Lunch with a Lakota

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

By Jake Nichols

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Kenneth Cane might be just a regular guy. His back story is commonplace. The Vietnam vet now lives in one of the poorest counties in the U.S., in a place called Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He used to rodeo some when he was a teenager before he was drafted in 1967. Cane is Native American. He wears his hair long like his grandfather Iron Cane and his father before him, the famous Sioux warrior named Crazy Horse.

Ken Iron Cane, 61, is the great-grandson of a legend, a man so revered by his people he is chiseled into a mountain overlooking his homeland, and so wronged by eminent domain his people have no home.

Cane, an easygoing father of 10, by eight different ‘wives,’ recently sat down with me to break bread.

Over coffee and the ‘Cowboy’ entrée at Mojo’s cafe, he sang the songs of his father and their fathers – a love for horses, a thirst for spirituality and medicine, and a desire to depart his knowledge onto future generations.

JHW: I can’t believe there is one of those cigar store Indians right there at the door. Does something like that offend you?

Ken Cane: Well, first of all you gotta understand, in your walks of life you are always gonna see some people that have a very silly way of thinking.

JHW: Stupid is stupid wherever you find it?

Cane: Yeah.

JHW: On the subject of proprieties, I think a lot of folks are currently unsure what to call you – Indian, Native American, First Nation. What do you prefer?
Cane: Lakota.

JHW: The nation?

Cane: Yes. Other nations might want to be called “Shoshones”or “Arapahos.” Us, we want to be called “Oglala Lakotans.”

This is important because there are a lot of places where the United States abused our name and called us “Sioux,” which is a rubberstamp word used so the government can go ahead and steal money from us. They use it for things like the war in Iraq. The best outlaws in the world are in Washington, D.C. When we think about all the money that is missing from our nation we get sad. We know what they have done.

One of the things we will be telling the world is that we are soon going to be referred to as Lakota,the nation.

JHW: What do you mean?

Cane: On June 24 to 27, all the descendants and elders will be at the Crazy Horse Monument. We will exorcise the Treaty of 1868 and 1851. My grandfather Iron Cane was one of the ones that sat down and put those treaties together.

This means we will go independent as a nation and we will take a seat in the United Nations. Then we gonna go ahead and live on concessions alone from the four countries that owe us money – United States, France, Britain, and Russia. I’m part of the delegate. I am helping create the constitution to bring about a peaceful change so that one day we can take care of our own horses, our own buffaloes.

[In September 2007, the U.N. passed a non-binding Resolution on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand refused to sign. A group of Lakota under the name Lakota Freedom Delegation promptly announced a withdrawal of the Lakota Sioux from all treaties with the United States government. It is unclear whether the Freedom Delegation speaks for the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the nation as a whole.]

JHW: Let’s talk about your great-grandfather, Crazy Horse. I know stories I have read in history books. You tell me what is true.

Cane: I am full-blood Lakota. I am a direct descendant of Crazy Horse. His real name was Cha-O-Ha [until his father gave him his name, Crazy Horse, when he was of mature age]. He was sort of like an emperor when he came into the world. Already, at 13, he was acting like a leader. He did some very heroic deeds in his life besides the battles.

During the times he was going through the visions and trying to accept the honor of his position, he stayed in the mountains and had taken sacred rocks and put them between his toes and fingers to remind him to always suffer for his people. He stayed that way for four days and four nights; no food, no water.

JHW: In battle, no one was more fearless. Your great-grandfather had visions he would not be harmed. Eye witnesses at the Battle of Little Big Horn say Crazy Horse rode closest to the U.S. soldiers and still they could not hit him.

Cane: When it came to battle, he was always out front. In the battle of Little Big Horn, what happened was Custer and his crew were allowed to come through the north corridor. My people wanted Custer and Crazy Horse to battle it together.
When Custer started to move toward the north, Crazy Horse was a quarter-mile ahead of any of his warriors, coming after him. He was swinging his tomahawk over his head and they say you could hear that whistle from a mile away. It can very much terrify you. Custer, he seen Crazy Horse, spun his horse around and ran right back to the middle of his troops.

JHW: No white man survived. There are conflicting stories as to Custer’s fate.

