 I'm Carol Irons. I'm an Abonackie elder. We are now doing the Abonackie Cultural Regeneration Project. We're being hosted here by Northwood Stewardship Center, being able to stay at this lovely facility where we have room and board and we conduct training programs. At this point, training programs for Abonackie adults who are then going back into their communities to provide more cultural training to community members. Now, to the point, we're going to have an excerpt that won't hurt. If somebody's... I'm going to have more room on my mind, too. It's my aging eyes. I said, I want to be back. She's going to sing a lullery. Yeah, she's going to sing a lullery. I heard that Samuel was coming. She said he's a grommet. She said he's a grommet. And what you're going to want to do, and it's easier to not work off the school to get a good, good, long, long piece. That's the thing. It didn't actually punch me. It just wouldn't mean it made slits in it, but... Did they also use turtle shells for rattles? Yes. Yeah, I've got a turtle shell rattle, but it's so heavy now for my grip and I just don't use it. I find these to be the nicest. You do have to remember with raw hide, folks. If you're outside using your rattle and it gets wet and it collapses, it's going to be just what you're working with now. Raw hide. That's a good point. So you don't use it out in the rain. Teaching you has many layers of meaning. I have not been able to confirm in Ebenaki country, or Wabanaki country, that much detail. So I just put it out there because one thing I was taught and one thing that was confirmed is that medicine wheel teaches. The medicine wheel represents a philosophy of life. Yes. So if you carry it out to those other details, they make sense. The things that are spoken of are the symbols that you see at Pow Wow a lot and people will just say, well, it was just what we had at Pow Wow. That's the physical representation, but there's a whole lot of teachings involved with it that are not physical. You see a circle and a circle all over the planet with Indigenous peoples everywhere and also with many cultures that are more urbanized. The circle is a symbol of the forever motion of energy. They'll talk about eternity because no matter where you stop on the circle, you're at a point of another beginning. So the circle is motion, it's movement, but it's also wholeness. And as you keep moving, you return to your source. Now, the spiral is a modification of that where you circle, but you don't come to exactly and precisely the point where you left off. Hopefully as we're growing, we're coming to a little different point each time we come around with experience. So the spiral to me is a very special symbol, but I haven't seen that as much here. You see it out west on the rock carvings quite a bit. So there's the circle and then there's the center and the center is the still point of balance. No matter where you are on the circle, you're equidistant from the center. So when people stand in a circle, no head is higher than the other. We're all on the circle and the circle, of course, is enclosing, enveloping, it's accepting. And the point of balance keeps everything equal and fair. Now, I've seen these colors different, and they're different with different nations. I had to correct it from the Seneca, which I don't know if the Seneca are the same as all the Iroquoian people are not. But this was what John Running here corrected me about for some of the colors. But in the east was the red. This is the east point, and it kind of has a whole quadrant. Can you see it? Yes, it's when the fire comes up in the sky, Father, Son, it's the return of the fire, and they know that there's fire in the belly of the earth, and it's when the new life, the new awakening, that's where spring lives, and sunrise are in the east. You know, so it all kind of fends. The next direction is south. Wabanaki used yellow, as far as I can determine, primarily from John Running here. Because when the sun is directly overhead in the summer, it's more yellow. Yeah, it's paler, it's very hot, but it tends to be paler than at the horizons. So, and of course, summer is the time of the power of growth, but some nations refer to great grandmother growth. I have not heard that in Wabanaki country, but it's a nice statement because there is a real power and energy there, and it's a living energy. In the west is the black because of the nightfall, night coming. It's also the time of autumn, and the time when when the exterior things are going to rest or dying down, but the root is storing the life, so it's underground in the dark. And from the west come the storm clouds. Well, in this part of the country, you know, and in the north is the time of the snow, the time of the white hairs, some of us, the time of the elders, for sure, but it's the winter time. And now you can also see the spirit keepers, again as corrected by John Running here. So it's eagle in the east, and I don't know of any nation on Turtle Island that doesn't have eagle in the east as the spirit keeper. And one of the things about eagle is that it flies the highest and takes our prayers to creator, and it can fly so high you lose sight of it. Now, I've heard two