We watched the movie ’Smoke Signals’ (1998). It seemed like it was a kind of funny, life on the reservation, Native American Indian movie. It was a warm story of a healing of a deep wound from childhood. Then it caught me completely by surprise in the last scene, when the grandmother asks her young adult grandson:

  “Tell me what has happened, what is happening and what will come to be?”

He closes his eyes and a scene begins “How shall we forgive our fathers…?”  It caught me so by surprise, the tears were jumping from my eyes. Do I even know what that means? Is there anything to forgive? Have I forgiven? Would I know if I had, or hadn’t????? The statement and questions are as alive and as raw in me upon waking up the following morning.

The young Indian spoke:

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us
too often
Or forever
When we were little
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
Or making us nervous because
there never seemed
to be any rage there at all

Do we forgive our fathers for marrying
Or not marrying
Our mothers?
For divorcing
Or not divorcing our mothers
And shall we forgive them
for their excesses of warmth or coldness?

Shall we forgive them for pushing
Or leaning
For shutting doors
For speaking through walls
Or never speaking
Or never being silent

Do we forgive our fathers
In our age
Or in theirs
Or in their deaths
Saying it to them
Or not saying it
If we forgive our fathers
What is left?
- Sherman Alexie

 

And then I could think of nothing else until I wrote…

How Shall We Forgive Our Fathers?

 How shall we forgive our fathers?

By first believing the child

 It’s true
They never could have got it all right
We never do

 Nevertheless
If you don’t believe the child,
there’s nothing to forgive

 And if you believe her
Why then
You must weep and rage
And emote your grief
for the breaking
of a sacred trust

 Even as you understand
He was who he was
And he did what he did

And forgiveness -
what of that?

I sound the word on my tongue
like a foreign language word
whose meaning is not known to me

 The fact that he did this,
I would never allow into the parlor
of my clean house

Would not allow it
to sully
the good furniture

 Okay.
So it happened.
I bark harshly, brusquely
Push her roughly
Out

Just keep it in the kitchen
the scullery
the outhouse

 Just don’t bring it into
The good room
The front room

And Walt Whitman rejoins
To the good preacher
And the good sermon:

THIS TOO IS GOD:

The disgusting
And base

And ugly beyond words…

 Could I forgive my father?
The idea delights me
The idea
That the possibility
is not too abstract
to grasp

 I see I can forgive him
simply
only in so far
as I can
believe the child

and bring her kindly
gently
into the good room

saying
come, you belong here
This is your home

whatever happens
whatever happened

This is your home…
always!

 Only then is it plain
that love is forever
and forgiveness is as easy
as falling off a log

 Then for my mother and myself
I say
Do you know
just how dear
he is to me?

He is forgiven
He is forgiven
He is forgiven
before we ever began

 Dinna ye hear it?
Dinna ye hear it?
The piper’s call is clear
to those who will only listen
to those who have ears to hear:

 No harm was ever meant
in all the universe
though things grew dire
and things grew worse

 No harm was ever meant
in all the universe
Just to remember this
beckons in the verse
we dreamed of.

 CCR McF. California, 2005

 *~*~*

Today, 2008; three years on, this extraordinary ‘encounter’/revelation/resolution epic leapt right back up at me from where it had lain buried in my files since I wrote it down.  Johanna had her visions, vivid and vibrant from early childhood. But why was I drawn to respond to the child/teen suicide epidemic on the Reservation?

 Dear God in Heaven; the wave went through me in my immersion up there (not my usual MO in itself!), I was in no way prepared for it feeling so… Scottish!  Was that old U.S. army that ran all over these lands, was it manned with that many Scots abroad?? Was all that was rent and riven in our homeland delivered wholesale upon the heads of a People, these people??

 The summer was surreal. I even found Harebells growing wild near Wounded Knee, a thing unseen since I left the Highlands of Scotland. And then, just as I was leaving the Reservation and heading straight for time with my mother in Scotland’s Dunoon, a young Lakota, Marcus White Bull, came to me with ‘spirit food’ to take home for my Scottish People. This was buffalo and choke cherry blessed in traditional ceremony for wellbeing and restoration.

 I carried the Spirit food home but opened it to find it had spoiled on the journey. We did not have the heart to just discard it, considering the intent with which it was given to me, so, with my sister Maggi, who also had been part of the weaving with Lakota, we dug into the earth, laid it in, and made a stone circle around it (with stones, the biggest we could manage to drag!! hauled up from the shore). Our Lakota-Scottish Stone Circle, circa 2005! We planted Harebells in the centre, the obvious choice since espyng those Harebells growing wild up at Wounded Knee.

