For Joshua (12 page)

No one drew a breath. Stillness. Quiet. Then, very deliberately, the beautiful young woman began beating on the skin of the object again.

Boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom
, was the sound it made. The men looked wide-eyed at each other in fear and wonder. Then, the woman began to sing.

“Hey, yah-hey, yah,” she sang in time with her beating. “Hey, yah-hey, yah.”

Her voice was pure and the men were hushed by the power of this strange and wonderful song. She went on. She faced each of the Four Directions and sang her song through. When she finished, facing the North, she gave four very heavy beats on the skin of this strange object, raised it to the sky like a blessing, lowered it slowly toward the earth, held it
there a moment, then opened her eyes and looked at the nervous circle of men.

Her eyes were like the darkest crystals. They shone and glimmered with a light that enchanted all of the men. It was a light of kindness, of compassion. It was a light of Love and of Spirit. No one said a word.

The woman began walking slowly around the circle, looking at each man in turn. When she had made the complete journey around the circle she stopped and held the object out in her hands.

“I have come from the Land of the Spirits,” she said in a voice that was both humble and strong. “We have been watching you and we have been distressed at what we have seen. You have allowed this time of scarcity to take you away from the Teachings. Instead of sharing and living in harmony with each other, you steal and fight and plot against each other. Instead of living in gratitude for what you have, you live in anger for what you do not have. Instead of seeking to live in balance you look for advantage, for gain. We have felt the spill of your brothers’ blood upon the land and we have heard the cry of your mothers, wives, sons, and daughters over the hatred that grows among you.

“We have decided to give you a gift to remind you of the way in which you are supposed to live your lives. A gift that will
remind you that you are connected to everything and that you have a responsibility to look after and care for all things. This gift is called Drum. It is made from the trunk of a tree and the skin of a moose to remind you of reverence and respect for all living things. It is round like the wombs of the mothers that gave you life and like the Great Circle of Life that feeds and sustains you. The song it sings is the song you heard in darkness as you lay in your mother’s womb. The heartbeat.

“When you were being born that sound comforted you. In that warm darkness of your mother’s belly, that sound told you that all was well, that you need not fear. Now, whenever you play this Drum you will be comforted again because you hear the heartbeat of your mother and of your Earth Mother. You will want to join your heartbeat to the heartbeat of Creation coming from this drum.

“I will teach you how to do that.”

And the woman showed the Drum to the men. When they were assembled around it in a circle she taught them a song. Their voices raised together to fill the night. They were shy at first. The power they could feel coming from the Drum and the power it gave their voices as they sang with it filled them with reverence and awe. Slowly they became more confident. Then they were singing, loudly, passionately, and well. Within them they could feel their spirits joined with the
spirit of Creation, their heartbeats joined with the heartbeat of Drum, of the universe, of Mother Earth, and their anger, hatred, jealousy, and bitterness faded off into the deep blue of the night.

When they had finished, the woman showed them how to care for Drum. She taught them how to cleanse it in the smoke of the sacred medicines of tobacco, sweet grass, sage, and cedar. She taught them how to warm it in the glow of their fires, to stretch its skin taut and firm so its voice would ring. Then she taught them to pray with it and to ask for their voices to be joined together in harmony with Drum. Several men were chosen to be makers of the Drum and she taught them the rituals and prayers involved in the gathering of the elements of Drum. When she had finished she prepared to leave them.

“Always remember,” she told them, “that Drum comes from the spirit of Woman. It is round like her womb. It is life-giving like her spirit. It is healing like her love, forgiveness, and nurturing. Honour your women. Protect them, provide for them, learn to walk in balance with them. Drum will always remind you of those duties.”

Then she turned and began to walk away. The men watched her as she walked. As she got further and further from the fire her steps got slower, shorter, less firm. When
she reached the edge of the forest again she turned to face them. They gasped. In the place of the beautiful young woman they had spoken with was a Grandmother. The Old One smiled at them and they saw the same eyes of gleaming dark crystal. She was beautiful. In her smile the men felt blessed, and as the Old One disappeared back to the Land of the Spirits they raised their voices together in an Honour Song to give thanks for this strange and wonderful new gift.

I woke in the rain. Sometime around dawn the clouds had moved in and the rain started pouring down in sheets. My little circle quickly became muddy. My blanket was sopping wet. My hair hung over my eyes, plastered to my face by torrents of water. I shivered. There were trees a footstep away from the edge of the circle and I wanted to step over and sit beneath their branches for shelter. I craved shelter as much as I had hungered for food the night before. It rained and rained and rained. I felt miserable. I pitied myself. I bemoaned my decision to come here and the difficulty in learning this way, its senselessness, its hardship. The trees and the bright dry spot beneath them
looked like a palace to me. I agonized over whether I should step out of the circle and into the trees. I wanted to stay where I was and learn whatever I was going to learn about myself, about the Native way, about the world, and about my right place within it. But I was cold, shivering, miserable, alone, and afraid. Once again, I did as John suggested and admitted my feelings to Creation. I talked about my agony and I felt the rain grow warmer. As I stomped around I vented my frustration and I began to feel more at ease. Then I realized that the rain felt good. For two days I had sat in the sun, wind, and dust, sweating out all kinds of things my body had absorbed. The rain was washing all of that away. The more I focused on that fact, the less I wanted to abandon my circle. Soon I was holding my face up to the rain and feeling the cool water splash against my eyelids. It was refreshing. Not just because it soothed the dust and dryness of things, but because it seemed to wash away the purple stain I felt inside, the one that revisiting myself and my life had created.

