For Joshua (14 page)

When I was twenty-four, jail ceased to be a place where I lived regularly. Instead I found work in the Native community as a reporter on a small Native newspaper. It was there that I began to find the parts of myself that had been missing all my life. I found elders who knew of the old ways. I found traditional people who knew and followed the teachings. I found young people like me who were making the journey back to themselves. I was not alone in being alone. It had not occurred to me that I was not the only one ever adopted, the only one who didn’t speak the language of his birthright, the only one who knew nothing of his tribal self, the only one who felt ashamed, unworthy, and afraid. But just knowing this wasn’t the whole answer. It still didn’t make the hurt go away.

I went to ceremonies and gatherings where the ancient teachings were discussed and passed on. I went to powwows, feasts, exhibitions, festivals, and celebrations where our cultural way was shown to thousands. I was given the opportunity to learn about myself, my history, culture, language, and belief system. For once, I put myself in a place where there was someone to teach me and I came to understand.

But understanding is not healing.

I had never been to a Sweat Lodge. It was something I had heard about and found myself wondering about at times, but I had never participated. I was afraid. Afraid that this ceremony would expose me. But one day someone showed me a glow in the darkness. The glow was the traditional teachings of our people. The more I engaged with the Native community, the more I began to see people who were trying to live as close to traditional teaching as possible. I watched them closely. In their actions I saw kindness, generosity, warmth. I listened when they spoke and in their words I heard understanding, empathy, compassion, and love. They showed me, by the power of their life as they lived it, that traditional ways were powerful ways. And I was attracted to the glow of their lives. When you’ve lived your whole life in darkness a glow, a light, is something you can’t resist.

I met some of those people after a while. We became friends. They talked to me about our way. They showed me by their example how someone can live well and happily by walking our path. Bit by bit I began to understand. Then I began to put that understanding into practice in
my
living. Not in a huge way, because I wasn’t ready or strong enough yet, but I made some small progress. After a time I started to
feel connected, rooted, tied to the tree of tradition, and I knew that it was time to start my journey to the light.

They told me that choosing to stay in the dark, as I had up until then, was not wrong. In our way, we can choose anything. In fact, our whole path is a pathway of choices. When we choose we create, they said, and our purpose here is to create ourselves, to
experience
ourselves, our souls. Choice is the power the Creator gave us to be able to do that.

They told me about the Sweat Lodge. They told me how they had made the same journey I was on and that the Sweat Lodge ceremony had helped them get past the pride and fear that held them back. That was good news to me—that people I admired had battled the same pride and fear. I wasn’t that different after all. So I agreed to learn this way.

Under the guidance of two men, Cliff and Walter, I began to try to open my mind and allow a teaching to enter my life. It wasn’t easy, because stubbornness is quite often the bulwark of fear and it took a lot of convincing to get me to the point where I could begin to see how much this ceremony offered me. Cliff was a Sioux and Walter was a Plains Cree man. Despite their different tribal backgrounds both men respected the Sweat Lodge ceremony for its ability to help people heal themselves. For them it was the basis of a tribal life and they were eager to help me to learn.

The first thing they taught me was that the Sweat Lodge ceremony is about humility. The word
humility
comes from the same root as “humus” or “earth” and the way Cliff and Walter saw it, humility means to be like the Earth. The Earth is very humble. Humility allows others to pass, to grow, to reach for Father Sky from the same arms of Mother Earth. Humility allows everything to be as it was created to be. So the Sweat Lodge begins with the Earth.

I was told that the beginning of the ceremony required me to go out and walk upon the land. These first steps through the bush were the beginning of a long journey. As I walked I was to try to pray and meditate upon the ceremony I was about to perform and ask for the humility to see it through to the end. While I was performing this “Spirit Walk” I was to look for rocks to be used in the ceremony. These rocks are called Grandfathers, because they are ancient and have been upon the Earth a long time. After these countless lifetimes spent upon the Earth the Grandfathers are wise and have many teachings that they will reveal in the ceremony. When I came upon a rock that seemed right, one that caught my attention, I was to offer a pinch of tobacco, say a prayer of thanks and a petition for strength, and gently carry it to the site chosen for the Sweat Lodge. For my first Sweat Lodge I made forty journeys for Grandfathers. Each
trip is like a day in your life. In the early morning I went to and fro, back and forth, for hours.

