“That is true,” the chief admitted, “but I am hoping some of my head men may yet enter the trance. Perhaps we do not know how to prepare the way.”
By this he meant that they had not learned how to hypnotize, for that is what the dance became. It was like a meeting of spiritualists who sit for visions. It was like the revival meetings of the Free Methodists or the old-time Shakers or Quakers. My friend Davies wrote me a long letter wherein he said: “It is foolish, as you say, but no more absurd to my mind than scores of other forms of religious ecstasy. My advice is let it run; it will wear itself out. Movements of this kind grow by opposition.”
All that he said was true, but, like the chief, I could not help hoping something would happen, for when they sang their songs warmed my heart and made my learning of little weight. The painted arrows, the fluttering feathers, the symbolic figures—every little thing had its appeal to me. When they raised their quivering palms in the air and cried to the Messiah in the west, I could scarcely restrain myself from joining in their supplication. This may seem strange, but it is true and you will never comprehend this last despairing cry of my race if I do not tell you the truth.
We believed in what we were. We had the pride of race. We were fulfilling our destiny as hunters and freemen. Do you think that in ten years you can make my proud people bow the neck to the scourge of a white man’s daily hatred? Is the Great Spirit a bungler? Does he draw a figure on the earth, only to wipe it away as a child writes upon a slate?
“Why are we so thrust upon and degraded? It must be that we have angered the Great Spirit. We must go back to the point wherein our old trail is found,” so my father argued.
The line that divides the mysterious and the commonplace is very slender, in the minds of my people. You do not realize that. They take up a cartridge. How wonderful it is! How is it made? A knife—what gives the point its gleam and its spring? The grass blade, what causes it to thrust from the earth? The clouds, where do they go—what are they? To the west of us is the Crow country; beyond that, who knows? You must put yourself in the place of those who think in this way before you judge them harshly. Many of these things I now understand, but I do not know why men are born and why they die. I do not know why the sun brings forth the grass.
My chief comprehended more than most men of his tribe, but to him the world was just as mysterious as to me. It did him no good to study the white man’s religions. They were so many and so contradictory that he was confused. He had always been a prayerful man—and had kept the Sun Dance, and all the ceremonials of the Uncapappas carefully. He was a grave soul, doing nothing thoughtlessly. He always asked the Great Spirit for guidance, yet he was never a medicine man, as the white men say. He did not become so during this dance. He helped to hypnotize the dancers, but so did others; that did not mean that they were priests or medicine men—it only meant they had the power to induce these trances.
It was a time of great bewilderment, of question and of doubt. No one thought of the present; all were dreaming of the past, hoping to bring the past. The future was black chaos unless the Great Spirit should restore their world of the buffalo.
The dance went on with steadily growing excitement. The autumn remained very mild and favorable to the ceremony, and yet there were fewer people in it than the agent supposed. Those most active continued to be the mourners. Those who had lost children crowded to the dance, as white people go to spiritualistic seances, in the hope of touching the hands of their babes and hearing the voices of their daughters. They sincerely believed that they met their dead and they deeply resented the brutal order of the agent who would keep them from this sweet reunion.
It was deeply moving to look upon their happy faces as they stood and called in piercing voices: “I saw my child—my little son. He was playing with his small bow and arrows. I called him and he ran to me. He was very happy with his grandfather. The sun was shining on the flowers and no one was hungry. My boy clung to my hand. I did not wish to come back. Oh, teach me the way to go again!”