Cane: They annihilated everyone. Custer was by himself and [the Northern Cheyenne] took him and walked him andlaid him down and prayed with him and sang with him and told him, ‘You was our friend. Why did you do this?’
Then the women took over. They took a sharp wedge and pierced into his ears and let the rawhide twist in his ears. That’s because he couldn’t listen.You have to understand, this was a promise broken.This is what happened at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

JHW: You are a medicine man. You come from a long line of medicine men. You just held a sweat lodge here in town to try to help local Jimmy Zell, who is battling Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Cane: My grandpa was a medicine man. My grandma was a midwife. I remember watching her work – I never saw a woman lie down. They always gave birth standing up. That is more natural, to let gravity do the work. Modern medicine can learn from the old ways.

I met Jim two or three years ago through a friend of mine. Jim was very interested in medicinal herbs. I told him about a few things I have done in the past. I had cured three cancers – two in Canada and one here in the U.S. in Pittsburgh at their cancer center.

Three or four days ago Jim really couldn’t eat. I gave him some Indian medicine and now he is picking up his health. His appetite is returning.

JHW: What goes on in the sweat lodge? How long are they? How hot are they?

Three people died from the one in Arizona a few months ago.

Cane: We are not in there to torture nobody or to hurt people. What happened down in Arizona is very much a disgrace. First of all, that was a non-Indian doing this. He was using these people who were very much in a helpless condition and looking for help.

We have rocks that we heat up for almost two hours. We start at a certain number of rocks and we build it up. So this way nobody gets hurt. I have never in my life gone to a sweat where people have died.

If you are having any kind of ailment I will help you to recover and recover fast because of the medicines we use are very, very strong. Everybody feels their whole being is being rinsed out. Brought back throughcleansing and releasing a lot of toxins that’s in your body.

JHW: There is also a lot of ceremony to a sweat.

Cane: We try to stay within that realm of ceremony. We are in there praying. You never pray for yourself. You pray for others. This goes in a natural circle. This is how we pray.

We try to emulate the whole past. The songs are from the ancient past and very old. I appreciated all this from the time of the beginning. I was only 16 when I first did my first Sun Dance in Fort Washakie [in Wyoming].

JHW: Tobacco ties and the peace pipe – they are important?

Cane: We have smaller pipes that recognize the older pipe. We are one of the holders of this sacred pipe, the Sacred Calf Pipe, the oldest in the world. People come from all over to see it.

You know, the pipes are stone and wood. The stone [bowl] has great significance. It represents the female. What we put inside represents the universe. The wood [stem] represents the man. Together: the man and the woman and the universe.
JHW: And what are you putting in that bowl?

Cane: [Unintelligible]; American Indian tobacco. It grows all over in the rivers. You take it and you dry it and cut it up. This is good for your lungs.

JHW: What are your rights to Western soil? Your people inhabited North and South Dakota, along with parts of Wyoming and Nebraska, all after moving west out of Minnesota. Your history is not written, what does it say?

Cane: We are in the seventh generation now. The sixth generation is the older people that took care of the Sacred Calf Pipes before us. They were the last holders of the sacred medicines and pipes. We are picking up their song.

The fourth generation is the one that left behind all the old tipi rings and shrines and medicine wheels. The medicine wheel is one of the most highly sophisticated rock formations that was put together for the sunrise and the moon.

JHW: Like the pyramids, huh?

Cane: Exactly. A long time ago when my people first came to this Earth, they were brought down from the stars – the Seven Sisters. They landed here and that was the beginning– the first generation. This is where they had intellectual people that had a connection to the stars. They communicated by telepathy when the wheel and the stars fit together to open communication.

There is some of that [spirituality] going on today. Not very openly, but it is being passed on.

JHW: What must the country have looked like then? Early North America, before the white man in the first generation?

Cane: Ah man, it was beautiful. My people talk about it. We had horses, even before the Europeans came. Before the Spaniards there were horses here. I love chasing those wild horses. I chased mustangs in the Badlands in North Dakota, Wyoming, Washington State.

JHW: Are they ever going to finish that monument?

Cane: Crazy Horse? The last time I was there we asked them and they said the old guy [sculptor Korczak Ziólkowski] that was doing it handed it off to his son. His son is more or less learning how to go about it from here. It is very tedious. I don’t know when it will be done.

JHW: More than a few ambiguities surround your great-grandfather. His birth, life and death are shrouded in controversy. For instance, no one knows where he was buried. Do they?

Cane: Oh yes, we do.

JHW: Where?

Cane: We can’t tell. We don’t elaborate about it. It is very much a ceremonial thing– one of the biggest ceremonies that ever happened in the Lakota Nation. He is in everybody’s prayers everyday. JHW


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Lunch with a Lakota | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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