The Circle of All Native Nations

The Indian culture such as the great warrior, Crazy Horse, believed in lying their deceased on scaffolds, wrapping them in buffalo blankets. There to be exposed to the elements and delivered over a year or two back to nature. Then to come back as buffalo grass, and eaten by the buffalos, which would be eaten by the Sioux, thus completing the cycle. Versus the Anglo belief of burial in a metal casket preventing breakdowns over a longer time. I got this from Stephen Ambrose book of Custer and Crazy Horse

Very worth reading❤️
Actor, film director, film producer and musician Keanu Charles Reeves (Keanu Charles Reeves),
Missed the first 20 minutes of the party dedicated to the end of filming of his new movie at one of the clubs in New York.
He waited patiently in the rain to be let in.
No one recognized him.
❤️Get your t-shirt: (https://nativerites.com/dh9)
The club owner said: “I didn't even know Keanu was standing in the rain waiting to get in - he didn't say anything to anyone.”
"He travels by public transport."
"He easily communicates with homeless people on the streets and helps them."
- He was only 60 years old (September 2, 1964)
- He can only eat hot dogs in the park, sitting among normal people.
- After filming one of the "Matrix", he gave all the stuntmen a new motorcycle - in recognition of their skills.
- He gave up most of the salaries of the costume designers and computer scientists who drew the special effects on "The Matrix" - deciding that their share of the film's budget was assessed short.
- He reduced his salary for the movie "The Devil's Advocate" to have enough money to invite Al Pacino.
- Almost at the same time his best friend passed away; His girlfriend lost a child and soon died in a car accident, and his sister suffered from leukemia.
Keanu didn't fail: he donated $5 million to the clinic that treated his sister, refused to be filmed (to be with her), and founded the Leukemia Foundation, donating significant amounts from each fee for the movie.
You may have been born a man, but stay a man..
Also read about Keanu
Keanu Reeves' father is of Hawaiian descent...
❤️ IF you are Native American, you will love this t-shirt 👉 (https://nativerites.com/dh9)

Very worth reading❤️
Actor, film director, film producer and musician Keanu Charles Reeves (Keanu Charles Reeves),
Missed the first 20 minutes of the party dedicated to the end of filming of his new movie at one of the clubs in New York.
He waited patiently in the rain to be let in.
No one recognized him.
❤️Get your t-shirt: (https://nativerites.com/dh25)
The club owner said: “I didn't even know Keanu was standing in the rain waiting to get in - he didn't say anything to anyone.”
"He travels by public transport."
"He easily communicates with homeless people on the streets and helps them."
- He was only 60 years old (September 2, 1964)
- He can only eat hot dogs in the park, sitting among normal people.
- After filming one of the "Matrix", he gave all the stuntmen a new motorcycle - in recognition of their skills.
- He gave up most of the salaries of the costume designers and computer scientists who drew the special effects on "The Matrix" - deciding that their share of the film's budget was assessed short.
- He reduced his salary for the movie "The Devil's Advocate" to have enough money to invite Al Pacino.
- Almost at the same time his best friend passed away; His girlfriend lost a child and soon died in a car accident, and his sister suffered from leukemia.
Keanu didn't fail: he donated $5 million to the clinic that treated his sister, refused to be filmed (to be with her), and founded the Leukemia Foundation, donating significant amounts from each fee for the movie.
You may have been born a man, but stay a man..
Also read about Keanu
Keanu Reeves' father is of Hawaiian descent...
❤️ IF you are Native American, you will love this t-shirt 👉 (https://nativerites.com/dh25)

Hopi Mirror. Pool near Walpi, Arizona. Early 1900s. Photo by Carl Moon.

