GUEST POST: Levi EagleFeather Sr.

         Living life for me during my early
years was much like walking through a very colorfull yet very surreal collage
of everyone else’s bad or leftover dreams. Nothing made any sense!

 

        Hello, my
name is Levi William EagleFeather Sr. I am a Lakota by heritage. Sicangu Lakota
by birth. I am an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe of Rosebud South
Dakota. I was
adopted at the age of four but haven’t been since I changed my mind about it at
the age of fifteen and got the hell away from the whole sordid mess.
That was quite awhile ago. I’m 55 now.

 

         It wasn’t until the first summer I
sundanced that those dreams faded and reality became mine. Clarity, like cool
clear water to a thirsty parched throat or shade to a sun drenched overheated mind,
soothed my weary war torn senses and 
underfed spirit. At long last I had found sanctuary and once again
re-entered the land of the human being or as we say in Lakota, Ikce Wicasa (common man). 

         Somewhere in Scott Momaday’s writing he
wrote that telling a story takes words to describe words. Life is certainly
that way.  Whether it’s yours or mine
it’s story.  Being such it requires or
demands words many words to bring forth a full sense of our reality. Words
which describe the full spectrum of thought, emotion and feeling that make-up
the scattered and fragmented and sometimes incomprehensible reality of our
lives as American Indians. Especially in the aftermath of the wars and ongoing
efforts of genocide against our people. Adoption is but one of those many
efforts and the resulting ism’s are but its results. Results that force us
into, well let’s just say that chameleons have nothing on us!  Nevertheless, for sanity’s sake for peace of
mind these results are ours to overcome.

         The words of our overcoming, these
words, my words, your words, our words describe just a portion of life's
meaning, but it’s our life and it‘s important. 
A living reality of experience, thought, feeling and emotion. No two
experiences ever exactly alike. No two thoughts, feelings or emotions ever
exactly the same, at the same time, or about the same thing. Always ongoing
ever-changing, growing, metamorphisizing neither negative or positive
necessarily, but always changing describing the ever shifting ever adapting
overcoming that is life and living. That part of life and living that in its many forms and
shapes is you and me, the American Indian.

         In looking back, when all is said and
done life has been pretty full for me, as it should be. I am, for the most part
most of the time, a happy man and enjoy living come what may. Although, it
hasn’t always been this way. Time and distance have allowed my spirit the space
needed to recover somewhat so the light of day no longer sears the
consciousness of my soul. I think, an experience of surviving hell and high
water and coming out on the other side does that to a person. Living through it
can and often does make us creatures of a darker understanding of life and
living. Sometimes morphing us into a breed of walking dead, soul dead. Adoption
can be like that, hell and high water, for some. It was for me and my sibs.

         I realize throughout it all some don’t
do so well. Adapt and overcome I mean. Seems that some get burned pretty bad
and take on lots of water and experience lots of hurting for many years after.
I think, myself, I just became hell. Unfortunately, for those associated with
me or those who experienced me during my early days will attest that that was
the reality of being too close or trying getting to know me. There was much scorched
earth left in the wake of my struggling. Struggling to survive those early
years on my own alone.

         Understanding the reality of all of this. Who, what and why I was and am has taken many years to gather and digest.

One thing good about us though
is that we are just another form of nature. Being such, raw
nature, we are energy. Raw energy and we seek to flow. In
flowing we seek our own level much  like water running to the
sea. Sometimes we rage sometimes we flood cutting our way
through the rock and the barriers that obstruct our knowing and our
understanding. Our journey our destiny if you will becomes
cluttered with the debris of our raging and flooding.
Disrupted journey’s disrupted destiny’s on the way to experience the
ebb and flow of natural being.

This is the first in a
series. Words, just words strung together to convey meaning and
understanding to a reality that wasn’t supposed to exist, but does.
It’s my story.

 

Levi lives in Germany and will be contributing to this
blog.