47 pages • 1 hour read
Joseph M. Marshall IIIThe Lakota Way: Stories and Lessons in Living
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Love/Cantognake”
Story Summary: “The Story of the Cottonwoods”
This story takes place before the white man’s steamboat brought smallpox that killed many Lakota up the Great Muddy River (in 1837). Two young people meet and fall in love with each other. On many nights, they stand and embrace under the courting robe made of elk skin. Everyone believes White Lance will take a gift of horses to Red Willow Woman’s family to ask her to marry him.
After White Lance proves himself in battle, he finds the camp with Red Willow Woman and asks her to marry him, but she says she has been promised to He Crow. He feels intensely sad and dedicates himself to battle, while Red Willow Woman, although a good wife with a daughter and later a son, seems distracted at all times. When they see each other at the summer gatherings, it’s evident that they are still in love, yet they act with propriety. White Lance marries Good Medicine and becomes a father and a leader, but he too seems distracted.
During a summer gathering, Good Medicine and He Crow talk, and then Good Medicine asks White Lance to take her to her relatives, while He Crow goes with Red Willow Woman to his relatives. Both couples wind up meeting up. He Crow tosses a stick, which he says is a sign that he is freeing his wife, and Good Medicine brings her husband’s clothes out of the lodge, a sign that she is freeing him. Finally, 25 years after they first met, White Lance and Red Willow Woman live as husband and wife.
They live together happily, but one day, White Lance returns to find Red Willow Woman missing. He goes to look for her in the snow and finds a bear attacking. He drives a lance into the bear, but the bear attacks him. Red Willow Woman and White Lance die at the same time, as does the bear. Two summers later, hunters find the lovers’ bones near the Great Muddy River, alongside two cottonwood saplings. The saplings grow into trees that seem to whisper together, and people sit in their shade and hear the story of White Lance and Red Willow Woman. Many years later, after those trees no longer exist, the author walks by the Great Muddy River, also called the Missouri River, after a friend of his dies young. He feels the comfort of the whispering of the cottonwoods, which he imagines are the children of the two trees.
Story Summary: “The Story of the Flutemaker”
Cloud awakens on the grassy bed underneath a cedar and recalls the pain of Dawn Woman telling him that her father has accepted the marriage gifts of Hollow Horn. He has loved Dawn Woman since they were children. Mired in pain, he hears a voice and traces it to the hollow branch of a cedar tree.
He cuts off the branch and makes it sing like it had when it was being blown by the wind. He places a top on it and puts his hands over the holes to raise and lower the pitch, and he practices making the branch sing as nature listens. He calls it “hokagapi,” or “to make a voice” (85). He has made a flute.
Delirious from not eating, he finds his way back to his village and stands playing his flute. All the women, including Dawn Woman, come to listen as he pours his anguish into his flute playing. She comes to speak to him and tells him she has not married because she loves only him. He then makes his flute play in joy. He and Dawn Woman marry and have two sons, whom he teaches to play the flute. He teaches others, telling them that the note of sadness in the flute comes from his own original sadness when he found the singing branch. The flute of sadness and pain became the flute of joy and love.
Story Summary: “Man and Woman, Bow and Arrow”
The author writes about witnessing the eagle mating ritual in which they plummet to the ground only to rise again. He says that in symmetry, there is beauty and strength and writes about the bow and arrow story that is at the heart of the traditional wedding ceremony. The man who performed the ritual would explain that a bow cannot exist without an arrow. They must work together.
The author’s maternal grandparents’ marriage was arranged by his grandmother’s mother. She likely chose the author’s grandfather because he was humble and hardworking. Marshall’s grandparents were married in 1920 and stayed married until his grandfather died in 1975. They raised the author and always treated each other with respect. Two days before she died, his grandmother looked into the distance and asked about a lodge by the river, and the author is convinced that his grandfather had shown up for his grandmother.
His other set of grandparents also enjoyed a long marriage. He writes about a neighbor on the Rosebud reservation who rose early on the day of the anniversary of her husband’s death and who sang a song honoring him. He writes that love is not a matter of lust but a matter of balance. He says that homosexuals are treated with tolerance among the Lakota as a way to maintain the balance of the community. Red Willow Woman and White Lance, as well as Dawn Woman and Cloud, achieved this balance and fit well together, like a bow and arrow.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Sacrifice/Icicupi”
Story Summary: “The Story of the Thunders”
In the old days, men sometimes had more than one wife. In a village just to the east of the Black Hills lives a woman named Sina Luta, or “Red Shawl” (94). Her husband, White Wing, agrees to marry a woman named Necklace whose parents froze to death in a blizzard. Red Shawl, who has just given birth to a son, is upset and jealous, and when White Wing leaves to get his second wife, she packs up her belongings, including her bow and arrow, and leaves home with her infant son.
