'"Right off, I don't remember how old she was when she found out she was part Indian. Her mama's family, a lot of them, had lived out West, in the Dakotas, and one of them had married a squaw, I don't recollect the tribe....
"Siwash? That's right. That sounds like it. So one time Sissy's aunt - her mama's sister - came here for a visit from Fargo and there was a lot of fuss about integration here then; everybody was all upset about the Supreme Court telling us we'd have to go to school with the colored, and I guess the Hankshaws were discussing it like everybody else when the aunt let the cat out of the bag about Indian blood in the family. Well!! Sissy's daddy got furious. I don't know why; a Indian's not the same as a nigra. But I guess he just about divorced his poor wife. Sissy, though, was right pleased. She figured out she was one-sixteenth - what was it? - Siwash. She talked about it at school. We'd never seen her so excited. She showed a lot of interest in Indians after that, although not as much as she showed in hitching rides. Of course, she didn't look a bit Indian. She was as fair as an apricot."
When I decided to go to Greece last spring, it was totally serendipitous. I was no Greko-maniac, never having dreamed of someday and somehow going to Greece. Far from it! The whole of Europe held no appeal to me, overpopulated, dirty, expensive, full of rude Germans and French, who I had seen only too often speeding down the highways of the canyon lands of North America. Greece was supposed to have great wildflowers being the at confluence of several ecological zones, but after being inhabited for the last 3,000 years by sheep and goat herds, what could possibly be left? I was doubtful, but I wanted to attend a conference on the myths of the centaur, Chiron, so when the opportunity came up and the money was available, I went with a vision of just enduring the Greekness of it all.
My mother had never been out of the United States. I don't really know what attracted her to the idea of going to Greece. Like me, she has a botanical interest, but the astrological mythology of Chiron held little real interest for her as her astrological interests tend to the mundane. What ever the motivation for her journey, my husband bought her an airplane ticket and paid her conference fees as a special gift. I gave her a tape of Greek travel phrases, telling her that she was in charge of figuring out the money and how to ask questions. Mom and I went to Greece. Who'd have expected that?
The Chironic conference was in a tiny town on the Pelion Peninsula, the mythological home range of the half-men, half-equine Centaurs. Spring wildflowers along the Aegean are spectacular. My mother and I were photographing the Grecian wildflowers along the back streets of Milina, when my long dead grandfather came walking up the road wearing a black band of mourning and carrying small bags of corn for his chickens and sulfur dust for his grapes. No, it wasn't really my grandfather, just an old man who looked just like him. He didn't speak a word of English, but he seemed to like us. It took all of our linguistic skill and a great deal of creative divination to follow the conversation. He asked to pose with us for photos and motioned for us to follow him home, where we found a garden full of oranges and artichokes. He filled our arms with oranges and made us promise to send him copies of the photos. He wrote his name in my Greek phrase book; it looks like it might be Euaggzs Pasakwoh, but I can't really make out the letters in his scrawling script. We met up with him maybe four or five times in that tiny Greek village and each time, he would take us places and show us things, or simply sit down and try to talk to us. Perhaps we looked like his children? I sent the photos to him in care of the hotel where my mother and I stayed. Yes, he sure does look exactly like my own grandfather. The resemblance was so strong, that my mother spent that first night in Milina grieving for her father.
My grandfather was part Cherokee, born in the Oklahoma panhandle before the turn of the 20th century. I always thought his dark skin and high cheekbones were vestiges of his Indian ancestry. No one in the family knows for sure exactly how much Cherokee, it is a matter of some debate. I voted for half, but my cousin says Grandpa was only a quarter, and despite my intentions to go to Oklahoma and try to discover the truth, that trip has not yet been taken.
I have spent my life being rather pleased to have some Native American blood coursing through my veins. Cherokee on my mother's side, but also Blackfeet from my father. My cheekbones are set high, even though neither of my tribes claim me. I check the ethnicity boxes for Native American, even though my mother never told me stories of our ancestors. I grew up in southwestern Colorado where prejudice was rampant against the indigenous peoples. "Real Indians are drunks" was the White Man's wisdom, but I rebelled against my own white culture by spending time in the red culture.
