About a month and a half earlier, after a ten-year involvement in various Twelve-Step programs based on Alcoholics Anonymous, I had come to an unusual realization. For the first time in my life, I found myself expressing a desire to have a Teacher that would help facilitate my spiritual path. I was never one to follow anyone in my life. I knew that "following" wasn't what it all was about. I had no idea what such a Teacher would look like. I simply longed to be able to sit at the feet of someone of flesh and blood for a change who could perhaps model what a well-rounded relationship with Spirit was, perhaps just talk to me about such things...who knew? The gist of it was that I was tired of having my spirituality so deep inside me that it had no form.
Within two weeks of expressing that intention in my prayers, I was at a local coffee shop and saw a makeshift poster announcing a "Cannunpa (Cha-nupa) Ceremony," a ceremony with the Sacred Pipe by a Lakota family, who was in town. With no particular investment, I went to the address, only to find that it was at the home of a friend. Having never really been drawn to Native American ways or Spirituality before, I found myself in a circle with about twenty people, and quietly watched the proceedings. Curious. A Lakota Medicine family was there named Chips; a mother and her three sons, with a couple of assistants.
It was all very simple. The eldest brother, Charles, led the ceremony after talking a little bit about their lives on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He said nothing at all astounding or earth-shaking, and I suppose what I appreciated most was that he seemed very aware, and happy to be alive. He said they were there doing healing ceremonies for the sick, that they had been invited, or "sponsored" by a local family, with whom they would be staying for a month or so. He spoke of the "Yuwipi" Ceremony where Spirit comes through his younger brother, Godfrey, and directs the people seeking healing. Through Yuwipi, Spirit tells them what they need to do in order to restore their health.
Having been involved in conventional medicine for sixteen years, and having had my own deeply Spiritual experiences with life and death, I was more than curious. I was determined to be a part of what they had to offer. In my typical way, after we had all prayed and shared the Pipe and most of the attendees had left, I lingered and queried as to what it would take to be a part of a ceremony. Of course I thought I might be able to step right in, and of course what I found was that such sacred things are not spectator sports. After a couple of weeks of maintaining contact with my friends--and, well, embarrassing as it sounds, lobbying to be a part--I was told that the family would be asked if I could attend an Inipi, better known as a purification or sweat lodge. I was told that there, Godfrey would "know my heart" and only then would I be invited to get more involved. Or not.
The Twelve Steps had taught me about surrender, and even with all my enthusiasm, I knew that the best I could do was to open myself up completely to what was happening and leave the rest up to Powers greater than myself. So that's what I did. After a while I was invited to an Inipi, and then another and another, until I did four nights in a row. My world was rocked. I went through what felt like the successive stages of a human being's spiritual development. There was little thought during the ceremony itself. In the midst of the ancient songs and drumming and prayers and heat and fear and relief and sweat and pain and expansion, contraction, deaths and rebirths, it felt as if my insides were re-ordered--every part of me. I had been brought from the visceral experience of the first person looking up and perceiving the moon in wonder to the expression of humanity that I was on that fourth day of ceremony in 1990.
On the second day of my Inipis, I began pitching in to help with the fire for the ceremony. I worked with a man named Richard, who I just assumed to be Native American. He was certainly weathered and dark enough. He grunted a lot and gave me little by way of direction. Before we started he told me that in the old ways, a boy desiring to become a major part of the sacred ceremonies would first have to tend fire for seven years for the people. In silence. Anything he learned would be picked up by observation. And that is, for the most part, how I was taught, by careful observation and mimicking all the things that Richard did until I got a sense of not only the nuts and bolts of firetending, but the relationship with fire and ceremony and Spirit that he embodied. It wasn't until a week later that I learned that Richard, in fact, was a fifty-year-old Jew from Brooklyn who had been setting Altar for the Chips for the last year on their road trips.
After my fourth Inipi, I asked for permission to move onto the property of the sponsor to help wherever I could. Given the okay, I dropped everything and did so. Slowly, I got to know the family a little better and after a couple of weeks of tending fire, was invited into the Yuwipi Ceremonies. There was a ceremony each night for the next two weeks, beginning with an Inipi at dusk and then ending with a "feast" at around midnight after the ceremony. People were literally, physically, touched by Spirit. People were transformed. People were told that they should prepare for death. People were told that they had to change their lives. People were instructed where to find specific herbs, and how they were to be prepared and taken, to effect healing. My experience was that Godfrey, bound tight and completely in a blanket and laid down on a bed of sage in the pitch blackness, did not do the telling, touching, or instructing. There were other "things" there that did the work. He was just the Spirit Caller.
