Tribal Traditions are About Healing- By Amanda Torrey

In our culture, traditional tribal medicine is a form of Mysticism which is why indigenous cultures translate into some New Age Mumbo Jumbo.  Indians hate that.  But, the truth be told, mysticism, like everything else, has two sides.  Its public side which everybody superficially interested thinks is true; and its personal side which is only seen to the degree that one is aligning themselves with a “mystery” perspective.  By mystery I mean that which can’t be immediately accessed.  What this means is that writing to a public becomes difficult because society is generally so overwhelmed by its images of the fantastical that to share experiences in a way that communicates any “vision” with others becomes near impossible.  This is why I’ve been so nervous talking about Thunder Bay.  Part of the reason being that whenever anybody brings up “Indian” stuff, it smacks of New Age woo woo.  I’m not about woo woo neither are most indigenous peoples.  But this path of extreme challenge, whether emotional, mental or physical is a method used by many traditional cultures dating back millennia, that look to stretch our endurance. It is undeniable that something inside happens as we morph and change, whether on a St. Andrews Cross or during a Sweat.

As much as we think their traditions woo woo, believe me Indians don’t think much of us either.  Because of our pension to only see the fantastical, they too are extremely nervous about talking to people about their spiritual realms because some “White” person invariably copies their traditions, makes tons of money, hurts themselves and others and then blame Indian culture.

When I say that my interest is in comparative religions, I am defining religion as a vehicle saturated in a specific religious language by which we can express spirituality both (it seems) personally as well as generally.  Nobody likes to be marginalized.  Like Indians, the religious factions aren’t happy about being judged by anybody outside their indoctrinations.  Normon Solomon says in his very first paragraph of his Introduction to “Judaism, a very short Introduction” that it is impossible to teach a society immersed in Christian concepts and ideas.  Mirroring this very thought, in Episode 45 of The Deviant Minds Salon which was aired a month ago, Lee Harrington (Soul and Passion) while we were talking about Transgender became interested in how different my realities were from his. He said (not an exact quote, but my understanding) that its really interesting to see how important our filters are to our understanding of reality.  It is true that I am clueless about extreme body modification for all sorts of reasons, and I am not likely to change my mind because of my filters which are created by both my genetic predispositions and how they receive environmental influences.  I don’t want to minimalize anybody – and if that’s what filters do then we are doomed.  I had this same discussion with a young Radical Feminist from Northwestern.  To me even an idea of gender is not a social issue, but a biological one in so far as a huge part of our philosophical vision is born into us.  Nature/Nurture is a wonder but again another tangent.  The problem is those who have not taken any course or read anything about genetic predispositions would not understand what I mean.

Indigenous people here in this hemisphere embrace the label Indian because they’ve heard that the term is NOT pejorative but is in fact a term of respect.   It was not, apparently, used to label peoples thought to be from India because the seafarers were too stupid to know they were not in India. At that time India was called Hindustan and the land here was almost celestial it was so beautiful.  So the natives were named for being divine, Indian meaning something like People from Eden or some such thing.  It’s been too long since I’ve talked about these things to R_____.  I too then will use the term Indian, especially as now Native Americans don’t live in Canada…That’s humor folks.

I began studying First Nation Traditions at DePaul.  So, as I was developing The Deviant Minds, NFP as a non-profit, I wanted to have a valid spiritual perspective that wasn’t influenced by monotheistic models.  My mentor, Kay Read, advised I find R_____, an Anishinaabe Social Worker that uses First Nation traditions to treat kids in crisis — so I did.  Even as he talked to me at first because he liked Dr. Read, he was extremely cautious about my temple, podcast and lifestyle choices.  Developing non-religious models around spirit and soul as they can be applied to sex and sexual crisis is not his concern; nor is he interested in defending spirit and soul.  Still, he advised me to come up and see what he does before I get too excited about how he might fit into my “plans.”  IB is an extremely close friend in crisis so I asked her if she wanted to come with me to Thunder Bay to see R____ — which she did especially since LadyLynDePomona and Phoenix could come as well.  So the 4 of us took a 12 hour road trip from Chicago to Thunder Bay to meet R_____.

Yes it was amazingly beautiful.  If I were blogging about my trip I would rhapsodize about driving north along the western shores of Lake Superior from Duluth, Minnesota to Thunder Bay Canada. But I won’t.  What I hope to focus on here is First Nation teachings and their applications to how Spirit relates to Tribe (Community), Stories (what I’m doing here), Ritual (creating a beginning, middle and end context around a crisis), and the Sweat (a mode of reconciliation and purification).  The Mystery (Spirit) and SWEAT is where I am focusing on in this “telling” understanding now that what I’m about to say is again going through my filters and the way I grok an experience.

