I don’t remember when I first understood it’s the journey; the process of thinking, feeling and the doing that makes us human and alive. All the sights we see and experience along the way ultimately build character and deepen our relationship with Creation. Remarkably, these “scenic overlooks” are born sometime before we choose to experience them in this dream called, World; that great dream sending us here in efforts to assist in purification of all Creation.
Awake, alive, we may watch as our scenes, our stories, appearing unrelated are linked continually, preparing us for a deeper, compassionate relationship with our spirit, creation, commitment and a seamless bond to one another. Finally it is made clear, we are not what we do, certainly not what we have physically, but the inspiration of our journey that makes the course we’ve chosen distinguished.
I remember as a little girl, not yet up and walking, sitting in a room occupied by the rays of light that pierced the windows through which danced flecks of matter. I knew then that existence is no greater or richer than being at this spot, enveloped by golden rays, at peace. No search for meaning, no unquenched desires, because the comfort of the sun is Creation's embrace. The moment is all: symbolic, metaphor, the “razor’s edge”, “dancing on the rays of the sun”, transformation, joy, peace, healing and grace.
In a relationship with ourselves, each other, and Creation, we are transformed. And although I may have been a year or so old the day I experienced those gracious loving rays cradling me on the worn woven carpet, the moment remains a vivid reminder of life’s meaning. The memory calls up again and again to lend balance in a life often engrossed in material success and a chase for worldly fulfillment. What more can the journey be than an education in grace and a guide for home? Most often, we quickly lose sight of our own validity and richness as we lose sight of a personal examination of our six senses, and the freedom to explore them uninterrupted. Having chosen our parents, family/clan in an effort to make the experience here effective our divine plan erases, purifies, all traces of fear. In doing so, we may choose people who themselves ended their exploration of taste, touch, smell, sight, sound, expression, choice or vision long before these basic skills developed within themselves. Profoundly, with lack of stimulation these tools are numbed and retard, derailing an understanding of our spirit, its strengths, its bond to Faith, and the singular union with all living beings, here and in the spirit life.
My own upbringing was strict and controlled. It’s not that my parents weren’t loving. My mother, like her brothers and sister was a product of the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school system. When Grandma died of tuberculosis in the mid 1930’s, Mother was just three years old and the remaining half of a pair of twins. Grandpa wasn’t willing to go it alone with four kids under the age of ten-Mom’s twin brother dying along with Grandma.
Arriving at Pipestone Indian School in southwest Minnesota, she was taken to the infirmary and watched over by the Catholic order of nuns dedicated to educating Native children from off the reservations. Her brothers, Ted and Cliff, ten years and five years old respectively, accompanied by their sister Martha, age eight, were delivered to appropriate dormitories and immediately prepared for a life in uniform, regulations, work on the operating farm, and of course, school work. Mother only occasionally saw them, divided by age, gender, chores and dormitories through childhood and into their adult years.
Mother saw little of her father either during the extensive Bureau of Indian Affairs schooling. Except for summers on the Standing Rock Reservation with her father’s friends, her family life had all but died at three. What she grew up learning of family life happened in those occasional summers to see her father, Grandpa Mahto (Mahto is the Sioux word for Bear), or kids at school inviting her home, typically down to Oklahoma. Even so, Indian Country had become a hard place to visit; food scarce despite government rations; shell-shock from constant attempts to terminate or change government policies regarding reservations, substandard housing, the old ones still grieving for what once was, and drinking pervasive, to name a few reasons the family may have been better off at school.
Mother remembers a student’s parent occasionally showing up at school on foot. They would come empty handed and stay on for weeks and longer, finding the school more livable than back home. Eventually the nuns would put some bucks together and buy the parent a ticket back, or they might even be seen walking up to the main road to hitchhike. But it wasn’t all economics, those folks just wanted to be with their own kids.
