As each year passed and the family became a little more divided, I witnessed a great loss of tradition.
At my first Sundance, all family members worked in unison, as I had witnessed at the Yuwipi Ceremonies, to get the details that had been passed down to them. Each successive Sundance, since Godfrey couldn’t make it and took Unci with him, and then Phillip died in a car accident, seemed to have missed many of the details I once thought essential. Without many guiding voices in the role I was asked to play, I found myself learning to focus my intention on others, open my heart, and invite the Spirit of Woptura to be present, even if I didn’t have the words and had lost many of the details of Sundance itself.
Spirit never stopped appearing at Sundance. It never stopped affecting people. Regardless of lost traditions and niceties. The miracles never stopped. An individual came to dance with infected abscesses on his feet. His foot was turning black, bordering on 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 until Arbor Day, and then completed the Dance, during which time his foot was completely healed. I’m talking no scars!
Something was happening there that seemed to go beyond words, songs, the practical details of rituals; as if just knowing the essence of the Spirit he was calling to was enough. It wasn’t that particular Sundance that cured him, it was his intention to dance “so that people live,” strengthened by the intention of others around him for the same.
Not long after my last Sundance at Pine Ridge, and shortly after Unci blessed my Cannunpa, a pipe that had taken me a year to make as directed, I began holding prayer circles. I was full of myself. Struck by my own knowledge, there was an element that I soon had to accept as living within me.
I wanted the people involved with me to know and experience how adept I was with what the family taught me. I came to recognize that my intention was aimed at making myself look good. I began by using some Lakota prayers that I had learned at the Yuwipi Ceremony. In one of them I called inktomi (Ick-tomi), the Spider. Big mistake!
What followed were four days of what some would call psychokinetic phenomena: objects around me were breaking spontaneously, I was experiencing raindrops in sealed rooms, fire alarms were going off all around me for no reason, a computer even started spewing messages on its screen that were utterly disturbing specific to the people I was with; stingy stingy phrases pulled from some deeply buried memory banks that had supposedly been erased by the previous owner. And those were just the external phenomena!
At the same time, he was completely drunk with a sense of power. But the cost was astronomical. I felt an uncomfortable presence around me, sometimes trying to get in me and stay I literally felt harassed by the Spirits, as if the emotions of specific personalities were going to run through me. I would suddenly collapse with abject fear, hilarious laughter, or desperate tears, knowing full well that it had nothing to do with what I myself was experiencing at the time.
He had crossed into a bloodline of spirits that he really knew. nothing about. My world had gone crazy. Nothing I had ever experienced in my life was remotely like this. To be honest, he didn’t even believe that such things happen.
I contacted the family, now back in Pine Ridge, and they told me that Inktomi could only be called by an experienced Wicasa Wakan (wi-cha-sha wa-con), Holy Man, because his medicine is so strong and unruly that only a person so trained and pure could handle it. It is Inktomi who is invoked during the Yuwipi Ceremonies. He was way in over my head.
My only recourse was to go back to the Cannunpa, even though I was scared to death. I prayed with him that he would help me undo what he had done. I did it with more humility than I had ever approached anything in my life. More than anything, he was afraid that the people he had done the ceremony with had been harmed. He had no idea what he had unleashed and on whom.
In the final analysis, I took the amazing gifts the family casually offered me. For every action there is a reaction, and this white man had taken what was not his out of the context of his caretakers and tried to do with it what they do with it. No, it just doesn’t work that way, and the balance is struck within the context of the traditions being violated, NOT in terms or experiences that make sense to the trespasser.
After four days of paralysis, the phenomena stopped. I realized that even apart from what I knew, apart from what I understood; there was a different Spirit than the one I called and it manifested itself in ways I could never have imagined. He had done things a certain way and certain things had happened!
What I had also done was abuse my intention within the context of a Sacred Ceremony. I put my Cannunpa down for years, only picking it up again when I was willing to stake everything I am and everything I own to use it for others, not myself.
For more information on the sacred ceremony, see Yuwipi by William K. Powers, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
