Language studies, music, and telling stories are my mundane focuses. I used to act as well, but in life you sometimes have to choose. I’d act again if the chance came, but for now I concentrate on things I can reach.

I was taking a Montauk language class. Good people. Montauk is classed as Algonquian-Y, which means it’s got similarities with Modern Mohegan which I had tried to study. It was held online, which made it easy to attend. And do something stupid to kick yourself over repeatedly forever and a day.

The question in class was, paraphrased, “What in your childhood is a connection to your culture?” What was important? Well, everyone else had fantastic answers. They talked about eating eel, going out on boats, and things their families would do. I wanted to answer like that, too. Problem. For me there is no large thing connecting me. I just am what I am, and in my head are a long series of events that when I was younger I took for granted everyone else would have known only to learn that no, not everyone is given a bow and arrow when they’re five. Or taught to make teepees in the backyard. But one thing to stand out? Shrimping I supposed.

When it came my turn to speak, I opened my mouth to give a mundane answer and said, “Rock speaking.”  WHY DID I SAY THAT!?!?!

Seriously, what the fuck was I thinking? Or was I thinking? I had to explain what that was, and my explanation on the fly came out as jumbled and weird and I probably sounded crazy when I was referencing something that had been perfectly normal for me growing up. It was what I chose to call growing up connected to the supernatural world in that moment, but it didn’t actually mean going out and talking to rocks. Pffft.  It’s not like that all.

The truth is I was raised before the internet. We were old-fashioned. Storytime from my Dad was a big deal to me. There’d be bonfires and people visiting. You’d hear the adults trade tales and talk about things that happened or were happening. There were so many stories about reincarnation, speculations about who I and my brother might have been, and through these stories there were constant reinforcements of our tribal identity. Tales of Dad’s “Aunt Fanny” (who it turned out was his grandmother) and how she could control the weather with her mood¹.  That great-grandfather who was chief but also a boxer (turns out he was a baseball player). More. As it should be.

So yes, I learned how to connect with the animist energies through my upbringing. It’s a very large part of who and what I am, but it was my environment that allowed me to do it without going crazy or being called crazy – at least up until the end, when colonization (as much as I loathe using that word in some contexts) finally got a firm grip on my family. I had moments in my life when I actually pondered my outlook and where it came from, realizing I was an animist and knowing it was how things just happened to be around me. I was about 13.

The supernatural was everywhere as a natural part of life; not to be handled with lead gloves like some treat their god with a separate altar and ways that segregate them from their holy, cutting off their spirit from that much-needed connection.² You worry about the little people first; the manitu, fairies, spirits, whatever you wanted to call them. Your gods are something you talked about around the fire with amusement and for entertainment and education. You didn’t cut the gods or the magic out of your life and stuff them into a Christian-styled little box. You were respectful to the manitu and Little Folk in the same way you were respectful of your neighbors, because you didn’t want to piss anyone off the same way you normally wouldn’t want to anger your neighbors. They were not something you didn’t name your dog after, or avoided talking about, or any number of strange things I see happening today. That’s corruption talking when you do that, and the more you act like that the more you cut yourself off from your supernatural being.

My first husband, despite his Native American ancestry, had a racist white mother. She made sure everything was going to be white, despite their father’s side, and just like my mother’s bigot sister thought anything that wasn’t Christian enough or White enough was of the devil and should be cut out. My first husband, when he left me for his new fling³, had already lost one child in a custody battle and tried to use that philosophy against me. He tried to have me incarcerated to avoid going to court again. But, ah ha! I came from a legitimate culture. His plot didn’t go far.⁴

But my husband’s plot did trick me into going into a women’s shelter, which acted more like a prison (I wasn’t even allowed a phone call for three days, or to leave my room. For my safety, they said.). When my father came to get me out, he said to the woman that it was his fault. He couldn’t stand by his daughter that day. He couldn’t say, “Hey, we’re Native American and this is who we are. We aren’t like you.” He decried me instead. It was the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.

I think that will hurt forever.

Only my closest 3 friends have known this all this time, what Dad did. But it’s time I opened up about it, because of you who might have come to this blog in need of knowing something about yourself. From then on, Dad openly told people I was crazy. He fell in with a very Christianized local “tribe” and went to that corrupted way. Their ways were so… well, you could go to any White American household and see the same things happening. Dad had said that about them more than once. Even so, the more involved he and my mother got the less I could tell him things, and the more he’d tell people I was crazy. But I should like to stop spitting spiders out of my mouth.

