Opening the Book of Indigenous Grief

WE DRIVE AWAY from the ranch, where the three-day grief ritual was held, and we’re sparkling, tired, clean, talking about picking up some Mexican food when we get back to the city.

Lively sundown desert passes outside the backseat window and I reflect on the small world we’d all made and inhabited, our camp, altars, singing, communal eating, new friendships, conversations, dancing, but most of all, our grief, our grieving, and the profound healing that washed through us all in so many ways.

In the driver’s seat is a choir leader in her early fifties, beside her is the legendary eighty-three year old facilitator who’s been doing this work for decades, next to me is my love of nine years, who has been training with him for the past two years, and then there’s me, Native writer and pipe-carrier who’s been walking the Red Road for the past twenty five years.

We’re a car on fire with the joy of spiritual healers who’ve just finished up doing some of what we’ve been put on this earth to do.

We blaze down the road, angels of grief swooping and trailing behind us.


GRIEF UNFELT, like a locked garage of inherited somethings you try not to think about.

Grief felt, but held back, contained, hid, pushed down, swallowed.

Grief felt and then expressed in a few tears, feelings moving outward, enough to be honored and not stopped.

Grief gone into fully, without reservation, letting it all come out, wails, sobs, snot, tears, everything moving until it completely exhausts itself.

Grief that halves you, leaves half of you back in the past.

Grief that freezes in you over the years, cutting you off from more than you’ll ever know, unless you unfreeze that grief by going into it and experiencing what’s there.

Grief that gets you running towards anything but the immeasurable pain of what you’ve lost, towards anything and everything that covers up that loss, numbs it, falsely fills it, material things, money, sex, drugs, domination, prestige, power, virtual worlds, the Capitalist American dream.

Grief that deforms you, disfigures you, keeps you from holding down a job, from staying connected to your family, from loving or knowing how to love.

And then…

Grief that teleports you into your people’s wondrous soul.

Grief that inspires you to see how you can heal the broken masculinity of yourself and other Indigenous men.

Grief that deepens you, seasons you, adds more dimension to your being, fills out the range of your heart’s feeling, humanizes you in a sacred way.

Grief as a power to know the essence of many truths, the essence of what your relationships have really meant to you.

Grief as medicine that restores your wholeness to you, that brings stolen voices back, lost limbs, lost abilities, lost gifts, lost purpose, lost relationships back.

Grief that takes you out of the rat race and puts you back on the path you and the ancestors designed for you before you were born.

Grief that initiates you into the Big Story of what life really is and then all the neverending beauty that comes with that.

Grief that works like echo-location to help you find your blood brothers, mentors, elders, ceremonial home, and spiritual family.

Grief that increases your capacity for love, for warriorship, for caring about all that needs caring for in this world.


TO BE INDIAN is to know colossal grief.

I grew up around Indians who were all just trying to party away the pain of their grief, and it kept costing them everything.

For many years, my uncle Mark lived under a bridge in Lincoln, NE. I’d hear stories from my brother, people at our Sundance, aunties who worked for our tribe. Grief was clearly the root of his situation.
My dad is an embodiment of grief, camouflaged as anger. How different would his life have been had someone taught him about grief and how to grieve when he was young?

My people were death-marched at gunpoint down to Oklahoma, ripped from our homelands, brutalized, abused, lied to, killed, and that was just the beginning.

We had a culture, spirituality, language, land, everything that had been ours since forever, and then we were stripped, violently shoved into another, soul-hollowed culture, muted, erased, our tongues cut out, braids cut off, spirits desecrated, and plunged as a whole population into utter poverty.

We lost a million things we loved and in the course of a few generations were maximally loaded with a million kinds of grief.

The thing that’s broken more Indians than anything else?

Grief.

        
AT THE END of our gathering’s second day, the grief ritual itself commences.

On one side of a line formed by the strewn branches of some pepper trees, there’re several altars, including an ancestor altar that’s mounded with photographs of deceased loved ones, candles, privately meaningful personal items, and offerings of all kinds, and then a central grief altar, that’s full of flowers and handmade grief bundles and more candles.

On the other side of that pepper tree line is the village, all the folks who’ve come to grieve, hippies, nurses, grandmas, sisters, experienced grievers, first-timers, those who haven’t cried in years or longer, those who’ve lost partners, those who never knew their real parents, activists who’ve chained themselves to logging equipment, ex-Marines, accountants, surfers, meditation teachers.

Flanking the village are the four people sitting with their djembes between their legs, ready to go for as long as it takes, to play their drums until the ritual naturally concludes.

After all kinds of instructions and explanations by the elder and his co-facilitators, the drums begin and everyone starts singing a three line song to the ancestors over and over again -this song will be sung non-stop for the next several hours.

A power pours through us all and we are suddenly in the atmosphere of the sacred, where long-prayed-for-things can spontaneously happen, where our pain and grief can finally emerge, erupt, be witnessed, be held by the village.

We dance, sing, look at each other, look at the altars, and feel the tear-filled energy of our griefs move and swim among us.

