The Legend of the Dream Catcher by ckm329

THE LEGEND OF

THE DREAM CATCHER

“We are each a thread in the web of life...

strenghtened by the promise of our dreams.”

THE LEGEND OF

THE DREAM CATCHER

Dream catchers are one of the most fascinating traditions of Native Americans. Native Americans believe that the night air is filled with dreams both good and bad. The dream catcher, hung over oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bed, catches the dreams as they flow by. Bad dreams flow easily through the central hole and dissipate, while the good dreams are caught within the web, and slide down the soft feathers to grace the sleeping person below. This idea of the dream catcher has been a part of Native American culture for generations. One element of the Native American dream catcher relates to the tradition of the hoop. The Native Americans hold the hoop in the highest esteem, because it symbolizes strength and unity. Many symbols of protection are based upon the hoop, and the dream catcher is one of these symbols. Not only did the Native American people believe that the dream catcher protected their dreams, but their future as well. This book is dedication to these people and their dreams, as it is the intricate web.

THE WEB OF OUR DREAMD 12

THE WEB OF OUR MDREAM 13

Long ago, when the world was sound, an old Lakota spiritual leader was on a high mountain. On the mountain, he had a vision. In his vision, Iktomi—the great trickster and teacher of wisdom—appeared in the form of a spider, and spoke to him in a sacred language that only great leaders of the Lakota could understand. As Iktomi spoke, he took the elder’s willow hoop—which had feathers, horse hair, beads and offerings on it—and began to spin a web. He spoke to the elder about the cycles of life and how we begin our lives as infants. We then move on to childhood and in to adulthood. Finally, we move into old age where we must be taken care of as infants, thus, completing the cycle.

“But,” Iktomi said as he continued to spin his web, “in each time of life there are many forces—some good and some bad. If you listen to the good forces, they will steer you in the right direction. But, if you listen to the bad forces, they will hurt you and steer you in the wrong direction.” He continued, “There are many forces and different directions that can help or interfere with the harmony of nature, with the Great Spirit and all of his wonderful teachings.” All while the spider spoke, he continued to weave his web... starting from the outside and working toward the center. When Iktomi finished speaking, he gave the Lakota elder the web and said, “See, the web is a perfect circle, but there is a hole in the center.”

“Use the web to help yourself and your people... to reach your goals and make use of their ideas, dreams and visions. If you believe in the Great Spirit, the web will catch your good ideas, and the bad ones will go through the hole.” The Lakota elder passed his vision on to his people. Now, the Sioux use the dreamcatchers as the web of their life. Traditionally, it is hung above their beds or in their homes to sift their dreams and visions. Good dreams are captured in the web of life and carried with them... but the evil dreams escape through the center’s hole and are no longer part of them.

The Lakota believe the dreamcatcher holds the destiny of their future.

THE PEOPL P OF THE PLAINS 26

THE PEOPLE OF THE PLAINS 27

The name Lakota means “allies” or “friends.” The Lakota people are seven groups of Native American people who banded together as members of the Seven Council Fires. They share a common culture and heritage, but are separate social and political entities. The open rolling praries and plains of North America were once part of the vast homeland of the Lakota people. The wide expanse of Lakota territory encompassed the region today that comprises the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wyoming. The history of the Lakota people is a study in survival and perserverence. Before being forced westward by European settlers and warring Indian tribes, the Lakota used the natural resources of their praries to their full advantage, building communities along the Missouri River, planting crops, and hunting in the abundant forests. Following their displacement and with the advent of horses acquired from the Europeans, the formerly sedentary Lakota adopted a nomadic lifestyle, pursuing the buffalo—their most valuable resource—across the Plains.

On the open plains, mixed grasses cover rolling hills interrupted by sandhills, badlands, buttes, and canyons formed by the Missouri River and its tributaries. According to the winter count kept by American Horse, the first group of Oglala Lakota arrived at the Black Hills in 1775. They roamed throughout the region for some one hundred years before being settling in reservations. It was not the first time the Native people had traveled to the Plains, but it was the first time they stayed. There, the seasonally nomadic Lakota shared the environment with long-term residents who lived in permanent village settlements along the rivers and practiced agriculture. Nature offered not one, but various ways for humans to live on the Plains in quiet and undisturbed peace. Or so they dreamt.

