THE PEOPLE OF THE LEAVES
Among the early Canadian French the Sioux were known as the _Gens des
Feuilles_, or People of the Leaves. This poetical title seems very
obscure in its meaning, at first, but it may have originated in a legend
of the Creation which is as follows:
In the ultimate Beginning, the Great Spirit made the world. Under his
potent, life-giving heat the seeds within the soil burst into bloom
and the earth was peopled with trees--trees of many kinds and forms,
the regal pine and cedar in evergreen beauty and the other hosts whose
leaves bud with the Spring, change with the Autumn and die with the
Winter's snow. These trees were all possessed of souls and some of them
yearned to be free. The Great Spirit, from his throne in the blue
skies, penetrating the slightest shadow of a leaf, divining the least
unfolding of a bud with his all-seeing, omnipotently sensitive beams
radiating like nerves from his golden heart, perceived the sorrow of the
sighing forests and mourned with tears of rain at their discontent. Then
he knew that a world of trees, however beautiful, was not complete and
he loosed the souls from their prisons of bark and limb and re-created
them in the form of Indians, who lived in the shelter of the woods, knit
to them by the eternal kinship of primal soul-source--verily the People
of the Leaves.
* * * * *
It is not strange that among a nation which adored the sun, the chief
ceremony should have been the Sun Dance, at once a propitiatory offering
to the Great Spirit and a public test of metal before a young man could
become a brave. The custom was an ancient one, as ancient, perhaps, as
the legend of the leaves, and in the accounts of the earliest explorers
and missionaries we read of this dance to the sun; of the physical
heroism which was the fruit of the torture and filled the ranks of
soldiery with men Spartan in fine scorn of pain and contempt of death.
It is interesting to trace similar practices in races widely separate
in origin, habits and beliefs, and it seems curious that this rite of
initiation into the honourable host of the braves, however dissimilar in
outer form, was not totally unlike in spirit the test of knighthood for
the hallowed circle of the Table Round.
The festival of the Sun Dance was celebrated every year in the month
of July, when the omnipotent orb reached his greatest strength, is,
indeed, still celebrated, but without the torture which was its reason
for being. A pole was driven deep and solid in the ground and from
the top, somewhat after the manner of a May-pole, long, stout thongs
depended. After incantations by the Medicine Men, the youths desiring
to distinguish themselves came forward in the presence of the assembled
multitude, to receive the torture which should condemn them as squaw men
or entitle them to fold their blankets as braves.
With a scalping knife the skin was slit over each breast and raised so
a thong from the pole could pass beneath and be fastened to the strip
of flesh. When all were bound thus, the dance began to the time of a
tom-tom and the chant. Goaded by pride into a kind of frenzy the novices
danced faster, more wildly, leaping higher, bending lower, until they
tore the cords loose from their bleeding bosoms and were free. If,
during the ordeal, one fainted or yielded in any way to the agony, he
was disgraced before his tribe, cast out as a white-hearted squaw man
until the next year's festival, when he might try to wipe out the stain
and enter the band of the brave. If, on the other hand, all the young
men bore the torture without flinching, their spirits rising superior to
all bodily pain, they were received as warriors and earned the right to
wear the medicine bag. Often one of greater puissance than his fellows
wished further to distinguish himself by a test extraordinary and
submitted to a second torture more heroic than the first. He suffered
the skin over his shoulder blades to be slit as his breast had been and
through these gashes thongs were drawn and fastened as before, but this
time the ends were attached to a sacred bison's skull, kept for the
purpose, which the brave dragged over rough, rocky ground and through
underbrush, until his strained flesh gave way and freed him of his
burden. This feat entitled him to additional honors and he was respected
and held worthy by the great men of the tribe.
After the torture, when a youth was declared a brave he retired to the
wilderness, there in solitude to await the message of the Great Spirit
which would reveal to him his medicine, or charm.
This "making medicine" as it was called, was a rite of most solemn
sacredness and secrecy and therefore shrouded in mystery. From the
lips of one who, in days past, when the ancient customs were rigidly
preserved, followed and watched a newly made brave, the ensuing
narrative was gleaned.
