River presented Argus with a pouch of tobacco and asked for help with his pipe. River was given a piece of pipestone by Dakota elder Chuck Derby, just before Chuck's death a couple of years ago. Chuck had asked River to hang onto it until he was ready to "make something good out of it."
Of course, Argus has said that he wants to be finished making pipes after mine, but he was very happy to help River get started. So Argus took river into his workshop and showed him how to file the pipestone, and then helped River with the hardest part: drilling the holes. River's stone is very small so Argus can't hand-drill the way he does with a very traditional pipe, so he used his drill press to create the holes and returned the stone to River. He also gave River an ash-wood blank stem to carve, and said that when River is ready to carve the "tang" (the part of the stem that enters the stone bowl) he'll help. So yeah, River is trying to start carving a small pipe of his own. I have no idea how that'll turn out...pipe-carving is painstaking, and hard enough for an adult, let alone an 11-year-old with "ADHOoh, something shiny over there!" But I was really happy that River came up with this on his own. We just got home from visiting Argus, and he presented me with the finished pipe. It's magnificent. Argus said that this pipe was unique among all the many he has made because it took a lot of energy from him--he felt strangely drained during the process, and had to take days off to recover before going back to work. This had only happened to him on one other pipe (the one he made before this one). Argus said that he thinks it's because mine and the previous one were the only two "healing pipes" he's ever made, and he was sensitive to the burden of the work it would be used for. He told me that learning how it would be used made this mean a lot to him. I think he's carried some of this work in his heart while he worked on this with me.
Argus also told me that after finishing this pipe, he'd prefer to not make another pipe. He feels finished after years and dozens. But he also hedged a bit on that; he said he'd decline to ever make a pipe for anyone else after this, unless it was a healing pipe from now on. He said that this pipe meant so much to him, and the energy of it was so strong, that he feels he can't return to making any other kind again. I think it touched him to be entrusted with something that is devoted to healing trauma wounds. He asked me to explain the significance of my quillwork design, so I did. He was very intrigued (and impressed) and said that he felt very, very good about turning this pipe over to me. He asked me whether any "government agency" would ever have control over my work with Survivors, and I said no...I told him the story of my bitter parting of ways with the demagogues of my former profession, and that never again would any government authority have that opportunity. I said that the pipe would be treated like a living thing, a servant to wounded people, and nothing else would ever be allowed to impede that. He said, "That's very cool" and grinned. He also said that he tends to worry about making pipes for people, because sometimes people want them designed to be fancy, attention-getting, and sensational, "but after our talk, and knowing what this will be used for, I don't worry about that at all." I gave him a copy of "Letters To Survivors" so that he could see for himself the kind of work I do (besides art). I also said that this work has stopped being a vocation and become more personal...some days, I get frustrated and upset and I swear I'm just going to quit and leave it all behind and go have a "normal" life. And then the next day I get right back to it. Argus Dowdy, the best living prayer-pipe maker, is passing his skills down to me. For a few weeks now, I've traveled to his home every weekend in Skiatook, Oklahoma, about 3 hours away. He's helping me learn the very old way of carving pipestone, including using a hand drill to bore the hole, and designing the entire thing with hand files (no mechanical tools). He's also showing me how to inlay the stone with silver, as was done in the 1800s (except then they used bullet lead because it was more available). We're going to start carving the stem out of ash this week, and bore the hole with a rod of red-hot metal, inch by painstaking inch. The stem will be decorated with porcupine quill work, and will have slots carved into it that will be used to for tying on Sun Dance ribbons.
Argus makes pipe sculptures for art shows that are purely commercial, and they sell for thousands of dollars. A traditional prayer pipe, however, must never be bought and sold because it is a living thing, and he is going to make mine with me and give it to me. During the entire process, he's sharing a lot of stories and teachings and humor, plus he's welcomed my kids into his home to watch and learn, too. The design of the pipe we're making is one I came up with, and every tiny detail has meaning. Some of the designs might only be recognized by very traditional Ojibways. Argus wants me to use this pipe for healing prayers for people who have been harmed in some way (imagine that!), and has asked me to design it purely as a healing/peacemaking tool. In the Indian way, any person who gives you tobacco and asks for prayer MUST have their request accepted--it is forbidden to deny the request of any person who asks to be prayed with in this way. Working with Argus is an amazing experience, because he is one of the true living legends of ancient pipe lore. In fact, he's the founder of the Pipekeepers group of Indians from many tribes who are working together to protect the sacred pipestone and pipes from misuse by preserving endangered traditions. I attended the sweatlodge purification ceremony again last night, and it was different in a good way. For one thing, James has decided to move the site to a VERY hidden location deep in the forest, and make it more of a special invitation event. He was so excited to call me and eagerly plead with me to come see it! He gave me directions in the way only an Indian can, since there are no real roads out here--just an old weed path. Obviously, I didn't drive the Solara convertible!
