My family is Sioux, out of North Dakota, but I didn’t grow up close to any of that. For a long time I didn’t go looking for it either. I’m not a sociable guy by nature. But down at the Elders’ center, I ran into a couple of Native veterans — Alaskan, not Sioux, but close enough in age that we’d served around the same time, in Vietnam. One of them had been a tunnel rat, went down into the tunnels the way I never had to. We didn’t have to explain much to each other. Now I see them most days, sometimes two or three times a week. That was the door that opened everything else.
Through them I went back to my own people’s ceremonies. I went to a Sun Dance the Sioux held. I sat with a medicine man and a shaman and started asking questions about my family, my background, things nobody had ever sat me down and taught me. Eventually I went out to the Badlands for a vision quest — three days, fasting, praying, waiting to be shown something about why I was put on this earth. I’m still not sure I got a full vision. Not everyone does — it’s not a guarantee, and I’ve made my peace with that. What I got instead was direction: help people who have less than you do.
After that I spent two years on the road — all fifty states, thirty-two countries — sitting with medicine men wherever I could find them, eating with Elders from every corner of the country, going to powwows, sweats, drumming, dancing. Sometimes I still build a fire by myself at night and dance around it. Sometimes other people join me. Either way works.
The prayers are simple. Tobacco, or sage, lavender, sweet grass — sometimes just a cigarette, if that’s what’s on hand. I smudge head to toe, turn to the four directions, and ask to be shown the way — not necessarily tomorrow, not necessarily in five years, just whenever the situation calls for it. Most of what I pray for isn’t for me. It’s for the next person who needs help. I saw a homeless girl at the library not long ago and gave her my coat. Small things like that.
For a while after the service I’d talk at schools — worked as a prep cook at the Space Needle by day, and a few of us Natives would go tour high schools and elementary schools where kids wanted to know about Vietnam. What surprised me was running into young Natives who didn’t know what a powwow was, didn’t know the four directions, didn’t know their own people’s prayers. So now that’s part of what I do — point them toward a powwow, meet them there, at UW, at Muckleshoot, sometimes up in Canada where the Elders and storytellers run deep. I go there to learn as much as I go to teach. I still ask them: what can I do to better myself?
It hasn’t all been ceremony and campfires. I still go to NA and AA meetings, because talking about my past brings a lot of it back up, and I lost a lot of my Native brothers along the way — it’s been hard to let myself get close to people again. My own therapist can’t get much out of me. But I taught myself beadwork and leatherwork, stitching, making portraits bead by bead, because I needed something to build with my hands when I couldn’t find the words.
If I could tell young people one thing, it’s this: know where you came from. Know what your ancestors sacrificed so you could be standing here. That fight for freedom and justice — it’s yours too, whether you’ve ever heard the story or not. A lot of Natives don’t know it themselves, and a lot are afraid to go looking, especially through government channels. So I think about starting something simple — a group, a conversation, just one honest question: Do you really know where you came from? That’s where the healing starts. It started there for me.
