(Aŋpétu Wičhákhiye šni él He Sápa Kȟaŋǧí Kíŋ Ičháǧe)
Hau! Hear now the voice of Ptesáŋwiŋ, as I have never told the story of a romantic love before, but this love was such that it even brought tears to these eyes that had never known tears before, and this is how it was…
Long ago — though not so long that the dust of their footprints has faded from the earth — there lived a young woman named Psipsíčala, Li’l Hopper. Her hair was black as the crow’s wing and fell down her back like a river at night. Her spirit burned with a light that neither sickness nor sorrow could quench. And there lived a man called Napȟáyšni — Possessing of Courage Never to Flee. His was the courage that speaks quietly, that carries no boast, the courage of one who walks forward though his heart is heavy and the path unknown.
On the day of her birth, when she cried her first cry, he happened to be there. He was the first to hold her, cradling her tiny form in strong arms. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka had already begun to weave their threads between them.
When they met again, she was in the fullness of her womanhood, though illness walked beside her. Napȟáyšni knew it. Others questioned him, asking why he would bind his heart to one whose time would be short. He never answered them, only needing to remember what her words to him were: “We all have a terminal illness. It’s called life.”
They wed after only twenty-two days, but in those days they planted a thousand-thousand seeds of love. They traveled on pilgrimage to prepare her spirit before they went into the high places, where the mountains scrape the belly of the sky, to live for a season in the old ways — with only the tools and customs of the ancestors.
That summer, the mountains witnessed a rare wonder. For decades, the seeds of many wildflowers had lain sleeping beneath the soil, blown by the winds and held fast by snow. Then the heat rose, the ice melted, and the slopes were clothed in a thousand colours. Each direction they walked brought them into a sea of blossoms — blue and yellow, crimson and white, purple and gold. The air was heavy with Uŋčí Makȟá’s own perfume, and depending on which of the four sacred compass directions the wind chose, that perfume shifted endlessly, so that no two days — no two breaths — smelled quite the same.
They made camp by a beaver dam, where the water gathered into a clear, deep pool. There they bathed, cooled their bodies in the heat, and laughed as lovers laugh. At night they slept upon a buffalo robe — the very one on which Psipsíčala had been born — and looked up at the wheeling stars.
But the day when all the stars of the heavens seem to fall came, when her breath began to fade. On a dawn after counting those stars in to their thousands together, when frost rimmed the grasses and the mountainside itself seemed to weep, Napȟáyšni held her in his arms as her breath left her, gentle as the last petal falling from a flower, and at her urging took her last breath just as soon as she was done with it, that her spirit may walk beside his in silent guidance. He was the first to have held her at her beginning, and now, with a heart that threatened to break, but would not break entirely for she never left him, not really, he was the last to hold her as her cooling body became again a part of Uŋčí Makȟá.
He lifted her body, not her, in his arms and bathed her body three times. Then he climbed the blooming slopes, gathering two of each of seven kinds of flowers — seven the most sacred of numbers. Fourteen blossoms in all. He wove them into her long hair into two braids, his hands slow and careful, and clothed her in her heirloom dress of soft, tanned doe-hide.
Then, with all the strength and gentleness of his love, he carried her up the fourteen feet of the tree-burial platform she had insisted on building by herself for herself. He wrapped her in the buffalo robe she had been born on, binding it with doe-hide straps. Last of all, he covered her face, but not before pressing his lips to her forehead one final time.
For three days, he fasted from food, water, and sleep, praying for her spirit. When the prayers were done, he packed their things and, too heavy with grief to ride, led their two horses slowly down the mountainside.
One year later without a word to anyone, on the anniversary of her passing, he went out alone onto the land and cried for a vision. He emptied his heart of all desire to see her again, for it is not right to seek a certain vision over the one Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka chooses to give. Yet when the vision came, he found himself standing right within The Northern Lights — The Dance of the Ancestors. His Psipsíčala was there, waiting, smiling, and she asked him to dance, holding out a celestial hand in anticipation…
They waltzed together, as gracefully as any couple on an imperial floor in faraway Vienna. The Northern Lights had never before danced so brightly and as brilliantly as they did that night accompanying them, and never will dance again so until the Great Day of Silence comes. And as they danced, he leaned in, whispering into her ear, “Is it right for us to dance this way, I still on Grandmother Earth, and you having walked on?”
And Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka’s voice rolled like distant thunder over the snowfields, booming: “Married after twenty-two days, and separated by death after the passing of but six moons, you still loved each other for one thousand-thousand years, for with the most true of loves time holds no reckoning. And I say to you both, and to all My creation, and thus it is, that dancing with someone you once loved on Grandmother Earth, and if it were possible, love stronger now still, is a good thing; I say love and dancing are always very good things.”
So it was.
Epilogue — From William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”
We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.
Beloved Daughter – A Death Song – Jaye Wíyaka Sápa
When you were born beloved daughter,
You cried and cried so,
But the world rejoiced mightily!
And Napȟáyšni held you, and
He rocked you gently in his arms.
You went forth and lived your life
And it was mostly very difficult, but
No matter where or when you never
Forgot to do the best you had in you
And you did well, suffering as Lakȟóta,
Honouring the ways Ptesáŋwiŋ taught.
Now through Wočhékiye you have returned
To Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka, most beloved daughter,
Our dearest one, our sweet Čík’a Psipsíčala,
And it’s Napȟáyšni and the whole world left
Crying and crying as you with first breath…
But it is you now rejoicing mightily as your
Spirit soars towards the Wanáǧi-Tȟačháŋku!
And so it will be with all of us,
All things on Uŋčí Makȟá, always meant to
Be as Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka’s breath made it so. A’ho!
For my late wife, Amber-Kimímela Psipsíčala Maȟpíya Ičáȟtagya Ská Wiŋ Heyókȟa Cuŋwíŋtku Wakíŋyaŋ Iyéya Uŋžíŋžíŋtka Hú-Otúyačhiŋ Wíyaka Sápa
February 2nd 1998 – August 13th 2022
