One Native Life

by Richard Wagamese

  A sweat lodge, in its simplest sense, is a sacred edifice. It’s shaped like a womb, and when you strip yourself down and crawl into it on your hands and knees, you return yourself to the innocence in which you were born. You return yourself to genuine humility. The darkness you sit in is a symbol of your unknowing, and the rocks glowing in the pit represent eternal, elemental truth.

  It’s not a ceremony to be taken lightly. It’s not a sauna. It’s not some charming throwback. Instead, it’s a gateway to the truths within you and a path to the spiritual truths that govern the universe. It’s a place of prayer, of sacrifice, of enduring, of healing and if you’re fortunate, of insight.

  An elder I had worked with previously arrived late one evening. He asked if I would be his helper, and I agreed. When the sun came up we began to build his lodge. He was patient and generous, taking his time in teaching me the traditional protocols of building a sweat lodge. I was deeply honoured. While we worked, he told me stories and talked about how the ceremony had evolved for the northern Ojibway.

  When we were finished he asked me to be his firekeeper.

  In the traditional way, acting as a firekeeper is an honoured role. You build the fire that heats the rocks used in the ceremony. Your prayers around that fire are the first prayers in the process. You prepare the ritual. You take care of everything so that the teacher can focus, and when the time comes you watch over the participants. You stand guard outside that lodge while the ceremony runs, attentive, ready to serve, and you pray along with the petitioners in the lodge.

  Ernie liked a hot ceremony. His lodges asked the utmost of participants, and the heat in them was tremendous. Quite often people could not endure it and surrendered long before the usual four rounds of prayer and song and talk.

  They would crawl out of the lodge when I opened the door, weak, spent and vulnerable. My job was to tend to them.

  They were German, Finnish, English, French, Ojibway, Cree, Metis and Algonquin. But stretched out on the ground, struggling for breath, crying, ashamed, perhaps, they were just people, human beings in need of care. I cradled heads and offered water. I applied cool cloths. I spoke softly and encouragingly. I helped people stand and walked them to shade.

  I did that for four days, and at the end, when there was just Ernie and me, praying and singing in the lodge, I offered thanks for that incredible privilege.

  Up until then I had been adamant that native things stay native things. I had fought so hard to reclaim the displaced parts of myself that I believed no one else had a right to the things that define and sustain us. Our spirituality was our spirituality. Being a firekeeper taught me different.

  We are all travellers searching for the comfort of a fire in the night. We are all in need of a place of prayer, of solace, of unity. Our fire burns bright enough for everyone.

  Ceremony

  . . .

  THERE IS a medicine bowl in our living room. Tobacco, sage, sweetgrass and cedar are mixed together in that bowl for prayer and blessings. With the touch of a flame, smoke climbs and billows around us and, when I close my eyes to pass it over my body, time folds in upon itself, transports me to a time beyond time. Some days I can’t remember how I lived without it, this easy ceremony.

  I went to a Salvation Army church when I was a small kid. Sunday school seemed to fit me, and I was eager to return every week. The stories were captivating, and I loved to sing. We learned all the big-beat hymns like “Jesus Loves Me,” “This Little Light of Mine” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Something in the music called to me, and I responded.

  When I was adopted, I was peeled away from that influence. I learned Presbyterian hymns after that, staid and proper and stern. I felt lonely for the lilt of the Army tunes. The Presbyterian canon meant strict regimentation in study, work and daily life. There was no room for choral glee.

  As a teenager living on the streets, I attended an evangelical church for a short time. A program called Teen Challenge took me in and introduced me to their doctrine, but their hand-clapping jubilation came along with talking in tongues and a severe discipleship. I lasted a few weeks, then ran back to my concrete world.