After dark the young Indian took his way cautiously far off into silent,
unpeopled places where sharp escarpments cut like cameos against the
sky. There, poised upon the cliffs, his slim figure silhouetted against
the moonlit clouds, he remained rigid as a statue through long hours,
waiting for the Voice from Above by whose revelation he should learn
wherein his power lay. Then lifting his arms towards the heavens he made
strange signs to the watchful stars. So he remained 'till dawn paled
from the East, when, having received his message, he went forth to seek
the animal which should hereafter be his manitou, or guardian spirit.
Sometimes it was the bison, the elk, the beaver, the weasel or other
beast of his native wild. Into his bag he put a tooth or claw and some
fur of the chosen creature, with herbs which might be propitious. Such
was his charm, his medicine-bag, the source of his valour and safety, to
be worn sleeping and waking, in peace and in war; to be guarded with his
life and to go with him in death back to the Great Spirit by whom it was
ordained.
If a warrior lost his medicine-bag in battle, he became an outcast among
his people and his disgrace was not to be wiped out until he slew and
took from an enemy's body the medicine-bag which replaced his own and
thus retrieved his honour.
Of all the quaint ceremonies connected with the old wood-worship and
sun-worship, combining the idea of Beginning and End, of pre-existence
and after-existence, none are more interesting than the rites attending
the burial of the dead. As the Indians sprang from the forest trees,
according to the myth of the leaves, lived in the shadow of the pleasant
woods, so at last, they were received into the strong, embracing
branches that tossed over them in wild gestures when the Great Spirit
spoke in anger from the sky; that tempered the Summer's heat into
cooling shadow for their repose; that shed their gift of crimson leaves
upon the Indians' devoted heads even as they, themselves, must shed the
garb of flesh before the blast of death. Or, sometimes, the dead were
exalted upon a naked rock, rising above earth's levels toward the sun.
Wherever his resting place might be, the dead man sat upright, if a
brave, dressed in his full war regalia, surrounded by his most prized
possessions and if he owned a horse, it was shot so its shade might
bear his spirit on the long, dark, devious way to the Happy Hunting
Ground. No mournful ghost who met his death in darkness could ever bask
in the celestial light of endless Summer-time; he was doomed to become
a phantom living in perpetual night. That is the reason none but forced
battles were fought after dark; the bravest of the braves feared the
curse of everlasting shadow. They believed, too, that no warrior who
lost his scalp could enter the fields of the glorious; hence the taking
of an enemy's scalp at once killed and damned him. The suicide was
likewise barred from Paradise.
* * * * *
Years ago, when the feuds of the hostile tribes still broke into the red
vengeance of the war-path, the Sioux and Cheyennes did battle with the
Gros Ventres at Squaw Butte, and by some mischance a medicine man of the
Sioux, not engaged in the combat, whose generalship lay in marshalling
the manitous to the aid of his people, was killed. A traveller,
journeying alone in the mountains, found him high upon a cliff with
his blanket and war dress tumbling about his bleaching bones, his
medicine-bag and all the emblems of his magic preserved intact. In the
bag was a grizzly bear's claw, an elk's tooth, and among other trinkets,
a small, smooth brass button of the kind worn by the rivermen trading
up and down the Missouri River between the East and the savage West.
It would be interesting to trace the migrations and transfiguration of
that little button from its existence as an humble article of dress to
the dignity of a charm in the medicine-bag of the old magician on that
isolated cliff. And the Master of Magic himself; he of prophetic powers
and knowledge born of intercourse with the gods; there he sat, an arrow
through his skull, his blind, eyeless sockets uplifted to the sun, his
necromancy unavailing, his wisdom but a dream! In that remote home which
his devoted tribesmen chose for him, no irreverent hand had disturbed
his watch, and he is probably still sitting, sitting with blind eyes
toward the sun while eagles circle overhead and gray wolves howl to the
moon. The years pass on unheeded, the face of the land has changed,
is changing, will change, and the rustling, swirling leaves of Autumn
fall thick and fast. Mayhap, after all, the old Magic Master, keeping
his eternal vigil, may see from beyond the flesh the thinning woods and
the dead leaves dropping from the trees; hear their weary rustle--poor
ghosts, as they flutter before the wintry wind. And among the lessening
trees, also driven by the Northern blast, does he see also, a gaunt and
silent troop of phantoms--mere Autumn leaves--whirling away before the
Storm?
_THE PASSING BUFFALO_