Perhaps it was the fact that, when I was a teenager, the only radio station in the area playing rock and roll was Navajo, which took me down this path. Or maybe it was a 1960's cultural thing having to do with the hippies using the images of Native America to define their own meaning. Anyway, I would sit and talk with Navajos and Utes. In Farmington, New Mexico, I recall that the police would stop me and tell me that the Navajos were dangerous, when they saw me with them at the city park. I wasn't talking to men drinking Thunderbird Wine, just people in town for the day to get groceries and do their laundry. Seemed perfectly safe to me.
I went to work for a Navajo-Mexican rancher at the age of nineteen. I would herd sheep in the mornings and evenings. During the day we were breaking horses and mules to pack and ride for some of the area ranches. I was the bronc-rider. My boss was the 60-year old wild-man and goat-roper, Davy Sanchez, from whom I learned many things like rope tricks, horse doctoring, and the Native American patterns of humor. His comical talent lay in the way he would describe things, calling his wife The Widow Woman, calling all my friends by the totem animals he assigned them (yes, I knew exactly who he was talking about when he said The Badger!). But, on those days that he managed to find a bottle of Tokay wine, the light-heartedness would go out of his humor and suddenly he couldn't distinguish between the real person and the totem symbol. Taking him to town was a particular liability, for before long, he would have talked the bar into giving him credit, using his rope for pawn. I'd ditch him once he started smelling of wine and head back to the ranch alone. A day later, I'd find myself making the trip to town to retrieve the rope with a twenty dollar bill. He'd be in his 90's now, if he was still living.
The course of time took me in and out of Native America many times. Partying with the Piutes. Hosting a family of Jicarillas. Then contracting reforestation work with the BIA took me to many of the remoter parts of Indian reservations. My most enduring and deepest contact was eighteen months on the Navajo Nation studying the environmental effects of road construction; trying to understand the cultural significance of pavement. Sometimes the hippie sub-culture to which I belonged, which had appropriated so much of the Indian way of life and cultural values, also made me feel like I belonged more to a tribe than not. But my tribe had no name.
Walking along the Todd River in Alice Springs, Australia, I met two young aborigine men sitting under a eucalyptus tree. I had been backpacking in the desert for a few days and the trail down the Todd is a favorite party place for the Aboriginal peoples in the area. The scene was like something you might find in any American Indian reservation border town in it's wilder moments. I was not afraid of the drunken revelry, but other people's alcoholism has been a source of pain in my life, and I do not wish to watch or partake of bacchanalian rites, so I walked quickly down the trail. One of the young men called to me from beneath the eucalyptus, and soon I found myself in a conversation about the parallels between Aborigines and American Indians. These young men were very educated. James knew a lot more than I did about the American Indian Movement. Perhaps because I had my hair in braids they assumed that I was Native American, and in our conversation, the White culture was certainly "the other". They drank beer and smoked pot while we talked. These men were from different tribes, one from the west coast and one from the southwest corner of that desert continent. They didn't speak each other's native language, and they certainly didn't understand the language of the local tribes, whom they regarded with some degree of superiority, as the skinny black women in the large group of revelers broke into a screaming argument. We talked for about an hour, and I left with a strong sense of how much the American Indian's were looked up to as role models in the struggles of aboriginal peoples around the globe.
An Australian park ranger helped me put this experience in perspective. In Australia, if you have any trace of "Abo" blood, you are considered to be an Aborigine. Period. Your name doesn't have to be on a tribal roll. An American Indian is considered to be aboriginal, and so, in effect is an Aborigine, in their way of reckoning. This park ranger advised me to carefully consider the unique potential of being able to come study the ethnobotanical practices of the Native Australian's from the vantage point of being an honorary tribal member. I felt myself cringe at the thought of passing myself off as a true American Indian, when none of my red relations would claim me. A phony, a wannabe; no I couldn't do that.
Wishing I was truly a Cherokee, wishing my name appeared in the tribal roles, wishing that I had that historical and genetic context to my life, back in America, I bought a book on personal mythology. In my secret heart, I was still an American Indian Princess and I saw my obligation to live out that mythological role. The book showed me how to get in contact with my spirit guide through creative visualization, and I found her in the imaginary hills of my vision of Oklahoma, a medicine woman, with knowledge of the herbs for her people. The book showed me how to visualize her there beside me when ever this mythic journey I was living proved to be more challenging than I was constitutionally fit for. Many times, I have walked down lonely streets and felt her presence beside me. She wears a calico dress and a bright shawl. Her hair is braided.