different versions. I've heard, and this is not Seneca. This is this was from Abenaki, as far as I know, raccoon, but I've had one or two people say they thought it was Red Fox. In either case, it's the trickster. This is, and as we go along with this, you'll understand why, but the trickster is the one that kind of tests you, throws a few ringers and you have to work things out. In the west, the spirit keeper is the black bear here in the northeast. And I think in all the eastern seaboard, in the west, it's usually grizzly bear. There are some people that have brown bear. The big one would be surprised if people in the far north had bowler bear, but that I don't know. But it's bear. So it's almost always eagle in the east and bear in the west. The one in the south, the trickster in the west is coyote. But in the southwest, it's a jumping, jumping mouse. So different ones there. In the north, the spirit keeper for Wabanaki, as I've been told, is moose. Moose nurtures the people in their times because that was the safest time to hunt moose. When the deep snows would make it a little harder for them to kick or move as fast. A lot of the plains people, it's buffalo. And I guess in the southwest too. Now we used to have a woods buffalo long, long ago. Oh yeah, yeah. But I haven't heard of anybody saying that. The north is moose as much as I've heard. So those are the spirit keepers of the four directions. You've got the colors, you've got the four directions. You have the circle, you have the center. You have two pads. As if the spring is the new beginning time, the sunrise, the spring. So when people talk about your birth, you're born in your spring. Wherever, you know, I was born in October, but I was born in my spring. That was the beginning of my lifetime. And the black path across is your earth walk. And it's usually shown as a black path. I guess it might be another color of them. That's your earth walk. In other words, you go from your birth to your death. Because in the autumn, when the plants are dying over, when you die over, you go into spirit world. So from your birth to your death, you walk on your earth walk. But the other thing you're walking at the same time, this is another layer of meaning. It's like transparencies. So you've got the primary circle now, but then you've got these different meanings. And each new transparency talks about the medicine wheel as the kind of context or frame of reference for it. So in your other walk, you are walking from your south to your north. And that's your spiritual walk. You're going from your time of confusion and testing and decision making to your time of wisdom as the elders in the north. Of course, the trick is to stay balanced in the center, theoretically. So that's the most basic understanding of the medicine wheel. And if you want to stop right there, that's fine. The other kind of teachings go on with a child being born in its east. And so it's, it's young childhood is in the east. It's adolescence is in the south. It's testing. It's testing the limits. It's being tested. It's making some choices that are going to bring some consequences without a whole lot of experience. But, you know, so this is the time of testing. And then this is the time of the adult raising their family, doing their jobs, working, providing for the families, learning more. But that's this is, and this is, this is more harvest and consequences. So when you've made choices here, you tend to get into certain skills, certain paths of work, certain family dynamics and community dynamics. And then the last is the time of the elders, the time of the white years. That's when you moved into your time of wisdom, supposedly, hypothetically. And just put that out there. But it's, you've learned a lot. You've experienced a great deal. You've learned a lot. You've digested what you could, made sense of it as you could. And it's the time of turning it back and giving it back to community before you move into it. Now, some people use it and make reference to it in terms of events in their life. You get married, you know, you had a little courtship, you get married. That takes its turn. It may be six months or it may be 60 years, depends on how things go. But it goes through periods of testing and learning and stuff, kind of settles into some patterns and routines. Maybe shake it up a little bit, push it back a little and get it going again. And so on and on into the older years and in the ending, a car accident. Boom. Then you go through, you know, am I going to live or not? What's happening to me and making decisions? No, don't do that surgery. But yeah, I'll do this. And so on and you live with the consequences or don't and move into, you know, coming to terms with it, the whatever healing can occur, whatever reconciliation can occur and then move on into the next phase of your life. So it's that kind of philosophy which isn't spelled out in books, but and that was from the Seneca Elder was telling me that further way of looking at the medicine wheel as a philosophy of life. But only the basics of it are what I've learned to be Wabanaki or Abenaki. What about that? That's the traditions preserver. Yeah, yeah. And the reason that was important