  A friend introduced me to the Jesus Freaks in the early 1970s. I liked their long hair and the remnants of the flower power mentality, but something in all the post-psychedelia made me sad. Scientology was big in the early ’70s, too. Then came the teachings of Ram Dass and Krishnamurti and the poetry of Khalil Gibran. After that was the huge swell of life-affirming therapies. I practised Transactional Analysis, tried Gestalt therapy, read Born to Win and books by B.F Skinner, Carl Rogers, Rollo May and Leo Buscaglia. I read everything from I’m OK, You’re OK to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Everywhere I went someone was into something, and I veered sharply towards anything that promised an answer. Nothing seemed capable of filling me, though, giving me detail. I learned about a lot of intriguing processes, but I couldn’t find the ease and comfort that I craved.

  Then along came Albert Lightning. He was a Cree traditional teacher and elder who had been a political leader at one time. When I met him, he was leading a workshop at the Indian Ecumenical Conference in Morley, Alberta. I talked to him for a long time one night. I told him about my search, about the hollowness in my chest and in my life.

  He taught me about ceremony that night. He took some tobacco, sweetgrass, sage and cedar, told me about their properties and how they were meant to be used. He told me about the principles they represented and about how living by those principles was the true Indian way. Through the ceremony of the medicine bowl, he taught me how to pray in gratitude, to ask for nothing, to be thankful instead for all that was present in my life right then and there. Then he told me to take the spirit of that small ceremony out into the world with me.

  Anyone can be spiritual in a quiet room, but out in the world is where the challenge presents itself. If you can learn to take the humility, gratitude and silence you find in the medicine bowl ceremony into the world, you can live a principled life. When you live a principled life you learn to live spiritually. When you learn to live spiritually you find harmony with people. Then life itself becomes a ceremony. That, in the end, is what it’s all about, this Indian way, this journey.

  When we smudge ourselves on these mountain mornings, my woman and I, we join ourselves to the great wheel of energy that exists all around us. And I am filled.

  The Sharing Circle

  . . .

  THERE’S A CIRCLE of stones in our front yard. The dog and I gathered them one day in the old pickup and brought them here from an area near a remote lake higher up in the mountains. The stones are of various types and textures, and they form the rim of a garden I planted for my woman’s pleasure.

  Within the garden are plants, flowers and grasses suited to the arid heat. As summer edges into fall, they’re tall and thick and colourful. The display draws hummingbirds, bees and butterflies. It’s a magnificent circle of life, and it took tending to get it this far.

  My people say that all things form a circle. Life is a circle that moves from the innocence of childhood and back to it again, in the quiet wisdom of elderhood. The energy we call Great Spirit moves in a great unseen circle around us. That’s why the bowl of a ceremonial pipe, a sweat lodge and a Medicine Wheel are round. The circle, they say, is the model of the universe.

  In my late forties I lived in a condo in Burnaby, British Columbia, amid the sharp angles of the metropolis. How isolated the geometry of the modern world makes us all. There’s a rigidity to straight lines, and when you live within them long enough you can’t help but be affected.

  I spoke to the pastor of a downtown church about it. It was a United Church called the Longhouse Ministry that ministered to urban native people and others who were marginalized. I expressed my concern that we weren’t speaking to each other any more. I told him about a simple ceremony I’d been instructed in a long time before.

  It’s called a Sharing Circle. It’s open to everyone,
a safe place to gather, to speak and be heard. It’s a place of prayer and ritual guided by ancient spiritual protocols aimed at creating harmony. In the Sharing Circle we can share about our common human experience, its joys and sorrows, and offer the power of our words and emotions to each other. The pastor and I agreed that the community could benefit from something like that.

  We put up posters and gave out pamphlets for a few weeks before the first gathering. I described the circle to organizations over the telephone. I e-mailed, faxed and visited in person. When the night of the first circle arrived, my woman and I were anxious. We didn’t know what to expect.

  It was a rainy night, cold, on the cusp of winter. We arrived a half hour early, and as I’d been instructed, I smudged the area with sacred medicines, said a prayer and centred myself on the push of positive energy. We wanted desperately to share the hope we felt, the strength we’d both found in the traditional teachings of my people and the vision of harmony we held for the planet.

