Stories of Transformation: Dallas Chief Eagle

Posted on September 13, 2024

There was this one little girl—there was a lot of violence in her home and alcoholism, and it built up in her and she started crying. And her primary caretaker said, “Don’t be crying around here.”

She went out into the trees and cried out there with no people around. As she was crying, she heard some little crickets making noise near her. And she thought that was amazing: she could cry, and they would sing.

From that day forward, when she cried, she would go to this special place to cry and the crickets would sing. One day, she felt that she needed those crickets at her house, and she made a little cricket mansion out of a matchbox, with walls and little rooms. The little girl went to her special place and found two crickets. She put them in that little box along with part of their nest and she took them home. She put the cricket house under her bed.

It was the little girl’s secret, because she thought if she told anyone at home, maybe they would try to get rid of her crickets. She didn’t have much trust in the people that she lived with. She kept them under her bed, and they would sing.

And one day she looked in there and she saw something moving, takuskanskan (something holy moving). She looked closely and there were baby crickets in the box, so she took them back outside to the special place. She must have spent a couple hours letting them go, being careful not to squash any babies.

The girl missed a lot of school because of the problems at home. On her way to school, she sometimes passed the home of an old woman who was a retired schoolteacher. The old woman saw her and invited her over. She wanted to get to know the little girl better.

The grandma invited her over now and then, and the little girl would stop by, and they would visit and spend time together.

The girl had told the grandma about some of her problems at home, but she’d never told anyone about the crickets. So one day she shared her secret about the crickets and, while she spoke, she saw that the grandma had tears flowing down her cheeks.

The grandma said, “Those crickets were there for you when the two-leggeds couldn’t be there for you.” She said, “What I want to do is to adopt you. Have a hunka (making of relatives) ceremony and adopt you as my daughter. And we’re going to give you a Lakota name and it’s going to be Cricket Woman. We’re going to have a big ceremony, and later I want you to live with me, too.”

“We’re going to make these arrangements. But in the meantime, let’s go on over to the school. They went to the school and had an IEP meeting and everybody got on board.

In her art classes, she could paint and draw crickets. In music class, she could get a recorder and record crickets and play them back. In the science class, she could study crickets. The school sent away for crickets for her, too—some rare white crickets. She had terrariums containing crickets that she could keep in her other classes.

Eventually she graduated and was able to live with the grandma. They had the hunka ceremony. They had beadwork and quillwork. The grandma had a jewelry box and gave it to the silversmith. He used all the stones in the box and mounted them on this beautiful ring, the most beautiful ring I ever saw.

Cricket Woman earned a doctorate degree in entomology. And she collected crickets; she even had an antique Jiminy Cricket. She had cricket puppets and records and posters and dolls and little gadgets and all kinds of stuff in her study.

As time went on, she learned how we have been killing crickets and insects indiscriminately—with poisons entering our water supply and so forth. She was really interested in protecting the crickets and other insects, but she needed another degree. So she went back to school, became a lawyer, and is now working for environmental justice.

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