to me is that's what we're about. Yeah. These two symbols. So if you want to put these later on your rattle, you can or on a, if you want to, you don't have the nurturer, the caregiver and the teacher or the teacher. We also did a very brief smudging. There is more to smudging. You're certainly not obligated to memorize a group of prayers because she did it. So I've got to say what she said, please do not do that. But you kind of speak from the heart. And when you're smudging, typically you're honoring creator, kitsumenito, and you're honoring Mother Earth and Turtle Island, if you want. And you honor each of the four directions. You start in this part of the country, you start in the East, and you always move sun wise. Well, when you think of the annual cycle, you go from spring to summer, right? Clockwise, for those of you so oriented to technology. You go from East to South and West and North. Sun wise. Yeah. In the, in the own way of speaking of it. And what you do is honor each of the directions. I tend to speak some of the things like honor the East, home of Eagle, place where sun rises, where the spring lives, where the new beginnings come from. And I'm holding the smudge bowl up to the East as close as I can determine. I've done it backwards before, so don't get too uptight about that. The spirits know we speak with a good heart. I then move to the South or hold the bowl up toward the South. And we're honoring South Wind, home of the trickster whose name I don't like to call. I've had enough of that this past week or two. Okay. So, you know, you're honoring the direction of summer, the power of growth, if you want to, and the trickster whose name we do not call. But you can call it if you want to. You will live with whatever you call in. Then you move to the West, home of Bear, who's the spirit keeper of the West. It's also the home of the Thunder Rush. It's the direction of harvest, the time of sunset. You know, so you can relate it either to the seasons, to the kind of things that happen in a lifetime. It's when we move toward the spiritual world. It's the time of consequences from the choices you made before. And then you move to the North. And the North is time of winter, time of the elders. And it's also considered time of healing and transformation. We transform into the spirit approach. Or transform on into the next new beginning. And that's usually, at least in the teachings I've had, the direction of spiritual wisdom and healing. Now, when I do a full smudging and honoring, I do the six directions, a creator, Mother Earth, East, South, West and North. And then I honor all my relatives. And I kind of may make a little circle. All my relatives, the standing ones, which are the plant people, the four-legged, the winged, the creepy crawlers, the swimmers. I'm honoring all of them because they're with us in the sacred circle. They are our brothers and sisters. We are not superior to them. In many ways, we are inferior to them. Without them, we cannot live. And we need to humble ourselves a little more in this world about that. Because we depend on them. I also honor the grandfathers and the grandmothers. And again, I might circle, sort of a little bit, the smudge bowl. Just in my hand, just thinking of whatever direction they're hanging out in. I'm sorry. The grandfathers and the grandmothers. Thank you. In other words, the ancestors in the spirit worlds. Now, a lot of people do a center point, either yourself. Obviously, after you've done the honorings, you smudge yourself and you smudge anybody else that's in the group. But you've done the honorings. What you do when you're doing those honorings, you're creating a sacred space. So this is not something to be flip about because you're honoring all that is. And we are just one strand on that web of life. And by honoring all that is, you're putting yourself within that context as one part. And you're honoring what surrounds you and helps you live. So it's something that you kind of do in a sacred manner with the sense of awe and appreciation, gratitude. And then you go on with the thing. Now, we will do that tonight. When we do it, it may start becoming automatic and you do your own prayer. I'm not telling you what to say. But your thinking of creator, your thinking of Mother Earth, many times smudgings are done without a word. But the person doing it and those who are participating are tuned into that. So you're thinking it, you're feeling it. And you start with creator and Mother Earth and you do each of the four directions. And then if you can remember to keep going, you do the ancestors and the elders or the grandfathers and the grandmothers, however you want to word it, and you do all your relatives. But those prayers, also the effect it has when there's a group of people is it starts bringing everybody into sync. It's amazing how it starts in energy flowing. And as you get more sensitized to energy, this is going to be important in your work because you begin to feel it. You can actually start feeling the energy flowing. And you know that everybody is becoming entrained. In other words, entrainment, where people's mental process and even heartbeat starts coming into sync with each other. So