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A Shamanic Tale
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10091 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
2,417 Words |
| Author
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Ron McCoy
Ron McCoy is professor of history at Emporia State University
(Kansas). His article "She of Myth and Memory: The Remarkable
Legend of Sacagawea" appeared in the March 2002 issue of The
World & I. |
TOUCHING THE FIRE
Buffalo Dancers, the Sky Bundle, and Other Tales
Roger Welsch
New York: Villard, 1992
224 pp., $20.00
At the beginning of Roger Welsch's Touching the Fire, the elders of Nebraska's Turtle Creek Nehawka tribe select a name by which the year just past will be remembered.
True to their traditions, the Nehawkas maintain a winter count--an orally transmitted chronology of the most memorable events of each "winter," or year as measured from the first snowfall of one year to the first snowfall of the next. Plains tribes that kept such records often augmented verbal descriptions of events with drawings, images intended to trigger knowledgeable persons' memories.
In Welsch's novel, the Nehawkas charged with this task experience no difficulty deciding on a name for the year. They call it "The Winter the People Came Home Again" because during this year the Nehawkas reclaimed their sacred Sky Bundle from Boston's Densmore Museum.
The Sky Bundle is a Medicine. A medicine bundle is a container--usually, though not necessarily, an animal hide--within which repose sacred objects believed to possess what westerners since the scientific revolution have called supernatural power. (The distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" is, from the perspective of many Native Americans, an artificial, inherently antinatural contrivance.) Such objects are imbued with Medicine; as the Lakota of North and South Dakota say, they are Wakan: sacred, holy. (Welsch draws tellingly on the Lakota term Wakan Tanka when he writes, "Among the native peoples of the northern Plains common name for God is the Great Mysterious. No noun, just two adjectives. The great, mysterious what? Just the Great Mysterious.") Medicine bundles may contain braided sweet grass, the fragrant incense of the Plains; locks of hair or scalps; fossils, rocks, shells; virtually anything.
Medicine bundles are kept by individuals, either for themselves or on behalf of others; in some instances, as with the Nehawkas' Sky Bundle, the keeper of the sacred assemblage acts for an entire tribe. The Lakota, for example, still maintain a medicine bundle within which they preserve the White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe, given to them long ago by a mysterious visitors who transformed herself into a white
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