, but it seems to have been a temporary alliance, having more to do with their animosity toward other tribes than a love for any white man.
Crow Fair is a five-day country fair—Indian style. It’s different from ours because their roots are nomadic, not agricultural. Instead of the horse pulls, steer judging, and cake stands, they have all-night sessions of Indian dancing, a traditional dress parade, and a lengthy rodeo augmented by horse racing and betting. Looking down from the hill where I pitched our borrowed tent, the encampment of well over five hundred tipis could have been a summer council at the turn of the nineteenth century except for the pickups, loudspeakers, and the ubiquitous aluminum folding chairs. Inside the sprawl of tipis, tents, and arbors was a circle of concession stands, at the center of which stood the big open-air dance arbor.
My young friend Ursula, who was visiting from Cambridge, asked if these Indians lived here all the time. Indians don’t, of course, still live in tipis, but the encampment looked so well-worn and amiable she wasn’t wrong in thinking so. Part of the “wholeness” of traditional Indian life that the tipi and circular dance arbor signify is the togetherness at these powwows. Indians don’t go home at night; they camp out where the action is, en masse, whole extended families and clans spanning several generations. It’s a tradition with them the way sending our kids to summer camp is with us.
Two days before the fair started, the pickups began to roll in with tipi poles slung over the tailgates. Brush was cut, canvas unrolled, and in twelve hours a village had been made. Tipis and tents, reserved mainly for sleeping, were often as plush as an Arab’s. Inside were wall-to-wall rugs, hanging lanterns, and ceremonial drums. Outdoor kitchens were arranged under canvas flies or inside a shady brush arbor with packing crates turned on end for shelves, and long picnic tables were loaded with food. With barely any elbow room between camps, even feuding tribes took on a congenial air, their children banding together and roving freely.
At the morning parade you could see the splendors of traditional beadwork, elk tooth shirts, buckskin dresses, and beaded moccasins, but what interested me more were the contradictions: the Sioux boy in warrior dress riding the hood of a Corvette; vans with smokey windows covered with star quilts and baskets; the roar of new wave music coming from the cars. John Whiteman, the last surviving Custer scout, rode on the back of a big ton truck with his tiny wife, who had hoisted up a brown-and-white-striped umbrella to shade herself from the sun. They were both, someone said, well past 110 years old.
Ursula and I were the first ones at the rodeo because everyone else seemed to know it would start late. The young, cigar-smoking man who sold us our tickets turned out to be an Eskimo from Barrow, Alaska. He’d come south to live with what he called “these mean Plains Indians.”
The Crow crossed into this valley in the late 1700s and fought off the Shoshone to claim territory that spread between the Big Horns, the Badlands, and the Wind River Mountains. Trappers, like Osborne Russell, who hunted right along with them, described the Crow as tall, insolent, and haughty, but submissive when cornered. Russell met one chief who had hair eleven feet long, and said their beadwork was “excessively gaudy.” The Crows were so pinched geographically by raiding Sioux and Blackfeet they adopted a militaristic style, still evident in the way they zipped around camp in police cars with “Executive Security Force” emblazoned on the doors. Endowed with a natural horse-handling ability, they became famous horse thieves.
The rodeo got under way after an off-key rendition of “God Bless America” (instead of the national anthem). A local band, aptly named “The Warriors,” warmed up on the stand in front of us. While the rough stock was run into the bucking chutes they played “He’s Just a Coca-Cola Cowboy.” As testimony to their enthusiasm for horses, the rodeo, usually a two- or three-hour affair, lasted seven hours.
Before the all-night session of dancing began we made the circuit of concession stands. Between the corn dogs and Indian tacos—fry bread topped with beans and hot sauce—was an aisle of video games. Between the menudo and the caramel apples were two gambling tents—one for bingo, the other for poker. You could eat corn barbecued in the husk Navajo style and a hunk of Taos bread, or gulp down a buffalo burger and a Coke, the one cooked by a Navajo from Shiprock, the other by an Ogalalla Sioux. Ursula had her ears pierced and bought a pair of opalescent earrings; I bought a T-shirt with the words “Crow Fair” across the front, and around and around we went until the dancing began.
