We Act Out the Creation Story

 

I'm Jerome Kills Small from the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota. My Lakota name is Sisoka Luta (shee-sho-kah Loo-tah), which translates to Red Robin, but I always say Cardinal .

I'm from the Red Star side of the family. My ancestral grandfather is Man Afraid of His Horses, and Young Man Afraid of His Horses. Young Man Afraid of His Horses had three other brothers. The first one, his name was Black Mountain Sheep, and they called him Chinska (sheen-sh-ka), Spoon, because we make spoons out of the mountain sheep horn. We boil it and make it soft, and we make ladles and spoons, and I have mountain sheep spoons and buffalo horn spoons and ladles. I keep them for memory of what I was told, and I still live that way.

Every chance I get, I like to show off my ancestral name. Man whose horses are feared was one of my grandfathers. Young Man Afraid of His Horses, one of his brother's names is Tashunk Kokipa pi (Tah shoon-kah Ko-kee-pah pee). In English the name is translated as Man Afraid of His Horses. Another one was Clown Horse and these came all from a dream. The old man named all of his relatives through Hambleceya. He went to the Gray Horn Butte, what we know as Devil's Tower. He did his fasting there and named each of these boys, and the last one's name is Red Star, and I'm a direct descendant of Red Star on my mother's side. We're a matriarchal society, so we generally take the last name of the mother. So my name on the tribal rolls is Red Star, and Kills Small secondary, which is my father.

When I was a small boy I remember being blind. When I was healed and I came to, I was in Kyle (Medicine Root), South Dakota, Medicine Root District, they say, and it's Peji Haka (Peh-zhee Hka-kah) They always say there's a lot of medicine in that Yellow Bear Canyon. It's a big canyon down there by Allen, South Dakota. Well, we lived on the edge of Yellow Bear Canyon in Kyle, South Dakota. That's where I knew that I was alive and the first time my mind started to record, I started to know these people. They were Grandma and Grandpa Louisa and Edward Spotted Crow. They were in their nineties when I was a small boy. They're the ones that helped to heal me when I was blind.

A medicine man by the name of Jess Steed is the one that made me see, and I like to say his name because I'm his document, I'm his doctoral thesis. I'm his doctoral dissertation. I'm the example. I'm the document of that medicine man. So it's up to the people to say who's the medicine man not the medicine man himself. It's the people who are the documents. If many documents say that that person healed me, then he must be the right person to go to. Then we know, by that circle of people, of how our stories run, through individuals.

They would tell a lot of things, and I'd just sit there and listen, and sometimes I would hear about their travels all over this land. They even talked about the depression. When there was no food, nothing could grow, a lot of grasshoppers, they tell about that. They used to say they went all the way to Wyoming. There was a store over there where things were very, very cheap, and they said that it was the Gray Medicine, Sage, Peji Hota (Peh-zhee-Hko-tah) that means Wyoming. It's called the sage land because of the sage brush, and they said when they went over there, they would remember when they used to go to the He Ska (Hke-skah). the Rocky Mountains. They used to go over there to look for medicine. We get the mountain sage and a lot of the medicines over there. They would come back through the Scotts Bluff area, back this way. They would tell all the places where they roamed, just to complete their shopping (you-sh-taahn), their going around and bringing things home for the winter.

So they were in touch with other tribes. We have relatives in Montana, in Lodge Grass, from the old da