And now:[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
NOTE: Seals I am told is the "Anglicized" spelling his family used for the family name
Sioui..
Ish
<+>=<+>KOLA Newslist<+>=<+>
2000 -43
Why is Leonard Peltier still in jail?!
=========================
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 14:06:41 EST
Subject: Fwd: Seals column
from Black Hills AIM (www.westendprod.com)
[This article THE CRAZY BUFFALO DANCE is being printed in 50 newspapers
around the US West as part of the High Country News series of 'Writers on the
Range'; fyi]
----
THE CRAZY BUFFALO DANCE
by David Seals
Many centuries ago the great Cheyenne prophet Mot'se-iyou'oiv (Sweet
Medicine) lay on his burial scaffold in Wyoming, surrounded by the grieving
Buffalo Peoples, and said, "Some day you will meet a people who are white,
good-looking people. When you do it will mean you are dead. It will be time
for the Renewal. You will die off because you will have taken the things they
give you. You will become crazy like them, and will forget all that I am now
telling you."
No one liked Sweet Medicine when he was young. He was an obscure man,
poor, and alone. He was not particularly a good man or a bad man. He did not
preach. He did not teach. He was not an artist or a civil rights leader. He
never held any elected positions. Neither was he a common man of the people,
nor was he a father or a husband, or much of a son to his foster parents. He
did not contribute constructively to his society. In fact he destroyed every
cherished icon and totem of men; and women had no interest in him at all. He
did not respect his elders and in fact was hunted by the police for years,
for insulting a chief. He was despised by everyone. He was a total fool. He
was the God of Wisdom.
When Sweet Medicine found the indigenous peoples wandering the empty
sagebrush prairies from the Yukon to Mexico, there were no buffalo in the
world. There were no wolves in the Wild, or eagles. People were dirty and
savage, living in holes and eating bugs and roots, raw, hopeless, Spiritless.
By the end of his four lifetimes the world and the people had become
rich with herds of fat buffalo and elk and deer, sleek intelligent wolves and
coyotes, and eagles and hawks filled the skies. They had 5 Societies of
sublime ritual that helped prepare them for a good life and a greater
eternity; they had a government of 44 Medicine Chiefs and Clan Mothers; their
semi-nomadic Economy of gardening, gathering, and medicine-hunting wasted
nothing.
How did he do it? What happened? Is it just an allegory? Doesn't it
sound eerily like an apocalyptic description of North America today, even
with a few controlled herds of buffalo in Yellowstone and on Ted Turner's
ranches, even with hundreds of millions of sleek cars and billions of miles
of crisscrossing fences and roads, cyanide gold mines, plutonium factories?
How did that bum transform the West and create the Classical Age of the
Plains Indians? And isn't it idiotic to dream childishly of those foregone
days in these times of unstoppable Progress and Individual Opportunity?
The complex answer to these questions, as far as traditional natives are
concerned (regardless of race), lies in the details of the vast society Sweet
Medicine created. It was centered around the Massaum ceremony, which
translates roughly from the word massa'ne to mean Crazy Buffalo Dance. In it
lies almost everything of the original genius of the First Nations.
The sundance, for instance, was only one small 4-day piece in the middle
of the Massaum, which ran 2 moons every year from the summer solstice to the
midsummer rising of the heliacal stars. A few good books based on interviews
with old Blanket Skins have chronicled some aspects of it - Grinnell's 1906
2-volumed 'The Cheyenne Indians', Mari Sandoz's masterpiece 'The Buffalo
Hunters', and the antrho analysis by Karl Schlesier 'The Wolves of Heaven'.
To summarize briefly, the Massaum revolves around the drama re-enacting
the Shaman's Death and his subsequent Resurrection. An actor portraying Sweet
Medicine played out the part in vastly detailed ritual (which took all Spring
in preparation) in which the White Buffalo Goddess killed him, and her 9
moon-priestesses (pubescent girls of the Young Wolves Society) chopped him
into pieces and devoured him. It was upon his resurrection that the spirits
of all the animals - and there were hundreds of animal tipis in a circle
around the central Medicine Lodge at the height of the Massaum, with whole
families depicting the kit foxes, white wolves, elk societies, dog soldiers,
etc. - were appeased, and gave their permission for a successful Fall Hunt.
Only upon the completion of the Massaum could the proto-Algonquians believe
they would survive another winter.
There were no bloody hollywood hunts on horseback, originally. The
Buffalo Jumps were part of an elaborate corral system (the Medicine Wheels,
for instance, like Stonehenge, were animal ceremonial corrals) in which women
worked with the coyotes and wolves to conduct a careful kill. Nothing of the
sacred animals was wasted, out of respect to them for giving permission to be
killed.
It was only upon the advent of horses and guns and whisky and money that
the horrible slaughters began for hides, and Indians lost track of their
ancient wisdoms.
The last big Massaum was held in 1876, when Crazy Horse played Sweet
Medicine in the drama. It had begun before the solstice at Medicine Deer
Rocks on the Rosebud Creek, and moved to the Little Bighorn River, and ended
at the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains - with a few interruptions in
between from Custer and the US Army. The medicine people all attributed the
American attack as the disruption in the ceremony that ruined the Fall Hunt
and ended the Buffalo Plains culture as it had been - and which Sweet
Medicine had also prophesied.
For 123 years the Massaum has not been performed completely. The last
partial attempts at it were in 1911-12, but Christian missionaries quickly
put a stop to it. The Sundance was outlawed until the 1970s.
For the past 2 winters a few crazy dreamers have been sending tobacco
offerings around to spiritual people, from the Yukon to Mexico, to try to
begin a bare bones renewal of the Massaum next spring. The buffalo and wolves
and coyotes have been proliferating with a sense of excitement and
anticipation, and we will feel it because there have been so many prayers to
do something. It has been 123 years since White Buffalo Woman walked beside
Sweet Medicine singing her songs of power.
-----
David Seals, Huron, is the author many books, including the novels 'Sweet
Medicine' and 'The Powwow Highway', which was also made into a feature
film. Mr. Seals, residing in Rapid City, SD is a member of Black Hills AIM
and the Bear Butte Council.
<+>=<+>
http://users.skynet.be/kola/
http://kola-hq.hypermart.net
<+>=<+>
