Bash
stood there face to face with a man in blue jeans and sunglasses. A medicine
man in a denim jacket and straw cowboy hat. He hadn't known what to expect,
but this wasn't it. Medicine men don't wear cowboy boots, do they?
What you are about to read is what I feel to be
some of the most honest writing that I have ever done. Then again, I could
be full of shit. I've been full of shit before and I'll be full of shit again.
I think this realization is part of what makes this an honest piece. It is
comprised of my thought processes and how these have evolved over the years.
It also includes a story, many stories, the story of my visit to a medicine
man in Talequah, Oklahoma. This story has seen many incarnations trying to
find its form. An author who has been instrumental in that process is Gerald
Vizenor and his novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles.
This novel tells the stories of a group of pilgrims
traveling through a post-apocalyptic world that has run out of gasoline. One
of the main characters is Proude Cedarfaire, a shaman trickster who exposes
"terminal creeds" in the people he meets. Terminal creeds are ways of thinking
and acting that can only result in death and destruction, when "Beliefs and
traditions (become) greater than the love of living." (15) Proude uses humor
and trickery to confront the destructive forces of the world. As he states,
you can "Outwit but never kill evil... The tricksters and warrior clowns have
stopped more evil violence with their wit than have lovers with their lust
and fools with the power of rage." (15)
Vizenor is also a trickster. He exposes the terminal
creeds of his characters, himself, and the reader through the use of satire.
Elizabeth Blair, in her essay "Text as trickster: Postmodern language games
in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart," states that "According to Vizenor,
one of the most effective ways to corrupt the sacred center is with satire."(np)
In my opinion, any worthwhile system of thought
or belief should include healthy portions of both reverence and mirth. I'm
suspect of anything that is beyond humor. Anything that can't be laughed at
is beyond question. Anything beyond question is likely to be a terminal creed.
You have to test your worldview. Vizenor has helped me to test mine.
His mother held a picture for him to look at;
one of those sepia colored memories that inhabit musty attics. His five-year-old
eyes traced the lines of the high cheekbones in the figure's face which stared
across the generations from the picture frame. His chubby fingers searched
his own face, finding the same features beneath the baby-fat on either side
of his pug nose.
This, she said, is a picture of your
Great-Great-Grandpa Bash Alexander Tarwater. That's where your name comes
from. He was full-blooded Cherokee.
What's a Cherokee? little B.A. asked.
That's an Indian tribe that your ancestors
belonged to.
Am I an Indian, too?
No, we're not Indian anymore.
What
is an Indian? That question used to concern me a great deal. The way I figure
it, I am 3/32 Cherokee Indian. I have 1/16 from my mom and 1/32 from my dad.
Neither family preserved any of the traditional knowledge. Growing up, I always
had a romantic notion that Indians were kinder, gentler, more insightful,
and more spiritual people. In Bearheart, Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher
is asked to define who is an Indian. She defines an Indian as "a member of
a recognized tribe and a person who has Indian blood." (195) At one point
in my life, I was bound and determined to document my Indian blood to prove
that I was a Cherokee Indian, looking for validation from the federal government.
It seems outrageous to me now that I thought at one time a certificate would
make me more spiritual, more complete, more Indian. This isn't to say that
I wasn't heartfelt in my convictions. As a child, I tormented myself with
guilt over what the whites have done to the native people of this land, what
my people had done to my people. I wondered how my blood could live with itself
in my veins. Someday, I promised myself, I would make amends.
Through my life, I've collected Native American
art, books, and ornaments. I've studied Native American mythology and have
aspirations of becoming a storyteller. I always felt that the only way to
accomplish this was to learn the stories of others. I purchased a medicine
pouch in Portland, Oregon back in '89. I've worn it constantly for eight years
now, taking it off only to bathe. I place small tokens in it that contain
important moments in my life. At first, it made me feel more Indian. I don't
feel that way any more. I've fed it with love, life, and energy for so long,
it is a part of me. It contains the stories of life that I've shared with
the world. I've learned a few lessons about what it means for me to be "Indian"
and whose stories I am destined to tell.
