The Repentant Warrior

Billy Little Hawk was a troubled youth. His teachers pronounced him "out of control" and "incorrigible." They worried about his parental guidance and moral upbringing. The truth beneath his rebellious nature was that he was angry. He was angry with white people and how they treated his Apache brothers and sisters. He was angry at the names they called him: Wahoo, Baby Killer and Billy Little Drunk. He was angry that they made him feel stupid and worthless.

He did not understand then what he came to understand much later: That something had been stolen from him, something he did not even know he possessed: his culture and his pride.

When Billy graduated high school, he joined the army and went to Vietnam. He wanted to prove something to himself and to his peers. He wanted to show the people who put him down that he was brave and strong. He wanted his people to be proud.

He killed for his country. He was wounded in battle and nearly died for his country. But when he got home, he found that no one was proud of what he had done. His family was glad to see him. They were pleased he had survived but they were not proud. And Billy Little Hawk was not proud of himself.

He read an article in the local paper that compared what the government was doing in Vietnam to what they had done to the Native American peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny. Americans love to hate people who are different from themselves. The Japanese were inhuman monsters, then the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese. The soldiers called them "gooks" and pretended they were less than human beings. They were uncivilized savages. They were baby killers.

Billy wanted to be a hero. Instead, like the Lakota police who killed Sitting Bull, like the Apache scouts who tracked down Geronimo for the blue coats, like Little Big Man who held the arms of Crazy Horse for a soldier to plunge his bayonet, he joined the enemy. He had killed his own people.

He became everything his parents feared he would become. He did drugs. He stole. He did many things for which he would later be ashamed. But mostly, he drank. He drank for the same reason every man drinks: to forget. To kill the pain. To fill the emptiness, the void that exists where the soul should be.

They say an Indian forgets easier than other people do. Maybe they have more to forget. Maybe they have more practice at forgetting. Billy only knew that when he was drunk, he forgot and when he was sober, he remembered, so he stayed drunk all the time.

He was nothing more than a drunken fool when he met a man named Black Crow. He was an old medicine man, a friend of Billy’s grandfather, a man with a crooked leg who had once traveled a thousand miles to smoke a sacred pipe with the great Wavoka, founder of the Ghost Dance. Billy’s father asked the old man to help his son. Black Crow replied that Billy would have to ask for himself.

They found Billy lying in an alley in Anadarko. It was morning but he was still too drunk to stand. Flies were buzzing around the outside of his head and the inside felt like a battlefield where little armies were playing out their war games, their cannons beating against his skull like the pounding of drums.

Billy wanted help from no one until he looked into Black Crow’s eyes. He saw that his pain was not his alone. It belonged to the old man as well. It belonged to his father and grandfather. It belonged to all the Apache, living and dead, and to all Native Americans everywhere. They were all suffering from the same disease, a disease of the spirit, a wasting away of the soul, leaving each man and woman standing alone, severed from their families, severed from their past, and, in the end, severed from themselves.

Standing there like a wooden Indian that has no tongue, Billy reached into his shirt pocket for the only thing he had to offer a man of the spirit world. He pulled out a wrinkled, soiled pack of Marlboros. There was only one broken cigarette left. His heart sank for he knew he could not make this offering, but the old one reached out his open hand and Billy gave it to him. Black Crow broke off the filter, lit it and smoked. In the way of the Apache, it meant that he had accepted Billy’s cry for help.

He was taken to the old man’s house where he bathed and ate with his family. Then they went into a room without furnishings. There were blankets, pillows, and a large ashtray on the floor where they sat. There were more blankets on the walls and covering the door and windows. Black Crow said they were sacred medicine, these blankets. Some had symbols of the sun, the earth, the moon and the stars. Others carried symbols of the buffalo, the wolf, the eagle and the hawk. He said they carried the blessings of powerful healers from many tribes.

He lit a bundle of sage and smoked Billy’s body to cleanse him. He released pollen in the four directions and marked his forehead and right foot with the sacred cross. Then he said a prayer, a chant in the old tongue. Billy did not know the words but he felt a calm cover his body. It was a sensation of wellbeing and peace, a sensation he had not felt in many years. They then smoked from the sacred pipe and talked.

It was the first time Billy told anyone what had happened in Vietnam. He told about the villages they torched, about the men, women and children they killed, and the people who died by his own hand. Billy talked for a long time while the old one listened, nodding, filling the pipe and lighting sage. Finally, Billy broke down and cried like a child, like a small child who had lost his way.

Black Crow said a prayer that soothed and comforted him. Then he spoke of Sand Creek, Medicine Bow and Wounded Knee. He spoke of the crimes the white eyes had committed against the red-skinned people. Billy had heard these stories before but when Black Crow told them, they became real for the first time. He could smell the smoke, see the fire, hear the gunshots and screams, and for a moment, it was as if he was there.

But Black Crow did not stop there. His was not a message of revenge. He spoke of the crimes his people, the Indian people, had inflicted upon the white eyes: the settlers who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, the hunters and trappers who lived in peace with the native peoples, and many others. He spoke of the atrocities inflicted by natives against other tribes.

He said that none have clean hands. He said we should not forget the wrongs of the past but right them by how we live today and tomorrow. In the end, he said, we are the sum of all that has been, all that is, and all that will be. There is no reason to bow our heads in shame. There is every reason to rise and do good and remember the good that has passed.

Four days and four nights, they talked and smoked the pipe. They chanted, prayed and walked the healing path. By the end of the fourth night, Billy Little Hawk was a new man, reborn to the light of truth in the knowledge of the old ways. Since that day he never strayed. Black Crow healed his broken spirit. When a man heals your spirit, he gives a part of himself to you and you become a part of him. It was as if they became one and Black Crow became the bridge that joined Billy to his family, tribe and nation.

Black Crow asked nothing of Billy in return. But when he was invited to accompany him on pilgrimage to Wounded Knee, it was the proudest day of Billy’s life. When he looked at the old man’s face, as he watched the young people dance the Ghost Dance on that sacred ground, he felt the deepest warmth and love he would ever know. It was the pride of a nation, a people and a culture reborn.

Black Crow was the grandfather Billy never knew. When the old man died, he called Billy to his bedside and gave him his medicine bundle. Billy knew what it meant. It was an honor and a challenge. It was a way of life. It was a repayment to the man who saved his soul. Billy accepted it with humility and with the pride of his people.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS) AND THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS). SEE WWW.JACKRANDOM.COM.