When the tree flowered

by John G. Neihardt

He peered squintingly at me for a while, and said: “I am very old, and I have learned so many things that I do not know much any more. Maybe I was wiser before my ears were troubled with so many forked words.

“In the old days, it was from the seven tepees and the seven council fires that our teaching came. It was older than the oldest grandfather could remember his grandfather telling him; and more and more grandfathers before that until it was old as hills, old as stars.

“The wisdom of the teaching was from vision and the vision was from Wakon Tonka: The people could not do anything right unless the Great Mysterious One helped them; and for this they prayed and made sacred songs and dances, and had a sacred way for doing everything. When a boy was just beginning to be a man, he had to go on vision quest; for what he saw would show him the good road and give him power, so that his life might be a story good to tell. I was thinking of my vision when you bothered me.”

He was silent again while he filled his pipe and lit it. Then, drawing hollow-cheeked upon the stem, he smoked awhile and brooded in the little cloud he made.

“Dho!” he said at length, uttering with explosive force the syllable of emphasis on something said or thought. “Dho!” Passing the pipe to me, he resumed aloud the tenor of his brooding. “It is so! Are the people good, and do they get along together any more? The hoop is broken and the people have forgotten. There is no voice on any hill to tell them, and they have no ears to hear.

“The hoop was breaking even then when I was happy and a boy; but then I did not know it, for the world was still as big as day, and Wakon Tonka could be found on any hill, and something wonderful could happen.

“After the Attacking of the Wagons the soldiers went away and our warriors burned their towns. And when the grass was new again there was a treaty with the Father in Washington. He said our land would be ours and no Wasichu could ever come there. You can see his tongue was forked. Red Cloud was not with us any more. The Great Father made an Agency for him on the North Platte. And that was bad; for many of our people went down there to eat Wasichu food, and take the many presents the Great Father gave them. And these they traded for the minne sheetsha [bad water, whiskey] that made them crazy, so that they forgot the Mother of all and the bison and the sacred hoop.

“But our Bad Face band that had been Red Cloud’s people would not go. Big Road was with us, and Little Hawk and Black Twin. Also Crazy Horse was ours; and now I see that he was greatest of them all. Sometimes some of our young men would go down there to get new guns and lead and powder, and what they told, the people talked and talked about it, and some of it I heard; but it was like a story. I think there were fifty lodges of us, and we lived the old way in the bison country of the Tongue and the Powder and the Rosebud; and with us were the Miniconjous and the Sans Arcs. I remember how they said the loafers and Wasichus at the Agency made fun of us and called us the wild Lakota; but they were the foolish ones. The hoop we lived in had grown smaller, but it was not broken yet, and the voices of the seven tepees were not still.

“I was getting stronger fast and I think it was about the time when Red Cloud made the treaty that I got my first calf. The treaty was just something people said, a little thing a long way off that maybe was not so; but the calf was very big. I gave the meat to old people, and they praised me, so that my grandmother and my grandfather and my mother were proud of me.

“There were more snows and grasses and I was getting tall when I heard Looks Twice telling my mother about Red Cloud’s long journey to see the Great Father and of the strange things that he saw in the world of the Wasichus where the sun comes from. Looks Twice was my father then, and my grandparents did not live with us, but he took care of them, and he was good to me and taught me many things about hunting and war.