Becoming a Yuwipi

Gary Holy Bull, collecting sage for a ceremony. Photo by Kern Nickerson, Ringing Rocks FoundationI want to tell you how I became a healer. I was  a little boy, 10 years old, running around Rocks Side. It was mid-July, a hot summer day, no cloud in the sky. I got tired, so I went inside the house to take a nap. To this day, I’m not sure if I fell asleep and these things happened or if I really did see them. We lived in a log house, a one-room log house, and there was one big log right down the middle, all the way across, which held all the rafters. I sat down on the bed, looking out, and I think I laid down.

I saw this lightning come in on both ends of this one log. And that lightning came through, met in the middle, and went down. When it hit the floor I heard this big crack, and when I looked at it, there was a man standing there with a sacred pipe. He stuck the pipe right through the floor into the ground. It jarred me; I screamed, I think. I ran out of the house, and I saw my stepfather, my mother, and my little brother outside. My stepfather knew what happened to me, because when I was running out he grabbed me and he held me and said, “You’re going to be okay. It’s okay.”

From that day on, I kept hearing voices. I thought I was going crazy. We had a lot of horses and cows, and the men would be looking for the horses, but they wouldn’t be able to find them. I kept telling my stepdad where they were—because this voice kept telling me where they were. Finally, the men decided to check it out. So they went to this place where the voices said the horses were, and sure enough they were there. 

I was around 13 or 12 years old. These voices had gotten stronger, and while I was in school—a Catholic residential school—I had a difficult time in class. So I was sent to an Indian hospital in Rapid City, South Dakota. The top floor was all of us crazy people. They were trying to help me with these voices, and they said I was schizophrenic. They were going to send me to Yankton, South Dakota, where they do electrical shock treatment, to help me with these voices. But for two years my mother and a non-Indian social worker worked and worked, and they got me out of that hospital. 

 

I was messed up because of it. I was heavily medicated. Sometimes they would put me in a straitjacket and put me in a padded cell—the whole nine yards in mainstream therapy. By the time I was turning 15, my family brought me home for a ceremony. Four different men came and a woman. They prepared me for what they call, for lack of terminology in the English language, a “vision quest.” When I turned 16 in June, I was taken to a high hill in the badlands on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I was given certain instructions, and they did the Yuwipi (Calling the Spirits) ceremony. They put this star quilt over me and tied me up and laid me down, and they prayed with the pipe and they left. I could hear them leaving. I started to cry. All I could say was, “God, I just want to go home. I don’t know anything. I just want to go home.” I kept saying that over and over. 

 

Four days must have been over. I could hear what I thought were people coming. I was untied, everything was neatly folded. Those ropes were all rolled up in a ball, and I was holding the pipe sitting there listening to songs. Different animals were singing. They came to come take me home. 

 

As I was coming down the hill, the first man that stood there stopped me and said, “From this day forward, when there is a great need, use this pipe to help your people.” I didn’t say anything; I just kept walking. 

 

The second old man stopped me and he said, “From this day forward, when your own relatives, your own family, or anybody falls sick, with this pipe you shall stand him up.” 

 

I went farther, and the third man stood there. He said, “With this pipe, from this day forward, you assure there will always be peace and harmony in your community and among those that are around you.” 

 

When I got close to the bottom I saw my mother and this medicine woman, an elderly woman, standing there. When I got there the elderly woman said, “Kakoja, grandson, grandchild, from this day forward, with this pipe, you shall not orphan anybody. You shall help everybody.”

 

That night I did a Yuwipi ceremony. A lot of people were there. Everybody said that these ways were going to continue because of what happened to me, that these ways will always be here, that there will always be healing. It scared me. I was 16 years old. 

I went back to school, and I had a very difficult time in school. I became an alcoholic at a very young age. Every year I only spent maybe two months out of jail. Somehow I got into a relationship, and on January 2, 1973, I was part of bringing a very, very beautiful baby into this world: my first son. A month later I walked away from that, too, not knowing how to be a parent, not even knowing how to be a husband. 

 

In 1977 I finally started to do Yuwipi ceremonies. I had to go back on the hill for four days to make amends to my Yuwipi bundle. In 1979 I became a sun dance intercessor helping Chief Frank Fools Crow. Today, it’s been six years since my wife walked out into the spirit world. Today, I do whatever it is that I can with this Yuwipi bundle and the sun dance to try to help young men become fathers. 

One of the things I always talk to the young men about is that we are what I call emasculated men. We are no longer that warrior who was free to hunt, free to protect and foster and nurture the life that he was so much a part of bringing into that lodge. Everything was taken away from him. They gave him a horse, they gave him a hoe, a rake, a pitchfork, and they told him to become a farmer—something very unfamiliar to his culture. And he became an alcoholic in the 1800s because that was the only place he felt being free and doing his purpose. He found that good feeling again drinking that alcohol, that intoxicating feeling, that euphoria. It didn’t last long. 

 

He couldn’t go to the missionary and tell him, “This is what’s happening to me,” because it was the missionary who took everything away from him. He couldn’t go to the government agent to tell him what was happening to him because that was the person who did all this to him. Eventually he became frustrated, he became abusive and who did he latch onto? His wife. So that’s where we come from. I try to help the young men today to understand that we need to break that cycle using these ceremonies, using the Yuwipi ceremonies to bring about that healing.

 

The most difficult part of this new job is getting into the schools, because we’re angry people. Thirty years ago, we were telling white people, “We’re from here! You people go home. You’re not from here.” Thirty years later we’re saying it, to each other now. “You’re from Cheyenne River Reservation, you go home over there. You’re from Santee, go home.” I can’t go into schools, not because I committed a crime, but because I’m not from there. I’m not from that reservation and I speak the L-dialect: Lakota. They speak Dakota. 

 

We have a long way to go for that healing that I’m talking about. We continue to orphan each other. All those things that were said to me coming down that hill are happening today. 

 

I still have visions, usually around spring. Come spring the calling is to go sit on the hill again. It’s like a doctor going to get another degree, a post-doctorate in psychology. You’ve got to go back and learn new ways to help people.