I just finished an audiobook called, "The Captured". It’s a true story of children who were kidnapped in Texas in the 1800s by Comanche or Apaches. The author had a great-great-great uncle who lived with the Comanche for two years before being returned to his original home. The thing is, he never fully recovered. More to the point, he never fit into white culture again, try as he might. Eventually giving up, he, Adolph Corn, lived his last few years in a cave, in solitude. In case after case, the situation was similar, especially for the young men. Within a year or two they had literally forgotten English (or German, as many who were captured were from recently immigrated families) and had fully embraced the Native culture as their own, even with its privations and hardships. One young man was recaptured by the whites and ended up dying, by most accounts, of a broken heart as a 15 year old boy once “reintegrated” into the culture of his birth. Another, Rudolf Fischer, who was captured as a 13 year-old, became as fierce a fighting man as any of the Comanche, and that’s saying something. His long hair, bleached white from the sun, made a stark contrast to his sun-darkened skin and made him into a truly frightful looking apparition of the Southern plains. What would make a child completely reject their birth family and even go so far as to kill those like them in defense of a new life and lifestyle?
I can only venture some guesses, but a few facts stand out. For one, the young men were treated like exactly that: a younger version of a fully-grown man. In a couple instances they were leading war parties by the time they'd been there for only a couple years, usually against the whites, sometimes against their former communities. All the former captives could live off the land indefinitely. Even later in life, relatives reported that one could knock a penny off a stick with an arrow at 20 yards.
Another's hands were so tough from the life he chose even after re-assimilation, that he could pick a live coal out of a fire with his bare hands to light his pipe. Several slept on the ground or outside for the bulk of the rest of their lives. Not because they had to... because they wanted to.
Getting re-assimilated, they asked good questions like, "why would I ever want to go to work for another man?" And, "why should I cut my hair and wear constricting clothes?" Sitting in a classroom amounted to torture. You think YOUR kid is unruly? Try sending an 18 year old - or a 10 year old, for that matter - to school after he knows how to be entirely self-sufficient.
This brings up several points for me. Actually, it brings up the same questions, including that timeless question of middle-aged men: What am I doing? Please forgive me as I publicly self-process. But I think I am not alone here. You might ask yourself the same questions, even if you are not of my gender or age. In fact, I hope you’re younger. Either way, you may have the same observations.
I was the one in the family that got up early as a 12-13 year old, grabbed my shotgun and my dog and went hunting in the fields behind my house to try to kill something before school. I slept outside in the summers often, often alone, and stayed up until 2-3am watching the stars. I read and re-read books about survival, hunting and fishing. I loved being outdoors. But I was also a good boy with a kind heart. I wanted to please my parents, especially my dad. So I did what they wanted me to do. I went to school, then a mission (eventually...kind heart and "pleaser personality" notwithstanding, I was not always an angel). Then I went to college and graduated. According to the convention to which I was now firmly dedicated, I married young but well and had three beautiful kids. For the bulk of my married life I kept pretty hard at recreation, but I was torn between the needs of a growing family and my own desire to be in nature, whether that meant surfing, trail running, hunting, fishing or snowboarding. Sometimes the family came first and sometimes my need to commune with something that was wild within me won out. Looking back, from my early teens until about 2008, my life was about taming this wild thing inside me. The Church mandated it and I made great progress within that paradigm, having deep, meaningful and amazing experiences within it. But some things weren’t meant to be wholly tamed. I submit that our souls are one of those things. Refined? Yes, I think so. But never tamed.
Mary Oliver famously asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” If I were to answer that as a member of the temporarily dominant culture today, I would have to say I am going to learn as a child to sit in a square room in rows. I am going to learn to quietly get in line behind my classmates before I leave for lunch, and that if I or my neighbor talks or giggles it will hold us all up. I am going to ask to go to the restroom. I am going to go to the principle’s office for busting my mouthy classmate – who was always one of my best friends – right in the mouth, breaking my hand in the process and then walking back into the classroom with our arms slung around each other like nothing happened (because nothing substantial did). I am going to be asked to get a license or two to fish, several licenses to hunt, one to drive a car, another to get married. I will swallow the treble barbed hook of a mortgage, keeping me from wandering with the seasons or my whims or to cool music festivals. I will eschew any substance or practice that loosens the societal grip on my mind. I’m going to get a job and trade my hours outside for hours inside, where I will make a lot of money for my employer, who will then share some of it with me. But I will still have to tell him when I’m going to the bathroom. In short, I am going to make my wild and precious life tame and homogeneous. Somehow, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one tame and homogeneous life” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But that is the reality for almost every adult I can name.
