Choctalking on Other Realities by LeAnne Howe

Author:LeAnne Howe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aunt Lute Books
Published: 2013-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Carlos Castaneda Lives in Romania

One spring afternoon in 1998, a fierce gust of floral winds blew me, and my Toyota RAV4, off I-80 near Iowa City, Iowa. It was April 27; I remember it precisely because I’d just taught a unit on American Indians to my Monday class at Grinnell College. I’d used an eighteenth-century Choctaw warrior named Red Shoes as an example of a charismatic leader who eventually turned on his own people. Hours later I ended up in a ditch near a stand of trees. Rather than explain to the wrecker driver that a strange wind pushed me into the ditch (it was a cloudless perfect day), I said a deer ran across the road. This happened so frequently in Iowa that he took my word for it. But it was the wind. As I’ve been told many times, cosmic forces such as a violent invisible wind often announce great change. I thought perhaps I was going to finally lose some weight, but that would come much later and without warning

The next day I received an invitation from the Center for Complexity Studies in Reşița, Romania to attend a ten-day summer seminar. Our panel titled “Cultural Communications and Understanding of Otherness” was about fostering pro-active attitudes towards protecting nature, the biosphere, and cultural diversity. Invited scholars and artists would stay at Raul Alb, White River Leisure Camp, from August 4-14, 1998. We would give lectures that supported the theme. While the Romanian-English translation was a bit stilted, I re-translated the invitation this way: The seminar organizers were beginning a Romanian environmental movement and they needed an American Indian along with others from the biosphere to help. I looked up tourist sites on the map and found that Bran Castle, commonly known as Dracula’s castle, was only 248 miles away from Reşița. (Possible road trip.) I replied at once to the invitation and said my lectures would be themed around “Spaces and the Production of the Sacred” and subsequently arranged it with them for Jim Wilson, my husband, to attend and lecture on “Family Politics, Family Place.” (Poor man. He has oodles of experiential research to draw from. “Married into a large Choctaw family” should be a separate line on his CV.)

Before setting off for the land of Dacia, Jim and I returned home to Ada, Oklahoma, prepared our lectures, gathered materials for the seminar, and bought indigenous gifts.

What follows is more or less what happened.

We fly from New York to Vienna, Austria, where we have a six-hour layover before traveling on to our final destination, Reşița, Romania. At Wien (pronounced Vine), we rock and roll out of the airport in search of the Demel Shop on Kolhmarkt, Vienna’s most famous confectioner. If you haven’t been to the Demel Shop and ordered a classic chocolate Sachertorte, try to imagine a layer of scrumptious, mouth-watering milk chocolate frosting covering a simple cake but with a layer of apricot jam just beneath the icing. (Academic fieldwork is rough.)

Yet, I have to

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