~ Tai 🏹🐴🦬🪶🐾
Artwork found on Pinterest ♥️

Samuel Pack Elliott (born August 9, 1944) is an American actor. He is the recipient of several accolades, including a Screen Actors Guild Award and a National Board of Review Award.
Buy your t-shirt: https://nativerites.com/look-1
He has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Emmy Awards. Elliott starred in the musical film A Star Is Born (2018), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a corresponding Critics' Choice Movie Award, Actors' Choice Award. Guild screen. He also won the National Review Board Award. Elliott played the role of Shea Brennan in the American television series 1883 (2021–2022), for which he won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Miniseries or Television Series.
Elliott is known for his distinctive lanky figure, full mustache, and deep, silent voice. He began his acting career with small appearances in The Way West (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), season 5 of Mission: Impossible and a television guest appearance in the Western Gunsmoke (1972). before landing his first starring role in Frogs (1972). His film breakthrough came in the film Lifeguard (1977). Elliott co-starred in the box office hit Mask (1985) and went on to star in several Louis L'Amour adaptations such as The Quick and the Dead (1987). and Conagher (1991), the latter of which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film. He received his second Golden Globe Award nomination and first Primetime Emmy Award for Buffalo Girls (1995). His other films from the early 1990s include John Buford in the historical drama Gettysburg (1993) and Virgil Earp in the Western Tombstone (also 1993). In 1998, he played Stranger in The Big Lbowski.
In the 2000s, Elliott appeared in supporting roles in the television series We Were Soldiers (2002) and the superhero films Hulk (2003) and Ghost Rider (2007). In 2015, he guest-starred on the series Justified, which won him a Critics' Choice Television Award, and in 2016 began starring in the Netflix series The Ranch. Elliott then had a starring role in the comedy The Hero.
Great t-shirt 👇👉
https://nativerites.com/look-1

A chief on the Crow Indian Reservation, Montana, 1927.

Daughters of a Navajo silversmith. ca. 1930-1940. Photo by Frasher's Fotos

𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝟕2𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮

Congratulations on your 72th birthday
Graham Greene, CM (born June 22, 1952) is an Indigenous (Oneida) Canadian actor who has worked on stage, in film, and in TV productions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Dances with Wolves (1990). Other notable films include Thunderheart (1992), Maverick (1994), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), The Green Mile (1999), Skins (2002), Transamerica (2005), Casino Jack (2010), Winter's Tale (2014), The Shack (2017), Wind River (2017) and Shadow Wolves (2019)
I think you will be proud to wear this T-shirt Awesome tshirt by ➴➴
https://nativerites.com/dh6

"Peace... comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us."
--Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa), Oglala Lakota

𝗞𝗮𝘄-𝗨-𝗧𝘇, 𝗮 𝗖𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗼 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿, 𝟭𝟵𝟬𝟲
The Caddo nation spread out through the parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The tribe dealt mainly in farming and did not like outsiders. Their farming skills were unparalleled, as they were able to grow squash, beans, and corn in areas that were humid swamps. The Caddo typically lived in grass huts in the shape of a cone.
Historians believe that they were kind to the Spanish explorers who arrived in the area because they were given many compliments about how they furnished their homes. The Caddo people also use the areas pine trees to make their famed bow and arrows

Little Crow and brother. Cheyenne. 1880s? Montana. Photo by L.A. Huffman. Source - Montana Historical Society.

"""Sioux Chief Long Wolf & Family"", ca. 1880.
~ “A Stranger Hears Last Wish of a Sioux Chief
Long Wolf went to London with Buffalo Bill's show and died there in 1892. Thanks to the struggles of a British homemaker, his remains will be returned home.”

May 28, 1997 |WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO
TIMES STAFF WRITER
BROMSGROVE, England — “After a restless century in a melancholy English graveyard, the remains--and the spirit--of a Sioux chief named Long Wolf are returning to his ancestral home in America because one stranger cared.

The stranger is a 56-year-old English homemaker named Elizabeth Knight, who lives in a small row house with her husband, Peter, a roof repairer in this Worcestershire village near Birmingham.

