-
Sweet Water Well
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
58 Sweet Water Well The paved road abruptly ends and we roll in a choking cloud of dust into Cannonball. My sticky mouth coated and dry. Grandpa waves to us from his tarpaper shack. We’d driven from Oregon to Cannonball, North Dakota, that summer I was eleven. The stifling heat made bearable only by frequent stops for orange pop. I cheered at the sign Entering the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Tonhse keya and paypithtikway, shahmock! He shouts in Cree. Strange how no one questioned these Crees living with the Sioux. Caught in a winter blizzard on their way north and offered the church sanctuary, they never left. It helped that Great-grandma was a medicine woman. Hearing of the sick she gathered herbs, roots, leaves, and bark from the rich river bottom land. Put in a glass of water, if the medicine moved in a circle it was right for you. I run to the well, toss off the cover, pull the rope hand over hand and slurp the cool sweet water from the mekwon until my stomach is full to burst, and water spurts from my nose. As Great-grandma fired up the wood stove to make coffee I snuck down to the Missouri river until I heard my dad yelling and caught hell because of rattlesnakes. In the hissing of the kerosene lamp I lay down on the blanketed wood floor drinking in the sweet flow of Cree. ...