The Good Red Road
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by: petergorman
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Word Count: 4241
“When we go to gather the peyote we talk to the Grandfathers and ask their permission to take some back with us so that our people can benefit from it. Then we ask permission of Mother Earth to take the medicine that’s there, to let us find it. Then we eat one or two and we leave a gift there——sometimes a scarf or tobacco—that we think is good in return for it. You have to leave a gift. Our teachings say you can’t take anything unless you leave something in its place. That’s how things balance out.
And if you’re in turn with the harmony of these things you know when it’s time to go. You just know you have enough and you can’t pick anymore. That’s just the way it is. You can take it or leave it.”
—Bertha Grove, Southern Ute Medicine Woman
It was a cool August evening high in the Rockies. To the East, a sliver of moon began to rise above the horizon. Overhead, patches of cloud obscured portions of the starry sky.
The teepee for the meeting had been put up earlier in the day, in the side yard of a small reservation house. The fire within it glowed, casting eerie shadows on the canvas walls. Nearly two dozen people milled about it, some in groups, talking, others quieting themselves. Many of them wore red shirts or had red blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Among them were members of the Ute, Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne nations.
I looked out across the plateau not far from Four Corners: 100 years ago teepee fires would have dotted the landscape instead of streetlights; horses would have stood where the collection of cars and pick-up trucks were parked.
At a signal I didn’t notice, a line formed and we began to walk around the teepee in a clockwise direction, pausing for a moment at each of the four directions: to the West, home of the Thunderbird, the place where water comes from; North, the direction from which man comes; East, the direction of the sun; and South, the direction of the Good Red Road, the path the spirit takes when we die.
We finished circling and stepped into the teepee. We walked in the same clockwise direction, between the fire and the wall, to seats we’d taken or been given earlier in the day.
Around the fire was an altar, a semi-circle of earth raised a few inches from the dirt floor. It’s ends pointed East, to either side of the door-flap. A thin line had been cut like a narrow groove into the center of the altar’s flattened top, signifying the Road, the path of our lives.
At the altar’s head sat the Roadman, who would conduct the ceremony. To his right, the Drummer fashioned a water drum, stretching a piece of elk skin over a small black kettle half-filled with water. To the Roadman’s left sat his companion, the Water Bearer, the woman who would bring us water first at midnight and again when dawn broke. Near the door sat the Fireman, who would maintain the fire all night.
When we settled into the old sofa cushions most of us used as seats, the Fireman, tall, thin man named High Chief, stepped outside. He returned with two long staves of cottonwood and arranged them carefully into the existing fire, spreading the bright coals into the shape of a large Thunderbird whose wings filled the half-moon altar. The smoke from the coals of the ceremonial fire would carry our prayers up through the teepee flaps to the heavens.
It was the fourth Native American Church meeting I’d attended. The first was held for a young boy’s birthday; the second for a woman who was about to leave for college; the third for someone who was ill. This one was being conducted for a young couple just starting out on their own. They had asked the girl’s mother to put the meeting up so that they could have the blessing of family, friends and tribal elders in a traditional way. Many of the people who sat around the fire that night had been present at the earlier meetings I’d attended as well.
During the day, several people had spoken to me about the two articles I’d written about the Native American Church. One was an account of my first meeting; the second about Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief considered responsible for spreading the use of peyote throughout the Southwest US. Some felt I was being irresponsible, that by writing about their ceremony for High Times magazine I was jeopardizing their religious freedom.
“It makes it look like we approve drug use,” said one young woman. “People see your magazine as a drug magazine and then they see our ceremony discussed in it and they think our ceremony is a drug ceremony.”
“I’ve never portrayed it that way,” I answered.
“That doesn’t matter. The message you’re sending is that people should come out and get high with the Indians. We don’t need that kind of political heat.”
Theoretically, a 1978 Congressional resolution called the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act provides Native Americans with the assurance of free exercise of their beliefs. But as Christopher Vescey, Director of Native American Studies at Colgate University has noted, there are several areas of the law which remain unclear. Among them are the “regulations regarding the collection, transport and use of peyote.”
I didn’t like hearing what the young woman said, but I knew it was true. Despite the fact that there was no correlation whatsoever between the NAC and High Times’ work toward legalizing cannabis, and that I’d never heard of marijuana use at a Native American Church meeting, I knew there were people who would make that connection for their own political agendas.
When we were all settled, the Roadman, Alden, stood. He was big, strong, good looking. He dressed in black, with a red sash around his waist.