""I am a very ordinary sort of person,"" she said.

The sort who writes letters, not e-mail, who makes no long-distance phone calls, has no fancy degrees, has little worldly experience, who never gets her name in the papers. The sort who turns detective and historian and raises a transatlantic fuss because her heart is moved and her sense of fair play is outraged.

This is the story of how heirs of Middle England and the Wild West have joined forces to fulfill a dying wish made more than a century ago.

For Knight, the story began the day in 1991 that she bought an old book in a market near her house. There was a 1923 story by a Scottish adventurer named R. B. Cunninghame Graham that began this way: ""In a lone corner of a crowded London cemetery, just at the end of a smoke-stained Greco-Roman colonnade under a poplar tree, nestles a neglected grave.""

In the grave, under a stylized cross and the howling image of his namesake, lies Long Wolf. He died at 59 in a London hospital on June 11, 1892, the victim of bronchial pneumonia contracted in what was then a crowded, dark, gloomy, industrial city as far as anywhere on Earth from the Great Plains of North America.

""I was moved. I kept taking the book down, imagining Long Wolf lying there amid the ranks of pale faces, the grave desolate and unkempt. It was so sad I said to myself, 'I have to do something,' "" Knight said.

She went looking for his grave.

Long Wolf died in Victorian England, when the sun never set on the Union Jack. London was the capital of a great empire and an international magnet for capital, knowledge--and curiosities like what Britons knew as ""red Indians"" to distinguish them from more commonly seen natives of India.

In the 19th century, British explorers, traders, naturalists and adventurers prowled the world. They stole rubber plants from the Amazon, shipped back strange beasts for London zoos and crated archeological treasures from ancient civilizations.

Fallout of the empire, such as the imminent return of colony Hong Kong to China, is a lingering fixture of British life today.

This month, a new British government refused Greece's demands for the famous Elgin Marbles, classical sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens by a 19th century British ambassador. Last week, Britain also rebuffed an Australian aborigine supported by his government who demanded the return of an ancestor's severed head, brought to England as a trophy at the dawn of the Victorian era.

Usually, it is foreign governments and institutions with special interests who rake through Britain's past. What makes Long Wolf's case so remarkable is that it was waged as the crusade of one British homemaker.

Family legend says that Long Wolf, an Oglala Sioux, fought at Little Bighorn and in later battles. A British physician, one Dr. Coffin, remarked on the scars from saber and bullet wounds on the body of a man formally identified on his burial certificate as Schoongamoneta Hoska (Wolf Long).

It was not as a warrior, though, but as a performer that Long Wolf came to England. It is unclear exactly when he joined, but by 1892, he was chief of the Sioux braves who noisily, dramatically and profitably lost all the battles--two performances a day--in Col. William Cody's Wild West Show.

Cody may have started as a buffalo hunter, but he ended as a consummate showman, star and impresario for a show that toured more than 1,000 cities across the United States and Europe for nearly three decades. Buffalo Bill's romanticized vision of the American West became the international stereotype, eventually borrowed whole cloth by infant Hollywood in the early days of this century.

The Sioux were Cody's principal foils for many of those years and among them he found friends. In comparison to the hardships they might have found on their reservations on the Plains, he offered them a life of relative comfort and adventure.

There are photos of Cody's Sioux troupers--like Long Wolf--in Venetian gondolas; one contemporary account tells how a London performance of Goethe's dark drama ""Faust"" left them ""greatly scared at its horrors.""

Cody brought his troupe to England for the first time in 1887 during jubilee celebrations marking Queen Victoria's 50th anniversary on the throne. A special grandstand big enough for 40,000 spectators along an arena 1,200 feet long was built on a 23-acre site at Earl's Court served by three Underground stations. A Daily Telegraph reviewer called the 1887 shows ""an exact reproduction of the scenes of fierce frontier life, vividly illustrated by the real people.""