B.A. headed down to the Ouchita Mountains in
central Arkansas to mine crystals. The valley from Ft. Smith was lined with
weathered rock mountains. The lines in the rock ran up and down showing how
the Earth had buckled and tossed her layers on their sides.
He spent the whole day working the ribbons of
quartz in the mine walls, sifting through the slag piles looking for the perfect
crystal. At the end of the day, his fingers were striped with red cuts where
the sharp quartz had separated his skin. The sun disappeared in the valley
and pushed storm clouds up the sides of the mountain. Lightening danced on
the peaks, trading energy with the crystal deposits. He ducked beneath the
overhang of an old abandoned shack to light a fire and wait out the storm.
Wet wood finally caught. He sat there contemplating
the blue flame that squeezed its way out of a rotten log. Tiny veins of runoff
brushed his feet searching for lower ground.
He thought of family: his wife and two kids in
Kansas City, his mother and father in St. Louis, and ancestors who had weathered
these same storms gathered around reassuring fires. He traced the lineage
in his mind: German farmers in southeastern Missouri, Welsh miners in Alabama,
Cherokee villagers in eastern woodlands.
Bash rolled a joint and offered the smoke to
the four directions, the ancestors, those who had gone before. He took a
puff and blew the deep fumes into the fire. The blue flame lost its hold
on the smoldering log. Moist white smoke billowed out of the rotten wood.
It hesitated, then took form. Long white hair framed familiar cheekbones
beneath archaic eyes. The rain gave way to a village at the edge of a virgin
forest. The ancient turned toward the wall of trees and pointed toward a
bearded man with pallid skin who emerged from the treeline. She shed knowing
tears as her son, her history, left her side and followed the white-man into
a different world. She turned toward Bash, fixed him in her mind. Her thoughts
rang out:
It will come back. The blood will tell.
She put her hands on her breast, then extended them to B.A. Her hands glowed
like the noon sun dancing in a crystal. She stepped forward and pressed the
light into his solar plexus. A bird fluttered inside him.
It's interesting that when I read Silko's Ceremony
and Vizenor's Bearheart during the same semester, it was Ceremony that really
struck home with me. I really needed Silko's story at that time. I wasn't
quite ready for the trickster. I was more in need of Grandma Spider's embrace.
After my bout with the medicine man, it was truly wonderful to be included
in a family that I would be proud to be a part of. It was reassuring and affirming
to hear "you don't write off all the white people, just like you don't trust
all the Indians." (128) I didn't need to be an Indian, a wannabe, or a colonizing
white devil. I could just be family because "human beings were one clan again."
(246)
Bash had decided it was time to find his people,
the tribe that his family had left behind. He sat in a Texaco parking lot
in Talequah. Two nights ago he talked to Crosslin Smith, head medicine man
of the Cherokee Nation on the phone.
I want to learn the Cherokee traditions.
Yeah, well if your ever in Talequah, look
me up. Click.
Bash brought a leather pouch filled with tobacco
as a gift. He made the pouch himself. He had heard that tobacco was an appropriate
payment for services rendered by a medicine man. He was trying to do it right.
Hello, Mr. Smith? This is Bash Tarwater.
I talked to you on the phone two days ago. You said if I was ever in Talequah,
I should look you up.
The line was silent.
My first reading of Ceremony was timed
perfectly. I read it about fourteen months after my visit to Crosslin Smith.
He showed me that I wasn't part of the Cherokee tribe. My romantic notions
were crushed. The warm reception I hoped was waiting for me in Talequah turned
out to be an eye- opening thump on the head. Silko gave me that reception.
Vizenor was another two-by-four that failed to register on top of the lumps
I already had. My second sitting of Bearheart for this study followed
the first by about two years. In keeping with my first contact with these
novels, I reread Ceremony first. It didn't fail me. I ended up with
ecstatic tears and a hopeful vision for all that is. Appropriately, I moved
on to pay a visit to the trickster in the forms of Vizenor, Proude Cedarfaire,
Benito Saint Plumero, and the endless cast of grinning pranksters that inhabit
the pages of Bearheart. This time, the trickster didn't fail to drop
my pants and run them up the flagpole. I had figured out that I didn't need
to be Indian to be myself, but I hadn't really explored the terminal creeds
that made me: "We become our memories and what we believe... We become the
terminal creeds we speak. Our words limit the animals we would become." (147)
I don't
do ceremonies any more. I'm retired. |
|
I don't want a ceremony. I want to learn the old ways.
