THUNDER MEDICINE PIPE

Scriver Thunder Medicine Pipe

Part of the appeal of indigenous prairie cultures to “outsiders” is that from a bit of distance the whole category of “Indians” in people’s minds is frozen in time and homogenous — there’s very little, if any, awareness of what ecology did to basic survival, like for instance causing fish-based systems to be quite different from bison-based systems, though both will allow for considerable prosperity as did the Midwest corn/squash/bean communities of the Mandan/Hidatsa/

Arikara communities.  Because the latter were sedentary to tend their fields, they naturally evolved into traders, especially since they were at the “top” of the Mississippi River complex so that there was a “road” to their villages.

Because the bison-eaters had to go where the animals went, the people were nomadic, but there wasn’t a lot they needed from traders until metal and glass arrived.  Knives for skinning, pots for simmering, and bright mirrors and beads as markers of extra-prosperous families.  The whites valued skins that had limited usefulness, but their value was accepted if one were a trader, so the effort of carrying them along was worthwhile.

In this time a new religious object developed, a long-stemmed pipe decorated with both local objects like ermine skins and eagle tail feathers and with exotic things like satin ribbons and falconry bells.  They were associated with collections of small animal skins that had symbolic resonance.  So they were complexes of material objects plus memes of song and dance to express their meaning.  This became what we call a “pipe bundle”, emerging from the conflation of cultures and managing to survive because white people didn’t see what they were.

In the mid-Sixties, a time when the last of the buffalo people were aging out and whites were suddenly interested in indigenous spirituality, Bob Scriver (to whom I was married at the time) had dreams meaningful to some people (Richard Little Dog, Tom Many Guns, George and Molly Kicking Woman, Mary Ground, and others.)  They said it meant Bob should acquire a Medicine Pipe Bundle.  Besides, they needed the money.  They had the endorsement and supplementary guidance of John Hellson, an immersion anthropologist — that is, one who had married into the Canadian branches of the Blackfoot Nation and lived there.

Becoming a Bundle Keeper was a two-level process.  On the one hand was the this-world phenomenon of the historical composite object itself, which had persistently and quietly stayed with the People because avaricious whites wanted the flashy war-related beaded buckskin and painted lodge skins.  

On the other hand was the invisible component, the practices, stories and protocols of the Bundle objects.  So there was one price for the “thing” and another price for the power to operate it.  The second part was achieved by a “Transfer,” a ceremony of community-witnessed gifts.  Entitlement was authorized by the dreams, not by written words on paper.

The importance of this second part was that if the actual Bundle were seized by enemies (like fundamentalist converts within a family, who might try to burn it as an act of their Christian conversion), it could be re-created with new materials according to the prototype.  

This was also a necessary idea when a lodgeskin wore out, which was more frequent with canvas, but which — like everything else in their lives — was dream-authorized (indicated by that Maltese cross at the top of the back, which might have a tail attached in the middle) and painted accordingly.

After a few years of being a Bundle Keeper, Bob had another set of dreams that were about a lodgeskin, one that was specific to badgers which he had kept for pets so that he knew their ways beyond sightings on the prairie.  The same old-timers accepted this, but guardedly.  Nevertheless, we paid them to interpret, paint, and devise the ceremony for the lodge.  

When Bob died, the lodgeskin disappeared.  Because I had been Bob’s wife and active in the development of the lodge, the power of it and the entitlement to make a new one of the same design has moved to me.  The problem of Bob’s next wife is solved, since she’s dead.  Bob’s grandkids participated to some degree and therefore are also empowered.  We could transfer this power and ask for money for the “title” to the design.

Part of the ceremony was an exchange of clothing, the previous keepers putting on the new keeper’s clothes, the reasoning being that then the personified power would “follow” the new people, deceived by their clothes.  This was as much practical as ceremonial so that Bob’s new clothes was just a new set of Dickies khaki workclothes from the Browning Merc.  

