Travels in a Stone Canoe: The Return to the Wisdomkeepers

Book by Arden Harvey Wall Steve

Chapter 1

"Harvey, I've met this Indian...."

Nothing has been the same for me since those simple words were spoken. My life's real work had abruptly and inexorably begun, and I was merely annoyed.

Looking back now, nearly two decades later, I try to reconstruct how it all began, how it came about that we -- two unlikely white journalists -- became runners stumbling between two worlds, spirit-journeyers on the path of the Wisdomkeepers. Events that seemed isolated and utterly unconnected at the time I now see as parts of an emerging whole. What's more, the whole itself keeps changing, as do we. The ever-shifting parts dissolve and reform, metamorphosing in and out of each other as in a dream.

The pieces of memory come floating back at me.

There was Steve Wall, who got me into all of this, and there was Two Trees, who envisioned this spirit-journey in the first place and who remains a dark and unsettling enigma to this day. There was the Maestro's mystic condor in Peru, and there was Frank Fools Crow's miraculous eagle at Wounded Knee. There was Leon Shenandoah, who taught us there was a path, and Mathew King, who taught us there was a set of instructions for following that path. "Original Instructions for being human," he called them. There was the eagle's feather and the owl's claw -- the signs that Two Trees predicted we would receive and which assumed a special metaphoric power for us as they propelled us onto the path. And then there was me, yanked out of the ordinary and flung into it all despite myself, protesting and complaining all the way.

I remember that pale gray morning in late November 1981. A light snow was falling at an angle past my seventh-floor window at National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C. I was at my desk writing an article for the magazine about the return of the Sinai Peninsula from the Israelis to the Egyptians ("Eternal Sinai," April 1982). Just six weeks earlier I had stood some twenty-five yards from Anwar Sadat at the moment of his assassination during a military parade in a sports stadium outside Cairo -- not quite the usual stuff for a National Geographic staff writer and, since my article wouldn't be published for many months, hardly a major news scoop. But I was properly shaken by the incident, seeing some special if indefinable personal providence at having been present at that vortex of history. I remember, moments after the first shooting began, standing there poised on the stadium tarmac, frozen more in amazement than fear, caught with arms akimbo in the crossfire between Sadat's fleeing assassins and the security police, bodies falling all around me. As I stood there a young dark-skinned Egyptian man in army fatigues, probably no more than seventeen or eighteen, ran wildly past me, his doelike eyes wide with fright; he was followed by half a dozen screaming security police in their blue uniforms and white helmets. Perhaps thirty seconds later they carried him back past me like a sack of potatoes, pummeling his limp form with fists and truncheons. I managed a few frames with my camera before being pushed into a crowd of journalists by police. "No pictures! No pictures!" they screamed. I remember most vividly the tumbled wooden chairs, thousands of them, which had been flung aside by the terrified crowd as it tried to escape the shooting, and the astonishing redness of the blood spreading out from under the bodies strewn around me on the tarmac. I distinctly recall asking myself, "What in God's name am I doing here?" and, all the while, thinking of my wife, Lorraine, and our children back in Washington. Though she hadn't told me for fear of upsetting me, weeks before Lorraine had had a kind of dream or presentiment about my being surrounded by blood. She follows the way of Subud, based on the Latihan, a spiritual exercise of surrender to God, and for weeks before Sadat's assassination she had the inward experience of there being a shooting, with blood everywhere and me in the midst of it. When she'd received that blood vision repeatedly during her Latihan, she feared the worst but knew I couldn't opt out of a major magazine assignment on the basis of a dream or presentiment; nor would I have. She even secretly packed a bag so that she would be ready to fly out to Egypt in an emergency. When she watched TV that day, October 6, 1981, and heard the first news of Sadat's assassination -- she knew I'd be seeing him that day -- she was actually relieved; she instantly realized it was Sadat's blood she had seen in her Latihan, not mine. I don't know why she didn't think it was my blood, too, which it might well have been, but she simply knew it wasn't, she said -- which I confirmed to her by phone from Egypt a few hours later.

Now, months later, back out of the vortex of history and safely ensconced in the secure confines of my office, I was trying to reduce the complex elements of that event to a few paragraphs of crisp, factual, unemotional copy for the magazine when the telephone rang and my new life began.