I want you to teach me the old Cherokee traditions.
What do you need that for, ain't you got a life?
Sounds like your just looking for some table dressing to impress your friends.
Bash was stunned. He was being sincere. I
want to come home to my tribe and honor my ancestors. What's wrong with that?
You just want to use our tradition for show.
You got no respect, just like everyone else.
B.A. couldn't understand what he had done wrong.
He looked out over the Texaco sign at the darkening sky. A storm was rolling
in. Rain blew through his open window. A violent cloud was heading across
the border to birth tornadoes in the Ouchita Mountains. There was nothing
left to say.
Look, Crosslin mumbled, if you want
to come up to my place, you can.
Bash looked at the leather pouch in his lap.
He made it for Crosslin Smith, so he might as well deliver it and leave.
No more questions. Crosslin rifled the directions over the phone. B.A. knew
better than to ask him to repeat them.
My wife says I'm a pack-rat. I collect everything.
When I moved from St. Louis to Kansas City after I got out of high school,
I loaded everything I ever refused to throw away in the trunk of my dad's
Mercury Montego. The back end of the car drooped like a full diaper. When
we unloaded it at the place that I was going to stay, we got to the bottom
of the trunk and there was the 65 pound sewer lid that I found on a St. Louis
street years earlier. My dad looked at me with his best German-father stare
and said, "No wonder we dragged ass all the way up here. Probably blew the
shocks out. What the hell do you need with a damn sewer lid? I never will
understand you." My wife says the same thing. I try to explain to her that
everything I keep has a story and a purpose. When people come over to my house,
I show them things. Each item tells them something about me, the world, and
themselves. I found a compatriot in Old Betonie in Ceremony.
When Tayo visits him, he looks around at all
the crap laying around the old hogan. There are piles of newspapers, Coke
bottles, phone books and old calendars interspersed with traditional Navaho
medicine man gear. Tayo can't understand why Betonie keeps all of this junk.
But, as he looks around, he spots two calendars that his Uncle Josiah used
to have. It's a memory, a connection. Betonie says, "That gives me some place
to start." (121) The world is no longer contained in just one culture where
there has been contact with others. To make the story fit, to make "something
great and inclusive of everything," changes and additions have to be made.
As Betonie tells Tayo, "after the white people came, elements in this world
began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made
changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth
keeps the ceremonies strong." (126)
He drove north hoping he could find the gravel
road that led to the medicine man's house. Images of the picture his mom had
shown him, the night in the Ouchita Mountains, years spent trying to make
sense of the voice inside him tumbled through his brain as he strained to
see through the drumming rain. It had all come to nothing, driving around
in an Oklahoma thunderstorm looking for a cranky old medicine man.
The rain cleared as he pulled into the driveway,
second house on the left, a mile from the first. A dark-skinned cowboy was
leaning on pickup truck looking unamused. Bash grabbed the tobacco pouch and
stepped out of his van.
Are you Crosslin Smith?
Yeah, I'm Crosslin Smith. Who are you anyway?
What do you want from me?
Good question. B.A. just wanted to give him the
pouch and get the hell out of there. Just hand it to him and go. Like
I told you. I want to learn the old ways.
So you can use them to
impress people? You got no respect for it. You're like all the other whites.
You got no sense of value.
Sometimes, when I share an item and its story
with someone else and it has more importance or pertinence to that person's
life, I give it to them. Our stories combine and grow. They become part of
each other, yet, they were never separated to begin with. The stories change
and evolve, yet, they never change.
This is what I found in Bearheart. Proude
is asked to tell a story at the house of the Gay Minikins. He tells of a woman
who makes love with a mongrel that has transformed into a man and become pregnant
by him (62-3). Later, Inawa Biwide relates the same story to Lilith Mae.
