Nameless, Lost People

The top-40 radio station out of Bismarck is silenced as several Dodge, Chevy and Ford pickups thunder down the dirt track into camp. “There’s going to be a naming ceremony,” Swan tells me, her nameless baby girl sleeping in a carrier on her chest.

I feel sheepish and unsure – mutter a lame excuse about food on the fire and not wanting it to burn.  I feel afraid that it is somehow not my place to witness the sacred ceremony.  A feeling near to panic arises in me, knowing from somewhere that Naming is among the most profound of the human magics, and simultaneously knowing that I have never been initiated into the sacredness of that power.

…people in t-shirts and shiny athletic shorts have been carrying nylon camping chairs and metal church-basement folding chairs in a seemingly unorganized, self-electing stream.

The deep barrel drum begins to thrum from the other side of the blue plastic tarp that defines the wall of our kitchen.  “Go, take a look,” I shoo the children toward the circle of trucks, to where people in t-shirts and shiny athletic shorts have been carrying nylon camping chairs and metal church-basement folding chairs in a seemingly unorganized, self-electing stream. The children go.  The thrumming continues.  The wailing song begins.

“Will you come, my love,” my husband asks me.  “Yes, yes,” I mutter, puttering, stirring, shaking seasonings into the simmering stew on the cinder-block range, feeding twigs into the fire.  “Yes, I’m coming,” as I grab my mug of tea.  I recognize the drink-in-hand-as-shield habit, adapted long ago in the battlefields of overwhelming college parties.

A wailing song, rhythmic and ululating, comes from the prayer circle.  I can’t see beyond the cab of a black pickup truck and the brim of Bill Left Hand’s cowboy hat.  I step over the tipi poles on the ground and make my way to the front of the truck where my white children are leaning against its grill.  I lean beside them.  I see men I know from the camp, and others I don’t, sitting propped on the edges of the metal folding chairs borrowed from the reservation’s Christian ministry around the stretched-skin drum — beating with mallets — following in perfect unison the lead of the two men who seem flawlessly to share the guiding position.  They lead the song — everyone singing knows the words.  Or, if their mouths seem not quite to know the syllables, their voices yet sing out in the high plaint, and the look of fixed ceremonial commitment and seriousness allows no room for any accusation of “not knowing”.

They are singing the sacred space into being, these men in western shirts and denim, Goodwill t-shirts and beat-up tennis shoes, knock-off Ray-Ban sunglasses.  These men sing a song as old as the sky for their people.

Another man, heavy-set, in his Nike high-tops and backwards baseball hat, walks the perimeter of the emerging energetic circle with a crumpled coffee can on a twisted wire handle.  The coffee can is puffing, with occasional encouraging shakes from the man, a thin gray smoke of sage and charcoal, bathing the naming rite and its officiants and participants in sacred aroma.

I feel a deep and impersonal grief rise from my heaving, choking diaphragm up through my aching heart and into my clenched throat.  I am suffocating on a grief pumped forth by the drumming from mysterious places in my blood.

The explosive “woah”s and “hey”s and the echoing “yah-yah-yah”s of Lakota pierce and warp the clear air that carries the ancient syllables. I feel a deep and impersonal grief rise from my heaving, choking diaphragm up through my aching heart and into my clenched throat.  I am suffocating on a grief pumped forth by the drumming from mysterious places in my blood. I feel ashamed of the tears squeezing from my eyes, so I duck between the black truck and the rusty tan one next to it.  I don’t want Bill Left Hand to see me crying at this sacred but not-upsetting ritual.  I look away.

I look back at the men, moved by a desperate place in myself that wonders — where do these rituals go when they die?  Where the songs of my savage grandmothers?  Where the rhythms and worshipful wondrous dances of my people?  Where — where the stories and the songs of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota that are whispered no longer to babies, or told around fires in the depth of long and cold Winter?

Where do the practices that speak of our unity — our identity — go when they are no longer resident in our hearts?  Can we call them back?  Can we find them if we go journeying?

Will they flush out of the undergrowth as we come crashing through the woods?  How long will we sit in quiet before they come to sniff our hands?