Now is the time to be brave.

        
I’D ONLY SEEN MY DAD once in the past ten years, at our powwow after he got out of prison, having completed his decade-long sentence. Picking up the threads of our relationship, we exchanged texts, him at my dying grandma’s bedside, me in my bedroom in Seattle. My roommates made dinner in the kitchen not too far away and I felt so many core parts of my family’s story.

“It’s really sad,” my dad texted me. “She’s going to leave us soon and everyone’s crying.”

I knew my dad meant everyone but him. He was steel, desert, machine, rock, sword, arrowhead, teeth, knuckles. Strength was everything for him. To be unkillable was the main thing. Survive, worry about the rest later. He was silence. Most of the stories he told me as a kid were about bloody fights outside bars, at the meat packing plant, in the country. My dad wasn’t the one crying in my grandma’s hospital room.

I was thirty-four, old enough to have some guts myself. I texted him, “Don’t be afraid to cry some tears yourself. It helps. It’s an expression of love.”

“I’ll never cry,” he texted me back.

“When I was little my dad told me that I had to be the strong one, that I was never supposed to cry. That’s how I’ve lived all my life.”

I pictured my dad, oldest of seven, tearing his ability to cry out of himself, burying it deep, never looking back. There he became the Indian man he’s always been. From then on he was strength and violence.

“I wish I could be with you all,” I texted him, in a new city, at a new job, barely a dollar in my pocket, my car gone, no way and no means to get back to Nebraska.

He didn’t text me back until the next day, to tell me that my grandma had passed.

I didn’t tell my roommates, didn’t tell anyone. I just walked around Seattle by myself, an Indian who knew no one, who wished so many things could’ve been different.

GRIEF AS MY PARTNER and I slowly walk around the giant dead fin whale that’s washed ashore a mile down from where we live.

Grief that prevents me from answering the phone when my brother calls, years after he’s moved away, onto another life, no longer living just a few blocks from me.

Grief at the funeral in Santee, running down my cheeks when the young granddaughters both ask last-minute to have all their long black hair cut off and buried with their grandpa there at his grave.

Grief as a little boy when I watch a Japanese boy get gunned down at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Grief as I leave my mom’s apartment, confounded as to why our family had to happen as it did, why my mom had to suffer so much, why she had to wind up the most alone of all of us.

Grief like a love song every time I go back to Seattle, singing of all the faraway beauty I experienced in that city, how I’ll never live there again, how it’ll always be one of the most ineffably precious periods of my life.

Grief when I place my hands on the Sundance tree, feeling my calling, all the prayers I carry, the suffering that we live to lessen, those who’ve gone before us who’ve given their all.

Grief when I say goodbye to my magical little nephew in my hometown, knowing I won’t see him again until another year passes, our days together meaning the world to me, his innocence a light that leaves me speechless.

TOWARD THE END of the third day, as our gathering is wrapping up, our motley crew, soft and vulnerable, stands in a wide circle in the shade of an old, melting tree, and around a shovel-dug shallow pit where we’re all one by one placing our grief bundles. I’ve set mine in with the others, made my prayers, and am quietly watching everyone else.

Big happiness edged with a little understandable sweet sorrow -when will any of us see each other again, the mainstream world and all of its pressure and challenges awaiting us- pervades the proceedings. I breathe it all in, feeling the pulse of our togetherness, and then I see about five or six little people standing at the lip of the pit, holding ballcaps at their bellies, like farmers removing their hats as a resident elder prays. I’m puzzled. You’d think they’d be happy, planted into our exuberance, the fresh radiance of our healed vision.

I ask them, What’s going on?

They reply, We’re paying our respects. Each one of these griefs being laid to rest was like a relative to us. These griefs traveled with these people here for many years, for a long time. And now that they’ve been grieved, their time, their lives are over. So we’re saying a last goodbye to them.

People continue to kneel and lay their bundles in the grave, praying, and I watch those little people, wondering at what I might see next. Then, I see clouds of butterflies billowing from the pit, grass growing from the bare earth.

What am I seeing now? I ask them.

You’re seeing what this grief is going to become now that it’s been grieved, they say.

I see more manifestations of new earthy life leap and fly and spill from the grave, and they continue.

Ungrieved grief is stolen future, they say.

My gut ripples, attempting to follow their understanding as they communicate it.

The future is made from grief that has been grieved; the grief not grieved is essentially the stuff the future needs for its growth held back, is vibrancy and vitality for the unborn generations unintentionally hoarded, held onto.

I see the cycle of grief they’re outlining for me, telepathically showing me, and feel like I comprehend it, hope I can put it into words correctly, clearly.

Grieving is required to make a habitable future, they say.

The future needs humanity’s healthy grieving.

They vanish and I know they’re right.

IN MY MID-TWENTIES, hungry to learn like I’m feeling the ache of my entire tribe’s hunger for our culture (which I surely am feeling on some level), scruffy, alone, hope-minded, I stop into the modest Ponca Museum in Niobrara and talk with my uncle Sandy, our tribe’s official historian.