  When people began to arrive, we were amazed. They were a glorious conglomeration. There were urban native people, dispossessed of their cultures and traditions. Along with them came a university professor, a carpenter, a schoolteacher, a working single mother, a grandmother and a businessman. All of them gathered shyly in that circle, silent, maybe skeptical and afraid.

  We sat in candlelight. When the ceremony started and a prayer was said, you could feel everyone relax. Taking up a hand drum, I explained the nature of the circle. I told them that the guiding principle was equality. We were all brothers and sisters, all looking for a linchpin, a way to focus our lives. Then I sang a prayer song.

  What followed stays with me still. I explained how the ceremony was created to allow every voice the opportunity to be heard. The circle was a sacred space for every hurt, every joy to find expression, I said. It was a teaching way to show us how similar we are, how joined. Then I passed around an eagle-wing fan, and each person had a chance to share.

  We heard stories of pain. We heard of struggle. We heard of confusion and doubt and unknowing. Some people spoke of gratitude, their relief at finding a place where unspoken things could be surrendered. As the talk continued the sounds of the city disappeared, even though we were half a block away from a major thoroughfare. We sat in a deep communal silence to listen to each other. When the ceremony ended with a final drum song, a prayer and hugs all around, not a single person wanted to leave.

  We carried on that simple ceremony for the better part of three years. Every time it was the same. The energy of the people, their desire for talk, for connection, for harmony, created a magnificent spiritual sense we all carried away. We learned that no one of us is ever far away from others, that we all carry the same baggage in life, that when we allow ourselves to hear each other, we are joined forever.

  Everyone has a story. That’s what the circle teaches us. We become better people, a better species, when we take the time to hear them. That’s how you change the world, really. One story, one voice at a time.

  Stripping It Down

  . . .

  WHEN WE CAME to this cabin we had to leave our old life behind. We had to disassemble everything, strip away the clutter of life. A painting that had seemed relevant in a city context became unnecessary here. Books that had marked our footsteps on a cosmopolitan journey lost their importance in the presence of bears. The transition surprised us both. We’d come to believe we needed all that stuff to define us. But in the end it was just stuff. We donated curios, mementoes and random objects to good causes, gave them to friends or tossed them away. What we were left with were the essentials.

  Oh, there’s the usual collection of things still. We have a television and a stereo, and we’ve held onto the art that retains its original frankness. We have a laptop and a PC, and we get our Internet signals from a satellite. Our occasional jaunts back to the city are made in a Subaru. But we shop less now, and what we bring home is, for the most part, only what we need. Food. Water. The stuff of life.

  When I first began my journey to reclaim my culture, I thought I needed a conglomeration of stuff to make me an Indian. I thought I had to live my life with an Indian motif, with native art, native books, native music and native fashion all around me. So I collected roomfuls of stuff.

  But when I started to attend ceremony and met traditional teachers, I confronted an astounding simplicity. Everything in my world was elaborate, shiny. But the teachers I found were nothing like that. Sometimes it was only the braids in their hair that bore any stamp of Indian-ness. I wondered about that. I wondered how you could be authentic without the signature. I wondered how you could be an Indian without the trappings, the visual statement of your being. So I asked.

  A wise Ojibway man named Art Solomon told me to gather a yard of cotton cloth, some ribbon, a pair of scissors and a can of tobacco. I was to make this gathering my mission, the sole focus of one day. Then I was to find a quiet place where I felt secure. I was to go there with my gathered articles and sit.

  I was to ask myself why my question was important, why I felt it necessary to move to knowledge. More importantly, I was to examine how it felt to not carry the answer. Once I’d discerned that, I was to cut a small square of cloth with the scissors, then take a pinch of the tobacco, place it in the cloth and tie it with ribbon.