So my son and I rumbled over logs and weeds and holes in our van, deeper and deeper into the forest until we found the small clearing in a grove of trees deep in the heart of undeveloped tribal land, facing east. This lodge is smaller than the others, which also meant it takes far fewer rocks to heat. I met James' sons for the first time, and found out that James and i have similar approaches to child naming. My sons' names are Cheyenne River and Cedar Ojibway, and James' sons are named River Sage, Rocky Boy, and Sundance. My son had more fun playing with his new friends at the lodge than anything else (partly because we forgot the Ritalin). Funny moment: as my friend Billy (who helps "work the rocks" for the ceremony) drove up into the camp, we suddenly smelled the thick odor of skunk. We started joking, "Man, it smells like he hit something in his car--and dragged it with him!" and "Naw, that's just Billy. That's how he always smells." As it turns out, a skunk had been sitting in the trail through the woods as he drove up. Instead of dodging out of the way, the skunk ran ahead of him down the trail in the same direction as Billy, trying to out-pace Billy's pickup, spraying the truck all the way. Stupid skunk. As I progress in my learning of Cheyenne songs, I appreciate the ceremony more each week. I had much to bring to the Grandfathers this week. Being human, we each bring our fallibility to our relationships with others, and sometimes we have blind spots to ourselves that need to be acknowledged when we discover them, and thus corrected. The first step in this, I think, is humble repentance, which in my life means prayer--not because I'm some "great guy," but because all too often I'm not. So many times I have looked at counseling patients - usually women who have lived through atrocities - in their deepest pits, darkest moments, emptiest of times. They shudder with their shame, faces drenched with tears and humiliation and worthlessness, arms cut and bodies sore, vacantly gazing down. And in that moment I see no shame or failure, I see human beings with astounding combinations of potential and shortfalls. Sooner or later, they will also see the same propensity to fail, err, or misstep in me as well, and I can just hope we'll each remember mercy when the tables are turned. But most of all, I hope that each of us can see ourselves this way, and thus forgive ourselves and notcarry dreadful burdens of undeserved shame and self-blame. This includes me as well, of course, and this was what I brought to the Grandfathers last night. My brother-friend, Tony, has moved off the Rez (Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota) where he had worked for years. He was the tribe's cultural representative for things like accepting returned remains from museums, interpreting old bead work symbols for the Smithsonian, doing relic repair, and teaching language classes. Tony also helped preserve cultural sites while the tribe cleared the live ammunition and bombs that the Army had scattered when they used the tribal land for target practice back in the 40's and 50's. He had spent his time there as a minister and traditional leader, working with youth in gangs and doing interventions in suicide and domestic violence crises. Tony is also a fluent speaker of Lakota.
So I brought one of my boys with me tonight, and we had a three-hour dinner to catch up. Tony told me that he misses going to sweats, and we talked about the possibility of me building him a lodge on his property if my family opts to move back home sometime soon. Tony and my son had lots of great conversations, and my son dazzled him with all his knowledge about everything from raptors to ways that different tribes do ceremonies. Tony asked me for advice on how to intervene with families who are going through things like alcoholism and domestic violence, and urged me to consider relocating back up to the Rez to work with people there--they have no counselors or administrators who can even begin a program for trauma. In particular, he said that sexual violence is rampant but the people will not talk about it, and he wishes there was a service program for victims among the Indian people back home. I'm not really considering it because the Rez isn't the place my family wants to go and live. It's rough, sad, dangerous, and isolated. But we are considering many options about where we will live and what we will do in the future. Tony also became a Sun Dancer before he left the Rez, and he gave his Sun Dance ribbons to me as a gift. They are for me to use during ceremonies like sweatlodge or pipe prayer, and are a great honor to receive. I told him that my current struggle is to accept mistakes of mine, release anger in a healthy way, and to remind myself of my own "feet of clay" as I try to turn my life into a form of service. We don't always do things correctly, I know, but we have to try. I told him I had been feeling miserable lately because of mistakes I made in efforts to care for people. Tony told me that efforts to help others never deserves apology or regret. He said that so few people ever bother to spend even a minute of their lives trying to uplift and support and love (yes, I said it!) the bruised and broken-hearted, just scurying on their way and ignoring each other's pain, that we have to break the cycle and make heartfelt efforts without giving up. Commercialization of sweat-lodge ceremony appalls Native Americans by Glen Creno - Oct. 22, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic The deaths of three people after a sweat-lodge ceremony near Sedona are bringing new attention to complaints that sacred Native American ceremonies are being commercialized and demeaned by the spiritual-growth movement. As details emerge of what happened in the sweat lodge, Native Americans are criticizing everything from the number of people who were in the tentlike structure to the fact that people paid to be there. "If you ask just about any Native American out there, they will be appalled by this," said Freddie Johnson, language and culture specialist at the Phoenix Indian Center. "It's disturbing to hear that there were three deaths from this so-called sweat lodge." About 60 people were crowded into a makeshift sweat