Talking circles and other bad things

Talking circles and other bad things


I say 'bad things' in jest … but not completely.

I was sitting in a talking circle a few years back, listening to what others had to say and simultaneously thinking back to what others had to say in past circles. As I sat there in my normal listening manner – head down and nodding slowly - I found myself becoming cynical and jaded.

How come I felt this way? Did I resent what they were saying? Was I judging them, or had I simply heard the same things so many times that I had become desensitized?

Whatever the reasons, since then I have had a hard time sitting through a talking circle. Maybe because when I sit in one it is always for a negative reason. It is to flush away the pain and suffering of residential school, or it is to talk about death or suicide, family violence or sexual abuse, or oppression. Even when the goal of the circle is positive, as on that day a few years back, people tend to turn it into the negative. It slowly morphs into a healing ceremony. At that time all we were doing was sharing what had happened to us the week previous. The first or second person shared something negative that had happened to them the week prior, then that got the negative ball rolling. People scoured their memories as they spoke to find something negative, even minutely negative, that had happened to them that they could share and revel in. Not one person spoke of something positive.

This is the problem.

It had been bugging me for a while but I could never fully grasp it.
We don't use our ceremonies to celebrate life or to rejoice in marriage or love or friendships - we use our ceremonies to heal and only to heal. We use them to come to terms with all the negative crap that has happened to Indigenous people in our past, but not to celebrate anything positive that has happened. If you are so "lucky" (as some say to me) to not have had immense overburdening negative things happen to you in your lifetime, if you have lived a happy healthy childhood and come from a happy healthy family, then it becomes a challenge to fit in to the ceremonial and traditional culture.

If our ceremonies serve no other purpose than to heal, and you are healthy, you become an outcast. I have encountered people who have even had the audacity to attempt to make me feel bad for having a wonderful childhood full of unconditional love.

Modern western medicine has grown away from the old textbook definition of 'health' as ‘the absence of illness from the body’ to a more holistic balanced definition that recognizes spirit, emotion, cognition and our physical selves. Am I crazy to think that our ceremonies are stuck in the same archaic western definition of health as western medicine used to be? Do we only use our ceremonies to "keep away the bad" or to heal those already burdened with illness and pain and suffering?

I went to a sweat once in Mandan country. The men had our own sweat, the woman had another near the men’s. We all went in naked, which was a hugely uncomfortable embarrassment for the other guys from Canada that I was with. The Mandan thought nothing of it. They laughed at us, they held their sweat lodge and would poke their heads out from under the covering if they needed some fresh air, they would come and go as they pleased. All of us northerners sat there shyly taking up as little space as possible and were shocked at their 'lack of seriousness' and even mumbled to ourselves that it was therefore less sacred a ceremony. I look back now and realize that most of those Mandan guys I was in there with came from healthy abundant families, that they associated ceremonies with celebration and joy, not suffering, not recovery. Sure they knew how to suffer, those Mandan’s really knew how to suffer, trust me, but their approach was different. In retrospect I would like to emulate them and their approach to traditional health (sweat lodges, circles etc.). Traditional health services that look beyond 'the absence of illness' and move towards a more holistic approach to well-being.