Fran Dancing Feather

The Red Tailed Hawk ranges all the way from North Alaska to as far south as Panama, as they move from place to place seeking more productive hunting. They will also fly to southern locations during the colder months even though they do not follow all the characteristics of true migration. According to Desert USA, Red Tailed hawks vary in weight from two to four pounds and average about twenty-two inches long, with a wingspan of fifty-six inches. They mate in the Springtime and lay from one to three eggs. They live from ten to twenty-one years and eat mostly small rodents and snakes.

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Like the web of the dream catcher, we are connected to all things within the circle of life. Light moves like a rainbow, as radiation from the sun, the stars, the moon and the lightening into the back of our eye to be interpreted. We hear the sound of clear water moving over the rocks of the river. We smell the scent of the pines and taste the morning mist. We feel the icy chill of a winter morning or the heat of the summer sun. We react to every emotional experience received through the five senses, with hundreds of biochemical responses transmitted from the mid-brain and down the spinal column into every organ of the body, mind and spirit. We react to all things seen, heard, smelled, tasted and touched.

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There are Indian songs used in private ceremony and even some used in public ceremony that are so powerful you are sure they could nearly raise the dead. You know they can heal any ills of the human body. They can change everything. When you listen to the voice and drum, things really happen inside the body that could never ever be explained by science. It may not happen every time the same song is sung but it happens often enough to know these old songs are the most powerful prayers and medicines in all the world. They are sounds and actions that have been among our people for thousands of years. They are best heard and felt outside in the Haudenosaunee woodlands near the Western door of the Nation. It may seem odd to an outsider that dancers wearing false faces can change the biology of the human form as they interact with our Creator. Perhaps we wonder how these things can happen. In drunkenness the ceremonies seemed clouded with mystery and doubt but in sobriety we feel everything. We feel the healing of many generations of difficulties and despair. The drum aligns itself with our own heartbeat and the pulse of the ancient earth and we become the song, the prayer or the face of the healer.

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The natural distribution range of the genus Yucca (49 species and 24 subspecies) covers a vast area of the Americas from Baja in the west, northwards into the American Southwest, through the drier central states and as far north as Alberta, Canada and east along the Atlantic coast. To the south, Yucca is found throughout Mexico. Yuccas have adapted to an equally vast range of climate and ecological conditions. They are found in rocky deserts and badlands, mountains, prairies and grasslands like the Verde Valley. Yuccas are pollinated by yucca moths. They instinctively transfer the pollen from one plant to another, and at the same time lay an egg in the flower. Then the moth larva feeds on some of the developing seeds, always leaving enough seed to perpetuate the species. Yucca species are the host plants for the caterpillars of the Yucca Giant-Skipper.

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A blanket of stifling heat settles oppressively over the dusky canyons like a purgatorial blanket. The air is completely still at 105 degrees and the swamp cooler quits working. Beads of sweat form on the forehead and begin to pour like rivers down the neck and chest. The serene song of the crickets rises to a disturbing crescendo of hundreds of thousands of creatures angrily protesting the oncoming assault, while charcoal colored thunderheads approach from the north. The dogs are barking. The soul is drawn outdoors to reconcile with a haunted stillness that feels as empty as a tomb. Who am I and what purpose do you have for me here?

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Alcoholism has been dealt with all throughout time in American Indian communities. We are blessed by a number of authors who have recorded means by which divine intervention from a loving Creator, have provided help for native people for centuries. In his book, Big Medicine from Six Nations, Ted Williams writes the following;

“We called this medicine Juuh ne(t) raath, which means ‘long root’. If supplication was directed either by pureness of will or by a high level of panic, to a Divine higher Consciousness, the person would be led, staggering and falling and hollering for help, into the woods and directly to this medicine. One bite of the root and the hallucinations would leave. Sometimes the alcoholic would leave the habit from that day on, but at the least he would abstain for a long period of time. It is very interesting that this plant hid from those who didn’t really need it, as though one had to suffer and experience a deep need first.”

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According to The World of the Coyote, a Sierra Club Book by Wayne Grady, coyotes “are without a doubt the most numerous and successful large predator in North America. They are also the most widely distributed, having extended their range in the past hundred years to cover almost the entire continent from Central America to Alaska and from California and British Columbia to Nova Scotia and New England. The coyote was known as God’s dog by the Navajo, where it probably originated, and as the medicine wolf by the more northerly native peoples when it spread to the grasslands.”

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(This article by Fran Dancing Feather appeared in the July issue of the AA Grapevine)

Today is the potluck to celebrate all the AA birthdays for the month. We have a big cake and tons of food and really great fellowship. There is no place I would rather be then right here. There is no one else I would rather be then me and no other fellowship on the planet that speaks higher about the gifts of healing then this little AA gathering way out in the back country of Central Arizona. It’s the Red Road meeting and we are just upriver from the local Indian Reservation.

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This is the time of year when desert dwellers have the opportunity to delight in the prickly pear cactus. The magenta colored fruits begin to replace their yellow blossoms with the cactus’ green “nopales,” or pads. There are about 350 varieties of prickly pear that provide nourishment and medicine and “People have been using the plant for thousands of years,” according to Patti Milligan who is a corporate nutritionalist. “Then the science follows and guess what? It makes sense.”

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According to Bird Life International (2008), “The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) is a long-legged bird in the cuckoo family. It is one of the two roadrunner species, This roadrunner is also known as the chaparral cock, ground cuckoo, and snake killer. The bird is about 22 inches long and weighs about 10 and a half ounces and is the largest North American cuckoo. The adult has a bushy crest and a long thick dark bill. It has a long dark tail, a dark head and back, and is blue on the front of the neck and on the belly. Roadrunners have four toes on each foot; two face forward, and two face backward. The name roadrunner comes from the bird’s habit of racing down roads in front of moving vehicles and then darting to safety in the brush. The Greater Roadrunner nests on a platform of sticks or low in a cactus or a bush and lays 3–6 eggs, which hatch in 20 days. The chicks fledge in another 18 days. Pairs may occasionally rear a second brood.”

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