I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

After this nothing happened.

Have we lost the very concepts in which events would take shape, form a pattern, mean something? The conceptual world in which the act has an identity, an intelligibility, has broken down. We suspect this is a possibility for all of us-and not just for the Crows. The unforeseeable, the unimaginable, is not death or failure but the reservations, the camps, where nothing happens. The unimaginable has become a possibility. Hannah Arendt was right to highlight the enormity of such an occurrence. The necessary, fixed field of possibilities comes to be questioned. Nothing is stable any more; the very framework itself ceases to make sense and cannot be trusted. What else would one call this but disorientation or bewilderment?

To lose the land is to lose a way of life and a way of thinking.
Fort Laramie Treaty, September 17 th, 1851: The Crows are ceded 33 million acres and promised $50,000 worth of supplies every year (they receive it only on one year!) . By the 1860's and the second Treaty this has been reduced to 25 %: eight million acres, and by 1882 it is down to 2 million.

A way of life has been destroyed. The Crow now lives in a world in which their are no living possibilities. He is like the Musselmaner. A black shadow. The field in which occurrences took place has been torn open and all rituals (such as the Sun Dance-which is outlawed and then forgotten), like all acts, are empty..they are broken circles. Nothing counts any more..we are beyond good or evil since the very concept of 'limit' has lost its meaning. And this is not unexpected: Concepts get their lives through the lives we are able to live with them.

For the Crow, they have quite literally, run out of time. A time when things happened is now consigned to the past. And yet,and yet...In a quite remarkable gesture, Plenty Coups, leader of the Crows, places his coup-stick and head-dress on the memorial to the Unknown Solider at the 1921 Washington ceremony. What can this mean? Is he burying them as well? Perhaps this is a final, defiant act, as if to say: I recognize that the only ritual possible for us now is one of remembering and mourning and by speaking of such things they will be kept alive..that by a loving act of remembrance of things past we shall name what has been taken from us and one day the land will tremble, the spirit of our fathers will haunt the white man, eventually breaking his spell, and they shall return to share our life...

I don't know if these are Plenty Coup's words from the ceremony but I like to think that they are because they are wonderfully subversive...

Translation 1:
"For the Indians of America I call upon the great spirit of the Red Men with gesture, and chant, and tribal tongue: That the dead should not have died in vain; that war might end; that peace be purchased by the blood of red men and white.

Translation 2:
I am told that this soldier is one who is known only to God. If that is the case, this soldier, known only to the "Maker" could
well be an American Indian. With all of the honors being extended to him this day, by all of the countries that were in the war, he truly is a chief. And in keeping with the rites that we extend to a departed chief, I hereby dedicate this grave as the grave site of a chief."