The story of the peace pipe |
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Two young men were out strolling one night talking
of love affairs. They passed around a hill and came to a
little ravine
or coulee. Suddenly they saw coming up from the ravine a
beautiful
woman. She was painted and her dress was of the very finest
material.
"What a beautiful girl!" said one of the young men. "Already I
love
her. I will steal her and make her my wife."
"No," said the other. "Don't harm her. She may be holy."
The young woman approached and held out a pipe which she first
offered
to the sky, then to the earth and then advanced, holding it
out in her
extended hands.
"I know what you young men have been saying; one of you is
good; the
other is wicked," she said.
She laid down the pipe on the ground and at once became a
buffalo cow.
The cow pawed the ground, stuck her tail straight out behind
her and
then lifted the pipe from the ground again in her hoofs;
immediately
she became a young woman again.
"I am come to give you this gift," she said. "It is the peace
pipe.
Hereafter all treaties and ceremonies shall be performed after
smoking
it. It shall bring peaceful thoughts into your minds. You
shall offer
it to the Great Mystery and to mother earth."
The two young men ran to the village and told what they had
seen and
heard. All the village came out where the young woman was.
She repeated to them what she had already told the young men
and
added:
"When you set free the ghost (the spirit of deceased persons)
you must
have a white buffalo cow skin."
She gave the pipe to the medicine men of the village, turned
again to
a buffalo cow and fled away to the land of buffaloes.
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Myth
of the Sioux - free of traditional myth of the native American

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