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I speak to you now of Respect. But keep in mind that Honor and Respect are simply two sides of the same coin. Honor looks inward, while Respect looks outward. In the time in which this happened it was after the coming of the horses to the Tribes, but quite a bit before the Ogallala and the Lakota and the Tsitsistas and the Siksika and all the others were chased off of the great prairie. The horses, in the language of the Tsitsistas, were called the “New Way” because it brought a mobility they had never had before, and soon horses had become the greatest of their treasures. During this time there were many buffalos, and the hunters brought home much meat so that the cooking pot of even the poorest of the hunters was always full. And so it was this way when the many families of the Tsitsistas came together for their summer gathering. A young man with two summers behind him felt that he should do something great so that he could make a name for himself and perhaps find the eyes of a certain young maiden looking favorably at him. He knew that the Siksika were camped perhaps three days walk north of them, and they had many fine horses. It must be remembered that in those days there were many battles and raids between tribes, and it was considered proper that the tribes would steal supplies and horses, especially horses, from those who could be their enemies within the year. He found the camp and watched beneath his blanket that matched the prairie grass as the fires inside their tipis, fueled by both buffalo dung and wood from the nearby forest, burned down to a dull glow. He had not watched all this time for nothing. Before the sun set he had watched as a young man took five horses and tied them to a stake in the middle of the camp in front of a larger tipi. They were good, strong horses, and tying them in front of the door of the tipi meant only one thing: this was an offer to the father of a young girl that he would look favorably on a union of his daughter and the young man who left them tied there. The young man stood up and wrapped his sodden blanket around himself and walked around the hill and into the woods. He picked up several pieces of wood and carried them toward the camp as if he were a member of the tribe sent to gather wood for the fires. He stepped into the camp and took his wood and placed it on a pile of other wood, then looked around. He saw nobody watching him and quickly walked over and grabbed the horses from their stake and made off with them toward the edge of camp he had come in by. He had not taken more than twenty paces when a flap to one of the tipis was thrown open almost in his face, but it was an old woman coming out in the rain to get more wood. She grabbed a few pieces and turned to go back in side, but her feet slipped in the rain soaked mud and she dropped the sticks and would have fallen had the young man not dropped his grip on the horse’s ropes and caught her. When she was steady on her feet again he picked up the wood she had dropped for her and even held the flap of buffalo hide back for her to go back into her tipi. The young man turned to reach for the horse’s ropes again and found two Siksikas with their spears aimed at his heart. They took his weapons from him, axe and spear, and took his blanket away as well. But they did not kill him as they had the right to do. Instead they walked him to the horse pasture and took out a horse that was not remarkable in any way. They put him on the horse and pointed him south and told him to leave. He turned to them and asked in trade tongue made both of signs and common words. “Why?” The older of the two said in the language of the Tsitsistas “Respect.” The boy returned home before evening the next day. The horse had made the trip home much shorter. And his family and others made much of the fact he had left with no horses and came back with one, and didn’t even have his weapons. At the gathering fire that night he told his story and of how he had come to have a horse but no weapons. And there was talk of respect in more than one camp that night, and the Tsitsista children and the Siksika children both went to sleep that night having learned that there is more than one kind of respect in the world. |
 
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