38
“Hihani wasté. Good morning relatives,” a man’s voice cut through the canvas with the sun.
“Uncle Robert?” asked Jordan.
“The one and only. Hope you boys are ready to sweat today.”
Miles was ready for anything. The errands yesterday reminded his arms that he hadn’t done too much work since the dirthouse. The night by the fire recharged his spirit with passion for life. Still needed coffee though.
Uncle Robert was a character, as most literary costars tend to be, his sharp wit and dull delivery left you unsure of what his temper meant. He used to ride rodeo, the tri-state bareback champion for most of his twenties, then he fought wildfires on the west coast with a thirty pound chainsaw and twice that in gear, now his days were filled by checkers and chess with his grandkids, and holding ceremony for his people.
“We only need half that pile for the lodge,” he figured. “Might as well split it all up while we’re at it though. I’ll let you young bucks get started and I’ll join in when you’re almost through, or if Ma comes down here.”
“We gotcha old man, just let me know if I need to walk you to the bathroom or anything,” teased Jordan.
“A piece of frybread would be nice.”
“Yeah, that does sound good. I’ll tell you what, since you’re not doing anything, you mind running and grabbing us a few pieces?”
“I’ll go grab a switch is what I’ll grab.”
“Easy now, don’t get all worked up on my account, I’d like to see you catch me anyway. Why don’t you just tell Miles some stories from the good old days instead.”
“Boy, I’d have you caught and tied before you could say Billy Mills. But, to save Miles from having to watch his buddy humiliated like that, maybe I can remember a thing or two about growing up around here.”
His deliberate cadence left space for his words to sink in.
“It was a lot different back then, when I was a kid, it was a lot wilder, a lot more free. Of course, I still had a POW number. 3441562U.” He pulled up his sleeve to share his tattooed identification. “Got a social security number to pay taxes, and this number to remind me that I was a prisoner. It wasn’t safe to leave here anyway though, not that it is now, but back then you could kill an Indian on sight and nobody’d say nothing.
There wasn’t none of this meth shit floating around, but there was plenty of alcohol, I’ve seen a lot of relatives get sucked down that hole and never climb out. The white man loves his bottle, and loves to push it on anyone he’s trying to take advantage of, every one of our treaties were signed through an alcohol poisoned haze, but they broke all them anyway, so I guess it never really mattered. Sugar’s the other one, alcohol and sugar, they bring them into some new region that’s ripe for the picking, and they leave with whatever they want, only a trail of alcoholism and diabetes remain in the strung out community.
Our water was a lot cleaner then too, now the river’s got uranium in it, the aquifer’s full of fracking waste and almost run dry from all the farms, and this tap water’s got some kind of chemical soap taste to it. And the food too, we used to eat more from the land, not whatever all that stuff they got at the store now is. And I’ve been off the rez where they have real food, I know the difference, but we’re locked in a prison camp and lucky to get anything.
And all this trash, it’s too much. We used to live with no waste, not even a bone to pick up. Then America happened, and there was all these boxes and bags, but we could just throw all that in the fire, so it was only the tin cans left rolling around. Now it’s all this plastic and styrofoam, can’t burn that mess, I tried once, but you could smell just how horrible that stuff is, and not to mention the people who drive onto the rez just to toss their trash by the road.
And back in the day, the natives who hung around the fort got the spoils of war, as long as they started living like the white man, so that’s who they put in charge of the rest of us. And still today, the councils are corrupted by the wasicu. Even our police, they may be Indians, but they answer to the Department of Interior, and I was thirty before it was even legal for us to pray in our way.
I remember as a kid, sneaking out to the caves with my parents to put on secret sweat lodges. And we couldn’t Sun Dance, so at powwows we’d do a few Sun Dance rounds and nobody was the wiser. So to me, powwow celebrations are sacred, nowadays it’s a bunch of other stuff too, but they keep our culture alive with the little ones who are all caught up on their phones most of the time.
Our ceremonies are coming back though, every year I see more and more young people returning to our traditional ways. And the Lakota sweat lodge has spread around the world, adopted by the earliest victims of forced assimilation, those whose own language and prayer were beaten out of them over centuries of colonization. ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ That was America’s justification to strip away everything that made us who we were, and before that it had been, ‘The only good Indian, is a dead Indian.’
