Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C. Cannon In Mind

Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C

Cannon In Mind 

 

      

By Ronan Saint John

Gerald Scott was beset by ancient dreams of late, maybe not going back 10,000 warrior years like he liked to pretend, but maybe twenty years back (still you will know that he had ancient dreams, 10,000 year dreams when you bring a word like beset, his word, into the equation this early on). For back then, back in his youth he had dreamed the dream of 10,000 year warriors, along with his friends, Jack Lennon and James Lawson (not Jim or Jimmy not since childhood and mother’s call) when he first went west, went via some covered wagon dream as he and they, along with Sarah Mays (now Sarah Scott although she will when mad at Gerald revert to Mays but that is another story which she can tell at her leisure) landed in Joshua Tree out in the California high desert. The pack of them had just graduated from their respective colleges and as youth might do back then, now too, they decided to travel before settling down to whatever they would settle down to although college debt-bound these days probably not likely and rather work, work as a damn Starbuck’s barista if necessary to get the damn thing down before Social Security benefits come into play.

I won’t name the colleges, all four, since that too does not matter to our story and they can tell one and all about their four years at their leisure as well except that Gerald had taken a course in Native American history at his school. Had done so to fulfill an elective requirement at first but got so into what the real history of those many tribes were compared to the baloney he had been force-fed when he was a kid in school, on television and in the cinema when those benighted indigenous peoples were called Indians buying into the standard lie that these were the lost tribes of the Northwest Passage and Christopher Columbus’ misdirected signals to lay claim to the Americas (a name also reeking of illegitimacy but I will stop on this road for guys like Seth Garth and Frank Jackman of American Left History blog can run the rack on those injustices far better than I can). And so the trip with a few dollars, a few knapsacks, a few sleeping bags and a beat up but serviceable Toyota Camry purchased on the cheap from Sarah’s brother who was heading into the Army.      

I could probably spend a good portion of what I have to say running circles around how this quartet finally got to the high desert out in Joshua Tree but guys like Jack Kerouac, who influenced my father in his time to head out to California in the 1960s when he was young himself, Benny Gold, Lester Lawrence and a million other literary travelers have beaten the paths out to the west already. Like I say this is about a 10,000 year vision not some ill-begotten travelogue with AAA ratings. I do have to mention the last leg, the last leg before sunny and hot California desert because the route they travelled was through the states that are square, as the writer Thomas Wolfe put when he was noting something very different about the folk out there, the usurpers, those who stand on somebody else’s land and memory. They had done a circuitous route around the four states where Native Americans still had some existence, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona. At Gerald’s urging they stopped along the way at every reservation area they came across, especially the Hopi reservation which joins those four states together.

Gerald had told the other three that he had had a strange dream one night when they were outside Grand Island, Nebraska about a dance in which they, the three men, were participating in someplace in the West in some canyon where the night fire was flicking off the canyon walls and that flickering was driving the men to more fervent dancing. Beyond that Gerald did not, could not, find meaning in what that dream portended. Except he thought it had meant something about his growing affinity for those long-lost warrior kings who were crucified by the trail of tears the white man, he and his people, had brought upon some other people’s land. And so the search for what that all meant. Since nobody was in a hurry to get home or get to ocean California which meant at some point turning back East and whatever they were going to do lives, everybody consented to the route.             

That route would indeed portend something because along the way they wound up in Gallup, New Mexico during August and were just in time for the annual Intertribal gatherings at Red River Junction. They camped just outside the state park there on Friday and the next day spend the day learning about Native American tribal lore from the various tribes gathered at the site. One of the things that caught Gerald’s attention, as it did the others including Sarah, was the mesmerizing effect of the tribal dancing. Dancing that when it counted back in the day prepared the warriors to confront whatever enemy of the day was to be fought-other tribes or the encroaching white man with his womenfolk and youngsters. The rhythm, the warrior beat filled their heads, although this was not spoken of until later, until after they reached Joshua Tree, with their own warrior dreams, maybe pipe dreams is a better way to put the situation.      

Back at the campsite that night as the sun was setting and the heat of the dusty day was settling down when they came to their site they, Gerald first from the way I heard the story, noticed a medium-sized camper with many logos, or what looked like logos on it, a fire going and a few what looked like older men sitting around a big drum with sticks playing to a methodical beat and chanting something that he could not understand (and never did, then or later). They decided to get closer which none of the men around the drum objected to. When the men took a break one of the younger men waved the four devotees over and asked how they liked it, asked if they had gone to the Intertribal. Yes, on both counts. He introduced himself as Jack Two Feathers and asked their names, where they were from, and why they were there. Gerald explained the Native American interest part.

Then Jack Two Feathers mentioned that it was the tradition of his tribe, the Hopi, to enhance their drumming, enhance their connection with their ancestors, and, laughingly, just to get high to use peyote buttons. The Hopis had had trouble with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other law enforcement agencies over the use of the substance which they, the Hopis, claimed was part of their religious experience and thus protected under the white man’s United States Constitution. They would lose that argument in the United States Supreme Court but among the young, and some of the older fearless men they still carried out the peyote tradition.

Jack Two Feathers asked them if they had ever tried peyote and Gerald mentioned that his father had told him that he had as a proper 1960s young hippie type, but he had not. None of the others had either. They all agreed, once Jack Two Feathers calmed them down about the effects of the substance, to try some once he told them that it would increase their spiritual well-being to see what it was all about. Jack Two Feathers passed out some stuff that looked like mushrooms or something and told them to chew the stuff well. After about an hour, and after Jack Two Feathers had rejoined the older men around the drum who were ready to continue their drumming ceremony, the buttons began to kick in.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened that night except they were mesmerized by the beat of the drum, mesmerized by some younger Hopis who started to dance to the beat of the drums and would go into a fever pitch, and they did not come down from their highs to finally go to sleep until almost dawn. Packing up the next afternoon to head toward Joshua Tree via the Arizona desert and the Grand Canyon Jack Two Feathers came by their laden car and passed a small packet of peyote buttons to Gerald saying that maybe some time they too would see the face of sorrow, the faces of warrior-kings who had roamed at will in these their lands before the white man’s greed took it all away and left nothing good behind. Maybe even have a spiritual journey out of the experiences as well.               

Fast forward to Joshua Tree a couple of weeks later and a couple of late night until dawn peyote button rounds flames flickering against the grey, beige, red clay canyon walls, the three men bare-chested while some others met drummed and Gerald and the others finally found out what Jack Two-Feathers meant, felt that 10,000 year ancient warrior dream and would be forever changed by the experience. Gerald laughed as they started heading home about whether he should tell his father what happened. Nah, he would never believe the tale.