Travels In A Stone Canoe: The Return To The Wisdomkeepers

YOU DON'T TAKE THE JOURNEY. The journey takes you. Nearly twenty years ago two unlikely and unknowing white journalists--ourselves, or those we thought ourselves to be--set out on what we've come to see now as a spirit-journey, a simultaneous exploration of outer and inner worlds. We thought at the time that we were going out on a magazine assignment after a good "story" - the supposed demise of the last generation of Native American spiritual elders, or Wisdomkeepers. But something happened to us along the way. We set out on the path of the Wisdomkeepers and we've never quite gotten back. We find ourselves shuttling between worlds, not quite part of either. We've become unwitting and at times unwilling messengers, or "runners," between those worlds. We crossed an invisible boundary, passed through a kind of mystic membrane between what most people think of as North America and what others--many of whom you'll meet in these pages--think of as Great Turtle Island. This last is as much a spiritual metaphor as it is a physical place, not only the living continent that sustains our earthly existence--the primal Native American vision of the land as it once was and in a visionary sense still is--but also, in an equally visionary sense, the very inward landscape of our being, of our humanness. We've come to realize that North America and, yes, even the United States of America--like Europe or Germany or Australia--are as much metaphors as Great Turtle Island. They exist in the minds of those who acknowledge them. When they cease to be acknowledged, they cease to exist. Witness the Soviet Union, that fallen metaphor. None of these metaphors, in the ultimate analysis, is any "truer" than the others. A metaphor's power is in its meaning, not its truth. And we ourselves give metaphors their meaning, their power, not some outside agency or external reality. The choice is ours. Great Turtle Island, like America, is as much inside of us as outside of us. Our years-long journey has taught us more about being white than about being red. That can be a chastening experience, to say the least. Seeing around the edges of yourself is unsettling. But, white and red, too, are metaphors, as are all racial stereotypes. Our skin color is within us. The great challenge of our time is to find metaphors that include rather than exclude. THIS JOURNEY OF OURS, then, is a journey into metaphor, into meaning, into human subjectivity, into the belief systems of others and of ourselves, into the very meaning of belief itself. And yet, despite its inward aspects, this spirit-journey is and has been absolutely real, filled with rent-a-cars and cheap motels and fast-food restaurants and shopping malls and Interstate highways, and--most significantly to us--with out-of-the-way dirt roads leading to the always open doors of those we call Wisdomkeepers, the spiritual elders of Native America. These wonderful men and women don't simply preserve the old wisdom. They live it. And, yes, they share it and teach it, too--not only with their words but with their example, their presence, their lives...lives always lived for others, never for themselves. We are not, definitely not, experts on Indians. We aren't scholars or anthropologists or historians; we're not even journalists any more. Yet our journey, our spirit-journey, continues, inexorably ongoing. Whenever we think it's finally over and done with, we somehow find ourselves swept back into it all once again despite ourselves, flung back onto the road, into the current, back on the path of the Wisdomkeepers. But don't mistake it for an easy path. Life, we've learned from the Wisdomkeepers, is not an entertainment. Life is a task, a holy task. There's a path you follow and there's a set of Original Instructions for following that path. Our journey, our life's work, has been an unfolding of those Instructions, which--as Wisdomkeeper Uncle Frank Davis showed us--lie within our souls like shredded, crumpled pieces of paper, heiroglyphed with the meanings of life, our own personal life in particular. When we at last open those crumpled messages, read them, and then translate them into our everyday lives, we will finally be on the path of the Wisdomkeepers. That path, though, is definitely not for the casual tourist or the pleasure-seeker or the merely curious. It can be hard to find and difficult to follow, at times even dangerous to your being, both physical and spiritual. Unless it's your path, it's pointless to follow. But if it is your path, then, alas, it's pointless to follow any other. We cannot tell you where this path leads. Perhaps only to itself. It may be simply an endlessly-looping circle of meaning that is self-evident only to those who travel along it. Indeed, that could be a definition for any belief system--since all belief systems may be seen as metaphorical constructions devised to explain the inexplicable, to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless, to make humanly accessible the fathomless Mystery, or, as our Lakota friends call it, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, the Great Holy--not a thing but a state of being, the very ground of existence and of human meaning. We have explored, not systematically but intuitively, the metaphorical systems of "natural" earth-based indigenous peoples, in particular that overarching visionary system presented to us by scores of Native American spiritual elders, both men and women, those we call