03/01/2024 No. 201
 
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Indian Style (II)
By Calvin Tatsey
November 1, 2008


The article is also published by http://theblackfeetreview.blogspot.com/.


When I was a little kid by Willow Creek, I went over there to catch frogs. I started imitating those elders, ceremonially. I started singing some songs. These two muskrats swam up the creek and they went on the other side of the bank, crawled out of the water and sat there looking at me. A magpie flew down and landed beside me and just sat there. What do you call those salamanders or lizards? He come crawling out of the brush and sat right along side of me on a rock, and he start singing and I jumped up and started running and took off home.

When I was a small kid the wind used to come through cracks and put me to sleep, it would sing to me.

I remember the old people would take their laundry down to the creek and wash clothes and they would sing water songs. They were really pretty songs. One song they said was an otter song; another, a beaver song; another, a swan song; another, a cleaning [washing-up] song.

The pipes, them pipes would move around and like almost shake, them old people would sit there and say they’re getting anxious to smoke [meaning spirits] we’d better light them up.

One time I saw my grandma cuss out a ghost, throw her shoe at it and chase it out.

Dreams, I’d talk to dead people, ghosts, from a very early age. They’d sing to me or just stand there or come in and walk around. In my dreams they were friendly. In my dreams I knew they were dead.

Right after the nineteen-sixty four floods, everything disappeared; everything went away, ended, when things were done.

My earliest recollection of spirituality, I think I was about two or three years old. I was dreaming that I jumped out of my body and I kept going up and up, until I was in space. I could see planet earth. Then I saw a big road, leading to Earth, and then a big ball going down that road, like it was going to collide with Earth or something. My memories of that are very sketchy now, but at the time, it made me very sick. It made me sick to where them old people had to doctor me, sick for about a month. I remember them painting my face. I think they stuck a black plume and a red plume above my head.

Another time was when we had all our relatives visiting at our house and all the adults left to do something, but all us kids stayed at our house. There had to be fifteen or twenty of us kids. We were playing tag and chasing each other, screaming at each other, screaming fighting, making a lot of noise. Too much noise, we woke up one of them bundles. We were wrestling and playing in the living room and that bundle came walking through that living room. It had the body of a man and the head of a buffalo. The head was big. I heard snorting and like a whole bunch of hoofs, like a stampede or something. We began to scatter, jumping out of the windows and exiting the house any way we could, running away and crying. The dogs which were outside sensed some presence also. They made all kinds of noises, yelping and howling, etc… We stayed outside until the adults returned home. When they returned my grandma went in there and made everything normal, safe, and put everything back in order. That was lesson number one.

For me lesson number two was my brother J---y. My grandma told me to get the smudge sticks down and that we were going to smudge and have a ceremony. While we were going about our business, my brother J---y and two lf his cool, non-traditional friends entered the house and I informed him of our plans. J---y began to belittle our traditions, telling us that we were in modern times and to forget about what we were doing. He then went outside and no more than three seconds later he re-entered the house, naked and in shock, he stayed in shock for about three days. The next day we found his clothes scattered up to a half a mile away, in all different locations. The thing about it was, J---y grew up with and in the ‘Indian Way’, practicing and aware of traditions, beliefs and culture, right along side of me, under my grandmother’s teachings. The lesson we learned from that was you have got to watch your mouth. You got to watch what you do and say around this holy stuff, these holy medicines.

Some of our neighborhood kids found a pipe; it was a old-cracked pipe, no stem, just a pipe. Their parents sent them to our house with the pipe, they set it on the table and left. At the time there were two old men and three old ladies in my house. Those old people broke a braid of sweet grass and stuffed it into the pipe and told me and my uncle to go put it away, outside. We brought it up to the foothills, west of Browning. We found a gopher hole, put it in the hole, stuffed it with dirt and put a big rock over it. We began to walk away and got no more than thirty or forty yards and then we heard this voice saying, ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ My uncle told me, ‘Don’t look back, don’t look back; keep walking.’ Being a young boy, I looked back, and this is what I saw. I saw an old Indian man standing, looking at us, waving and saying, ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ We began to run away. We ran far enough to where we couldn’t hear it anymore, and continued home. About four days later I had a dream and the old man was involved, he said in Blackfeet, ‘I’m going home now, sand hills [Blackfeet Heaven].’ Another lesson, some of the pipes are genuine.

Taboos, throughout my whole life, I was told not to eat rabbit; also not to whistle in a house. I was raised with a lot of instructions.

