On the Building of a True Tribal Community

Wakan Tanka Tunkashila Pilamaye Chanupa Wakan Cha

Prior to our mind-blowing, mind-training weekend, inaptly titled Mindfulness for the Yoga-less (more on why and the tender touch of Yoga Therapist Samantha “Like the Whiskey” Jameson in the next post), we attended a talk sponsored by the nearby town of Coloma’s North Berrien Historical Museum.. The descriptor stated: “Potawatomi Customs and Traditional Medicines presentation by Andy Jackson, Pokagon Tribal Council member. The Potawatomi inhabited the southwestern portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula long before European settlers began arriving in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Pokagon band remains active in the air today, preserving cultural traditions and autonomy as a federally recognized Native American nation. Jackson will present on the customs practiced and medicines used by her people.”

Note her people, as Andy turned out to be a girl. Or a woman rather, fifty-five years of age and a knowledgeable, trusted Medicine Person schooled in the traditional ways of her people. She opened the talk by identifying and thanking members of her tribe whose presence there supported her and gave her strength. Andy identified herself as a member of The Turtle clan of Pokagon Potawatomi’s, a Native American people of the Great Plains, upper Mississippi River and western Great Lakes region who called themselves Neshnabé from Anishinaabe, the “youngest brother" and Bodéwadmi or “keepers of the fire” in the Council of Three Fires with the Ojibwe and Odawa. Her exact Indian name I missed, but it boiled down to “She Who Cooks Killer Food for Her Family”. She then went on tell a fun hours worth of stories that could only be told by someone living the soulful, wholesome life in the center of the center of a traditional culture. There was information on the endless medicines and rituals they perform - from growing traditional tobacco and singing and praying over plants to harvesting milkweed and making soups to mixing mint and lemongrass in Ceremonial teas. But at the heart of it all is what I call a Mind Medicine, an understanding of life and death, the reality of the Creator and a connected tribal community that provides its people happy, meaningful, mentally-sound existences, having little to do with material wealth or notoriety in the world. These are traditional healing ways that have much to offer contemporary western cultures.

Now there was the surface content of the talk which I somewhat recounted and enjoyed — knowledge of plants and animals, stories of knocking on people’s door whose property held a nice caché of some medicine, fun times with family learning the language and upholding the culture. If your’e a Spartan and you’ve headed to or from Michigan State University home to Detroit, you’ve passed the town of Okemos a hundred times, unknowing that Okemos means “Grandma” in Potawatomi. At least I did (Go Green). Beyond her stories, I also enjoyed Andy’s demeanor and the way she thanked her elder who was present. I had a chance to approach Tom who was 94 years old and enjoyed meeting him as well. I asked, “What do they call you? Out of respect, is there a term?”, “Nope, they just call me Tom”, he replied.”When I was younger everyone called me Som.” “Som,?” i asked “Like S-O-M?” “Yeah, Som, that’s it.” “Why did they call you Som?” “You know, I don’t know why.” (we both laughed). Andy also spoke of Ceremonies like the annual thirteen mile Water Walk, a moving prayer open to non-tribal members. I’m always jazzed learning about Michigan tribes, not only because it’s my home and will be for a long time, but because my passion for healing and spiritual knowledge was actually first fired by leaving the area. And to return now to its richness, having been previously unaware, its a perfect reflection of the poet T.S. Elliott’s quote, “"… and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

So there’s this freshness, a newness, in the realization that’s its all personally, in many ways, come full circle. But there’s more to the feeling. There’s also an awareness - and people I humbly say this, with great joy and awe - that the Healing Ways hidden in the secrets and the dirt, back roads and the kitchen cabinets of Potawatomi Okemos (Grandma’s), are the same Healing Ways upheld here, at The Higher Haven. Same but unique in their own way., as are all clans, let’s say. We share the same four sacred medicines — tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass. We take part in the sweatlodge and other rituals that allow our people to renew themselves and strengthen themselves. And we carry and honor an authentic Healing Pipe for which we are very grateful. We have fire keepers too, or A fire keeper, and we take care of them, or him, as he does us. Our guy not only fixed the door, the great nemesis of all sweat lodge leaders, he writes haikus. He’s not on parole, and I’m not sure he’s even seen the inside of a jail cell. And when a tree or a rock let’s him know what’s up, he knows how to listen. We have some cool tribal members and we have a lot more coming, as we build our community one warrior at a time. I envy Andy because she doesn’t have to boost her social media posts to build her tiospaye, her family, warmly surrounded by relatives. Yet its an honor to be a bridge to the traditional Ceremonial way of life, provide a transformative experience for people and do our best to live the teaching of Matakuye O’yasin, that we are all truly related. We’ll be teaching a similar workshop to this, a Mindfulness Weekend for anyone who wants to learn techniques to expand their human happiness and take part in a traditional healing Ceremony. Join us the weekend of Saturday and Sunday November 10th-11th and if you do, you may just find yourself a member of our tribe, too,

