Growing Corn : Tools for Community

Journey To Become A Caretaker Of The Earth

I was born and raised on the Confederated Flathead Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Montana in the 50’s and 60’s. I left home in the early 70’s. My parent’s effort to raise a family in a “Leave it to Beaver Cleaver” fashion and the juxtaposition of my observing the elders of the tribe walk to church in their moccasins and fur-covered braids, fancy shawls and leather beaded pouches, going to powwows that lasted for days in the heat of the summer, and being a minority at school was my introduction to a life filled with conflict of purpose.

When I was twelve, my father bought a set of “Book of Knowledge” from a traveling salesman. I’m sure he felt we needed to know the world. I pored over those books and was introduced to a world populated by indigenous people living indigenous ways. What did that mean? At age 15, I set out on a great journey to explore religion, spirituality and indigenous ways, looking for my path and purpose.

As a pre-med student, an Anthropology major and Archaeology minor at the University of Montana, I learned about indigenous and healing ways in the world. Much of my work at the University took me into the field where I learned about the Native American peoples of the past. After five years of study and learning abroad, I quit school, realizing that to study another people was egocentric and a Western approach which did not sit well with me. I began to find my teachers. In 1995, I interned with Rosita Arvigo, a Mayan healer and learned the ways of the healer from teachers including Alberto Villodo and John Perkins, traveling to Belize and various countries in South America.

After years of meeting healers and traveling to foreign places, I landed on the doorstep of don Lucio Campos Elizade, a very well-known traditional healer and Caporal Mayor granicero in the Nahua tradition of Central Mexico. In 1996, he told me that the gods were reaching for me and that I must develop a relationship with the Weather Spirits. He said that I would be sitting on many mountaintops, and this relationship to weather would offer me safety as I pilgrimaged to sacred places. He led me through a coronation ceremony where I became a weather worker (granicera) in this tradition and spent a great deal of time with don Lucio learning the ways of connection to the Weather Beings.

Simultaneously studying Plant Spirit Medicine with Eliot Cowan, I found that even after my search for an authentic tradition, his advice to “follow your heart” was profound. Having had several teachers before Mr. Cowan, his counsel has led me through the maze of my own heart and mind, to discover a deeper connection to the divine through the ancestral lineage of the Huichol.

Often a person is called to a path through sickness or tragedy. I was called through my dreams and spiritual visitations by the gods, and at some point I recognized that it was the Huichol gods who were invading me. Through further confirmation from an elder Huichol shaman don Guadalupe Gonzalez Rios, I was given permission to move forward with apprenticeship in 1997, and in 2003 and 2004 I was initiated as a marakame in this tradition.

During my exploration, I came across medicine men and woman notably of the Shuar and Qe’ro of South America who said that the responsibility of caretaking the world by the indigenous people would soon come to a completion. It would become the people of the west who would take this on. I accepted this wholeheartedly, as I knew I had a calling to be one of those caretakers.

From here I continue to develop my work and offer what I have learned and know to our western people.