Crow
Big Horn Montana
Age 79 years old.
“Bird Above” is significant to the Crow, as he was the one who reestablish “Peyote” to the crow religion ,originally ban in 1887 by the US government. That was just a few years before the culmination of the Ghost Dance epic ending at “Wounded Knee”
In the 20’s it started to re-emerge
The Indian Office, believing peyote to be addictive and harmful to ‘civilisation’, banned the plant’s sale in Montana in 1923. When it was found that Crows were driving to Wyoming to get the cactus, a ban on peyote was enacted there in 1929. However, due to the campaigning of Bird Above, who showed that peyote fostered virtue by encouraging monogamy, hard work and temperance, at a time when tests showed the plant not to be addictive, had the ban repealed. The peyote religion proved popular, with despairing missionaries commenting in the 1930s that most of their members would attend Christian sermons and yet practice peyote beliefs.[64] At the turn of the millennium it is believed that around one hundred peyote ceremonies are performed on the Crow reservation each year. Other Native-Christian religions are practiced among the Crow, including a Native form of Pentecostalism which was initially introduced on the reservation by Crow believers in the 1920s, but today has many adherents.
Welcome “Bird Above”.
