Musings.9: Barbara

rabbit appeared in my yard nearly three years ago, a beautiful rabbit and a breathtaking moment when the art I was pursuing showed itself in my everyday life. Before I moved to Georgia I lived in Williamsburg, VA in a neighborhood very close to the National Historic site of Jamestown and the Jamestown Settlement. A number of streets and neighborhoods in the area bore the name of the alliance of Native Americans, Powhatan, prominent in the area when Jamestown was settled. So, although I had moved away, in the months prior to the 400th anniversary of the settlement (2007) I read a copy of Paula Gunn Allen's biography "Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat."

"Pocahontas" was basically a childhood nickname for a girl named Matoaka by her people and Lady Rebecca Rolfe by the English. The nickname, as Gunn Allen writes, "relates to a kind of vivacity, mischievousness, and quick intelligence ... at least as understood by the English." The name may also have related to the rabbit, which native peoples "recognized as a trickster," and pointed to qualities of creativity, shrewdness, and a "wild sense of humor."

One evening in the time frame when I was reading "Pocahontas" my husband called me out into the yard to see a rabbit. All that sprang to mind as I followed him out the door was the sort of brown rabbit our Boxer once loved to chase, so I was puzzled as to why my husband was so eager for me to see this rabbit. Oh, it was a beauty! It sat in the corner of the yard, nibbling something and looking so beautiful that I was afraid for it! Its coat was a silky, shiny black and white which made it stand out there among the trees and bracken. We had seen foxes only a few weeks earlier and I was instantly afraid this gorgeous rabbit with the amazingly floppy black ears would become food for the fox. It would not let me approach, of course, to pick it up and try to find its owner so I was reduced to walking up and down the street, knocking on doors. No one answered. Sigh. (I can say, however, that the rabbit remained safe for I saw it several times later foraging in its owner's flower beds.)

That beautiful rabbit stayed in my mind, always associated with Pocahontas and the trickster, so I went out and found the materials to stitch together a facsimile for myself, which you see here. Later for grins and giggles I gave the rabbit, whose name is Mina, a whimsical top hat. The top hat is the model for Uncle Joe's and the leprechauns' hat in Melissa's last two dreams. Now I see that the hat and the rabbit afford me the context to talk about a culture which centered itself around Dream-Vision.

Matoaka/Pocahontas was born into the Mattaponi/Pamunkey tribe which was part of the Powhatan Alliance who "were the People of the Dream-Vision, which is what the Native word Powhatan means." These people embraced "a tradition immersed in Dream-Vision protocols, lore, practices, and understandings that shaped and directed the course of ... life." Their world view was shaped by "the assumption that this wold we live in is by its nature a Dream-Vision ... the manito are the greater dreamers, the humans the lesser, the manito aki the location of the Dream-Vision as it takes shape and gains sufficient 'thrust' to move into our more physically dense reality."

Such a view was NOT alien to the English of the time who commonly referred to "this realm as 'Faerie' or 'the Underworld,' or sometimes Logres." Roughly 350 years after Jamestown was settled physicist David Bohm described "the consciousness form we usually engage in as 'explicate' and the other one as 'implicate.'" Whether the Powhatan term manito aki, the English terms faerie, Underworld, Logres, or physicist Bohm's terms explicate and implicate are used, the concept "implied in each of these terms is that there is a world within and beyond the one most modern people recognize."

"The state of awareness when one is in or communicating with this realm was long identified as Dream-Vision, or powa, in the Algonquin world. It is allied to the Native Australian concept of Dream Time, a way of organizing reality, including via sensory data, that brings phenomena into awareness that are absent from perceptual fields in another brain state."

"Dream-Visions are maps for navigating one's life path. Composed of messages coded in the language of the manito aki, the spirit world, Dream-Visions came accompanied by a guidebook, the Oral Tradition; and by travel guides: one's guardian spirit, or powagan."
"As the pathway to the spirit world, such dreams cross the boundaries of ordinary time and offer answers to the myriad problems that face the nation, clan, or individual." Adherence to such a world view suggests that people like this, whatever their culture or geography or era "were almost always in an 'altered' state of consciousness," with access to "the manito - the powers, beings, forces, reality, if you will, of a world that is not quite this one, but is bigger, beyond, beneath, before, behind, and above this one." I posit that Dream-Vision people understand that dreams offer clues, guidance concerning implicate forms which are journeying toward the explicit world.

In the time since I read "Pocahontas" I have read other works - "Black Elk Speaks," "The Bone Rattle," "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" - and I usually found myself trying to see the arrival of the Eurpoeans upon this soil from the eyes of the natives. So many sources mention the shock of seeing these huge ships and white, white people, but really, how did they see it? One morning I believe I was given an answer.

I dreamt I was with a native woman. We stood in front of what appeared to be a sea wall. One of those mammoth, multi-storied cruise ships was berthed on the other side of the wall. It was so big that no matter how far back I leaned I could not see the top. Between us and the wall there were bushes, about waist high, decorated with tiny white people. As I wrote out the dream I realized that, apparently, the natives initially associated the fair European skin with the white of the cotton bolls that appeared on plants in the area! I've driven past fields of cotton just across the river from Jamestown Settlement, so the association is even more vivid for me.

I like it. I like knowing the implicate order can pull images out of its hat to connect my vision with that of a people living nearly a half-millennia ago in a place I once inhabited.

[[A bibliography for this post includes:
Gunn Allen, Paula."Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat". New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

Peat, F. David. "Blackfoot Physics: A Journey Into the Native American Universe". Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 2002.

Bohm, David. "Wholeness and the Implicate Order". London: Routledge Classics, 1980.

All quoted material is from "Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat" by Paula Gunn Allen.]]