It was safer for half-breeds to pretend they weren’t Indian, to be ashamed of their native roots and never pass them down to their kids, which fell right in line with the American policy of ‘Killing Indians on paper,’ which would facilitate the dismantlement of our sovereign nations, as full-blooded enrollment bred itself out of existence. The US government set it up so that a tribe was only recognized through its membership based on the blood quantum that they determined, so if they just let us fizzle out into their population, then soon enough we’d no longer be a threat.
But we knew that even a single drop of indigenous blood connected our children to our ancestors, and that blood has spread all around Turtle Island, and now it’s nudging the seventh generation awake as the time for the big change draws near. There’s even a prophecy about it, about all the white kids growing out their hair and running off to join us, leaving their parents confused as a new way of life is ushered into existence.
You got any native blood in you, Miles?”
“Yeah actually, a little bit, I’ve got a great great grandparent on either side that was Cherokee. Never heard anything about it really, it’s only recently been something I even thought about, to tell you the truth.”
“Sounds about right. I’ve heard in the East that just about everyone claims a drop of Cherokee. And considering the history of first contact and five hundred years of acculturation, it makes sense, and so does the whitewashing of anything to do with a people destined for extinction. But it’s still alive inside you, and it’s brought you here to a land where your people are still connected to the Earth. And long ago the Tetuwan people, or what nowadays they just call Lakota, we actually spread out all the way to the east, so who knows, maybe we are related.”
“We’re all related,” corrected Miles.
“Aho, I guess we might make an Indian out of you yet Miles, that is if you don’t melt in the lodge first.”
Once the wood was split, Jordan led the way as they built the fire. Two bigger pieces ran east to west, channeling the energy from the fire to the lodge. Then seven pieces sat atop the two, creating a platform to hold thirteen big lava rocks, leaving enough space underneath to burn the fire from both ends. Robert prayed with the stones as they went on, turning to the four directions, to the sky, and to the Earth.
“These are our relatives too, you know? Our grandfathers. They’ve been on this Earth a lot longer than any of us, even me, and they hold an energy inside that can reconnect us to the womb of Unci Maka. This Sacred Fire will charge them up, the Peta Wakan, and then the water will release that energy as it carries our united prayers in every direction. I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s going to be hot, really hot, you might even think you’re dying at some point, but that’s the moment that your heart’s being opened with a new connection as your ego melts out of its way.
That world you’re from is all about the ego, and its self-preservation of me and my, it keeps everyone locked in a cycle of individual desires amid a world of dwindling scarcity. But once you shed that illusion of being something separate from the rest of the world, you become free to once again experience a life of ultimate abundance. That’s how it’s meant to be, and it makes it that much easier to give yourself to the world, which only makes the abundance of life spread further, as you learn to share your heart as you walk in a good way.
The whole planet’s been eaten up with private property and personal interests, and you can see where that’s gotten us, but as we all start to give the Earth back to herself, we’ll find that we’re the ones who benefit the most from our own selflessness. And if we don’t manage to figure it out soon, she’s going to take it all back on her own anyway, and only those of us who hold our connection with her sacred will stand a chance of surviving the changes she has planned.
Unci Maka is alive. And she birthed us for a reason. Just how your sentient body creates whatever cells you need at any given time. She’s an incubator for her own evolution, and the transition is not a disintegration into chaos, it is a new beginning of something more beautiful than before. She’s our nurturing cocoon as we prepare to take flight into a new dimension. And the caterpillar doesn’t really know what’s going on as its cells melt into turmoil, it would be easy to assume that their entire world was coming to an end, but as if by the design of a scale unknowable by the goop, the goop begins to come together to emerge with a new way of life unimaginable to the caterpillar of limited dimension.
All this bad stuff happening around us seems catastrophic from a person’s eye view, from a single cell of an astronomically larger being, but we are not a single celled organism. We are but a piece of a design far grander than we will ever understand, and perhaps all this destruction is simply a catalyst for change, as those who give themselves to tomorrow wake up in a creation beyond their wildest dreams, while the fractured shell of our toxic chrysalis gently fades into the mythologies of our children’s ancestors.”