Yet, it is not the same story. It has changed according to the teller and
the audience. This was not foreign or unfamiliar to me. I am acquainted with
the fluid nature of oral tradition. What hadn't occurred to me was what Vizenor
has accomplished with his novel. He has brought a fluid nature to the written
tradition. He tells the story as well. Only, this time, the woman is Lilith
Mae and her lovers are the two dogs that stay with her even in death.
When I first recorded the story of my visit to
the medicine man, I tried to remain as faithful to reality as possible. Matching
it to my memory made it special to me. I could remember the words we said
and the roads I traveled. But, there was something lacking. It didn't read
well for others. They took it as fiction and failed to take the same thing
from the experience as me. I realize now that it is harmful and egotistical
to think that I can give someone my exact experience. Trying to enforce my
reality on others to maintain and support the integrity of my vision is a
terminal creed. "Survival is not narcissism." (Vizenor 198)
Bash was getting pissed. This guy had no idea
who he was. He had no idea what B.A. felt. I've got a sense of value,
he blurted out.
Oh, yeah, what's value?
Value is a way of life. It's how you do
things. It's doing something because it's right and not doing something because
it's wrong. It's dealing with people honorably no matter who they are.
He breathed through his teeth trying to stop himself from shaking.
But you got no sense of identity. You want
to use these traditions without giving them proper respect. You don't know
who you are.
Kurt Spellmeyer states, "tales must be told, retold,
and revised until they seem real to the teller." (267) I'll take him one better
and say that tales must be told, retold, and revised until they seem real
to the listener. My experience with the medicine man has been told and retold
to those around me. When I first recorded it, I omitted the things that happened
when I went into his house. I felt that by committing it to paper, I was
losing control of it. I wouldn't be there to defend, explain, and amend the
story as I saw fit. I refused to be "absent from any discussion of (my) world."
(Sarris 23) By putting the story in the first person, I felt that I was making
my presence known, that I had established a thin chord of control on the
reader.
Yet, in Ceremony and Bearheart,
the author is present, especially in Bearheart. Vizenor is
there in the stories of the pilgrims. He is the trickster, milking everyone's
sacred cow and squirting it in our faces. These novels are both written in
the third person. I realized that the only way to truly share this story
with the reader was to change the narrative perspective to the third person,
giving up the possession of the story to the process of the story.
Yeah? Crosslin leaned forward and looked
through Bash's eyes at the one behind him. WHO ARE YOU?
Bash felt like he'd been hit in the head with
a two-by-four. He started to panic thinking back on philosophy classes where
Jesuits had tried to tear him down to rebuild him in their image. It didn't
work then, it wasn't going to work now. He didn't have time to think. He didn't
have time to be profound...
I'm me!
Brilliant. That really showed him.
He put his hands to his chest and remembered the
glow that had been put there. He cradled it and extended it to Crosslin.
I'm the glow in my heart. The knowledge
that has been with me from before I can remember. The part of me that has
seen everything I've ever experienced. I'm everything and I'm nothing. I'm
me and I'm you. I can't put a name to it, I just know it's there.
He returned the glow to his chest and waited.
Smith drew back for the final blow. You didn't
come here to learn the old ways. What do you really want?
Vizenor questions meaning and truth as opposed
to trying to convince us of something. It has occurred to me that even speaking
with someone face-to-face, there is no way to guarantee that they will take
from the discussion what I think I have given them. Or, worse, taking from
it what I believe they should. That's a terminal creed. If I have no control
over a spoken story, what makes me think I have control over a written story.
While I place great faith in dialog and personal contact, "the heart changes
the world not the mouth." (230) The question is, could I put my heart into
writing? I decided to give it a shot and revise In the Driveway of the Medicine
Man.
Bash felt his shoulders slump, the anger fell
away. There was nothing left to say. Look, I've known that I have
Cherokee blood ever since I was five-years-old. It's shadowed my whole life
looking for a voice. I have to do something with it. I need to know whether
to embrace it or bury it. One way or the other, I need to get on with my
life.
Crosslin surveyed thirty years of confusion in
a single glance. He took a step back. His eyes softened.
