rain, riding hard to Northfield where they would do violence and once more bring the past into the present. I had a sense of them all out there, could feel the chill of the dark and wet on my own skin. “How do you know?” she said and I felt the pull of her voice drawing me away from this vision and into another place. “How do you know dark from light?”
WARAJU PRAIRIE,
MINNESOTA
1849–1859
“From the desperate city you go into the desperate country. . . .”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
A BRIEF
HISTORY OF
THE OTHER
T HE MORNING OF his birth the sun rose pale and rimmed with sun dogs, like a harried old man chased by wolves across the great emptiness. On the open span of prairie below, a scattering of a dozen teepees huddled near a wooded draw. Smoke rose in thin breathing streams from only four of those teepees. The rest shuddered in the north wind, the buffalo skin flaps opening and closing like slit mouths. On the outskirts of the village circle, one teepee had collapsed inward as though crushed by a giant foot.
A woman in fringed doeskin, her hair unbraided, passed this collapsed teepee carrying something close to her chest. Hungry half-wolf mongrels nipped at her ankles until she kicked them away. When she reached the edge of a winding creek, she broke through the skin of ice with the flat of one hand. A moment later she dunked the baby she carried headlong into the frigid water and then pulled it out again, holding it by the ankles. The village, silent until this moment, erupted with the sound of his squalling. She held him upside down for a moment longer, saying his name aloud: Wanikiya, Savior .
With his birth winter would return, and the strange speckling illness that flourished in the unnatural warm air, killing half of Seeing Stone’s tribe, would release its hold.
The woman’s name was Wichapewastwan, Good Star Woman , and after she dunked the child in the frigid water she carried him back to the teepee and coated his skin with bear grease and a fine layer of vermilion powder before binding him in the cradleboard. All that remained of her husband, Seeing Stone, was a lock of hair within a deerskin mourning bundle hanging from one of the cedar poles. This was where his second soul remained close to this earth, whispering inside her and telling her that this child, born to an old woman, would be proclaimed a “child beloved.”
The baby had a fine head of dusky black hair and a single lock of silver. His mother would swear that sometimes the ghost of his father became visible in the child’s dark eyes, like glimmers of fish seen in a river at night.
After the child’s birth the medicine man, Hanyokeyah, Flies in the Night , led the remaining band back onto the reservation and the camp the white soldiers chose for them to live, a place they had fled from when Chief Seeing Stone’s oldest son, Tatanyandowan, Pretty Singer , killed a cow that belonged to a settler.
The hair-faced soldiers had come to the camp to demand they turn the killer over, but Seeing Stone refused and instead took his band of Wahpekute, The People Who Shoot Among the Leaves , out onto the prairie during the moon when the wind shakes the leaves from the trees. Flies in the Night had advised against this journey, dreaming of the illness— which caused skin to peel away like layers of birchbark—coming down on them in a red rain of pollen as they passed through a maple forest on the way out to the grasslands.
Now, with the child’s birth, they would go back and turn over Pretty Singer to the soldiers. Eager to escape this place of sickness, they would leave some of the teepees still standing. The train of dogs and travois poles and speckled ponies marched into the moaning north wind, and if the child Wanikiya’s newborn vision had not been clouded, he might have turned his neck from the confines of the cradleboard and witnessed the grove of cottonwoods where bodies were draped from
WARAJU PRAIRIE,
MINNESOTA
1849–1859
“From the desperate city you go into the desperate country. . . .”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
A BRIEF
HISTORY OF
THE OTHER
T HE MORNING OF his birth the sun rose pale and rimmed with sun dogs, like a harried old man chased by wolves across the great emptiness. On the open span of prairie below, a scattering of a dozen teepees huddled near a wooded draw. Smoke rose in thin breathing streams from only four of those teepees. The rest shuddered in the north wind, the buffalo skin flaps opening and closing like slit mouths. On the outskirts of the village circle, one teepee had collapsed inward as though crushed by a giant foot.
A woman in fringed doeskin, her hair unbraided, passed this collapsed teepee carrying something close to her chest. Hungry half-wolf mongrels nipped at her ankles until she kicked them away. When she reached the edge of a winding creek, she broke through the skin of ice with the flat of one hand. A moment later she dunked the baby she carried headlong into the frigid water and then pulled it out again, holding it by the ankles. The village, silent until this moment, erupted with the sound of his squalling. She held him upside down for a moment longer, saying his name aloud: Wanikiya, Savior .
With his birth winter would return, and the strange speckling illness that flourished in the unnatural warm air, killing half of Seeing Stone’s tribe, would release its hold.
The woman’s name was Wichapewastwan, Good Star Woman , and after she dunked the child in the frigid water she carried him back to the teepee and coated his skin with bear grease and a fine layer of vermilion powder before binding him in the cradleboard. All that remained of her husband, Seeing Stone, was a lock of hair within a deerskin mourning bundle hanging from one of the cedar poles. This was where his second soul remained close to this earth, whispering inside her and telling her that this child, born to an old woman, would be proclaimed a “child beloved.”
The baby had a fine head of dusky black hair and a single lock of silver. His mother would swear that sometimes the ghost of his father became visible in the child’s dark eyes, like glimmers of fish seen in a river at night.
After the child’s birth the medicine man, Hanyokeyah, Flies in the Night , led the remaining band back onto the reservation and the camp the white soldiers chose for them to live, a place they had fled from when Chief Seeing Stone’s oldest son, Tatanyandowan, Pretty Singer , killed a cow that belonged to a settler.
The hair-faced soldiers had come to the camp to demand they turn the killer over, but Seeing Stone refused and instead took his band of Wahpekute, The People Who Shoot Among the Leaves , out onto the prairie during the moon when the wind shakes the leaves from the trees. Flies in the Night had advised against this journey, dreaming of the illness— which caused skin to peel away like layers of birchbark—coming down on them in a red rain of pollen as they passed through a maple forest on the way out to the grasslands.
Now, with the child’s birth, they would go back and turn over Pretty Singer to the soldiers. Eager to escape this place of sickness, they would leave some of the teepees still standing. The train of dogs and travois poles and speckled ponies marched into the moaning north wind, and if the child Wanikiya’s newborn vision had not been clouded, he might have turned his neck from the confines of the cradleboard and witnessed the grove of cottonwoods where bodies were draped from
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