“There’s a lot you’re going to have to remember,” he says, sitting at his crowded, cheap-looking desk. “Someday it’ll be you doing the remembering and not me, understand?”

I feel like a project the spirits are working on, a special animal they’re building, a book they’re taking turns filling up, and Sandy is like a great mountain they keep bringing me to, keep carrying me to the top of.

“Do you know who this is?” He asks, pointing at a little boy’s face in an ancient photograph, several other binders of photographs assembled for our afternoon together in front of him.

My young self looks at the smudge of the smiling little Indian boy, captured somewhere back in the 40s maybe, or the 30s. I look up at uncle Sandy and see into all the layers of his old, jowled, brown Taylor face, each layer a sadness, a joy, a treasured experience, a forgotten thing, conversations with elders I’ll never know the names of, spirits of the land that have threaded into him, loves had and then lost, his portion of the grief that defines our people, the grief that is both secret deer trail back to our tribe’s original heart, and then the gulf that seemingly separates us from everything we used to be forever.

“That’s your grandpa Cliff when he was little,” Sandy says, half his face becoming a smile. “Most of these photos weren’t labelled, so if you don’t know you won’t know, understand?”

I glance at him and then back down at my long ago grandpa, before he served in Korea, before he had seven kids, before the whole life that happened up until when I got to know him.

Uncle Sandy stays silent for a while and I’m blessed, tearful, stoic, sharp, lacking. To get here I had to face a world of feelings the rest of my family never talks about, never mentions. I had to walk into a darkness that many were lost in, many became ghosts in, many passed onto their children. I had to enter myself and pray the truth would guide me.

“Let’s look at some more pictures,” Sandy says, “of relatives you should know who’re no longer here.”

        
HUNDREDS OF YEARS ago, an elder grieves the death of his two oldest sons in battle, and that grief becomes a luminous, bird-like prayer. Its substance of enormous pain and even more immense love, transforms through his wailing, tears, crashing to the ground, and song, into a perfect thought, an enlightened idea, an emanation of medicine that travels through time, flapping its wings, crying out, seeking its fated opportunity, its beloved recipient.

That grief-turned-medicine bird sees a young Ponca man walking across a college campus, dives into his chest, and mutates into a genius epiphanic expression of grief wisdom. The young Ponca sinks into the shape of an old-growth forest of grief medicine. He’s a force of nature. He grieves hard, writes about it, goes back home and talks to his family, his elders, the medicine men. All agree: the healing medicine of Indigenous grieving is traveling back to the people through him.

He grieves, creates in collaboration with the elders and spirits new ceremonies for grieving that feel like old ceremonies, does those ceremonies with relatives, watches the healing of communal grief work spread, make a home in his people’s lives, organically dance over to other tribes, reformulating into the appropriate expression of their culture, getting them back into communal ceremonial grieving again too. It becomes something of a movement. It’s beautiful. Turtle Island hands many a man and woman new grief songs that’ll be sung for generations to come, that’ll carry that healing grief medicine forward for centuries and centuries.

And Natives everywhere become fearless grievers again, delivering themselves into healing, beauty, hope, medicine, deeper know-hows that empower them to help those they love.

It’s a radical, magnificent thing.

It’s a true story coded into every heartfelt tear that’s ever been cried.

It’s lightyears away from what that heart-gashed elder imagined as he cried in the tall grass, and yet, it’s exactly what his praying, loving spirit was asking for with his every cell and word and utterance.

The grief of our ancestors becomes medicine and the healing of grieving liberates Indigenous people everywhere.

Yes, relatives, this is truly how it happens.

THE ELDER LEADING the ritual stands in front of us, his words educating that part of our spirit that came here wanting to remember how to grieve, wanting to grieve some of our hidden burden-that-shouldn’t-be-a-burden away. He wears a straw hat, could be a grassy old church with a magical musical instrument in it, a battered ship about to sink crowded with rare wonders. The sun makes us all sweat, and we listen.

“We didn’t come here to finally get rid of our grief,” he says, “we came here to make grief our friend. We have so much tenderness inside of us and it gets lost when we don’t allow ourselves to feel the depths of our losses, our heartbreak, the full woundings in our humanness.

 “My teacher said that grief ritual is the glue of real community. It’s a technology of belonging, a technology of connection. Grieving is soul-cleansing. It’s like taking a bath on a mountainside with the angels of the ancestors all around us, and it’s like doing that together!”

We all laugh, already people have eloquently mourned people who’ve left their worlds years ago, already people have, raw and brave, poured out their heart’s beauty in the loving safety of our temporary village. It is as real as any skeptics might wish it wasn’t. It is a drink from the grail at the center of the cavern’s labyrinth, entering one and circulating through all, the sweet communal substance of years-in-the-making joy generated from days spent well together in a medicinally grief-centered space. I’m in ready awe.

“We are here to stay the course,” the elder says, his large frame shifting in his sandals, his encompassing care touching us all.

 “Stay the course and make beauty that nourishes the world.”