Free Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) by Leonard C. Dog

nothing. First we lived in a tent. I built my own house with my own hands. Without money. Nobody helped. I built it from wooden crates, logs, packing paper, old car windows, pieces of corrugated sheet iron. I found a big iron stove that a white man had thrown away, found an old door from a wrecked place, but it was a cozy home. I took care of my own.
    “I have white friends. They are good people. Man to man I can relate, but white Americans as a whole, that’s different. The white man made me a surplus Indian. I couldn’t digest the white man’s ways. They made me sick. I am a truant from school, a truant from life. I am a truant from the white man’s life into the spirituallife. They cut me in half—a white man’s half and an Indian half. Now, when I’m old, I try to put the halves together, because, though I’m a full-blood, I have to live in the white man’s world. Under that system I need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, a judge, a psychiatrist, a pill, and lots of money. We didn’t need such things when I was a kid. To tell the truth, now I need only my pipe. To hell with all the other stuff!
    “The buffalo’s gone. He was something! Now we have the holsteins, the Angus. Us buffalo people can’t get used to the holstein. That’s a surplus buffalo. Babies used to go to sleep on milk from the two natural milk bottles of their mother. Now it’s pasteurized stuff from the holstein. But even the holstein milk is gone. Now it’s powder, and formula. Old-time fellows used to go to sleep on cougar milk, on white lightning, the hard stuff. Slept like babies. Now we have insomnia. It used to be hump meat, raw buffalo liver, kidney. Now it’s milk, cheese, powdered eggs, bread like cotton wool. It made me lose all my teeth. Maybe that was the plan: Make Mister Indian lose his teeth so that he can savor that soft white man’s chesli [shit].
    “Why did the white man come here? Why did Custer steal the sacred Black Hills from us? White men are crazy about gold. They have gold-rimmed glasses, gold watches, gold teeth. They were always rooting around, tearing everything apart, digging, digging, digging. They tore up the whole Black Hills to find gold, silver, and precious stones. They still work the huge gold mine, the Homestake mine, up there. Now they’re after gas, coal, oil, and uranium. You can see the big trucks with the nuclear stuff coming through here from the Black Hills. We got to civilize the white man because he has gone crazy.
    “They call us bloody savages, but when they have a war, suddenly we’re good Indians. ‘Here, take a gun, fight for your country!’ So, okay, our young boys went over there to Vietnam, went to war, and some of them died there. But for whose country? We were fighting the last war against aborigines. That was like Crow and Rhee scouting for Custer. The white man has eyes, but hedoes not see. He has ears, but he does not hear. The clock of the universe, the spirit clock, has already struck twelve. It is time to set this clock right, time to stop and think. Let my voice be heard. Stop making weapons! Make relatives! Make a worldwide alowanpi, the relation-making ceremony. If you don’t watch out, a time will come when the bullets won’t work, the bomb won’t work, the spaceships will fall into the ocean. The generals, the senators, the president himself won’t know what to do. They’ll end up eating snakes, nothing but snakes.
    “The Great Spirit of the wasichu gave the white folks the Bible and the dictionary, because they always forget. The Ten Commandments—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t covet—they always forget. They have to look up that don’t kill, don’t rob, don’t lie all the time. We don’t have to be reminded, so we don’t need a book to tell us.
    “I have no education, but the spirits talk to me. I listen, and I learn about relationship, I learn about spirits. Over the hills there, one time, there were two antelopes, a buck and a female. Someone