BAD MEDICINE

part 2 of 2
Avis Little Eagle joined Indian Country Today fresh out of journalism school. She is Hunkpapa Lakota, the people of medicine man Sitting Bull, from the Standing Rock reservation near Little Eagle, South Dakota.

At first Little Eagle did the usual small stories handed to young reporters. Then, in late 1990, her editor handed her a tip about a person who claimed to be a Hunkpapa medicine man from the Rosebud reservation. The man, who lived in another state, sold ceremonies and even conducted a Sacred Pipe ceremony with a coven of white witches. But that wasn’t what caught Little Eagle’s attention. The man had married a white woman, then allegedly raped her teenage daughter. When confronted by his wife, he reportedly told her that it was a Lakota tradition for fathers to take their daughters’ virginity.

Little Eagle was outraged. It was an insult to all Lakota–and the Hunkpapa in particular–that this man dared to claim them as his people. She soon found that the family name the man used hadn’t been listed on the tribal rolls for more than a century. She also tracked down a newspaper story, titled “Urban Indian in a Concrete Jungle,” that described how the man struggled to keep his spirituality in a city setting. He’d begun his spiritual training as an eight-year-old, he told the reporter, when his father left him on the top of a mountain on the Rosebud reservation.

“That should have been a warning flag to anyone who knows anything about Rosebud, or at least bothered to check it out,” says Little Eagle. “There are no mountains on the Rosebud reservation. It’s all flat prairie.

“It just got me angry that anyone would believe this guy’s hokey-pokey, especially that medicine men would do that to virgins.”

Little Eagle went after the story with a vengeance. Its publication brought the newspaper office a bomb scare and a threatened lawsuit (which hasn’t materialized). But it also generated many telephone calls from readers who wanted to expose so-called medicine men. What had begun as a single story for Little Eagle turned into a wide-ranging series about the exploitation of Indian religions across the country.

One of Little Eagle’s articles focused on the activities of Harley “Swiftdeer” Reagan, who claimed to be of Cherokee ancestry and had founded the California-based Deer Tribe, a collection of mostly white new-agers. They practiced an assortment of American Indian rituals–sweat lodges, sun dances, Sacred Pipe ceremonies–along with a mixture of Buddhism, new-age crystal healing and magic. Little Eagle’s story uncovered reports of tribal drug use and sex orgies, including a $200 workshop called “Women Loving Women.” But what really enraged the Indian community, especially the Cherokee, was Reagan’s claim that the sex acts he directed his followers to perform were part of an ancient Cherokee tradition.

As disturbing as Reagan’s activities were, Little Eagle says, she still thought most people would see through him. Worse were the accounts she heard from women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Indian medicine men.

She wasn’t the only one hearing the stories, either. For years, reports of sexual transgressions by spiritual leaders had been filtering back to the reservations. Some of the exploitation was subtle and no more original than any pickup line heard at a bar on a Saturday night. Medicine men promised love and “marriage through the pipe” to wide-eyed followers who believed they had found the perfect natural man…at least until the next morning.

Others were more creative: “The Great Spirit wanted me to give you this medicine,” “You have been chosen to receive this message from the Great Spirit.” And some simply raped their stunned followers and warned them not to tell.

Among those at risk were urban Indian women seeking to re-establish ties to their culture without knowing the requirements of the religion involved. But the easiest targets, it seemed, were non-Indian women involved in the new-age movement.

In the mid-Eighties, Charlotte Black Elk heard rumors that a Colorado medicine man had raped a young white woman inside a sweat lodge, an extremely sacrilegious act, while his wife watched. When the young woman complained to the wife, the wife replied that as a medicine man, her husband was infallible.

Soon Black Elk was hearing reports of such transgressions with increasing frequency. In 1991, she says, she received a call from a Colorado woman, a follower of a man claiming to be a Lakota medicine man. The man’s female devotees were all well-educated, active members of their community with a shared interest in preserving the natural environment. The medicine man had been a wonderful inspiration, the woman told Black Elk, but now she had concerns about one of his requests.

