Black Elk Feather Quotations

I was painted red all over with black lightning on my limbs. I wore a black mask, and across my forehead a single eagle feather hung.

Then she gave something to the chief, and it was a pipe with a bison calf carved on one side to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, and with twelve eagle feathers hanging from the stem to mean the sky and the twelve moons, and these were tied with a grass that never breaks,