Long Wolf went to London with Buffalo Bill's show and died there in 1892. Thanks to the struggles of a British homemaker, his remains will be returned home.

Victoria was First Fan, telling trick shooter Annie Oakley after one special performance, ""You are a very, very clever little girl."" Her Majesty was amused, she confided to her diary, at the way ""wild painted red Indians on their wild ba****ck horses of different tribes [sic] . . . all came tearing round at full speed shrieking and screaming which had the weirdest effect.""

""Attack on the Deadwood Stage"" was always a showstopper. And how lucky that Wild Bill was able to drive off Sioux marauders one afternoon when the imperiled stagecoach carried a royal flush: the kings of Belgium, Denmark, Greece and Saxony, and the Prince of Wales.

Chief Long Wolf was the oldest performer for the 1892 season, when Cody's 200-member troupe, complete with 100 Texas ponies, included almost 100 Indian warriors, among them 11 Sioux ""prisoners of war"" released by the U.S. government to his custody.

It is 117 miles from Bromsgrove to London, but it can seem much farther if you venture from a suburban village to a 40-acre London cemetery where there are 200,000 graves.

Elizabeth Knight took walking shoes, many questions and plenty of patience to the graveyard on May 1, 1992. The poplar tree was gone and so was his name from the rough white stone.

But the neophyte historian eventually found Long Wolf's grave, confirming it in cemetery records. Still visible is the image of a lone wolf--just like the one the chief sketched as his epitaph before he died.

Knight remembers standing by the grave and silently vowing that she would find the forgotten chief's family. She has read about the American West for many years, and she knows some things.

""It was the custom to return a body home because the Sioux believe that otherwise a person's spirit wanders without rest,"" Knight said firmly amid years of research in her living room in Bromsgrove.

His descendants say that as Long Wolf's illness worsened and he realized that he would die, he told his wife, Wants, that he wanted to be buried at home. Nonetheless, he ruled out any attempt to take his body back: Three Sioux had died on the voyage to Europe and were buried at sea; Long Wolf believed that a sea burial would mean his spirit would wander forever, his descendants say.

In the end, it fell to Cody to do what could be done for a chief whose people were a mainstay of his show.

""Bill said he would take care of Long Wolf, and he did,"" Knight said.

Long Wolf was laid to rest at 10:30 a.m. June 13, 1892, in a grave that Cody had purchased for the princely sum of 23 pounds and three shillings in the fashionable ""grand circle"" at Brompton Cemetery. Cemetery Supt. Murdo MacMillan says Long Wolf was buried a prestigious 13 feet under. In those days, when there were 20 shillings to a pound, a British worker earned about one pound a week and spectators paid one to four shillings to see the Wild West Show.

After finding Long Wolf's grave, Knight began to search for his family with Holmesian zeal and the help of George Georgson, who publishes the quarterly magazine American Indian Review in London.

From Bromsgrove, Knight spread the news to societies and journals in America that a Sioux chief lay unclaimed in London. She heard nothing for a long time and began to believe that she never would. Then one day in 1993, her mail campaign paid off. ""I remember that when the letter came one Saturday morning after months of silence, I was really surprised. It was a magic moment,"" Knight said.

John Black Feather, a great-grandson of Long Wolf, read of Knight's quest in a South Dakota newspaper. Long Wolf's family was as eager to find the old chief as Knight was to reunite them.

""Mrs. Knight is a blessing for us. My mother, Jessie, is 87, and all these years she's been trying to find Long Wolf,"" said Black Feather, 60, who ranches buffalo on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

""My mother's mother, Lizzie Long Wolf, was in London, about 12 years old, when Long Wolf lay dying. She heard him say how much he would like to come home, but there was no way at the time,"" Black Feather said by phone. ""Medicine men and holy men say that the spirit doesn't rest until the body is brought home. My mother believes it too.""

