michele

Back in 2008, I was at UBC. Newly arrived to take on a huge responsibility. Before my attempt to achieve a Phd.

And there was a theme in my life, which is of “missing”, grief  and scared I guess…as it is recurrent and I move through the transitions of my life these days, all the while moving and shifting the thoughts and ideas given as sacred…here is a recollection…August 2008…and it is still relevant, and is still as strong as it was that day. And still teaches me today, about this work we are doing, trying to do.

…So I dreamt this morning in a way I haven’t for a long while…you were there and so I want to tell you this…I was told that you always tell the people who are in those dreams as sometimes there are pieces we get for someone else…for that person,….

I woke suddenly this morning.
After a night of running and outwitting others in order to keep safe what at times appeared to be a book of knowledge that the children had and were trying to keep. 
People in suits were trying to take it. 
The kids were hiding it in their clothes and in their stuff but the people kept finding it. 
People wanted it and were intent to destroy it. Benevolently at best, dysconsciously but unchecked nonetheless.
It felt like a night of defensiveness and violence. 
The kids were just kids with so much responsibility and were looking for adults to help them and found most were untrustworthy.
And then there I was there helping them and organizing them around me and I never questioned what they were trying to do or why. 
I could feel the issues of trust and the need to ensure sharing of knowledge for all of them.

When I finally left the children in relative safety,

I found my way to a room that had in it assembled the great Indian minds of today: PhD,’s new philosophers, thinkers, writers, storytellers, ceremonialists, tribal leaders, academics, …. as they came in–many of them late, joking about Indian time, as if it really was,

there were not enough chairs for them all…a wall obstructed the view of half of them.

There was no ‘Roberts Rules of order’ to the chairs and some tried in vain to make it into a circle. While others were moving them into lines and rows for lectures.

 
Some of them were dressed in their finest regalia, some of them were in those clothes you knew they wore everyday to their office also a regalia to their ceremony and work

 
Some brought their bundles, some their books (another bundle if you think about it)…all expecting to lead.

You were there. 
We, you and I, were leading them.

I started to notice and feel, because as I told you before, I like to watch and observe…I watched the chaos generations in the making.

The invited guests, they were all complaining, that I wasn’t doing it right. 
All complaining that I should be doing it this way or that.
That I should go around the room to be respectful of the minds and speakers there. 

Who was I to be leading them? 
Complaining that there wasn’t enough room, there wasn’t….you name it…while I was talking and others were sharing, people kept talking under their breath to each other.

I started and this is what I said

“At first sight, we see that we all come from different nations, different tribal ways and so whose ways were to be the best and therefore structure this gathering?

The thing we share, the common unity, “community” is that we are all “the people”. 
We all descend from the first peoples according the highest principles of being that we were all offered in our tribal ways.
With privilege comes responsibility to and with others.”

We had brought them all together to do the hardest work of their careers: tell their life stories, to write them, as evidence and as support to those coming.

We were brought together to add and in some cases begin the writing of the book of life, to give to the ones coming, the ones that I and so many others had spent so much time trying to find, love, in some cases protect and help, because they (the vulnerable ones) only had one copy left and it was in shambles and they couldn’t read it. 
Worse, it was a translation, from an interpretation, not the actual living stories because…technology. because social policy. because the agenda. because the agreement. because the time.

Meanwhile, the littlest ones of our people were protecting it with their lives because they were told it was important but not what was in it. 
And because they learned not to question their elders and their leadership, and loved them unconditionally, they were dying from fighting to keep it safe.

If we are to leave our great thoughts to academic minds is one thing, but to give the stories back to our littlest ones about how we came to be, they will find their use in this world again.

And then I told them about Indian time, the way my grandmother told me…that summertime is the most important time to work, but that there is always work for all of us to do…because when the food comes there is work to be done by all of us, indirectly and directly…that Indian time means being where we need to be, to help prepare and be prepared…being there way before the food is ready and being prepared…to work. Being ready to set up chairs, cook food, be humble.

and just as they came into the room, finding it not ready for them, and them not being ready for us either, the work will not get done. 
I told them about how I am late to places and it is the one lesson I try hard to teach my children…to be earlier and to be of use to others in being early, in whatever way I can: emotionally, intellectually, physically…

Whose responsibility is it to be ready and to prepare the room and to prepare themselves?
We have all been busy “arriving” that we are not spending enough time teaching the children–not just our own what we know and why. 