Shroom Stroll

We took our second Herb Walk with Naturopath Maggie Conklin of Douglas’ LadyHawk Nutrition this week. Cooler temperatures coupled with the shift in evening light made for a pleasant saunter through our backwoods, richly populated with flowers, plants and herbs indigenous to Michigan’s Northern hardwood forests. This night’s particular walk focused on mushrooms, those fleshy fungi of the class Basidiomycota, with their often umbrella shaped caps borne on a stalk. Amateur Mycologist Anthony Blowers was in or rather behind the house to help lead the way, pointing out and identifying edible Oyster Mushrooms (Pleurotus Ostreatus), the lilac of Purple Tooth (Trichaptum Biforme), and the unique shape and colors of Trametes Versicolor, or Turkey Tail, the name derived from the mushroom’s resemblance to a wild Turkey’s back plumage.

 A seven-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health found Turkey Tail boosts immunity in women treated for breast cancer, and its merit as a supplement and immunity boost for dogs is widely known. Mushrooms’ general immunomodulating ability to stimulate or suppress the immune system and help the body fight cancer, infection and other diseases, is, for lack of a better term, mushrooming. It’s wild, literally, leaning about the nutritional and medicinal value as well as the history of interactions between our species and those of the timberlands, with Oyster Mushrooms first cultivated in Germany as a subsistence measure during World War I. We also came across Chlorociboria Aeruginasens -  tough to say but easy to see - the Green Stain Fungus that often brightly colors felled trees on the forest floor. Woodworkers have prized the stained lumber for ages, 14th and 15th century Renaissance Italian craftsman using the wood to provide the emerald coloring in their intricate inlaid intarsia designs. Paul Stamets’ name came up, a whole other discovery and story (teller), the author and Master Mycologist who’s given a Ted Talk on Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World. Check him and the new wave of technologies harnessing the inherent power of these magical plants out at fungi.com.

 The number of treasures we walk right over and past in this world because of our lack of spiritual awareness can be astounding. With that, we’ll be growing our knowledge of the healing power of the natural world at Maggie’s next herb walk in Saugatuck, a quick 20-minute jaunt from South Haven, on Tuesday, September 25th at 6 pm. And given Tony’s expertise and added experience as a chef, we hope to have him back in the near future to make his offerings a part of all the wild things cookin’ at The Higher Haven.

Sky Is A Neighborhood

Sky is a Neighborhood is a Foo Fighters song heard on the Howard Stern show last week, Howard jamming it and singing its praises.  "The sky is a neighborhood, heart is a storybook, a star burned out...Oh my dear Heaven is a big band now, Gotta get to sleep somehow (The sky is a neighborhood) Bangin' on the ceiling... Bangin' on the ceiling" I like the song and its cryptic, poetic title, as this piece needed a heading that harkens skyward. Always deeply contemplating (aka obsessing) on how to better the Higher Haven and offer visitors a singular, more sanctified experience, I had the idea recently to acquire a Telescope. The channel of thought ran this way: visitors could connect more directly with big, celestial movements happening overhead, movements that definitely effect our human lives, although the influence of many remain unaware. The HH's stretch of 20 acres is not an official Dark Park, however, the black blanket of night sky covering the place from dusk to dawn, aglow with brilliant, diamond-chipped stars, always inspires.  Considering that star smattering is speckled with planets, there's a simple, beautiful aspect to the scientific, astronomical focus Up. But here, there's also an appreciation for the astrological aspect, an awareness and reverence for ancient sciences like Vedic astrology, informing us of patterns and periods as well as the challenges posed by different planetary periods; the planetary weather if you will. And whose plans don’t benefit a bit from checking the weather?

We also practice a form of Shamanism drawn from the indigenous people of the Americas, people of the plains who looked to the stars to help navigate their nomadic movements. I'm on the hunt for and hoping to gather a book buried deep in one of many basement boxes,  the best source of Lakota Star Knowledge I’ve ever come across, acquired at Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) University on the Rosebud Reservation, circa 2001. Recounting how tribes synched their movements with that of the sun and the moon and stars, the guide helped establish my personal practice of modern day stargazing, a healthy acknowledgment of the cycles of the moon, the solstices, etc. Jiving with the sky, as the ancients realized, helps one live a less fractured life. And although a  comfy home and a roof with central heat may cushion us from the rough, rocky edges of living in nature,  the same Wakagna Luta, The Red Road of The Spirit World, aka The Milky way, looms above. This bright, starry path that called to our ancestors still calls to us today, perhaps calling to rise up and ascend to our True Home.  There you have my long-winded, slightly dramatic explanation on the mindset behind expanding our night vision with setting up a Higher Haven Telescope. And because the Cosmos' vastness have been on my psyche’s radar, I wanted to share the following  piece, written by Sky Scientist Carl Sagan.  With a vein (vane?) or two of atheistic pessimism, this excerpt taken from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision for the Human Future in Space is quite profound in its grasp of the fragility as well as the majesty of life on Earth. 

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”