“This guy was telling them that in order to preserve a certain stand of old-growth forest they would have to form a `circle of protection’ around it,” Black Elk says. “To create this circle, he said he would place these women at various points around the forest. Then he would come to each of them and have sex, which would create this protective circle of sexual energy.”

The woman asked Black Elk if this was indeed part of Lakota tradition. “I told her it was bullshit and to get the hell away from that guy,” she says. “I heard that when they confronted him, he said he would just have to go someplace where people knew how to appreciate the power of prayer.”

But not all the misconduct was off the reservation. In 1990 a seventy-year-old Pine Ridge medicine man, Grover Horned Antelope, was convicted of raping a young Lakota woman outside his sweat lodge.

“We had heard what he was doing before,” says Black Elk. “One time the police brought a young white woman he had raped to me to explain that this was not part of our spiritual practices and that she should press charges. But she wouldn’t, she wanted to be accepted so bad.

“This time it was an Indian woman, and she did press charges.”
Horned Antelope was tried in a South Dakota state court. It was the first time a Pine Ridge medicine man had been charged, much less convicted, of sexual assault, and there was some muttering that his case was really an attack on religious rights. “But most people were saddened and outraged that a medicine man had done this,” Black Elk says.

“I just wanted to expose him to give people an opportunity to choose whether they want to go to him or not,” his victim told Indian Country Today. “I can’t blame all the medicine men, because some of them are good. I love my religion because it helps me to live…This sent a message to the medicine men, to other ones that might do this.”

But the prosecution of Horned Antelope was the exception rather than the rule. Like many victims of rape, women on the reservation can be reluctant to report the crime–and, culturally, pointing the finger at a medicine man is comparable to a Catholic parishioner accusing her priest. Non-Indians wrestle with the additional fear of being ostracized by the very people from whom they are trying to win acceptance.

“There is now such a fascination with Lakota ritual that these people are easily taken in by `medicine men’ who have little or no standing in their own communities,” says Black Elk. “Then it comes as a total shock when something like this happens. They go into denial. New-agers are ignorant of the religious and cultural practices. They are not seeking to place themselves at risk, but their ignorance puts them there. They don’t even know where to go to ask if something is right or wrong.”

Outside of Indian Country, Little Eagle’s stories received little notice. “It just wasn’t an issue off the reservation,” she says. On the reservation, though, she found herself at the center of a storm. There were threats and angry telephone confrontations. Drained, she finally let the subject go.

Kayla Moonwatcher’s adoption ceremony was set for February 22, 1992. Five days before, she got a call from Oscar Brave Eagle, who wanted her to accompany him to the site.

Originally she was going to have her spirit name, Whirling Rainbow Woman, blessed in February, with the adoption ritual set for several months later. But Brave Eagle had suggested holding both ceremonies on the same day in February, with David Swallow presiding over both.

Moonwatcher had been preparing for the event all winter long, and she still had much to do. But when Brave Eagle told her they had not had enough time alone together to talk or for him to teach her some of the sacred songs, she agreed.

Two days later Brave Eagle picked her up and they drove to the site. It was a good day, a beautiful sunny day, and they worked hard to set up the sweat lodge. And then, Moonwatcher says, Brave Eagle–normally a reticent and private man–started discussing his lack of a sex life.

When later questioned by a Larimer County investigator, Moonwatcher and Brave Eagle would concur on the sequence of events that led up to this conversation. But after that, their stories part. Brave Eagle told the investigator that Moonwatcher had dressed provocatively and that what occurred was consensual sex. But according to statements Moonwatcher made to the investigator as well as what she later told her friends, Brave Eagle grabbed her ankle. Attempting to pull away, she lost her balance and fell. And suddenly, she told the police, Brave Eagle was on her, telling her that he loved her.

“I just kept trying to tell him that I thought of him as a father and that this wasn’t right,” she says. At one point she almost managed to get away, but Brave Eagle, a 250-pound man, caught her and began shaking her by the shoulders. “He said he didn’t want to adopt me at the ceremony,” she says. “He said he was going to ask Dave to marry us through the pipe.”

