One with her ancestors
By CLARE HOWARD of the Journal Star
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Drenched in sweat, her loose cotton dress clings to her body. She's crouching at the edge of a pit filled with hot stones, blackness engulfing everything inside this low, squat tent. A fragrance like early spring rises from the damp earth.
Steamy heat clogs respiration, pressing hard on lungs and muddling sense of time and place. Hours pass in moments.
Others are here around this pit, shadowy forms perceived for only seconds when a rock glows red-hot or a leaf ignites and muted light flickers, then fades inside the tent.
"Welcome, grandfather," the small group chants as each stone is ceremoniously carried into the tent, a Native American Inipi lodge. As the pit fills, temperatures inside the Inipi pass 170 degrees. Bare winter soil offers blessed but fleetingly cool relief. Sage, lavender and copal tossed on the stones sizzle and burn, filling the Inipi with aromas of verdant earth now in the dead of winter.
As time passes, sensory perception shifts, no longer dominated by reason and sequential thought. Heat, sound, smell, vibration and spirituality pass the mind as a gauge of the world. With heightened senses, the deep and muffled tones of a drum thud in rhythm with her beating heart, creating a sense of oneness, merging her with the others, with the stones, the stars, the coyotes howling on distant hills. She is in the womb of Mother Earth. Embraced by Mother Earth. Connected with all Earth and attuned to ancient knowledge, ancient runes.
Eliida Lakota was barefooted when she crawled into this Inipi sweat lodge at the Native American Fellowship Center on Illinois Route 8 west of Peoria about 10 p.m. on the last day of 2005. Stooping low through a small tent flap, she entered another world structured on customs practiced by her Native American ancestors spanning back thousands of years. Though ancient, these customs and traditions are beliefs Lakota lives by and teaches for survival and healing.
She emerges from the Inipi sopping wet in the early hours of the new year, assuaged and purified. She and three other women stand around the bonfire under a clear winter night sky. Sweat turns to vapor that rises from their forms and hangs like ghostly haze in the fire's glow. The women watch as more stones, more "stone people," are carried into the lodge, where only men remain. This final session is the "warrior door," when temperatures inside the Inipi approach 200 degrees.
"We are all wounded. I'm wounded," said Lakota, an artist, teacher and occupational therapist. She works at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in the eating disorder clinic helping women gain balance in their mind-body-spirit perceptions. She also leads a class, "Native American Spirituality," to Native American women at the federal prison camp in Pekin.
"Art is not separate from daily life. Spirituality is not for Sunday but is integrated into every activity we do. When I teach at the prison, I provide an opportunity for traditional spiritual rituals and healing," said Lakota, 64, a third-generation Native American whose ancestors are Lakota and Yakama.
"People think they are physical beings who have a spiritual experience on Sundays. But we are spiritual beings who have a physical experience on Earth. In 100 years, all that will remain is the spirit."
Several weeks ago on a Thursday night, Lakota walked alone across a desolate, snow-swept parking lot outside the Pekin prison, her arms loaded with supplies for her class; her lesson plan was based on the healing role of art and Native American spirituality.
Native American women incarcerated here are from North and South Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Montana. Some come from reservations. Others come without the cultural knowledge of their ancestors because they grew up away from the reservation.
"These women have all suffered loss. They all come here wounded, separated from their families and their culture," said Lakota, who volunteers at the prison. She describes their offenses as primarily "crimes of poverty."
"Separate a man from his culture and he suffers loss. He loses his identity. When I work with these women, we use art to find ourselves and our culture," she said.
The women walk to the class in pairs and alone, eight of them this night, Lakota,
Ojibwa, Yakama, Mohawk, Menominee and Winnebago. Meeting at the prison chapel at 7 p.m., Lakota starts with a purification ceremony burning sage, sweet grass and cedar. As the smoking herbs are carried from one woman to the next, they cup their hands, scooping the blue-gray smoke and veiling it over their heads.
"This takes me away from where I am and what goes on in this compound. We get into beading and making moccasins and thinking about home and tradition. We listen to Native American music and feel the good memories return," said Crystal Fredericks, a Plains Indian from Fort Berthold, N.D.
Rinissa Fitzpatrick from Standing Rock, N.D., also a Plains Indian, said, "We come here and we pray, we share, we learn and we bless each other. This is good medicine for our hearts."