lodge in the incident earlier this month, authorities said, as part of a spiritual retreat led by self-improvement guru James Arthur Ray. Participants paid $9,000 or more for the series of exercises and seminars. Johnson said no more than a dozen people, and probably many fewer, should be in a single sweat-lodge ceremony because the experience is supposed to encourage personal interaction. He said the notion of charging for the experience would be similar to charging admission to a church. He said a donation of something like tobacco would be appropriate if made afterward.The sweat lodge traditionally is a purification rite, in which hot stones inside a tent create heat and steam. It is intended to purify the body through sweating, as well as induce a spiritual experience. The tradition is thousands of years old, with the earliest sweat lodges used by small groups of native people before embarking on a hunt or going to war, said Vernon Foster, an Arizona representative of the American Indian Movement. "It was a very private ceremony that took place, and usually it was one of our monks, and maybe four or five of the warriors," he said. "Going into the lodge allowed us not only to be intuitive thinkers but to make contact with the intuitive world, to communicate with unseen things." Lodges are typically constructed with willow saplings and use lava stones heated in a fire. The ceremony might be conducted by several leaders, with the largest structures providing room for 12 to 15 people, Foster said. The traditional sweat lodge is supposed to be round and emulate "Mother Earth," Foster said. "It's not supposed to look like a stadium," he added, in a reference to the size of structure used in the fatal event. About 20 people were taken to area hospitals after Ray's Oct. 8 event. Paramedics sent to the Angel Valley Retreat Center found people sprawled on the ground. Investigators have not yet said what caused them to collapse. The people in the sweat lodge had fasted for more than a day before the event. On the day of the event, they had breakfast and were told to drink lots of water before going into the dark, low, 415-square-foot enclosure in midafternoon, where they spent more than two hours. Ray's group leased the rustic resort between Sedona and Cornville. Ray's spokesman declined to comment on the criticism by Native Americans. Investigators have said that a local group was hired to erect the sweat lodge, which was covered with blankets and tarps. [Hired?! You don't out-source this; we build our own sweat lodges. If we intend to use it, WE build it. Building it is part of the ceremony!] The sweat lodge was constructed in 2008, according to Amayra Hamilton, co-owner of Angel Valley. "This structure has been used on several other occasions since it was erected, without ever having caused any problem or even coming close to being problematic," Hamilton said in an e-mailed statement. The incident near Sedona unfairly calls legitimate sweat-lodge ceremonies into question, said Rick Black Elk, head of the eastern Texas chapter of the American Indian Movement. He agreed with Johnson that probably fewer than 10 people should be in the ceremony at once. Also, the traditional ceremony calls for breaks outside the lodge, where participants can cool off and drink water, Johnson said. Black Elk said people who feel ill are encouraged to lie down and get fresh air. "That's BS that you have to sit in there for two hours and take it," he said. Foster said ceremonies were typically designed to last 60 to 90 minutes. "It's not something that was prolonged," he said. "You go in and you sang your songs and you said your words and you finished up. You didn't add to that. Sometimes at our ceremonies, we go in for what we call a wipe down. We go in and sweat and sing a song and you're finished." Black Elk said Native Americans have become distressed by people who pretend to be shamans, or medicine men. "They wear a little turquoise and call themselves Indians," he said. "They're wannabes." Sedona's economy is tourism-based, and it has a significant component of New Age spiritualism, built in part on beliefs by some that its stunning rock formations contain special geomagnetic power. The town has numerous self-proclaimed "healers" and people who offer, for a price, their own methods for spiritual achievement. We went to the sweat lodge ceremony last night, out at the tribe's ceremonial grounds on the prairie. The sun had begun to go down, but the sky was grey with thick, swirling clouds spanning the entire horizon. As we cut the wood and built the fire, lightning began to flash across the edges of the sky in bold, bright bolts. The rain began to pelt us with fat, cold drops--not a downpour, just a refreshment. So there we were, on the prairie surrounded by lightning, cooled by raindrops, and smelling the aroma of burning cedar wood. There were only five of us total for the ceremony last night, so we just sat in the soft grasses and talked and talked.
As it got darker, the lighting became more intense and vivid. It began to shoot horizontally, igniting the thick black clouds. This wasn't a dangerous kind of storm; the lightning was in the far horizon and nothing became severe. Just amazing. Rain continued to drizzle. It wasn't that kind of miserable, muddy, gloomy rain; it was that refreshing, sweet-smelling, cool rain that only spatters you but doesn't soak you. We went all four rounds, and the leader made it hot, as usual. There was a lot of stuff we needed to "work on" in the ceremony, and I talked to the leader about it as we rested in the grass. The anger is easier to manage for me. As hard as it was, I knew I needed to pray for someone who has been very hurt, and hurtful, in our lives recently. I came to understand that hurt people hurt people. It was a difficult sweat, not just because of the stinging heat but because of these personal difficulties. All I can do is pray about it and be the man I know I can be, and hope that's enough. No, it IS enough. I'm a good man--that IS enough. I watched the amazing lightning all the way home, 30 miles through the Oklahoma country. |
Culture and Traditionalism
Photos and information about traditional culture and art Categories
All
Archives
September 2019
|