Recovering the Indigenous Mind

art by Erin Langley

Here I will attempt to illustrate what indigenous mind recovery looks like for many people. A whole new batch of ancestors has recently been making itself known to me. They show up in many ways, repeatedly, so that I start taking notice. Dr. Apela Colorado, founder of the Indigenous Mind program, requires the principle of triangulation to verify information coming to us. That is, information must come once and be confirmed twice to legitimize the content. Triangulation provides a practical way to stay grounded in the midst of the deep process of indigenous mind recovery. Often, once we're aware that the process is underway, we see that its first tendrils extend back many years, sometimes to childhood.

As a teenager, I had an out-of-body experience (OBE), in which I'm in a boat in a vast sea. All I can see is water and fog, except for one other boat carrying a lone man. I shout to the man, "Where are we?" He says, "Look around you! This is the Black Sea!" At that time, I had no idea I was on an ancestral journey. In 2006, I completed a painting, pictured above, entitled "Black Sea" in honor of this dream. I hadn't planned to make the Black Sea. It just appeared in the chaotic forms I happened to lay down as I experimented with the paint. I only elicited what was already there. Around this same time, I was having dreams of being in a gulag, a term I did not recognize until I looked it up. I also dreamed of caves and mountains in the Caucasus region. These dreams came back to me when I read a book that Ryan Hurd of the Dream Studies Portal recommended called Entering the Circle, about a Russian psychiatrist learning from Siberian kams (shamans) who teach about some of the topics that appeared in my dreams about the region.

Then, when my daughter was born this summer, a nurse took us on as her special case for some reason. She really rallied for us in the hospital when we had trouble checking out and going home. As we were finally leaving, she told me about the charity work her foundation does along the Black Sea each year. Within the past month, I decided to revisit this theme of the Black Sea by using a satellite shot of it as my computer wallpaper. The next week, a relative gave me a piece of granite whose shape is reminiscent of the Black Sea. Etc., etc. This is what triangulation looks like.

I bring up ways of knowing that supplement Western research methods that we also rely on in the Indigenous Mind program, such as the genealogical sections of our libraries, the Mormon temple, Cyndi's List, or living relatives who may have done ancestral research. Eventually it occurred to me that I could incorporate lucid dreaming into this process, and that is just what I attempted to do last night. I don't know very much about my ancestors from Russia, except that some are Jewish, and lived in Odessa. In last night's lucid dream, I got to visit Russia and learn a bit about its history. I will report on its content in my next post.

Ancestral Remembrance

art by Jen Delyth

I have been discovering the rich, complex world of lucid dreaming. I've engaged dream figures in conversations, received messages for others, and just plain explored this new-to-me terrain. I find myself backpeddling a bit, noticing my tendency to charge into something new with great gusto, and naïveté. I've begun to see new (read: old) applications of lucid dreaming, such as ancestral remembrance, or reconnecting with the ancient ways of our respective tribes. Some of these ways have been lost, sometimes on purpose. What a great way to retrieve and restore the dreamways of our indigenous people. Since all of our indigenous ancestors lived closely with the Earth, reconnecting with these ways absolutely falls into the realm of lucid dreaming for the Earth.

In a recent correspondence, Robert Waggoner, author of the amazing book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, asked me what I meant when I mentioned integrating ancestral ways through lucid dreaming. Here's an excerpt from my response:

I'll start with a lucid dream featuring the Mo'o, or the giant black lizard/goddess who's the guardian of the Indigenous Mind program I did under the tutelage of Dr. Apela Colorado, and various traditional elders from around the globe. The Mo'o is also the protector of all the Polynesian islands. As we did our residencies in Maui, the Mo'o figured in to a lot of our tribe's initiation dreams. We, the students, come from various tribes around the globe as well, and we explored and reconnected with our ancestral ways and homelands while having the opportunity to sit in circle with elders who came from relatively intact indigenous cultures. The Mo'o was always there to guide us as we "lost our Western minds" and began to experience our indigenous minds, or our Whole minds.

This dream occurred in June of 2006:

Ravens are flying by. The formations they make are amazing! They are doing it just for fun. One is sitting on another's back. One is flying with wings down, one with wings outstretched, there's a group of about nine of them flying. I tell my housemate, who says he is familiar with ravens flying just for fun. I tell him he's not seen anything like this, though. Then I am outside again on the deck. There is one big Raven, and I say, "It was YOU!" because I recognize it as the one who gave me medicine in a previous dream. It gets bigger and bigger and lands on the deck with a thud. Then it transforms into a giant raven chick and falls to a lower story of the deck. Then it transforms yet again into a giant black crocodile (the Mo'o), HUGE, at least 30 feet long. It is going to eat me. I get very afraid. Then I remind myself that I am dreaming, and if I were awake, I'd scold myself for not having the courage to be eaten. I muster what bravery I can, and allow the crocodile to eat me. But because I have brought my fears into the dream, I can no longer see the lizard. I can only feel as it chomps down on my arm, then stomach, then leg, and then I know I must be completely inside it.

That dream happened right before I left for my ancestral journey in Ireland. It was about walking the talk and becoming a whole person, connected to my history and heritage in ways beyond knowing the names of my dead relatives listed with dates on a piece of paper. And, Ireland was truly initiatory. To say the initiation started with the dream would be wrong; it is more like the occurrences are so bound up in each other that they are one. It is difficult to separate parts out from the process, which is alive and whole.