Amidst the cacophony of dashing lights in the dark, voices from nowhere in the silence, and the circles of sometimes desperate prayer focused on the greatest good, some people were healed, and some left to go on with their deaths. To a one, each of the people involved had nowhere else to go but to these ceremonies, as "Western" medicine had exhausted all of its options with them. Naturally. After all, they were seeing a Medicine Man! Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Immune Disorders including AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome were all dealt with, and each outcome was different. No one left those ceremonies without being deeply affected. Some people left in terror. Others left whole.
What I grasped was that in the ancient ways it was found that if things were done in a certain way, certain things would happen. Over years and years--perhaps millennia--of trial and error, visions and personal instructions by Spirit and Nature, it was found that the right combination of preparation, songs, intent, and action would beckon Spirit to appear, advise, and affect; time could be dissolved and the miraculous would be attainable.
What I witnessed was four individuals, Unci (Grandmother), Charles, Phillip (who, a paraplegic from a car accident, sat in a wheelchair), and Godfrey, the Yuwipi Man, working the space of the ceremony room, speaking to each other, sometimes in Lakota, sometimes in English, cobbling together different parts of the ceremony during their preparations, sometimes instructing, "no, NO the rattle goes over THERE," "spread the sand from Wahinheya (the Mole) from right to left, not left to right," "that song goes like This," all in precise detail with no guidebook or directions to follow but the memory of the way things had been taught them by their ancestors.
And all throughout, what became more and more evident to me was that there was a consistency of intent amongst them, an approach that crescendoed into the feeling that, indeed, they became, through the process of preparation and delivery, of one mind, one heart--all in service to the individual needing help. This was the gift that they passed on to me by their example, and I embraced it. But there was more: what I was a part of with them felt very, very old. At first this was just a feeling, but as time unfolded, I learned just how it was grounded in fact.
Nobody knows how far back the Chips' lineage goes. It's fair to surmise that it went way back, perhaps thousands of unbroken years along with the Sioux. The records start in the early 1800s with two boys from different families who were orphaned at an early age. They were adopted by a Grandmother, who raised them as brothers. One's name was Woptura (Wo-p-tuch-ha). The other one's name was Curly, better known as Crazy Horse. Woptura was recognized early on as carrying the Medicine. Some say he is one of the Immortals. It was he who made the medicine bundle that Crazy Horse wore in his hair that kept him impervious to bullets in war. (He did have his jaw shot through by the jealous husband of a lover, but that was the only such scar he suffered in his time.) The day that Crazy Horse was lured into a nearby fort and held captive, family legend has it that Woptura rode behind him, furiously trying to catch him to give him back the bundle, upon which he had been making repairs. He was too late. Crazy Horse, unprotected for perhaps the first time in many years, had been killed.
Woptura lived in very turbulent times. Around the turn of the century, all the Sioux children were taken from their families and put into Missionary Schools. Speaking the Native languages was forbidden, and all practicing of the medicine ways, songs, ceremonies, and rituals was banned at the risk of heavy punishment by the government. Woptura went underground and kept the medicine ways alive. John "Fire" Lame Deer states that all Lakota Medicine people today trace their lineage back to Woptura. It was Woptura, most believe, who originated the Yuwipi ceremony. Woptura had a son who inherited his Medicine. He was named Charles "Horn" Chips. "Chips" was the best the government agents could do when the family tried to explain that woptura was the thin, fine particulate film that lies on the very top of pond water. Others described it as the very fine powder from ground buffalo horn.
Charles "Horn" Chips had a son named Ellis. Ellis did not inherit the "Powers," yet he was a tremendously accomplished Singer who went on to create the Sioux National Anthem. Ellis, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, married a woman named Victoria from the Rosebud Reservation, about 75 miles East, and they had three sons. When it was found that the youngest, Godfrey, would talk to the Spirits during Yuwipi Ceremonies, Ellis obtained government permission to remove him from Grammar School and take on the full-time duty of training him in the Medicine ways--to the best of my knowledge, the last such Medicine Man to have been granted that privilege. The "edict," which I saw, stated that if father and son, or Godfrey alone were found in town on a school day, they would both be jailed. Ellis brought his son from Medicine Man to Medicine Man for his trainings, while also teaching him all that he himself had learned.
