Following the Drum

Respect the ground, respect the drum, respect each other.—Abe Conklin, Ponca/Osage (1926-1995)

When I pull into the campground in the Badlands of South Dakota, it’s almost dark. I make a cold turkey sandwich and a cup of camomile tea on the Coleman stove, roll out the sleeping bag on the blue three-fold futon on the platform in the back of the van, then sit at the picnic table as the final light fades. It seems to rise again. Over the warped and shapen hills to the east, the moon, a day or so past full, comes up, over the tents and trailers around me. Others are looking up, and I can hear soft voices, wordless murmurs. In this gray landscape, illumined with light, I feel at home with my fellow travelers, safe.

***

It’s been a long day, which began near Wounded Knee, where I stood alone at the graveyard marked by an obelisk of names—Chief Big Foot among the fallen. The names of those massacred at Wounded Knee on December 28, 1890, read like poetry:

Bear Woman, the oldest woman in the band

Mr. Red Fish

Mrs. Trouble in Love

Whirl Wind Hawk

Not Go In Among, son of Hailing Bear and Her Good Medicine

Pretty Enemy

Horned Cloud

Trouble in Front, son of Shedding Bear

Cast Away and Run

The fence around the mass grave is laced with ribbons—red, yellow, white, black—the sacred colors of the four directions. They flutter in the the soft wind. The dry creek that once ran with blood traces the worst of the battle scene as though it still flowed. I stay as long as I can. I can feel the battle raging, the screams of massacre.

I pass a herd of horses, and then a hill covered with pickups and horse vans and many people looking over even more horses. A sign says HORSE SALE. I don’t stop.

I turn off the two-lane road on the Pine Ridge reservation to a village called Porcupine. Square reservation houses line the main street, the only street. I stop for a Coke and drive on to the end of the town road, which dips down into a park. I can hear a drum. I go on down the hill and ask the first person I see if this is a public event. “Oh, yes,” he tells me.

I walk closer to the round drum, huge as a table, with seven men around it, all beating it in rhythm. One man begins a whining chant, almost in falsetto, and the others come in, like voices in fugue form, repeating the chant and turning it upside down against itself. I’ve heard this music, minor and and wandering, before, at powwows, in big cities. Here in this tiny village in a vast landscape, I can hear where the music comes from, rising from the earth like the desert stirred up by a dust devil, holding the deep snows and the relentless heat of summer on the plains, the moon I saw at the badlands, the agony of lost homelands and interrupted lives. The joy of the steady beat of the drum under it all, and how that works its way into the songs of rabbits, journeys, storms, the history of the history that these songs contain. The banner on the makeshift stage says PORCUPINE SINGERS. I stay as long as I can in this personal space of the Lakota in celebration of who they are.

***

I can’t leave the Dakotas. I backtrack, going back to the places I’ve been. I head west again, stay a night, turn back to cross South Dakota, go north to Bismarck, North Dakota, for the International Powwow I’d decided not to attend. During the Intertribal dances on the first night, I make a circle of the powwow grounds, stopping to listen to each drum until I find the one I’d like to be close to. Several draw me, but I want to make the full circle. The last drum is the Porcupine Singers. For the evening and then for two more days I sit in the low bleachers beside them. We don’t exchange a word. They bring me back to all the wilderness I’ve known. I feel Utah’s oppressive heat, see again in my mind’s eye the coil of the Milky Way across an ebony sky above the distant song of coyotes, echoing now in the high chants of the singers.

From others who return to this drum, I hear a little of their history, learn about the drum keeper, who never leaves the drum alone, who, when he must leave, assigns someone to keep the drum while he is gone.

On the last day, I stay to watch him tend the drum. He lifts it into its huge leather case, rounded to fit it like a jacket. He gathers all the drumsticks. He lifts the round lid of the drum case and sets it in place. It doesn’t drop on. Here and there it buckles on the rim. I am sitting close enough that I could touch it with one finger, giving it the steadiness it needs to fall into place. Without a second thought, I touch it, and the lid slips on. The drumkeeper lifts his awkward package and takes it away. When he comes back, he wraps the drumsticks in leather and ties them, carries them away. He comes back, looks around the space where the drum has been to be sure he has missed nothing. He stands still, looking at me, and says, “Thank you.”

He returns to the drum.

***

Back home in California, I make my way to the first night of the Stanford Powwow, which I have attended many times. As I walk across the field to the powwow grounds, the announcer says, “Our Southern Drum will sing for the Grass Dancers. Welcome the Porcupine Singers from Pine Ridge!” I run.

When they take a break, I stop one of them who brushes by me. “I am so glad you are here. I’ve heard you twice before, at Porcupine and Bismarck.” Immediately, he takes me to the lead singer and introduces me, invites me to sit under the canvas canopy that covers the drum and a few chairs, with his fiancée. For two days, he invites me again to the shade of the tent.

On Sunday, his fiancée tells me that a special dinner will honor the Southern and Northern head drums, and the singer would like me to go with them. We meet and walk along the tables full of salmon, chicken, roasted vegetables, fruit, and we fill our plates. The singer is interrupted by people who come to talk to him, always with a handshake. She and I find a table and begin to eat. He comes to join us. I turn to ask him a question. She touches my wrist, stops my sentence. “He is praying,” she says.

He invites me to come back again to Porcupine. “Just ask,” he says. “You’ll be able to find us.” To my surprise, he gives me a strong hug. The walk across the field to my car is a long one. As it was with the Dakotas, I don’t want to leave.

***

Badlands National Park landscape is a National Park Service photograph. You can listen to the Porcupine Singers at www.myspace.com/porcupinesingers