Distinctly Montana Magazine

56 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 6 had meant the phrase in the standard prosaic, if negative, Anglo-American sense of the phrase? After all, we throw away trash when it is mere refuse. When we say we have squandered an opportunity, we call it throwing it away. It must have sounded to Campbell as if White Bull were describing a wasted life. 2 There is perhaps one exception in English litera- ture, and it nearly catches the Plains Indian sense. It comes from William Shakespeare himself. In Macbeth, he writes that the Thane of Cawdor "died as one that had been studied in his death, to throw away the dearest thing he owed as 'twere a careless trifle," though for the traitorous Thane, the death redeems rather than consecrates. Is it possible that what stuck in White Bull's mind wasn't an "appalling" sense of having wit- nessed an "apparent senseless act" or a "shock- ing incident," but something closer to profound admiration at having witnessed not just a brave act, but a sacred one? In this sense, "throwing your life away" describes something which, to the participants and observers, must have been sacrosanct. If so, Lame White Man died in his state of un- dress and unadornment because he had no need of anything but his blanket and moccasins, his gun, and his loose hair. He may not have made the vow at the same time as the Suicide Boys, or had the vow observed by the members of his tribe as they paraded him through the village, but nevertheless, Lame White Man had decided, in the words of the Sioux battle cry, that it was a good day to die. This summer, thousands of people from all over the world will see, without quite understanding, the spot where Noisy Walking and his young compatriots joined with a war chief of the Chey- enne in the holy act of throwing their lives away one afternoon, 150 years ago. 2 For that matter, the name of the Suicide Boys most likely represents another cross-cultural failure of translation. The West almost never calls spiritually-tinged self-sacrifice "suicide." National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, "Dead cavalry horses," Folder 8 (2367A_08569700)

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