Grandpa Mahto was making ends meet breaking horses in the Dakotas for the military, until that dried up around World War II. Grandpa, originally from Fort Peck, Montana, was Assiniboine. When he married Grandma Sitting, a Red Lake Chippewa from northern Minnesota, he married into the Ojibwa tradition. Her family was not thrilled. Grandpa was Sioux. Still fresh in Ojibwe minds was the Sioux and Ojibwe wars that took place late in the 18th Century in which the Chippewa moved the Sioux further south and west; many Sioux at one time lake’s people. What is often considered Sioux country, for many years had been Ponca, Kiowa, Hidatsa, Mandan and Arikara territory. When Grandpa married Grandma, these stories were still fresh. Time is different to an Indian. It is only in recent years that I’ve seen the Indigenous work to conform to this society’s clock. Time is not linear, but endless, circular, providing enough opportunity to accomplish what you’ve come here to do. Although there is a point of getting to a job on time, Indian time is holistic; everything in its time, as the cycle of seasons and the continuum of creation and existence bear out. It’s a tuning to the universal system of movement rather than man’s conjured up clock to control and acquire desires.
But whether modern time was kind to Grandpa Mahto was not as important as his ability to transcend the changes that were required. He was born before the car, an expert horseman, hunter and craftsman by the time the government showed up to take him to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. He would high tail it back to Montana when given the chance. Government agents eventually picked him back up on the rez and sent him east again. His last attempt at foregoing the mandatory schooling, he got as far as the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Taken in by a sympathetic family living near Fort Yates, he evaded authorities.
It wasn’t long however, before Grandpa knew change had come for good. He moved as well as anyone at the time could through the maze of White expectations and Indigenous (Red Peoples) wisdom. He retained roots in the traditional culture, speaking his language, remaining close to what he knew: horses, wild life and craft. Mother tells a story of going to a cowboy movie with him in the 1940’s after he had moved to Minneapolis. Over the course of the movie he grew so frustrated at the poor portrayal of Indian life and customs, he jumped out of his seat and started yelling at the screen how ridiculous it all was and far from the truth-to say nothing of the silly music or farcical customs of the tribe they were recreating. Entering the theatre he may have thought he was about to see an honest re-enactment of the Indian Wars. Yet, if he was troubled by the gross and blatant disenfranchisement of Indian people, he didn’t let it stop him from carrying out what he saw as his duty.
He fought and sustained shrapnel injuries in World War I. People said he wasn’t the same after he returned. He spent some time in Europe and the States recovering from shell shock. At some point in the 1920’s Grandpa was in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) painting the town red after a long cattle drive from the Dakotas, and Grandmother was heading back home to Red Lake Reservation from Flandreau Indian School. Somewhere the cowboys met up with Grandma and her girlfriends and set in motion a short courtship, marriage, together producing five children by 1931 when my mother and her twin were born.
To make a go of it they ran the trading post on Cass Lake Reservation just east of Grandma’s home, Red Lake rez. Grandpa could adapt. By this time he’d seen the full collapse of the Indigenous world, been to a new war on a foreign continent, and was attempting to make peace with a new system of living in a world of people with insatiable appetite. He was making as good a go of it as any Indian could at the time. Natives were just on the verge of getting the right to vote, yet tightly controlled by a myriad of federal and state treaties-the Dawes Act, a vast number of other acts and resolutions, plus the loss of over a million acres of land promised in early government negotiations. Casting a vote seemed inconsequential. After Grandma died in the 30’s, Grandpa retreated to the Standing Rock Reservation of North Dakota, spending most of his days riding the range and trying to make peace with his first 50 years.
Grandpa knew the horse, and by the 1940’s when he returned to the Twin Cities their use had declined to almost nothing. Besides, the Army Corp of Engineers was in the business of flooding large areas of range, and rerouted the Missouri River throughout the Dakotas. Certainly it disrupted life on the Standing Rock and Grandpa once again looked for a new livelihood. He reestablished himself in the maelstrom of Minneapolis, moving directly into modern society. He had always been an excellent wildlife painter, detailing the birds and animals he’d known intimately outdoors. He painted murals for various establishments around Minneapolis/St. Paul, as well as the interiors of various homes. He was good and he was fast. One summer my uncles went to work for him. Mom recalls seeing the brothers covered in paint, perhaps more on themselves than on the walls, costing Grandpa stress, time, and money. The two brothers couldn’t keep up his pace or achieve the quality people had come to expect from his work. Even up until the late 1980’s and early 90’s, his murals were decorating the walls of Twin City establishments and withstanding the test of time.