Adolescent years, at five years of age, my aunt G---e cut my braids off and I began to associate with my biological mother. My fondest memory of her is when she used to make dried choke cherry cakes. She’d take all of us kids to the creek and she’d wash clothes.

Coming into contact with the white people, I finally began to realize how poor we were; during those times of awareness I began to realize our poverty. For me it was a culture shock, waking up to the real World out here. It was like from a happy, sheltered, Indian life, to a nightmare.

Back then nobody had running water, most never had electricity, and practically everybody had outhouses. Once a month everybody would get relief checks, now they call them welfare checks.

It seems like every house I went to, the adults were drunk, and there was always somebody getting assaulted.

It seems like everybody went hungry, very little food in every household. I remember families going behind a local grocery store getting food from the garbage. I remember families going to the trash pile to pick food that they would attempt to feed their people with, or items that they would later try to sell or utilize in their own homes.

My grandmother would send me behind Buttrey’s Foods to dig out of the dumpster so we could have food to make soup. I remember eating horsemeat. The Old People, old man B—d E------s would bring us horsemeat so we could have something to eat.

I remember what seemed like kids disappearing, the welfare would always take kids from their families all the time. I have one family member who was removed from my family and it took him twenty-five years to find his way back home.

My sister, younger brother and I, were taken from my family at one time. It seemed like they would sneak up on us and take us. The night before they took us, our female dog had puppies, so we were all dusty and dirty. The welfare and police took us to a white foster home. That night, that white woman made us all bathe and washed our clothes. That night we talked amongst ourselves and ended up running away, back to our grandma. The next day we went to school and went back home. That was the end of that episode. It happened a few times, we’d run away from a foster home and we’d always return home.

My first encounter with the White man’s God. I met this white kid in school. I’d go to his house and play with him because his family always had food. This preacher and his wife, from Dallas, Texas, wanted to adopt an Indian child. I was 10 years old. They came up and met with my mother and they decided that I could go to their home and stay with them, like a trial run. These people used to like to go to big churches. They were rich. They sent me to an art school down there, Owens Fine Art Center, or something like that, Dallas, Texas. They gave me my own room, nice room. They had a big house. He was some editor or something in some newspaper down there, his name was S-----n D-----g The III and his wife’s name was D---i.

That was my first encounter with Blacks, Mexicans and whites, real whites, the kind that have never been around a Reservation, or Indians.

I was there about a month-and-a-half maybe, and I began to get lonesome. Because I was lonesome, I went to their backyard and got and used the local plants. With which I made a smudge. I removed my shirt and smudged myself and began to sing. D---i saw me, called her husband, and they began to watch me, along with a couple of their friends. After a while, they got afraid, and her husband ordered me into their house where he grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘Listen, you can’t do that anymore, you can’t conjure those things, not in this house, not in The Lord’s House.’ He said what he said in a violent way, which scared me.

That night something happened, because my grandma ordered them to send me home, right away. She felt something too, a thousand miles away that I should no longer be there. That’s why she ordered them to send me home. The strange thing about it is we didn’t have a telephone then. When I got home she said, ‘I knew something was wrong, I had to bring you home.’

Their church was real big. They all wore neckties and suits when they attended. While I was there, I attended their church with them every Sunday. After church, we got to pick a restaurant, very fancy, Greek, Italian and so forth. No fast food or anything, waiters, formal everything.

S-----n was a part time minister. During one Sunday session, during church services, I looked up toward the ceiling and saw floating lights; also floating lights around their statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, etc. I personally know that these lights represent angels that I saw in the white man’s church. I see the same lights in our Sweat Lodges and Sundance ceremonies.

When I sang in his backyard I didn’t understand why his were better than mine, or so he made me think, or so he made me feel.

When I got on the plane to come home, the first person I met was a Blackfeet Indian, coming from Vietnam. That was my first experience with the white man’s God and their ways.

After my return from Texas, it seemed like everything had changed, because I was brought to a new level of awareness. At this new level, I began to realize that everything had begun to change. During that period, I became ashamed to be an Indian, because along with my recent Texas, experience, my friends, and it seemed like the entire neighborhood, began to call me a devil worshipper and make fun of my traditional beliefs and practices. I didn’t understand it then, and like they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty, but now I see that I completely shut down for about 10 years. I began to roam the streets, skip school, drink alcohol when I could, and just become a total wreck.

For example, three friends and I, broke into a service station and stole pop and candy. Consequently, we were sent to prison for that, our only crime was being poor and hungry. I did two years in a juvenile, Federal Facility, for that break-in.