But I had to have something to put on that came from Margaret Many Guns, who was standing in for Richard Little Dog’s wife who was dead.  Tom had physical custody of the Bundle which he kept in the rafters of his house on Moccasin Flats.  But he was drinking and couldn’t always resist the temptation to sell bits and pieces from it.  So the necessity of transfer was based partly on Richard’s missing wife, since it took a wife to maintain the protocols of its care, and partly to save it from being whittled down to nothing.

But Margaret Many Guns didn’t like any of this.  Her first husband had been a powerful ceremonialist in Canada so she understood the prestige of the Bundle even being in the house, and she did not like white people.  She barely knew me, though everyone knew Bob.  The next problem was that she was shaped like Queen Victoria — four by four — and I (in those days) was more of Queen Elizabeth II’s size.  What she ended up producing was an orange cotton “Mother Hubbard” with some strips of purple ribbon, and a set of high-top moccasins with minimal beading and a rubbing of red ochre.  

We all accepted this.  The idea was not fancy stuff but the reality of the situation.  I kept the dress and moccasins, and after the divorce I took them with me.  I have them now and I believe the power is with them.  When Bob died, the Bundle and the Badger Lodge disappeared.  The right to reproduce them remains partly with me.  What should I do about it?

I could just “secularize” the dress and mocs and sell them or give them to the grandchildren.  They’re pretty humble and might not be valued.  I could destroy them — set them free -- like putting them up in a tree in a remote place and letting them disintegrate.  I could just put it all off until after my death when it would be someone else’s problem.  Few would recognize such plain things.

I talked to Darnell Doore about it, since she is an historian and ceremonialist.  She and her husband, Smoky, sponsor Sun Lodges.  She offered to put the clothing into the top as a formal offering to the Sun.  This is an attractive offer.

There’s another dimension.  For a while I considered attending Thunder Pipe openings as a singleton though none of the original participants I knew are still living.  As a way of extending my plain cotton dress, I thought of creating a fancy “cape” to wear over it.  I’ve nearly finished that now and told Darnell about it.  In her mind she pictured elk-teeth, bugle beads, and other embellishments like the ones on the women in this photo. 

McClintock photo of Blackfeet Women

But mine is mostly star-shaped buttons and a polka dot ribbon on a square of purple cloth with a hole for the wearer’s head and some floating ribbons.  I haven’t figured out how to finish the head-hole yet.  To a naive person, this might make the plain cotton dress from a resentful Margaret Many Guns into something marketable because of the story as much as the appearance.

The value to me is one of participation in the “meme” dimension, but it is not authentic in the sense of being old and produced by indigenous people.  Their materials always have a fringy, earthy, hard-to-see quality because they had to be seen — as though they were 3D movies — through the experiences of prairie people who moved through the land, always dusted and scented.  I never completed that, but have a sense of it.  My cape is too bright, too clean, almost Disney-cartoon.  Nevertheless, it is an object-marker of something more.

CEREMONIAL COMMUNION CIRCLES

The Thunder Pipe transferred to Bob Scriver.

It has disappeared.

People who share a life that is well-defined by beliefs and experience come together.  They begin their ceremony in the anthropologically defined act of crossing a threshold (limen), either actual or symbolic.  Performing some act of unison (singing, making a gesture like genuflecting) that joins them into sympathy that eliminates rivalry, worry, anger.  In this liminal time and space acts of sharing and insight are performed.  (Listening to music or speech, kneeling for prayer)  Then there is a time of putting away.  In the end, crossing that threshold in the other direction, the people return to their ordinary lives.

If the act is Christian communion (as above), the ceremony includes singing, reading, praying, and the sharing of bread and wine in memory of Jesus, the central cult figure.  In the background is the hope of eternal life or sometimes relief in this one.

Opening a Medicine Pipe Bundle

If the act is Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening, the ceremony includes unwrapping the contents of the Bundle, including the three-foot long calumet with an attached fan of eagle tailfeathers, singing, dancing, praying, and sharing of sarvisberry soup, the last of the previous year’s gathering, in hopes of a crop as good or better this coming year.  In the background is the hope of escaping lightning strikes and prairie fires.  Also, a wish for harmony and fittingness with the land, escape from enemies.

