Joseph M. Marshall III Read Online Free PDF Page A

caused unusual behavior. Older women relatives took him and his sister into their homes and acted in an uncharacteristically somber manner, all the while treating them with utmost love and respect.
    Such behavior was not totally unfamiliar to children. Death was part of their environment. Adult men were killed in battle or during a hunt. The elderly died of old age and people died from illness or women in childbirth. Although children were not excluded from the rituals and ceremonies surrounding mourning and burial, they were not directly involved unless, of course, someone from their immediate family or a close relative had died.
    Few children would know exactly what to do or how to behave. Light Hair and his sister could do no more than react to the mood of the adults and grieve in the same way everyone was. One day they were taken to a secluded area and to a long bundle atop a platform on four poles, a bundle of buffalo hide. There they left tiny bundles of prairie sage tied to the poles and an old man sang an honoring song. From the platform hung some small personal possessions they recognized as belonging to their mother. Perhaps it was at that moment they might have realized somehow their mother would never come home from wherever she had gone.
    So she left Light Hair when he was at that turn in his new journey that would take him beyond those first formative years. She gave him life, thus filling what Wakantanka had created her to do, and she gave him a foundation on which to build the balance of his life, thus fulfilling the expectation held for all Lakota mothers. Her work on Earth was wholly fulfilled, it seemed, because she gave her son all that he would need: life and a foundation.
    Losing one’s birth mother was not unknown among the Lakota, but in reality there were no orphans. Other mothers and grandmothers filled in because they had always been there.
    The seasons did not stop, however. Sun rose and traveled its daily journey. Moon graced the night without missing its more than ancient cycle. In the Hunkpatila encampment life went on. There came a day when Crazy Horse and his woman relatives made a feast and invited everyone to eat, and they talked of the woman who had been a shadowy guest in all their grieving hearts and in so doing let her rise from their grief into the light of the next life. And so, finally, she was on her next journey.
    More seasons turned. Leaves colored and fell, the autumn winds grew colder until they became the gusty breath of winter blowing the snow as it fell across the land. Spring came once again with its ancient promise of renewal, then summer with the fulfillment of that promise. And one day Light Hair and his sister were given their new mothers.
    They were sisters, quiet and polite as they walked into the circle of their new life as the wives of Crazy Horse and the mothers of his daughter and son. They were the younger sisters of a man renowned among his own Sicangu people, one whose name was spoken often in reference to courage and leadership: Spotted Tail. Even Light Hair had heard the name, though unaware as yet that his new uncle, a tall, stalwart man, would influence his journey on this Earth.
    A man having more than one wife at a time was not unusual among the Lakota. Such an arrangement had to be worth the added responsibility, however. Now and then a man would take his wife’s widowed sister into the family circle, for example. Crazy Horse, though of modest means, was much in demand as a healer and he had as much of an obligation to the community as he did toward his children. Thus a new wife was a necessity, and two—in his case—would turn out to be a blessing for his children.
    Crazy Horse had told Light Hair and his sister that they would have new mothers. It was a tentative declaration though, not in the sense that it might not happen, but stemming from a feeling of trepidation. There was the real fear that Light Hair and his sister would not accept their