Inipi

Lu DiGrazia

She said I was the smartest person she knew. I pulled back slightly and raised my eyebrows. No one had ever said that to me. We had long intellectual conversations that lasted for over an hour on many occasions. We became companions by accident due to our mutual respect and attraction to each other that led to me being hired by her to help her out. I could anticipate her anxiety and was able to get her to breathe through it and say, “What do you have to worry about right now?” She never had an answer for that. She felt very vulnerable and as a result her emotions could be easily triggered.

Her mom had left her with $20,000, which she had hung onto for her later years, so she was free to hire me to help her with her affairs, and to lead her in breath work to help her with stress. I saw her writing in her little black book often and we would talk about what she was writing. She had a shelf full of these books from her years of life. She was still very sharp mentally. It took a special kind of contemplation to realize she was born in 1899. I was probably the only one to read and hear her stories while she was alive.

She would occasionally show me her journals, and I would read her very clear concise handwriting out loud to her. It seemed like a lost art to put pen to paper. Her example was inspirational, and I began to write my life events and thoughts down, and would occasionally read out loud to her what I wrote.

She wrote: We arrived on June 25th, the Holiday they were celebrating for the defeat of Custer, June 25th-26th—1876. Everyone was in their finest costumes, beautiful, long braids, whooping, dancing, lots of leather, and horses tied nearby. It was a serious ceremony. Who would have thought that they would have arrived on any other day of the year—that here people celebrated the victory of the Indians, the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors over the whites at Little Bighorn. It is little known that Lt. Colonel Custer and his troops made a charge into the huge camp of Indians, on their own land. The tribes did not attack Custer.

She wrote that they stayed under a pepper tree on the Res. They were told that if it rained, to high tail it out of there, as flash flooding was common. Well of course it began to rain, and so they high tailed it about 3 in the morning. That was a bit upsetting. She totally understood that Lakota hated them for the color of their skin. Even though her ancestors came after the 20th century began, she still looked like the people who stole their land, wantonly killed them in mass, and ended their relationship with the buffalo by killing them all for sport from the trains. Just target practice for the white men. I couldn’t bear to have lived on the Reservation for too long, it would have been too emotionally painful.

All night they heard the pepper balls hitting the tent and rolling down the sides. They soon discovered that the sound they were hearing was the droppings of the locust swarm in the tree. Every step they took, 120 locust jumped up about to the height of your shoulders. Her poor girl, who was 6, who had traveled with them, was just barely that tall so the locust were jumping about the height of her eyeballs.

They were preparing for a ceremonial sweat. There would be a ritual meal where everyone brought something to eat. Because they were living in a tent, under the pepper tree, and just had a cooler to prepare their food, and nothing more, she made a tuna salad, the easiest thing she could think of to contribute under the circumstances. When they went to the host home, there was little furniture and no rugs on the floor. There were two women living there and a bunch of children. She was told that half of them had lost their parents. She opened the small refrigerator to put the tuna salad away and it was empty, except for a jar of mustard and some catsup. As she stared into the bare food storage with incredulity, someone pulled at her shirt, she immediately looked down to see a tiny little girl, who said, “What did you bring?” It was a sad moment. The child was obviously hungry and there was no food.

She had never done a Native sweat before. She was 2 months pregnant, was fit and had no concerns. She was the only woman at the lodge and there were about 10 men, including her husband. The sweat lodge is called “Inipi” and means “to live again.” It was a sturdy lodge made with young saplings probably willow, and covered with blankets. The ceremony is a purification rite and helps one on a vision quest to enter a state of humility and a cleansing, like a spiritual rebirth, through intense, near life threatening heat. There is a re-connection with one’s past through intense near death feelings, connecting one to a deep sense of being born and our place as Earthlings on this planet, connecting to Earth Spirits, Sky Spirits, even spirits we know who have passed on. All My Relations, spoken often by the Yuwipi, are plants, stones, two-leggeds, animals, sky Earth, moon, spirit helpers, ancestors and the Creator Spirit, that are all related from the beginning of Earth to the present. Harmony depends on this conscious connection. There is a feeling that we are deeply mortal and vulnerable, and every little thing you were not proud of in your life would now be revealed to you. The powers of Earth, fire, water and air, all powers of the Universe are present and represented. One could not leave a sweat with arrogance or evil intent. A large pit was dug out in the middle, and the hot rocks which had been under intense fire outside were placed with a shovel into that pit. Sage was burned and the scent felt like heaven.

The sweat was guided by the Sacred Spiritual Leader, Yuwipi. His calm voice guided the prayers. He chanted incantations and other things in Lakota. With the exception of the glowing rocks, it was pitch black, reinforcing the sense of a near death experience and a sense of being in a hellish landscape. The ground was dirt. “All Our Relations,” was meant to make sure they all remembered who came before and their interconnectedness to all things in the universe, all the people we stood behind, in this life. She was the first person to enter the lodge. What she didn’t realize at that moment was that she would also be the last to leave! Everyone else came into the cramped space clockwise and took their place next to each other on the floor in a circle around the glowing rocks. The close proximity made it hotter. A flapped blanket was draped over the entrance. The Yuwipi would toss water on the molten rocks making it hotter. Her whole life passed before her in there. She remembered things she had long forgotten. The intensity of the heat was painful. One’s whole life would be reviewed; also one felt as though one was burning in the Christian hell—quite a feeling. You thought your lungs would explode from the heat and your nostril hair was going to catch fire. Then the sense of wanting to escape and run out; and there was no escape and nowhere to go. She was the very furthest from the entry. She curled herself up in a small ball where she could feel some air coming from the bottom of the tent. That is probably, she thought, what saved her from passing out or screaming to get out. The hot rocks in the middle of the lodge glowed like a lava field. Then, as if she was transformed, her body became numb. She lifted above herself and just saw herself in meditation and in Peace. She was with her child in the warm womb of being. Her spirit animal, the hawk, soared above her on the air currents, as her spirit accompanied the winged one seeing all that was.

Her cat jumped into my lap. I was startled, and she looked directly into my eyes. I felt her little spirit and her connection to her name, Luna, as I glanced up and saw the moon, full now, rising in the East. Her little being and I were at one in spirit. My friend just smiled in a knowing way. She said Luna often arrived at moments like this.

Fresh air was never felt with the same joy when returning to the outside of that sweat lodge. She always felt that that cleansing ritual was for her and for her baby growing inside of her. It was a spiritual bonding of the sort rarely experienced with a mother and child, and rare for a white woman to have experienced.

When they left, they made a wrong turn and traveled over 150 miles out of the way before realizing that they took a left turn instead of a right.

That is kind of like life. Taking a wrong turn is part of our maturation. That is when the greatest lessons can be learned and self-corrected. They slept in the car by the side of the rode and the traffic passing by on the narrow road was so loud, that thee car rumbled underneath them, and the air disturbance shook the car every time. It was so scary they had to drive on just to save their sanity. It wasn’t until dawn that the road signs revealed they were way, way out of the path they should have taken. They turned around and headed homeward.

I put her little black book down. I felt as though I had time traveled into a world I never knew. I was very tired. She was dozing by now. Reading some passages from her narrative helped her to relax and to experience again long ago memories which she kept securely in her little black books. ”Sleep in the spirit of Peace and Harmony my friend,” I whispered.