There are little mini-versions of these ceremonies.  Christians may open secular deliberations with prayer by a “holy man” or a lay representative of a Abramic tradition.  In the old days Blackfeet might open a discussion when older men sit in a circle and pass around a pipe for smoking.  Those who wish to convene a deliberation are expected to provide enough tobacco to go around the circle -- the one pipe (much shorter than the ceremonial calumet) being passed around and refilled as needed --three or four times, quite like elders in Afghanistan going around their circle with three cups of tea each.  High level business meetings might open with two martinis before an expensive meal.  Family meals, esp. the ones on major occasions, begin by saying grace.  Candles have been lit.  Human patterns echo each other, marking their importance with valued substances.

Bringing branches

Longmire is back.  The plots turn on a fancy casino.  In the office is a wall mural of tribal men on horseback carrying branches like flags -- a long branch with a bunch of leaves at the end.  They are participants in a Sun Lodge ceremony, a sacred ceremony.  Some would say it should not be photographed nor posted in a casino, but gambling (stick game) is an important element of understanding the world for indigenous people.  It competes with notions of causing one’s own bad luck or with ideas about witchcraft and how other people can cause you to have misfortunes.  In the Christian world this sort of thinking about why bad things happen are connected to Satan (a flipped over version of Christianity) and angels.  For all the Abramists (Xian, Jewish and Islam) people are at the mercy of an all-knowing, all-powerful humanoid theos, which provides clues in the form of a book.

To start a comparison of what the general public calls “religion,” we must choose a dimension of a very complex and pervasive system of understanding that varies from one population to another, usually according to what succeeds in that ecology.  It guides the actions of the whole population through the cycle of the seasons.  Theology is a near-mathematical version of how to please the theos, God.  The version may vary from the Golden Rule of Jesus to the “process theology” of physicists, which is not much help in daily life but is infinitely ponderable for people who approach religion that abstract way, which is a bit of a luxury.

Beaver Bundle: kept by a virtuous couple

Theology applied to the Plains Indian understanding of the world can only end up in distortion and oppression because their system is not mathematical nor is it focused on staying alive either on earth or in heaven.  I mean, death is seen as a natural part of life, not a disaster.

The ceremonial aspect of what we call “religion” is very strong because it unifies the people who have an interest in staying together, identifying themselves with the group.  On the prairie one needs community is order to survive, and the community needs the committed participation of individuals in order to continue to exist.  In some of the Abramic traditions, the individual can depart from the group.  At least in our times we are preoccupied with the fortunes of an individual person moving across ecologies, or following the Campbell hero cycle away from home and then returning.  One could joke that Jesus has become Marco Polo.  One could quip that the ceremonial worship circle has become the bazaar, the marketplace, where the sacred is bought and sold and all cultures are reduced to bargaining.

Circle of smokers

So the material culture of Native Americans is made into artifacts for sale and prestige, which the People object to as mocking their importance as holiness.  But they don’t realize that this is an important dimension of Abramic ceremonies, this buying and selling of everything, even skeletons and body parts.  Objectification is an important dimension of the mathematical and technical culture that is so entwined with Xian ideas that one can bargain one’s way into heaven and out of hell.  One can pursue “eternal” life this way, so that for people who have money or strategies for using insurance, total dedication to one’s health can eclipse any of Jesus’ ideas.  He was not afraid to die and we are told that God the Father wanted that death, too.  It was a bargain.

Crucifixion?

“Magic” is a sub-theme of religion anywhere, from the “cheap grace” of outward compliance with virtue to the self-torture of Sun Dance suspension from piercings.  Everybody loves a short cut, a bargain.  So the nature-related mysticism of indigenous communities is often seen as “pagan,” ineffective, but the institutional authority-controlled theologically endorsed ideas are represented as absolute.  Only the “scientific” establishment and institutions have now become persuasive enough to challenge the Abramic theological systems.  Those who feel that the evidence shows that God is indeed dead, if not just a bit of poetry anyway, also see that science is “owned” by an elite.  They turn to what they think are tolerant and inclusive autochthonous ceremonies that make them feel a lot better.  They want magic.

