Chapter Text
We-nen-wi-wik ka-ni-an,
En-da-yan pi-ma-ti-su-i-un en-da-yan,
Nin-nik-ka-ni ma-nit-to; ke-kek-o-i-yan,
Be-mo-se ma-ko-yan; Ka-ka-mi-ni-ni-ta,
O-ni-ni-shink-ni-yo; Ni ma-nit-to ni-yan."The spirit has made sacred the place in which I live
The spirit gave the medicine which we receive.
I too have taken the medicine he gave us.
I brought life to the people.
I have come to the medicine lodge also.
We spirits are talking together.
The migis is on my body.
The spirit has put away all my sickness."--Midewiwin Migis Ceremony Chant
Traditional, Great Lakes Tribes
***
One cardinal rule when working with dangerous machinery or in precarious locations is not to let the mind wander. Maybe someone should have reminded me of that. My mind was definitely not on what I was doing.
I was up a jeffries tube, using both hands to pry open a stubborn access panel, laser-solder clenched between my teeth, when I lost my balance. Then I was falling. I don't remember hitting the ground. That's a good thing. It would have hurt like hell.
I opened my eyes to see two men descending. They wore old jeans and boots. One went bare-chested with a beaded leather vest and a red-and-white bandanna tied about his head, feather sticking out of it. The other had a leather jacket and stetson. They carried rifles from which lightnings crackled. Except for that—and the superman-style levitation—they might have been a pair of AIM militants from the late twentieth century. Appropriate form for the Thunderpeople, I thought. The manitto have a sense of humor.
But at no point was I in doubt as to who they were.
One held out his hand to me. "Your grandfathers are calling you, Peshewa."
I put my hand in his and let him pull me up, raise me in the air after him. We passed through the wall.
The other side was not the ship.
I suppose I should have expected that.
It was a road, somewhere out west. From the ragged skyline, I thought it might be the Black Hills. I had been here only once, as a young boy. My father and taken me to Wounded Knee—a pilgrimage still, even in the twenty-fourth century. Why?, Paris had asked once, when he had first entered the maquis. Couldn't we get over it, after so long?
If I'm honest with myself, that's what initially set me against him.
Now, I am no longer flying, but walking along the road. I am alone; my escorts have disappeared. The sky is clear and as blue as turquoise. No cloud crosses it, no bird. The silence is eerie. The sun beats down. I consider removing my uniform turtleneck, then realize I'm not wearing my uniform. Instead, I'm dressed in denim shirt and jeans. I unbutton the shirt.
The silence is broken abruptly by the sputter and whine of an engine somewhere in the distance behind me. I stop, turn to see. Dust-dry earth is being churned up in the wake of some type of ground vehicle. I stop, watch it approach. It...looks like a pickup truck—none too different from the pile of junk Paris is trying to rehabilitate in the shuttle-bay. The color of this one is indeterminate rust and from the sound of the engine, it could stand a complete overhaul. I spent enough time holding wrenches for Paris, I ought to know.
It slows, stops. The passenger, a youngish man with layered hair and shell choker rolls down his window. "Hey, uncle—goin' up?"
"I...don't know."
I must sound like I'm suffering from heat-stroke.
He studies me a minute. So does the driver, who has leaned forward to see past him. The driver is a much older man, grey hair in braids beside his face; his flannel shirt looks as old as he is. They confer in their own tongue, one I don't recognize. Finally the younger opens his door. "Git in."
"Thanks." I climb in beside him. The cab is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes, honest sweat and old coffee. They are good smells; they take me back to my childhood. I had missed them, in Starfleet, without even realizing that I had. We ride in silence a while. I'm concerned about the engine, wish for once that I had Paris with me to offer his expertise. I'm still trying to figure out what these two are doing with such an old ground vehicle in the first place. I can smell the exhaust fumes through the open window; the dust chokes me.
One of them, the driver, brings out a pack of cigarettes, passes them around. 'Lucky Strike' the printing says: machine rolled, archaic—like the truck. I turn one in my fingers, smooth and light and white against my skin. I am being tested. I light it. When we have smoked a while, the young one who sits now in the middle says, "Been up here before?"
"Once, when I was a boy. My father brought me."
"No white map now to show you the way?"
"I figured I'd find it, if I was meant to."
He grins, takes a swig from a big plastic cup with 'Unimart' emblazoned on the side. Coffee. Black and strong and bitter as these hills.
"What tribe you from?" the driver asks after a bit.
"Officially, Potowatomi."
"And unofficially?"
I tick them off on my fingers so I don't forget any. "Wea, Shawnee, Dine, Crow, Flathead, Nez Perce, Hopi, Aztec...."
"Shit!" The other two laugh at my recitation.
The old man says to the younger, "Regular walkin' pow-wow, enit?"
