It’s how an Indian prays

Some days, when you get to the middle of your fifties like I am, you look back and wonder how you ever made it this far without certain things happening. There are turns of fate and circumstance all along life’s road and at my age, you get to re-examine all of them. People get sick, people leave, and accidents happen, good fortune sprawls across your path as suddenly as summer rain. It’s a lot to consider.
As a writer and a journalist, I’ve been fortunate to have met a lot of very good people along the way. Some of them were famous, some were infamous, a few were notorious and most of them were unexceptional, ordinary people with ordinary lives. But hindsight lets me see that what made them extraordinary were the extraordinary stories they carried that changed me somehow, made me more, made me better.
One was a lady I’ll call Emily. She was an Elder and a traditional teacher and in the humble nature of those spirit healers, wouldn’t want her real name used even though I’m sure she’s long continued on her soul journey. She was a Stony woman and lived in southern Alberta. I found my way to her not long after I’d gotten back in touch with my people after twenty some years.
Emily lived on the same reserve she’d been born on and when I met she was in her late 70s. She was a quiet woman. Her favorite activity seemed to be sitting in her old willow rocker, smoking her pipe and watching the land. We never spoke then. Without saying a word to me she let me know that these were special times and I’d be better off if I could learn to discern why. I tried but I was impatient and all I learned was quiet.
Emily had seen things change amazingly for her people. She’d been born just after the turn of the last century. She was a teen when World War I broke out. She was a young wife with a couple kids when the Great Depression hit. She watched her people change forever, more drawn to devices and new tools than the old ways and the old skills. She watched young people leave their culture and language behind and head for the cities. She’d seen ceremony become less vital.
I came to her not really knowing anything about ceremonial things. I didn’t know much about anything that had to do with First Nations people. I was living in Calgary, learning to fly fish and I’d wandered to her cabin one day tracking a trout stream that wound its way out of the Alberta foothills. It was early evening and she invited me to sit and join her for tea.
I haven’t been in very many situations where I was just known instantaneously. Emily looked at me, smiled and patted my hand. Talking to her was incredibly easy and when I spoke about having finally made it back to my people and being dumbfounded at the amount I didn’t know she understood. Then she undertook to teach me. Very gently, very easily, she showed me traditional spiritual ways and she talked to me about their value.
She’d been in residential school and knew how it felt to have tradition and language and ceremony removed. She understood that when people arrive back home that it’s necessary to bring them back from the inside out. So she taught me how to build a sweat lodge, to gather medicines and how to pray. “Always just ask for nothing,” she said. “Just give thanks for what’s already here. It’s how an Indian prays.”
Those words meant a great deal to me. My adopted home had been built on a foundation of religiosity rather than spirituality and I bore a lot of emotional bruises from that. Then I noticed that she had a beat up old bible on her bedside table. When I asked her how she could keep that after all she’d been through in the residential school, she took my hands in both of hers, looked deeply into my eyes and said, “Because Jesus wept.”
It seemed like an odd thing to say and it took me years to get it. Our greatest teachings are like that. There are no profound answers. Instead, there’s just enough to carry with you and explore and consider while you live. I finally came to understand what she meant and it changed me. See, Jesus wept in gratitude for pain and for the lessons it contained. When you can come to accept your pain and confront it, you can learn to let it go.
You can learn to say a prayer of gratitude for the teachings within it all. That’s what she meant. It’s how an Indian prays.