The family knew that Long Wolf had been buried in London, his great-grandson said, but that was scant comfort. ""We checked it out and found London was a big town. There must be so many cemeteries. We had no money to go over there, and we didn't know how to go about tracking a body down. Suppose it wasn't a marked grave?"" asked Black Feather, a retired mechanic who spends his winters in Tempe, Ariz.

In fall 1993, Knight and her husband visited Long Wolf's family at Pine Ridge, bringing soil from the grave. A few months later, great-granddaughters Martha and Mary Ann Black Feather visited their ancestor's grave.

Now, a long paper and money chase is at last ending. Knight and Georgson organized the fund-raising. There were evenings of song and readings in the Bromsgrove library. Black Feather won official permission to return the remains to America.

This month, Georgson, acting as expediter here in Britain, received final approvals for transport and exhumation from the British government and the Archdiocese of London, which is responsible for the cemetery.

Knight is quietly amazed at the international flurry. ""I had no idea it would escalate so,"" she marveled.

Organizer Georgson is counting the days. Some sponsors remain to be found. But a London funeral director has volunteered to exhume Long Wolf, an American airline says it will fly the remains home without cost, and Black Feather says he has an offer of transportation to London for the family, tribal leaders and a shaman.

""This summer the family will be able to come to take Long Wolf home at last,"" Georgson said.

Long Wolf will be reburied at Wolf Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

""This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, isn't it?"" said Knight, who will join her Sioux acquaintances in London to witness the first steps in Long Wolf's last journey.

""Hou, kola."" Hello, friend.

That is how she will greet Long Wolf's kin, for Knight is the only homemaker in Bromsgrove who is studying the Sioux language to better reach out to Americans whose lives she has already touched so deeply."

Very worth reading❤️
Actor, film director, film producer and musician Keanu Charles Reeves (Keanu Charles Reeves),
Missed the first 20 minutes of the party dedicated to the end of filming of his new movie at one of the clubs in New York.
He waited patiently in the rain to be let in.
No one recognized him.
❤️Get your t-shirt: https://nativerites.com/get-your-t-shirt
The club owner said: “I didn't even know Keanu was standing in the rain waiting to get in - he didn't say anything to anyone.”
"He travels by public transport."
"He easily communicates with homeless people on the streets and helps them."
- He was only 60 years old (September 2, 1964)
- He can only eat hot dogs in the park, sitting among normal people.
- After filming one of the "Matrix", he gave all the stuntmen a new motorcycle - in recognition of their skills.
- He gave up most of the salaries of the costume designers and computer scientists who drew the special effects on "The Matrix" - deciding that their share of the film's budget was assessed short.
- He reduced his salary for the movie "The Devil's Advocate" to have enough money to invite Al Pacino.
- Almost at the same time his best friend passed away; His girlfriend lost a child and soon died in a car accident, and his sister suffered from leukemia.
Keanu didn't fail: he donated $5 million to the clinic that treated his sister, refused to be filmed (to be with her), and founded the Leukemia Foundation, donating significant amounts from each fee for the movie.
You may have been born a man, but stay a man..
Also read about Keanu
Keanu Reeves' father is of Hawaiian descent...
❤️ IF you are Native American, you will love this t-shirt 👉 https://nativerites.com/get-your-t-shirt

Native Americans, also known as American Indians, First Americans, Indigenous Americans and other terms, are the indigenous peoples of the U...

Elsie Vance Chestuen was born in 1873, her Indian name was Chestuen. Her mother was Dilth-cley-ih, daughter of the Apache Chief Bidu-ya, Beduiat known as Victorio. Elsie's father is unknown, her mother married Mangus who was the son of Mangas Coloradas, Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches.Elsie was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on 4th November 1886 when she was 13 years old,she was enrolled as Elsie Vanci. Carlisle and other schools like this have been a contentious issue with the Native Americans, many say that children were forced to leave their families at very young age. They were forced to change their Indian names and give up their cultures, languages, and religion.
Elsie was only at Carlisle school for 3 years.On the 30th of May 1889, when she was 16 years old, she was sent to Alabama due to illness, she stayed with another Indian lady called Mollie. Elsie must have moved back to her home at some stage, as she died at Fort Sill on April 15th 1898, from tuberculosis. She was 26 years old, Elsie Vance Chestuen, is buried at the Beef Creek Apache Cemetery in Oklahoma.