Meanwhile, the old-time restoration of order and relationship gets lost in the rush to emplace alchemic ideas of the right kind of rattle, the right secret song, the proper length of the pipe stem.  All those technologies of the Holy keep individuals from belonging to any community except the crowd around the sales table.  

It turns out that no one can capture the wind nor be the wind, but we can feel it.  Experience of the world itself is what counts, the sensory information that forms human existence, whether it is about wine or athuahasca, whether it is about our personal selves or our community.

Sold at a NYCity auction for thousands of dollars.

Quills -- not beads.  Possibly human scalps.

FELT MEANING

All my efforts to understand the feeling of the Holy have led to the conviction that all contemporary religions are institutions that claim knowledge of and access to the sacred, but -- hopelessly --  can only echo and derive because they are based on writing.  Words can only point to “felt meanings,” which are inexplicable and unique products of persons interacting with the world that are better expressed by the arts: music, dance, arts, and the other uses of the creating senses.

There is always a lot of interest among people to “create,” but a reluctance to seek felt meanings by interacting with the world, which is the source of what is called “creation” but is really “translation” from felt meaning to its metaphors, which might be only a chord or a shape or a gesture.  It is the metaphors that the institutional religions seize on and claim are unique and privileged: owned.

The felt meanings are bodily sums of the human sensorium.  The written analysis of them in tracts and Bibles and sermons are products of rational thought about the instinct-infused felt meanings.  It is like the analysis of how to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, and even suggestions of how to do it oneself -- but though the descriptions might help you understand it better, they will never enable you to actually do it.  Because the actual creation is in the realm of “felt” meaning, not constructed rational definitions.

I bought a book called “The Felt Meanings of the World: a Metaphysics of Feeling,” by Quentin Smith, which is a careful and reflective observation of what people feel, sorting the happening.  I haven’t read it yet though I’ve had it a while.  Suzanne Langer was doing something similar in her own way.  Universities -- even Divinity Schools -- are about rationality, introspective reflection, theories of analysis.  If you get too emotional, they’ll send you for therapy.  At a Pentecostal Bible school, they’ll accept your ecstasies and miseries, but push them into pre-existing Christian categories, not very sophisticated ones but ones expressed in writing.  The poetic passages -- Song of Solomon or the Psalms -- the ones related to prayer and metaphor -- come closest.  

Otherwise, one must go to the anthropological non-literary religions that the Abramic world will refuse to accept as legitimate.  They are called animistic because they work directly in the metaphors of real objects instead of words, for instance, the skins of animals associated with dance and song that carry the concepts in the Thunder Pipe Bundles of the Blackfeet. 

Religion in words is a hostage to academia and legalistic argument.  Feeling the sacred cannot be argued -- one either feels it or not, though it’s possible to have some sense of it through empathy.  Because of pre-existing definitions meant to capture the power of metaphors, institutional religion cannot allow re-definition of concepts like “God” so that it must always contest the claims of primal, instinctive, poetic perception of the Holy.  This is done by defining, appealing to precedent, invoking authorities, and basically never leaving the functions of the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, a product of mutation and evolution that allows language to be a filter of experience.  This requirement limits accounts of the sacred to those who have mastered professional (professing) systems supported by institutions. 

But systems exist in juxtaposition to other systems, including those of physiology, physics, and even aesthetics, though they are “about” human experience rather than exemplifying it.  Because these macro-categories or disciplines start from different ways of experiencing, they can oppose each other or reinforce each other without arguing about dogma.

