Burdened by painful memories, he found comfort rooted in spirituality, culture and a shared connection
Part two of a four-part series.
The bitterly cold air stung my naked legs as I walked from the front porch of the double wide and into the waiting van. In my right hand, I gripped a towel as I climbed into the van and found a seat toward the back.
I leaned into the vinyl seat and looked out the window as the seven other men and women clients and our driver took their seats. As the van began rolling down the gravel road, the sun neared the western horizon and painted the plains around us a light pink (perhaps something like in the public domain photo above, posted on wikimedia commons). I took a deep breath and took everything in. It was my second week of treatment, and the lessons of these first days had finally begun to sink in.
My counselor the day before had told me that I had been carrying around baggage for years. This baggage consisted of every trauma my heart had endured over my 21 years of existence. Every hateful word, every angry touch, every lost loved one.
The memory of my grandmother’s funeral, her still body lying in a casket inside a teepee. The tears of my uncles and aunties and my mother. And 10-year-old me standing outside the teepee weeping with my cousins. Our muffled cries ringing out across the plains of my family’s Pine Ridge Reservation land. A few years later, my father pulling into the driveway of our Gregory home, the heaviness of knowing he would walk into the house in a moment and find something, anything to criticize or shout at me or my siblings about.
Me retreating to my room, turning on my music — the resplendent sounds of Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Alice in Chains filling my small, cozy room. My mother and father shouting outside my door over money, their children — anything and everything. And just a year later, the crushing sight of my mother walking out the door of my father’s bedroom for the last time.
Me sitting in a chair, holding the snacks and movies she bought me to ease this impenetrable loss — bitter compensation for the departure of my best friend, the one constant presence in my 14 years on earth. And a few years later, me sitting on the carpeted stairs of my family’s empty home, a bottle of aspirin in my hand, contemplating an escape from the nothingness in my heart.
Somewhere along my two-week journey in treatment I had had an epiphany — these memories invaded my thoughts nearly every day. Like chains around my ankles, they had been inescapable and constant, weighing down my thoughts and feelings every moment. Every experience, every beautiful moment stained by the childhood memories of belittlement and sorrow.
The other men and women in the van laughed and teased one another, slapping each other on the backs as the van rolled onto the highway leading to Rapid City. I fought to work up the courage to join in the festivities, but doubt held me back.
“I don’t belong,” I thought. “I didn’t grow up on the reservation like them. I didn’t experience what they had. I wasn’t Indian anymore, not really.”
The old man, my roommate, looked back at me and smiled.
“Where you at, brother?” he said. “It’s all right man. Smile.”
I teared up a bit and smiled. I realized he didn’t see me as different. To this man, this elder I had come to respect deeply, I was Indian enough. Somehow my youth spent almost entirely off the reservation in the home of my white attorney stepfather, so far from the deprivations of reservation life, hadn’t washed away all of my Indianness.
As the van rolled toward Rapid City, the gently sloping hills on both sides of the highway passed by, and I thought about our destination — an inipi, or sweat lodge ceremony. I hadn’t been to an inipi for many years, since I was a teenager. My Lakota spirituality always seemed like a great burden that I both feared and admired. I had avoided it for as long as I could. Now some part of me longed for it.
At the front of the vehicle, the driver pulled out a cassette from his coat pocket and stuck it in the vehicle’s cassette player. A few seconds later, a slow, rhythmic drum emanated from the van’s speakers, followed by a synthesized buildup that crescendoed with Native American chanting. The music was glorious and it filled my heart, and I knew in that moment that my spirit had been empty for a long time, that a vacuum had existed where spirituality, culture and connection belonged.
I felt a warmth course through me and my fears, usually ever present, melted away. I glimpsed hope — for a future free of emotional chains and filled with laughter and ceremony. And I imagined a return to the circle of my people.
Kevin Abourezk is the deputy managing editor of Indian Country Today and an award-winning film producer who has spent his 24-year career in journalism documenting the lives, accomplishments and tragedies of Native American people. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Dakota and a master’s in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
