Coming of Age

The Brave Hearts Women's Society Coming of Age Ceremony

On Monday, I turned 18. Which is to say, I came of age.
 

Resources about American Indian coming of age ceremonies are scarce on the internet. Of course, there’s the ridiculously co-opted idea of a “vision quest,” but Googling that results in a smattering of pages for painfully white dojos and holistic medicine clinics—ironically, themselves things we have also stolen from foreign cultures. Regardless of how much they’ve grown to dominate the white imagination, however, vision quests did exist first in Native American cultures. Yellow-Wolf: His Own Story, a compassionate anthropological study of the Nez Pierce Indians published in the 1940s, touches on this coming of age ceremony piquantly. According to Yellow Wolf, the ceremony grants a certain type of invincibility. His words are beautiful and poignant, and the whole book is worth reading, available for free online. But I digress:

You know our schooling. Young people sent out into wild, night places without anything, their hands empty. I did that! Often stayed from home three, maybe five, suns and nights. Because my father died when I was young, no living man had sympathy for me. Your father's spirit outside somewhere might recognize you and come to you.

My father had a Power, but a soft body. Bullets entered his body but he did not die. Scars, many scars, on different parts of his body. All these showed his bravery in war.

The life in trees, in grass, might compose your Power. It is impossible to explain. It is against orders of your Wyakin to explain, if you could. This is all impossible to be understood by whites. I believe if I now went to war I would be killed by gas. My Power is not against that, only against arrows and bullets.  

In a less violent tradition, I recently read an NPR article about the growing trend of sending Indian girls, mainly Sioux, to the grassy banks of the rez to learn to erect tepees, harvest food, and live the way their ancestors did before being persecuted into standard American homogeny (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129611281). I just find this a wonderfully beautiful idea. Considering how American Indian culture has been near-exterminated, revisiting it seems not just a nice gesture but necessary. This isn’t to imply that the ceremony is entirely grounded in the past, however. The dark realities of the present tend to slink in, as well. From the article:

“At times, we have a nutritionist come in and talk to them about eating right and not just drinking Gatorade, about not being afraid of doctors and having to get a check-up,” Brook Spotted Eagle says. “Sexual abuse and incest can pose a huge problem within families. There's no easy way to talk about these issues, so you just have to get them out there.”

Combining modern advice and ingrained tradition is a necessary idea, and one that has its basis in many other cultures, as well. It is also a grim shadow of the American imperialism and dominance that lead to these traditions originally disappearing. Immigrant colonists introduced Gatorade as much as they did alcohol to the Indians, after all. 

As for my birthday, what did I do? Sat on a couch and watched some movies with friends, honestly. Not the most culturally minded activity by a long shot, certainly. Still, I hope I can change.  With this much beauty in the world around me and the ceremonies performed by these people I've read about, I desperately hope I can change. 

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