Jeffrey Sitting Bear, Peyote, and Hippies

A phone call to an Oglala Lakota elder.

“You’re an Indian," said Jeffrey Sitting Bear, 73, an Oglala Lakota elder and holy man, over the phone one recent Monday morning. "They called you ‘wild’ and ‘a savage.’”

Sitting Bear and I speak at least once a month on a number of subjects – racism, good food, bad weather, spirituality, and weird things that go bump in the night. I reached him on his cell phone at his home in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He tells me he’s struggling to pay his bills. He suffers from more than a few ailments, and with feet that barely function, the only thing left to do is pray that white folks start paying us rent for the billions of acres of land they stole and still live on.

“I’ll send you $50,” I said. “I’d rob a bank, but I sneeze too much; they’d pick me out of the lineup right away. It’s also why I’m no longer allowed in movie theaters.”

And I suppose this is a damn fine spot to introduce myself to you, dear reader. I am an Oglala Lakota and Chicano writer and reporter living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I cover Indian country and push back against the whitewashed American narrative in all of its rotten forms. But I digress. Back to my phone call with Sitting Bear, who is also my cousin. I called him to talk about peyote and mushrooms and the 1960s and hippies and all manner of what white people call psychedelics.

“‘Medicine,’ we call it,” he told me in his broken English.

Sitting Bear was born in 1950 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwest South Dakota, which was originally established as Prison Camp No. 334 by U.S. government officials who viewed the Oglala Lakota people as enemies, a fact that is rarely taught in American schools even today.

Growing up, no one in his home spoke English; he learned it later when he was forced to attend a brutal boarding school with nuns and priests who would viciously whip Native children on their backs and pierce their tongues with needles whenever they spoke their ancestral language. Today, Sitting Bear says he still struggles with the white man’s words, especially when attempting to translate Lakota to English.

“It’s hard to translate into English how sacred peyote is,” he said in his deep, whispered voice. “It came to Indians first, then we shared it with white people. When we gave it to them, we told them, ‘This is medicine. This is to heal your body. Heal your mind. It’s not to get high.’”

But get high they did, back in the free-love era when Sitting Bear was a teenager. In places like San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, white people dressed in faux Indian headbands and feathers and buckskin suede leather fringe vests with beads. They ate peyote and gave themselves Indian names.The whole hippie scene weirded Sitting Bear out, because, for him, for the first time since white people blundered onto Native land, they didn’t seem to hate, fear, and despise Natives. Suddenly, they idolized everything Indigenous, including peyote.

“You’re supposed to use it in prayer and for healing,” he told me. “But sometimes people take it and use it as a drug.” Peyote is not supposed to be a drug. “It’s something really good. It’s medicine when you take it, and it’ll show you every gift you have. That’s how it works, the medicine. How you treat it is how it’s going to treat you. If you reject it, it’ll reject you, too,” Sitting Bear said.

Sitting Bear recalled the first time he had peyote. It was in ceremony. He was 14-years old, and he remembers his elders telling him, “If you take this, you’ll be all right.”

Not long after drinking the medicine, he said he felt himself connecting to a tree. “My stomach and arms were like that. And now I’m going up … the roots … and now I’m part of the roots. Up there, the air was really good. And the music. I was praying and I got sick from the peyote. It was really, really strong. Then, they gave me some more. There was a vision in the fire. Nice colors. Really nice. We all have different experiences and visions with it. Everybody.”

Still, Sitting Bear believes white people have a long way to go to learn the right way to use the medicine. “In a good way,” he said. “The Indian way.”

“They must respect the teaching we have in the Indian way. But you have to respect yourself first. We have to respect ourselves, understand ourselves, believe in ourselves, and then heal ourselves. And then, the medicine will do that for us,” he said.

Indeed, Natives like Jeffrey Sitting Bear are few and far between, at least for white folks; he’s the real deal, a full-blood Oglala who could tell you the history of our people going back thousands of years, but only in Lakota. To a white person, he’s the Indian that somehow traveled through time from 1860 and landed here to share ancient wisdom and dire warnings, and he even welcomes these non-Natives to his ceremonies. “The Creator doesn’t discriminate, so why should I?” he once said to me back on Pine Ridge. Then, on that summer day years ago now, he proceeded to tell me a story about my family’s name. 

“Your family, Wacašnapi,” he paused to chuckle. “Do you know when a man grabs a rock and aims it at a tree and misses?”

“Yes,” I responded, smiling, waiting for the punchline.

“That’s what it means,” he said with a huge grin that traveled from ear to ear. 

“Your name is Can’t Shoot Straight!” yelled another Native from behind me, giggling on the ground like a hyena.

Sitting Bear broke into a long bellyful laugh and took another drag from a Marlboro Menthol and told another story. Meanwhile, I decided to wander off and find a tree to pelt with a rock. And, of course, I missed.

Native elders are like this – jokers, storytellers, wisdom keepers, runners of the ceremony, and Sitting Bear is no different. Folks of all stripes flock to him and around him, each desperately seeking answers and guidance. He never refuses a single soul, because he knows that everyone is deeply broken in one form or another.

On the phone with Sitting Bear, he told me peyote has power, like fire or water or earth. Disrespect water and you’ll drown. Play with fire and you’ll burn. Mother Earth will bury you alive beneath her soil, rocks, and rubble if she senses any cockiness or impudence. That’s “The Indian Way” Sitting Bear speaks of. Without that you run the risk of what Natives call “bad medicine,” like buying a “sage wand” at Whole Foods, but that’s a tale for another time.

And the epilogue to this story is never take peyote for granted, be wary of any hippie in a headband who ignores Native wisdom, and always listen to the elders. “You take this peyote in a right way, and it can be good for you. Or you can take it in a bad way, and it’ll be bad for you,” Sitting Bear said. You’ve been warned. Hoka.