A Firefighter’s Lesson, Part 5 – Energy Used and Abused
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A Firefighter’s Lesson, Part 5 – Energy Used and Abused

As each year passed and the family became a little more divided, I witnessed a great loss of tradition.

At my first Sundance, all family members worked in unison, as I had witnessed at the Yuwipi Ceremonies, to get the details passed down to them. Each successive Sundance, as Godfrey was unable to be present and took Unci with him, and then Phillip was killed in a car accident, seemed to have lost a lot of the details I once thought were essential. Without many voices to guide me in the role I was asked to play, I found myself learning to focus my intention on others, open my heart, and invite the Spirit of Woptura to be present, even if I didn’t have the words and had missed many. of the details of Sundance itself.

Spirit never stopped showing up at Sundance. It never stopped affecting people. Regardless of lost traditions and subtleties. The miracles never stopped. An individual came to dance with infected abscesses on his feet. His foot was turning black, bordering on gangrene. I pushed long and hard for him to go to the hospital in Rapid City. He ignored me. He prayed hard and was able to walk to Arbor Day, and then completed the Dance, during which time his foot was completely healed. I’m talking no scars!

Something was happening here that seemed to go beyond the words, the songs, the practical details of the 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 “for the people to live,” strengthened by the intention of others 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 instructed, I began doing prayer circles. I was full of myself. Impressed by my own knowledge, there was an element that I soon had to accept was living within me.

I wanted the people involved with me to know and experience how skilled I was with what my family taught me. I came to recognize that my intention was directed at making myself look good. I began 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 followed was four days of what some would call psychokinetic phenomena: objects around me spontaneously shattered, I experienced raindrops in sealed rooms, fire alarms went off around me for no reason, a computer even started spitting out messages. on your screen. screen that was absolutely eerily specific to the people he was with; isolated and petty phrases extracted 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 in me and stay I literally felt haunted by the Spirits, as if the emotions of specific personalities were going to run through me. Suddenly I would collapse with 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 into a spirit lineage that he truly knew. any on. My world had gone crazy. Nothing I had ever experienced in my life was even remotely like this. To be honest, he didn’t even believe such things would happen.

I contacted the family, now back in Pine Ridge, and was told that Inktomi could only 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 who is invoked during the Yuwipi Ceremonies. He was way over my head.

My only recourse was to return to the Cannunpa, even though I was scared to death. I prayed with him to help me undo what I had done. I did it with more humility than I had ever come close to anything in my life. More than anything, he was afraid that the people he had done the ceremony with had been harmed. He had no idea what he had unleashed and on whom.

In the final analysis, I took the amazing gifts offered to me by the family casually. 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 it what they do with it. 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 outsider.

After four days of paralysis, the phenomena ceased. I realized that even apart from what I knew, apart from what I understood; there was a different Spirit that I called and that manifested itself in ways that I could never have imagined. He had done things a certain way and certain things had happened!

What I had also done was abuse my intention within the context of a Sacred Ceremony. I gave up my Cannunpa for years, only picking it up again when I was willing to stake everything I am and everything I own to use it for others, not myself.

For more on the sacred ceremony, see Yuwipi by William K. Powers, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

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