Dark. Instead of the tamping, rigid, narcotic bounce of Sun Dance that seemed to set into motion a chronic tremor, one that radiated out of the Lodge to knock against our legbones and temples, the dances at Crow Fair were show-offish and glittering. These Society, War, Animal, and Contest Dances served no direct purpose these days, the way some religious dances do. “What you’re seeing out there is a lot of dyed turkey feathers and plastic elk teeth, and kids doing the Indian disco,” a friend commented. He’s an Italian from Saint Louis who married a Kiowa woman when he was sixteen and together they moved to Wyoming to live with the Shoshone. Incongruity delights him as much as tradition. “We assimilate a little this way, and a little that way. Life is only mutation.”
The dance arbor was lit by mercury vapor lamps hung from one forty-foot power pole at the center—no bonfires or Coleman lanterns here. The ceremonies started with a long prayer in English during which a Crow child in front of me shot off a toy gun, aiming first at the preacher, then at himself, then at me. Six separate drum groups set up around the periphery with names like Night Hawks, Whistling Elk, Plenty Coups, Magpie, and Salt Lake Crows. Although participants had come from a great number of tribes—Assiniboine, Apache and Shoshone, Sioux, Kiowa, and Arapaho—what we saw was only Plains-Indian dancing. Performed in a clockwise motion, as if following the sun, the dancers moved in long lines like spokes on a wheel. Anyone could dance, and it seemed at times as if everyone did. Families crowded in around the dance space with their folding chairs and Pendleton blankets—babies and grandmothers, boys and fathers, mothers and daughters, all dressed fit to kill. The long succession of dances began: Girls’ Fancy Shawl, Boys’ Traditional, Fast and Slow War Dance, a Hoop Dance, a Hot Dance, and a Grass Dance. Intertribal dances—open to anyone—alternated with contest dances that were judged. Participants wore Coors numbers pinned to their backs the way bronc riders do. The costumes were elaborate. There were feathers dyed magenta and lime green, then fluffed at the tips; great feather bustles attached to every backside; and long straps of sleighbells running from ankles to hips. The Hot Dancers wore porcupine-hair roaches on their heads, the War Dancers carried straight and crooked lances, the Society Dancers wore wolf heads with little pointed ears, and the women in fringed buckskin dresses carried elegant eagle fans. One young man, who seemed to be a loner, had painted black stripes across his face and chest so thickly the paint ran together into a blackface. Later, we discovered he was white. A good many white people danced every night. One couple had flown in from Germany; they were Hot Dance aficionados, and when I tried to talk to them I found out they spoke only German and Crow. A blond boy of ten said he had driven north from Arizona with his adopted Apache parents. After eating a cheesy, dripping box of nachos, he went out to win his contest.
I squeezed through the delicious congestion of bodies, feathers brushing my cheeks, and circled under the eaves of the arbor. One boy, who couldn’t have been older than three, in war bonnet and bells, shuffled out into the dance circle. The Mylar balloon tied to his hand was shaped like a fish. Four boys dancing near the power pole crouched low, jerking their heads and shoulders in the Prairie Chicken Dance. The Fast Dancers spun by, like wheels of fireworks, orbiting at twice the speed of the others.
Outside the arbor was a residual flux: crowds of Indian teenagers ambled past the bright concession stands, behind which a ribbon of headlights streamed, and behind them glowed rows of tents and tipis.
The arbor closed at 3 A.M., and we walked up our hill and went to bed. A couple of drunks stumbled by. “Hey. What’s this? A tombstone?” one of them said as he kicked the tent. When no one answered, he disappeared in the brush. Later, the 49ers, a roving group of singers, began their encampment serenade. They sang until dawn every night of the fair so that even sleep, accompanied by their drumbeats, felt like a kind of dancing.
