The children spent the morning drawing me Native pictures; Mrs Begay said it was something else to remember them by. I couldn't ever possibly forget them.
This week has been Native American Awareness Week and how lucky I was to have been here on the reservation for it. Some of the children have been dressing in traditional dress and have been learning Navajo songs, I've tried to sing a long with them but I need to study my Navajo to get the words right! I even got to learn a Navajo 'womanhood' ceremony and taste some traditional food. On Thursday, the comedians, James & Ernie came to school and did some stand-up. They are from the reservation and have become big stars in the Native community; they were absolutely hilarious and I was so pleased to have been able to watch them. After the show I went over to meet them; they were being bombarded with autograph requests.
My evenings have been jam-packed with activities and on Wednesday I got to rub shoulders with yet another Navajo celebrity, James Bilagody.
James is a musician/storyteller and is involved in numerous projects. He plays guitar in a rock band from Phoenix, he tells Native stories to children in schools and has even been in a movie called Blue Gap Boys which I actually watched before he arrived. So when he swaggered into the house wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar, I instantly knew that I was going to really like him.
James is extremely talented and wise. We talked for nearly an hour and a half about spirituality, life and death, family, language and history. Like me, James loves language and of course, music so I talked about my family's heritage and the Creole language. I told him how much of an influence music has been to my writing, so just for me he played an Elvis Presley song on his guitar. For those of you who know me very well, he was my childhood love. I absolutely adored Elvis Presley's music and movies from the age of about six. And not the chubby 70's lamb-chop sideburns Elvis, I was besotted with the beautiful, young, perfectly coiffed 50's Elvis whose voice to me was like warm caramel.
James played me some traditional songs and some of his own which he could translate into Spanish and English. They all had a message and each note or chord represented something, like the rhythm of a horse running or the sweetness of a woman's voice.
I gained new perspectives from our deep conversation and his music had completely lifted my spirits - I will definitely be keeping in touch with him as he said he would love to read my writing.
On Thursday night, Sina and I went to a sweatlodge run by a man called David Peshlakai. A sweat ceremony is a very old purification ceremony which involves sitting in a cave that's built into the earth and enduring the steam from hot coals that are placed into a pit in the center. The cave itself is dome-shaped and represents the womb. Everything down to the drum, the pipe, the fire and the pitch-fork involved in the ceremony, represents what the Natives call their 'Grandmothers' and 'Grandfathers'. David was an incredibly interesting man to talk to. He has gone through numerous intiations to become a 'seer', one who supervises these ceremonies and has visions for those who seek healing or purification.
The initations he has gone through include vision quests and sundances. Vision quests go back to the beginning of Native tradition. It involves sitting alone up in the mountain the whole night with no food and water and waiting for a message or a 'vision' that one should be able to find in nothing but the oneness that they experience with nature during that night. A sundance is a much harsher initiation and quite frankly, I don't know how any of these men have survived it. In a sundance, the man is pierced in the chest by tree branches and must dance the whole day before the sun and cannot stop - brutal, eh? But this is a test of true strength and bravery - the man is made a warrior, a survivor and David's piercing scars proved that.
I was blown away by the sweat ceremony. It is far too hard to describe the feeling - and even saying that seems like too a weak statement. There were just four of us in the sweat, including David. He stuffed the sacred pipe with cedar and passed it around. We all smoked it and blessed ourselves with it. He then gave us the cedar itself for us to chew. He then began putting the hot coal in the pit - the sweat started to pour! Once the door is closed, water is thrown onto the rocks and an overwhelming gush of steam fills the 'womb' where everyone begins to say prayers and thanks to Mother Earth, Father Sky and send love and healing to everyone they know, including those that are in the sweat as well.
As I thought about my loved ones and gave gratitude to everything that is, David beat the drum and sang purification songs. The drum represented the beating from the mother's heart that a baby hears from the womb. There were four rounds of this and when the ceremony had finished, we all crawled out, shook hands with each other and walked once around the campfire.
The cool air kissing my skin after all of that heat was exhilirating - I felt refreshed and truly grateful to Sina, to David, to Di Ne and the universe for every single experience I have had.
To conclude this lengthy blog, I just thought I'd also let you know that I tried riding a horse for the first time!
This is me and Shortch or Shorch (the spelling is as ambiguous as the reason behind his name!) the family's gentle, loveable pet horse.
Awesome. xxxx
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