She says Brave Eagle reminded her of a comment her boyfriend, Olixn Adams, had made after a recent sweat lodge. Anything you need, you just let us know, Adams had told Brave Eagle.

“You said, anything I need, and I need this,” Moonwatcher claims Brave Eagle now told her. He shook her again and she blacked out. When she came to, she told the investigator, she was lying on the ground; her pants and underwear had been pulled off, and Brave Eagle was raping her.

“The whole time he was saying how much he loved me and wanted to marry me,” she says. “I was freaked out and crying, but for him it was some kind of loving experience.”

After that, Moonwatcher told the investigator, she again lost consciousness. When she came to, Brave Eagle was nowhere to be seen. Gathering her clothing, she staggered to the creek to wash. When she finished, she still felt dirty and sat on the bank, crying. Finally she dressed and walked back to the ceremony site to see if the keys were in the truck.

Passing the sweat lodge, she says she was startled when Brave Eagle suddenly yelled from within. “He said, `You should come in here and pray about what happened…Only through the pipe can you be purified and cleansed.’ I felt contaminated and didn’t want to be within a hundred feet of him,” she says. “But I was afraid of more violence, so I went in.”

Once she was inside, Brave Eagle handed her his pipe and told her to pray. So she prayed out loud for aid in understanding what had just happened, she says, and prayed that Brave Eagle, the man she had thought of as a father, would seek help. When she handed the pipe back, she expected Brave Eagle to offer some promise to make amends. Perhaps, she thought, there could be a healing.

She says she could scarcely contain her rage when he simply packed his pipe without praying.

They drove back to Boulder in silence. When they arrived at the home she shared with Adams, Moonwatcher jumped from the truck and ran inside. Over the next few days she told no one her story. And three days later she went through with the ceremonies.

“I didn’t know how to say no,” she explains. “Dave was driving down with his entourage. I had fifty people coming. I was ashamed and embarrassed…here I was, an independent, empowered woman who had allowed herself to be put in a position where I could be raped.”

Surprisingly, Moonwatcher says, the naming ceremony was everything she had hoped, and she felt like she truly belonged. But when Brave Eagle, to whom she had not spoken since that day and who now acted as though nothing had happened, stepped forward to adopt her, she felt numb. “There was no joy,” she says.

For two weeks after that, she says the only people she could bear to talk to were the counselors at the Boulder Rape Crisis Center. Her moods swung wildly, from giddy to violently angry.

“She was edgy and argumentative,” Adams recalls. “I could tell something had gone wrong. The worse it got, the more I wondered, what gives? But she was keeping it to herself.”

At the end of the second week, after a retreat with the women in her moon lodge, Moonwatcher was riding home with one of the participants when she began to cry. She had something she had to get off her chest, she said, and made the woman promise not to tell.

Listening, the woman grew angry. “She said I had to tell to protect other women,” Moonwatcher says. And, the woman said, she had to tell Adams so that he could support her.

“She came in the house in tears,” Adams remembers. “She kept making me promise not to get violent or mad–it took an hour of that for her to finally get around to saying, `Oscar raped me.’ Then she told me the story.”

For more than a year, Moonwatcher says, she tried to convince Oscar Brave Eagle to begin the healing process. She wanted a public apology in front of their mutual friends, and she wanted him to seek counseling.

“I was afraid that if he did this to me, he might do it to one of the other women he was working with,” she says. “I called and said, `You son of a bitch. What you did to me was terrible. Now what are you going to do about it?’ He said he was sorry and that it would never happen again. He had accepted me as his daughter and therefore it couldn’t happen again.” But that was as far as he would go.

Eventually, Moonwatcher says, she told Swallow, who promised he would pray over how to break the adoption ceremony without removing her personal commitment to Brave Eagle’s son. But he also told her she was contaminated and would need a healing ceremony before she could sun dance again. And even after she underwent the ritual on Swallow’s land in South Dakota, she says, the medicine man seemed aloof. (Efforts to reach Swallow at his Denver apartment were unsuccessful.)

