Agh Now that I have the blog built and I’m ready to go, all the fanciful paragraphs I’d thought up have flown away like so many scattered flutterbies. Where do I go from here?

Well, let me start by telling you who I am. I’m Spearcarrier – I recently started going by Spearcarrier’s Ghostfox for various reasons but Spearcarrier by itself will do just fine. I’m the first Spearcarrier on the world wide web. I probably won’t be the last. I’m infamous in some circles, mostly because of younger more desperate days before I learned to keep away from bad apples although the usual libel and slander from bad apples definitely has come into play. I’m famous in other circles, which probably are mostly populated with good apples.

I’m a budding folk musician, a writer, comic artist. A first generation university undergraduate (anthropology). I was briefly a field archaeologist, a purchasing secretary, a bill collector for a rather unscrupulous lawfirm, temp agency pro, stage and film actress, and have always been an artist of some sort or another.

I’m native American, and I’ve always been just as proud of those forefathers as I am of the others. I come from river folk, mountain folk, magic folk. My father raised me with bows and arrows, wigwams and teepees, stories around a fire, and lore that had come down through the family for generations. I remember when native Americans were finally given the right to practice our religion – it was on the news. And yes, it really hasn’t been that long if I was alive to see it.

I’ve scraped with death a few times. I survived the worst of it. My life and death experiences have shaped me into someone whose a little liberal, a little conservative, and completely doesn’t give a damn if you like it or hate it. I don’t care about your pronouns. I care about your adult rights to choose.

I’m also an abuse escapee. I’ve been a taken for granted tool for ladder climbing. I’ve had ideas stolen so others could make big. I’ve been used. Cheated on. Stomped in the mud. My ex-husband hurt me with parental estrangement,too – even though I was always nice and fair to them. Also people tend not to believe a word I say, either because they don’t understand metaphor or – like so many – are disguising their contempt of me with disbelief.

For a while in my attempts to find family and make sense of things, I fell in with a very insane crowd. My life path took me through that, away from it, over the mountains, to outer space, and finally back home again. Back to the river I was born and raised with. Back to the reality I never wanted to accept, for all it was a most important thing to me as a child.

I’m a mermaid. And my father is a river spirit.

Already you don’t believe me, and already I don’t care. I know what I’m saying when I say that. If you aren’t willing to entertain so fanciful a notion this early in our relationship, then perhaps you’d better leave. At my age women tend to stop taking bullshit and start putting their own worlds first. They realize their best years were spent pleasing all the world’s assholes in many cases. I’m definitely at that stage, and I don’t care what you think. I’m a mermaid. My father is a river spirit.

I don’t mean that I can breathe underwater – although that would kick ass. Or that I have fish fin hands and feet, although my fingers and toes *are* slightly webbed. (This is why I decided I was a mermaid when I was small.) And alas, no. I don’t get to grow a mermaid tail on a moonlit night to swim freely in my father’s river, not that such a thing would be possible with the commercial market destroying my hometown the way it is.

What I mean is I come from the river, the way my family has always come from the river. I’m tied to the water. I get very maudlin when not allowed to go swimming for a certain length of time. And my father was the same, only for him it might’ve been worse. The things he showed me after he died still pang me.

Oops, I just said something else you can’t believe. Why in the fuck are you still here exactly? Yes, when my father died he came to me like so many do to tell me things. What he chose to share with me was his childhood. The sun reflecting off of the river wheat on a bright day with his mother standing off a little to the side. That glorious blue sky.  Or later when he was playing with the boys, and that little girl with the bow in her hair that insisted on hanging with him. He really liked her, for all he was maybe ten. And.. there could’ve been more but I had to tell him to stop. It was too soon.

