Manataka American Indian Council
Today Is a Good Day to Die
As told by Lee Standing Bear Moore
I
cannot remember when it was I first heard the Indian phrase, “Today is a good
day to die.” The phrase was used in the context of a warrior’s desire to die an
honorable and brave death. For many decades I accepted this idea, but as age
and death-threatening ailments became commonplace, my idea of its meaning
changed drastically.
I was born at the Bell Mission near Los Angeles
and the product of a family forced to move west from our ancestral home in
Arkansas. In the 1940’s, many Indian and poor people of Oklahoma and Arkansas
were “encouraged” by the government to relocate to the west coast to fill
wartime jobs. The mass relocation was similar to the Dust Bowl days of the
1930’s when the dispossessed were drawn west from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New
Mexico and Arkansas. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of
Wrath:
"…families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and
hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two
hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless -
restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to
pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We
got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all
for land."
I learned the meaning of death as I grew up in gang-infested areas of Los Angeles County. There was little honor or bravery associated with the senseless deaths I witnessed as a youngster. The first time I experienced death was in 1956 as I sat in the emergency room of the Studebaker Hospital awaiting stitches from a bicycle accident. A boy from our school brought Jerry in with the hook of crow bar planted in his head. There was little doctors could do for him. As a 10-year old, the experience of seeing a schoolyard buddy bloodied from head to toe with gore was horrific. Jerry laid on a bench not three feet from where I sat and as I stared into his eyes blood streamed down his head across gang tattoos on his arms and dripped into a pool on the floor. He died holding my hand. As my formative school years past, shootings, stabbings, and bludgeoning deaths were nearly everyday occurrences. My heart and brain were anesthetized to death by the age of fifteen.
After I entered the U.S. Army at the age of nineteen, I became intimately acquainted with death. As a platoon sergeant during the Vietnam War, I knew death was always an inch away during the many firefights and major operation battles. As months passed in the steaming jungles, an awareness of death consumed every moment. Friends dropped like flies. A single breath often separated my consciousness from death. As a matter of self-preservation and sanity, I was forced to become a friend of death and even welcomed it on several occasions.
On May 13, 1968, a mountaintop signal site called Nui Ba Den where I was temporarily stationed was overran by two regiments of North Vietnamese Regulars. The nearly 100 defenders were slaughtered. If not killed outright, many were tortured and some taken prisoner.
After the short battle was over, I wandered alone on the mountain for several days searching for food and water and removing booby traps from the bodies of dead comrades. At one point, when NVA patrols came dangerously close to my position several times, I was ready to give up my life. I felt like there was no hope for rescue and the prospects of being tortured was consuming me. It was then that I stood against the horizon and roared at the top of my lungs, “Take me now! Shoot me now! Today is a good day to die!” My screams were heard on echoes across the 6,000-foot mountain but the enemy had no ears. Strangely, the enemy did not take my life but allowed me to live.
It was NOT a good day to die.
Obviously, I was among the survivors but the gruesome memories haunted me for years and the faces of death are often seen in my dreams making me a life-long causality of that unnecessary and brutal war.
As years past, I knew death many times. Family, friends and co-workers crossed life’s threshold due to illness, accidents and sometimes circumstances that were not always brave or honorable.
Regardless of my close experiences with death over the years, the meaning of the term “Today is a good day to die” eluded me. That is until just recently.
During the past four months, I had three close encounters with death because of a bad heart and blood ailments received during the war. My heart was shocked back into rhythm during the last hospital visit. I knew during these encounters that death would not take me. Over the years, the Creator of All Things visited me many times. One time as I stood in the fire circle on the sacred Manataka Mountain the wind swirled around my body like a small tornado and the night sky opened to a voice that gave many instructions. Other voices sang many songs. And finally the time of my death was spoken. I have not completed all the instructions and thus my crossing time has not arrived. Each day I am allowed to continue my path and quest is a gift.
I
do not think I have ever feared death. I steadfastly hold the ways of the
Beauty Path in my heart and thus fear of death is insignificant. The depth and
breadth of Indian philosophy and spiritual belief has always served me well in
times of crisis. Just as the water of life is not distressed by its many
changes, from liquid to solid to vapor in the eternal circle, I am not afraid of
my body changing into spirit. After all, the same water that appeared a the
time of Creation remains on earth today. The idea that my spirit will one day
join with those of my ancestors and other loved ones is an appealing thought.
My opinions and hard-won beliefs about the Beauty Way have become rock solid over the years. However, my idea of the meaning of the term, “today is a good day to die” has changed.
I now know that this term does not necessarily refer to an action such has bravery or define some abstract ideal of honor. In my mind, the term does not have anything to do with the designs of mankind, but instead acknowledges the will of the Creator in a good way.
“Today is a good day to die” means that we are ready in our mind, heart and spirit to become one with the Eternal Spirit of the Creator. It means we are prepared to enter the never-ending and timeless River of Spirit to float forever. The Creator may later require our energy and spirit in the form of another creation so we may become the fodder and substance of something entirely new, return as fragment of another being or some other transformation as the will of the Creator may dictate. Who can say otherwise?
In keeping with the nature of all creation, energy and spirit never die as they are simply reformed repeatedly in a perpetual sacred symphony conducted by our Great Grandfather in heaven.
This definition of the term, “Today is a good day to die” is yet another example of the tremendous spiritual growth we have experienced because of the gift of knowledge and practice of the Beauty Path of the Indian.
Today IS a good day to die.