Tahca Ushte, Lame Deer

Chief Lame Deer was born in 1903. John Fire is the name given by pale faces. This Sioux preferred his name Lakota Tahca Ushte, Lame Deer. I knew his son Archie Fire in the 80’s. Lakota seer and healer, Archie honored us with his presence at the Blue Rock, at Flornoy in Mayenne. His tradition still forms healers.

Indian Memory

Strongly attached to the Lakota tradition, the grandfather and especially his son have forever marked my commitment to the awakening of all. Archie Fire was our guardian angel while we made our onikaghe, Lakota-style sweat huts, on the banks of the river Mayenne. His interventions have overwhelmed us all.

But here is the story of his venerable father, John Fire Deer Lame, Tahca Ushte in Lakota, that I will tell you. Partly raised among whites, Tahca Ushte confides in a remarkable book, Indian Memoir.

Red outside, white inside

From childhood, he knows a first catastrophe. At 14, he is told that he must go to boarding school. A non-Indian cannot imagine how we feel in boarding school.

At home, the little Indians are surrounded by their families. If children call their aunt “mother”, it is not out of politeness, but because an aunt treats her nephews like a mother.

Of his school years he later said, “They couldn’t make me into an apple – red outside and white inside.”

Playing the harp

For the Indian child, white boarding is a terrible ordeal. He is torn from his home’s family intimacy and taken to a strange, icy place. It’s like leaving the heat of a kitchen to be thrown into a snowstorm.

In 1920, when his mother died, he found out that she would be buried on Christian soil, the way white people did. He was disgusted. We Indians do not believe in eternity,” he said to the priest. “When my time comes, I want to go where my ancestors went.” The priest replied:

“Maybe it’s hell.” Tahca Ushte doesn’t care. ” I would rather roast in the company of my Sioux grandmother or one of my uncles than sit on a cloud playing harp with an unknown pale face.”

Fucking shit box

After a silence, he adds: “This Christian name of John, do not give it to me when I am no longer. Call me Tahca Ushte, Lame Deer.” Indians name newborns after an event or animal that occurs at the time of birth. One of his uncles was in the woods when he saw a limping deer. So the infant was named.

When he was a young man, he joined a team of pale faces who rodeo from town to town. He meets an Indian as broke as he is who refuses to leave his traditional tent. The Pale Faces say he would be better under a roof. His old tent is unhealthy, he should burn it. “I don’t want your fucking house. I don’t want to live in a box. Fuck you with your fucking fridge. Throw me that chair out of the window. Sit on the ground, it’s real. Toss me that pisser thing, I won’t use it. And your goldfish, you can shove it up your ass. Kill me that cow and eat it. There is no tomorrow in your fucking shit box!”

Wakan Tanka

I was proud of the old man. He expressed what I felt. All those silly pale faces gave me colic. I went to see one of my uncles who was a healer.
“Tell me about the Great Spirit,” I ask him. Here is what the seer said to Lame Deer:

–Wakan Tanka is not a kind of human being, like the white god.
It is a power. This power can be held in a cup of coffee.
The Great Spirit is not a bearded old man.

Not tender

The life of this man has not been easy, like that of his many fellows. The Statsas they say in Quebec were not tender with the Indian at that time. Unless it was a motoIndian!… Although things have changed, I don’t think today’s Indians feel much better.

The Indian mentality and those of pale faces is too different. Incompatible in fact. They evolved each on a branch of the tree of species, as if they were not human brothers. The white population of the USA is made of junk and junk. There are Europeans from all countries, as well as Asians and Africans. These people live nearby, while the Indians are sheltered on reserves.

Difference

Prisoners of a past gone, the Indians become vagrants in the city. Lost without a penny in the midst of despising and even hostile whites, they have fallen into alcoholism. Sometimes one of them was lucky enough to have brothers looking after him. While most white Americans hate everyone else, Indians live as brothers and sisters. That makes all the difference. The Indian education of love and respect clashes with the cult of indifference and mistrust, typical white tendencies.

The cult of the dollar is also an absolute difference between these two peoples, alien to each other. Unquestionably the dollar god gathers the largest number of faithful among the white population of the states, as Tahca explains.

The green frog skin

The green frog skin is what I call the paper dollar. My grandparents grew up in an Indian world where money did not exist. Just before the fight against Custer, the white soldiers had received their pay. Their pockets were full of green money and they didn’t know where to spend it.

