Indians Are Cool Because We Remember Our Ancestors by Cliff Taylor

There are so many things that’re cool about being Indian. In fact, that’s why the overwhelming numbers of Non-Indians couldn’t handle us, I think, because we were just too cool. It made them jealous, jealous enough to decide to kill us all. Ain’t history crazy? But guess what? We’re still here, practically unkillable, and still cool as hell. Damn, it feels good to be an Indian, haha.

One thing that is especially cool about being Indian is how powerfully connected we are to our ancestors. Picture two people carrying a blinged-out couch: one of those people is a living Indian, the other is an ancestor, and that couch is the connection; our connection is large like that, prodigious, visible, heavy-duty, mammoth and undeniable. Connection is everything, and being connected to our ancestors is, in so many ways, defining. I’d even go so far as to say that without our ancestors and our connection to them, we wouldn’t be here, we’d be completely lost, successfully assimilated and gone. Boy, am I glad that that’s not the case. Boy, am I glad that my ancestors stepped in and said, That ain’t going to be the way this all goes down.

I remember the elder who first really taught me about the ancestors. It was this Lakota woman named Char Bordeaux. I went over to visit her when I was about 21 years old and she kind of disappeared off into a back room, leaving me sitting in her living room, and then when she came back out she had like a gigantic bag of ancestor knowledge that she sort of dumped all over the floor and said I was going to have to take home, to eat, to study with my soul, to press into my memory, to integrate into my young bones. I’m kind of not kidding. If you’ve ever been young and sat with one of these gifted older Indians who’s been through hell and is still full of laughter and love but can really let you know a couple things in a way that’s so serious you kind of tremble in your sneakers, then you know what I’m talking about. She brought out this real stuff about the ancestors while we were visiting in her little home in Lincoln, Nebraska, and she very insistently let me know that the fate of our people’s lives depended on our remembering the things she was showing me, the things she’d collected and now had spread out on the floor before me. It was as real as the sweet skin on your grandma’s cheek, as the Ponca corn I got growing in my backyard. It was dead real.

But what did she teach me? Our ancestors are as alive as we are, just on the Other Side of things. It’s our responsibility to remember them, and in doing so, to keep our connection to them profoundly present and active and alive. We’re supposed to talk with them, make offerings to them, look to them with our hearts, and they will help us, guide us, protect us, collaborate with us, be there for us in countless subtle and then big and direct ways. We were with them before we were born, planning out our lives, constructing and calibrating and fine-tuning a life-purpose that’d we’d bring with us into our lives, a life-purpose that served the benefit of the people and in fact the whole great Hoop of Life, a life-purpose that’d always be glowing right in our core. Our ancestors would continue to be with us after we were born, help us always with this life-purpose, with the agreements we had made, with that specific, detailed plan we were aiming for, doing our bravest, damndest best to fulfill. These ancestors were always trying to help us remember, always, because in our remembering was exactly what was needed for our soul as we crawled and fought and cried and loved and created and prayed and struggled and laughed and danced our way through this life. You get the drift? As she talked and stomped and told me about them, they practically began to fill the room, join me on the couch, puff on their pipes on the floor, open and sniff around the kitchen cupboards, nod and concur with the things that they’d taught her that she was now teaching me. It was beautiful, overwhelming, hyperreal, and rich. Their company felt like home; her teachings felt like things I used to know; and I loved it. It was cool.

The ancestors are such a big subject. Most Indians know they’re real because they dream of them, literally dream of old Indians from the old times who come and tell them things, show them things, give them things, communicate things to them that then influence their decisions, their understandings, that alter their lives. It’s a riot. It’s painful sometimes, because we’re surrounded by a dominant culture that’s designed to make us forget, that wants such natural spiritual connections severed, that tried to kill us off because of what we knew and how we lived. One time I had a dream where this old Indian woman told me that every human being on the earth should have an active, tended, cared-for altar of sorts set up for their ancestors and that such a reality was the key to preventing our species from just totally obliterating itself, which was the course we were on presently. I had this dream while everything was happening in Standing Rock. I actually included it in its entirety in a book of short stories I wrote about Standing Rock, kind of putting it in there as part of the Hail Mary effort of the book itself, to be like the woman in my dream and just launch the idea out there in hopes that it would be caught and seen for what it was. Can you imagine that though? What would the world look like if everyone prioritized working with their best and most beautiful ancestors, bringing their big-picture wisdom into the mix and flow of their lives, into the gift of this special, fleeting human life? Speaking as an Indian who does have an everyday relationship with his ancestors, all I can say is that it’d be worth a shot, you know, it really would.

20 years have passed since I started picking up and examining what that Lakota elder laid out for me on her living room floor about the ancestors. I’ve learned a lot but still feel like I know just a little bit. Did you know that every time we close the flap on our sweat-lodges and begin to sing that our ancestors come in there, speaking to us and helping us regardless of the degree to which we are aware of them? Did you know that some of our ancestors need healing too? That they are carrying wounds from their human lives that still have them all tangled up, enraged, lost, maybe racist, maybe classist, maybe hungering to taste alcohol through our lips, through our drinking. When we heal ourselves we can heal those ancestors too, liberating all that stuck, repeating, and trapped energy, so that it can feed more beautiful enterprises and dreams and projects and goals. And no specialness whatsoever is required for relating to those relatives who’re rooting for you, who’re looking out for you, who’re helping you land a better job, or know where to move next, or how to get through this seemingly inescapable pain or that raw-deal suffering. Connection to them belongs to and is available to everyone. That’s why you better listen to your crazy Uncle, because maybe he never forgot how to FEEL them and they work with that by speaking through him every once in awhile, by helping him with his purpose and his gifts like that. They’re with you when you look at anything that’s really meaningful to your people, that quietly shimmers with your people’s essence. They’re with you when you drum and sing by the river, when you cry for your loved one who’s passed on, when you hold a stone in your hand and pray. They’re with you when you’re laughing and truly loving your life, when you’re looking into your relative’s eyes and seeing more than just them, when you’re seeing the ones who came before, and then the ones who came before even them.

Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it cool, to be able to feel your ancestors, to know their presence, their compassion, their power, and how their mysterious genius is with you? When I was young they’d come around real strong and it’d make me cry, it’d touch something so deep in the center of my heart. I love them. They rescued me from hell and hard times in my Nebraska youth. They dragged me by the shirt at my belly to all sorts of elders and medicine men and Sundancers and relatives, tapping my ears and telling me to listen close, to record everything I was hearing in my brain, in my soul, in my bones, in my life-energy itself, so that I could learn and grow and heal, and so that I could then pass along what I’d heard to help other relatives do the same. They directed me to ceremony, to a life of prayer, to Mother Earth Herself as the great superior alternative to so much of the addictive, consumerist garbage of Capitalist America. They taught me to not take myself too seriously but to take them and our work utterly seriously. They gave me this vision of how important, how crucial, and how radically possible it is for everyone to connect with them and then have the character of their lives reshaped into something that is infused with their wisdom, their guidance, their joy, and their knowing care. Pick up your end of the couch and feel that connection. Think of all the things they did, that they suffered and endured in their human lifetimes, so that you could be here today, so that you could connect with them and keep the soul and traditions and culture and songs of your tribe beautifully alive. Connect with them every day and ask, What, Relatives, should I do next? And then wait, watch, listen. They will answer you. The number one thing to remember is that your ancestors love you and they will answer you.

Trust this Ponca, they will.

Cliff Taylor is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He is the author of The Memory of Souls, a memoir about the Sundance and his life/walk with the little people. He can be reached through his website @ www.cliffponca.com