the beginning of a ceremony is really important because that's what you're doing. You're bringing everybody into the same pulse, the same flow of energy, the same resonance. And resonance is like when you hit a tuning fork and all the other things start vibrating at the same vibration. That's what you want in a ceremony. So we're working in the energy field as well as with the help we have from the spirit world. The pipe is an altar. It's not something you do to show off, to impress a lot of people, to disrupt some other function because you're kind of important and you're walking in to do a pipe. That is such an abuse of our sacred, sacred ceremonies. And the pipe is not, we don't have the words in English. It's real problematic because speaking in English, we don't have a word that conveys the sacredness when we say pipe. You know, people think of a briar pipe. So we're going to go over a little bit about pipe. I was told by the clan mother of the Seneca Wolf clan when we had done a ceremony like what we're going to do tonight. And I didn't know what I was doing. I was just brand new with this. This was done many decades ago. So we would go out at winter. It was middle of winter. We got snowed in. It was awful. This was out in western New York state. Kind of a flat-ish area and the wind blowing and the snow packing in like everything. And with the wind it packs it and the snow plows couldn't get through. And in the evening, after dark, we'd go out to the little teaching lodge, which is just a little one-room cabin smaller than this room. Pitch dark and we'd sit in a circle and she'd do some ceremony and stuff. And she had an eagle feather. You'd hear her voice. I mean, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face because there was no light in the windows. There was no fire. There's nothing pitch dark. And her disembodied voice, the other side of this little room, said that she had an eagle feather and she was going to pass it. And she said, you hold it a little bit. She said, don't hold it too long. But if everybody's quiet and you hold it, it may bring you a teaching. The grandparents that we've done the ceremony and stuff, the grandparents circle you and it's totally safe. You're very nurtured. It's nice. And she said, you know, just hold it and see if an image comes to you or a phrase or a word or whatever and then pass it to the next person. Well, you're all sitting there totally silent. Nobody knows what's going on. Times passing. You're kind of shivering. Finally somebody bumps you because you can't see anything. So you can't see the feather. You can't see their hand, but they're, you know, and they pass his feather to you and you hold it and you either you get something or not and then you try to find the next person's hand and pass it. So she did that. Finally, I guess it got back around to her and then she sent it back around a second time for a little bit. And then when everything was finished, go back to the house and have some hot cocoa and try and warm up. And what I saw was pipe. I had never seen an Indian pipe. This was way back in the seventies or eighties. And what I saw was the profile vision of a pipe. I didn't know what that was about. When I was holding the feather, yes. And then passed it on. And the second time it came, I think if I remember right, I think I saw some things on the stem of the pipe and passed it on. So anyway, we got back to house and we were all supposed to debrief and say what we saw. And some people got a word or a phrase and and she said, well, okay, that's that's they're telling you something and it was okay. I didn't know. I didn't know anything. And so the next day she took me aside and she said, you need to make a pipe. And meanwhile, she had gone and done her own thing trying to understand different people's things. And the next day she'd take each one aside and tell them. And she said, you have to make a pipe. You need to be a pipe holder. It was like, I think that's a lot of responsibility. And I didn't think I want that, you know, because it is a lot of responsibility. It's not a show off thing. It's not just, oh, every Indian has a pipe. I got to have a pipe. A lot of people have this as a cutraman. They got to have a ribbon shirt. They got to have a pipe and they got to have a feather out of their hair or something. And unfortunately, that's a lot of what we're left with. And I was a little resistant. And anyway, she talked to me and said, no, when you go home, you're going to go home pretty soon and you're going to make a pipe. And so anyway, so we did some more work about why in the world. And she said, your people have lost a lot. You need to be teaching. You need to first learn yourself and then you have to teach. So that's kind of where it came from. And it came from Seneca country. And I'm right up front about that. Grandmother Doris did not know medicine, will teachings, but she said, you do have to keep doing what you're doing. I didn't think I was doing much of anything at that point. But she, you know, you sit down with grandmother Doris and she'd do a reading on you if she wanted to get to know you. And I hadn't asked for that. We were just visiting to pay her our respects because