As I walked I fought a lot of battles with myself. And all the walking made me feel that the Sweat Lodge was senseless. I wanted an instant fix, as though finding a spiritual way of life was like some drive-thru where you could make an order, pay for it, and continue on your way. I wanted to be able to order a double humility burger and get going. But I began to see that this walk was a lot like life itself. As long as I focused on the repetition life became stale. I lost my creativity—the spark of life—and my focus dulled. But like the process of that walk, if I concentrate on picking up something eternal, ancient and healing on each day of my Earth Walk, something that could teach me how to become who I was created to be, then my walk is en-lightening. That’s why the Sweat Lodge ceremony begins with a walk upon the Earth.

Cliff and Walter and I talked about this idea when I’d collected all forty stones.

“Everyone wants to live a Shake ’n’ Bake life,” Walter said. “Nobody wants to have to sacrifice anything to learn. But sacrifice is always the price of admission to another level.”

“You’re giving up your day to do this,” Cliff said. “That’s a sacrifice. You’re letting go of your pride, you’re willing to let
someone teach you, you’re admitting you don’t know. Those are all sacrifices. Without them, without making them, you wouldn’t have reached this point.”

“Now that the Spirit Walk is completed we’re going to build a fire. We’ll lay logs down like a bed and pile the Grandfathers on top of them. Then around and over the Grandfathers you will sprinkle tobacco and pray in your own way to ask for the help of those Grandfathers. Then we’ll place more wood over all of them.”

We set to work. They were very methodical, very gentle and easy in their movements, and I took special care to be as attentive as they were. We worked in a silence that was scary to me. It gave the whole process a liturgical quality that spooked me, as though I were making a commitment I might not be able to keep. I felt a thin coil of fear wrap itself around my belly. But whenever our eyes met, Cliff or Walter would grin at me and it helped ease the anxiety I felt.

Once we’d built the wood and stones up into a high pile I was sent to gather some dry birch bark from the bush while they sat and smoked. When I returned with an armful they were waiting, laughing, and joking casually. Under Walter’s direction I placed hunks of bark randomly amongst the stones and wood.

“Rock and fire were the first elements the Creator used
when he created this world and so they are the first part of the ritual,” he said.

When the fire got going we picked up a shovel and Cliff directed me to dig a circle in the Earth—a small, fairly deep circle.

“Can you tell which direction is east?” he asked.

I looked around, suddenly ashamed that I was as good as lost in the woods. I made a guess and pointed.

“Good,” Cliff said. “East is the direction where the light comes from each day. So, with the light as your guide, you make the fire the point that fixes the direction east. Then, you walk back and you place the earth you dug out back on the ground. This will be the altar where the pipe and the medicines will sit. In the pit and on the altar you place a small pinch of tobacco—the first medicine—and pray for the humility to complete the ceremony.”

Once we’d placed the altar a few paces back from the fire we headed off to a marshy area to gather red willow saplings. Again we said a quiet prayer for each sapling we cut down and offered tobacco to honour its sacrifice.

“The saplings make the frame or the ribs of the lodge. We usually use red willow because the nature of red willow is humility—it always bends but keeps its shape anyway,” Walter told me.

“What do you mean, the ribs of the lodge?” I asked, thinking that it was a strange way to describe it.

“Well, the lodge is built round, like the wombs of our mothers. It’s round like the Earth. Both of them give us life. So when we put the saplings together we refer to them as the ribs because the womb is sheltered by the ribs. We treat them respectfully, gently, as though they were the ribs of our own mothers. It teaches us to be gentle,” he said.

When we found a copse of saplings we laid pinches of tobacco down to thank them for allowing us to make use of them in the ceremony. Then we stripped the branches from the saplings and carried them gently back to the site of the lodge and lay them carefully on the Earth.

