Post by blackcrowheart on Jan 30, 2006 9:11:08 GMT -5
Eliida Lakota shares her spirituality with Native Americans at the
Pekin Federal Prison
Sunday, January 29, 2006
By CLARE HOWARD
pjstar.com/stories/012906/HEA_B8OLSHRV.027.shtml
Drenched in sweat, her loose cotton dress clings to her body. She's
crouching at the edge of a pit filled with hot stones, blackness
engulfing everything inside this low, squat tent. A fragrance like
early spring rises from the damp earth.
Steamy heat clogs respiration, pressing hard on lungs and muddling
sense of time and place. Hours pass in moments.
Others are here around this pit, shadowy forms perceived for only
seconds when a rock glows red-hot or a leaf ignites and muted light
flickers, then fades inside the tent.
"Welcome, grandfather," the small group chants as each stone is
ceremoniously carried into the tent, a Native American Inipi lodge.
As the pit fills, temperatures inside the Inipi pass 170 degrees.
Bare winter soil offers blessed but fleetingly cool relief. Sage,
lavender and copal tossed on the stones sizzle and burn, filling the
Inipi with aromas of verdant earth now in the dead of winter.
As time passes, sensory perception shifts, no longer dominated by
reason and sequential thought. Heat, sound, smell, vibration and
spirituality pass the mind as a gauge of the world. With heightened
senses, the deep and muffled tones of a drum thud in rhythm with her
beating heart, creating a sense of oneness, merging her with the
others, with the stones, the stars, the coyotes howling on distant
hills. She is in the womb of Mother Earth. Embraced by Mother Earth.
Connected with all Earth and attuned to ancient knowledge, ancient
runes.
Eliida Lakota was barefooted when she crawled into this Inipi sweat
lodge at the Native American Fellowship Center on Illinois Route 8
west of Peoria about 10 p.m. on the last day of 2005. Stooping low
through a small tent flap, she entered another world structured on
customs practiced by her Native American ancestors spanning back
thousands of years. Though ancient, these customs and traditions are
beliefs Lakota lives by and teaches for survival and healing.
She emerges from the Inipi sopping wet in the early hours of the new
year, assuaged and purified. She and three other women stand around
the bonfire under a clear winter night sky. Sweat turns to vapor
that rises from their forms and hangs like ghostly haze in the
fire's glow. The women watch as more stones, more "stone people,"
are carried into the lodge, where only men remain. This final
session is the "warrior door," when temperatures inside the Inipi
approach 200 degrees.
"We are all wounded. I'm wounded," said Lakota, an artist, teacher
and occupational therapist. She works at OSF Saint Francis Medical
Center in the eating disorder clinic helping women gain balance in
their mind-body-spirit perceptions. She also leads a class, "Native
American Spirituality," to Native American women at the federal
prison camp in Pekin.
"Art is not separate from daily life. Spirituality is not for Sunday
but is integrated into every activity we do. When I teach at the
prison, I provide an opportunity for traditional spiritual rituals
and healing," said Lakota, 64, a third-generation Native American
whose ancestors are Lakota and Yakama.
"People think they are physical beings who have a spiritual
experience on Sundays. But we are spiritual beings who have a
physical experience on Earth. In 100 years, all that will remain is
the spirit."
Several weeks ago on a Thursday night, Lakota walked alone across a
desolate, snow-swept parking lot outside the Pekin prison, her arms
loaded with supplies for her class; her lesson plan was based on the
healing role of art and Native American spirituality.
Native American women incarcerated here are from North and South
Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and
Montana. Some come from reservations. Others come without the
cultural knowledge of their ancestors because they grew up away from
the reservation.
"These women have all suffered loss. They all come here wounded,
separated from their families and their culture," said Lakota, who
volunteers at the prison. She describes their offenses as
primarily "crimes of poverty."
"Separate a man from his culture and he suffers loss. He loses his
identity. When I work with these women, we use art to find ourselves
and our culture," she said.
The women walk to the class in pairs and alone, eight of them this
night, Lakota,
Ojibwa, Yakama, Mohawk, Menominee and Winnebago. Meeting at the
prison chapel at 7 p.m., Lakota starts with a purification ceremony
burning sage, sweet grass and cedar. As the smoking herbs are
carried from one woman to the next, they cup their hands, scooping
the blue-gray smoke and veiling it over their heads.
"This takes me away from where I am and what goes on in this
compound. We get into beading and making moccasins and thinking
about home and tradition. We listen to Native American music and
feel the good memories return," said Crystal Fredericks, a Plains
Indian from Fort Berthold, N.D.
