Thomas Kevin O'Rourke
Songs of Holy Grandfathers at Eagle Butte
Long ago, one Friday night in May, I recounted stories of great-grandmothers on the low stage of the Seward Cafe. From them, I received the knowledge of Three Sisters gardening, the language of animals, foraging for mushrooms and wild foods, herbal medicine and poetry. Ten years sober, I had gotten better at storytelling. Despite sobriety, I carried shortcomings of which I am ashamed. For instance, I attended the men’s group nicknamed Werewolves Anonymous on Wednesday evening that past week. Been doing this so long that I became a facilitator. Hi. I’m O., a recovering violent and abusive man.
My AA sponsor, a man I’ll call Father Merle, sat at a table with a dark-skinned elder who leaned forward in her chair and listened with her chin in her hand. In the end, Merle waved at me to visit with them.
The woman shook my hand. “Ever been to a Sundance?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“When the chokecherries turn black, get to Eagle Butte on the Cheyenne River Reservation. When you arrive at the gate, tell them Lola sent you. They’ll expect you and set you to chop wood and haul water.”
I looked to Father Merle. “When do chokecherries turn black?”
“First week of August. Do what she tells you,” Merle said.
Lola nodded.
In August, I hitched straight west from Minneapolis until reaching the home of the Cheyenne River Sioux. I arrived a week early for the Sundance, but people pitched tents in a public camp. My tent consisted of an army surplus mosquito fly and a piece of sheet plastic to keep off the rain. I had integrated the discipline of doing twelve Solar Salutations, one for each of the twelve steps, as the sun rises. Old Cheyenne men found me and set me at tasks.
Firewood and rocks are necessary for sweat lodges. We rode in pickup beds into the gullies and across the steppes for cutting wood and digging rocks from hillsides. One of the crew, a Sundancer, took me aside.
“Your first Sundance, be careful of mania. Our flaws increase in intensity, as do our gifts. It’s the best time to face ourselves. Our flaws become diamondback rattlers that kill us if we don’t.”
The Sundance arbor needed boughs for shade. Sunday began the first of four days of purification. In the shade of the arbor at the day’s end, I pulled out my small jack-knife and pulled splinters from my palms and fingers. The crew, women and men, lined up. The Holy Man, nearly seven feet tall, extended his palms to me. The Titan worked harder than anyone and had the most splinters.
On Tuesday, I’m tasked with security at the cattle gate entrance to the camp by the medicine man’s trailer. A new silver Volvo station wagon arrived at the gate. I opened the gate and judged the visitors as they drove into camp and crossed the shallow creek. They parked in tall grass near the Sundance arbor and got out of the car. As they walked toward the arbor, grass beneath the silver Volvo’s hot catalytic converter and muffler pipe caught fire.
The giant Holy Man came out of his trailer and stood beside me at the cattle gate. In another minute, the gas tank blew, and flames engulfed the car.
Hunching my shoulders, I told him. “I judged them for being rich as they drove through the gate.”
Eyes wide with horror, he shook his head. “You have a new name. He Judges People, Their Cars Catch Fire.”
*
Wednesday was Tree Day. We dug an inclined trench to a six-foot-deep hole at the arbor’s center to raise the tree when it arrived. Most men from camp wore ribbon shirts, clean blue jeans and cowboy boots for the occasion. The women dressed in ankle-length skirts. Eagle bone whistles dangled on sinew around the necks of men sundancers. I climbed aboard the flatbed pulled by a four-wheel-drive pickup. Earlier I helped a crew lash wood cross-supports on that flatbed. I wore a bandana over my face as the caravan drove the winding dirt roads in a cloud of chalky dust to harvest the sacred poplar tree and deliver it to the Sundance grounds. The sundancers sang to the tree in the Lakota Language. A boy and girl made the first ax cuts in the trunk. Next, Veterans, women and men, took a stroke. The singing continued as the tree gently toppled, not touching the ground, caught on log stringers by the crew. The caravan returned to camp and stopped outside the cattle gate. Strong young men removed the tree from the wood cross-supports and carried it above their shoulders on log stringers.