Yes, there is a darkness around you. Why don't you come inside
and we'll talk.
|
|
We all share the same story. The story of the process that is creation. The
original version of this story was in the first person. It was my way of possessing
the story in the very act of sharing it. Hiding the discussion inside Crosslin
Smith's house was an act of denial and mistrust of the reader. I rationalized
it to myself that I was honoring Crosslin by not divulging what we had discussed.
I felt that I couldn't trust his/our words to someone without his/our permission.
The medicine man sat down in an overstuffed chair
and motioned to a couch across from him. Bash looked around the room as he
sat down. It looked like a rummage sale had exploded all over the walls and
floors. It kind of reminded him of his grandmother's house.
Lord knows, Crosslin didn't trust me until he
had smacked me upside the head to see if I could remain standing. Mistrust
is another terminal creed. I have often told people that trust is an all or
nothing proposition. Either you trust people or you don't. There are people
who don't want us to trust each other. Take a look at the media. We are constantly
bombarded with images of dangerous strangers that want to take your life,
your property, and your soul.
Once there was a tribal dance that I couldn't
go to. I was sick, or tired, or something. The next day, my friend said he
saw me dancing around the circle with everyone else. I didn't tell him I wasn't
there. It's weird when that happens.
It's profitable to keep people divided, they're
easier to conquer that way. If we don't start trusting each other, we'll never
survive: "Mistrusting each other gives them evil power over us." (Vizenor
229)
I've worked on ecumenical councils with folks
like Robert Schueller. I've even attended the same function with Dr. Ruth
Westheimer. She said that she already knew me. I asked her if she meant in
the biblical sense. Hah-ha. She was short but cute.
There was one preacher who asked me for a
story. I told him a story about Eagle. A year later I was at a council and
he opened his speech with that story. He didn't even give me credit. I don't
tell him stories no more.
So I decided to entrust the story of the medicine man to those
I haven't met. This was a big step for me. My writing usually takes a reflective
posture that centers on how I don't trust writing. After encountering Vizenor,
I've loosened up on that stand. Bearheart is a test(e)ment to his
incredibly huge balls. It takes a lot of courage to present the world with
their own story in terms that they are not willing to recognize. But, we
have to recognize our own story, including the fact that we eat, shit, breathe,
and fuck, and sometimes, we do horrible things to one another. The trickster's
job is to reveal those things to us. He/she sweeps those things out from
under the carpet and places them before us in full view. The trickster forces
the issues that others would distract us from.
Something I've learned as I've gotten older
is the tools aren't the real medicine. I know all about herbs and chants and
everything else. I figured you had to have them or else it wouldn't work.
Well, a while ago, I had a woman come to me
for a healing. She was real bad off. The night before I had made up a batch
of herbs and put them in the refrigerator. The stuff was red liquid from the
herbs I used. When she got there I did the healing and she left feeling fine,
fully recovered. She left a bag of groceries for me by the door. When I took
the bowl back to the fridge I saw that I had picked up the wrong thing. I
had left the mixture on the shelf and grabbed the Kool-aid I had for the kids.
Boy, if that lady ever knew I used Kool-aid to heal her she'd kill me.
The main thing I learned from Crosslin Smith is
that being a member of a tribe is more than sharing the same blood. If we
go back far enough, we all share the same blood. What makes a tribe is community.
Not long ago, I went to a Native American art fair out at Haskell University
in Lawrence, Kansas. I wandered around and watched the people there. It was
easy to see who didn't fit in. People who knew each other's names, families,
and histories belonged there. I didn't. If I hung around, I might reach that
point; help out where I could, get to know the names and faces.
Bash asked the medicine man, What about
people that want to learn about the old ways. Is there any way they can learn?
What do they need to know for?
There are a lot of people in the city
that aren't satisfied with the way things are. They live in a world with
concrete and steel all around them. It's hard to see the changes of the seasons
much less stay in touch with the Earth. They want to change it but they don't
have a system or a model to work from. Don't you think that those with good
hearts that really want to find a better way to live should have some guidance?