Telling no one where she is going, she heads east, and she makes a camp. Suddenly, there is a great wind and thunderstorm, and she tries to crawl to thicket. She crawls to a gully, hoping to find shelter by looking over its ridge. After the wind takes her weapons and food, she knows she has been foolish to leave home. There is then a flash flood, and she wedges her son’s cradleboard into the fork of a cottonwood tree. She is swept away in a current, and she wakes up on a sandbar.
She is struck with grief and worry, as she cannot find her son. Despite hunger and a hurt ankle, she returns to the gully and does not find the cradleboard in the tree. She follows the path of the current, pleading for the return of her son. She knows she has been foolish and that her husband and village will likely not forgive her. Suddenly, her son appears before her, and they are reunited and return home. She encounters her husband on the way home, and he tells her he has decided Necklace should marry someone else. However, she tells him that they will welcome Necklace into their home, and the two wives become good friends. Red Shawl’s son grows up, and White Wing bestows on him the name his mother has given him, “Wakinyan Aglipi,” or “Brought Back by the Thunders” (102). She would always explain how foolishness can lead to wisdom.
Story Summary: “The Gift of Self”
One of the Lakota creation stories describes how people came out of a hole in the Earth. At first, everyone was happy and lived in plenty until a drought came. Then, the bison, or “tatanka,” came out, and people were saved by eating the bison and using every part of the animal for their survival.
In 1876, eight days before the Battle of Little Bighorn, about 700-900 Lakota and Sahiyela (Northern Cheyenne) warriors under Crazy Horse fought a battle with General George Crook’s 1300-man force at Rosebud Creek. There, a rider rescued the Sahiyela leader. She was Buffalo Calf Road, who rescued her brother in battle.
Eleven months after the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Oglala Lakota leader Crazy Horse decided to surrender to the US government. Of the 900 remaining people, only 130 were fighters. The rest were children, women, and the elderly. Even though some warriors wanted to fight on, they were afraid that the government forces would find the other people, as General William Harvey had killed women and children in a Sicangu camp in 1855 when the men were away. In 1864, Chivington had killed women and children at Sand Creek in Colorado. Therefore, 900 people sacrificed their lives for a better future. His uncle, Spotted Tail, had sacrificed himself by taking the place of another man and was punished for an offense against whites he did not commit by being imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth.
Marshall writes that “the gift of self is the most meaningful anyone can give” (106). He writes of a man who worked all the time to give lavish material support to his wife and daughter. When he entered his daughter’s room, he found a note taped alongside the bed that was a handwritten apology for not being able to attend her birthday party. She had kept that instead of the expensive jewelry he had given her because it was really from her father.
The Lakota have a spiritual practice called “Wiwanyang Wacipi,” or the "Sun Dance" (107). Many non-Indians are turned off by the ritual, in which male dancers pierce their skin on the upper chest and insert bone skewers that are connected to a chord that is pulled while they dance. The government outlawed this dance, but the author writes that “they failed or chose not to see the ceremony for what it was: a symbolic act of sacrifice” (107).
The author recalls his grandmother doing laundry for his uncle when his uncle was attending the University of South Dakota in the 1940s. His grandmother had to wash them by hand and iron the clothes, and they hauled them by horse to a rural highway to send back. This was the ultimate sacrifice in the days before electricity. The author’s grandparents made many sacrifices for the author when he was growing up.
The author recalls hunting with his cousin, Israel Knife, in the 1960s. They came upon white hunters who had killed a deer whose antlers were caught in a fence. They were going to cut off the deer’s head until the author and Israel managed to disentangle the deer’s head. The author claims the deer looked relieved, and they refused to take the money the white men offered, knowing the white men would always think of them when they saw a deer.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In these chapters, the author provides a different take on love than perhaps the way it is often portrayed in American culture. Love is, in these stories, a kind of selflessness. It at times absorbing loss and sacrifice, such as that by Red Shawl, whose experiencing almost losing and then finding her precious infant son taught her that love for her husband involves sacrifice and making room for another person in her house and heart.
The story of the surrender of Crazy Horse to the government to spare the women, children, and elderly among his followers puts a different spin on virtue and love than that we are generally used to in American culture. Because Crazy Horse loved his people, he surrendered to spare their lives. His surrender was not weak or cowardly, though perhaps some have colored it that way. It is instead a testament to the strength of love and the sacrifices that those in power must make out of love for their people.
The author also believes that respect for living things is part of having a loving spirit. He writes about how he and his cousin rescued a dead deer whose antlers were stuck in a fence when white hunters were going to wrest it from the fence. Respect for the deer and sacrifice—as the author and his cousin refused to accept money from the white hunters for their actions—was a form of love. Marshall suggests that love for the land and its creatures is an extension of the love humans feel for each other.
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By Joseph M. Marshall III