The melee battle has covered the battlefield with a huge cloud of dust where the green frog skins of soldiers swirl like flakes in the storm. And what do the Indians do with this money?

They gave it to their children so that they could have fun folding these strange pieces of colored paper, so that they could make toys out of them, little horses, little bison. At least this time the money was used for entertainment.

It made him crazy

The books say a soldier survived, but he went mad. Here he is, crouching in a ravine. He sees the children playing with money and making paper. The women use it to heat up buffalo dung. Men light their pipes with green frog skins. He sees these beautiful banknotes flying in the dust and then drifting away with the winds. It made him crazy.

For the white man, every blade of grass and every spring is labeled according to its price. When he looks at them, he does not see them. All he sees are green frog skins.

This is the point of view of an Indian who has never left the United States. Elsewhere, there is a significant proportion of people who look like the Indians. The loathing of the dollar and its misdeeds runs in my gut. And all of mine.

First love

In the past, it was not easy for a boy and a girl to get to know each other. There was no room for intimacy in the family tipi. And out in the tall grass, they risked being scalped. If the boys tried something in the tipi, the mothers had tied around their daughters’ waist a belt of hair that passed between their legs: “Forbidden way“.

There was really only one way to meet. The girl was to stand in the centre of the family tipi with a large blanket. The boy approached and she wrapped him in the blanket. Still standing, they rubbed their noses. Those who saw them pretended to ignore them and it stopped there.

He was given

If the boy wanted more, he would go to a healer-seer of the Elk Clan who made him a flute to teach him a magical music that would turn his beloved’s head. Open beak on a bird’s head, this flute could prove to be very effective. When the girl heard the flute of the elk charmer, she could not help running to him.

You could not get married without parental consent. The best way to do this is to bring the two families together and make their decision. It costs several horses to the young man, unless he is too broke to give a horse. Then there is only the ceremony: “He loved her so much, we gave her to him“. And it makes a great marriage.

City wedding

Among its many activities, rodeos, various crafts, Lame Deer has lost nothing of its Indian culture. He became a chief of the tribe and was one of the last red men to live so imbued with his ancestral tradition. This is how one grows to touch the sky. At the end of his life, he celebrated weddings according to the Lakota rite. Sometimes in the Indian reserves but often, already, in cities of whites.

“I put a red blanket on this young man and this Navajo girl. I made them hold the pipe chanunpa in their hands. I tied their wrists with cloth. I sang the old prayers over them.”

Let’s smoke Chanunpa

They lived in an apartment on the eighth floor of a white town. This is what I told them: “I want you to imagine yourself at home during this wedding. Forget this old city, remember that there is a summit, a hill that attracts you, a corner of land that makes you experience the power of the spirits.

You’re standing there like you’re on top of the world. Forget traffic, all that city noise and concentrate. And from the four ends of the world, from heaven above, from earth below, the blessing of Wakan Tanka the Great Spirit will come upon you.

The spirit is upon you and on her who hold you bound under this cover, he gives you new life. He blesses the nest that you build. Now let’s smoke Chanunpa, let’s smoke the pipe. He Hechetu.

A Spiritual Testament

As I said in the intro, I knew his son Archie Fire. He added to his father’s book the recommendations that John Fire Lame Deer gave him before dying. It is a spiritual testament for the long life of Indian culture in the states and elsewhere in the world.

“Teach our people that no son can be like his father, no daughter like her mother. Man must not try to shape his son in his image. Where my steps stop, yours begin. And where your steps stop, begin those of your son.

“Do not attach yourself to material things. Even to the Sacred Pipe which is only matter.

I have seen the Spirits

“My son, I was in the Spirit World and your ancestors forced me to turn back. But I saw them. We have been Chiefs, my son, since time immemorial. When I was in the Spirit World, I asked my father, “Where is my son?”
-Here he is, on top of the mountain. He will go further than you in the physical world. He is the last healer-seer that you will have to train. the 24th. Then your life will be over.
-Take me in your arms, my son. Put me on my bed. I’m sleepy, I’m tired. Help me to rest.

So, for the last time, I put my father to sleep on December 14, 1976. Mitakuye Oyasin.on behalf of all mine“

Testimony of Archie Fire Lame Deer, Santa Barbara, January 1985.