It was quite a while before I became familiar with this history. For the longest time, all I knew was that this family, whom I was quickly learning to love, carried something very powerful and special when their intent was focused on the good of others. Indeed, I had been brought to some people to be shown an example of Spirit in action. And the key to my being able to be in relationship with them was that they allowed me to learn and participate with them in ceremony and ritual. Not once was I told what or how to believe. I was always directed to continue to cultivate my own relationship with Spirit, to build my own medicine, to find how Spirit spoke to me so that I could then help others.
And this was why, when I was asked about Sundance, even at this early juncture in my relationship with the Chips, I knew it wasn't Godfrey's request.
At that first Sundance, I was thrust into an alternate reality. A brutal reality. The three counties that compose the Pine Ridge Reservation are the poorest in the nation. At that time, in 1991, the average life expectancy of a resident on the "Rez" was 48 years. Infant mortality was at a rate six times higher than the general US population. Alcoholism and drug use and gun play and car wrecks were rampant. Perhaps 85% of the population had nothing to do with the traditional ways. They were oriented to Christianity, and had more than a little fear of the things they surmised were going on "up there." I was told, if I were to come out to Sundance, to be prepared to die.
They weren't kidding, and it was not necessarily about Sundance itself. It was about being on the rez. During one six-week stretch while I was on Pine Ridge, which has a population of about 20,000, there was one violent death each week.
The Chips' home (inherited from Woptura) was about 640 acres on the prairie adjacent to the Dakota Badlands. A log cabin built in the 1920s, a clapboard house with ceremony room, and a trailer were the family homes. Water came from a persnickety hand pump, outhouses were the only privies, and the roads were no more than splintered and sliced asphalt, if they weren't gravel and dirt. Winters were brutal, insulation was sheets of plastic stapled to the inside of the walls, and the diet was primarily canned and highly processed goods called "commodities" dispensed by the government. With the nearest hospital over 100 miles away in Rapid City, I as a former paramedic knew that I could easily die from something as simple as a badly broken leg. Perhaps the strongest prayers of my life were prayed when I first understood the danger of the environment I was in.
Arriving about two weeks before the Sundance started, I was asked to tend fire for it with a few other people. That meant hauling firewood out of the creeks with no more than a 1960s vintage pick-up, and chain sawing up over six cords for use during the ceremony, which lasts for an "official" period of nine days. Four days of this are preparation, during which time there is a least one Inipi per day. One day is called "Tree Day," on which a tree is sacrificed and placed at the center of the arbor where the ceremony occurs. The following four days are the Sundance itself, which involves three Inipis or more each day. Along with traipsing far into the hills and gathering hundreds of Stone People for the lodges, re-building the arbor, which had a diameter of about 200 feet, and setting up camp sites, gathering sage, and tending fire for Inipis, I was working 14-hour days. I had been given no more spiritual direction than "Live your life as a prayer as you build a place for the people." I had to thrust myself into a world where my primary relationship was with Nature. And Nature told me what to do as it placed me closer and closer to the thin line between this world and that which lies beyond death. My solace was found by constantly turning to my relationship with my Creator for strength and understanding and the clarity to help others. By actively giving thanks for everything that was around me, I found that I received many "you're welcomes" from nature that were both deeply personal and objectively obvious.
Over the course of a number of visits to the rez over the next few years, I began taking on the responsibilities of Chief Firetender for the Sundance. Charles Chips, the Spiritual Intercessor, prepared all aspects of the ceremony itself, including choosing and working with the Dancers. I was responsible for everything that had to do with the physical aspects of the ceremony and grounds and, since I was very familiar with the property, mobilizing and working with the 100 or so supporters who arrived to assist about 50 Dancers. In this role, I passed on the little I knew about moving people to "one mind, one heart."
I had experienced the "idea" of preparing ceremony through Inipis in the small scale during the Yuwipis. Sundance seemed like a completely different matter, but I found that no matter how daunting the size of the event, no matter how complex the details, or foreign the language, what allowed things to happen in a good way--what provided a home for Spirit and fostered the allowance of miracles--was the intent of the people who participated to be there for others. I found that regardless of the knowledge or use of the ancient prayers, as long as the intent of the participants was clearly for the greater good, that is exactly what happened. It was that which I learned to work with.