The rapid series of events in the last quarter of the nineteenth century brought tremendous change to the lives of the Plains peoples. These encounters and conflicts with Euro-Americans are often seen as symbols for all the hardships that Native Americans have confronted. In 1876, the Lakota and Cheyenne fought General George A. Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn. The Lakota were forced to give up their sacred Black Hills to gold-mining interests by an act of Congress in 1877. The last buffalo hunt occurred in 1882. In 1890, Chief Big Foot and his band were brutally fired upon at Wounded Knee Creek. The Lakota have continued to occupy a central role in the national political Indian movement of the last half of the twentieth century. Two Lakota were founding members of the American Indian Movement, the militant Indian rights group whose protests culminated in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. The site at Wounded Knee has become a symbol of Native American desire for sovereignty based on the tribal system of values.

Despite daunting social and economic problems, including high unemployment and poor health care, the Lakota people continue a rich ceremonial and community life. Traditional Lakota values, the use of the Lakota language, and an expressive heritage remain strong.

THE HOPE OF THE THE GHOST 40

THE HOPE OF THE GHOST 41

On the morning of December 29, 1890, the Sioux chief Big Foot and some 350 of his followers camped on the banks of Wounded Knee creek. Surrounding their camp was a force of U.S. troops charged with the responsibility of arresting Big Foot and disarming his warriors. The scene was tense; trouble had been brewing for months. The once proud Lakota found their free-roaming life destroyed, their treaties ignored, the buffalo gone, themselves confined to reservations that were dependent on Native American Agents for their existence. In a desperate attempt to return to the days of their glory, many sought salvation in a new mysticism preached by a Paiute shaman called Wovoka. Emissaries from the Sioux in South Dakota traveled to Nevada to hear his words. Wovoka called himself the Messiah and prophesied that the dead would soon join the living in a world in which the Indians could live in the old way surrounded by plentiful game. A tidal wave of new soil would cover the earth, bury the whites, and restore the prairie. To hasten the event, the Indians were to dance the Ghost Dance.

Many dancers wore brightly colored shirts emblazoned with images of eagles and buffaloes. These “Ghost Shirts” they believed would protect them from the bluecoats’ bullets. In the fall of 1890, the Ghost Dance spread through the Sioux villages of the Dakota reservations, revitalizing the Indians and bringing fear to the whites. A desperate Native American Agent at Pine Ridge wired his superiors in Washington, “We need protection and we need it now. The leaders should be arrested and confined at some military post until the matter is quieted, and this should be done now.” The order called to arrest Chief Sitting Bull, who was killed in the attempt on December 15. Chief Big Foot was next on the list. When he heard of Sitting Bull’s death, Big Foot led his people south to seek protection at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The army intercepted the band on December 28 and brought them to the edge of the Wounded Knee to camp. The next morning the chief sat among his warriors and powwowed with the army officers. Suddenly a shot pierced the early morning gloom. Within seconds the charged atmosphere erupted as Native braves scurried to retrieve their discarded rifles and troopers fired into the Sioux camp. From the heights above, the army’s Hotchkiss guns raked the Indian teepees with grapeshot. Clouds of gun smoke filled the air as men, women and children scrambled for their lives. Many who ran for a nearby ravine were cut down in a cross fire.

When the smoke cleared and the shooting stopped, approximately 300 Sioux were dead, Chief Big Foot among them. Twenty-five soldiers lost their lives. As the remaining troopers began the grim task of removing the dead, a blizzard swept in from the North. A few days later, they returned to complete the job. Scattered fighting continued, but the massacre at Wounded Knee effectively squelched the Ghost Dance movement and ended the Indian Wars. Philip Wells was a mixed-blood Sioux who served as an interpreter for the Army. He later recounted what he saw that Monday morning: “I was interpreting for Colonel Forsyth just before the battle of Wounded Knee. The captured Indians had been ordered to give up their arms, but Big Foot replied that his people had no arms. Forsyth said to me, ‘Tell Big Foot he says the Indians have no arms, yet yesterday they were well armed when they surrendered. He is deceiving me. Tell him he need have no fear in giving up his arms, as I wish to treat him kindly.’ Big Foot replied, ‘They have no guns, except such as you have found.’ Forsyth declared, ‘You are lying to me in return for my kindness.’

