[Page: E1979]
I shouldn't have been surprised by the eagle.
I had just turned off Highway 61, taking the road that leads to the Prairie Island Indian Reservation near Red Wing. It was soaring above a field near the bluffs that loom over the backwaters of the Mississippi River, hovering in a steady wind blowing from the west, dipping the feathers on its wingtips to stay impossibly stationary. It didn't seem to move forward at all but just held its own in the gale, hanging in one spot as if it had repealed the law of gravity. I stopped to watch.
`Amos,' I thought. `The eagle is there for Amos.'
Every time I saw Amos, there always seemed to be an eagle overhead. So I don't know why it should have been any different Friday, even though Friday was the day Amos Owen was buried.
The first time I saw Amos, he was kneeling in a foot of snow, struggling against another strong wind to light the sacred Dakota Indian ceremonial pipe he held cradled in his arms. In a large circle around him, 50 people stood quietly, trying to keep warm. I remember wondering how this man with the long gray ponytail, who was not wearing a jacket and whose hands were unprotected, could stand the bitter cold.
Then, from high above, came a shrill call. Eyes turned upward, toward the crystal blue sky, where a majestic eagle was circling above our little gathering on the banks of the Minnesota River. An eagle, some of us said, trying not to shout. But other people, veterans of previous pipe ceremonies, seemed unfazed. Of course there's an eagle, they said. There's always an eagle.
It was the day after Christmas, 1985. I had driven to that windswept park called Land of Memories in Mankato to take part in Amos' pipe ceremony. On another day after Christmas, near the spot where we stood, 38 Dakota men were hanged by the state of Minnesota in an act of official vengeance that followed the 1862 war between the people of the Dakota (Sioux) nation and the white settlers who were flooding across their land.
That act of legalized lynching was seared into the consciousness of the state's Indians. And Amos Owen, the Dakota spiritual leader who died last week at 73, did more than anyone I know to help heal the scars that were left by the largest mass execution in American history and by the imprisonment and exile of the Dakota people that followed the hanging.
Each Dec. 26, Amos led a pipe ceremony in Mankato, burning sweet sage, praying to the four directions, reciting the names of the 38 who died and passing the pipe around the circle. As Amos bent over the redstone pipe that cold, blustery day and at last got its contents to catch fire, it was clear that he held something more precious than a pipe in his hands, he held the desire to bring peace and reconciliation between peoples.
Amos devoted the last years of his life to the pipe and its ways, the traditional religious practices of the Dakota. He wasn't a preacher--Amos didn't have to raise his voice to be listened to--but he possessed an aura of spiritual sincerity a lot of bishops would envy. He was a teacher who showed his students patience and generosity. Many times, Amos started the day with a pipe ceremony on one of Minnesota's Indian reservations and ended it with a ceremony on another reservation, criss-crossing the state in between.
`He was the type of person who never said no to people,' says his friend, Vernell Wabasha, who often hosted Amos when he visited the Lower Sioux Reservation near Redwood Falls. `When people came and asked for help, he always did what he could.'
Over the years, hundreds came to visit Amos on the Prairie Island reservation and to participate in the sweatlodge ceremonies he held each week. Only a mile from the sweatlodge where Amos sought prayer and purification, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant stands like a visitor from another planet.
One day in 1979, Amos was on the hillside behind his house, cutting sumac branches to make pipe stems, when he noticed dozens of cars speeding away from the power plant. Later, Amos and the other reservation residents learned that there had been a leak at the plant and that the workers had evacuated without telling the residents of the reservation.
Amos wasn't surprised that there had been an accident at the power plant. He believed that when disrespect is shown to creation, bad luck follows. For that reason, Amos did not fish during the last 12 years of his life. He loved fishing but he had made a pledge not to kill anything.
`Even when I have to cut willows,' he said last month, `for every tree I cut, I talk to each one and give them an offering--tobacco or something. I give an offering to everything in Mother Nature that I use. A lot of people forget to do that and then they wonder why something goes wrong. There's a world out there that nobody knows about. That's why they call it the Great Mystery.'
On Friday, a horse-drawn hearse carried Amos to the Prairie Island cemetery. He was buried under a cottonwood tree in a coffin made by one of his sons, his body wrapped in a star quilt and with bracelets of sage around his ankles and his wrists. There were Christian prayers and Dakota prayers and a strong wind and an eagle soaring above the bluff.
It was a beautiful day.