we were from the other side of the state. But she very promptly did that. And she said, you have this job and this is what you're here for. You need to keep learning and you need to keep. So that's, that's why I'm here. You will many times have teachings from Lakota. Their limited knowledge is that pretty much pipe teachings are universal. There are variations with different teachers and there are variations with different peoples. But pretty much the pipe is an altar. And every Native American nation that I know of, it's, it's one of the most holy ceremonies we have. Because mine is a teaching fight, I can take it out and do show and tell and things like that, you know, which most of us wouldn't do usually. I was lucky enough to be gifted. This is extremely expensive. This kind of cloth, this is wool, the old timey wool cloth with the selvedge and I was gifted a yard of it. It was at that time like $36 a yard. It's worn out. But and we keep our pipes wrapped in red cloth. This was the pipe I saw that she told me to go make. Now when I made it and I knew it was great. And I knew that Indian pipes were red pipe stones. But what the explanation was is this is the stone of your land. And this is what your people made pipes out of. They also made them of clay. There are clay pipes have been found also. And it's a turtle shape, as you can see. All I knew of was a briar pipe, so it's got a nice big hole. Grandmother, your way know and said, well, that's because you're teaching and you're working with groups. So that's okay. And it's a stone that's not hard to work, actually. Soapstone, right? Soapstone. And so I came home and had to get a piece of soapstone. We do have soapstone quarry in Vermont down around Proctor, Vermont, somewhere. The problem is you cannot go to the quarry. I could not go and gift Mother Earth and get a piece of pipe stone straight from the earth. It's a safety thing. I understand it. They've got it fenced off. You can't even go there. They have a little shed where they cut up pieces of stone to make various items. You know, the long ago they made these flat things so that you could put wrap in your blanket when you were riding horse and buggy. You know, to keep people's feet warm or people put it in the bottom of their bed and those kind of things. And there's some. I had to sleep in a barn with it that night with a piece of soapstone. Yeah. Really. Yeah. Because it'll hold the heat quite a long time. Yeah. So it's as traditional as they get otherwise. It's got the four bands for the four directions. It's got the turtle looking outward because my job is teaching and sharing. I also do some healing work. But so the stone is the bone of Mother Earth. It's one reason this is so sacred. The pipe itself, the bone of Mother Earth with the with the bowl, regardless of which stone, the red pipe stone is not the only one now. They're also that people are making pipes out of a lot of other things. You'll see some commercial pipes where people have made them out of marble or various really hard stones are beautiful. Often when you find them in a gift store, they're already joined the stem and the pipe and they're people who know what they're doing. When they're making these to sell, they make them joined and they glue them. They make them. You can't separate them. When you're dealing with a pipe that's truly a ceremonial pipe, you don't keep it joined. You only join it when you're doing the pipe ceremony. And it is separate otherwise. It's carried separately. And the stem is often they say Schumack, but I was told to make the stem out of cedar, which is a very special wood to me. I have the colors, the red and yellow reverse Seneca colors, but that's all that honors the teacher who brought this from a spirit world to me, what I was supposed to do. And other things that have meaning rabbit to me speaks of gentleness and humility. It's a reminder to me because I can be kind of hard headed and fierce sometimes. Fox does some special work with me. And this is this was a bird called hollow the hawk that good friends of mine were caretaking until it died. So the stem clearly is one of the standing ones. So we're bringing the universe together in the pipe. We have mother earth. We have the standing ones. Some people put no direct no decorations or accompaniments on their stem. Other people in the Dakota country a lot, they take long springs of sage and wrap them on the pipe stem. But there are others that'll hang a feather or two or or a string of feathers or whatever. So that's it's partly different nations, but it's also partly individual. I didn't have Abinaki teachings for this. And so, you know, like, again, don't get your knickers in a knot. Just understand that some of its individual, some of it may be by nation, but we didn't have that available. So that's the stem. Now, when you join them, you do it very ceremonially. And the pipe ceremony itself, you'd be taught that if you were going to be carrying a pipe. But when you join it, you've already been into the ceremony. Everything's been smudged. There have been prayers. You've you've you you ceremonially join it. And then you put in your pinches of tobacco with your honorings of the directions creator