The voice on the phone was Steve Wall's. He was calling from the Appalachian wilds of northeast Georgia, where he was at work on a freelance contract for the magazine photographing a story ("Wild Water, Proud People," April 1983) on the Chattooga River, the wild-watered river of the movie Deliverance. Steve and I had worked together briefly a couple of years earlier on an article about Vietnamese boat people who had migrated to the Gulf Coast. He had a pleasantly blasphemous manner about him and was one hell of a photographer. He also had a way with ideas and a mulishly stubborn habit of seeing them through to the end, come what may. The article on Vietnamese boat people had been his idea; he'd been given a speculative go-ahead or "flyer" by the magazine, then found that the elusive refugees he'd hoped to photograph at Empire, Louisiana, had fled white persecution to Biloxi, Mississippi. For weeks he hung out on the Biloxi fishing docks, where the Vietnamese fishermen congregated, getting to know them, winning their friendship and trust, and sending back to Geographic a trove of remarkable photographs -- rich, warm, intensely personal, and human -- that demanded publication. I was assigned the writing end of the article, which appeared in the September 1981 issue as "Troubled Odyssey of Vietnamese Fishermen." Steve and I had gone our separate ways on different assignments after that but had taken something of a liking to each other and had spoken of getting another magazine assignment together if the opportunity arose.

His voice on the phone was, as usual, excited. Steve doesn't chitchat. He expounds. He discourses. He overflows with passions and wild enthusiasms. In that mellifluous North Carolina accent of his -- "You're the one with the accent!" he has told me many a time -- he announced, "Harvey, I've met this Indian."

I could hardly have been more dismissive. "Really?" I asked him. "You've met an Indian? So...?"

Steve continued, unruffled at my tone: "He's a medicine man, a Cherokee named Two Trees. An incredible character. Told me he knew I was coming to see him before I got here. Said he'd been expecting me."

"Oh, sure..."

"Now listen to this, Harvey. There's something very special about this guy. He has this idea. I think it'd make a terrific story for Geographic. He says he's had a vision about a journey to what he calls the Grandfathers -- the greatest medicine men and spiritual leaders of the seven great Indian nations. He says it's a kind of mission, a journey of penance. He calls it a 'spirit-journey.' He wants us to go with him -- "

"Us?"

"Yeah...you and me! You didn't think I'd forget you, did you, partner?"

Something within me groaned.

Steve went on: "He wants me to go with him and photograph the whole thing. He says he's no writer any more than he's a photographer. I told him about you, how we worked together on the Vietnamese boat people article. 'That's the one!' he said. 'He'll be the writer, this Harvey guy!' He wants you to go along and handle the word side, write it all up just as it happens and also record the Grandfathers' words. So...what do you say? Want to go on a spirit-journey? Think the magazine would be interested?"

"Now, Steve, hold on a minute."

Deaf to my protestations, Steve rolled on with unchecked enthusiasm.

"Now just keep listening, you hear? This is important. He says the Grandfathers are dying out and that the old ways, the old wisdom, is dying out with them. He says someone has to go out to them, take their photographs, record their words. He says you and I are the ones chosen to go out and do it. He says we'll receive signs when it's time to start."

"Signs? What signs?"

"He says we'll know when we get them."

It all seemed a bit too much to swallow as I sat there in the marbled confines of National Geographic headquarters with blood visions of Sadat dancing in my head.

Indians? Grandfathers? Spirit-journey?

I wanted none of it.

Over the years, in the course of my travels for the magazine, I'd had a few troubling experiences with Indians. Once, in 1970, I was escorted at shotgun-point off the Crow reservation in Montana. I was working at the time on an article about the Big Horn Mountains and Basin -- never published -- and had been exploring a beautiful wilderness area called Black Canyon, deep within the reservation, when I stumbled on a summer encampment of Crow Indian teenagers at the canyon's bottom. After parking my shiny rented car and walking up to a group of Indians standing near the roughtimbered camp gate, I smiled, extended my hand, and announced my usual "Hi! I'm Harvey Arden, National Geographic..." A pretty picture of self-importance I must have made. A young Indian man cradling a shotgun walked toward me, grim-faced. He stopped a foot short of my nose, staring me down hard.

"Ain't suppose t'be here, mister. Better leave."

"Uhhh..." I stammered, taken by surprise, "the...uh...the Tribal Council chairman...Edison Real Bird up at Crow Agency?...He told me I could drive around the rez -- Doing a story for the magazine."

I put on my most authoritative and confident smile.

The young Indian man sniffed at me.

