Lesson of a fire bidder, part 5 – Energy used and abused
As the years passed and the family became a little more divided, I witnessed much loss of tradition.
At my first Sundance, all the family members worked in unison, as I had witnessed at the Yuwipi Ceremonies, to get the specifics as they were relayed to them. Every successive Sundance, since Godfrey was unable to be present and took Unci with him, and then Phillip was killed in a car accident, he seemed to have lost many of the details that I once thought were essential. Without many voices to guide me in the role I was called to play, I found myself learning to focus my intention on others, open my heart, and signal the Spirit of Woptura to be present, even if I didn’t have the opportunity to do so. words and had lost many of the details of Sundance itself.
The spirit never stopped showing up at Sundance. It never stopped affecting people. Regardless of the traditions and subtleties lost. The miracles never stopped. An individual came to dance with infected abscesses on his feet. His foot was turning black, almost gangrenous. I put a lot of pressure on him to go to the hospital in Rapid City. He ignored me. He prayed a lot and was able to walk for Arbor Day, and then completed the Dance, during which time his foot was completely healed. I’m not talking about scars!
Something was happening there that seemed to go beyond words, songs, the basic details of rituals; as if just knowing the essence of the Spirit he was calling was enough. It wasn’t that particular Sundance that cured him, it was his intention to dance “so that people may live”, strengthened by the intention of those around him for the same.
Not long after my last Sundance at Pine Ridge, and shortly after Unci blessed my Cannunpa, a pipe that had taken me a year to make as directed, I began making prayer circles. I was full of myself. Impressed by my own knowledge, there was an element that I soon had to come to terms with living within me.
I wanted the people involved with me to know and experience how skilled I was with what the family taught me. I came to recognize that my intention was to make myself look good. I started by using some Lakota prayers that I had learned at the Yuwipi Ceremony. In one of them I called Inktomi (Ick-tomi), the Spider. Big mistake!
What was four days of what some would call psychokinetic phenomena: objects around me were spontaneously breaking, I was experiencing raindrops in sealed rooms, fire alarms were going off around me for no reason, even a computer was starting to drop messages. on his screen that were absolutely eerily specific to the people he was with; Malignant and isolated sentences drawn from some deeply buried memory banks that had supposedly been erased by the previous owner. And those were just the external phenomena!
At the same time, he was completely drunk with a sense of power. But the cost was astronomical. I felt an uncomfortable presence around me, sometimes trying to get on me and stay. I literally felt harassed by the Spirits, as if the emotions of specific personalities were passing through me. Suddenly I found myself collapsing into abject fear, hilarious laughter, or desperate tears, knowing full well that it had nothing to do with what I myself was experiencing at the time.
He had crossed over to a lineage of spirits that he actually knew any upon. My world had gone crazy. Nothing I had ever experienced in my life was even remotely like this. To be honest, I didn’t even believe such things would happen.
I contacted the family, now back in Pine Ridge, and they told me that Inktomi was only to be called by an experienced Wicasa Wakan (wi-cha-sha wa-con), Holy Man, because his medicine is so strong and rebellious that only such a trained and pure person could handle it. It is Inktomi that is used during the Yuwipi Ceremonies. It was way above my head.
My only recourse was to go back to the Cannunpa, even though I was scared to death. I prayed with him to help me undo what he had done. I did it with more humility than I had ever come close to anything in my life. More than anything else, he feared that the people with whom he had performed the ceremony had been harmed. He had no idea what he had unleashed and on whom.
In the final analysis, I had casually taken the amazing gifts the family offered me. For every action there is a reaction, and this white man had taken what was not his from the context of his caretakers and tried to do with him what they do with him. No, it just doesn’t work that way, and the balance is achieved within the context of the traditions being violated, NOT in terms or experiences that make sense to the intruder.
After four days of parayer, the phenomena ceased. I came to realize that even separated from what I knew, separated from what I understood; there was a Spirit other than the one I invoked and which manifested in ways I would never have imagined. He had done things a certain way and certain things had happened!
What I also did was abuse my intention in the context of a Sacred Ceremony. I put down my Cannunpa for years, and only took it back when I was willing to bet everything I am and everything I have on using it for others, not myself.
For more information on the sacred ceremony, see Yuwipi by William K. Powers, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.