Thus, the Bernini portrait of St. Theresa in the throes of spiritual orgasm is inarguable.  It just IS.  And the ISness of it means that sexual experience can be -- as in Song of Solomon -- legitimate, though it is not wordless.  Part of what legitimizes sex is that it is involved in “attachment,” or “bonding,” or the phenomenon of love that has become so badly corrupted, partly through overdependence on words rather than experience.  Quite like religion.

One of the most useful texts for me is Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane.”  In it he points to the feelings we have in what Turner calls “the liminal space.”  We can actually experience the difference between standing or passing through a doorway, or up or down a height, or at the edge of something like the ocean or in a place where something significant has happened.

No doubt this is physiological, a feeling produced by the brain and its subtle sensorium that animals use to keep from falling over cliffs or returning to a dangerous place, though this is a negative way of putting it.  Still, even a one-celled animal senses molecularly what to avoid and what to approach.  As evolution has proceeded, those functions have been elaborated, but any creature that didn’t have those abilities was likely to be eliminated.

It’s a long leap from a paramecium to Gerard Manley Hopkins, but even something as complex as his poetry is basically a construct of senses filtered through language. One could reverse-engineer it to the original experience, and -- indeed -- that’s basically what we do as we read.  Of course, in some times and places authorities will insist on literal meanings and burn you at the stake if you say god/father is just a metaphor.  Some fathers, who believe THEY are god, will also insist with near-lethal punishment and this is the core evil -- not the concepts of god or fathers, nor even their confusion into entitlement -- but the departure from reality, which often means giving up control and recognizing suffering, if only through empathy.  There is no way prosperity is either a privilege or a virtue.  It’s just another ISness.

The first step towards Felt Meaning is awareness through all the senses, every way that the body interacts with the world including gravity, which way one is facing, memory, the state of muscles including the gut, sound, the present chemistry of one’s blood.  The second step is the neurology of recognizing and sorting the information.  The third step is deriving meaning from all those factors.  The fourth is acting on the meaning and sharing evidence with others, writing poems and painting pictures as well as defining words and arguing about them in shared strategies of rational thought.  

The fifth step is renewing awareness of embeddedness, which is a Felt Meaning.  A human is woven of the universe, an instrument of the planet able to produce consciousness and response, thus part of the flow of change, the velocity of creation.  One can feel it.  This is where the future will come from.

HEAR THE THUNDER, FEEL THE RAIN

This undecorated calumet appears jointed, like bamboo.

It might have been adapted from a walking stick.

“Calumets” are far from exclusive to the Blackfeet, but the Amskapi Pikuni had their own versions, as did many of the Plains Indian tribes.

“Calumet is a Norman word (pronounced: [kalyme]), first recorded in David Ferrand's La Muse normande around 1625–1655.  Its first meaning was "sort of reeds used to make pipes", with a suffix substitution for calumel. It corresponds to the French word chalumeau, meaning 'reeds' (Modern French also means 'straw', 'blowlamp').The term was used by Norman-French settlers in Canada to describe the ceremonial pipes they saw used among the First Nations people of the region.”

This bare calumet has been smoked.  

Ours had the same cross-section shape.

“Peace pipe” is another misnomer that emerged from movies and novels.  But certainly peace or a truce is one of the uses of a tobacco pipe (around here normally smoking kinnikinnick but sometimes “twist” tobacco if it can be found).  Esp. for older folks, it’s a soother and an energizer at once, a function of nicotine.  Also, it is a ceremonial implement on first meetings to give people a chance to settle and adjust to each other.  Some cultures use cups of tea or coffee or alcohol.  

This sort of information is just facts.  More interesting is the accumulation of the “Bundle” that was wrapped up with  a Thunder Pipe Bundle along with the felt meanings of the people on the prairies in the spring when the thunderstorms raked the land, just as they are doing today, May 26.  North American Indian Days is a formal modern festival pow-wow with all the giveaways and family business that need to be done, but it is late, AFTER the thunderstorms in July.  This is because Agent Campbell persuaded them to cut hay first, THEN have the ceremonies. 