As each year went by, and the family became a bit more splintered, I witnessed much loss of tradition. At my first Sundance all of the family members worked in unison--as I had witnessed in the Yuwipi Ceremonies--to get the specifics down as they had been passed on to them. Each successive Sundance--as Godfrey was unable to be present and took Unci with him, and then Phillip was killed in a car crash--seemed to have lost so many of the details that I had once thought were essential. Without many voices to guide me in the part that I was called on to play, I found myself learning to focus my intent on others, open my heart, and beckon the Spirit of Woptura to be present, even if I didn't have the words and had lost many of the details of the Sundance itself.
Spirit never ceased to appear and affect the people. The miracles never stopped. One individual came to dance with infected abscesses on his feet that I recognized as being on the border of gangrene. I lobbied long and hard for him to go to the hospital in Rapid City. He ignored me. He prayed hard and was able to walk by Tree Day, and then went on to complete the Dance, during which time his foot completely healed. There was something going on there that seemed to go beyond the words, the songs, the nuts and bolts of the rituals; as if just knowing the essence of the Spirit he was calling in was enough. It wasn't that particular Sundance that cured him, it was his intent to dance "so that the people may live," strengthened by the intent of the others around him for the same.
Not too long after my last Sundance on Pine Ridge, and shortly after Unci blessed my Cannunpa, a pipe I had taken a year to make myself as I was instructed, I started doing prayer circles. I was full of myself. Impressed by my own knowledge, there was an element that I soon had to come to terms with that was living inside of me. I wanted those people involved with me to know and experience how adept I was with what I was taught by the family. I came to recognize that my intent was geared towards making me look good.
I began by using some prayers in Lakota that I had learned in the Yuwipi Ceremony. In one of them, I called on Inktomi, the Spider. What followed was four days of what some would call psycho-kinetic phenomena: objects around me would spontaneously break, I experienced raindrops in sealed rooms, fire alarms would go off around me for no reason, even a computer started to spew out messages on its screen that were absolutely hauntingly specific to the people I was with--mean-spirited, isolated sentences dredged out from some deeply buried memory banks that supposedly had been erased by the prior owner. I felt an uncomfortable presence about me and literally felt hounded. My world had gone berserk.
Nothing I had ever experienced in my life remotely resembled this. To be honest, I didn't even believe that such things happened. I contacted the family, now back at Pine Ridge, and was told that Inktomi, the Trickster, was only to be called upon by an experienced Wicasa Wakan (wi-cha-sha wa-con), Holy Man, for its medicine is so strong and unruly that only a person so trained and pure could handle it. It is Inktomi that is called upon during Yuwipi Ceremonies. I was in way over my head.
My only recourse was to return to the Cannunpa, even though I was scared to death of it. I prayed with it for help to undo what I had done. I did so more humbly than I had approached anything in my life. I was in fear that the people with whom I had done ceremony had been harmed. The phenomena ceased. I came to realize that even separate from what I knew, separate from what I understood, there was a distinct Spirit that I called on that manifested in ways I could never have imagined. I had done things in a certain way and certain things had happened. What I had done was misuse my intent within the context of a Sacred Ceremony, and I had suffered the consequences. I laid down my Cannunpa for years, and only picked it up again when I understood that it was not for me, but for others. Before he died, Phillip, the middle brother, who was an exquisite singer and drummer, sat with me and we talked about the Yuwipi Ceremony. In it, right after the Yuwipi Man is encased and tied in the star quilt and laid down on the bed of sage, the lights are put out and the Welcoming Song begins. A rattle that is placed on the altar is taken up by Spirit, and shaking and glowing, it literally flies around the room barely above the heads of those gathered in prayer.
Technically, the rattle, made with the relatively transparent hide of a Buffalo's testicles and filled with large, luminous sand particles brought up from deep inside the earth by a particular ant that lives on the prairie, has the potential to produce this multi-colored, shimmering glow. But in the dark, no one in the room could possibly pick the rattle up and shake it so continuously, rhythmically, speedily, and precisely about the perimeter of the room without smacking a participant in the head, tripping over a person or object in the room, or, at the very least, disrupting the 405 prayer ties that form the outer border of the altar space.
Phillip told me, "When that rattle takes off, you just focus your prayers on the person who's there to be healed. Everything else is just Hollywood Bullshit." I understand what he meant now.
For more information regarding sacred ceremony, refer to Yuwipi by William K. Powers, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Russ Reina is Lost Valley's Conference Coordinator and a regular contributor to this magazine.
�2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
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