Last Call: Holy Cows
Adams, James Ring
LAST CALL by James Ring Adams Holy Cows DEPENDING ON YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARD Indian prophecies, and on how you count white buffalo, the birth of a white bison calf in southern Michigan on July 29...
...Miracle and Spirit Walker, on the contrary, had pigmented skin and eyes, showing that their white coat was a genuine, if extremely rare, variation...
...LAST CALL by James Ring Adams Holy Cows DEPENDING ON YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARD Indian prophecies, and on how you count white buffalo, the birth of a white bison calf in southern Michigan on July 29 may be the harbinger of a new age of world peace...
...Two or three other white buffalo appeared in the next two years, including two within a month on the South Dakota ranch of Joe Merrival, an Oglala Lakota who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation...
...Spirit Walker only lived a bit over two weeks after her birth at the Child's Place Buffalo Ranch, but the slightly underweight female with a pure white coat sent a shock wave among the Lakota Sioux, many of whom have long believed that a radical shift in the world —and in the status of the American Indian—will follow the birth of seven white buffalo calves...
...hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled 'New Age shamans' and their followers...
...and a genetic test by the Denver-based trade group confirmed that Miracle was pure bison...
...The American Indian Dance Theater is touring to enthusiastic audiences and friendly reviews with a program drawn from modern choreography, tribal traditions, and the post-war Pow-Wow competitions...
...The first annual Native American Music Awards this May put on a show of surprising range and energy in genres from jazz to country music...
...As the Lakota intellectual Vine DeLoria, Jr...
...But the calf is cited as a personal inspiration by Cheyenne, Arapaho, Navaho, and even Central American tribal elders...
...She was born in 1994 at David Heider's farm in Janesville, Wisconsin, and now thrives under the care of her non-Indian owner...
...Since Red Heifers played a role in purifying worshipers at the temple, Melody was supposed to foretell construction of the Third Temple and help usher in the Messianic age...
...The energy is too widespread to arise simply from casino money...
...According to Sam Albrecht of the National Bison Association, these calves were albinos...
...With the success of Smoke Signals and the impending release of Naturally Native (financed by the filthy rich Mashantucket Pequots, owners of the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut), modern Indians are finally imposing their true personalities—and their sardonic sense of humor—on the most stereotyping of all the media, the movies...
...AS FOR SPIRIT WALKER, THE FOLKS AT THE Child's Place Buffalo Ranch were obviously chagrined at her death...
...As a local tourist attraction, explains Mr...
...WHETHER OR NOT A NEW AGE IS IMMINENT, the white buffalo calves coincide with a remarkable upsurge in American Indian cultural life...
...On the contrary, many see tribal traditions as a necessary corrective to the flaws of modernity...
...THE BIRTH OF MIRACLE IN 1994 CRYSTALLIZED this attitude far beyond the confines of the Sioux nation...
...Indian voices in American literature continue to proliferate...
...94 October 19 9 8 • The American Spectator...
...There was another problem...
...But these hopes were dashed this January, when the village rabbi Shmaria Shore spotted white hairs on her tail...
...Nealy, they were prepared for visitors...
...Miracle is fostering what might be called "evangelical shamanism...
...Her coat has changed color three times as she has matured, signifying to some Lakota elders that their religious message is meant for all the races of humanity, not just the Red Man...
...IT'S NOT CLEAR IF SPIRIT WALKER IS THE SEVENTH or the fifth, though by nearly universal agreement the heifer named Miracle was the fourth...
...delights in rubbing in, Lockean, technological America no longer intimidates the rising Indian generation...
...It's only a matte' of time before someone, for good or ill, hits Broadway with an Indian version of Riverdance...
...When this bovine phenomenon, named Melody, was born at the Kfar Menachem religious youth village in northern Israel last May, a delegation of orthodox rabbis declared it a possible candidate for the first of the kind to appear in the Holy Land since the destruction of the Second Temple...
...One of the latest and most refreshing is that of Delphine Red Shirt, wife of a dean at an Ivy League school whose memoir of her impoverished reservation childhood, Bead on an Anthill (University of Nebraska Press), artfully incorporates chunks of her native Lakota language...
...She reflects the specifically Lakota legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, Ptehincala San Win, a mysterious lady who came to a camp of the Sioux some 200 to 1,000 years ago (depending on your count) and taught them their basic religious rituals...
...But the ranch has put up a tombstone with her picture and hopes that the pilgrims will keep coming...
...FOR SIMILAR HAIR-SPLITTING, YOU NEED ONLY turn to the circle of Orthodox Judaism tracking the Red Heifer...
...One of the biggest problems for the traditional leaders, in fact, is to project their message without contamination by New Age dilettantes, or in the words of a "Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality": "non-Indian `wannabes...
...Chad Nealy of the Child's Place Buffalo Ranch told me that blood was drawn from Spirit Walker before she died of pneumonia, but test results weren't yet in...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
