One Bead at a Time by Beverly Little Thunder

Author:Beverly Little Thunder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

8.

FROG SEEDS

SHORTLY AFTER WE MOVED to Arizona, I found a church that had two sweat lodges behind the church. A man named Ashley tended the fire and kept the lodges there. I’d known him for a number of years. Ashley said, “I’ll do the fire and I’ll be your fire keeper any time you want to come.” So, every Friday, a group of us women would meet there and I would do a lodge.

Leonard Crow Dog came into town, and found out I was doing lodges there. He came to the lodge one Friday night and told Ashley, “Mary’s going to run the lodge tonight—the women’s lodge.” We’d gotten there really early and I just had a bad feeling about it. So we went in. I’d had him put on extra rocks so there’d be hot rocks when Mary got there.

When she got there I said, “I understand you need to run a lodge for your family and we’ve heated it up for you.”

Leonard was mad. The next day he took the lodge down because “that queer” had been in it.

HELPING A WOMAN THROUGH BREAST CANCER

For a while, we were going down to the river and doing full moon ceremonies rather than putting up a sweat lodge because we had no place to put it. We finally moved into a house with a yard where we could put up a lodge, and we began having a lodge there once a month. A lot of women in the community would come. There was a Native woman named Cindy who came often. It turned out that she’d been a babysitter for my children when my husband, Caesar, worked at the drug and alcohol rehab, only now she was grown up. At first I didn’t recognize her and then she saw Caesar’s picture and she said, “Oh, don’t you remember me?” We became friends. She came to a full moon ceremony one night, where she met another woman named Cindy, who was really tiny. Cindy Domingiz had a little girl. You could almost see the electricity between them when they both got out of their trucks at the same time. They looked at each other and it was like watching a movie. A couple weeks later, big Cindy was saying things like, oh, I took Cindy here, I took Cindy there, we went to California, we did this and we did that. At one point she said, “You call me Cindy Straight Arrow and her Cindy Twisted Arrow.”

I laughed and I said, “Cindy Twisted Arrow? Shouldn’t that be Mrs. and Mrs.?” She started laughing and she said, “Well, yeah.”

So, they became lovers. About six months after they became lovers, she began experiencing homophobia at the lodge she attended in California, around the same time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She called me up at four in the morning on a Thursday and asked if I would run a lodge for her. I said, “Four in the morning?”

She said, “Yeah.”

She came over and helped set the fire so all I had to do was get up in the morning and light it.

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