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.
Green Corn
The corn is sacred like the songs that honor her and those same songs honor me and you and everyone who respects the Greatness of all Things. No matter how far we have traveled from these precious homelands, the heartbeat moves upon the earth and reaches us and we remember. We recall the voices of the singers on cold winter mornings and warm seasonal gatherings among the guardian pines and birch trees of the sacred mountain. It is in the deepest recesses of our DNA that the sound of the ceremonial songs carries life-giving prayer throughout our recovery. Our heart has come home to our ancestors and the eternal circle is complete. We have become empowered by our powerlessness and the wounds of a lifetime of losses and foolish dreams. A Power greater then us has restored us to the sanity that was stolen by the first bitter taste of alcohol. We thought before recovery, that we could never return. We could never go home because we had desecrated our ceremony in the blur of our foolish choices. But we were wrong.
A Native Awakening
The ceremony lives on in the heartfelt songs of the old ones. After the painful examination of our defects and brokenness, we are set free to hear the timeless heartbeat and walk through the promised archway to freedom. The songs run deeper and we can allow our Oldest Living Relation, our Creator, to remove our shortcomings. The songs become our eleventh step. In recovery we have learned that our addictions have caused us to suffer from over a hundred forms of fears that melt away with each heartbeat of the sacred drum of our ancestors. We are becoming who we truly are. The words of the ancient language express an honor, respect and dignity within us that we had suspected had gone away forever. We are interconnected with every created aspect of the earth and sky and everything in between. We are the medicine of our people and of our Creator. We are the love and the continuing healing and recovery. And we are whole!