“I want to thank you all for coming tonight,” he began, “to give blessings to these young people here, Joyce and David, before Grandfather Peyote.”
He looked around at each of us, then at the young couple. “I’m looking at the faces here,” he said. “Some of them have come a long way to sit up all night with you. That’s good. You listen to them, to what they have to say. And you listen to what the Grandfathers have to say too.”
When he finished he sat and opened his medicine box. He took out an eagle feather fan and a bone whistle and lay them near the altar. He made a small bed of fresh sage on the altar-top and placed his Grandfather Peyote on it. It was a large and perfect button, one he had used for years.
From a small bag he took some cedar and tossed it into the fire: The sweet wood smell filled the teepee. Those who had their own feather fans used them to draw the smoke to them. Those of us who didn’t used our hands.
Dried corn husks and a bag of loose tobacco were passed and we rolled cigarettes. High Chief pulled a burning stick from the fire and passed it to light the ceremonial smoke. I’d been told that the tobacco, like the cedar, could take a person a long way on the road of their life, whatever their road was.
We smoked in silence. When we finished, High Chief collected the butts and arranged them around the altar, their burned ends facing the fire so that our prayers would join the rising smoke.
Two jars of peyote were brought out and put at the head of the altar. One was filled with dried ground buttons; the other with peyote tea. Alden blessed them with cedar smoke, took a spoonful from the jar of dried peyote and ate it. He followed it with a drink of the tea. When he was finished he passed the jars to the Drummer, who did the same, then passed them to the Water Bearer.
As the peyote was passed from person to person the Roadman took out a gourd rattle and a ceremonial staff, a simple stick dressed with beads and feathers. He shook the rattle and began to sing. Though the words were foreign to me his voice was clear and the song haunting. The Drummer began to accompany him, playing on the water drum with a short, flat stick. The drumming was quick and rhythmic; the sound of the rattle lent an insistent quality to the beat. The teepee began to fill with the rich sounds.
When the peyote reached me I poured a spoonful into my left hand and ate it. It was dry and bitter and I gagged on it before getting it down.
It was early afternoon and I’d managed to push aside the conversation with the young woman. I was standing near the teepee when someone I didn’t know approached.
“You’re the writer fellow, aren’t you?” the man asked.
I said I was.
“Let me ask you then: What gives you the right to write about something you know nothing about?”
I told him that my job as a journalist was to witness things and write about them for the people who didn’t witness them. I didn’t say it smugly; I was just being straight.
“You know,” the man said, “for us it’s a way of life. We’re not playing at being Indian. We are Indian.”
Each of the men sang four songs before passing on the rattle and the staff. I stared into the fire and listened, feeling the rhythm get under my skin and into my blood. I felt my heartbeat begin to fall into the pattern of the music and watched as the fire seemed to adjust to it as well.
High Chief brought new wood and arranged the coals every new minutes: The Thunderbird pulsed, beginning to take on a life of its own. I began to feel as though everyone in the teepee was becoming part of something greater than ourselves, as though our intentions and presence were becoming one intention and one presence. It was a strong feeling. There was a dignity and strength among them that could never really be conquered. It didn’t come from the physical attributes of the celebrants, many of whom were no longer young, but from some spiritual pool of belief. Whether those beliefs were mine or not wasn’t important. Being there was. Feeling the power and the beauty of the meeting wash through me was.
The peyote made its way around to me a second time; it was even more bitter than the first. I remembered a story I’d been told about its taste, that some Indians believed that the spirit of peyote had made itself bitter so that man would not abuse it.
When the peyote had been passed to everyone twice, the jars were capped and put away. The singing continued. The drum, staff and rattle passed from man to man around the circle, their voices becoming one voice, their song one song.
I asked Bertha Grove, the Elder who had invited me to the meeting, to tell me about peyote. She was old and beautiful, with sparkling black eyes and long gray hair wrapped around her head. Her son Alden was the Roadman that night; her brother Junior had been the Roadman for the earlier meetings I’d attended.
“It’s just the way we believe,” she said. “It’s medicine to help us reach the Creator with our prayers. Of course not everyone believes it. Some people they don’t understand the Native American Church. They think it’s evil and that people who use peyote are no good. They have their opinion but they don’t understand it. You have to experience it your own self in order to understand what you’re talking about.”
Bertha was the Spiritual leader of the Southern Utes in that area. Not a Roadman because that job was reserved for men, but even they stopped to listen when Bertha talked.
“Some of the people around here say that we make you pay money to write about us. One woman’s going around saying I was paid a thousand dollars for those articles. Like I was selling our beliefs.”