Crow Fair days are hot; Crow Fair nights are cold. A rumbling truck woke me. It was the septic tank man (he was white) pumping the outhouses. Some Livingston, Montana, friends who had arrived late were scattered around on the ground in sleeping bags. I brushed my teeth with water I’d brought for the radiator. The dance arbor, abandoned and dreary at midday, was getting a facelift from a cleanup crew. All the action was elsewhere: when I walked toward the bluffs behind the camp, I discovered two hundred children splashing in the Little Big Horn River.
That afternoon I visited Gary Johnson’s camp. He’s a bright, sly Crow drummer. Over some beadwork repairs he was swatting flies. “You killed our buffalo, I’ll kill your flies,” he said with a sardonic grin as I pulled up a chair. A small boy had taken Gary’s drumstick and had beaten the metal top of a beer cooler until it was covered with dents. “Let him play, let him play,” Gary admonished the boy’s mother. “That’s how we learn to make music.” To be a drummer is to be a singer too, the voice used as percussively as the drum is musically. “I’d like to steal this boy. He and I would sing every night.”
Every turn of the nomadic Crow life was once marked by movement and music. There were dances to celebrate birth, puberty, marriage, or death. There were healing dances and hunters’ dances and contrary dances, in which all movement was done in reverse. There were dances to count coup, welcome strangers, honor guests, to cement alliances and feuds. Songs weren’t composed but received whole from animals, plants, or storms. Antelope gave mothers lullabies, thunder and wind gave medicine songs, bears taught hunting songs.
Carlos Castaneda gave us talking bushes, but few of us realized how common these transmissions had become in aboriginal America. When I asked Gary about his pink-and-red-striped tip—the only one of its kind in camp—he explained: “That’s a medicine tipi. Somehow I inherited it. The creek water rose up and told the guy living in it to dress and live like a woman. That was to be his medicine. So he became a berdache [a transvestite].” He gave me a serious look. “I’ll do anything in that tipi, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sleep in it.”
D. H. Lawrence described the Apache ceremonies he saw as “the feet of birds treading a dance” and claimed the music awakened in him “new root-griefs, old root-richnesses.” In the next three nights I saw the quick, addled movements of blue grouse, feet that worked the ground like hooves, or else massaged it erotically with moccasins. One of the nights, when almost everyone had gone, I thought I heard women singing. It turned out to be teenage boys whose strange, hoarse voices convulsed and ululated in a falsetto. Gary was there and he drummed and danced and his son and wife danced, all the repetitions redoubled by multiple generations. How affectionately the shimmering beadwork traced the shapes of their dreams and threaded them back to the bodies that dreamed them.
It had been raining on and off all evening. The spectators and all but a few dancers had left. Shoals of garbage—pop cans, hot-dog wrappers, corn husks, and pieces of fry bread—drifted up against the wooden benches. I knew I had been riding an ebb tide here at Crow Fair. I’d seen bead workers’ beadwork, dancers’ dance steps, Indianness for the sake of being Indian—a shell of a culture whose spontaneous force had been revived against great odds and was transmitting weak signals. But transmitting nonetheless. The last intertribal dance was announced. Already, three of the drum groups had packed up and were leaving the arbor when five or six Crow men, dressed like cowboys, walked onto the grass. In boots, not moccasins, and still smoking cigarettes, they formed a long line and shuffled around and around. The shrill, trembling song that accompanied them could empower anyone listening to turn away from distraction and slide their hands across the buttocks of the world—above and beyond the ceremonial decor that was, after all, the point of all this. At the last minute, a young boy jumped up and burst into a boiling, hot-stepping Fast Dance, his feathered headdress shaking down his back like lightning. I wondered how much of this culture-straddling he could take and what in it would finally be instructive to him. Almost under his bounding feet a row of young children were sleeping on blankets laid out for them. Their feather bustles were bent and askew and a couple of moccasins were missing. A very tall Crow man with long braids but skin so light he might actually have been white began picking up the children. One by one, and so gently none of them woke, he carried them away.