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10:49am December 13, 2011

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Dreams out of nowhere

autisticwolfchild:

youneedacat:

autisticwolfchild:

youneedacat:

I just had a dream that I came from a culture (in the USA but not the mainstream culture) that had these public festivals from time to time. And one of the things that happened while I was attending one, was that two people who’d had prolonged contact with the psych system got up and talked about their lives. One had been diagnosed with severe chronic depression, the other with severe chronic schizophrenia. Both had really struggled to stay alive. And the whole point of this part of the festival was to show both of them, who had been given very little hope from mainstream society’s standpoint, that their entire community was backing them and would do everything possible to assist them with anything they had trouble with, for as long as they needed it. And that anyone else in similar situations could expect the same. And somehow disabled people in general, from our culture, managed to fare a lot better than disabled people in the USA in general.

I don’t know where these dreams come from. When I was 14 and had just been in a mental institution I had an elaborate and fairly realistic dream about a large network of safehouses for helping people who wanted out of institutions in general. Despite the fact that I had no conscious conception of what an institution was in general, the dream managed to include every kind of disability institution as well as the foster system. (In the dream, in fact, the whole thing was explained to me by a girl in our house who had been rescued from the foster system long before I’d been rescued from the psych system.) The house I’d come to worked in a way where everyone’s abilities were complementary (and duplicated) so we could assist each other without the need for the huge power imbalances that crop up when you have a hierarchy of staff over clients. People could stay as long or as short as we needed to. The whole thing was somehow secret enough the system wouldn’t find us, and yet known enough to really help people get out of terrible situations.

In both of these instances I’ve never even thought of the possibility of anything resembling these things, let alone planned them out as thoroughly as they came out in the dreams. It’s really strange to just have dreams like this out of nowhere.

 It sounds like Native American ideas around healing.

In particular it sounds like what I’ve heard from in person, and read in the three most recent books written by Lewis Mehl-Madrona Coyote Wisdom, Narrative Medicine, and Healing the Mind Through The Power Of Story: The Promise of Narrative Psychiatry.

The guy’s not necessarily the most reliable in person, partially due to likely being ADHD, (he admits it himself) and being more interested sometimes in research than in sitting still in any urban center for office hours, but I know the northern native communities loved him. He does spend a lot of time out on the lecture circuit promoting his books too. I can’t deny what he writes is brilliant though. 

Ewwwwww no. That guy’s not only not legit, but actively offensive and known to many Indian communities as such. (Such people aren’t hard to spot once you know that, for instance, the Lakota have declared war on people who do some of the things he’s done.) There’s basically an entire community of white and mostly-white people who do and say the exact same sorts of stuff he does and says. It’s hard to tell individual to individual whether they actually have convinced themselves they’re justified or not, but in the cultures they claim (ancestral or in terms of being taught by) ties to, what they do is grossly offensive. It would be like me deciding to hold sweat lodges (which this guy has done, and found sneaky ways to claim he’s not charging money, while charging money), and claiming I have the right just because I have Choctaw/Cherokee ancestry back a ways.

Also I think the community I was with in this dream was a European immigrant community (like the Minnesota Swedes or something, who I partially descend from, although I didn’t recognize any of our actual culture in that).

 I’m not sure what you mean by legit, but he actually is who he says he is, and he is Native American. (mixed blood, because both his parents were mixed blood, His mother Cherokee and Scottish and his father Oglala Lakota and Quebecoise, and he learned a lot from his grandmother as well) But he is a flake in person. had all sorts of issues with him as a prof. But I do know he was well respected up here. and “people who do some of the same stuff he’s done” are not the same as “he has done x or y”.  

As for “actively offensive”, I suppose that depends on who you ask. I know there are some people who don’t like the idea of sharing aboriginal healing ideas with “outsiders”, and get quite offended by it. Others think now is the time fortold in prophecy that the white man will finally start to listen and heal the breach between the peoples, and this is how we will save the planet before we destroy ourselves. (Crazy Horse)

I know he has helped to host sweat lodges along with some other elders when he was here, but there was no charging for them. I don’t know how things run in the U.S. though. or what he might have gotten cuaght up in. But nobody’s all good or all bad.

Edit: oh, I forgot, he did tell us he had his share of haters, largely in the States. Didn’t really pay much attention, and it was several years ago now…  Ithink it was something to do with it being a combination of the fact that he was sharing indigenous knowledge outside the Indigenous community, and the whole popularity thing (his Coyote Healing series is HUGELY popular, like best selling popular) will draw negative attention…any time) <shrug> didn’t think of it until was puzzling over my knowledge of him and your reaction.

At any rate, I was just trying to help. Didn’t mean to upset you. 

Oh I knew he was mixed, I meant not a legitimate cultural authority on a lot of the things he’s put out there – and some of what he puts out there is so far beyond just not-even-close-to-accurate (culturally or otherwise) that it’s hard for me to believe anyone with even cursory knowledge takes it seriously. I’m not really upset, I just had a bit of a visceral reaction to thinking I might have had a dream out of the kind of books he writes.