I hadn’t paid her or anyone else anything. “You’re kidding!” I said.
“Nope. But that’s just people. You can’t listen to everyone you hear.”
“What do you say to them when they say that?”
“I tell them it was two thousand.”
After the drum had circled the fire four times the Drummer stopped playing. The Roadman tossed cedar into the fire. The Water Bearer left the teepee. When she returned she carried a bucket of water with her. The Roadman blessed it with his fan, drank, then passed it around the circle. Each of us drank. When the circle was complete he blew his bone whistle to the Four Directions and said that anyone who needed to step outside for a few minutes could. We’d been sitting for more than five hours.
The night air had grown cold and a breeze had picked up. I stretched my back and legs, took out a cigarette, then stepped away from the teepee. The sliver of moon had risen halfway across the sky and the patches of clouds had vanished. I felt the grass under my feet.
I wondered what it was I was really doing there: Was I just playing Indian? Or worse, exploiting them for a story? Would I be there if I wasn’t writing a story?
The thoughts took just a moment to cross my mind but seemed to land in the air around me. I began to feel shakey and self-conscious. I’d thought there was a good reason to be there. I thought it was important for people to know about their church and this ceremony, important to learn what other cultures believed in and valued because the more we understand the less we distrust. But there, out behind the house, away from the meeting lodge, I wondered if I wasn’t overstepping my bounds for personal reasons.
Someone called and I started back. The moment the teepee came into view I wanted to be back inside, staring at the fire, surrounded. Bertha and High Chief stood by the door, hurrying those of us who were slow. I stepped back into the light.
When we were seated again the Roadman offered tobacco to the young couple. David, who had never been to a meeting before, was unsure what to do. Joyce, who’d grown up in the church, rolled a corn husk cigarette, lit it with High Chief’s fire stick, smoked four puffs and began to pray.
“I want to thank you all for coming,” she started, “to be here for David and me at this meeting.” She spoke simply and from the heart, asking the Grandfathers to bless her union, to give it strength in times of difficulty and warmth in times of cold. She asked forgiveness from those she had caused pain and forgave those who had pained her. Then she thanked the spirits of all things and asked the fire to carry her prayers to the heavens.
When she finished High Chief collected what remained of her cigarette and put it near the altar.
The Roadman thanked her for her prayers, then passed the tobacco and corn husks to all of us. I remember thinking that I’d been told that in the meeting it was important to take whatever problems you had or prayers you wanted answered and put them in the fire where the Grandfathers, the Creator, would take care of them. I silently asked them to make sure that my intentions were good, that what I wrote did not hurt these people. Then I asked the fire to carry those thoughts to a good place.
When we’d finished smoking High Chief threw what was left of our cigarettes into the fire. The flames leapt.
“Most of those that come to the Native American Church turn to it because that’s where they find their spiritual life and friends,” Bertha said. “That’s where they can meet up with people who have been through hardships already. People don’t look down on you there. They’re more forgiving.”
I asked her feeling about the stories High Times published on the church.
“The think to know is how much this means to us. How important it is for us to have this path open to reach the Grandfathers. You know, people put up ceremonies for everything you’d go to any other church for: weddings, birthdays, sickness, death in the family, all sorts of things.
“But this is only one path, one type of ceremony, and this is the only one where we use peyote. In our Sun Dances we just use drumming and dancing. And in our Sweat Lodge ceremonies the hot stones connect us with the womb of Mother Earth. We don’t use peyote there, either. It think it’s important that you write that, that there are different ceremonies for different things.”
“So you worry that the laws will be changed and outlaw the peyote ceremony?”
She laughed. “It could happen, I guess. But I don’t think the Grandfathers would allow it.”
Bertha herself was a healer who didn’t generally use peyote in her healing. “I was taught to go talk with Mother Earth,” she once explained, “to ask her to point out which of her plants can help someone, depending on what ails them. You know, after a lifetime you know so many plants, but I still ask Mother Earth for help and she keeps showing me new plants to use to help people.
At one of the other ceremonies I’d attended, Bertha spent a long time working with a sick woman; feeling her pain and the places in her body in which it had settled. Near morning she’d finally pushed the sickness to up near the top of the woman’s head, then sucked it out.
When I asked her about it the next day she said that while I might not see something coming out of the woman’s head, she had. “It’s like sick flesh in my mouth when I get it out. Like bad meat. But then its up to the person to finish healing themselves, to fix the things they need to fix so they won’t get sick again.”