❤Sitting Bull was the first man to become chief of the entire Lakota Sioux nation.
Sitting Bull was born around 1831 into the Hunkpapa people, a Lakota Sioux tribe that roamed the Great Plains in what is now the Dakotas. He was initially called “Jumping Badger” by his family, but earned the boyhood nickname “Slow” for his quiet and deliberate demeanor. The future chief killed his first buffalo when he was just 10 years old. At 14, he joined a Hunkpapa raiding party and distinguished himself by knocking a Crow warrior from his horse with a tomahawk. In celebration of the boy’s bravery, his father relinquished his own name and transferred it to his son. From then on, Slow became known as Tatanka-Iyotanka, or “Sitting Bull.”
Sitting Bull was renowned for his skill in close quarters fighting and collected several red feathers representing wounds sustained in battle. As word of his exploits spread, his fellow warriors took to yelling, “Sitting Bull, I am he!” to intimidate their enemies during combat. The most stunning display of his courage came in 1872, when the Sioux clashed with the U.S. Army during a campaign to block construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad. As a symbol of his contempt for the soldiers, the middle-aged chief strolled out into the open and took a seat in front of their lines. Inviting several others to join him, he proceeded to have a long, leisurely smoke from his to***co pipe, all the while ignoring the hail of bullets whizzing by his head. Upon finishing his pipe, Siting Bull carefully cleaned it and then walked off, still seemingly oblivious to the gunfire around him. His nephew White Bull would later call the act of defiance “the bravest deed possible.

I'm Not Pretty

❤️Well worth reading
Actor, film director, film producer and musician Keanu Charles Reeves (Keanu Charles Reeves),
❤️Get your t-shirt: https://nativerites.com/native-american-131
Missed the first 20 minutes of the party dedicated to the end of filming of his new movie at one of the clubs in New York.
He waited patiently in the rain to be let in.
No one recognized him.
The club owner said: “I didn't even know Keanu was standing in the rain waiting to get in - he didn't say anything to anyone.”
"He travels by public transport."
"He easily communicates with homeless people on the streets and helps them."
- He was only 60 years old (September 2, 1964)
- He can only eat hot dogs in the park, sitting among normal people.
- After filming one of the "Matrix", he gave all the stuntmen a new motorcycle - in recognition of their skills.
- He gave up most of the salaries of the costume designers and computer scientists who drew the special effects on "The Matrix" - deciding that their share of the film's budget was assessed short.
- He reduced his salary for the movie "The Devil's Advocate" to have enough money to invite Al Pacino.
- Almost at the same time his best friend passed away; His girlfriend lost a child and soon died in a car accident, and his sister suffered from leukemia.
Keanu didn't fail: he donated $5 million to the clinic that treated his sister, refused to be filmed (to be with her), and founded the Leukemia Foundation, donating significant amounts from each fee for the movie.
You may have been born a man, but stay a man..
Also read about Keanu
❤️Visit the store to support Native American products 👇
https://nativerites.com/native-american-131