and mother earth and the four directions. And I put in the other beings because to me that's part of what my work is, is the web of life, our relationship with all it is. Some people don't put the other ones in. But to me, the grandfathers and the grandmothers are guiding us. And that's terribly important to me. That's an individual thing. But the prayers for creator and mother earth and one touches the earth and puts that engine and the four directions, that's pretty standard. And then you join and well, they're joined before that. And then when they're joined, then you would proceed to light the pipe and pass it. Now, when the pipe is lit, I was taught that you hold it in your left hand with the bowl always in your hand. Now, a lot of pipes, it's hard to fit them just right. And they can break apart fall apart if you don't and you don't want that to happen in ceremony. So when you've got the pipe and the stem joined, if the stem is resting in the crook of your arm and the bowl is in your hand, you're very secure with it. I often, even when it's in the pipe bag, carry it that way, just to be very respectful. But some people are carrying the pipe bag around and I don't tend to do that. But you know, again, that's an individual thing. But this is what I was taught. When you're smoking a pipe, your breath is the breath. The moisture in your mouth is part of what helps the lit tobacco to make it smoke. The smoke is the prayers going to great mystery. So every pinch you've put in that pipe is a prayer and honoring or a prayer. Because after you do the honorings, you may put in pinches of prayer for people's health or for this project we're starting to work on or for this upcoming conference that I'm hopeful something good will come of it. Let me lift pipe before the conference and you can do that in your home before you would go or you can do it with the participants if they're willing. But you would put a prayer for the good outcome or a good process in this conference or council. You know, you can put the different prayers you need. I don't tend to mix a whole lot of prayers at once. If I have two or three people who have asked for prayers for healing, I can do them all in one pipe. Once you start smoking pipe, it's a timeless time. When you do pipe ceremony, as when you do sweat lodge ceremony, you can't be on a schedule. Well, I got 40 minutes. I'll do a quick pipe. I can't do it that way. And I just don't think that's where you're at because you actually can kind of go into a late trance sort of your shifting. Your brainwaves are shifting and you are more able to get nudges from the spirit world. You're certainly doing some holy work. And so it's part of the respect and all that you're not rushing it or timing it. So that's that's basically what pipe is about. I would urge if anybody feels drawn to pipe that you seek out someone who gives you pipe teachings. But basically that's what pipes about when you participate in a pipe ceremony. You've brought in your breath, you've brought the water and the breath, which helps transform the tobacco that's been lit and smoldering to make smoke. And it's the smoke that carries your prayers to creator. So you've got, you've got the breath, you've got the water, you've got the earth, the stone of mother earth, you've got the all your relatives with the standing ones and whatever else you may have. So it's, it's the universe. And you're an active participant in that. And you can put one prayer, you can put several prayers, you always smoke it till it's finished. You don't get halfway and say, Oh, the phone's ringing. Sorry. Set it aside or put it out. No, you always you sit right there. I've had people walk in when I was doing pipe ceremony. I didn't even look up. And if they were respectful, they either backed out or they just sat off to the side. I would finish the ceremony. And ceremonially, it is finished and you separate it and and set it aside or clean it. I would dump this into the smudge bowl, the ashes. But later, I may take this in, I have one toothbrush that's dedicated to the pipe and the and the smudge bowl. And I will use the toothbrush to get some of the charrots and wash them. But and I have a we use coat hangers now and I have one of copper that I made that to to get because if this gets plugged, you're not going to pipe, you're not going to smoke your pipe where well, so you've got to you've got to keep it clean. Well, that's good. Okay, any questions? So you use cedar for your stem? What was the other word? A lot of people do it with shumak. But I've seen people do it with other. I mean, you know, it's I don't think it's a some kind of hard and fast rule. And you used cedar because cedar is special to me. Gotcha. Okay, yeah. There's a nice smell to it too. Yes, it does. Yeah. So that's that's it. You know, soapstone is not hard to work. I think I had like a utility knife and a screwdriver. A couple of school drivers had a flat blade and I had a Phillips. You use the Phillip and you keep getting the hole a little bit bigger and then you you're reaming out here and then they got to meet of course, that's the trick. And that's it. But it is something shifts in you when you start taking out your pipe and