We ride again in silence then. No one has offered names. It doesn't seem important. We exist in the now. The past is something we drive into. The future will take care of itself.
The driver begins to sing, low. A prayer perhaps. I cannot understand, but it blends with the turquoise sky and brown land, the bare hills that surround us: the Paha Sapa. The center of the Lakota universe. I am reminded of my maternal grandfather, rising at dawn to burn cedar till it made the eyes tear, singing to the morning sun, the mother earth, the winds of the four directions. After a bit, the old man falls silent. I inhale a little from the last of my cigarette, cup my hands and puff out smoke so that it curls back around my head. Then I crush out the butt and pitch it through the open window, an offering of tobacco to the land itself. I sing slow, "Na, ha, ha, ha; ne, he, he, he; hu, hu, he; te, he, he." They are not words, but the melody is old. The man in the middle begins to beat time on the dashboard, making mitig wakik of plastic foam.
The engine is laboring now. We are climbing towards our destination as sunset approaches. I will learn something here— whatever it is the manitto seek to teach. I feel a pressure in my heart. The grandfathers are calling. I wonder if my companions feel it, too.
When I am done with the song, the driver speaks. "So. You do know the traditions. I thought you was one of them 'Native American' boys from the city, all educated up with white ways till you don't remember no Indi'n ones."
This feels too much like the old critique; I lash back. "I speak my language. I know the ways of my people."
"Your people." The old man frowns. "They belong to you, or you to them?"
I am surprised by his question, by his wording. Hearing it put so, I answer without thinking—instinctively. "I belong to them."
He nods. "Now you're soundin' like an Indi'n."
We round a bend in the road, I see the pillars and arch picked out against darkening sky. The driver pulls to the side and turns off the engine. We sit a moment, then get out, walk up in file. No one else is there when we reach the top. Here is the gravemound with its iron fence and the ribbons for the dead tied to the bars. The sun sits on the noose of the horizon and the earth shivers under my feet. It holds the bones of the murdered ones. I hear their voices on the wind. The old man points across the road to the creekbed of Chankpe Opi Wakpala—Wounded Knee. "There," is all he says.
The other, the young man, is unrolling a bundle, removing a pipe. He begins to pray to each of the directions. I turn to watch. He stands as straight as the obelisk in the background. Smoke drifts in the still air. The voices are louder. The ghosts are coming.
What am I doing here? Why have I been brought back to this place? I am not Lakota; my ancestors do not lie in this sad earth.
Or do they?
Some events echo down history as root experiences beyond tribal lines. Wounded Knee is like that. There are things I claim as Potowatomi and Shawnee: the burning of Prophetstown, the Battle of the Thames and the death of Tecumseh. But Tecumseh lived as a warrior, and died as one. Wounded Knee was very different. No great battle was fought here, no heroic last stand. This was a massacre: mothers and children, fathers, the elderly—all fleeing through the badlands in the middle of December, freezing in thread- bare blankets, pursued for daring to believe again. Wounded Knee was an ending; the west was lost. But it was an ending that jangles like an off-key last note in a final performance. In the words of Black Elk, "A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream... but the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer...."
Half in despair, half in rage, I raise my arms overhead and shout, "Open the sky from the center!"
The prayers behind me stop. I turn. No one is there; the old man and the young have both disappeared. Their truck is no longer here, either. It is as if they had never been.
The sun has set now and night comes on. I button my shirt. Wind whistles through the trees and gravestones. The air is chill, but not nearly so bitter as it would have been in the middle of December in 1890. I squat down, run my hands up and down may arms and wait. I'm not sure what I'm waiting for.
After a while, I see something moving through the grass towards me, a sleek shape undulating uphill from the creekbed. An otter. As she comes closer, I see she carries something in her mouth. She lays it at my feet. A broken twig. I pick it up. "And what am I to do with this, sister?"
Black eyes watch me, seal-brown fur is dark on darker shadows. I know as clear as if I were told that I am to heal the break. I touch the twig where it has snapped and the wood knits back together. The twig lies whole in my hand. Otter darts off, into the dark, returns with a bit of vine. This, too, she lays at my feet. I remember again the words of Black Elk: The nation's hoop is broken.
Carefully, I bend the twig into a small circle, tie it off with thin green vine. Then I stare at it there in the palm of my hand—a promise, a challenge, a dream.
"I don't understand," I tell otter.
She just looks at me, like a teacher with a dim child, then scampers off, back towards the creek. Overhead, heat lightening crackles, then the Thunderbeings speak. Their voices boom off the Black Hills. I listen for a while but do not understand what they say.
Finally, I hear footsteps approach and, standing, look to see who the spirits are sending this time. All small and blond, she comes struggling up the pitted path on a world 70,000 light years from the one on which she was born.
Kes.