Uncle Robert had been right about at least one thing, the lodge was hot. The rocks were glowing red as Jordan passed them in with a pitchfork, another placed them in the center with a pair of deer antlers, Unci sprinkled cedar needles onto each one as the purifying aroma filled the dome, and that was all before the door was shut to concentrate steam and darkness in equal proportion. A few other people had shown up to the four rounds of song and prayer, Miles was the only one with his face in the dirt by the end. He begged for his life as he felt a door open, his prayers poured out from a place in his heart he didn’t know existed.
His whole body tingled as he lay by the fire recovering from his near-life experience, his mind was still, but something else inside stirred the embers of unknowable belief. He understood that he’d not been ready for this moment until he was, it had taken an open-hearted path of hard work and sacrifice to prepare him for the transformation ahead, and he had an unshakable feeling that this was just the beginning of a never ending journey into himself.
He slept like a newborn fresh from the womb of incinerated hesitation, his dreams took him to a place outside the boundaries of cerebral make believe, he woke with a new sense of self and a spark of connection to the greatest mysteries of the universe.
“You ready to go save the world, champ?” coaxed Jordan.
“Yep. Whadja have in mind?”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Figured we’d start with weatherproofing Unci’s glass ceiling.”
“Now that sounds like a good idea. What are we going to do for materials?”
“This is the rez, man. And the phrase Indian rigging didn’t come from nowhere. We’ll find whatever we need, just gotta be ready to improvise a bit.”
Jordan wasn’t kidding, they found most of their supplies at the same dumpster in town. Someone must have been building a six foot wall somewhere, because there was a stack of two foot drywall scraps that looked like plenty to raise the roof, a bunch of busted up ceiling tiles for harvesting insulation, and an old pool liner that could be cut into strips to seal the snow vents. The only thing they lacked was nails, but Robert invited them to swing by and dig through his toolshed, as long as Miles could beat him in a game of chess.
“I love playing with the takojas,” he confided. “But it’s refreshing to play with someone who at least understands how the pieces move. Of course, it’s about like any other toy used to normalize civilization’s grip on reality, and this one is specifically a war game of competing races, royalty surrounded by the church as they hide behind the sacrifice of the commoners, but at least they got one thing right, the queen is far more powerful than any king has ever been.
Our people used to live in a matriarchal society, which isn’t to say that they walked all over us the way the man’s world does to them, it meant we were equal, equal but different, and those differences are what made our society a whole. Women lead through their intuition and compassion for life, they’re more capable of seeing the bigger picture as they listen to the little people, while men tend to micromanage the rational explanations of territorial war. Women are physiologically connected to the water, and us to the fire, both vital elements of survival, but they must be kept in balance, or else you end up with an overheated planet and oceans of sickness.
Our women are sacred, and should be treated that way. We should look up to them for their more evolved emotional processing, it’s what gives them the capacity to do what feels right, even if it doesn’t make sense on paper.
But none of that works for the patriarchal takeover of the natural world, no colonizing general would stand a chance toe-to-toe with Ma. So when they wrote the rules in a language we didn’t understand, they made sure to put the now alcoholic men in charge. It took three quarters of the enrolled men to vote on whatever bum deal the government offered us, but it doesn’t really matter who they tell us to be, ain’t nobody gonna tell me that Jordan’s unci isn’t calling the shots, and she answers to the greatest unci of them all anyway.
Checkmate.”
“Good one.”
Miles may have lost the match, but he gained more through every conversation with Uncle Robert than words alone can convey, plus he still let them dig some nails out of the shed.
“Alright then, you boys have fun over there, maybe I’ll come supervise later, and just let me know when you’re ready to sweat again.”
Miles was still picking up the pieces from yesterday, he might need a little time to sort through them all, though he imagined that might be what the ceremony was all about. He’d return to the inipi, that was a given, but he could also still feel the lodge working through him as he felt himself walking in prayer. A prayer he believed in, not the awkward recital of uncertainty, he could feel the intentions of his heart building with every step. It had already given his life new meaning, which was saying a lot considering the past months of new meanings, but this was something else entirely. Something from deep inside, something that was always there waiting to be unlocked, and now he held the keys to navigating the great unknown. It felt fucking amazing.
Fixing Unci’s ceiling felt pretty good too.