working with it. And if you're if you're interested in doing that, you need to you need to put something of yourself in it. I know people gift a pipe to someone else. Then perhaps they ought to make their own bag at least a pipe bag, because it to me, if you put something of yourself in it, you're joining yourself with it in that way. But a gifted pipe isn't bad or wrong or anything. I don't know. But it certainly is not some I have seen them so misused. I was meeting up with some people. There was a couple of people kind of mad at some of us because we were teaching shamanic stuff. And I was just meeting up with my friends. They were going to be doing the teaching. And a couple other people came confronted us in the parking lot because they just knew we were evil because we were teaching this stuff. And at some point the woman of the couple realized who I was. I didn't know these people that much, but somehow she heard something. There's talk out there. I'm not aware because this was like 25, 30 years ago. She she broke off from there was this little circle of five or six people standing in the parking lot talking, trying to talk peaceably. They were trying to tell us we shouldn't be doing this. And we were trying to say, oh, come on, you know, this is all over the planet, the shamanic work. We're going to talk about that later. But she broke off and she ran across the little parking lot to their car, rummaged around in there, came back with a pipe she was putting together and she stuffed tobacco in it. And she stuck it in the circle and lit it and started puffing this pipe. And I thought, I don't know what she thought she was doing, whether she thought she was shielding us or protecting them. But just the way she was, it was very clear she had no pipe teachings. She did not know the sacred way of handling the pipe and the ceremonial way in which it is joined and filled always with prayers. So it wasn't going to hurt me. I knew that. I don't think the pipe had even been awakened. It didn't feel that way. But it was just, it was sad because she thought this pipe was a powerful thing and it was going to do something wonder, either make me drop dead or push us away or protect them. And it really wasn't going to do any of that because it wasn't being handled right. After you, a pipe has come to you, there's, you need the pipe teachings and then there's, you need to have the pipe awakened. And there's different ways of doing it. People have done it in different ways. But it's a ceremonial kind of process where someone who already is a pipe holder, what was done with me was that we, there was three or four of us and we were all lifting pipe and I was to lift my pipe. But it passed and each one that was a pipe holder blew smoke from their pipe onto my pipe and stem. So they were empowering or enlivening it. And, you know, we were doing it all prayerfully and everything. Pipe can do wonderful things and they're subtle. And this is part of what the medicine work is. It's, it is subtle. It's not usually some big blammy, you know, and you're gobsmacked and you're all excited and some miracle happened and somebody floated off through the doorway. It's, it's really subtle, but it's, it can be very powerful. There was a group of us who had all headpipes. We were lifting. There had been a drought all summer. This was right here in Northeastern Vermont. We had gotten together for years, just once a week doing ceremonial stuff. And we had this drug, the churches have been praying for rain for two or three weeks. Is this in the 70s? I don't know if it was the 70s or the 80s, but it was back there. Yeah. And it was, it was so dry and we gathered late one afternoon. People got out of work and stuff and we got to this friend's house and we went, she wanted to go up on the hill up behind her house. Now we didn't dare to light a fire. The grass crackled under our feet. Most of it was just plain brown. And we got up in this little field behind her house. Most of the grass was dead. It was dust. It crackled. The sky was totally empty. There were no predictions or anything. But we thought, you know, the churches are praying for rain. The cornfields are stunted. People's crops are not making it. And this was like early August or early to mid August. And, you know, we just need to do what we can do. And so we walked into that place and walked in a circle and we each stopped off and sat down. So we had a circle of number five or six women anyway. Each one with a pipe, each one knew properly what to do. And so we just stopped chatting and all and each one got out their pipe. We kind of watched and when everyone was ready, we each proceeded to do our own. We'd done our smudging before we walked in the circle. And each one pulled out their materials and their tobacco and their matches and we each lit our pipe in a sacred manner. We filled it and we lit it. And we knew that the only prayers we were putting in it was we were praying for rain, for the land, for the Mother Earth, for all the beings, this plant people as well as all the other beings. So you make your prayers pretty detailed. And we sat there and we were smoking our pipe and the sun was pretty hot, but it was late. It was in the