If history had recorded his name, would we elevate his to the stature of a Mark Bingham - the gay man whose fatal stand on United Airlines Flight 93 helped pull out a tragic win for liberal democracy? Though their missions were different, both men were fighting for a broader culture where they had - if not total equality - a place within society, against a culture in which they would have none. Over a century before the Stonewall Riots, long before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, or its repeal, or the bathroom wars in South Dakota and North Carolina, an historically anonymous winyanktehca rode out four times on his sorrel mare, to divine the day’s events, until he returned with a vision of a decisive victory for his side. Whether he was discovered by High Eagle or not, numerous historic accounts establish that a winkte was deployed that morning as a clairvoyant, and that the visions he brought back with him would determine the steps taken by the military commanders, setting in motion what became known as the Fetterman Fight, alternatively the Fetterman Massacre, or the Battle of the Hundred in Hand. Marshall III’s novelization of the battle, Hundred in the Hand, the real-life Oglala medicine man, High Eagle, learns of a young dreamer among the Miniconjou and enlists him. The winkte who rode that morning was dispatched as a seer. The winkte, short for the Lakota winyanktehca, commonly translated as ‘two-souled person,’ were seen as wakan - sacred or divine. Like the many of the white soldiers they fought, the indigenous warriors amassed near the forks of Peno Creek that morning viewed warfare through a metaphysical lens.
The young winkte, whose name history didn’t record, had been dispatched by military commanders among the “hostiles” - a pan-tribal coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho adamant on shutting down incursions into the Powder basin via the Bozeman Trail.
On a temperate December morning near the forks of Peno Creek in the Powder River Country of Wyoming - nearly 150 years ago - a young man “with the mannerisms of a woman,” known to the Lakota as a winkte, rode forward toward enemy lines on a sorrel horse, black hood on his head, armed with a whistle made of eagle bone.
0 kommentar(er)