Rinissa Fitzpatrick from Standing Rock, N.D., also a Plains Indian,
said, "We come here and we pray, we share, we learn and we bless
each other. This is good medicine for our hearts."
The women have their own Inipi lodge on the prison grounds. Jeffrey
Rendon, prison chaplain, said every federal prison must by law
provide a sweat lodge because freedom of religion is a guaranteed
right in the United States.
"The sweat lodge is the church. When people come to prison, they
still have a right to practice their religion in a safe
environment," he said.
Lakota has instinctively learned to deal with loss and pain through
art and spirituality. Often, she listens to innate messages.
"We all have instructions in our DNA that guide us," she said. "We
have to learn how to hear those instructions."
Listening
Learning to listen is a developmental skill, sometimes manifested
with unexpected revelations, she said, recalling how she wept once
when confronted with evidence of her own ancestral messaging. In
this instance, it came in the simple form of a dress.
She had never made herself a traditional Native American dress
because she never had the money to invest in the leather. When she
mentioned that to a friend, he insisted she select pieces from skins
he had inherited. He spread the pieces out before her, and she chose
carefully from among the pelts of brain-tanned leather.
Brain tanning is a traditional method using the animal's own brain
tissue to rub softness and suppleness into the hide. When Lakota
unfolded the pieces on her living room floor, she realized she had
no idea how to design the dress. She started cutting and sewing,
creating a simple garment that clung loosely to her body, maximizing
each precious pelt.
She later attended a workshop at Porcupine Reservation in South
Dakota. The instructor taught a dress design not at all reflective
of common images of Native American dress. He said South Lakota
women made dresses very differently from other Native American
tribes. Dresses of the southern Lakota were simple, without fancy
beadwork at the breast because the women were so proud of their
brain-tanned leather they didn't want to hide it with beadwork.
Southern Lakota women made dresses with side gussets so the garment
could be tightened in winter, loosened in summer and worn through
pregnancy. Lakota had sewn gussets into her dress to maximize the
leather and allow her to wear little under it in summer and more
under it in winter.
Her ancestors had made arm holes large enough so mothers could nurse
without removing the dress. She wasn't sure why her armholes were so
large, but they were. Each aspect of the traditional Native American
Lakota dress was a precise description of the dress she had made
unknowingly with leathers spread on the floor of her Bartonville
home.
Body-mind-spirit
"Through art, you get in touch with who you are," she said. "Your
DNA determines your eye color and your skin, but it's also the way
you think, your body-mind-spirit connection. DNA holds the spiritual
life of your people.
"If you are having trouble with your spiritual life, look into the
spirituality of your ancestors. Every cell of your body has a
memory. Art taps into that."
Lance Factor, the George Appleton Lawrence distinguished professor
of philosophy at Knox College and husband of artist Barbara Factor,
said the belief that art reflects our inner consciousness and is a
tool for healing is also part of Western philosophy.
"Through art, we are able to express things we can't say verbally.
Furthermore, art allows us to figure ourselves out. A vital idea in
art is that it taps into the unconscious. That's one source of the
therapeutic, healing power of art," he said.
"Another tradition in art is that it represents external reality and
functions much like a photograph. That's objective, but when art
gives voice to the deeply personal, it is not a record of the
objective world but something therapeutic and healing."
Connecting
Through Lakota's prison class, the female inmates have bonded and
derived strength. Fitzpatrick, closely versed in the traditions of
her ancestors in Standing Rock, N.D., said, "I realize this is a
learning lesson for me being here. But there is a spirituality both
mentally and physically about this experience. It's almost as if
someone here needs me more than my family. Without this class, this
would be slow death for many of us. This class keeps us grounded."
Fredericks said. "When we meet other native people, our spirits
connect. We need that, especially in a place like this."
Lakota has spoken with the women about making a traditional star
quilt.
"The star quilt helps the Creator find us," Fitzpatrick said.
Several weeks later, reflecting on her class at the prison, Lakota
spoke about the spirit dolls she makes:
"The spirit dolls remind us to stay in touch with our inner spirit,
nurturing and creative. If anything will save Earth, it will be
nurturing and creativity. Earth needs women to stand together to
save what's left. To do that, we need to stay in touch with our own
spirit and stay in touch with the spirit of our ancestors. A lot of
the women in prison were not in touch with their heritage and
traditions, had not burned sage and sweet grass for years. Without
that connection with their ancestors, their wounds will never heal."
