Weathering Life
by Angelique Zerillo, CG
“When you dress a bear,” Jeff shared, “it looks just like a human.”
Jeff’s definition of “dress” here is skinning a bear before breaking it down into its parts, not dressing a bear in a raincoat or putting one in a tutu.
I wore a long, thin, white cotton dress to the lodge that day. It was the lightest and most conservative thing I own, appropriate enough to wear for my invitation to join a handful of members of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in an Inipi Ceremony, a multiple-hour purification ceremony, more commonly referred to as a sweat lodge.
This invite came as a surprise, a gift, a challenge, and an opportunity to immerse myself in another’s heritage. The invite was accepted with the hope that I could find some additional peace and healing that my culture could not offer me. A friend of a friend of the tribe extended this hand to an Ojibwe (Ojibway) ceremonial purification practice, offering it to both me and many others in need of physical, mental, and spiritual healing. Every aspect of it, from the construction of the lodge, the ceremonial starting of the fire, the teachings, the songs, the prayers, the tobacco offered, the cedar branches we helped trim, the braided sweetgrass, the bee balm tea, the blueberries, the bear grease, revealed some small lesson and an opportunity to connect with something I didn’t know I was culturally allowed to find meaning in.
Jeff had just turned to his left when he made this statement about the bear, passing a 1970s-style, parquet wooden serving bowl to his neighbor, Tara, a teacher. The bowl reminded me of the ‘nice’ restaurants where I used to eat iceberg lettuce salads with French dressing with my grandparents in Michigan when I was very young.
Tara served herself and passed the bowl to a woman of part-Mohawk and part-French descent named MC from Montreal, who then passed the bowl to me. There were twenty of us in the lodge that day. Invited from multiple states, multiple cultures, and numerous faiths. All seeking healing.
The bowl was filled with frozen blueberries to the brim, long thawed and soaking in their own juices. We gingerly passed the shallow bowl brimming with floating berries and liquid around the circle of humans sitting on the earth inside the lodge that Saturday, careful not to spill the sweet, cool, purple juice down the fronts of us or into our laps. We were hours into our ceremony, all sweaty, thirsty, and quite hot. Grabbing fistfuls of berries and sipping sweet, berry water from the bowl, we carefully passed that bowl to our neighbor to the left as each of us finished.
“We know that blueberries are safe to eat because of the bear,” Jeff continued.
The bear, with all of our shared traits, taught our ancestors what plants were safe to eat. I assume many of us squeezed into the sweat lodge that day in the darkness, especially those of us who aren’t of indigenous descent, had not connected those exact dots before Jeff highlighted them between bear, self, and safety.
By this time in the lodge, our crowd had dwindled to about half of those who had started this journey together. There were no expectations of completion of the ceremony. No shame. No judgment in asking to leave once the blanket door was peeled open.
Our eyes would struggle to adjust to the square hole of daylight between each round in the lodge, while fresh-from-the-fire rocks the size of muskmelons were added to the growing pile in the center of the floor, so hot that they occasionally sparked and cracked clean in half when set down. Our epicenter of healing. These rocks. Ancestors, represented in their final physical form, were placed there to help guide us and heal us. Embracing that indigenous wisdom and teaching, I thought of the thousands of years they waited to perform this sacrificial act of care for us.
I sat with perfect strangers that day and one dear friend who was my thread to this ceremony. Others, sharing their struggles, worries, and wishes for healing and transformation, ranged from brain and prostate cancer to suicide and safe pregnancies. No small things spoken out loud. I’m certain more pain was left unshared. I struggled not to sponge up others’ worries as I attempted to wring out mine.
I am a tough woman. Tough, meaning resilient. Those words, for most females, feel redundant as being female requires a certain toughness merely for day-to-day survival's sake. But, without the help of my neighbors in the lodge that day, along with the words, the songs, the rhythm of the drum, the guidance (sometimes whispered in my ear to ‘just take the scarf and breathe through it’ when the heat got too intense), and the gentle instruction (ney, permission) to release control and collapse to the earth were all elegantly woven together, holding me at just the right moments, helping me sustain and experience this ceremony in its entirety. I didn’t feel terribly tough crawling through the door of the lodge that day. But it was a room and a womb built of great supports, transforming me from fear to a surprising sensation of safety. I for sure entered feeling claustrophobic. I left feeling expansive.
The sweat lodge itself, built of bent willow branches no more than ten feet across and covered in fabric, tall enough to crawl and sit inside, represents the womb of Mother Earth. Participation in a ceremony of this nature is an opportunity to be reborn, of sorts, by offering your pain, your prayers, and the desire to share and shed them via rivers of sweat (and tears, if needed) over the course of many hours and many rounds in darkness and heat, all under the love and guidance of your ancestors.
We, a hodgepodge of humans from various cultures and walks of life, were offered the choice to stay or go after each round that Saturday. I chose to stay. To do so, I eventually had to succumb to lying down on the cool earth, clearing aside a bed of blankets and cedar leaves to muddy my white dress up with reckless, Zara-fast-fashion abandon.
“Your dress!” others squealed as I crawled out on my knees at the end of the ceremony. Sweetgrass tickled my shoulder as I stood up. I had a braided swatch of it tucked inside my dress.
Sweetgrass has a familiar scent that took me days to identify afterwards. It dances around the nose like almond paste does on the palate. Nutty, sugary, and slightly earthy. That olfactory connection and memory trigger gave me a better idea of how the origin story for bear claw pastries (that I grew up eating from the Welcome Traveler gas station near my home as a kid) got its name. Beyond being shaped like the claw of a bear, now I’ll say it honors that wise animal that initially taught us all how to survive. The almond paste in the middle of the pastry, tickling my palate as sweetgrass now too, aka the hairs of Mother Earth. My sweet amalgam, mixing smells, tastes, and memories, old and new, for further meaning.
When I exited the lodge, I was completely soaked —like wring-a-mop-out soaked at the end. My dress, drenched in sweat and tears and white as a cloud when I crawled into the lodge, came out tie-dyed in mud.
Bryce, two generations behind the tribal elder present and our diligent firekeeper that day, helped each of us as we crawled out of the lodge. He held my hands as I stood upright. His face was quite close to mine, and our eyes locked. His smile. Oh, that sweet smile. It was the most beautiful first gift of sight I could receive after such a physically taxing experience in total darkness. In response to the others’ chatter and verbal gasps at my ruined dress, I whispered to him, “This means I did it right, doesn’t it?” He giggled and grinned, welcoming a much lighter (in all definitions of weight and loss) me back to the world.
We both knew there’s no ‘right’ way to heal. There is something to be said, though, about facing healing with guidance, with a community of some sort, as well as complementing those supports with the wisdom from your elders or your faith (however you define what came before you and what may come after). Healing is, after all, a continuum encompassing space and time, and certainly requiring the participation of all cultures and faiths.
So to the bear, to the creator, and to the braided sweetgrass woven together that I kept close to my heart that day, helping me knit my mind, my body, and my spirit back together a wee bit tighter, I say, “Miigwech, miigwech, and chi miigwech.”
