Chapter 2 Good Little Indians

Chapter Two

Good Little Indians

      Having returned from Sabbatical and begun using Storm’s Seven Arrows as a text in my college Ethics course, I attended a lecture by James Kirsch, who was one of the founders of the C. G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles.  He was in his eighties at that time.  He said it was his observation that third generation Americans, whose dreams he had analyzed, dreamed frequently in Native American motifs.  He shared several examples in his lecture, emphasized the importance for analysts to be familiar with Native American mythology and legends, and offered an hypothesis to account for the presence of these Native American motifs in Europeans’ dreams.  He believed the land itself had a memory of the events occurring there; we who sleep within the soul space of the land are accessing those memories.  When I asked him what the moral of his story was, he replied, “we should be good little Indians” (J. Kirsch, personal communication, 1978). 

      Western European cultural tradition has viewed Native American cultures with curiosity, suspicion, and fear.  Much of our history illustrates the destruction of Native practices, languages, and religious traditions as the conquerors took possession of lands cared for by the indigenous peoples.  Ironically, as the European conquest of the Native tribes spread across the continent, or Turtle Island as my Iroquois ancestors translated it into English, the Europeans intermarried with the indigenous inhabitants. The (unconscious) result was mixing up the gene pool.  Now my English ancestors, who arrived here on the Mayflower, have descendents carrying the genetic make-up of everyone, European and Indigenous.

      Native American motifs were recurrent images in my childhood. I experienced visions during illnesses with high fevers and dreamed of cowboys and Indians.  Growing up in rural Idaho during the 1940s and 50s, I saw a lot of Wild West moving picture shows.  I attended Dartmouth College, founded in 1638 as a school for Native Americans.  I transferred to the University of Utah, which was named after the Ute Indians.  My Mormon ancestors lived among the Shoshone and Bannock of Idaho and the Ute and Piute Indians of Utah and Nevada.  Throughout my childhood I was told of my Scots/Irish/English/German heritage.  But I began to wonder about my other ancestors as I was turning thirty and my children were being born.  It was then that a series of interesting events occurred.

      On our family’s first visit to my brother’s home in Arizona, we encountered its surprising décor; wall-to-wall, there was only one motif: cowboys and Indians. “Growing up in Idaho must have had an unconscious impact” was my first thought.  My closest faculty friend at the college, a charismatic teacher of Mathematics, was proud of his Great Lakes Native American lineage.  It was he who had gifted me Hyemeyohsts Storm’s book, Seven Arrows (1972), which reconnected me with the philosophy, psychology, and religious beliefs of the Plains Indians. After encountering the book, my dreams had very explicit images of scenes I had never experienced, such as Eagle and Deer Dancers curing me in their Native regalia.  My paternal grandmother, Theodocia Chipman Shelley Melville, confirmed my belief that my brother and I had inherited Native American genes from her side of the family. 

      Shortly after meeting Dr. Kirsch in 1978, I was taken as a Spirit Brother by Meyalo, an eighty-four year old Papago Medicine Man.  He was surprised to discover a white man who understood and taught what he called “the stories of life”.  Meyalo’s spirit daughter had enrolled in the college Ethics class and had read much of Storm’s book.  When she told her daughter a story from Seven Arrows, the girl told Meyalo the story.  That afternoon he was waiting at the door for my student.  “Where is this book which tells the Stories of Life?” was his greeting to his spirit daughter.  She looked down at the book in her arms and he took it!  He went into his room for two days, read the book, and then wanted to know “who is this man who teaches the Stories of Life?”  The old man waited everyday to hear what his spirit daughter would say about her teacher’s stories. He wondered what sort of man this Michael Melville was.  Often he sent questions through my student, who was to report everything she heard in class.  That’s how we got to know each other, although we never met in person.