In the late 40’s and early 50’s Grandpa remarried and produced another family. He had successfully transitioned the modern age. Perhaps he’d worked it out during his days on the range considering how change had come so quickly. No chance really to decide if he would fit in, nor could he have known the world he knew best would as quickly disappear. His success due perhaps to staying busy, staying on the move; not stalled out long enough to mourn the many losses. That would be left to another generation. And as a part of that new generation, this would be a poignant lesson I would come to learn in years to come: unresolved issues we do not absolve or forgive such as: grief, rejection, bitterness, etc., we will pass along to our children. Phrases I’ve often heard from people regarding the unresolved nature of Indian Country like: “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” are empty and disempowering. Historic grief unattended develops into real illness in the form of depression, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It is foremost we cleanse or purify our emotional history to begin our own journey home. If not, we support hindering our own children by cutting short their early exploration, perhaps delivering abuse, or simply passing the mantle of depression through inherent DNA. To make right decisions on our own behalf, history must be relieved and laid to rest in each of us.
Grandpa died in the early 1960’s of emphysema. He rolled his own cigarettes for years and never knew anything but lead paint. But truly, if emphysema was an indication of anything, it warned his power, his breath was spent. The incredible energy to accept and curry change was awesome. He walked it at times without firm ground underneath, and many times, in great discomfort for what he saw. And what of a legacy? Parents leave an opening for their children to walk through spiritually by building on the past-sometimes from absenteeism, neglect, betrayal, or, as cherished and needed through acts of tenderness, of welcome-all are stimulus to reach deeper into ourselves for truth. All become a fair opportunity to see and to see healing.
As for Mother, she learned most of what she knew about family life from the movies. If kids were good, or had a little pocket change on the school’s books-usually sent from someone back home, they were bussed on weekends to the movies. Throughout the Great Depression, Grandpa stayed employed and regularly sent the kids money and candy. It always made Mother feel “special”, even as a ward of an institution throughout the year-even holidays.
What mother brought out of those schools after graduating from Haskell Institute’s Business Department-the Bureau of Indian Affair’s trade school in 1950, was control and regimentation. When she hooked up with my father and started at long last a regular family, she knew nothing as sure as regulated routine.
Once I was old enough to walk, pick things up and follow orders, I remember little of languishing in the rays of the sun-or as the Hopi say, “dancing on the rays of the sun”. I was three when I first remember standing on a chair reaching over the sink with my brother, Pete. He would wash and I would dry the dishes. Everything had an order; a definition-one did not vary the expectations. And although these orders left us with little of our own world to personally define, Mother always brought with her confining orders, a zeal for the confinement. She obviously loved finally having her own family, and a world of her choosing for them. Her talent and love for craftsmanship and art, inherent from her ancestors, passed intrinsically along to us. We spent a little time each day with controlled art projects as she watched over our shoulders; paint-by-numbers, finger painting, drawing, dressmaking, or watching her work on re-upholstery, sewing and creating doll clothes. And despite our expected duties, she always wanted it to seem fun. We gathered around her as she talked about life, engaging us in dialogue or made-up tales. We often hit the sack long before the sun went down looking forward to a bedtime story she conjured up from a stimulated imagination. We were lured pre-dusk by the prospect of hearing the next installment of the continuing saga.
She also gave us an everlasting appreciation for music. Mother spent a good deal of her spare time in school listening to a variety of music, especially opera and jazz. Most days in my pre-school years, she’d spread out a few of her current favorite albums on the floor near the record player. She’d sing along to her “hits” list doing housework, sewing, or just sit mesmerized by the picture the song created for her-playing it over and over, and over, till something distracted her and forced her to get on with the day. She was well read and knowledgeable of the great classic writers too. With all this education came a robust opinion on almost every subject that she never hesitated to share. All that was born of creativity was examined and touted enthusiastically.