Pekin Federal Prison
Sunday, January 29, 2006
By CLARE HOWARD
pjstar.com/stories/012906/HEA_B8OLSHRV.027.shtml
Drenched in sweat, her loose cotton dress clings to her body. She's
crouching at the edge of a pit filled with hot stones, blackness
engulfing everything inside this low, squat tent. A fragrance like
early spring rises from the damp earth.
Steamy heat clogs respiration, pressing hard on lungs and muddling
sense of time and place. Hours pass in moments.
Others are here around this pit, shadowy forms perceived for only
seconds when a rock glows red-hot or a leaf ignites and muted light
flickers, then fades inside the tent.
"Welcome, grandfather," the small group chants as each stone is
ceremoniously carried into the tent, a Native American Inipi lodge.
As the pit fills, temperatures inside the Inipi pass 170 degrees.
Bare winter soil offers blessed but fleetingly cool relief. Sage,
lavender and copal tossed on the stones sizzle and burn, filling the
Inipi with aromas of verdant earth now in the dead of winter.
As time passes, sensory perception shifts, no longer dominated by
reason and sequential thought. Heat, sound, smell, vibration and
spirituality pass the mind as a gauge of the world. With heightened
senses, the deep and muffled tones of a drum thud in rhythm with her
beating heart, creating a sense of oneness, merging her with the
others, with the stones, the stars, the coyotes howling on distant
hills. She is in the womb of Mother Earth. Embraced by Mother Earth.
Connected with all Earth and attuned to ancient knowledge, ancient
runes.
Eliida Lakota was barefooted when she crawled into this Inipi sweat
lodge at the Native American Fellowship Center on Illinois Route 8
west of Peoria about 10 p.m. on the last day of 2005. Stooping low
through a small tent flap, she entered another world structured on
customs practiced by her Native American ancestors spanning back
thousands of years. Though ancient, these customs and traditions are
beliefs Lakota lives by and teaches for survival and healing.
She emerges from the Inipi sopping wet in the early hours of the new
year, assuaged and purified. She and three other women stand around
the bonfire under a clear winter night sky. Sweat turns to vapor
that rises from their forms and hangs like ghostly haze in the
fire's glow. The women watch as more stones, more "stone people,"
are carried into the lodge, where only men remain. This final
session is the "warrior door," when temperatures inside the Inipi
approach 200 degrees.
"We are all wounded. I'm wounded," said Lakota, an artist, teacher
and occupational therapist. She works at OSF Saint Francis Medical
Center in the eating disorder clinic helping women gain balance in
their mind-body-spirit perceptions. She also leads a class, "Native
American Spirituality," to Native American women at the federal
prison camp in Pekin.
"Art is not separate from daily life. Spirituality is not for Sunday
but is integrated into every activity we do. When I teach at the
prison, I provide an opportunity for traditional spiritual rituals
and healing," said Lakota, 64, a third-generation Native American
whose ancestors are Lakota and Yakama.
"People think they are physical beings who have a spiritual
experience on Sundays. But we are spiritual beings who have a
physical experience on Earth. In 100 years, all that will remain is
the spirit."
Several weeks ago on a Thursday night, Lakota walked alone across a
desolate, snow-swept parking lot outside the Pekin prison, her arms
loaded with supplies for her class; her lesson plan was based on the
healing role of art and Native American spirituality.
Native American women incarcerated here are from North and South
Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and
Montana. Some come from reservations. Others come without the
cultural knowledge of their ancestors because they grew up away from
the reservation.
"These women have all suffered loss. They all come here wounded,
separated from their families and their culture," said Lakota, who
volunteers at the prison. She describes their offenses as
primarily "crimes of poverty."
"Separate a man from his culture and he suffers loss. He loses his
identity. When I work with these women, we use art to find ourselves
and our culture," she said.
The women walk to the class in pairs and alone, eight of them this
night, Lakota,
Ojibwa, Yakama, Mohawk, Menominee and Winnebago. Meeting at the
prison chapel at 7 p.m., Lakota starts with a purification ceremony
burning sage, sweet grass and cedar. As the smoking herbs are
carried from one woman to the next, they cup their hands, scooping
the blue-gray smoke and veiling it over their heads.
"This takes me away from where I am and what goes on in this
compound. We get into beading and making moccasins and thinking
about home and tradition. We listen to Native American music and
feel the good memories return," said Crystal Fredericks, a Plains
Indian from Fort Berthold, N.D.