Moonwatcher returned to Red Scaffold for the sun dance. During the portion when participants are encouraged to step up to a microphone and discuss the past year, Moonwatcher told a stunned audience that she had been raped “by someone you all know”–although she did not name Brave Eagle. She says she also informed the sun dance medicine man of the assault, but he scolded her with the admonition that “we don’t name names here.” Oscar’s teacher, Pete Bear Stops, promised that the pipe would take care of any misdeeds by its owner, Moonwatcher later told police.

Moonwatcher felt rejected until the older women invited her to their sweat lodge. Once inside, the women discussed her charge. “They told me to do whatever I had to to stop this from happening to other women,” she remembers.

In the meantime, though, her relationship with Adams was deteriorating. Together they talked with counselors at the crisis center. But nothing seemed to work for long, and Moonwatcher distanced herself from her former lover.

“She didn’t trust or like men much anymore,” Adams told the Larimer County investigator.

Moonwatcher eventually told her story about the rape to all the men and women in the Rainbow Bridge community. Many said they already knew something was wrong because she had stopped working with him, but now they were shocked and angry to learn why.

As word of her accusation spread, Moonwatcher was surprised by the number of people who called or showed up on her doorstep with stories of sexual misconduct by other medicine men. Some of these men worked in the Denver area, while others had large followings in different parts of the country. In Texas, women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a particular medicine man had even formed their own support group.

In August 1993 Moonwatcher attended a women-only sun dance in Arizona. The Lakota woman who sponsored the sun dance told Moonwatcher that years earlier she had been raped by a medicine man while his wife watched–the same man who had been reported to Black Elk years earlier. And Moonwatcher was introduced to other women who said they had been raped, not just by medicine men, but by Christian clergy members as well.

Over the next few months, Moonwatcher and Adams would tell police, she kept calling Brave Eagle, demanding that they meet to discuss what he could do to make amends. Medicine men are not supposed to carry weapons or instigate violence, and she says she challenged her former teacher to bury his pipe “because you carry your penis as a weapon.” Brave Eagle would agree to meet her, both Moonwatcher and Adams say, but he would never show up.

Moonwatcher didn’t want to go through another anniversary of the rape without something being done to heal her spirit and bring the ordeal to some kind of closure. In January, concerned that other women might be victimized, she says she decided to confront Brave Eagle.

Two weeks later, Moonwatcher, Adams and six Rainbow members went to Brave Eagle’s home. His wife complained about the number of people trying to get into her small house, but they entered anyway.

“He was trying to shake everybody’s hand,” Moonwatcher says. “I told him to sit his ass down, we weren’t there as friends. Then I told him, `Oscar, you raped me, and it was an evil, horrible thing to do.'”

“He just kept saying, `I know. I know. I’m sorry that I hurt you,'” says Adams. “But he just kept dancing around the word `rape.’ He’d just say, `You’re right’ whenever Kayla accused him.

In a written statement given to the Larimer County investigator, Adams said, “The only time [Brave Eagle] looked me in the eye, was when he verbally apologized for raping Kayla and causing her so much pain.” Statements provided by other witnesses also contend that Brave Eagle admitted to the rape and apologized to each of them as well as to Moonwatcher.

When contacted by Westword, Brave Eagle’s wife would not discuss any statements she or her husband had made to the group. “At first I thought that it had something to do with the politics going on about the sun dance,” his wife says. “And then I was just horrified…who wouldn’t be? Now she’s telling everyone around here and in South Dakota.” She referred any other questions to Brave Eagle’s attorney, David Mahonee, who has not responded to requests for an interview.

According to the statements of Moonwatcher and other witnesses, Moonwatcher gave Brave Eagle a list of her demands, including a public apology and his agreement to seek counseling, before she left his house. She also wanted him to bury his pipe for a year, in effect putting him out of the medicine-man business. “I told him that I wanted to hear from both him and Dave Swallow within 24 hours about how to proceed, or I would go to the authorities,” she says.