"He ain't got no authority down here, that Edison Real Bird. And neither do you, Mr. National Geographic. You're trespassing on foreign soil, mister. This ain't your U.S.A. down here. This is Crow land. Indian Country. Better leave, you hear?"

"Uh..."

"Better leave," he reiterated, suggestively jiggling the cradled shotgun in his arms and toying with the trigger.

There was no room for argument in his voice, and that look in his eye was not brotherly love. I left.

It would be my first -- though by no means my last -- experience with the almost inescapable schisms between various "progressive" and "traditional" factions on most Indian reservations. I may have had Tribal Chairman Edison Real Bird's permission to explore the rez, but nobody else's. I was learning that when a white person makes a friend on an Indian reservation, he or she is also likely to be making, quite unwittingly, half a dozen enemies. This I could see was no easy world for an outsider to enter. You are seen through by every pair of eyes, friendly or otherwise. You are indeed an intruder. This is foreign soil! What other purpose could you possibly have for being here than some kind of exploitation or other? Frankly, I felt no strong personal pull to explore that problematical world despite my alerted journalistic instincts. Indians, after all, do "make a good story." They've always been as much a staple of National Geographic as of the silver screen. But the thought of walking up cold to an Indian reservation and finding my way back to the living, beating heart behind it all -- although alluring in its way -- was, to be blunt, uninviting. Hell, I could be going on a magazine assignment anywhere in the world -- Bali, Paris, Timbuktu. If I wanted to report on human suffering, why not get an assignment in Calcutta? The Indian reservations I had glimpsed now and again from the road during my travels seemed, well, dismal, unpleasant, distant from my usual world, seemingly in another dimension of time and space altogether. I'd driven past or through some of the Navajo and Pueblo reservations in the Southwest and had seen the slouch-roofed hovels in the distance, the forlorn figures weaving barefooted by the side of the highway, the roadside signs announcing CAUTION -- DANGER: ESCAPEES MAY POSE AS HITCHHIKERS. No, not a place a lone white man -- or two white men, for that matter -- would want to dawdle around, nosing into people's business, looking for a "good story."

I didn't make the connection at the time, but only recently I had had another somewhat unnerving "Indian experience." That had been in Iquitos, in the Amazonian jungle east of the Andes, where, as part of my coverage for a Geographic article on Peru just eight months before ("The Two Souls of Peru," March 1982), I had witnessed an all-night curing rite by an Indian curandero, or folk healer, using the hallucinogenic native drug ayahuasca.

I'd actually been looking for a brujo, a sorcerer or witch doctor -- standard Geographic curiosities -- but had been told by the locals that there were no brujos around there anymore, only curanderos. The curanderos, I was told, cured the spells cast by the brujos. When I asked how they could cure the brujos' spells if there were no brujos anymore, I received only a blank stare and a nonresponsive shake of the head from my uneasy informants. It was the kind of dumb question only a gringo journalist could ask. In any case, my guide, fellow gringo Tony Luscombe, finally found the name of a curandero who worked at the local slaughterhouse. "Just ask for the Maestro," he was told.

I remember that, just as we walked up to the place, a young bull had broken through the slaughterhouse doorway as if out of a rodeo chute and was racing and bucking madly through the streets, snorting and bellowing, followed closely by a screaming crowd of men, women, and children brandishing sticks and flinging stones. They chased after the terrified beast, striking him repeatedly, until he finally veered wildly back through the doorway into the slaughterhouse, where the infuriated workmen he'd escaped from immediately and unceremoniously bludgeoned him to death with huge clubs to the joyous cheers of the crowd. The women quickly rushed up with their slop buckets to get some of the still-steaming blood and guts from this spirited beast. One old woman dipped her hand in the red gore and put it to her lips. "Para la fuerza!" she said with an ecstatic smile and a wild roll of her eyes. "For strength!"

When I asked for the Maestro, I was directed to a small secondfloor apartment in a building just down the street. There I met Maestro Cristóbal, a wiry, angular, rheumy-eyed elder of Quechuan, or Inca, ancestry, who sat crosslegged on a low sofa with a tray of stained old colored bottles in his lap. He'd apparently been examining them when I came in. They looked like something Macbeth's witches might have filled from their bubbling broth of evil. The Maestro snorted when I asked if he was a curandero. He held up a small grimy corked bottle filled with a nasty-looking reddish brown liquid. "This is my power," he told me, using the same word -- fuerza -- as the old woman in the slaughterhouse had used for "strength." He pointed a finger at his right eye; the pupil seemed mis...