Every summer the Sauk and Fox Indians, who used to live on the site of Rock Island, returned for a Pow Wow at Black Hawk State Park. On the Fourth of July weekend in 1970, just after fourth grade, Bill's big brother Mike and his girlfriend took us to see it.
We wandered the booths where Sauk/Fox ladies sold beadwork, moccasins, feathered headdresses, little toy drums, fried bread, and ice cream sandwiches. For some reason, the phallic Weinermobile was there, selling hot dogs.
Mike bought me a small green-plastic statue of a Sauk with a round face, long flowing hair, and bulging muscles.
The lady at the booth said that he was Wisakeha, a beautiful youth who created all of the world's rivers. He fell asleep on the day the White-Eyes first bridged the Mississippi, but someday he would awaken and banish war from the world forever.
Mike got quiet after that, maybe thinking of Vietnam.
The show came later: Fancy Dancers fluttering with fringed shirts and enormous feathered headdresses, Medicine Dancers in animal masks, Eagle Dancers with red and green streamers fringing from their pants. A "Wild Indian" blew cigarette smoke through his nose and scared the little kids with his tomahawk. Sauk women marched single-file across the dirt, chanting to the corn spirits. Teenage boys wearing only buckskin pants marched across the dirt, pounding on drums and screaming. They invited the kids to scream as loud as we could to awaken Wisakeha.
When a white-haired old man in a red-beaded headdress began to screech in the old Sauk language, Bill and I decided to look for Indian arrowheads in the hickory-oak woods. We walked up a steep trail that led away from the Pow Wow until we could no longer hear the shrill song or the murmuring voices. Sometimes we caught a glimpse of the river through the foliage, glinting down past a white-brick dam.
Suddenly the woods became very quiet. We saw a figure standing a little down from the path, facing the river. An Indian! One of the teenage performers, I thought, still in costume, except his buckskin pants were down around his ankles, leaving him naked. I saw the side of his thigh, the curve of his clenched buttocks, his thin striated belly, his massive chest painted green like the forest. He was peeing, I realized with a start -- and he had a garden hose between his legs! It took two hands to direct the stream of urine into the undergrowth.
He couldn’t be a real Indian boy! I thought. He was too muscular, too alien, too beautiful. His chest was green, but the rest of his body was dark gold, like a statue. He must be Wisakeha, the god that the Sauk and Fox worshipped, who would soon banish war from the world. We watched in utter silence, afraid to move or breathe.
Suddenly the boy noticed that we were watching. He turned, his muscles taut, his eyes pools of black. And he screamed. It wasn’t angry, like the screams of wild Indians on tv, or the preacher at church – he was screaming with joy. He wanted to be seen.
But we were too terrified to stick around. We ran back to the Pow Wow as fast as we could, and collapsed yelling into Mike’s arms.
Maybe we did awaken a sleeping god that day.
What we traditionally wore was a loincloth and leggings that look like pants together, but the leggings don't cover the groin or buttocks, but most powwow dancers just go with a loincloth over pants or flaps seen into pants.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger, every time a white person grabbed the loincloth, I silently wished I was dressed traditionally, just for the shock value.
People grab loinclothes? Isn't that like a sexual assault, nonconsensual touching of the genitals?
DeleteIt's like running a black kid's hair for good luck. The motive is more racist than sexual.
DeleteAnd of course just look at rape statistics.
I mean, same-sex hookups are pretty common if you're Lakota, with no stigma attached unless you're a bottom or behave in a feminine manner (which is more "different" or "odd" than anything negative). One reason is het sex has pretty extensive incest taboos(like, seventh cousins) and long, drawn out courtship rituals which are required by most Lakota women, and even then, female physiology brings with it a number of taboos like menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation, to say nothing of ritual abstinence for certain periods in a man's life, which also don't apply to just guys.
ReplyDeleteWe also know that as late as the boomer generation, straight boys didn't consider jerking off together queer. In fact, many straight boys saw teaching boys a couple years younger about sex (which basically meant about masturbation and bullshit, since everything but masturbation was the blind leading the blind) as an obligation.
Maybe your god wanted to teach you?
Maybe, but I think he was just urinating. At least, that's all I remember.
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