 Before I left Dunoon that summer we all held hands around the circle of stones. That occasion, our mother’s 76th birthday, was the first time in maybe 20 years that all her six children were together with her (she dreamed we would be ’scattered to the far corners of the Earth’ and indeed we have been).

That moment in time remains memorable for its profundity, beyond what any of us might have thought we were doing. In the old language they would say that the ‘Spirit descended upon us’. Everything that happened was surprising; precious. My big sister began to sing:

 Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things hath done,
in whom this world rejoices;

 And we took up the melody and words we all knew from childhood…

 who from our mother’s arms (womb)
hath blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today…

And if you’re having trouble with this part of the telling, all I can say is that we ourselves were astonished. Again, this was not our usual MO, but judgment was suspended somehow as the melody carried the essence of what was occurring and tugged us into our hearts. And as we finished our singing; one voice, one heart, our dear mother upspake:

“Thank-you for completing the circle and bringing the blessing home.”

We stood then for a long time, in the circle, holding hands, lumps in throats, tears in eyes, nobody in a hurry to ‘break the spell’ of what had just gone down.

*~*~*

"It is time for the broken hoop to be mended." Pine Ridge Agency greeting Barry Brailsford on his "Journey of the Stone" to the (12) Nations in 1992.

 *~*~*~*~*

 So appropriate that it is the SEVA Foundation that comes through with a grant for the Wounded Knee home building.

SEVA - Ram Dass’ baby, first for cataract operations in Nepal, then with this specific fund for Native American Indians.

 I volunteered for SEVA one holiday season and I always remember Ram Dass reflecting how it was the failing eyesight of the Nepalese that lit a fire under him. How, he said, the onus is on us as human beings to fan the flame where our passion rises because who can say that this is more important than that... and how can we know why one amongst us light up on this issue, and another on that? We cannot fathom it but it behooves us to be true to that drive.

 

"The smallest spark gives life to the fire."

 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 UNTITLED JOURNEY

Winged Bird
Steal my pierced heart
Fly with it high and higher
Till man and his earth
Are blurred and lost

Blind my eyes and deafen my ears
To lances that pierce
Voices that soothe
And
Hands that hold
Falsely

 Carry my heart to a peaceful land
Of untouched beauty
Where Soul and Mind
Together
Disturbing no other
Lie in blissful Love

 Let their child
The mother of a new creation
Be
Untainted by memories
Of a world past
Or flaws of destruction

 Let the child live
In the fruits
In the wisdom
Of a peaceful land
Growing
Maturing

 Child of beauty
Are you ready?
Then
Return my healed heart to earth
Bring with you seeds
Of a new generation

 Begin
Only when it is safe
And plant wisely
I will guard these seeds
With my life

 Goweitduweetza (Veronica Riley)

 from the Continuum Center booklet on the Edward S. Curtis Photographic Exhibit of the North American Indian.
www.continuumcenter.net Minneapolis

*~*~*~~*~*~

 "Happy New Era" WOUNDED KNEE 2005 - capturing the spirit of sustainable home building with Lakota, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota  

"A group of five women and one wheelchair travel to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as volunteer labour to build a ’cob’ house from the ground. Over the din of the ever-present wind the camera captures the flavour of a building site like no other. Characters and stories come and go between rock runs for the foundation of a house. Wild storms and flapping tarps are weathered with good-natured banter. Rare footage of Little Big Horn day shows Lakota keeping alive their warrior skills, such as dragging the injured off the battlefield with horse and rope.

 The shadow of the past is etched in stone in the grounds of the notorious Christian church at Wounded Knee."

 Running time; 24 mins. Widescreen DVD NTSC
Created by Yinka Selley jubalea@yahoo.co.uk

Final thesis for MA in film studies at Bath University, City of Bath, England, U.K.

Camera: Maggi Moon and Elmer Bear Eagle, Editing assistant: Tony Mills

 With special thanks to Leola One Feather, Freda Yellow Hair, and the Wounded Knee community. And to WomenRise for Global Peace, especially Johanna Parry Cougar, the Santa Cruz ’cob Lady.’

Now Airing periodically on Santa Cruz Community TV.