Rinissa Fitzpatrick from Standing Rock, N.D., also a Plains Indian,
said, "We come here and we pray, we share, we learn and we bless
each other. This is good medicine for our hearts."
The women have their own Inipi lodge on the prison grounds. Jeffrey
Rendon, prison chaplain, said every federal prison must by law
provide a sweat lodge because freedom of religion is a guaranteed
right in the United States.
"The sweat lodge is the church. When people come to prison, they
still have a right to practice their religion in a safe
environment," he said.
Lakota has instinctively learned to deal with loss and pain through
art and spirituality. Often, she listens to innate messages.
"We all have instructions in our DNA that guide us," she said. "We
have to learn how to hear those instructions."
Listening
Learning to listen is a developmental skill, sometimes manifested
with unexpected revelations, she said, recalling how she wept once
when confronted with evidence of her own ancestral messaging. In
this instance, it came in the simple form of a dress.
She had never made herself a traditional Native American dress
because she never had the money to invest in the leather. When she
mentioned that to a friend, he insisted she select pieces from skins
he had inherited. He spread the pieces out before her, and she chose
carefully from among the pelts of brain-tanned leather.
Brain tanning is a traditional method using the animal's own brain
tissue to rub softness and suppleness into the hide. When Lakota
unfolded the pieces on her living room floor, she realized she had
no idea how to design the dress. She started cutting and sewing,
creating a simple garment that clung loosely to her body, maximizing
each precious pelt.
She later attended a workshop at Porcupine Reservation in South
Dakota. The instructor taught a dress design not at all reflective
of common images of Native American dress. He said South Lakota
women made dresses very differently from other Native American
tribes. Dresses of the southern Lakota were simple, without fancy
beadwork at the breast because the women were so proud of their
brain-tanned leather they didn't want to hide it with beadwork.
Southern Lakota women made dresses with side gussets so the garment
could be tightened in winter, loosened in summer and worn through
pregnancy. Lakota had sewn gussets into her dress to maximize the
leather and allow her to wear little under it in summer and more
under it in winter.
Her ancestors had made arm holes large enough so mothers could nurse
without removing the dress. She wasn't sure why her armholes were so
large, but they were. Each aspect of the traditional Native American
Lakota dress was a precise description of the dress she had made
unknowingly with leathers spread on the floor of her Bartonville
home.
Body-mind-spirit
"Through art, you get in touch with who you are," she said. "Your
DNA determines your eye color and your skin, but it's also the way
you think, your body-mind-spirit connection. DNA holds the spiritual
life of your people.
"If you are having trouble with your spiritual life, look into the
spirituality of your ancestors. Every cell of your body has a
memory. Art taps into that."
Lance Factor, the George Appleton Lawrence distinguished professor
of philosophy at Knox College and husband of artist Barbara Factor,
said the belief that art reflects our inner consciousness and is a
tool for healing is also part of Western philosophy.
"Through art, we are able to express things we can't say verbally.
Furthermore, art allows us to figure ourselves out. A vital idea in
art is that it taps into the unconscious. That's one source of the
therapeutic, healing power of art," he said.
"Another tradition in art is that it represents external reality and
functions much like a photograph. That's objective, but when art
gives voice to the deeply personal, it is not a record of the
objective world but something therapeutic and healing."
Connecting
Through Lakota's prison class, the female inmates have bonded and
derived strength. Fitzpatrick, closely versed in the traditions of
her ancestors in Standing Rock, N.D., said, "I realize this is a
learning lesson for me being here. But there is a spirituality both
mentally and physically about this experience. It's almost as if
someone here needs me more than my family. Without this class, this
would be slow death for many of us. This class keeps us grounded."
Fredericks said. "When we meet other native people, our spirits
connect. We need that, especially in a place like this."
Lakota has spoken with the women about making a traditional star
quilt.
"The star quilt helps the Creator find us," Fitzpatrick said.
Several weeks later, reflecting on her class at the prison, Lakota
spoke about the spirit dolls she makes:
"The spirit dolls remind us to stay in touch with our inner spirit,
nurturing and creative. If anything will save Earth, it will be
nurturing and creativity. Earth needs women to stand together to
save what's left. To do that, we need to stay in touch with our own
spirit and stay in touch with the spirit of our ancestors. A lot of
the women in prison were not in touch with their heritage and
traditions, had not burned sage and sweet grass for years. Without
that connection with their ancestors, their wounds will never heal."