The drummers sang as the men carried the tree around the arbor and lay it on the ground, trunk towards the trench. Women sundancers fastened long ribbons of tobacco ties in the poplar limbs. Men lashed a bundle of chokecherry branches laden with fruit across the tree’s crotch. Sundancers tied piercing ropes to the trunk below the crotch. When the drum signaled an honor song, sundancers raised the tree into position with the ropes, spiders spreading themselves around the arena on threads. The camp’s helpers, including boys and girls, filled the hole and tamped the earth to hold the tree firm. The public left the arena, and only the dancers remained, women dancers in charge of wrapping tobacco ties around the tree’s base to the height of an adult.
At the east gate, where the spirits enter at dawn with the rising sun, an experienced helper stretched barrier ropes from posts to trees in the woods so the public couldn’t take a shortcut across the outside and interfere with the flow and visitation and presence of beings from parallel dimensions. Within the arena’s outer edge, 12-inch tall red sticks served as a fence to prevent the world and its distractions from entering the spirit world. The Sundance ground was now ready. Sundancers returned to personal camps for the night.
Before dawn, a winkte holy person with a voice, body and mind of a man and a woman sang the call to prayer. A young man who worked the sweat lodge fires overnight walked through the camp and called out in a resonating voice, “Sundancers, the Grandfathers are ready!” The Grandfathers are the red-hot stones. A leader pours water on them in the sweat lodges.
Sundancers made their way to the sweat lodges, men bare-chested in shorts and women in calf-length smocks. After the sweat, they returned to camp and brought their regalia to the arbor. At the drum’s signal, sundancers fetched their pipes from the pipe tipi. They lined up, the men bare-chested and in ankle-length handmade skirts with unique designs of different colors: bolts of lightning, a bison, a mountain range, black and white, a yellow spider. The women wore one-piece shifts of one of the six colors—red, black, yellow, white, blue, and green, representing one of the six directions. All sundancers wore crowns of sage wrapped in cloth, the same colors or combination of colors, and sage bracelets on wrists and feet. The drummers sang the Six-Direction song as the dancers walked, then stopped and faced the given direction. The dancers entered the arena at the east gate. A cedar boy at the east gate gripped the wildwood handle attached with a sheetrock screw to a coffee can filled with coals. He added cedar leaves onto the coals from a cloth bag slung from his shoulder. Each dancer waved the fragrant smoke towards them as they entered the arena. The child retreated, and the dance began.
Someone told me sundancers walk in the spirit world as though dead. During their trek into the underworld, protocols forbid the sundancers to touch, make eye contact, or speak with the public.
When a dance round ended, sundancers sequestered themselves and rested in the private arbor area until the drum began anew. The six dance rounds went from sunrise to late afternoon. They danced the four days and fasted, including no water or liquid.
People watched the Sundance from the public shade arbor encircling the arena except at the east gate. During the piercing rounds, family members entered the south gate to dance behind Sundancer fathers, uncles, brothers, sons, aunties, daughters and sisters.
*
While in the tent village camp, a four-foot-long bull snake found me. The snake had an aluminum pop-top around its neck just behind the head. Maybe somebody necklaced the snake when it was smaller. Maybe it crawled into the pop-top on its own, but now the pop-top cut into the flesh. Other folks in the camp killed bull snakes, confusing them with the common diamondback rattlers.
Sliding both palms under the snake’s belly, I taped her to a stump, then clipped the pop-top with my multi-tool. I removed the black vinyl tape with care not to tear the bull snake’s skin.
*
On the third day of Sundance, the public prays at the sacred tree during the healing round. We lined up at the north side of the arbor and removed sneakers, sandals and work boots as Cedar Boy smudged us. When permitted, we entered the arena one at a time. The Holy Man stood in the arbor between the north entry and the tree with colored strips of cloth tied in the branches.