While I was in that facility, I first learned about the American Indian Movement. What ‘AIM’ began to mean and represent for me was that it was finally my peoples’ turn to be recognized; the Blacks and Mexicans had their turns, now it was our turn. From ‘AIM’ I learned to be proud of who I was, of how I looked and of what I had learned.

Throughout America, Indians had seemed to find hope. They were rejoicing. ‘AIM’ had caused something in the air where everybody Indian had finally found something that restored pride. Where long hair, headbands, beads and just anything that to many, represented Indians, were en vogue.

While I was in that facility, I met three remnants of the past, a Shoshone, Navajo and a Sioux; they had to have an interpreter, real old time Indians, little or no exposure to the white man’s educational system. They were the real McCoy. For some reason, the four of us banded together, forming our own basketball team.

That’s when I first became consciously aware of spirit talk. For example, being in different dorms, one of my friends would come out of his dorm while I was outside of mine and we’d look at one another, understanding what the other was thinking, or wanted, across the distance, without saying a word.

One experience between my friends and I was when my Shoshone friend had a death in his family, one of his family members passed-away. Before the death was known about by any of us, including the Shoshone, we all felt a deep sadness and didn’t understand why. An experience that I now relate to this incident was that just two days before, all four of us were together, surrounded by hundreds of fellow inmates and despite the noise of everyone, we heard a wailing that to us signified death. No one else but the four of us heard the sound. At the time of the wailing we all looked at one another without saying a word, however, we all understood that death was at one of our doors. As I’ve said, the Shoshone was the unfortunate one.

This gift or curse whatever you want to call it, still remains with me to this day. I possess the ability to sense death before death visits someone close to me, anybody close to me.

We were always going to do ceremonies and the people couldn’t pay us. Most of the time they just gave us clothing or food, often, they just fed us. In the nineteen-sixties, when other kids found out we were going to ceremonies, they made fun of us and called my grandmother a witch, so we went to church and kept on going to ceremonies. We were still into healing. I was told church and ceremonies we prayed to the same God. While growing up I had to hide everything, because Medicine People were not accepted back then. I heard adults tell their kids to be careful with that kid and his family, to keep away from him.

In this work I am living now, I am still alone. When I grew up I watched actual power. We did our ceremonies in broad daylight. There was no trickery. It was done in the open. It was pure power. There were about thirty people that could do it, mostly men. Now there are only four to six people that have actual spiritual help that I know of, that have the real thing. They refuse to come out. What I saw or witnessed was truly the last of the Buffalo People. I know most of their pipes and their songs. I witnessed a show of respect, love and caring for each other. My job is to pray and take care of the whole tribe. If someone was sick, or having trouble or hard times, we would hear about it and pray for them. I don’t see that kind of caring for the whole tribe; it’s broken; the Circle is broken; we’re pitiful again. When I was young, we would go to their homes to do ceremonies, those days are gone.”

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Oki Niscunnie (Hello my Friend). My name is Calvin Tatsey. I am fifty two years old. My Indian name is Big Gun Sees Good, which represents Power and Wisdom, according to my name giver. I am the father of four and the grandfather of eight. I am an enrolled member of The Blackfeet Nation of Montana. I have resided on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation throughout my entire life, with migrations to attend school, training, work and to experience different cultures, people and places. I have experienced every Blackfeet ceremony, except for The Sundance; however, I have assisted with the preparations of and observed several throughout their durations. I have worked at several occupations, e.g., cowboy, farm-worker, tree planter and thinner, logger, lifeguard, store clerk, police dispatcher, police officer, jailer, correctional officer, casino surveillance supervisor, heavy equipment operator, building constructions, chemical dependency counselor, etc...; and through all that, I've been a Writer first-and-foremost! My life-and-work experiences are vast and many; my cultural experiences are the same; my writing -- Fiction -- involves and draws from both, relating and applying to Native American issues, news and first-hand stories pertaining to culture, ceremonies, language and Native American life; some are short and some are long, but all are interesting and entertaining. I am an addictions counselor with a degree in Human Services (minor in Psychology) and a CDC Certificate and I have worked in the field professionally; however, my love for writing now requires most of my time, so I am no longer in the field. I am currently in the process of enrolling-in Montana State University’s 2008 fall semester: Mass Communications, (journalism) program. I have graduated from two Law Enforcement Academies: the Montana Law Enforcement Academy and Corrections Corporation of America. I am a versatile writer who writes compelling stories and articles that grab attention and connect with people; a marketing writer; a copywriter; a poet, and a well rounded professional. I have over thirty years of writing experience.
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