In those days it was clear that the people couldn’t come together until there was enough grass and water for their horses.  Some agents tried to suppress any such gathering, even the ones by the recent post-Civil War Indian school grads who wanted to convene scholarly discussion.  The white agents were afraid that any gathering would be a plot. If you really want an authentic version of a Bundle Opening, go to "The Old North Trail", which includes photos and instructions of the event around 1900, all by Walter McClintock, who came as a friend every summer. 

I want to talk about the experience, but it’s necessary to give a little background.  The calumet itself is studded with brass tacks.  Smooth and straight, it seems to have been drilled on a rifling lathe.  Our “Thunder Pipe Bundle” and it has a proper pedigree, which was oral when we got it and then was written down and notarized by Wilber Werner, a staunch Catholic who -- I suspect -- thought the ceremony was a naive version of the Mass.  

The Green Parrot

Many of the pipes have a whole bird affixed to the top and ours had a green parrot with taxidermy eyes.  Another rather famous pipe had a colorful rooster on it.  These are not ancient sinew and bone artifacts -- they are mixes of European metal and methods with whatever might come to hand for a tribal person on the high prairie.  Knowing that, it seems likely that the association went from lightning strike danger (which was very real on the prairie) to the danger of battles on horseback and dwindling of the buffalo to a kind of reconciliation of material cultures in hope of finding a way forward.

The Scriver Thunder Pipe Bundle -- the decorated calumet

Unlike the ordinary pipes used for real smoking, the heart of the Pipe Bundle was a yard long and the stone bowl was in the Bundle but not attached.  Fanned and hanging under the calumet was the entire suite of an eagle’s tail feathers, each with its shaft decorated with beads or quills.  Mixed with them are white ermine skins and bright satin ribbons.  On top, at the end for drawing smoke, was the bright plumage of a colorful bird. Ours had a parrot with taxidermy eyes and another had a Harlequin duck with glass eyes.  We were told there was one called “The White Man Thunder Bundle” that sported an impressive rooster.  They were not perched or even stuffed as was fashionable in the 19^th century, but more like “study skins” that are kept in drawers for comparisons.  “Study skins” do not have eyes.

Near the “head” end of the calument is a handful of bells, sometimes “jinglebells” and sometimes falconry bells.  They are said to be the Pleiades or whatever the local mythologists made of the cluster of bells.  They show up as a pattern of circles on the smoke flap ears of lodges.   Another tube, the sawed off section of a rifle, decorated with ribbons and so on, is the “woman’s pipe.”  Another historical sign: this was added when the shooter had access to the gun and a hacksaw, but too early to just discard something so powerful as a section of gun barrel, so it was saved. 

This book was published by Bob Scriver through a "vanity publisher."

The rest is animal skins, preserved with handsful of tobacco.  Sometimes there will be iniskim, the little fossil stones that look like buffalo.  Bob documented our Bundle contents in “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”  The illustrations of this post are from his book for which Marshall Noice, an artist, took the photos.  The implications of that will be the subject of a future post.

The Kicking Woman family opened their Bundle on Mother’s Day.  Molly, who was Canadian and from an observant family, was the one who really understood the preparations, including sarvisberry soup with its bitterroot inclusion, carrying on the theme of plenty in the face of want.  Like Lent, a ceremony in the thunderstorm season would be late for whatever food had been preserved in the winter, but early for summer’s plenty.  All the families who still had saved dried sarvisberries donated them for the one big pot of soup.  

George Kicking Woman, all dressed up.

Molly was the force behind George and, as the woman always was, the true Keeper in terms of managing it,  but George didn’t mind seeming a powerful patriarch as white visitors usually assumed.  He was a mild and earnest man, unlikely to kick anyone, but white people got a lot of mileage out of the name.  Bob and George were the same age.  George was the youngest of the Keepers at the ceremonies we attended.