During this time a medicine man, gaudily dressed and fantastically painted, executed the maneuvers of the ghost dance, raising and throwing dust into the air. He exclaimed ‘Ha! Ha!’ as he did so, meaning he was about to do something terrible, and said, ‘I have lived long enough,’ meaning he would fight until he died. Turning to the young warriors who were squatted together, he said ‘Do not fear, but let your hearts be strong. Many soldiers are about us and have many bullets, but I am assured their bullets cannot penetrate us. The prairie is large, and their bullets will fly over the prairies and will not come toward us. If they do come toward us, they will float away like dust in the air.’ I turned to Major Whitside and repeated what he had said. Whitside replied, ‘Go direct to Forsyth.’ Forsyth and I went to the circle of warriors where he told me to tell the medicine man to sit down and keep quiet, but he paid no attention to the order. Forsyth repeated the order. Big Foot’s brother-in-law answered, ‘He will sit down when he gets around the circle.’ When the medicine man came to the end of the circle, he squatted down. A cavalry sergeant exclaimed, ‘There goes an Indian with a gun under his blanket!’ Forsyth ordered him to take the gun from the Indian, which he did. Whitside then said to me, ‘Tell the Indians it is necessary that they be searched one at a time.’ The young warriors paid no attention to what I told them. I heard someone on my left exclaim, ‘Look out! Look out!’

I saw five or six young warriors cast off their blankets, pull guns out from under them and brandish them in the air. One of the warriors shot into the soldiers, who were ordered to fire into the Indians. I looked in the direction of the medicine man. He or some other medicine man approached to within three or four feet of me with a long cheese knife, ground to a sharp point and raised to stab me He stabbed me during the melee and nearly cut off my nose. I held him off until I could swing my rifle to hit him, which I did. I shot and killed him in self-defense. ‘Troop K’ was drawn up between the tents of the women and children and the main body of the Indians, who had been summoned to deliver their arms. The Indians began firing into ‘Troop K’ to gain the canyon of Wounded Knee creek. In doing so they exposed their women and children to their own fire. Captain Wallace was killed at this time in front of his troops. A bullet, which struck him in the forehead, plowed away the top of his head. I started to pull off my nose, which was hung by the skin, but Lieutenant Guy Preston shouted, ‘That can be saved!’ He then led me away from the scene of the trouble.

THE VOICE OF PINE RIDGE 56

THE VOICE OF PINE RIDGE 57

Almost every historical atrocity has a geographically symbolic core, a place whose name conjures up the trauma of a whole people: Auschwitz, Robben Island, Nanjing. For the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that place is a site near Wounded Knee Creek, 16 miles northeast of the town of Pine Ridge. From a distance the hill is unremarkable, another picturesque treespotted mound in the creased prairie. But here at the mass grave of all those who were killed on a winter morning more than a century ago, it’s easy to believe that certain energies—acts of tremendous violence and of transcendent love—hang in the air forever and possess a forever half-life. Alex White Plume, a 60-year-old Oglala Lakota activist, lives with his family and extended family on a 2,000-acre ranch near Wounded Knee Creek. White Plume’s land is lovely beyond any singing, rolling out from sage-covered knolls to creeks bruised with late summer lushness. From certain spots, you can see the Badlands, all sun-bleached spires and scoured pinnacles. And looking another way, you can see the horizon-crowning darkness of the Black Hills of South Dakota.

One hot and humid day in early August, I drove out to interview White Plume in a screened outdoor kitchen he had just built for his wife. Hemp plants sprouted thickly all over their garden. “Go ahead and smoke as much as you like,” White Plume offered. “I always tell people that: Smoke as much as you want, but you won’t get very high.” The plants are remnants from a plantation of industrial hemp—low-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) Cannabis sativa—cultivated by the White Plume family in 2000. During World War II cultivation of hemp was encouraged in the United States, its fiber used for rope, canvas, and uniforms. But in 1970 low-THC industrial hemp was outlawed under the Controlled Substances Act. In 1998 the Oglala Sioux Tribe passed an ordinance allowing the cultivation of hemp, a crop well suited to places like the “rez,” with a short season, arid soil, and weather fluctuations.

“The people of Pine Ridge have sovereign status as an independent nation,” White Plume said. “I take that to mean I am free to make a living from this land.” So in spite of reportedly stern warnings from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on Pine Ridge, who pointed out that Oglala Sioux sovereignty is limited and does not include the right to violate federal laws, the White Plumes planted an acre and a half of industrial hemp using seeds collected from plants growing wild on the rez. A few days before the crop was harvested, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the BIA, and the U.S. Marshals swarmed the place in helicopters and SUV s and shut down the hemp operation. The crop went feral. “It was an experiment in capitalism and a test of our sovereignty, but it seems the U.S. government doesn’t want to admit that we should have either.” Then he laughed in the way of a man who cannot be defeated by ordinary disappointments.

