Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer

[stanley]

Lame Deer Seeker of Visions

John Lame Deer, who as an old man looks back to tell his own story, is a full blooded Sioux born in 1900 on the Rose

Bud Reservation in South Dakota, and what a story he has to tell! It opens on a hilltop in a hole called a "vision pit"

wherein the sixteen year old Lame Deer waits for four days without food or water for a vision that will make him into

a man. He hopes also that the bearers of the vision, whoever or whatever they are, will select him as a medicine

man for he longs to be a healer and to carry on the ancient ways of the Sioux nation. With the help of an ancient pipe

for the smoking of willow bark and a dried gourd containing forty small squares of flesh that his grandmother has cut

from her own shoulder with a razor blade, Lame Deer gets his vision, the strange feeling of powerful presences

manifesting as the touch of a giant wing on the back of his head and shoulders, a high pitched human voice that could

have come from "no normal human," a bird call with language in it, and finally an out of body experience. It is a

terrifying ordeal and the answer to Lame Deer's dream of spiritual attainment.

It's all solemn stuff, of course, but related not only in a tone that conveys our story teller's dignity and seriousness of

purpose , but also with wry humor: " ... It would have made those anthropologists mad. Performing such an ancient

ceremony with a razor blade instead of a flint knife!" It's at this point early in this account of a twentieth century

Native American's struggle to find his identity and maintain it in a society that has so little regard for it that we get

the first mention of white culture's tendency to dominate every aspect of Indian life.

Lame Deer's story of loss of roots in youth and final return and redemption in old age begins with the Indian school.

White teachers forbid the children to speak their own language. They must wear white man clothes and eat hand out

white man food. "For their own good" they must leave the ways of their parents and grandparents and become like

white people. The catch 22 that Lame Deer so eloquently deplores is that, for all this, the Indian is still an Indian, a

second class citizen who has lost his own culture, but is not welcome in the culture that has stolen it from him.

This is a story about the Native American experience that many readers like myself are familiar with. The power of

Lame Deer's version is in that it is the first person account of one particular man's struggle to answer his father's

challenging question: "What are you going to be? A white man or an Indian?" Lame Deer by his own account does not

come to terms with the question for a long time, and in his evasions and compromises he pursues a decades long journey

that is at once colorful, funny, tragic and at its lowest points pathetic. Alcoholic, rodeo rider, jailbird, world war two

veteran, wry observer of white culture absurdities, protester against the outrages inflicted upon his people, and finally,

seeker of a return to all the important things in his own culture that he has neglected or abandoned, Lame Deer writes

so compelling a story that it is hard to put it down.

I am a sympathetic white reader but with little direct experience of Native American cultures. Lame Deer's book for me

was at several points an eye opener. His cogent discussion, for example, of the different orientation of many Native

Americans to money as opposed to "responsible" white money management was both humorous and a challenge to my

own notions of what money is really for.

I don't know how a less sympathetic white reader might respond to this book, nor would I presume to predict how

Native American readers would judge it. I do know that for me it was a great read, and more compelling than any work

of fiction and, so, deserving, in my opinion, of a full 4 star rating.