Many times in my parent’s twenty year marriage the family went into debt over the purchase of art objects she just had to own. Sometimes these pieces were kept in their original box, too precious in her mind to be in the threatening environment of four active children. Nothing was ever bought, put on lay-away or credit with my father’s knowledge or blessing. She just had to have it… and my father would never have agreed.
Ever so often I’d enter my parent’s forbidden room and, like an interloper, rifle through the boxes that stored her most precious objects. I couldn’t resist the urge to examine the beautiful craftsmanship or unique artistry of each piece. Mother had a way of coveting her belongings, and sometimes everyone else’s; a feeling that could only have come from an early life of having nothing of her own. She often complained of a childhood filled with drab uniforms and an expected sameness the nuns equated with control, and devotion. What was left of self-expression was a very active imagination. Of all attempts to kill the spirit in the Indian, it was the attempt to make everyone the same that may have been most devastating. We understood it was our unique identity, creativity and respect for individuality that strengthened a whole tribe.
She dreamed of a richer life. Despite a constant search for money and living with meager furnishings, our walls still held cheap prints of Picasso paintings, Indian painter Oscar Howe, or original paintings from artists she’d met at the University of North Dakota. Pueblo pottery, Chinese figurines, Indian baskets hung alongside prints of European painters-homage and devotion to her artistic appreciation. She knew the difference between craft and art, “form” versus “function”. Extolling a depth of respect for man’s calling to create in an alternative language, she understood expressing another dimension to life that blends the physical, mental and spiritual. Why not? Within her own being she was capable of combining all three forces to explain and create “vision”. She would and could use the combined elements if needed. This embodiment I would one day come to recognize as the energy of “healing”. She took this force as part of motherhood and personal education, perhaps even a distraction as life transformed her. But as she aged, she emptied it all out as if once the children were gone it was no longer useful. Perhaps it left the door wide open for me to walk through. Here began my lifelong exploration of language, symbolism and the path to home. As the artist has discovered in a search to explain an aspect of the journey through conjoining the elements-“physical” and “mental”, creating a third energy revealing metaphor, art, life…
Walking through the open door, I began to explore the arts as well. I found the language of Creation spoken clearly, fluently through symbols, signs and metaphors, basic forms such as the house, the home, symbolic of our own inner self. To reflect and understand more fully how we fit we must enter a place where we can challenge the current to find change and growth. This transitory state can be found in motion, in untested territory, to seek “vision”, and find ourselves reflected in others.
Pueblo holy man, Joseph Rael in his book, Being and Vibration says about motion-the journey: “Wherever there is motion, the action of sight is there and there is capacity of listening. Listening is action, listening is vibration.” And even further, it is imperative our effort to continue to discover, remain focused in motion as a necessity, like the birds, the insects, the animal world without question, as instinct to gain revelation, miracle. “When a nation, a society, or individuals no longer create, they begin to die because they are no longer part of action or movement. They are no longer the beings of giving to receive; therefore they are not receiving…”, revelation.
Seeing and listening perpetuates our sinuous connection to home; the life beyond this earthly one. Symbolically, all motion is a quest, a journey, a pilgrimage. The ancestors first understood the importance of motion in far reaching walks eventually known as the Great Migrations. To Tierra del Fuego and the Arctic Circle, the walks, great or small, took the ancestors to the yet untried, the new and the unknown. In faith, all travels take us out of what we know and test the knowledge we’ve accrued. In anticipation we are willing to receive the strange, the foreign, and the unexpected. A willingness to receive the unexpected invites and encourages a spiritual state of being, or a more complete essence. In motion, in travel, in journey, in time suspended, revelations, experiences, thoughts reveal themselves and take form. A rear view mirror symbolically offers a reflection of where we were and who we are in the moment, relative to the road ahead.
