The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 9the actual present. In one story told among the Passamaquoddy, for instance, a hero
and medicine man called Glooscap destroys a monster, slits open his belly, and the
wound he makes becomes “a mighty stream” “flowing by the village and on to the
great sea of the east.” “That should be enough water for the people,” Glooscap
observes: a comment that acquires its point once we know that the Passamaquoddy
were fishermen living on the east coast – their name, in fact, comes from peskede
makadi meaning “plenty of herring.” Glooscap is ensuring the survival of the tribe.
Fear and awe are mingled in the Cheyenne story of one of their great heroes,
Sweet Medicine, the offspring of a virgin birth. Abandoned by his mother on the
prairie, raised by an old woman, he already has “grown-up wisdom and hunting
skill” when he is only 10 years old. Intimations that he is the chosen one are scattered
through the account of his early years. As a child of 10, he kills a miraculous calf and
so ends a famine in his village: “however much they ate of the calf,” the tale reveals,
“there was always more.” And, although for a time he is banished from the village, a
prophet without honor in his own country, he reaps advantage from exile.
“Wandering alone on the prairie,” Sweet Medicine is led by a mysterious voice inside
“the sacred mountain called Bear Butte.” There he has a meeting with spirits, who
instruct him in “the many useful things by which people could live,” give him “the
sacred four arrows (“two arrows are for war and two for hunting”), and teach him
“how to make a special tipi in which the sacred arrows were to be kept.” With these
gifts, Sacred Medicine then makes “the long journey home,” where he finds his
people suffering from another famine. “People of the Cheyenne,” he declaims four
times as he approaches the village, “with great power I am approaching. Be joyful.
The sacred arrows I am bringing.” Instructing his people in “the sacred laws,”
teaching them “what the spirits inside the holy mountain taught him,” he establishes
“the true Cheyenne nation” and appeases “the One Above.” “At daybreak,” after
instruction, ceremony, and the smoking of “the sacred tobacco,” the story reveals,
“the people emerged from the sacred arrow lodge” and “found the prairie around
them covered with buffalo.” The famine is over. For the duration of four lives, Sweet
Medicine lives among his people making the Cheyenne “a proud tribe respected
throughout the Plains.” But “only the rocks and mountains last forever.” When he
knows his end is near, Sweet Medicine instructs his people to carry him to “a place
near the Sacred Bear Butte” and there build him a lodge to die in. He withdraws into
the hut to die, but, before doing so, he offers his people one final word of prophecy –
or, rather, warning. “I have seen in my mind,” he announces,that some time after I am dead – and may the time be long – light-skinned, bearded
men will arrive with sticks spitting fire. They will conquer the land and drive you
before them. They will kill the animals who give their flesh that you might live.... They
will take your land until there is nothing left for you.The future, as Sweet Medicine describes it, seems inexorably fated. All he can offer
the people, by way of advice, is the courage to face it and to fight for survival. “You
must be strong,” his parting words are, or “the Cheyenne will cease to be.”GGray_c01.indd 9ray_c 01 .indd 9 8 8/1/2011 7:54:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 53 AM