Stories of Arrow Boy are part of the legacy of the renowned Native American prophet and spiritual leader known as Sweet Medicine, or Motseyoef. Born of the ancient Cheyenne (also known as the Tsistsista), Arrow Boy’s life as a mystical young child began after his mother carried him in utero for four years. From birth to adulthood, he lived the path of an extraordinary medicine man who brought the sacred arrow medicine bundle to his people. The epic stories of his spiritual enlightenment are the foundation of many belief systems found today in indigenous cultures of the Northern Plains.
As early as 500 BCE Arrow Boy’s people appeared on the Great Plains, but the foundation of the Tsistsista worldview is much older. This worldview is what shaped the development of Arrow Boy, attributing to him the shamanic powers that would direct many ceremonial rituals necessary to establish equilibrium in the broader universe of his people.
Arrow Boy is said to have begun talking and hunting at a very young age. Both his mother and father died while he was young, and he was raised by his grandmother, who understood his giftedness. As a child, Arrow Boy requested an audience with his elders where he demonstrated divine abilities. He instructed his helpers to tie him up with the sinew from his bow and then cover him with his buffalo robe. He had them pull at the sinew, which was tightly bound around his neck, until his head was severed from his body. His head was placed back under the buffalo robe and three more transformations occurred: he morphed into a pile of bones, a frail elderly man, and a young boy whole and alive. Each transfiguration occurred under the buffalo cloak. Arrow Boy revealed how he could move into death and back again into the living. This ritual was the precursor to the contemporary Yuwipi ceremony (Night Sing) of the Lakota people.
Still a child, Arrow Boy was compelled to leave his people when he challenged the chief, Young Wolf, who tried to appropriate a buffalo that Arrow Boy had killed. As he butchered and skinned the animal, Young Wolf tried pushing him away, but Arrow Boy remained relentless, returning to his task. At last, when the young chief threw him to the ground, Arrow Boy took a leg bone of the buffalo and hit him over the head. The chief lay dead and Arrow Boy was forced to flee. Most of the animals, including the buffalo, also disappeared, leaving the people in great despair. Arrow Boy wandered into the hills where he encountered old, wise ones living deep within a mountain who tutored him in the way of the sacred. It was there that he was first given his medicine bundle—the sacred arrows—along with ceremonies to take back to the Cheyenne people. Upon his return he taught the people sacred songs. He made meat for the starving people out of old buffalo bones. Soon the buffalo returned, entering even into the camp where they were taken down and converted into food, clothing, and tools.
The story of Arrow Boy, who later becomes the prophet Motseyoef, is not linear; for he is said to have lived multiple lifetimes and appears in different centuries of Tsistsista oral history. As a prophet he is said to have given the prescient warning of the arrival of the white men who would disrupt the balance in the world.
On one of Motseyoef’s journeys, he went to a sacred mountain with a younger man. There they encountered Nonoma the wolf spirit, his wife Esceheman, and their daughter Ehyophstah, the guiding spirit of the animals. The symbolism of the Massaum ceremony comes from this journey. It is described as a “healing ritual conducted in the sacred mountain,” constituting a reenactment of creation for the restoration of universal balance (Schlesier 1987, 78). The sacred mountain referenced in this account is Nowah’wus (also known as Bear Butte), the focal point for much of Arrow Boy’s initiation into mystical knowledge. It brought together many bands of people in a common spiritual observance that maintains harmony within all things of this earth and of the heavens.
Sheila Ann Rocha
See also Culture Heroes of the Native Americans; Folk Medicine; Shamans
Further Reading
Deloria, Vine, Jr. 2006. The World We Used to Live In. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz, eds. 1984. American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Books.
Powell, Peter J. 1998. Sweet Medicine: Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Schlesier, Karl H. 1987. The Wolves of Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies, and Prehistoric Origins. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.