She had turned to a young healer, a white woman, who was there with us. “And I was watching your spirit last night, she said. I was thinking about you and I saw something I am going to tell you about. I could see that you’re a good healer. You have a good heart and you know how to relieve pain. But you better be careful. I don’t think you know how to get rid of the sickness you pull out. And you know sickness, like everything else, is something. Even if you can’t see it. You have to be careful when you suck a person’s sickness out not to swallow it yourself or let it stick on you or you’ll get sick. Maybe it will be a different sickness in you, but you’ll get sick. And don’t just go spitting it out, either, or it might land on somebody else. You take out a cold and spit it out and who knows? Maybe it will land on someone else as bad luck, or pneumonia.
“What we Indians do, what we were taught, is to take that sickness and wrap it in something—just imagine wrapping it in something—and then ask the Creator to take it someplace far away and bury it where it won’t harm anyone else.”
She looked at the young woman healer for several seconds. “If you don’t learn that you’re going to get awful sick real soon.”
The healer, someone I knew, got sick six months later and has been nearly bedridden since.
The night grew deep. High Chief kept the Thunderbird glowing. The fire moved with the rhythm of the drum and the hours passed. I could no longer tell which man was singing without looking at them. Voices filled the teepee and I lost myself in the fire. Sparks took what seemed like hours to jump, flicker and die. Time passed like a dream. I found myself crying at one point, tears streaming down my face from an emptiness I didn’t know I felt. At another point someone nudged me and asked why I was smiling. I had no idea. I just felt things and they moved through me. I saw friends in New York and thunderstorms in the jungle. I saw people in the teepee like shining stars, floating above the ground. When I looked again they were just people. I saw the fire alive with intention and felt it like an ecstatic thing. None of it made sense to me but all of it made sense. It was as if I no longer existed as the me I knew, as if my dreams and desires belonged to someone else. All I wanted was to stay in the light with my heart matching the beat of the drum. It might have been a glimpse of balance or harmony, an exhilarating freedom from myself. All things were all things rang in my head, without words. The spirit in everything was the same spirit and I was feeling that part of it which was me.
I knew, in the end, that people must know about this, that it was not something that should be kept from them. And I also knew, without words, why the missionaries and government had been so afraid of this ceremony. It wasn’t the use of peyote or the water drum, or the sage, rattle and staff which frightened them. It was the empowerment of people.
And then, suddenly, the light of false dawn showed in the teepee’s fire flaps and for a minute I felt a terrifying loss, as the ego that had disappeared came rushing back with a fury. My back ached, my mouth was dry. Everything was me and my needs and I was helpless to push them away.
The Roadman stood and threw cedar onto the fire. The Water Bearer and some of the other women left. But the drumming continued and the dawn didn’t break. The music beat back my ego and I disappeared again into the flames. My petty concerns vanished and I was staring into the heart of the sun, listening to the music of the universe and flying through worlds I’d never seen. It wasn’t hallucination, it was feeling. If I could have thought I would have tried to grasp the images and make them concrete but I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything. I was just there.
I became aware that the drumming had stopped, that the songs were no longer being sung. I looked up at the teepee flaps and saw dawn breaking across the sky. An immense feeling of well-being passed through me. I thought of Joyce and David and wished them well. I thought of the Grandfathers and thanked them. I thought of the fire and thanked it as well. I had to fight an urge to shout joyfully.
When the women returned they brought food and water: dried meat and corn, a bowl of sweet cherries, crackers. The little pots were set in a line facing the altar. The Water Bearer sat behind them and asked for the tobacco. She prayed while she smoked, asking blessings for Joyce and David, for her own children, for all of us. When she finished she passed the food and we ate quietly.
It was Bertha’s turn to speak next. She talked to the young couple, telling them what was in store and what their responsibilities were. “You go out and do things for yourself,” she said. “You go find some rooms now and stop living with your family. You got your own family now, so get on with it.
“What you asked the Grandfathers for, when you had that main smoke, was to help you get through the hard times and help you enjoy the good times. He will. The Grandfathers will do that because you put that in the fire. But it’s up to you to take care of the rest. It’s your life, what you make of it. That’s the way it really is.”
She turned to me. “And this fellow here, he’s gonna write about us. I think it’s good for people to know what we do here. The only thing we ask is that he does it with respect.”
When she finished the Roadman thanked us for coming, then blew his whistle once more. He put away his eagle feather fan and his Grandfather Peyote and gave the bed of sage to Joyce.
We stepped into the morning.
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