  This small tobacco tie would symbolize my question and my emotional and spiritual need. When I returned to Art I was to offer the tobacco. I could ask my question once the tobacco was accepted. It seemed odd, quaint, charming in a folksy kind of way. But I did it.

  True learning requires sacrifice. That’s what the tobacco offering taught me. That was the intent of the ritual. That’s why Art asked me to make that offering. On my quest for understanding, I had to sacrifice my time and my money. I had to sacrifice my pride by confronting the truth of my unknowing. In the end I had to sacrifice my humility by reaching out for help in understanding.

  That ceremony stripped away the stuff that blocked me from myself. I could see that it didn’t matter how I looked or what I wore. What mattered was the nature of my question, and how I felt about it. I had to strip things down in order to hear the answer. When I did, I learned that what I needed was far less than I had, far less than what I desired, and it freed me.

  I didn’t become more Indian by learning that—only more human.

  BOOK FOUR

  ISHPIMING

  (UNIVERSE)

  EVERYTHING IS ENERGY. This is what our teachers say. Great Spirit is the feeling of that energy expressed in all things, radiating everywhere around us. To stand upon the land is to feel joined to it, to become a part of that wheel of creative, nurturing energy. In the Long Ago Time, Star People brought us teachings. When they returned to their home we were left to gaze across the universe and feel the truth of what they had given us. Everything is energy. We are all one being. We are all one soul, and we need each other. That is spiritual. That is truth. That is Indian.

  Neighbours

  . . .

  THE LAKE HERE has tempers and moods. When the wind is right, it can whip itself into whitecaps. Other times, an easterly breeze will let the water be languid. A slight southwesterly push can create speckled channels. When it’s placid, the lake hangs like a mirror between the poke of mountains.

  It’s a shape-shifter, this lake. Like all living beings, it breathes and moves and changes. It slides from azure to grey, indigo, cobalt, moss green or even silver, depending on the weather and the light. In storms it has a purple cast, and once last fall it took on a deep, melancholic blue, like yearning.

  The lake is what draws people here. The community that’s grown up around it is small, mostly former city dwellers like us, disgruntled with the speed and noise and smell of things urban. Our homes lean towards the rustic, and improvements happen gradually, as time and finances permit. Everyone is thrifty with their time.

  There are the motorized outdoorsmen, too, the particular breed who can only appreciate nature
at thirty miles an hour from an ATV, dirt bike, snowmobile or powerboat. But they mostly keep to themselves. If they chop down the odd beautiful tree or bulldoze a lovely copse of aspen to make room for their toys, we’ve learned to let it be.

  My woman and I came here in the late summer of 2005. It took us a year or so to completely shrug off the city. but from the beginning our time here was marked by a downshift of energy. Despite ourselves, we would slip into idle, appreciating the symphony of land and silence. Now the place has rooted us.

  We never learned about our neighbours in the city beyond simple elevator courtesy and chit-chat. Everyone was just too busy. Out here it’s remarkably different.

  Across the road are the Haggartys. John and Penny commuted to the city for a few years, but the long drive and the urban hustle and bustle grew to be too much. So they built a log home and settled in. With local jobs, they’re fixtures now.

  We met them soon after we arrived. John walks their two dogs down the road in the mornings, and he and I spoke right away. It wasn’t long before we were sharing dinners, telling our stories and becoming friends. Getting to know them has been a pleasure. They’re in their fifties, like us, seasoned by mortgages, career dips and dives, aging and other life lessons. They still tour on their motorcycle, ski some in the winter, love the land, love each other and hold out hope for long and agile senior years ahead.

  Down the road a ways are Merv Williams and Ann Sevin. They have a pair of border collies named Tai and Chi and a twenty-foot lake barge. We met them at another neighbour’s fiftieth birthday party. We were taken right away by their lack of facade, any need to be anything other than who they are. They are genuine. Staunch as old pines.