evening and kept smoking. A little drifters cloud came over. And you know, that would do that every now and then. So I didn't think much of it, but bit by bit. And we just sat, it was long pipe and clouds began coming over and clouds clouded over. And then they began to get kind of gray colored and it began to get pretty solid. And I thought, Whoa, we're going to get a shower. But a shower wouldn't have done it. But it was still felt awfully good. And we so we just sat there. We finished our pipes and nobody said a word. Nobody got up to run back down. Nobody. We just sat there. Few drops of rain. Everybody finished their pipe. We emptied our pipes on the ground. We sat there, began to rain. And we just sat there. Nobody moved. And the rain came and the rain came. And it wasn't lashing heavy rain, but it was steady rain. And we sat there. We got sopping wet. Nobody moved. We couldn't believe that. And it rained all night. Did we do it? Everybody was praying for rain. Who knows? This is part of the healing work. You don't know if you did it. And you better not try to claim you did. You have help from the spirit world. You have help from the powers of creation. It was the rain spirits that came. It was just a wind that brought them. It was it was everything. It wasn't just us. We were only just doing our part. But if everybody contributes their part, there's some wonderful things that happen. I remember. That's my pipe bag. Some people bead them. Some people leave them plain. Again, there's not rules. That's an individual thing. But you always have your pipe in a bag. It's always separate when you carry it. The protocols for pipe ceremony are basically that respect. And sometimes they'll pass a pipe and each person puts a pinch or their prayer in it. Sometimes it's just the person that's holding the pipe that does it. Some people, when they smoke the pipe, then they're blowing the smoke back on themselves and on the pipe. Other people don't do that. So, you know, whatever teachers you work with, you can honor that or you'll find your own way. But it is it is such a sacred thing. And you want to be careful. I'm more cautious about who I'm willing to do pipe with. No reflection here, but it's just out there. Even more so with sweat lodge. But this is part of the most sacred practices of our people, our pipe, and now sweat lodge. Whether we had it originally or not, it's a purification lodge. We certainly had some way of doing that. And we had medicine people who did other kinds of ceremonies, as the time called for it. Questions? Oh, I know a guy. In these breathing caves, the air travels steadily in to the earth for six hours. Hour after hour, the air is moving in. And then it pauses. It reverses direction. And for six hours, the air flows out. Mother Earth is breathing. And there are special places at different parts of the planet where this occurs. And the scientists have their explanation and they're happy with that. And that's good. Keep them out of the way. But we know that it's Mother Earth breathing. You know, you can talk about temperature or pressure of differentials and all that stuff. Yeah, we got that in our bodies, too. So, you know, when you look at a stream or a river, it's her veins. And it also is essential for us to live. That's why she's our mother. Her blood is our blood. And the breath is our breath. So it just puts you in a different relationship when you begin to realize that. And when her bony structure has a certain amount of crystalline element in it, as ours does, and crystals, as you know, work with energy. So there's that whole piece of it. And no, I'm not scientific. I can't explain all that to you, but that's part of what that's about. That's one of the things that's a little bit in this booklet. There's fire in the belly of Mother Earth and in Father Sun. And that's part of the reason that they are seen as a couple. So there's fire. There's wind or breath, air. There's water. And there's flesh. Sometime in the 70s or 80s, a scientist named Shuman developed, of course, it's never real to this technology to discover it right. So this is what we're about. Now, he developed some kind of very fine, sensitive, technological instrument, and he made a great discovery. There's a pulse deep in the earth. And it's now called the Shuman Resonance. That's what our ancient drum is, folks. The drum is the heartbeat of Mother Earth. Now, tell us we didn't have medicine people or shamans. Right. Because they knew this Mother Earth had a heartbeat. The drum is used to replicate that heartbeat. And when you're in a gathering and there's a steady drumbeat, people's hearts literally shift into that pattern. They resonate. And it brings the people together. That's another piece of ceremony. You can do that with your rattles. Same way. It's the vibration. It's the rhythm. And it's a replication. And that's why we don't do all the syncopated and different kinds of rhythms. We tend to do a very steady rhythm. The only other rhythm we do is the pa-pa-pa-pa-pa, which is the heartbeat. But otherwise, it's a very steady boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And this is why it's the physical manifestation of that knowledge and that ancient wisdom.