Next Cliff pointed out where I should dig small holes that the ends of the saplings would sink into. In each hole I placed a pinch of tobacco and said a prayer for guidance and one of gratitude. It felt strange. My prayers were awkward. Language seemed to fail me when it was called upon to address something other than the everyday. I wondered whether these prayers were being heard. Then, starting from the east, we worked our way around the Four Directions, carefully bending each sapling over, placing each end in one of the small holes. Using bark we stripped from the branches we bound the ribs together while Walter sang a prayer song
in his language. It sounded eerie to me, in a cadence and vocabulary I couldn’t understand.

“What was that song about?” I asked when he’d finished.

“It was a song asking for the willows to lend us the humility to gain strength from what we are about to do,” Cliff said. “Strength comes from humility. Most people get it the other way around, but the lodge teaches us the right flow.”

Over the frame we begin placing canvas tarpaulins.

“In the old days they would use hides to do this, but in the modern world there aren’t a lot of hides around anymore,” Walter said. “The hides represented the Animal People, our greatest teachers, the bringers of the light. As you place the hides on the ribs of the lodge you say a prayer of gratitude for the many teachings of our animal brothers and sisters. Once the frame is covered I want you to take a smudging bowl that is filled with sweet grass, sage, cedar, and tobacco—the four medicines—and walk east to west around the lodge and smudge it with the medicines and offer up a prayer of gratitude and a petition for the teachings needed to help you on your journey. Then put the smudging bowl on the altar at the front of the lodge.”

The words felt clumsy, dishonest almost, as I walked around the lodge. I wasn’t convinced that I was ready for this.
The strangeness of the smudging bowl, with its pungent smoke and the lightness of the eagle feather they’d given me to pass the smoke over the top of the lodge, felt like the most foreign of tools. I felt awkward using them. Unnatural. I wasn’t sure I could get past the fear that, should I fail, I wouldn’t measure up as an Indian—though I had only the vaguest sense of what success or failure might mean. But I finished the smudging and laid the bowl and feather lightly on the altar.

We were ready. Cliff’s nephew arrived to act as the Fire Keeper—an honoured role in itself. The Fire Keeper’s responsibility is to tend to the Grandfathers—and to those who share this ceremony—by having water ready and following the directions of the leader, who on this day would be Walter. We stripped to our skin and washed ourselves in the river that ran by the site. Then we smudged with the medicines. The smudging process is like washing. You bring the smoke from the medicines over your entire body, top to bottom, and Cliff and Walter even smudged the soles of their feet.

“The reason for the washing and the smudging is so that you will be as clean as you were when you arrived here. You’re pure,” Cliff said. “It’s a stripping away of all the worldly things we hide behind—clothing, possessions, jewels, money—and we’re completely open to the world again. Completely
ourselves, just the way we are. This is humility. The Sweat Lodge is about going back, returning to the Earth, to humility, and your nakedness is a symbol of that humility.”

All I could do was look at him. His words seemed so calm, so assured, but all I heard was that I’d be required to forget everything that had helped me to survive, that I’d be helpless once I entered the lodge. That prospect frightened me badly. But I kept up a brave face as we walked around the fire and offered tobacco to the Grandfathers. We walked around the fire, going from east to west, then got down on our hands and knees to crawl inside the lodge.

“You’re placing yourself on the Earth and crawling into darkness,” Walter said. “The darkness is a symbol of all our doubts and fears. We face them humbly on our hands and knees. It’s a good way. Pride keeps us on our feet a lot of times, thinking we can fight them off. We can’t.”

Walter began to prepare the sacred pipe. We smoked. The pipe felt odd to me, sitting there in the half-darkness, looking towards the open door and the world that looked more inviting right then than it ever had before. I smoked. Deep down I felt proud that I was smoking a ceremonial pipe with other men. But I also felt the creep of fear along my spine.

The Fire Keeper began to bring in the Grandfathers. Walter placed each gently into the pit. Each time, my two
friends greeted them—
“Ho, Mishomis,”
meaning “Hello, Grandfather.” When the proper number of Grandfathers for the first round of the ceremony were present Walter signalled the Fire Keeper to close the door of the lodge.