All tagged Native America

When You Wish Upon A Mound...

When You Wish Upon A Mound...

Laurie Gilberg Vander Velde
Art and Culture, Historic Travel, Off-the-beaten path destination, Personal essay, Sacred Places

by Laurie Gilberg Vander Velde

 

She was so vivacious and charismatic that I went up and introduced myself after the talk she gave.  When I told her I was from St. Louis, she immediately asked, “Have you ever been to Cahokia Mounds?”  “Well, my kids went on school trips... I’ve been meaning to go since they built the new visitor’s center...,” I muttered my reply.  “You have to go,” she urged.  “It’s one of the most wonderful, inspiring Native American sites in all of North America.  Promise me you’ll go.”  “Sure,” I said.

 

I met Judie in October 2009 when she spoke at a retreat for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College at the lovely Tamaya Resort north of Albuquerque.  Judie and I had an instant rapport, and, when we met for lunch in Santa Fe a week or so later, she again pressed us to go to Cahokia Mounds.  Again we promised.  But life intervenes, and by the time we returned to Santa Fe the following summer and called Judie to get together, we still hadn’t gone.  

The secret of Taos blue corn

Editors
Art and Culture, Culinary Travel, Historic Travel

by Eric Lucas

 

Hardly anything seems secret about a kernel of blue corn. It’s the size and shape of a baby’s tooth, the indigo color of ocean dusk, not rock-hard but sturdy, like old pine.

Such a seed would be a secret, were it a product of American industrial agriculture—patented, engineered at a molecular level, sold under some trade name like Blue 7X-RR. You would pay a large Midwestern company to have some; you’d use huge machines like science fiction robots to lay it in the ground; pour on it chemicals with carbon-chain formulas as long as Finnish words; autoclave it into foods as artificial as plastic. And you’d get your pants sued off if you attempted to replicate it or reproduce it in any way.

Photo by Manya Kaczkowski, 2010But the handful of blue corn seeds I’m holding represent a gift from, first of all, Robert Mirabal, a Taos Pueblo resident; also a gift from two millennia and the ground on which a billion people live. Corn is the bedrock of civilization in the Western Hemisphere. It built a dozen empires in Mexico and South America; helped create two dozen thriving cities in the desert Southwest about which Spanish explorers marveled so much that their colonizer, Don Juan de Oñate, declared his conquest a “kingdom.” Nuevo Mexico; it’s called New Mexico now, but still part of the kingdom of corn. And the seeds Mirabal has given me are no secret, just gifts from that kingdom’s treasure.

 

My Spiritual Journey

Margie Goldsmith
Personal essay, Spirituality

by Margie Goldsmith                                                                       

 

A year ago, I met Belen Stoneman, a Native American from the Akimel O’otham of the Hohokum tribe. She was a spa therapist and resident “healer.” at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa in Chandler, Arizona, and happened to be at a spa event in New York. As I walked by, she stared at my beaded moccasin boots, which look as though they were made on a reservation, but are actually from New York. “I like your boots,” she smiled.

Belen at Aji Mountain“And I like your necklace,” I answered, admiring the chunky turquoise strands almost hidden by black hair cascading priestess-like down her shoulders. She was in her late forties, olive skin, dark eyes, about 5/4’, and wore a long flowered skirt. I’d been told she was a clairvoyant.  “Would you like a reading?” Belen asked

One of my college professors had told me I was psychic, a gift, he said, I should develop in a positive way. I hadn’t been aware of such a talent nor did I know to tap into it. Years later, a cigar-smoking Shaman on the Amazon River told me I had special powers. I almost believed him, until he told the next person in line exactly the same thing.

Belen indicated I should sit on a stool.  How would she do the reading? Animal cards?  Feathers?  She picked up a pen and sheet of paper, closed her eyes, and moved the pen around the paper as if in a trance, drawing squiggly circles, star shapes, and curlicues.  She opened her eyes, studied the design, and said, “I have a spiritual guide named White Cloud. He directs me and sends me messages. White Cloud says you can see things other people can’t. White Cloud says we played together as children.”

I felt a small tingle. Did that mean that in a former life – if there was such a thing – I was Native American?  Is that why I always rooted for the Indians and not the cowboys?

“White Cloud says you are very comfortable in the mountains,” she continued.

“I love mountains,” I said.

“My people lived in the mountains, and the spirits of my ancestors still live there.”