I'll tell you, Crosslin
replied, Some people you can tell and they get it. Others you can talk
to and talk to and talk to and they'll never get it. You have to show those
people. I could do a ceremony for you right now but it wouldn't do any good.
Some you tell, others you gotta show. Make them feel like something has really
happened. That's the only way you'll convince them.
But what about the people that are searching?
What about them?
I guess there is a need. But, I'm not sure
what to do about it, said the medicine man.
When the characters in Bearheart make
lists of the words they "most most most appreciate" (111) to decide who shall
face the evil gambler, Proude lists the names of those on the pilgrimage.
He understands the importance of tribe and family. Family in all its glory
and pain. Family takes care of each other. Family hurts and forgives each
other. I went to Talequah expecting to find a long lost part of my family.
I had to come back home to Kansas City to find that. There is a saying in
my tribe: "Family is very simple– help with the chores and don't shit on
the floors." Family is there no matter what. We see all the beauty and ugliness
of each other, and accept the choices made. Sometimes the individual turns
away from family. Sometimes you lose members.
The pilgrims in Bearheart take care of
each other as best they can. The one thing they can't do is save individuals
from their own terminal creeds. Little Big Mouse wishes to become part of
everything and offers herself up to the cripples and mutants created by those
who don't care. She accomplishes this as the mutants tear her to pieces and
abscond with her various parts. The pilgrims are helpless to stop this. I
have watched members of my own family walk away and destroy themselves. You
do what you can, but, sometimes, you have to let those around you experience
the lessons and ends that they design for themselves.
The conversation ended. Bash wasn't sure what
to do with the tobacco pouch he had made for the medicine man. After all,
they just sat and talked shop. Would it be an insult to give the medicine
man a gift? Then he thought,
I made this for him. I should get the
hell over myself.
He offered the pouch to the medicine man with
both hands.
I made this for you. It has organic tobacco
in it. I hope you can use it.
Crosslin took the pouch and put it on a table.
As B.A. walked through the door the medicine man placed his hand on Bash's
shoulder and said, Maybe we'll meet again.
Maybe. Bash walked to his van and climbed
inside. He wasn't sure what just happened or what it meant. Eventually, it
would make sense. He pulled out of the driveway and headed home thinking about
the things the medicine man said. He drove north, back to his wife, his children,
his home, his family, his tribe...
Ever since that day, he asks himself the questions
that the medicine man confronted him with: What is value? Who are you?
What do you want? Every day, the answers change and remain the same.
I still wear the medicine bag I bought in Portland.
I still place tokens of stories inside. I no longer wear it to be one of the
"classic hobbycraft mannikins dressed in throwaway pantribal vestments, promotional
hierograms of cultural suicide." (104) Years ago, descriptions like this
and the term "wannabe" made me angry and scared. I still believe that there
is a way to bring us out of our isolation and colonial attitudes, both white
and Indian. Like Vizenor, Silko, and countless other mixed-bloods, if the
blood of different tribes can co-exist in the veins it can co-exist in the
world. My wanting to be Indian was the fear of not being Indian. But, historical
and romantic notions of Indianess don't help me deal with the world at hand.
This is where I need to focus my attentions and my love. As Proude Cedarfaire
says, "The power of the spirit is carried in the heart not in histories and
materials. The living hold the foolishness of the past... Good spirits soar
with the birds and the sun not in secret bundles." (Vizenor 218)
My stories are yours, and yours mine. The world
created us just as we create the world. My beliefs are based on what is in
my heart. And, these days, I welcome the trickster to come and try them. If
they don't survive his/her humor, they weren't meant to be.
Vizenor, the medicine man, my family, and you
have helped me to gather the balls to pursue my life the way I think best.
I value my life and my love. I am the storyteller and the audience. I want
to be satisfied that I do my best. I will meet the medicine man again. I
meet him every time I share my life.
—Phill Huber © 1997
Works Cited:
Blair, Elizabeth, "Text as trickster: Postmodern language
games in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart..." MELUS Vol. 20, 1 January 1995:
75. Electric Library. Online. 3 October 1996.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: The Viking
Press, 1977.
Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. |