Wisdomkeepers. We have sought them out in their homes in the isolated fastnesses of their reservations across the vast sweep of this stolen continent, and, violating the first law of journalism--yes, we admit it, we confess it shamelessly--we have lost our objectivity. We have been moved to the roots of our souls. We are changed. We have been seized and shaken, given a new meaning for our own lives, an unexpected set of both general and personal instructions for being human, a way both new and ancient of approaching the very act of living. TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, the matter of "signs." Every path has its signs, its signposts. If you can't read them, or refuse to acknowledge them, they're certainly not going to help you find your way. Those signs are as much within yourself as they are "out there." Dismiss them with a skeptical sneer and, in the end, you're left with the ashes of your own disbelief. But open your eyes to their possible meaning, to their soul-charging poetry, and you may suddenly find yourself "on the wind," as we call it. This doesn't mean to believe everything or anything, but simply to be open to the meaning, the poetry of things and events, of your own life. We've learned to be open, too, to the meanings and beliefs of others, not so as to copy them or steal them, but to learn from them, to be moved within the depths of our being by them. Belief isn't necessary at all. Only respect is necessary. Respect opens you to the meanings of others, and to your own meaning as well. Signs--and, yes, even wonders--can occasionally light your path, illuminate those meanings. They're both inner and outer, these signs. We've learned to be open to them, but never expectant or demanding. They come when they come, and when they do they're always intensely personal and specific, like those you'll read of in these pages - an eagle's feather, an owl's claw, a shaman's walking stick, a wild-visaged False Face mask. Sometimes they're hopeful, sometimes foreboding; sometimes they're harbingers, sometimes confirmations, sometimes warnings, sometimes seemingly cosmic jokes. For any and all such "signs" we make no claims beyond the ordinary. Indeed, we've learned that the ordinary is, at times, the most visionary state of all. The ordinary, this very passing moment, this holy unstoppable Now, is the entry-point, the gateway, to what Wisdomkeeper Mathew King called the Great Reality. Or so goes another metaphor. Metaphors within metaphors. All is metaphor. The Wisdomkeepers taught us that wisdom isn't something you believe. It's something you do. And they taught us also that the Instructions for doing it may not come to you until the last possible and least expected moment--sometimes just as you've abandoned all hope and stopped trying. AMONG THE IROQUOIS, or Haudenosaunee, who have taught us so much, there is a story, a still-living tradition, a sacred memory of a luminous prophet and deliverer called the Peacemaker. Don't, please, think of it as a "legend" or a "myth"--those are white man's words, any Indian will tell you, for the "quaint" beliefs of other cultures than his own. His own myths white man calls "history." As a sign that the Creator had sent him on a sacred mission, the Peacemaker traveled in a miraculous stone canoe. Carved from white granite, this magical vessel floated lightly as a feather, carrying the Peacemaker wherever he was meant to go. He didn't have to paddle. The stone canoe simply took him there. From this story, which you'll hear in detail from the lips of the Peacemaker's descendants in the pages ahead, we have respectfully borrowed another metaphor for our spirit-journey--the Stone Canoe. We like to think that, in our own small way, we've been privileged to travel these past two decades in a kind of symbolic Stone Canoe, a magical vessel that takes us wherever it is we're supposed to go. We're not supposed to steer it or paddle. We're not supposed to plan a fixed itinerary. We're just supposed to go along, letting the unseen current take us wherever we're meant to go. We continually have to remind ourselves: Don't try to pre-think or pre-envision it all. The best ideas are the ones you find yourself doing without even thinking about them. You can't think your way to the Truth. Truth, like Beauty, isn't something you think, it's something you feel. Just as you can't think the wind, you can only feel it. And the same with the Stone Canoe. You can't think yourself aboard, you can only feel it under you and realize you've been riding in it all along. When that happens, you're on the wind, you're riding in your own personal Stone Canoe, you're following the path of the Wisdomkeepers. WE MAKE no pretence to being wise or in any way holier than thou. Indeed our very imperfection has saved us time and again. Without it, we'd never have discovered the path of the Wisdomkeepers even existed. From the Wisdomkeepers themselves we've learned that you don't have to be perfect to do holy work. You don't even have to be holy. You can be a couple of contraries, a couple of shape-shifters like ourselves, and still lead a life worthy of being called human. We're not saying we've done it; but we're trying . . .

Please write if you would like more information.   Other books by Harvey Arden include: Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders Dreamkeepers: A Spirit Journey into Aboriginal Australia Noble Red Man Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance by Leonard Peltier, Edited by Harvey Arden.