      Six weeks later Meyalo died.  He said he was tired; his spirit was cold.  Before he asked the rattlesnakes to transport him into the Spirit World, he took me as his Spirit Brother and promised me a gift.  When his feathered headband was handed to me, I thought I had received the gift.  But that was just the beginning of the many gifts, which Meyalo has been giving since the summer of 1979.  From that time to this, my consciousness has been continually embracing my Native heritage.  In following my Spirit Brother’s guidance, I have come to this point of sharing my stories.  A more academic telling of these tales, written with my fellow psychotherapists in mind, is an account of the inter-tribal Peyote Ceremony, its history and function as a sacred container, which provides an opening for the Unconscious to enter and heal our people.  I called it The Peyote Ceremony of the Native American Church: Gateway to Healing and Transformation. (Unpublished Masters Thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2004. It can be viewed at my Ancient Whiteagle Wisdom blog at www.dreamcoat.wordpress.com)   But once again I am getting ahead of myself.   I need to go back to 1997, the Redwoods, the grape vineyards, and marijuana farms of Mendocino County in Northern California.  That’s where my family had been living for sixteen years after leaving the gangs, latchkey children, overcrowding, and urban sprawl, which had eaten up all the strawberry fields around us during our eleven years in Orange County.

      “Follow your roots,” my wife had told me after thirty years of marriage.  She was done with me; that was clear to her and the kids, but I was still in denial about everything.  I was thinking, questioning, “How could this be happening?  This isn’t the way I planned it; we’re supposed to live out our old age together.  How can she do this to me?”  I sat there stunned in disbelief.  “And what does she mean by “roots” anyway?  God, I’m a hybrid when it comes to roots, my mom’s roots are German and Jewish on her mother’s side, and Scots/Irish Orangemen on her father’s side.  My dad’s roots are French by way of Scotland and English back to the Mayflower.  Maybe she meant the secret Native American genes slumbering within me of my Patawatomi, Seneca, Pequot, and Cherokee ancestors.  Oh fuck it! I need to find a place to get out of the rain!”

      That’s how it started anyway.  For sixteen years I had been a gentle, Deer man, that’s how my wife said she saw me, as a deer shaman living out a dream of educating our four sons together in our Montessori style home/school.  She was from the old world of ancient Greece, but in the way Chippewa medicine man Sun Bear talked about such people,
she was definitely Bear with an Owl on her shoulder. 

      Bears and Deer have very different values and life styles.  Mother Bears raise their young by themselves, driving off the male until they are ready to mate again.  Deer are herd animals  andthe stag is protective of his many wives and children.  Male deer hang out together until they are ready to rut and then they challenge each other for the right to mate with the females.  Mrs. Bear got jealous of my flirting with the other ladies and hanging out with the young bucks.  She came from a long line of strong family values and deer just can’t seem to remember bear boundaries.

      Or maybe it started nine months before that with the Christmas gift my son, the Puma (Mountain Lion), slipped under the tree for his mom and dad.  I remember opening it that winter and thinking,  “Interesting title: Synchronicity: Science, Myth and the Trickster, just up my alley; that might be a good supplement to the dry Critical Thinking text I’ll be teaching this summer”.  Little did I know that Coyote was lurking in those pages, just waiting patiently for me to stumble into his trap.  That’s the trickster part of the book’s title.  There is this wild magic in the world, which the ancient Greeks called Hermes and the Native Americans called Coyote.  The Native Haida people of British Columbia called it Raven, but whatever you call it, it means trouble,laughter, humiliation, surprises, and lack of moral and sexual boundaries.  I guess you could call it the Balancer of Opposites if you are a mind to be philosophical.  At that time, I was definitely prone to intellectualizing life.    

      But that was before Mrs. Bear asked me to leave:  “You’re just too negative” she said, “you need to get your own place, I don’t want you sleeping with me anymore.” 

