Chief Joseph

Following an urge I traveled back to where I was was a boy to visit a rock in the forest where my father and my brother would go and smoke tobacco. I found the place and sat there and my mind went back in time.

I watched as my brother shaped an arrow with a knife. He carefully shaved the bark off as my father guided him. As my brother shaped the wood, my father shaped his mind and I went back to carefully packing tobacco into a cigarette paper. With our arrows and makins done, we sat on the Smoking Rock, the very same rock where Chief Joseph was buried, and we passed tobacco smoke as our father told of the heroic deeds of Chief Joseph and Chaulkin Gaun.

We needed arrows and bows. There was a phantom at Witches Hallow and on Halloween night, we would go there with our weapons to do battle with whatever might emerge. And each time we plunged into that blackness, we would shoot into the direction of wherever we heard its movement. Each time we went to battle, we faced the same enemy as our heros did long ago. It was a shape shifter and it would haunt us as it haunts each and every human being. As we went to war, we learned that our willow arrows could not defeat it.

The spirits of Chief Joseph and Chaulkin Gaun were true warriors and the enemy that they defated would challenge and stalk me and my brother for years to come. Our father introduced us to the enemy and introduced us to the weapons to fight it. The weapon was contained in the stories themselves. The weapon was inside the blackness of the hallow. The weapon was inside us.

I got up from the rock and I made an arrow. I rolled some Indian heads into a paper and smoked it. I buried the arrow and the ashes at the base of the rock in an offering to Chief Joseph and walked away.

And as I walked away, it occured to me that our father wasn't talking about the past. He was talking about the future.