"Where are we?" she asks when she gets within speaking distance. Her face is full of that avid curiosity which makes her dear.
"Wounded Knee. It's a place on Earth."
"So this is Earth? I'd thought it would be greener."
"Depends on where you are."
She just nods, as if that were obvious, and walks under the arch, into the graveyard and up to the monument in the center. I know what it says, recite it from memory for her. She can't read the English. "This monument is erected by the surviving relatives and other Ogalala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians...." Blown by the wind, a white plastic flower from one of the old graves rolls up against the grey granite.
"People died here; they were frightened," she says. It might have been absurd. We were standing in a graveyard; of course the dead were here. But that wasn't what she meant.
"You hear their spirits?"
Looking now across the road, down to the creek, she points. "I see them. They're running, trying to get away. I see a woman covered in blood. I see a child with a hole in his neck lying on the ground. I see a tall man with a...weapon...stab an old man." She closes her eyes, shudders. "Too many voices. Too many dead. This is not a good place. They're restless."
"They died badly. They shouldn't have died at all."
"Why did it happen?"
"Because they dared to hope. It was a long time ago, in wars over land. My ancestors lost."
"Like Chief Joseph."
"Yes, exactly. He lived during those same wars, a little earlier. He had surrendered by this point, Crazy Horse was dead, and in the south, Geronimo had surrendered, too. Of the ones who resisted, only Sitting Bull was left, but it looked as if the war chiefs couldn't hold the land. It was then, out of the west, that a seer named Wovoka came. He was Paiute, from Pyramid Lake. He brought a vision—given him by God, he said. A new religion. The Ghost Dance. Many embraced it. Wovoka promised hope, a new world, a messiah. His vision gave back heart to a defeated people and they took up the dance. They danced to speak to the dead, to talk to the ghosts of the past, the ancestors—but they also danced to bring in the new world that Wovoka promised, one that remembered the ways of our ancestors, which made the holy tree bloom again."
I pause, look off into the west, whence the dead go.
"Was it a mistake? I don't know. But the US army didn't trust it, or us. They wanted us beaten, defeated, pliant. They called the Ghost Dance a war dance and ordered it to stop. They blamed Sitting Bull even though he wasn't involved, then corrupted some of his own people to kill him. After Sitting Bull's murder, one band of Lakota—Big Foot's—gave up on the dance and tried to flee to Pine Ridge. The army intercepted them and took them here, ordered them to disarm. A shot went off accidentally, people on both sides started shooting. But Big Foot's band were women and children, the ill and the old—only a few warriors. The army had most of the guns. They butchered Big Foot's people. A massacre. Their bodies lie there—" I point to the mound. "The soldiers piled the dead in a single trench. This place was the end of our freedom. The end of our hope." I repeat for her Black Elk's words: "The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer...."
She thinks about that, finally says, "I wonder. Are you talking about Wounded Knee? Or Voyager?"
I start. "What?" But I had heard her perfectly.
She smiles up at me. There is something of otter in her: otter who brings medicine and laughter both. Is it any surprise if otter called her? "You like your metaphors, Chakotay. Maybe your spirits are making one for you."
I look down at the tiny twig hoop in my palm. "What? They want me to teach Voyager to Ghost Dance?" My voice conveys my skepticism.
"You tell me. They're your spirits."
"I'm not Wovoka."
"Would you want to be?"
"No. His vision failed. Or he didn't understand it. I don't know. It's not my place to judge." I look back at her. In moonlight, she looks more elfin than usual.
Wrong mythology, Chakotay.
"I'm not a shaman," I tell her. "I don't walk the roads between worlds."
"Don't you? What's this we're doing, then?"
"I'm dreaming!"
"That makes a difference? I thought you were the one who taught me to pay attention to my dreams?"
The woman argues like a lawyer. I throw up my hands, turn away a moment. But when I turn back, she's gone. "Kes?" No one answers. I wonder if she was ever really here at all. With Kes, one never knows. Perhaps she really can walk in and out of others' dreams.
Overhead, thunder rolls again. I look up. "What do you want from me?" I yell.
"Heal the hoop, Peshewa."
The voice comes from behind. I turn. The young man from the truck stands before me again. He no longer looks mortal. The light of the stars shimmers on his skin. "Who are you?" I ask.
He grins. "Who do you think, uncle?"
"Nanahboozhoo."
Son of the West Wind. Trickster. Clever one. He who races faster than the lightening.
"You helped bring medicine to the people," I say.
"Yes. Now, I bring it to you." He holds out something towards me. An otterskin bag. "Take it."
"Who am I to beat the drum!"
Lightning shivers along his limbs. "Who are you to refuse?" he asks. His voice is thunder.
I fall on my face. Nanahboozhoo makes a bad enemy. When I dare to look up again, he is gone. The otterskin bag sits in front of my nose.