Before we even talked about a trip to Thunder Bay, R______ told me that Spirit’s natural way of being is balance.  To reach this balance it must reconcile itself in the world in four ways.  The first is from our selves as it aligns with the intellectual, emotional and physical parts of our psyche and how it relates to our “Soul” (don’t get squeaked).  After we balance our selves, this soul then first aligns with every other soul in the world (Gaia), then with the stars (our ancestors) and finally, with the spirits of our immediate environment.  This teaching was (for me) my purpose of participating in the Sweat.

There were four of us, two who had serious health issues.  R_________ whipped us into his RV and took us to Sullivan, an old military town 150 miles north of Thunder Bay to his teacher where we were given carefully into the hands of an elder, I__, who ushered us through an extraordinary experience.  I’s lodge is a 2 room house-like structure whereby young tree trunks(?) are bent and covered over by blankets and canvas.  One room has a pit dug into the ground where a fire is warming large white rocks.  The second room where we entered has a small mound in the center looking much like a woman’s pregnant belly sticking up from the bare ground.  There’s an opening where we crawled in and another pit in its center where the stones that are heated in the other room are deposited for the Sweat.  I___’s situation is further complicated by a congenital heart condition and Lyn has degenerative nerve damage from an old car accident.  I___ was at the left side of the opening (looking out from the inside).  Lyn crawled in next to him clockwise in the small space only big enough to sit up in being no easy feat considering her nerve damage.  I crawled in after Lyn, Phoenix after me, followed by R______ with his drum; I______ at the rear sitting on the right side of the opening.  As this structure is so snug, you MUST stay as close to the outer wall as possible

Since Phoenix is Lyn’s partner and caregiver, we crawled over each other to switch places which meant I ended up in the “hot” spot where the steam hit the hardest whenever I___ poured herbal water onto the HOT rocks.  I still don’t quite understand how my perception told me the rotation included four cycles of five minutes of heat before I___’s prayers and R’s chanting and drumming.  Those imagined 20 minutes really came out to be an hour.  I think my intense focus on the here and now concentrating on the heat made it seem shorter for whatever reason.  We were advised that if the heat got too much, the ground was cool and that heat stayed more toward the top of the small enclosure.  I thought of lying my cheek on the cool Earth at times, but something said, “Don’t lie down.  Face the Fire.”  So I sat back up and turned toward the pit and water poured from my body.  I may not have understood this correctly, but as I remember it, the first session is the opening; the second the male figure; the third, the female, and the fourth the closing.  I___’s prayers were beautiful — R’s singing with the drum was beautiful.  They were a comfort in the oven-like experience.  I didn’t think I could do it.  The spirit told me it wasn’t as hard as I thought.  Face the Fire it said.  And so I did.

R____ taught us other things the day after during our “processing” time, but I don’t want to share that here — maybe later.  He took us for a ride through the Reservation and we saw many wonderful things including a Bald-headed Eagle standing on a bit of land in the middle of a swamp that was separated by a small bridge from a bigger body of water to our right.  The land that Canada granted as a Reservation was Sacred and the Indians didn’t want to live on it, but preferred it as a place to be seen from a distance.  But this is what they were allotted…which actually is on the shore of Lake Superior…and ironically forced to lease to Canada as beachfront property.

R____ said we could take tumbled rocks from an amazing mountain on the Reservation whose face rises close to waters of Superior.  My stone looks a lot like a brick and sits under the window by the wall in my office.  I am very grateful to R_____ for his humor, knowledge and hospitality.   I am grateful to I___ and his sister that supplied us with appropriate attire for the sweat and distracting fun for the 5 minutes she lifted the blanket for us to get air.  I’ll probably go up again next fall.

So facing the fire means what?  Enduring an exchange that I think impossible?  Changing something I don’t believe is possible to change?  Taking personal responsibility for my actions?  Trusting one more time?  Accepting help when I need help?  Paying attention to how I am not aligned with my soul – Gaia – my ancestors – my house?  Reality is obviously a matter of perception, language, definition, social strictures.  If a spirit’s presence can be logically defined by cultures, or even by vision that not everybody has, we need to accept that not all interpretations are about US and HOW WE interpret our own visions.  That’s our right.

So with that said, for me?  There were spirits with us in the midst of the heat and steam.  We have a soul.  It is not religious, judgmental, nor does it ask us to do anything against our natures.  Interacting with spirit is interacting with Mystery which is a mystical process.  And all I know, is that it works for me – with or without my filters.