Each person spoke to the Holy Man, who sent the individual to the tree. The person knelt, prayed, stood up and walked between a gauntlet of sundancers until exiting through the south gate.
When my turn came, I approached the giant Holy Man. Even though I’m six feet tall and my eyes were level with his chest, he tilted his head to one side, and his dark eyes met mine. “Hello, Snake Medicine. What’s with you?”
I blurted, “I have domestic violence, and I’m trying to stop.”
He exhaled and sighed. “That’s a difficult one. Go to The Man. Pray for yourself, me, and those we harm.”
That’s when I learned the sacred tree was a person, not an object. I walked barefoot to The Man and knelt, pressing my face against the softness of thousands of prayer ties wrapped around his trunk. Piercing ropes dangled at my back and shoulders as I asked The Man and Sentient Infinity for this affliction of war, street violence, domestic violence, and abuse to be lifted from me and others. I asked that somehow those I harmed would seek healing and forgive me. Then I stood and stepped slowly between the gauntlet of sundancers I knew from woodcutting crews.
During the ensuing decades, I learned the songs, Lakota language, and intricacies of the ceremony. But then it was new, my brain cells excited and exploding with light and intensity, mania harnessed in helpful labor. The way I told it to young men I mentored at sweat lodges and under Sundance arbors, eagle wings smacked my head, face, back, and shoulders and shoved me from one line of sundancers to the others.
The truth is that both lines of sundancers patted and stroked my back, torso, arms and forehead, thighs, knees, calves, and feet with fans of eagle feathers and stroked my cheeks, wiping tears away. As I walked between them, I heard a conversation with Father Merle.
“I was in the hatch fifty times,” he said. “When they released me the last time, they issued the papers: Certified Sane. They even named a violent ward after me. So, taking responsibility for your insanity is possible.”
My mouth dropped open. “Insanity is my excuse to do whatever I want.”
“Not anymore,” Merle said.
I paused between pairs of sundancers in the gauntlet, my eyes looking inward to when my parents split because of domestic violence in Chicago. Mom moved us from the first floor to the basement apartment, likely costing less. The lower-level gangway made it easy to enter unseen from the street through the kitchen door. In those days, all the kids went home for lunch. I was six, in first grade, and walked with my sister, still five. Instead of dressed to play, I wore my Cub Scout uniform, pants with brass studs, red as a chickaree to keep the pockets from disrepair.
The kitchen lights were off and shades drawn. Instead of juice and white bread with baloney or the sweet tomato smell of hot ravioli, the place seemed empty and forsaken.
No laughter from little brother, comedian and clown. As Mom stood framed in the hallway, her eyes wide and spooky, she said, Stay in your rooms until I come for you – urgency in her voice. She couldn’t just grab us and run because infant Jennifer was in a crib, and brother Dave the clown, three years old, hid somewhere. I pulled a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and still recall the image of a white bone-handled shank as I paced my bedroom and listened to my teeth chatter. I couldn’t control that any more than I could control what happened next.
The bedroom door swung open. The hands upon the frame belonged to a man in khaki slacks. I almost forgot this event the way flame eats at celluloid. I understood my shame and flashbacks of clutching the little knife in terror, the brass pocket studs in recurring nightmares, and how self-hatred, addiction, and violence became my lifelong maelstrom in answer to my shit upon and torn Cub Scout denims.
I continued through the gauntlet as sundancers beat me gently with angel wings, and waves of tears fell, a chorus of stones heavy as songs of Holy Grandfathers.
Thomas Kevin O’Rourke is a recovering street person, retired barge worker, and jack of all trades. He led men’s groups to end violence, deconstruct classism and racism, emphasize restorative justice and healing from atrocity, and taught gestalt poetry in Minnesota prisons. He has been a Sundancer with the Sicangu of Rosebud Reservation for forty years.