Inyan

-L

the creek after the blue water creek massacre - 9/3/1855

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...and still they dare call it a "battle."
-L

Spotted Tail's Death Song

"Nephew, do you know what it means when we say today is good day to die? Here is something we have over the wasicu. Their minds are clever, they can make guns and knives and little round things that tell the time of day or the four directions. Their minds are very clever.

"But they are afraid to die.

"They understand how to make a far-seeing glass and how to make the powder that explodes, but life and death they do not understand.

"Dying is natural.

"To the rooted people, the grazers, the fliers, the crawlers, the swimmers, to us and mitakuye oyasin - all our relations - dying is natural. We like to live, and dying is a part of living. We enjoy Mother Earth - birthing and dying are part of her way. As we love her, we love them. A Lakota likes living and is not afraid of death. He accepts it.

"That is what a death song says. I love the earth and am ready for death.

"On an evening like this you feel it strongly. I love the earth and am ready for death. They are a part of the same feeling. Wasicu are afraid to die. It makes their sweat bead out, their guts clench, their bowels go loose. I would hate to be a wasicu. Remember always, you can fight for life, but you cannot fight against death."

Crazy Horse

"He would have preferred, I imagine, simply to avoid them and go on living a traditional Sioux life, raiding, hunting dreaming; but the option of avoidance was not available to him for very long. The whites were too many, and they weren't satisfied with the Holy Road. They weren't satisfied with any one place or one road; they wanted everything. So he fought: on the Bozeman, on the Powder River, on the Yellowstone, in the Black Hills, on the Tongue and the Rosebud, at the Little Big Horn...He didn't win the war. What is hard to judge is how long he really expected to, if he ever expected to. Despite much urging, and unlike Red Cloud, Spotted Tail and Sitting Bull, he never went east, never saw the whites in their seats of power; had he done so, he might have drawn the same conclusion they drew. But he went his own way, travelled his own road, until it dead-ended at Fort Robinson in September of 1877. Looked back on from the perspective of one hundred and twenty years, Crazy Horse's doom seems Sophoclean, inevitable, but perhaps all dooms do, once the roads taken and not taken deliver the character to his fate."

-Larry McMurtry "Crazy Horse"