One set of myths led to another, and the passing years found me studying mythological traditions and the archetypal ties between them. Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Rollo May, among many others, have blazed this trail before me. The fundamental idea is that we mortal beings live out the myths of our own making, ever changing, ever transcending our own personal legacy, ever encompassing new dimensions, and that by examining those myths, we can more effectively navigate through life by the virtue of increased self-understanding. I find astrological mythology very effective for both self-discovery and assisting others in self-realization.
Chiron is the most prominent "planet" in my own astrological chart. In our starry skies, Chiron is a hybrid between a planet and an asteroid that was discovered in 1977. This celestial body was named by his astronomical discoverer after the mythical centaur who was born to Philyra, the sea nymph, from a mating with old Saturn, in the guise of a stallion. Most mythical centaurs are rowdy critters, given to drunkenness and uninhibited behaviors of the most shocking kind, but Chiron, living in seclusion in a cave on Mt. Pelion, was not your typical centaur, but more of a shamanic kind-of-guy. He is a kind of back-to-nature character, encompassing that same earth wisdom and respect that we Caucasians like to project onto the Native American traditions. Known far an wide for his wisdom and special abilities in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, the mantic arts, herbalolgy, and medicine, he became the teacher of the sacred warriors including Achilles, Ascelpius and Jason. Hercules was involved in the demise of Chiron, when he accidentally wounded him with an arrow dipped in the blood of the hydra. Hydra blood is always fatal, but it had wounded an immortal being, so the result was a nasty dose of pain that Chiron just had to live with. Chiron is often referred to as the Wounded Healer, and although it's not a pleasant prospect to be faced with excruciation for the rest of eternity, this pain is considered to be his greatest source of wisdom. Fortunately for our hero, it just so happened that thirty years earlier Zeus had been really ticked-off by Prometheus, a Titan that had at least given humans fire, if not actually created humans. There was probably more to that, as Prometheus was also keeping some pretty big secrets from Zeus. Anyway Zeus had him chained to a rock in the Causasus Mts. where everyday an eagle came and ripped out his liver, and every night in the bitter cold of the mountain air, his liver grew back. Poor Prometheus! The only way he could escape would be for some god to give up his immortality for him. Hercules put the deal together...Chiron gave up his immortality and got to die, Prometheus told Zeus the secrets and got to be immortal. Zeus made Chiron into a constellation (Sagittarius).
I resonate with this myth. I am a hybrid in many ways, Caucasian and Indian, scientist and metaphysician. The instinctive fear and loathing I have of humans for their desecration of the earth and their lack of wisdom seems to issue from my equine nature. I have developed a peculiar adeptness in those areas of Chironic ability: herbalogy, mathematics, astrology. Teaching, and contemplation of spiritual philosophy are Chironic activities. Chiron is often prominent in the charts of ecologists and environmentalists, who might be considered planetary healers. I did not set out to become Chironic, but only rather realized that I was living out the archetype.
I was riding a train through Oregon in the summer of 1995 when I met two men. One was headed home after visiting his aging parents, the other was in search of a young woman who he had met and fallen in love with as she rode her bike south through his town on a Pacific Coast tour. We sat and talked through the hours. The feelings were strong between us, like long lost family, and then we discovered that each of us was carrying that same mixture of Cherokee and Blackfeet blood. My mother had told me my Caucasian blood was French, but my fellow travelers both, remarkably, had Portuguese ancestry. I got a powerful feeling that my mother was wrong and so we spontaneously formed the Amtrak Chapter of the Cherokee/Blackfeet/Portuguese Club. I wonder if they will ask for my resignation when they find out that my grandfather is an elderly Greek fellow on the Pelion peninsula?
Having a heritage on my Caucasian side was never part of my personal myth, until I sat down to write a few postcards to my Grecian acquaintances. '"Bandolier National Monument'", the card description reads, '"goes back 400 years'". Four hundred years is nothing in the Greek world! Suddenly the American Indian traditions and legends looked shallow, premature, and undeveloped. Suddenly I realized a strength in my Caucasian heritage. Suddenly I understood how there was a vacuum around Native American theology created by it's limitation to race. I understood, with my pen hovering over the postcard, that this vacuum was why many of the hippies had turned to paganism in their quest for a meaningful earth religion. White culture has it's own ancient pre-Christian heritage that meets the psychological needs for historical meaning and content. One of my grandfathers might be Cherokee, but the other is Greek. I think in that moment I quit wishing I was Cherokee.