Visiting Elders Just back home from a week in Durango, Colorado. At Fort Lewis College where I’d been invited to be part of their Native American Center’s Visiting Elder series. Durango is a scenic, friendly town. It’s nestled 6,512 feet high in the heart of the encircling Rocky Mountains. Right within sight of one of the six sacred peaks of the Navajo homeland, the homeland known as Dine’tah. Hesperus Peak. Dibe’ Nitsaa. The mountain adorned with jet, its mantle of snow as white as the hair of an ancient being. Fort Lewis College itself is on a 500 foot mesa above the town. Built on the site of a former government Indian boarding school, it has transcended that troubled and often tragic past to transform itself into an institution of higher learning that is truly Native-friendly. Not a perfect place. That’s never possible with people. That’s why every Dine’ rug always has a deliberate flaw in it, to remind us humans that only the Creator can be without fault. Though we should all try to do and be our best. Which was how Fort Lewis seemed to me while I was there. A place where folks were truly trying hard to do things the right way. The people I met—from their President on down to the grounds keeper--were terrific. Native students, with ideas as inspiring as the atmosphere of the Native American Center itself. Where I could see in its wide-windowed, light-filled rooms young people using computer stations on one side of the hall while a drum group practiced in the meeting room on the other side. Advisers whose doors were always open. Teachers whose enthusiasm for drawing out the best from their classes was infectious. People working together to keep the balance. Like the Dine’ (Navajo) healing chant of the Beautyway.. Whose hypnotically repetitive lines are often translated into English to begin with: “Beauty before me I walk. . .” Although I have been told by Dine’ elders that the central word in that healing way – hozho-- means not just “beauty” but also “balance” and “blessing” and more. It’s been said that it’s the most important word in the Dine’ language. What a week it was. I truly did feel blessed to have been there. However, dang it, there was this one question that no one ever answered for me. “Okay,” I kept asking people. “So when do I meet this elder I’m supposed to be visiting?” Yuk yuk. Joking aside (but not too far aside, seeing as I how I get lonely without it), I still cannot stop envisioning myself in that familiar role I’ve taken over so many decades. Of the one who sits quietly and listens to those older than myself whose years have brought them so much wisdom. Not the one that others turn to for that kind of knowledge. Visiting elders. That was what I did when I was a grad student at Syracuse University in the Creative Writing program. I would hop on my old Harley and head on down the highway—cut through the heart of Haudenosaunee land—to the Nedrow exit. Onondaga. And there I would sit in the Onondaga Trading Post, have tea and listen to my friend Dewasentah/Alice Papineau. Head Clan Mother of the Eel Clan and keeper of so much knowledge that my head would be spinning faster than the wheels of my hawg as I chugged home to grad student housing after each visit. One of my early book of poems, ENTERING ONONDAGA, was inspired by her and those visits. I never knew what she was going to share with me. It might be a ghost story from the rez. A memory of what it was like when the people collecting kids to take them to the Thomas Indian School drove their wagon through town as parents tried to hide their children. A history lesson about how the Army Corps of Engineers came in and carved a catch basin reservoir out of the heart of the Onondaga Nation which, by the way, still owns a good part of the land on which Syracuse was built. Land leased by the Onondagas to the city. (Chief Oren Lyons would later mention that fact to me. Then say, with a chuckle, “And when the lease runs out, we do not plan to renew it. We’ll just take it back and then lower everyone’s taxes in the city so they won’t ever want the city government to get it back!) One day Dewasentah talked at length to me about the Great Law of Peace, the story of how the warring five nations of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca were brought together by the Peacemaker. Convinced to join together in unity and peace under the great white pine that still stands symbolically at Onondaga. “When I first heard the Great Law spoken in Indian,” she said, “it was at Six Nations. And it was as if everything, the grass, the trees, was listening and everything was alive.” There were so many stories that I heard from her on my visits. Some I’ve never written about or told because they were meant to teach me, not be talked about. There are always things meant to be kept secret and it was my honor to be trusted in that way. Though there were other things that she made clear to me were my duty to remember and share. “You hear what I’m telling you,” she would sometimes say. “One day when I’m gone, you tell it back to the children here.” A decade and a half after those grad school days, I was making one of my visits to the Onondaga Nation School that I try to do every year or two. During a break between classes, I stepped outside and looked down the road. A familiar figure was walking purposefully in my direction. It was Dewasentah, coming from her house which was only a hundred yards from ONS. She was carrying two things in her hands. A small lacrosse stick. An envelope with a name written on it and a eagle feather inside. “Here,” she said. “You have been coming here so long and working with our children. I decided you need an Onondaga name. I wrote it down as you would say it. You can check with Audrey about the correct way to spell it and put in the accents. Gah-ney-goh-hee-yoh. It means ‘The Good Mind.’ The Good Mind. The unselfish opposite of the Twisted Mind that we humans often fall into. A reminder to me about that. It’s a name that I carry quietly and have tried my best to deserve. Like so many of the other gifts I’ve been blessed to receive from my old people. When I’ve been visiting elders.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 22:20:57 +0000
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