Instead, according to several witnesses, Brave Eagle and Swallow conducted a sweat lodge for the women and berated them for their “lusty behavior.” When Moonwatcher heard about that discussion, she says, it finally tipped the scales. For nearly two years she had tried to find a way to heal through Lakota spirituality without going to the white criminal justice system. She remembered the medicine man who told her that the pipe would take care of Brave Eagle. “Well,” she says, “I decided that the pipe would take care of him by me going to the authorities.”

The case wound up in the office of the Larimer County sheriff. An investigator interviewed Moonwatcher and Brave Eagle; other witnesses sent in statements.

Brave Eagle told investigator Jack Henander that the sex was consensual and that Moonwatcher had seduced him. Brave Eagle said he had accidentally broken Moonwatcher’s pipe. “He said he was apologizing about the broken pipe when she confronted him in front of her friends and was not apologizing for sexually assaulting her,” Henander wrote in his report.

When Henander informed Moonwatcher of Brave Eagle’s response, she told the investigator that her former mentor was confusing her with someone else. According to Henander, “She said that Oscar Brave Eagle was getting confused due to the fact that her pipe was not broken, but that it was a friend of her’s pipe that had broken.”

Brave Eagle also complained to Henander that Moonwatcher often wore provocative outfits and “that the elders looked very harshly at her for wearing that type of clothing.” And in a March letter to the investigator, Brave Eagle accused Moonwatcher and Adams of charging $360 a person for ceremonies that Moonwatcher was not qualified to run. “These two people are blacklisted by the medicine men who are true Lakota people. The allegations she is making about me are wrong, and the community respects me, and I am a traditional Lakota,” Brave Eagle wrote.

In April the Larimer County district attorney charged Brave Eagle with first-degree sexual assault, including the use of violence; a warrant was issued for his arrest. Brave Eagle turned himself in earlier this month.

According to Assistant District Attorney Mitch Murray, who will be prosecuting the case, it isn’t unheard of for a rape victim to wait two years before bringing charges. “It’s not the best for us,” he says. “But especially when the victim knows the person, they often will try to work it out, as in this case. If there is no satisfaction, then they press charges.”

Although Murray declines to comment on the merits of the case, he adds that his office wouldn’t have brought charges against Brave Eagle without sufficient grounds.

Arvol Looking Horse says he frequently receives calls from women wondering what to do about medicine men who have sexually assaulted or harassed them. “I tell them to write it down and confront the person,” Looking Horse says. “Then I tell them to take it to court.

“This has got to stop. It is making our people look bad.”
Medicine men who commit sexual offenses “are not in their right minds,” he says. “Our rites are sacred and you must come with a pure heart and pure mind. And the people running the sweat lodges must be that above all else.”

According to Philip Under Baggage, a councilmember for the Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation, the recent rash of complaints about medicine men–most of them from women in Denver, Minneapolis and California–has alarmed Lakota leaders. “The elders and the tribal council have been meeting to try to come up with some guidelines for the general public on how to protect themselves from these false spiritual leaders,” he says, adding that they want to emphasize that sex has nothing to do with Lakota religious practices. And the council sent this statement to Westword: “We do not tolerate this and denounce these people who claim to be medicine men. This does not represent the Lakota spiritual way of life.”

But Black Elk and Little Eagle say that ultimately, the only solution will be for victimized women to come forward with their accusations.

Legitimate medicine men and tribal leaders have been reluctant to denounce the others publicly, Little Eagle says, and the warning to Moonwatcher to “not name names” is “just another part of `good old boy’ mentality.”

Some Lakota would still rather blame the victims than the medicine men, Black Elk says, “though most us of know that this isn’t right and should be stopped.” In some respects, she adds, the exploitation by the medicine men “is a type of racism. Sort of, `You took our land, now we’ll take your money and whatever else.'” She hopes that publicity about these cases will encourage more women to challenge spiritual leaders who abuse their power. “I would be happy to counsel with any of them,” she says. “And I will even go to the trials to testify as an expert witness on the traditions of our people.”

Unfortunately, she adds, one traditional way for dealing with men who assault women no longer exists.

“In the old days, they would have been warned once. If they did it again, they would be dead.”

end of part 2