      “What am I supposed to do in the middle of October in the Redwood Forest with winter coming?  I have no car.  How will I eat and pay rent with a part-time job teaching at the college?” said Deer, looking frightened, not sure the bear was safe anymore.  “That’s your problem,” she said,  “Why don’t you go ask your friends, the Jew Boos?”  Astounded, I thought,  “The Jew Boos?  My God, she means the woman who should have been a Rabbi and her Laplander Finish Lutheran turned Buddhist husband.  Well those are my roots, I guess; it’s worth a try.”  And sure enough she was right.  My friend, whom I affectionately call “Rebbi”, did have a lead on a place to keep me warm and dry, but there was a small, very small catch.  She said, “This woman is vegetarian; could you handle that?”  Desperately clinging to my last shred of hope I said, “Sure no problem!”  Or so I thought anyway. 

      There is often a surprise created by Coyote as his victim, in this case the Deer, stumbles into a new situation.  The surprise in the Cracker Jack Box was the connection to the vegetarian question of the Rebbi.  My gracious hostess was a devotee of a living Punjabi Saint.  She and her community were more than happy to entertain the possibility of a new convert.  How does this happen in a small rural California town in the middle of the Emerald Triangle?  Or perhaps what else would you expect Coyote to provide a desperate refugee?  Something, which looks easy, but isn’t!  That’s what Coyote does.  He lures us humble, trusting Deer People into cozy sanctuary only to twist our tails. 

      The first thing that happened that cold November was I got sick.  What else would I expect?  After applying for welfare, I was riding the bus 14 miles to work with all the druggies.  How did I know that? I was listening to the people talk about losing their licenses, cars, and relationships after being arrested for Driving Under the Influence of a controlled substance or alcohol.  Many had just been released from the County Jail and were riding north talking in LOUD, like their hearing was affected as well as their brains from all the meth-amphetamines.  Do I sound bitter?  Well perhaps I was a little angry, and humiliated with no car.  While I was grumbling about my situation over lunch with my College Department Head, my elder colleague listened patiently to my tale of woe.  Then he said, rather cryptically peering over his spectacles, “Oh dear, what a predicament!   Physician, heal thyself!”  Stunned like the proverbial deer in the headlights, I was speechless.  As he went back to munching his salad, it seemed he morphed right before my eyes.  One moment he was the rather conservative professor, who wished he had been a Baptist preacher, and the next he was the head of the deer clan with antlers nudging me to move on from my ruminating, grumbling victim role to a more active one.  I knew that physicians had to seek healing from their colleagues, that trying to heal yourself lacks the objectivity needed to find the right herbs.  What kind of deer medicine was this?   Like duh!  How can someone so smart be so stupid?   I would find a psychologist; after all, I was the adult child of alcoholic parents just like my colleague who was sitting on the other side of the table. Perhaps the Drug and Alcohol program at the County Mental Health could provide me the counseling I needed.  “Thanks, Tom,” I said, getting up from the table, “I’ll take your advice.”

      What I found at the County Drug and Alcohol Center was another surprise.  The Counselor had a picture of a familiar Punjabi Holy Man on the wall behind him.  “My God,” I thought, “what’s going on here?  These people are all over the place!”  He informed me that although they could have helped me the previous year, when their grant covered people with family patterns of drug and alcohol abuse, now they only treated people who were currently addicted.  Since I was not an addict, I would have to find someone in the community who would do therapy with me.  He shook my hand, wished me luck, and opened the door for me to step out.  “Now what?”   I was disappointed.

      Coyote had a much better plan for me as it turned out.  Since complete humiliation was part of his scheme, I had applied for and received Welfare.  That meant not only enough food stamps to keep me alive, but free medical and dental benefits.  As I walked into the Healing Arts Center where I was teaching a Dream Workshop, I was greeted by my colleague, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.  I asked her if she took Medi-Cal clients.  She did.  I told her about my situation and that I needed a counselor, would she take me as a client?  Again a positive response.  That week, I embarked on what would become a six-year-long journey with an older woman, who, in the terminology of modern psychotherapy, became my “good-enough mother”.  She re-parented me as we explored my childhood, my young adulthood, my marriage, separation and divorce.  She gave me the support I needed to grow strong enough to face the coming storms.