They are becoming grasshoppers in guise of “children and youth” by the same people who defined our ancestors as not human and and and
It is our own responsibility to be ready and to prepare the place and to honour the ones who do the preparing. 
Just as the spirits, whatever you call them, prepared the universe for us, we must do the same…for each other and for those to come.

That we must humble ourselves to know that even in this room, there no hierarchy of who is best to lead.

We must relearn leadership of the time of the first humans because without those humans and their leadership, we would not be here…and we can and will return to those ways because they are still alive.
But we need to be together to teach each other, remind each other, love each other and laugh with each other (flirt with each other) and lead each other and tell those stories the way our mentors and teachers did and do. The ways they learned from their people as conduits of the universe, great spirit…

It is possible and necessary for cultural continuance.

Some people will be angry with my words.
Some people may feel disrespected too. 
Some People may feel, this is not the right place for them to be. 
Some people may leave.
I ask that you stay for one day, this day and at the end of it, should you still feel you need to leave, do so, without regret, remorse or bad feelings unresolved. 
To do what we require of others, we will do ourselves.
And we will be stronger, all of us for it. 
It will feel uncomfortable perhaps.

But I ask us all to try by doing.

You took down the wall. 
And You and some other guys got up and brought in enough chairs for everyone. 
You stood over there. 

And then stood yourself beside me.

I asked them all, all of us to, in their own language and ways of being to all lead prayer for all of us there. 

And I woke up to their voices, some singing, some praying in their language, some in english, but all heartfelt and tearful. It was sunrise.

He’s always trying to help eh?

Misplacing the items he takes.

Holding them on our behalf, he says.

‘For safe keeping’, he says, convincingly…himself or you, it’s unclear really, who he’s trying to convince.

Wincing at you while he chatters away, staring into you.

For safe keeping, until later when you ask for them.

When you need them,… like really need them…like yesterday!

And… he forgets where he put them

And you, so desperately need them NOW!

Left to deal with “being flexible. Adaptive. Making do with what you have”.

Until then, you need something else.

So THEN he remembers and brings you what at first appears to you to be the wrong thing.

Presents them as gifts.

All the same, it’s been yours all along.

The whole time he’s held them, for you, from you.

That’s the problem, he says this time, with time…

It shifts.

It’s alive, like the people. Like all living things.

And off he goes, leaving you to sit with your self, wondering…what the heck? What to do? What do I know?

We ALL have that time…

You know…

When we look about to find what we have thought long and deeply about…

That we’ve long lost our reflections, and therefore, somehow we have lost our selves.

…and reminisce that our olders did the same and went about looking for mirrors…they didn’t.

They were too busy being alive and knowing it.

Too busy to be distracted and dis-track-ed by a “train of thought”.

But we, you and I, we’ve been looking for a while now.

Trained. Tracked. Distracted.

It all started you know, back when our lakes and rivers weren’t reflecting us

…they were getting damned up and polluted or flooded.

Lands and mountains moved from here to there without a thought about it and what was left.

“You can, actually move a mountain if you tried” and a river, and a stream, sadly.

And we were given tins of salmon and these really nice looking glasses to look in…gifts they said.

Mine got a little bent with time. You know the way old mirrors go foggy.

When I was little I was given another one, forced to hold in my right hand…

It would distort me. For years.

I never look quite right when I looked at it to see me.

For years I tried to break it, break me.

But I could never really commit to the mess of it.

The cleansing I required to rid the mess deemed unbearable.

After a while, I just left it there. That mirror.

“nothing to see here folks”…as I erased my self by not looking in that mirror.

Until finally went home.

I couldn’t pack everything, there was so much baggage to consider.

So I left it.

It wouldn’t fit.

I didn’t like it anyways.

After all, like everything else, it was replaceable…Wasn’t it?

