Coming Of Age with a Warrior's Dream

Enrolling in Indian School

In the old dreaming traditions, when a boy becomes a man he has a vision that tells him his path in
life. In that dream he will meet a teacher; a guide to help him through the dangerous times to come;
and he will receive a gift to indicate his purpose.

Having been raised as white, the Indian side of my family treated only as an interesting but not very
important story, I knew nothing of this when I was twelve. I only knew that I was ever drawn to the
old things and the old ways and wished most of all that someone would teach me the things I needed
to know to live in this world rather than on it. White people survive by forcing artificial things upon
their surroundings; without the artifices of their civilization the world is a very hostile place. I did not
want to live that way; I wanted to know the things that make this earth an abundant and
comfortable place even when all the trappings of modern life are taken from us.

I spent a lot of time in the woods, alone, back then. I suppose I was a savage. In summer I'd enter the
forest, leave my clothing and belongings in a hidden pile, and wander the back woods naked,
keeping to the fringes of civilization like any other wild animal. In winter I'd bundle myself in my
warmest coats and burrow into the drifts of leaves that gathered deep beneath the limestone ledges
that ranfor miles along the steep hollows of my rocky homeland, and I would consider how to live
there. I built fires, learned tracks and hunting, and came to see the acquisition of the old knowledge
as a hopeless undertaking. The best I could do was live until I ran out of things; there was no one to
teach me any better.

I do remember a day when I was deep in the woods meditating upon such issues and I slipped into a
strange state of mind, in which the voice in my own mind grew quiet and I began to think in pictures
rather than words. I began seeing the energy around me, lines of reddish purple and a sultry drifting
haze, shifting and swirling around the pattern of my thoughts. I envisioned a teacher, a warrior from
the old days who could fill in the many gaps in my education. This need was a vibrant pattern of
energy radiating out in all directions, with me as its center. It was my first prayer in this lifetime, in
the old sense, the old way of doing things. I did not think of it as a prayer. I felt awkward and even a
little embarrassed when it was over, and assured myself it was only imagination and not important
at all.

It may not have been that next night that the dream came, because these things take time. The
message must fall upon distant ears, and that person must find a way to respond. It isn't magic, I
guess you could say--you don't get results instantaneously and you may even be turned down. I was
lucky, though. Someone heard, and a few weeks or perhaps a few months later, I was answered and
my Dream came.

More accurately, I went to it, because my answer lay with people I did not know, in a place I had
never seen. I was very suddenly and without any explanation, physically there, in a desert place out
West, alone in the dark with the cactus and the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. I was confused and I
thought I must be dreaming, that it would all fade away in a moment and I'd wake up. I shuffled
my bare feet in the dusty sand, and hugged my t-shirt with my bare arms against the cold, and
looked out at the mesas rising level and imperious against a black and starry sky, and I waited for
something silly to happen that would take me out of this place. Nothing happened, except I got
colder. I started walking.

It was strange because walking took as much effort as it ever took, and I had to be careful not to
bump into things. I wasn't scared, or afraid I would not get home. In a new way, I felt like I was
where I belonged. I picked a direction that seemed right and kept walking. Very soon, in the farthest
distance I could see a light that was not a star, and I walked toward it.

Up close I could see the brightly lit windows and doors of a wooden building, roughly constructed,
set casually on piles of stone. It looked like a schoolhouse to me, but it was out in the middle of
nowhere, nothing else around there at all, no cars and no roads and no sign of anything else. I could
hear people inside, the shouts and laughter of boys and girls. When I walked up to the loose wooden
steps that climbed to the screen door, I stopped because I suddenly had doubts that I belonged there.
Then I plucked up my courage and went inside, feeling that everything I was seeking was in there.

The people who were milling about in the hallway stopped and stared at me. I felt very awkward and
I suppose my ears must have lit up bright red; both branches of my family, American and European,
were from the far northern climes, so my skin is the white sun hungry skin of the cold forests. These
people were dark, desert people with round faces and long black hair.

To my left was the open door of a small office, and inside it a round Indian woman sat behind a desk
looking over some paperwork. I walked up to her and said, loud enough to be clearly heard
throughout the hall, "I want to find a teacher!"

She looked up at me and sat back in her chair with a quizzical expression. I think it must have been
fairly unusual for students to arrive in this manner, walking in out of the desert in the dead of night.
She studied me carefully, and then smiled. "Sit a moment," she told me. I took one of the folding
chairs in the hall and waited there, my hands clasped tightly in my lap, and my eyes never left her.
She called out a man's name, in a language I had never heard before, and in a moment a tall young
man with clean dark features and black short hair strode up to us. They talked for a few moments,
arguing in that strange language. There was a lot of staring involved, on my part and on his, and I
knew he was arguing against me. In the end they used English.

"He's too white," the man said bluntly.

"Maybe so," the woman answered, "but I see interesting things in him. I think we'll give him a
chance."

The man was silent, mulling it over, then shrugged. "If you say so," he conceded. There was no
reluctance nor argument in his voice now; he would accept his task and do it well.

He sat down beside me, and while we waited for the Elders to gather he explained that it was
customary for us to exchange gifts. I was embarrassed because I had brought nothing with me. Then
I remembered the rolled up Sergeant Rock comic book in my hip pocket, and I offered that to him. I
think my hands shook a little; I didn't know if it was enough. He looked a little puzzled, but then he
smiled. From a pocket of his shirt he took a folded map, one of those that used to be given away in
gas stations when I was growing up, literally worth nothing. I held it as though it were a great
treasure, and when the Elders came we spread it open on a table in one of the classrooms and they
pointed to a particular place, a confluence of rivers that I was always to remember, a place where
three rivers crossed in a pattern that looked strangely like the branch of a tree in winter. I devoured
the image with my mind, locking it in place as red and white energies swirled around me and my
surroundings dissolved into mist.

Then I sat up in bed, and jumped up to find pencil and paper, and spent the next half hour sketching
that image over and over and over, piling each new effort on a growing stack of jumbled papers on
my desk, smiling and laughing like a madman until my sisters peered in my bedroom to see what in
the world their crazy brother was up to now.

The world intruded again into my secret life, chipping away my faith with brutal efficiency, until I
lost hope and felt alone. But I was not alone, and I would never entirely forget what had happened.
Privately I pored over atlases and National Geographic maps of the world, looking for a place where
three rivers crossed. Thirty years later, I would find it.