I thought about the reasons John might have had for bringing me to this point in his teachings. I needed release. I needed to be free from the stranglehold in which my past held me. I needed to cut the ropes of shame, guilt, and fear, to see my life for what it had been and walk forward to a better way. Those were the reasons he’d decided to bring
me here. And as much as I understood, though, I still felt the cold nuzzle of fear in my belly. The habits that nearly killed me were still my crutch—and I could not imagine life without them. I didn’t know how I was going to acquire, or even if I had the ability to acquire, new skills, new tools, new ways of being.

The rain slacked off to a drizzle, then to a light mist. Finally it stopped completely. I was relieved. I lay my blanket flat on the ledge to dry. It was cool but I removed my shirt, too, and did some jumping jacks to get my blood flowing and warm myself. When I felt the goose pimples disappear from my arms I sat down again and looked outward over the trees. My eyes came to rest on something so commonplace, so ordinary, that it had escaped my attention all the times I had visited that ledge.

It was a tree, no more than a twig really, sticking out from a small cleft in the ledge. It was sparse and dry and twisted. It looked as though it should be dead, as if its roots had no soil to grip that rock. But it lived. There was a tiny clump of foliage near its tip and the fresh rain glistened on it. I don’t know how I could have missed it all along but right then I was riveted to it. Strange as it seemed to me, I felt as though that little tree was trying to tell me something. So I sat and watched it, studied it, and waited for its message.

I began to think of how hard I had sought a footing in my life. I thought about the struggle. Then, I remembered a time when the battle had grown too hard and I had given up, surrendered, capitulated, and become willing to allow the world to toss me where it would.

I was twenty-three years old. That summer I had taken off again and headed into the west. When I arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan, I stopped to look around for work. The only place I could afford to stay was the Salvation Army, and I hated it there. But I needed to earn money to keep on travelling so I gritted my teeth and held on. But I was never too good at holding on and eventually I went to the bars in search of those things I knew how to deal with. And I found them. It wasn’t long before I was in the company of a group of young Native people who were just like me. They were drinkers, hardcore and remorseless, and they were lost, dispossessed, and angry.

They welcomed me as a brother because of the colour of my skin, and if I didn’t know anything about my language, culture, or history it didn’t seem to matter to them. All that mattered was that I was another “skin”—short
for redskin—and that I would do as they did. We drank. Lots. There were fights, brutal ones sometimes, that even the women joined in. Fights with baseball bats and knives, broken beer bottles, and even a rifle once. But there was camaraderie, laughter, and a caring that reminded me of the winos I’d hung with years earlier. They helped each other when they were sick with the drink, and nothing was too much to ask if you needed help. I wanted to be a big part of that so I listened and learned.

Many of the young men in our group had grown up under the influence of militant Native groups like the American Indian Movement. They wore their hair long, in braids or long ponytails, and they weren’t ashamed to wear colourful patches bearing one message of solidarity or another. They were pro-Indian and anti-white. There was no middle ground or room for negotiation in that. From them I learned about the genocidal policies of governments in Canada and the U.S. I heard for the first time the story of the residential schools and how generations of our people had been abducted from their homes and sent to learn the white man’s way. I heard how language had been lost, ceremonies outlawed, how Indians had needed a pass from the Indian Agent in order to leave the reserve, how it had been illegal for them to meet in groups, that we hadn’t even been allowed to
vote until 1960, and that recent government policy had been directed at making Indians a part of the mainstream, abolishing the Indian Act and the reserves—the heinous “White Paper on Indian Policy.”

I heard all of that and more. It wasn’t long before I had a red headband, the colour of AIM, and was reciting the rhetoric I had adopted from my new “brothers in the struggle.” I became racist in my thinking and it was easy to blame the white man and society for my ordeals. In fact, it made more sense than anything I’d thought of or heard before. It had never been me that had caused my troubles—it had been the bigoted hand of the white man that yanked me from my family, tossed me into a foster home, adopted me, tried to make me white, and then threw me into prison when I couldn’t or wouldn’t assume his colour or his thinking. My life finally made sense to me and I had a purpose.

Unfortunately, I continued to drown that sense of purpose in alcohol. Trying to fit in with this new group meant that I believed I needed to prove myself. I drank even more to screw up the courage to be outrageous. Somehow, during a blackout, I managed to get hold of a credit card. When I came to, there was a large group of us in a motel room somewhere outside Regina and the party was in full swing. It scared me to think that I’d done something I
couldn’t remember and I grew fearful of being arrested. The next morning I left. I used the card to get a plane ticket and fly back to Ontario where I used it to keep on drinking, stay in good hotels, buy clothes, and keep on drinking. Finally, I was arrested, charged with fraud, and jailed for ten months.