The women have their own Inipi lodge on the prison grounds. Jeffrey Rendon, prison chaplain, said every federal prison must by law provide a sweat lodge because freedom of religion is a guaranteed right in the United States.
"The sweat lodge is the church. When people come to prison, they still have a right to practice their religion in a safe environment," he said.
Lakota has instinctively learned to deal with loss and pain through art and spirituality. Often, she listens to innate messages.
"We all have instructions in our DNA that guide us," she said. "We have to learn how to hear those instructions."
Listening
Learning to listen is a developmental skill, sometimes manifested with unexpected revelations, she said, recalling how she wept once when confronted with evidence of her own ancestral messaging. In this instance, it came in the simple form of a dress.
She had never made herself a traditional Native American dress because she never had the money to invest in the leather. When she mentioned that to a friend, he insisted she select pieces from skins he had inherited. He spread the pieces out before her, and she chose carefully from among the pelts of brain-tanned leather.
Brain tanning is a traditional method using the animal's own brain tissue to rub softness and suppleness into the hide. When Lakota unfolded the pieces on her living room floor, she realized she had no idea how to design the dress. She started cutting and sewing, creating a simple garment that clung loosely to her body, maximizing each precious pelt.
She later attended a workshop at Porcupine Reservation in South Dakota. The instructor taught a dress design not at all reflective of common images of Native American dress. He said South Lakota women made dresses very differently from other Native American tribes. Dresses of the southern Lakota were simple, without fancy beadwork at the breast because the women were so proud of their brain-tanned leather they didn't want to hide it with beadwork.
Southern Lakota women made dresses with side gussets so the garment could be tightened in winter, loosened in summer and worn through pregnancy. Lakota had sewn gussets into her dress to maximize the leather and allow her to wear little under it in summer and more under it in winter.
Her ancestors had made arm holes large enough so mothers could nurse without removing the dress. She wasn't sure why her armholes were so large, but they were. Each aspect of the traditional Native American Lakota dress was a precise description of the dress she had made unknowingly with leathers spread on the floor of her Bartonville home.
Body-mind-spirit
"Through art, you get in touch with who you are," she said. "Your DNA determines your eye color and your skin, but it's also the way you think, your body-mind-spirit connection. DNA holds the spiritual life of your people.
"If you are having trouble with your spiritual life, look into the spirituality of your ancestors. Every cell of your body has a memory. Art taps into that."
Lance Factor, the George Appleton Lawrence distinguished professor of philosophy at Knox College and husband of artist Barbara Factor, said the belief that art reflects our inner consciousness and is a tool for healing is also part of Western philosophy.
"Through art, we are able to express things we can't say verbally. Furthermore, art allows us to figure ourselves out. A vital idea in art is that it taps into the unconscious. That's one source of the therapeutic, healing power of art," he said.
"Another tradition in art is that it represents external reality and functions much like a photograph. That's objective, but when art gives voice to the deeply personal, it is not a record of the objective world but something therapeutic and healing."
Connecting
Through Lakota's prison class, the female inmates have bonded and derived strength. Fitzpatrick, closely versed in the traditions of her ancestors in Standing Rock, N.D., said, "I realize this is a learning lesson for me being here. But there is a spirituality both mentally and physically about this experience. It's almost as if someone here needs me more than my family. Without this class, this would be slow death for many of us. This class keeps us grounded."
Fredericks said. "When we meet other native people, our spirits connect. We need that, especially in a place like this."
Lakota has spoken with the women about making a traditional star quilt.
"The star quilt helps the Creator find us," Fitzpatrick said.
Several weeks later, reflecting on her class at the prison, Lakota spoke about the spirit dolls she makes:
"The spirit dolls remind us to stay in touch with our inner spirit, nurturing and creative. If anything will save Earth, it will be nurturing and creativity. Earth needs women to stand together to save what's left. To do that, we need to stay in touch with our own spirit and stay in touch with the spirit of our ancestors. A lot of the women in prison were not in touch with their heritage and traditions, had not burned sage and sweet grass for years. Without that connection with their ancestors, their wounds will never heal."
Clare Howard can be reached at 686-3250 or Clare Howard
Link to Report
Special thanks to Bea Woodward for passing this on.
Contents
February 2006 Reports
Last updated on February 19, 2006