Ga lo Vann is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Eastern Oklahoma and a prisoner at Oregon State Correctional State Institution in Salem.
Popular Indigenous references and imagery in the American consciousness are largely antiquated. Bare chested, buckskin-clad, stone-faced brown bodies mounted atop painted horses cantering to or from tipi circles are cast involuntarily upon the stage of my imagination.
I am Indigenous, and I have never seen these images I conjure in the real world. These images have been force-fed to all of us by Western movies, books and school history classes. The harm I see the most comes not from the misconception that this is more than how a small fraction of Indigenous ever lived or looked like, but that it makes the millions of Indigenous alive today invisible to non-Indigenous eyes. This identity genocide robs our shared continent of the wisdom drawn from the soil that will make our continued existence possible.
The classic is a designation bestowed upon literary works that deliver messages so profoundly relevant and lasting they never cease to hold insight into our human condition no matter their age. Indigenous erasure has stolen America’s most relevant and oldest literary tradition: Indigenous History.
The hanbleceya is one of this land’s oldest practices. The word’s meaning cannot be directly translated because it loses so much of the context that is learned by growing up with the term and its impact upon your sense of time, people you love and Indigenous world views.
Hanbleceya is usually anglicized into the term “vision quest.” A truer sentiment is “crying for a dream.” To hanbleceya is to put forward a great effort to be gifted purpose and meaning.
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One of the first histories is the account of a young man’s hanbleceya. He knew he had to find an elder who would guide him in his effort to find his dream, his purpose. It is the experienced elder who spiritually and physically guides the young man through this ceremony. There is much about the ceremony you learn through preparation and practice only, but some elements are typically consistent. The elder helps the young man set up an altar to pray in for four days and nights. Fasting from food and water, waiting. That is exactly how this young man began. But he viewed his dream as something he should receive after praying and fasting. He viewed his purpose as an entitlement and not a gift.
A hanbleceya altar is almost always on some dramatic, beautiful hillside or outcrop as this young man’s was, on Mato Paha (Bear Butte). Since the young man’s hanbleceya, Mato Paha’s views have been polluted by a concrete highway snaking through towns and cities, an airport and the world’s largest outdoor bar to entertain Sturgis Motorcycle Rally goers. Many ceremonies traditionally occur in summer months, as this was a time when food could be easily found and the climate permitted. Mato Paha is the site of the first hanbleceya and many thousands come from around the world to pray and care for the land. To find peaceful, unmolested time to pray in, the way our people have since the beginning, we must now schedule around the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, further restricting the short summer months. It does not matter what time of year: those on hanbleceya must witness the airport lights invading their prayers and visual space, and the bustle of multiple townships lit up and laid out glaring before their eyes. All of this, while trying to pray.
In spite of awesome beauty, days without food and water can strain your mind to aimlessness, unable to focus on one thing, let alone your ultimate destiny. The young man’s unfocused mind and impatient nature caused him to wander up the hill. While praying for personal power, he wandered into a cave. In the cave he found an old woman alone. The old woman asked who he was, the young man told her his name and declared he prayed seeking a dream of power for his life. The old woman told him of the Water Serpent, Unk Cekula, who lived in a body of water near the base of Mato Paha. Unk Cekula’s powerful, lithe and scaly body was marked by spots from nose to tail along her belly. Behind the seventh spotted scale down from her head lay her heart. Removing Unk Cekula’s heart and keeping it would provide its possessor untold power, control and influence. Immediately after removal the heart would speak, making four requests the captor must refuse. Thereafter, any requests the heart made must be fulfilled.
“How am I to kill this enormous powerful serpent many times my size?” the young man asked.
“I have four arrows, and they will kill her,” replied the old woman.
Further noticing the young man, she moved closer. In return for helping you make a destiny, perhaps you will help an old woman know lust once more. Moving closer the young man showed displeasure, squeezing his eyes shut to erase her as their lips met. In his blinded reticence the old woman was returned to youthful maidenhood. Upon opening his eyes, he was struck by the woman’s beauty and attempted to hide his previous disgust.
“You are beautiful, and I will fulfill your request in return for helping me,” he told her.
The old woman said, “I know you would have refused me had you not closed your eyes. I am the same woman, but now young and beautiful. Your shallow heart makes you ugly to me, and I will not be with you.”
The young man left the cave feeling ashamed and carrying four arrows. He descended Mato Paha toward the water. Upon approaching the lapping precipice, Unk Cekula broke the surface, rising high above the young man to repeatedly strike. The young man quickly fired his arrows, missing Unk Cekula and her seventh spotted scale. Coiling around the young man she dragged him deep into the water. In panic and drowning his eyes darted, looking for any help as he struggled to free himself. Unk Cekula’s coils gripped him, squeezing the last air from his lungs. As he accepted his death, he caught sight of a broken arrow tip floating within reach. Harnessing his will, he grasped the broken bolt and plunged the tip into her seventh spotted scale, killing her and freeing himself. After dragging Unk Cekula’s body out of the water, he cut into her, stealing her heart. Out of its scaley home, the heart spoke to the young man.