Once at home though, I went in search of my mirror after the only ones that recognized me, left this world for that one.

But I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find one.

Most people couldn’t understand why I would want to see what was in them anyways.

Especially since they thought I had such a nice replacement somewhere. Why on earth would I want to see theirs? Ours? Could I still have one? From whom does one get a mirror anyway? Such disturbing questions I brought.

I think they liked toiling with the idea of having more than one, never realizing its’ illusion was deep.

And that those mirrors are just that. An illusion

Lucky me.

So Coyote, always willing to help me out, went out.

He went out and found me one and brought it back.

I looked at it for a minute.

“hey…Wait a minute! This ain’t right! Where’d you get this?”

“At the trading post, school library, museum, resort gift shop, social services and…the airport gift shop and customs. Why?”eyes darting as he recounted his latest journey here and there in a list that resembled Saturday morning errands.

I turned it over to reflect him to himself.

“Here’s why? Look it. Who’s that?”

With chagrin he looks at me, for a moment.

And then smiles as he preens himself all stretched out.

His butt that way. His nose this way.

His nose, points, all the way up, touching the reflection of his ‘mirror’.

For a moment, lovingly nudges it, in my hand.

The slight movement of one whose fondness cannot always find outright expression.

And says “well that’s an indian!”

I stopped for a minute shaking my head, sigh and turned it again to face me.

Looking at me, looking at it, I realized, he was absolutely right.

There in place of the glass and a handle, coyote had fashioned a postcard picture into a ‘Made in China” dreamcatcher with a stick stuck enough to handle it.

And the picture in the postcard? An Edward Curtis “Indian”, as homogeneous, as he made us into art.

And there I was, in my search for myself, realizing at that moment, that what I was looking for is no more reflected in this mirror than exists in that imagined mirror, of my mind. Put there by this and that idea by that one or this guy over here and his poetry and prose.

Because an Indian is as constructed as Edward Curtis recorded them. Defined in policy just the same as his photos binded and bonded us to the past and as he/they saw us/them.

“But it’s not me” I said finally.

“Well no it’s not, but you’re not an indian.”

I look at him, at the Indian cradled in my lap while I sit, crisscross apple sauce, on the deck beside coyote as he licks one paw and then offers it to me.

I hear “she ain’t pretty, she just looks that way” by the Northern Pikes, playing in my head.

Eye ball to eye ball now, I say with my heart in my throat as if I will choke…

“But I need a mirror, How am I supposed to know if I am who I am if …

“Smoke and mirrors…pictures and remembrances. All games of the mind.” He says. “not our games. Our games are fun.” He winks softly as if involuntarily as he says so.

Paw in hand. What can I say?

“Well you better go look in the water for all that learning you’re looking for, hike the hill and sit in the grass, just like your First Peoples did. And listen like they did when they woke.” He pulls and prods me with his paw as if to move me.

And I realize, there it is…that mirror.

“What you do with them remembrances, those ideas, those pictures they made, is up to you now. That is the reflection you’re looking to find.

You live it.

You don’t see no white guy reflecting Shakespeare’s sensibilities now do ya???

Nope.”

How many times my ancestors would tell me before they left this world for that one…KNOW YOUR PLACE

Why would we do that to ourselves…focus on someone else’s picture of our self?

On the reflections from mirrors that we did not create our selves.

…use your illusions…and then, I think…regenerate and transformation…. Collecting until it replaces our own self and we can parade it with pride that we can transform into figments of others imaginations…

I get up and stories in songs sung in the night come to mind and dizzily set me back into my chair.

Habit I suppose, but I take and sip my tea. Sitting and realizing I am on the porch and looking out just as my grandmother did. Seeing what she saw. I was part of her, science finally admitted what we knew, DNA in lands and waterways, deep seeded connections. Humans, generation…generate…gene…gen

And coyote, gets up, makes circles into a nest and plops down to snooze. Peeks at me once and snuggles in against the chill.

My turn to watch him and realize…

He’s a smart one, coyote, even when he’s annoying eh?

Blessings. O^u

― Rumi “The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” 

Recollections of sitting on porches and talking about life, the universe and everything with my people, here and there Summer 1998