‘Heaven’ is all around us

Sometimes I’m glad my ancestors couldn’t write, especially when it comes to spirituality. Anyone can see what happened to the Bible — how it’s been interpreted and misinterpreted depending on what someone wanted others to believe, I guess.

My ancestors knew there was a Creator and they even had a name for it. They also believed in the power of prayer.

The last known mystic in our family was my great-grandmother’s brother. I’ll call him “Uncle.” My mother was 3 years old when he shared his power with her. She told me that Uncle was a very kind person. He held her on his lap and took a piece of cooked sugar, put it in his mouth, and then was going to put it in mom’s mouth. She knew she wasn’t supposed to take food from someone’s mouth, so she looked at her mother. Her mother nodded, and she took the piece of cooked sugar.

In an unfortunate turn of events, by the time mom reached puberty, which was probably when she would have been taught how to use that power, there was no one left to teach her. Their lives were being torn asunder by the newcomers, and in my mind it was as if they were standing on top of ladders, teetering and trying to keep their balance.

Mom always knew she had a lot of power. It became clear to her when she was 17 years old. She had her first ice cream cone in a little shop in Anchorage. She was excited to take her cousin there the next time they went to town. The military had been brought up and there were a couple GIs sitting at the counter when mom and her cousin entered and asked for ice cream

cones.

“Can’t you read the sign? No dogs or Indians allowed!” the waitress said rudely.

“Can’t you just give them an ice cream cone?” one of the GIs asked.

“No!” the waitress insisted.

Mom was humiliated, angry and hurt. The next time she went to Anchorage she saw that little ice cream shop had burned to the ground.

Mom told me about Uncle. When he was 17, it was as if he died for three days. Family was preparing for his burial when he awoke and coughed up some hair. He told them a medicine man from another tribe was trying to harm our family and a battle was fought in the spirit world. Several months later the other medicine man died. Some newcomers were skeptical. Once when they were traveling down a trail, one skeptic lost his can of snuff and wanted to go back and look for it. Uncle told him to keep walking and then had him retrieve it farther up the trail where they hadn’t been yet.

Can you imagine what Christians with Bibles would have said to those stories back then? I felt they already thought of us as heathen savages and this would have surely clinched the deal. No, we just kept these stories to ourselves and tried to understand the newcomers’ theories.

My mother was one of the strongest people I know. She also wanted to do what was right for her family, even if it meant going to church. I remember going to a church in Sutton when I was very young and being amazed at how the teachers could stick a picture of Jesus with his walking stick onto a board using some kind of felt material. They stuck some sheep up there, too. I liked the looks of Jesus. He was so pretty with his long brown hair. He could have easily been a girl.

I never could wrap my head around the concept of God. The closest I came was thinking about the storybook of the little kid wearing a coat and the sun and wind both thought they could make him take it off. There was a picture of the wind like a big cloud in the sky with bulging eyes and big, fat lips blowing at that kid. We also had to sing songs like “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I had no idea what that meant. I’m still not sure.

Mom went through a lot of traumatic things in her lifetime, but I only saw her cry once during my growing up years. I was 8 years old and we were outside visiting with a Christian woman named Myrtle. I thought that was such an odd name. She was plain looking with long, curly blonde hair. Mom was trying to decide which church was following the Bible closest. And then Myrtle dropped the bomb. She told mom that her grandparents couldn’t go to heaven because they hadn’t accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. It was a very sad day. I still get a little angry when I think about the sorrow that belief caused.

We started going to church and I tried to understand what it was all about, flipping through that weird, floppy Bible book with strange words and pretending something about it made sense. I was happy when we didn’t have to go to church anymore, even though I tried it again in my 20s until I realized I would never qualify to make it into heaven and I doubted I’d want to be there anyway.

Someone asked my older brother many years ago, before the oil spill, why he didn’t go to church. He answered, “Why would I want to go into a manmade building when I can take my boat out onto Prince William Sound and be surrounded by my own sanctuary?”

I believe that my family has always inherently been sensitive and intuitive, but we chose not to embrace those ways because, after all, good people went to church and read the Bible.

Recently I asked my older brother if he prays and he said, “Every day.”

I asked whom he prays to and he said, “God.”

“Where is he?” I asked. He said, “Everywhere.”

Patricia Wade is an Ahtna Athabascan and a member of the Chickaloon Tribe who lives in Palmer.