Students find tribe's buffalo stone story hidden away

[Rrlapier at AOL.COM]

Students find  tribe's buffalo stone story hidden away
By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian 
      Glen Still Smoking II holds a 1889  letter he found in the Smithsonian 
archives that his  great-great-great-great-grandfather Mountain Chief wrote to 
the  Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Still Smoking is one of five University 
of  Montana student researchers who are spending the month of June in  
Washington, D.C., locating and copying documents relating to Montana's  Indian 
tribes. 
DAVE BECK photo
As far back as he can remember, Glen Still Smoking II has known  the story of 
the buffalo stone.

Called iniskim by traditional members of  his Blackfeet tribe, the small 
stone, usually a fossilized shell found on the  Montana prairie, is used in a 
ritual for calling buffalo.

Often the stone  is in the shape of an animal, and is considered an important 
medicine object,  Still Smoking said.

One of  its magical qualities is how it is found.

“You don't look for it,” the  University of Montana student explained. “It 
chirps, it calls out to be  found.”

Several years ago, a buffalo stone called to Still Smoking's  father, a stone 
he gave to his son.

Still Smoking carries it with him,  and he packed this special gift when he 
headed to the Smithsonian Institute  earlier this month as part of a historic 
UM student research team tasked with  locating, assessing, copying and bringing 
home the millions of documents and  records pertaining to Montana's Indian 
tribes.

The students are three  weeks into the monthlong project; already, the five 
have discovered stories of  their ancestors and their tribes.

So it was with great awe and excitement  last week when Still Smoking came 
upon a document from the mid-1800s, a 35-page,  detailed retelling of the 
buffalo stone story and its meaning.

What he  learned is that the story he was told as a boy is very much the same 
story told  on the faded parchment.

At the time, the discovery was the highlight of  his trip, but then, two days 
later at the Library of Congress, Still Smoking and  Helen Cryer came upon a 
90-minute Blackfeet audio recording taken in 1898 by  Walter McClintock.

On this recording, one of the earliest recordings ever  made, a Blackfeet 
named Cream Antelope tells the story of the buffalo  stone.

“This whole experience has been pretty monumental for me,” Still  Smoking 
said. “It's the first time I have been on the East Coast - there are a  lot of 
new sights, and I've already gone through three disposable  cameras.”

“I can't believe I'm here,” he said. “I'm learning quite a bit  about my 
tribe and my people.”



The First Buffalo  Stone

One time long, long ago, before we had horses, the buffalo  suddenly 
disappeared. All the hunters killed elk, deer and smaller game animals  along the 
river bottoms then. When all of them were either killed or driven  away, the 
people began to starve. They were camped in a circle near a buffalo  drive. Among 
them was a very, very poor old woman, the second wife of her  husband. Her 
buffalo robe was old and full of holes; her moccasins were old and  were torn to 
shreds by the rocks she walked over.

While gathering wood  for the fire one day, she thought she heard someone 
singing a song. The song  seemed quite close, but when she looked around, she saw 
no one. Following the  sound and looking closely, she found a small rock that 
was singing, “Take me! I  am of great power. Take me! I am of great power.”

When the woman picked  up the rock, it told her what to do and taught her a 
special song. She told her  husband her experience and then said, “Call all the 
men together and ask them to  sing this song that will call the buffalo back.”

“Are you sure?” asked  her husband.

“Yes, I am sure. First get me a small piece of the back of a  buffalo from 
the Bear-Medicine man.” Then she told her husband how to arrange  the inside of 
the lodge in a kind of square box with some sagebrush and buffalo  chips. “Now 
tell the men to come and ask them for the four rattles they use.” It  is a 
custom for the first wife to sit close to her husband in their lodge. But  this 
time, the husband told the second wife to put on the first wife's dress and  
sit beside him. After all the men were seated in the lodge, the buffalo stone  
began to sing, “The buffalo will all drift back. The buffalo will all drift  
back.”

Then the woman said to one of the younger men, “Go beyond the  drive and put 
up a lot of buffalo chips in line. Then all of you are to wave at  the chips 
with a buffalo robe, four times, while you shout like you were  singing. The 
fourth time that you shout, all the chips will turn into buffalo  and will go 
over the cliff.”

The men followed her directions, and the  woman led the singing in the lodge. 
She knew just what the young man was doing  all the time, and she knew that a 
cow-buffalo would take the lead. While the  woman was singing a song about 
the leader that would take her followers over the  cliff, all the buffalo went 
over the drive and were killed.

Then the  woman sang a different song: “I have made more than a hundred 
buffalo fall over  the cliff, and the man above hears me.”

Ever since then, the people took  good care of a buffalo stone and prayed to 
it, for they knew that it had much  power. 



**************Gas prices getting you down? Search AOL Autos for 
fuel-efficient used cars.      (http://autos.aol.com/used?ncid=aolaut00050000000007)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20080624/ba8470ca/attachment.htm>