You see, I’m a mermaid because I come from a long long line of medicine people. And those people, if the anthropologists are correct about where the shamans went, came from a long line of shamans. I’m not a medicine woman. I believe this is because the Indian School system that took my great-grandmother away from her family is partly to blame. My grandmother wanting to kill the Indian in the family sealed the deal… except the power remained. It went through Dad and when no one else was receptive, it settled for me. I see the world loosely. I’ve been called “bat-shit crazy” by teenagers at the beach while I performed rites for my father’s spirit. I’ve had people try to lock me away for being different. People who claim to believe in the supernatural have called me way out there. (People who claim to believe in the supernatural have also had their pants scared off of them while being around me and ran away, finally believing in the supernatural.)

But my children do not walk the red road. My brothers have been colonized to the point I’m told they don’t even think like an Indian by others. I know I have some cousins, but from what I’ve gathered by my few meetings they’re all more mundane than I can imagine being on a bad day. Which isn’t bad… it just means that now that Dad is gone, I’m alone – not that he could relate to me in the end. He’d found Christianity, all prettily disguised as a native American religion tied up in a red bow. He’d forgotten everything he ever taught me. I was alone before he died, and after he died he clearly remembered and came back… but the damage is done. I am the last shaman in the family, if you will.

This revelation came to me the other day while reading an old article by the famous Frank Speck, so I called a friend and elder – Leslie. Leslie-elder didn’t believe me at first – remember what I said – but finally suggested that being short of someone to teach, perhaps I should write everything down before I get hit by a bus and it dies with me. I agreed this was a good suggestion, and that’s why this blog.

But to write yet another whitelighter book on how to be a shaman wouldn’t work, especially since I’m not actually a shaman so much as someone with history and weird mind. Doing things with what I was raised to know isn’t a matter of book learning.That’s not how I was taught. It’s a matter of life learning, life experience and experimenting. So no, I can’t teach someone how to be a shaman. What I can do is talk about my life, about things I’ve seen, and through that you can find a connection to the universe. You can take my experiences and use them as a road map to find the road. So lesson number one, it’s not all about you while at the same time it is all about you. It is a cut circle.

Writing this blog is actually a dangerous thing for me to do. The fact that I have one and a half feet in the spirit world means anything I do academically would always be viewed with suspicion. When I was going to school. I had my career damaged before I could even graduate simply by reading an alternative history book in public. (The scandal.) Not to mention the rumors – apparently I believed in alien abduction before I knew there was a firm theory in alien abduction. Truly ahead of my time. I’ll talk about that here, too. And I’m going to talk about all of that, because I have to choose what’s important.

This blog will probably get written in very rare spurts.  My mind focus goes in spurts. I have a full plate in life with some on the side.

Sometimes I’ll be breaking taboo to talk about something. These taboos were not presented to me as taboos when I was growing up, though. I read that they were taboos in that article. I do not feel confined by them as a result. And if I don’t talk about them, well, the knowledge will be lost. So again. Which is more important?

And finally, I most likely will cover a variety of topics if I can make time to write at all. Family stories. Medicine stories Things I discover while researching the family tree. Feelings I have. Language and linguistics. History. The river. Dad. I’ll do my best to make sure everything here will show you how to be less mundane, but I’m not perfect. Mermaids aren’t perfect. Just beautiful.

I’ll probably reference that Frank Speck article at least once. I’m going to be learning more about myself and how all of this fits together as I go. To me, what I’m realizing is a big mystery. A tragedy. A looming disaster I’m racing against time with. I have so much to learn still yet.

Yes, I did put a donation widget on the page. It’s not there to “sell” what (very) little I know, and what I discover. (That’s what a book would do.) It’s there in the hopes that others will appreciate what I’m doing enough to help me keep paying for the website and maybe buy some seashells for my buxom mermaid breasts. They get cold in the water.

And lastly, because I have to talk about sad things. Things that I’m still angry about years later. Bad things. This journal will definitely be sad from time to time. It’s probably going to have a rocky start. My Dad hasn’t been gone that long, and I still cry for him.

If you’re still around after you’ve read all that, then maybe you’re ready to walk through this with me. Maybe I don’t have to walk the forest path alone. If so, then welcome friend. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.