For Joshua (17 page)

That’s who I was for a long time. I had the hair, the dances, the drumming, the clothes, the head knowledge and the skill to speak of all of it, and the greater skill to write of it, but that’s all I had. I had the outside down pat but my insides, where I really lived, were in turmoil, pain, and confusion and they always got me drunk, always drove the people who cared for me from my life, always helped me create more guilt. My working life was becoming a success, I’d been involved with several beautiful, talented women who genuinely cared for me, the Native community was welcoming and generous, and I had money in the bank. But it seemed that nothing was ever enough to ease my pain. Nothing.

As I watched the sky and thought about the agony I’d endured as a young man searching for himself, the agony of the Sweat Lodge ritual, the agony of my alcoholism, and the agony of four days of solitude on a ledge facing the mountains, I realized that I had never known the most crucial of teachings: that nothing in the world was ever going to be enough for me until
I
was enough for me.

I smiled at that. So clear, so simple, so true.

The night sky was a huge purple bowl of sky dotted with the icy points of stars. And as I sat there drinking it all in I thought about how those stars represented so many possible worlds. I wondered if there were travellers like me in each of
those worlds, wanderers, nomads, who might have been graced with a friend like John, a night like this and a universe that felt close enough to touch, so that finally, sometime before sleep grabbed me in comforting arms, I imagined I could see a rover on one of those worlds, sitting on the same kind of hill on the same kind of night, on the same search as I was. I waved to him. Wished him well. Then, as sleep descended, I imagined him waving back. I smiled.

In my dream I was a young boy again. The land was exactly as I remembered, thick with bush and rock and water. The light of the sun reflected off all those rivers and lakes so that finally the light I moved through was a mercurial silver sliding upwards into gold, an infinite, nurturing light. And I was running. Above me was the hard blue helmet of the sky and around me the trees like crooked fingers raised upwards in praise. Even the rocks lay lodged in the breast of the Earth like hymns. I was naked—stark naked—except for a pair of big black gumboots that I was struggling not to run completely out of. The tops of those big boots slapped against my thighs, and behind me I could
hear the exaggerated thump of feet in hot pursuit. I was laughing. Ahead of me was the glitter of a lake and as I burst from the trees onto a platform of rock the sun blinded me for an instant.

At that moment I was grabbed from behind and lifted into the air. I felt strong arms enfold me and there was a wild flail of hair against my face. It smelled of wood smoke and I laughed as I lifted a hand to part it from my face.

Only it wasn’t hair.

It was a curtain. A thick curtain hung in front of a window to block off light. As I parted it the sunlight streaming into the room was hard and I squinted against it. When my eyes adjusted I was looking out at a playground. There were hundreds of children there, running, playing, laughing. It seemed a happy enough scene, but as I scanned it my gaze came to rest on one small child alone in a sandbox at the far edge of the lot. He was playing with a tiny red truck, concentrating very hard at moving piles of sand and oblivious to the scurrying throng around him. Just then the recess bell rang and he looked up. It was me. It was me at six or seven years old—small, crew cut, thick glasses, with baggy clothes, oversized to grow into. The children all raced towards the school and I walked slowly, obediently, behind them. The laughter and happy chatter began to fade into
silence. As I watched myself as a little boy move towards the building, all the world receded into a thick silence until finally I could see only the small boy moving evenly towards the waiting school. I couldn’t stand it. I threw open the window and stepped through it into the playground.

Only it wasn’t a playground.

It was a laneway. Flat, narrow and gravelled, it meandered through a brown landscape, furrowed and even as a table. There were few trees, skinny, leafless, and stunted. There was a moon hovering over everything and I walked in shadow. I felt a great sadness within myself and the salty taste of tears at the back of my tongue. Ahead of me was a house. It stood alone in a great field and every window was ablaze with light. The closer I got to that house the more the weight of sadness slowed me down. I heard my footsteps fall in even measure like a drum being thumped at a funereal tempo. When I got to the door of that house it opened and I heard a voice saying, “It’s about time. How long did you expect us to wait for you?” I swallowed hard and stepped through the doorway and into the house.

Only it wasn’t a house.

It was a powwow ground. There were hundreds of people sitting in a huge circle, within which there were many dancers shuffling clockwise to the heavy beat of a drum and
the shrill wail of singers who sat under an arbour of cedar boughs in the very middle of that great circle. The dancers were a glorious sight. They wore every colour of the rainbow and their regalia shook and shimmered. Its brilliance rivalled that of the sun. Here an old man in elaborately beaded buckskin. There a young girl in a long dress adorned with jingling metal cones. Behind her a young man bedecked with long skirts of gold yarn and a headpiece of porcupine quills and fur. Old women in simpler dresses, carrying eagle feather fans, were followed by middle-aged men with eagle feather bustles on their backs, great breastplates of deer bone and faces painted in bold patterns. Everyone, it seemed, was dressed in celebration. Then, one by one as they danced past me, they motioned for me to join them. I felt fear. But as that long line of dancers passed I began to feel people closing in behind me. Many hands pressed gently against my back and I was eased outwards into the dancing area.

My feet began to move, seeking out the tempo of the drum. But as I moved I felt a terrible weight on my body. I wanted to move faster, to join that drum and the voices of the singers, but gravity worked against me. I strained against the pressure and as I collapsed my face into a grimace of agony I caught a reflection of myself in one of the small mirrors one
of the dancers had mounted on his shield. I wasn’t dressed ceremonially. I was in rags that fluttered around me.

