Reclamation

I was taken from this life in the black night, blindfolded to be clubbed to death so that I might be born again in spirit song, dance and name given by my great ancestor who, ten thousand years ago or more, crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to Cowichan and the Salish Sea warm land of the raven, the black bear and the salmon. I have suffered four hundred years of dislocation of the soul in this barren culture, nameless but for “primitive squaw.” I have lost Tamanawas, the sacred ritual dance the Potlatch feast of giving and my children and my language. I will endure four days and nights confined and cold and hungry while all around the rhythmic pulse of elders’ drumming, chanting guides me back in time and space to voices still resounding stories of a dancing flame light upon the earth And I will rise in cedar forests and walk the clamshell middens feel our language on my skin and see with startled eyes new life the Soulfire I’ve been given. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This was for the Shaman's Way contest but I think I missed it. Cowichan --used to be pronounced coWEEchan now it's usually said like, Cow i chan. The Canadian government outlawed many Coast Salish practices until the 1960's--the Spirit Quest, Potlatch feast and Tamanwas dance among them. Children were placed in residential schools, away from their families, and were forbidden to speak their mother tongue. More recently, the spirit quest ritual has been revived as (loosely) described in the poem. However, it is also now used as a form of "intervention" to help address an array of problems frequently attributed to colonization (e.g., drug and alcohol misuse). So, where in the past, young people would go off into the forest voluntarily, it is now often the case, (at least in Cowichan) that young people are taken from their beds in the night. Initiates are first symbolically "clubbed to death" then "reborn" after multiple days of ritual practices.