The Sacred Bear-Spear💥
Many generations ago, even before the Blackfeet used horses as beasts of burden, the tribe was undertaking its autumn migration, when one evening before striking camp for the night it was reported that a dog-sledge or cart belonging to the chief was missing.
To make matters worse, the chief's ermine robe and his wife's buckskin dress, with her sacred elk-skin robe, had been packed in the little cart.
Strangely enough, no one could recollect having noticed the dog during the march.
Messengers were dispatched to the camping-site of the night before, but to no avail.
At last the chief's son, Sokumapi, a boy about twelve years of age, begged to be allowed to search for the missing dog, a proposal to which his father, after some demur, consented.
Sokumapi set out alone for the last camping-ground, which was under the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, and carefully examined the site.
Soon he found a single dog-sledge track leading into a deep gulch, near the entrance to which he discovered a large cave.
A heap of freshly turned earth stood in front of the cave, beside which was the missing cart.
As he stood looking at it, wondering what had become of the dog which had drawn it, an immense grizzly-bear suddenly dashed out.
So rapid was its attack that Sokumapi had no chance either to defend himself or to take refuge in flight.
The bear, giving vent to the most terrific roars, dragged him into the cave, hugging him with such force that he fainted.
When he regained consciousness it was to find the bear's great head within a foot of his own, and he thought that he saw a kindly and almost human expression in its big brown eyes.
For a long time he lay still, until at last, to his intense surprise, the Bear broke the silence by addressing him in human speech.
"Have no fear," said the grizzly.
"I am the Great Bear, and my power is extensive.
I know the circumstances of your search, and I have drawn you to this cavern because I desired to assist you.
Winter is upon us, and you had better remain with me during the cold season, in the course of which I will reveal to you the secret of my supernatural power."
It will be observed that the circumstances of this tale are almost identical with those which relate to the manner in which the Beaver Medicine was revealed to mankind.
The hero of both stories remains during the winter with the animal, the chief of its species, who in the period of hibernation instructs him in certain potent mysteries.
The Bear, having reassured Sokumapi, showed him how to transform various substances into food.
His strange host slept during most of the winter; but when the warm winds of spring returned and the snows melted from the hills the grizzly became restless, and told Sokumapi that it was time to leave the cave.
Before they quitted it, however, he taught the lad the secret of his supernatural power.
Among other things, he showed him how to make a Bear-spear.
He instructed him to take a long stick, to one end of which he must secure a sharp point, to
symbolize the bear's tusks.
To the staff must be attached a bear's nose and teeth, while the rest of the spear was to be covered with bear's skin, painted the sacred color, red.
The Bear also told him to decorate the handle with eagle's feathers and grizzly claws, and in
war-time to wear a grizzly claw in his hair, so that the strength of the Great Bear might go with him in battle, and to imitate the noise a grizzly makes when it charges.
The Bear furthermore instructed him what songs should be used in order to heal the sick, and how to paint his face and body so that he would be invulnerable in battle, and, lastly, told him of the sacred nature of the spear, which was only to be employed in warfare and for curing disease.
Thus if a person was sick unto death, and a relative purchased the Bear-spear, its supernatural power would restore the ailing man to health.
Equipped with this knowledge, Sokumapi returned to his people, who had long mourned him as dead.
After a feast had been given to celebrate his home-coming he began to manufacture the Bear-spear as directed by his friend.
Shortly after his return the Crows made war upon the Blackfeet, and on the meeting of the two tribes in battle Sokumapi appeared in front of his people carrying the Bear-spear on his back.
His face and body were painted as the Great Bear had instructed him, and he sang the battle-songs that the grizzly had taught him.
After these ceremonies he impetuously charged the enemy, followed by all his braves in a solid phalanx, and such was the efficacy of the Bear magic that the Crows immediately took to flight.
The victorious Blackfeet brought back Sokumapi to their camp in triumph, to the accompaniment of the Bear songs.
He was made a war-chief, and ever afterward the spear which he had used was regarded as the palladium of the Blackfoot Indians.
In the spring the Bear-spear is unrolled from its covering and produced when the first thunder is heard, and when the Bear begins to quit his winter quarters; but when the Bear returns to his den to hibernate the spear is once more rolled up and put away.
The greatest care is taken to protect it against injury.
It has a special guardian, and no woman is permitted to touch it