After that we spoke of the treaties made and broken between the U.S. and the Sioux, and that led naturally to a conversation about the Black Hills, which the Oglala consider their axis mundi, the center of their spiritual world. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteed the Sioux possession of the hills, but after gold was discovered there in 1874, prospectors swarmed in, and the U.S. government quickly seized the land. The Sioux refused to accept the legitimacy of the seizure and fought the takeover for more than a century. On June 30, 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an award of $17.5 million for the value of the land in 1877, along with 103 years’ worth of interest, together totaling $106 million. But the Sioux rejected the payment, insisting that the Black Hills would never be for sale. And then White Plume asked me to consider the seemingly calculated insult of Mount Rushmore. “The leaders of the people who have broken every treaty with my people have their faces carved into our most holy place. What is the equivalent? Do you have an equivalent?” I could offer none. Then White Plume, who punctuates his oddly unexcited view of history’s injustices not only with laughter but also with pauses long enough to roll a cigarette, looked up and asked if I had extra time on my hands and extra fuel in my car.

I said I had both, and we drove out onto his cathedral land. Sitting by a cottonwood-lined creek, in a dark pool of shade, we spoke of the ways in which lives are lost on the rez and about the suicide, earlier that summer, of a 15-yearold Oglala Lakota girl. Partly because time is not linear for the Oglala Lakota but rather is expressed in circular endlessness and beginnings, and partly because many can recite the members of their family trees, branch after branch, twig after twig, vines and incidental outgrowths included, it does not seem to me too big a historical step to go from the bodies piled in the snow at Wounded Knee in 1890 to the body of Dusti Rose Jumping Eagle lying in shiny mannequin perfection in an open coffin in a tepee in Billy Mills Hall in the town of Pine Ridge in early July, a scarf draped over her neck to conceal the wound.

“The whole Sioux Nation was wounded at that last terrible massacre, and we’ve been suffering ever since. It’s true we have our own ways of healing ourselves from the genocidal wound, but there is just so much historical trauma, so much pain, so much death,” White Plume said, and he would know. There is a flat plateau in the center of his ranch, he told me, where some of the historic Ghost Dances that precipitated the Wounded Knee massacre are supposed to have taken place. Three of his relatives were killed on that winter day. Testifying to the commissioner of Indian Affairs in February 1891, the Oglala leader American Horse said of that day, “There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce... Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that was especially a very sad sight... Of course it would have been all right if only the men were killed; we would feel almost grateful for it. But the fact of the killing of the women, and of the young boys and girls who are to go to make up the future strength of our people, is the saddest part of the whole affair and we feel it very sorely.”

“They tried extermination, they tried assimilation, they broke every single treaty they ever made with us,” White Plume said. “They took away our horses. They outlawed our language. Our ceremonies were forbidden.” White Plume is insistent about the depth and breadth of the policies and laws by which the U.S. government sought to quash Native Americans, but his delivery is uncomplainingly matter-offact. “Our holy leaders had to go underground for nearly a century.” It wasn’t until Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, in 1978, that any interference in native spiritual practices was made a crime. “And yet our ceremonies survived, our language survived,” White Plume said. Buried deep within the pages of the 2010 Defense appropriations bill, signed by President Barack Obama in December 2009, is an official apology “to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” The resolution commends those states “that have begun reconciliation efforts with recognized Indian tribes,” but there is no mention of reparations, nor of honoring long-broken treaties.

White Plume lit one of his rolled-up cigarettes and squinted at me through a ribbon of smoke. “Do you know what saved me from becoming a cold-blooded murderer? My language saved me. There is no way for me to be hateful in my language. It’s such a beautiful, gentle language. It’s so peaceful.” Then he started to speak in Lakota, and there was no denying the words came softly. And out there, against the restless Great Plains sky, bleak with heavy spring snow clouds, White Plume raised an American flag, union down. According to the Flag Code of the United States of America, the flag should never be displayed union down, except as a signal of dire distress or in instances of extreme danger to life or property. “That’s almost right,” White Plume said. “We’re in dire distress, but we don’t need anyone to come and save the Indian. When we honor our customs, and when we perform ceremonies, and when we listen to our ancestors, then we have everything we need to heal ourselves within ourselves.”

White Plume thought for a moment, and then he added, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Write this: When the lights go out for good, my people will still be here. We have our ancient ways. We will remain.â&#x20AC;?

“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream… the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” —Chief Black Elk

“The Legend of the Dreamcatcher” Produced, created, and edited by Caroline Mitchell All photography credited to Aaron Huey