8 ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMANISM QUARTERLY 11(1) Red-Wing Larry J. Zimmerman Archaeology Laboratory University of South Dakota Vermillion, SD 57069 SUMMARY Red-Wing is comprised of two linked vignettes. In the first, the Indian, Kills, examines his sister's bones while burying them in a mound. To him, the bones point toward a natural future, a journey to the spirit world. Eleven hundred years later, the archaeologist excavates the remains. To him, the bones are objects of science and clues to the information he seeks from the past. Yet the common humanity of grief speaks to the archaeologist in a meaning not dissimilar from that of the Indian. As Kills examined the bone under the death tree, he knew it to be from her shoulder. So much smaller than the shoulder of the bison she had fashioned into a hoe to tend her small garden. He had wrapped her in the bison robe two winters ago and bound her body to the wooden platform to face the great circle of the sky. The flesh on the now white bone had been food for Crow and the small crawling brothers who helped a person on the journey to the spirit world, a path his sister now journeyed. Calls Hump had told him the time had come to gather the bones so that his sister might lie with the ancestors in the mounds on the edge of the hill over- looking the river, Flowing Life. He put the shoulder bone into a small bundle with the others that had fallen from the scaffold. He found the sharp awl he had left with her when she faced the heavens. He pressed the point, polished smooth from use in making designs on wet clay pots, into his thumb. It drew blood. Pain helped the remembrance of her skill and her delight in using it. She would have the awl, too, along with one of her pots, when she faced Mother Earth. With the bundle that was his sister, he met others who had sweated with him and had gone to gather their relatives who would now nurture Mother Earth, as she had nutured them. In silence they walked. Each thought of the loved one who would continue on the circle. On the bluff, Calls Hump had already opened the door to the spirit world. Into this hole, the size of one man's body, would go six bundles to join the ancestors. As he shook his rattle made from Turtle's house, Calls Hump chanted that which only the holy ones knew. He motioned Kills to place his sister in the opening and to the others, their own bundles. Each placed precious objects from the belongings of the spirit traveler near the bundle. Calls Hump stopped his songs and laid down the turtle shell rattle. He emptied the baskets of earth taken from the hole back into the opening. He directed those so selected to take the baskets to the banks of Flowing Life and bring earth to heap over the bones. This they did. They carried each basket to empty it silently over the bundles. Calls Hump shaped the earth until it was as high as the waist, about as big around as the floor of a skin shelter. The people had already built twelve mounds for the ancestors here. Kills emptied his last basket and watched Calls Hump smooth the earth. He was not required to go back for the feast. He would rest by sister until Sun was low. Cool air blew up from Flowing Life to dry his sweat. He absently fingered the claws of his brother Badger on a rawhide thong around his neck. The others walked back to the village in the valley. He was alone. Spirit-sister sang to him, laughing on the wind. She was to begin the next step of her journey, the road south where Old Woman would show her the way to join Mother Earth. Spirits of ancestors stayed near for a time. They liked to be treated well. Spirit food would be offered at this place for as long as spirits were remembered. A rich, musical "O-Ka-LEEEEE" sounded from near the mound. The sound startled him. Red-Wing had flown up from the cattails near the river to speak to spirit-sister, who bore the bird's name. In Red- Wing's song, spirit-sister beckoned. But now was not his time. Someday a relative would place his bones with the ancestors to be with Mother Earth. He felt no fear. All make the journey to Old Woman .... The fourth year of the project had been the most successful. The sampling scheme had worked well. Three lodges had been excavated and the activity areas pretty well doped out. The project was important because the early Plains Village Tradition along the Big Sioux was so poorly known. Apparently these people were in transition from hunting and gathering nomadism to the use of cultivated plants and fully sedentary life. And the project was documenting that transition. All that remained for this season was completing the testing of the last two of the fourteen mounds above the village on the river terrace. With that done, the season would be over and it would be back to the classroom to chant the liturgy of the Plains archae- ology to a new batch of graduate students. Nowdays students were enthralled by "the new archaeology." They were more interested in the twisted pathways of "middle-range" theories and eigenvectors than in the past and the people who made it. Although it was late afternoon, and cool air blew up from the Big Sioux, Ben sweated from the effort