“You have captured me, and I will give you great power. You will be able to call any woman you wish to your lodge. The animals will find you to sacrifice themselves for your hunt. You will have sight beyond distance and time.” The heart then made four requests, but the young man denied them. Thereafter, to use the influence of the heart, the young man would have to do whatever it commanded. He was to keep the heart in his home, hidden from the world and the people, performing its made up ceremonies. At first the ceremonies, like performing every task backward, painting his body and bringing strange offerings to the heart all seemed small though inconvenient. He called women to him. Game ran into his arrows and spears willingly, serving the power of the heart. He saw his enemies coming before they were enemies and he cut them down. Soon the heart was asking for more complicated and cumbersome ceremonies. When the young man protested the heart asked, “Is this not a small effort compared to what I have given you? You have any woman you want; your belly is always full; you have power over all others but me.”
“My relations are meaningless. I want to win a woman’s heart. My meat has no flavor. I want to hunt as other men do. My sight has begun to frighten me. I see enemies everywhere. I see futures I cannot understand. I cannot be touched, and yet I do not feel safe anywhere. I have become empty and a slave to you, and I want to be free.” He tore down the walls of his lodge, revealing Unk Cekula’s poison heart. As the people came to see the commotion, the heart turned to stone, taking away the young man’s power to control. He was free.
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This history has been told on this continent since humans were here. It is an “American” classic. It is a timeless example of our willing subjugation of ourselves and our children to the tyrannies of fear and control. America is people. The people have many times over cried for a dream. America’s economic and military power are the power of Unk Cekula’s poisoning heart. It is a power exercised by elected officials whose offices are secured by the murder and enslavement of both colored and white bodies. Their ceremonies are legislative sessions, community policing, one-strike mandatory minimum sentencing laws, school resource officers and the like. America, enchanted with its control, sees enemy criminals everywhere and criminalizes its own youth before they break the law. Even as they are victims of sexual assault, violence, addictions and poverty.
During my imprisonment I came to know an elder who was a boy when he received his dream. He was born mixed blood as I am, seeking a family, a place to belong within a structure of love. His mother let him move to another state to be with his father and with the family his father was raising. The boy loved the father in his vision and imagined being taught how to be a good family man. Even without being instructed by an Indigenous elder, the boy knew what our people believe. The highest most sacred thing a man can be is a good family man, not a prophet, not a king. He believed and loved and trusted his dreamed father with every part of his being the way only a child can. But his father had addictions. His father had returned from the Korean War. It was not long before the boy was being raped by his father and his father’s friends. Eventually his father’s new wife also raped him. His respite was beatings instead of sexual assaults. The father took the boy to bordering states and traded him to sex parties in exchange for drugs. He was the oldest — his siblings, his younger brothers and sisters were being actively groomed to become what he was to his father.
His stepmother became intimate with him, professing her love and convincing him his father was causing the poisonous fear and control in their lives. There came a day the boy chose to take a stand. He took his sleeping father’s rifle, and standing at the bedside, aimed it at him, twisting inside from his torturers. He planned to threaten his father, to make him stop the abuse. His father suddenly moved as he never had before when the boy had watched him sleeping. Startled, the boy fired, killing his father and mistakenly killing his little sister who was also in the bed. Her death was an accident.
His stepmother, having walked in on the scene, began to run. He turned the gun on her, and she was gone, too.
The 15-year-old boy surrendered to the police, admitting guilt and entering the American criminal justice system. In jail, he was kept in solitary confinement for 10 months with only visits from social workers every 60 to 90 days. The female social workers were distant and procedural. One was a man who played checkers with the boy through the bars, even smuggling him a hamburger against the rules and at professional risk. That was the first man the boy had encountered in years whose engagement did not pose physical danger to him. The boy’s father, stepmother, father’s friends, Johns, police officers, Sheriff’s deputies, the judge, the District Attorney prosecuting him, every last one caused him hurt or subjected him to their part of his lifetime of continuous victimhood, subjection to violence. He still smiles to himself thinking of the kindness through the bars; “That guy was a pretty cool dude,” he tells me.
This past year was rife with self-pitying refrains of “I can’t wait to get past 2020, it was the worst.” The year 2021 marks this boy’s 40th year in prison. I love him. He is my elder. And in spite of a system built to not treat or offer intentional rehabilitative efforts to anyone ineligible for “good time,” he has found an identity and teaches selflessly, sharing his knowledge with countless young men. I also find great meaning in his “American” story. He would not tell his story the way I tell it because he feels its focal moment lies in his killing of three people. From my eyes, he was a child rape and torture victim who was subject to more beatings than his own mind allows him to recall. His stepmother begged him on multiple occasions to kill his father. He was the oldest son, who saved his younger siblings from what was coming next for them. The state did not protect or serve him away from his living hell, but made sure it continued and called him, a child, “evil.”
When I first met him, he told me the evilest thing in the world is when an adult tells a child they are safe and won’t be hurt, and it is a lie. At the time I did not know the depth of what he meant.
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This is important because it is not simple. And it is not novel. I am surrounded by many thousands of prisoners in Oregon and millions across the country with such varied American histories. We as a nation are as the young man enslaved to Unk Cekula’s poisonous heart as we seek to control and make enemies of one another. But we all have many arrows. They are our votes, our holding legislators accountable, our defense and rehabilitation of victims — not their criminalization. Our arrows are not-using the N-word when you are out of mixed company, they are not-engaging in racial mimicry by effecting stereotypical Black, Hispanic, Asian, Indigenous etc. accents EVER, for any reason. They are doing more than just talking about racial disparities but also about gender inequities and refusing to support leaders of any color who do not advance women’s issues. Our arrows are taking personal responsibility for our complicity in a system that criminalizes victims and responsibly working to deal rationally with crime.
We are here together crying for a dream. As a nation, we are crying for a dream.
READ MORE: Ga lo Vann's column for Street Roots