souls-journey-2023

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I attend a beautiful sunrise ceremony in honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on a Monday, as planned, and am on the road before 8 AM. I arrive at the Standing Rock Reservation as the sun sets. I spend Tuesday in and around Standing Rock and am encamped at a cottage on Bureau of Indian Affairs Route 33 on the Pine Ridge Reservation by that evening. Wednesday is spent visiting the Lakota Technical High School in Pine Ridge where I deliver hundreds of dollars of donated art supplies, as well as dozens of Boston Celtics shirts, shorts, basketballs, official NBA socks. It feels good and energetic to be at the high school. Members of the football team are strapping themselves to the front of large school buses, leaning into the straps and pulling the buses across the parking lot.

There is a lot of cheering, teasing, and all-around good fun as each young man pulls the bus about 40 yards. The young men who help me unload the car are also having a very good time. The equipment I’ve brought is greatly admired, and they talk amongst themselves about how much the art teacher will like the canvases and quality acrylics, how much the boy’s basketball coach will enjoy the Celtics basketball warm-up pants. They unfurl the 40 foot wide winged Leonard Peltier ”puppet” and hold it against the wall of the high school as I take photographs.

Later that day I go to the Wounded Knee Memorial. It is immensely moving to be here and a separate entry about Wounded Knee would be appropriate. After spending time in the Wounded Knee graveyard with the living and the dead I go back to my cabin at Bureau of Indian Affairs Road 33. For reasons I don’t understand my left ankle is immensely painful and swollen and I spend the evening trying to sleep through agony unlike any I’ve known before.

Thursday morning I return to Wounded Knee for reflection and then proceed, exactly on the schedule I have laid out months ago, to Rapid City South Dakota, where I have planned to rest for two or three days exploring the Black Hills before heading north towards Calgary for a 10 day jaunt across Alberta and a rendezvous with my friend Joy, my ex wife Lynne, and my sister Sheryl. Instead of checking in to a motel however, I go directly to the Rapid City hospital emergency room where I am admitted.

Tenth straight day in the hospital in Rapid City.  My ankle remains inflamed, infected, and painful. I am scheduled for a clean out surgery. All of the MRIs and the ultrasounds have been reassuring in the sense that the bacteria appear not to have entered into the bones. I receive 9 anti-bacterial infusions a day.  My current projected discharge date is a week from today. Both Sam and Louise Andrews have offered to fly out and drive me to California in my car, currently resting in the Monument Hospital emergency room parking lot. Needless to say, humans plan, the gods bless … or not … and the god’s timelines (and perspective on time and “outcomes”) remain far different than our own. I am, of course, immensely grateful for all of the kindness shown me and for the many lessons that I am learning and that I trust will yet emerge from this experience. That said, in some profound ways the bottom line is about how fundamentally alone I am, even as I experience myself a part of a much larger, perhaps infinite, whole.

After delivering the wampum shells to the museum/library/cultural center at Akwesasne, and having had a very nice conversation with a woman who works there, vacations once a year on the Cape, and is very involved in a language immersion school and the Mohawk powwow on Cornwall Island, I intentionally took a “wrong” turn away from the border to smoke the last of my Vermont grown marijuana and not cross the border with any cannabis.
I then turned the car around onto the side of a very remote road to face downhill, and got out of the car to do the pipe ceremony, when coming down the road was a woman in a wheelchair.
“Not something you see everyday,” I said, and thereupon met Aaryn. Aaryn pronounces Akwesasne completely differently than I do and laughs when I say it. After about an hour together I consider her one of my closest friends and this magnificent human being is but what cold my attention to her was that she was in a wheelchair and was rolling down the hill in her wheelchair. In the middle of fucking nowhere. I’ll tell you the rest of the story later Uh Oh.

I travel to Minneapolis, mostly to see if I can reconnect a broken friendship. And it seems we do. I visit Louise Ehrlich’s bookshop, mostly an art gallery filled with books about Indigenous Americans. We are NOT a nation of immigrants. On the morning of my departure I attend an Indigenous Peoples’ Day sunrise ceremony.

The Red Path awaits its visitors in silence, welcoming those who tread upon it. The visit to the Mohawk Cultural Center is both ordinary and amazing. There is that absolutely incredible emblematic Wolf Belt that depicts a treaty between the French and the Mohawks. The seven purple lines signify the seven nations, white the peace paths guarded at each end by sachems of the Wolf clan, symbolized by the purple animal figures. 

“The first night I was ever completely alone in the forest I was already a grandmother. Later that night the heavens opened and the earth and the rooted ones drank the waters and I stepped out of my tent into the rain and mud barefooted and did my spinning jiggle dance. May that which I felt in those moments be with you in mind and in spirit on your travels among the living and the dead. May you be as one on your way with our blessing. Walk in beauty.” Author unknown.

I depart on my next voyage September 30, 2023, my mother’s 110^th birthday. My plans are to go to a powwow on the land of the Massachusett people that day, and then proceed to the land of the Western Abenaki in Vermont, where I will visit friends and memories. Next Akwesasne, Minneapolis, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, the Black Hills, Calgary, Banff, Vancouver, Orcas Island, Bainbridge, Seattle, Portland, Petrolia, San Francisco. I must get to Calgary by 20 October where I will rendezvous with my good friend Joy. I plan to be in SF by 11/10.  “Where before we locked the gates, help us now to keep them open.”