The point is that my father, who had raised me to be what I was, turned his back from it. He had gone to people who did exactly as I warn in this post not to do. The end result was a lot of very important things regarding us and our way of life were lost. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to bring them back. I’d need a band to do it. I have just me right now.

As I said in an earlier post, there was a time that I did experiment with stuff and fell in with some crazy people. I was open-minded and over-sheltered so that I had no world experience to protect me. When you’ve also been abused, sometimes you fall into a repeat-abuse pattern where you *think* someone is alright but really they’re just slowly turning up the burner. You’ll clutch onto anything that makes you feel real, even a crazy cult that thinks they’re a bunch of elves. It becomes a vicious cycle.

To go back to the family ways, you must first recenter yourself and learn to recognize red flags. I still will take people at their face value, but these days when my husband starts one of his PTSD cycles I know it for what it is. And although there were some people I’ve recently been in contact with I like a lot, I did see a lot of red flags about them. When you’ve been repeatedly done wrong, you sometimes develop an instinct to people please. I recently tried to people please, but when others started acting paranoid about me I stopped because I’ve gotten my balance back well enough to know that this situation ain’t healthy, and it’s not me making it that way.

We’re not crazy, you and I. We’re not on the street wearing a cardboard box screaming that the end is near, even when it is. We just have a different outlook on how the world is put together. Even when family members who helped shape you like my Dad did for me turn their backs, that doesn’t mean they’re right. It just means they’re mean. It also doesn’t mean you should love them less or cut them out, lest you sink to below their level.

I don’t know how many others out there had families that kept the lore the way my father did. And I don’t know if any of the family lore matches what storebought shamans believe. It isn’t that I haven’t picked up a book once in a while about it. It’s that something about those books has me putting them down unread, as if something were telling me, “This ain’t right.”⁵

There is one thing I’ve read about shamanism: Penobscot Shamanism by Frank Speck. Published in Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, October-December 1919, I’d stumbled across this while looking for Old Pequot words to collect. The Penobscot are one of the Algonquian tribes closely related to my own, so the chance that Frank Speck – linguist and friend of Indians – had put the right words into the article was high. It was the first time I’d picked up something “official” about shamanism. I sat in my chair through the night into the next day taking notes, laughing outloud, pumping my fist in the air, and sometimes even crying as thing after thing was vindicated. I spent the night being reassured by science that I was not crazy.

One of the things I want to do with this blog is use it as an instrument for research, and I want to start with that article. Perhaps I will go through it point for point, making posts here and there to talk about my own association with the knowledge. Reading that article brought back so many memories. I’m hoping going through it will enable me to share them with you.

I know that a lot of what I’m going to say, if I manage to say it, will be “culturally sensitive”. I know that. But my entire life of trying to find another person like me to learn from, to go back to the Medicine within the tribe, to reconnect and grow with others has always been thwarted. Usually it was politics – can’t share that tribal money not even with a relative no matter how blood-related they are!! – or distance – Dad really really hated snow. Or religion – can’t have anything non-Christian surface! No! And sometimes it was just plain life.

Does this mean I’d reject an offer to go back and disappear with the others? Hell no. I’d be gone. So gone. If there’s a river involved, I am gone.

Still.

Once upon a time these things were not a secret. There were personal things we kept to ourselves because not to do so would be TMI, but we didn’t have to hide. We didn’t have to pretend we were only medical doctors while putting our totems in a bag. We didn’t have to nod and pay lip service to a foreign entity. We were not under fire by an imported religion and way of life as evil, even when we did bad things. We were and still are a natural part of the order, you and I. In my short long life, I have never had anything happen to change my mind that in order to regain our place in the world we must act like it’s ours to begin with. And that means no more hiding. We just have to remember time and place.

Rock speaking. Seriously!?!!?

_____________________________________________________________________________________

1. Yes, I *know* Encanto had that in it. Disney has a reputation of doing some good research on things, so my guess is my Great-Grandma Fanny wasn’t the only one out there. And yes, I really love Encanto. I’ve never seen another movie that resonated with me so well. On that Disney did good. (Now I have to go watch it again.) ↩︎
2. I’m pleased to announce that the ancient Norse were the same way about it, so that I often wonder if our two very similar outlooks on being weren’t cultural exchange at one point. ↩︎
3. Who ignored my warning about black eyes and rags and later came to tell me how right I was – as if she was going to get any sympathy out of me. ↩︎
4. And he did himself an even worse one by asking about the computer instead of the kids when we went to court, but don’t let anyone who believes I’m a monster hear about that I guess. ↩︎
5. “Ain’t” is a real word. It was even in the dictionary when I was growing up. It has a fantastic and blue-blooded history. Get used to it. ↩︎