In the mirror I saw remnants of material I recognized. There was the harsh blue of prison shirts; beside it, the lime green of the trousers I had worn to school the first day at Dalewood; next to that the grey silk of a suit I’d once owned; there was a swatch of faded denim, a flag of black leather, and a strip of T-shirt with “Rick’s a drunk” emblazoned on it. I stopped where I was and I felt the burning desire to flee. I felt shame and anger that my regalia was that of a wanderer who’d never found a home, a tribe, or a family. Everyone could see how my outfit reflected who I was—and who I had never been.

I turned towards the people seated around the dancing area, looking for an opening, a place to run through. As I did, the beat of the drum slowed and the voices of the singers moved into a more solemn cadence. The dancers surrounded me. They looked at me, and in their eyes I saw sorrow and empathy. They began to dance slowly around me and as they passed, one by one, they tore off the strips of material I was dressed in. I felt the weight lessen as the rags fell away. I stood there unable to move until finally I felt naked. But strangely there was no shame in my nakedness. Instead, I felt comforted, and as I watched them an old man began to walk
towards me. He was carrying a blanket. The closer he came the more I could see the light in his eyes. It was a brilliant light, one that spoke of knowledge and healing. As he got closer he began to open that blanket. It was purple, a deep, deep purple, and at its centre was a huge star pattern done in an orange—more rust than tangerine. When he reached me he opened his arms wide and wrapped me in that blanket. It felt smooth, worn with age, comfortable and safe. I grasped its edges and pulled it closer around me. Then he held out a pipe. It looked ancient. Fragile, but very strong. I felt embarrassed because I’d been told how sacred a pipe was to my people and I felt undeserving of handling it. But the old man stood there, imploring me with his eyes to take the pipe. I did. When I looked at that old man the light in his eyes shone clearly, strongly, and I squinted them closed. When I opened them again the light shone brightly in my eyes. I wanted to smile at that old man.

Only it wasn’t the old man.

It was the sun.

The morning was bright and clear and around me I could hear the sounds of the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks busy with their lives. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and sat up. The effect of being removed from the dream so suddenly was confusing. The real world seemed strange and
foreign. It took a while to adjust to being awake and there was a part of me that wanted to sink back into sleep again and get back to the dream. Instead, I took a swallow of water and began to think about my vision and the three days I’d spent on that hill.

I wasn’t afraid anymore. Where shadow had seemed so mysterious and threatening mere hours before it was only shadow now—a part of the pattern, just like I was. The animals I could hear around me weren’t predatory, nor were they prey; they were friends and neighbours now. Thinking of that, I thought about the people in that powwow ground in my dream. They’d been as welcoming as the first traditional Native people I’d met when I was twenty-four. I laughed. If I’d only known then how welcome I was, how the rags of my life meant nothing to them at all, that they were willing to help me learn to dress in something more real and healing than I’d ever worn, maybe I would have grown up then. Maybe I could have spared myself the years of agony between then and now. Those people had known what the word “community” meant because they had lived it—and they’d been taught it by ones who knew by living too.

I thought about the pipe the old man in my dream had given me. When I had first seen one all those years ago it had frightened me, because of all the bunk and hogwash I’d come
to believe that a pipe represented: pagan worship, bad medicine, something akin to voodoo. But it was never any of that. The pipe had always been about belonging, about community, about unity. Sitting on the hill on that bright, clear morning, feeling a perfect fit with everything that surrounded me, I thought about what I’d been taught about the pipe.

John and I were sitting on the floor of his living room, preparing to go on a trip to take part in a special ceremony in Montana. He showed me how to wrap all of the articles he would need and I was very deliberate in following his instructions. Finally, he took an old elk hide pouch from the cloth it was wrapped in. It was adorned with elaborate floral beadwork and it was beautiful.

“This was a gift from the man who taught me,” John said. “It was given to him by his grandfather, so who knows how old it is. It’s pretty old, though.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a pipe bag. It’s the womb that carries my pipe. Keeps it safe. Keeps it strong,” he said.

“There’s a peace pipe in there?” I asked in awe.

“Well, there’s a pipe in here,” he said. “I’m not so sure it’s a peace pipe. But it’s a pipe.”

“Aren’t they called peace pipes?”

He leaned back on his arms and set the pipe bag on the floor in front of him. Looking at me, he smiled. “That’s what most people think. Seems like everyone when they first come around have the idea that our pipes are peace pipes. Guess maybe they get to that, but it’s not what they were created to be.”

He went on to explain a lot to me.

“When settler people came to this country they saw our people sitting in a circle on the ground and smoking a ‘peace pipe.’ They called it this because smoking the pipe always went before the good talk and neighbourliness our ancestors displayed, so the assumption that the pipe was intended for ‘peace’ was an easy one to make. But we never called it that. For us it was a ‘unity pipe.’ ”

“Isn’t that kind of the same thing, though?” I asked.

He smiled. “Well, unity means ‘a coming together.’ We behaved really solemnly around the pipe and I guess the newcomers thought we regarded peace as a sacred thing. But they missed the point. We regard
unity
as sacred. When unity happens, peace is a result. Unity results in all sorts of other things, too—things like equality, respect, dignity, truth, wisdom, kindness, love, honesty, and honour. When these come about, then—and only then—does peace come about.
Our old people understood and taught this, so that the pipe was about joining, coming together, a bonding of very sacred and spiritual forces and energies. It was a unity pipe.”

“But it’s still sacred?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” John said. “The pipe is very sacred. It’s the most powerful tool we have for talking with the Creator and our spirit helpers. There are songs to be sung and prayers to be offered by the pipe carrier. It takes many years to learn all of these songs and petitions.”