What I’m describing happened fifty years ago.  Most people at an Opening were related, but many of them were likely to be from Canada where the old ways have persisted longer.  People were actually speaking their own language.  The smudge is lit in a dishpan of dirt.  Drummers were a “rawhide orchestra,” an assortment of men who knew the songs or can pick them up quickly, since they are a pattern based on a phrase that is meant to describe the particular animal with which it is associated.  Joe Old Chief was one of them and one of the last to "cross the horizon."  They used hand drums.  In the Beaver Bundle openings the drummers pounded on a dry rawhide with rattles.  The smudge was different as well.

Harlequin duck, augmented with pow-wow feathers.

This is from a Last Star bundle.

The Bundle is about the lives of the animals and their powers to help.  The man who is inspired to dance with one of them, takes it up in its funny swaddling of calico or headscarf, meant to keep it intact without shedding bits, and endeavors to dance in imitation of the living animal, moving it in front of him like a little boy making a toy car “go.”  The best dancers evoke the animal with uncanny imitation of its rhythms and wiggles, as though it were a puppet, but also “beconme the animal” with all the skill of dancing or acting.  The collection of animals is like a hymnal, a mnemonic device to act as a reminder of both animal and song.  

For those of us who had handled these animals and watched them out on the prairie or mountainsides they brought back moments and, as humans are “wired” to do, the mood of that memory, which made a kind of trance.   Bob and I had watched the animals as well as bringing them into the shop and skinning them for mounting, giving them glass eyes.  The “permission” to acquire a Bundle comes in a dream, and Bob had the dream.  It also requires a LOT of money, and Bob paid it.  Even if he weren’t paying for a transfer, he would slip hundreds of dollars to Molly a week or so ahead of time to help with the preparations.

The ceremony was a spiritual way to reconcile an individual with the community that had practical benefits for the community itself.  As each man chose an animal and danced with it briefly, his family and friends would stand in place to ululate in support.  Then they would “gift” money to someone in the circle to honor the dancer.  Most went to someone who had lost a family member or someone who was suffering.  The “orderly,” who kept the smudge going and passed the money to the designated recipient, was Young Jim Whitecalf, son of the Old Jim Whitecalf who so captured the imaginations of white outsiders that he's featured in two books.

Double-page spread in "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains

In the portrait, which some call a diorama, of the Thunder Pipe Bundle, are the principals in the first ceremony Bob and I attended.  They posed and are recognizable, real people, except for Charlie Reevis, who was deceased.  George Kicking Woman was the youngest Bundle Keeper, the same age as Bob.  The man with the black face is Louis Plenty Treaty, the most spiritual man I ever met.  I used to say you could seat him in a Buddhist ceremony and he would be perfectly fitting.  The next is Tom Many Guns, who had been the Keeper of this Bundle just previously, but had been drinking a lot and selling bits of it to finance his addiction.  

In fact, we were startled to realize we’d been buying them, but pleased to put them back in.  Next, in a red wool jacket is Richard Little Dog who was the ceremonialist and technically the real owner -- that is, it had been transferred to him properly.  Nearest the camera in a Hudson’s Bay blanket capote is Joe Gambler, who was armed for posing and made the most of pantomiming attacks when posing got boring.

I don’t remember the names of all the four drummers.  I think Joe Old Chief and Joe Young Eagle were there.   The woman in blue, closest to the camera was Margaret Many Guns, who was originally Canadian.  She made my ceremonial clothes, including moccasins, which were very simple but meant to be exchanged with her clothes so that the “power” would recognize me and go with me after the exchange.  Next in pink is Mrs. Young Eagle and then Molly Kicking Woman.  I think the gray-haired woman was Mary Blackman.

These people are all gone now, but the ceremony has been reinstituted.  Like all memories, it is re-constituted, and as in all communities, it has somehow drifted from the hands of the most old-timey and observant people into the practices of the educated and relatively prosperous.  I’m smelling sweetgrass smudge (I grow a little), but you buy sweetgrass on the Internet now.  It’s hard to find on the prairie, poisoned out like most of the birds and animals in the Bundle.  The People are there, but they are changed.