And that’s exactly where I’ve been, but at least I know it. I can’t say that for everyone. In fact, I can say that about hardly anyone, statistically speaking, which is why I’m going to share this essay. I had the chance in my early 20’s to change the course of my life. It would have been hard, very uncomfortable, because I had already made commitments. But I had just learned what critical thinking was and had serious questions about life, religion, personal philosophy and path. I had stumbled upon – I still don’t know how – books about real Native Americans written by Charles Eastman and Black Elk. They spoke to me deeply and I read voraciously all I could get my hands on. Pre-fatherhood, I was spending copious amounts of time in the woods outside Seattle, namely Issaquah and North Bend at the base of Mt. Si, scouting for deer, elk, bear and mountain goat to bow hunt. I was happiest outside, but I could not admit it to myself. That was not what I was taught. Therefore, it was not what would make me happy, as contradictory as that is. It was not okay. Therefore, it was irresponsible and wrong. So I stayed on my path toward happiness in the future, in heaven.
Are you like that, too? Are you nearing middle age with the same questions? Or are you younger, but with an old soul that knows that all the purposes of your life can be wrapped up in your own personal happiness, and know that that is EXACTLY how it’s supposed to be? Do you also know that Mary Oliver’s question is the right question – and maybe the ONLY question worth sitting with? Can you relate with a supposedly reclaimed but supremely miserable young man in Texas in the late 1800’s, standing alone in a school yard in anachronistic handmade buckskins, watching his classmates play red-rover and tag, wondering how he could ever be satisfied with that level of play again, when he could now ride bareback, shoot grasshoppers on the fly with his handmade bow and harvest big game to feed his family, not to mention protect them against real danger? Can you see that? More importantly, can you feel it?
Quanah Parker was the product of a family that consisted of a Comanche chief and a kidnapped girl, Mary Parker, who stayed by choice with the Comanche all her days. He is largely credited with being the last Native American chief to surrender to the whites. Quanah begged Rudolf Fisher to go meet his white father when they was found out that Rudolf was still alive. There were political reasons as well as personal ones for this. After multiple refusals, he finally consented to go. But he could not stay long. The freedom he had known was too much. He reintegrated back into Native culture as best he could as it had basically already failed due to pressure from the whites and the murderous effect that had on the land, particularly on the mobile food larder that was the mighty American Bison herd.
I can relate to Rudolf. I also felt freedom, turned myself in, and now I want back out. I am 50 years old, and I publicly and consistently reject this culture in many ways. But more importantly I re-embrace the opposite of the culture - that wild thing within me; the un-tamable part of me that no one, including a brainwashed, substandard version of myself, can smother. I give a nod to the species that have awaited my return, both physical and spiritual, both plant, animal, and mineral. I feel my soul ready to melt back into the sweet soil. I long to hear my boots make sucking noises in the mud as I trudge home in a misting November rain. I am dying to taste wild blackcaps again, and to feel cold on my face that I know I could easily erase… if I only lived in a house instead of a tipi, or had driven my truck to this spot, or hadn’t stayed out so late waiting for that last flock of ducks to set their wings before dusk, a happily shivering, wet retriever by my side and the smell of gunpowder still in my nose.
This is the home of my soul. I have been a captive of the whites and dammit, I am returning home.
PART 2: Let’s Go Together
It may take time to unravel commitments that were made under duress of an insane philosophy, or one bereft of concern for your wild wisdom, or when you were otherwise in a state of confusion. The commitments were real and affect others, some of whom you love deeply. It doesn’t ultimately matter if you go live in a tipi on the edge of Hell’s Canyon in Snake River country in the next few months. The point, the whole point really, is to see the entrapment, the whole sub-sane tragic comedy, and know that at some point the disentanglement is good work for the rest of your life that will, at any rate, slow you from making further entangling, soul-sucking promises. Try to go slow. Be compassionate with yourself if you can’t. In fact, if you ignore my (hypocritical) advice and cut and run without forethought, when everyone else in your life asks why you've gone bonkers (even though they’ll think they have the answers), you have my support anyway – even if it seems unwise to me, too. If your life has become something you don’t want and slowly disentangling is not going to work for you, I am handing you right now a stick of dynamite. You will rebuild with cleaner materials when the dust settles, as it always does. As Don Henley sings in “My Thanksgiving”, “sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge.”
To conclude, you are wild. You are not meant to be tame. You are meant to love deeply and with passion and with abandon. You are related to the hummingbird, the eagle, the bear, the owl and a host of other animals that are hoping and praying that you learn their names, too, for they have so much to teach you. You are meant to feel far more than an air-conditioned office, car and stick-built home will allow. You are a glorious animal, made of the dust of your Mother under the starry, atmospheric hug of your Father. You were made to lift your head and feel the warm sun on your face, and laugh in awe at the wind, and make love under lightning skies. We all were.
The captives came to know it and I am dedicated to remembering it.
How about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment