CIIS Public Programs Podcast

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Apela Colorado is a traditional cultural practitioner and Indigenous scientist dedicated to creating a bridge between Western thought and Indigenous worldviews. In her latest book, Woman Between the Worlds, Dr. Colorado invites us to explore how Indigenous wisdom resonates in modern life while lovingly teaching us to honor its power, beauty, and potential. IN this episode, CIIS faculty Susana Bustos joins Dr. Colorado for a conversation about  her lifelong journey connecting with the essence of Indigenous spirituality and culture, and reawakening to the wisdom of her Native American and French Gaul ancestors.  

This episode was recorded during a live online event on November 4th, 2021. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Susana Bustos: Good evening, Apela. It's so good to be with you tonight. Thank you. It's a big honor for me to be in your presence. 

Apela Colorado: You're welcome. It's good to be here. 

Susana: Apela, you have such a long trajectory of studying Indigenous wisdom and living it. You know, it's your whole life, your whole being has been like shaped and searching deeper and deeper into that wisdom, that ancestral wisdom. And also, you have been bridging it into academic settings and activism. And there's so much in your trajectory that's very appealing, very interesting in that. Also, it's inspiring in that way. I would like to ask you - you're coming from the Oneida tribe. Can you tell us what Oneida means? And in what ways it has shaped your work. 

Apela: Oneida, the, that's in English, but it's, the original word is Onᐱyoteʔa∙ká, and it means People of The Long-Lasting, or Everlasting, Stone. And the way that it's impacted my life is [laughs] every way, basically, because as a young woman, I learned to-- I won't say read, but I learned to contemplate the petroglyphs, the rock symbols, and the rocks have those symbols on them because they're messages that ancestors wanted to pass on to generations for... It could be thousands of years when descendants might not even speak the same language, so they had to think about how to transfer critical knowledge, life-sustaining knowledge, in a way that could go through time and change.  

That's why they created the symbolism of the rock art, and by way of talking about that now, I want to acknowledge our ancestors, each of us on this call tonight, whether you're listening or, Susana and myself talking, we have ancestors behind us and I acknowledge right now the ancestors, and I ask you to come forward and be with us in this conversation, that what we say, and how we say it, the tone of our voice, the intention in our mind, the feeling in our hearts, that are come together to serve creation.  

So how the rocks have influenced my life, studying them for many years, I would sketch them. I had the images around my bed and go to sleep, thinking about them, and one rock in particular captivated me. And it was a rock about three feet long, more or less oval shape, and it had what looked like a giant lizard or something that's shaped like that, but jaws like a crocodile with teeth, and the tail was segmented, and in its claws, it held the head of a thunderbird, and it took me years to even find out it was a thunderbird. And on its back, on the dorsal fin, it carried a whale or sometimes in other versions, in other, rocks it could be a shark.  

So, there's an inversion: the sky and thunder being, the consciousness, is down below, and the watery realm of emotion and spirit is on the top. That inversion is what's happening in the time between worlds, now, when Earth is going through her changes, the head and the intellect has been so dominant for the last 500 years, that is now learning to accept its place, not above, but beneath what the heart and the spirit desire, and lead us to do, and be in order to come in accord with creation. The rest of the symbol that, of, on this rock shows in the jaws a head, it's like almost like a happy face, but with sort of oblong kind of eyes and that, that head is between the jaws and about to be eaten. In the middle of the being, you see two eyes, which is a water spirit, and then a spiral in here and then segmented tails.  

One of the things that it means is that our consciousness, in order to go through the change that the Earth is leading us through right now, the consciousness that we have is going to be devoured. And then it's going to go through the spiral, which is a new life coming through, and the tail, the segments show the generation of-- it's a circle. So, it's a whole thought, mind coming out.  

Took me many, many years to understand that. And without really being conscious in a linear way, I set about creating a academic program, a Masters and a PhD. Now, it's called an Indigenous Science and Peace Studies at the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica. And that program is based on that one rock carving, and the program brings together both the settler community or the Western mind, along with Indigenous practitioners. And scholars would come together and in the circle, we confront our histories. We research our genealogies, and we reclaim the Indigenous mind for now and we do it together. The power of the circle is really great because now we call-- we divide people or name people settler or First Nations and Indigenous. And settlers is accurate, but it's not sufficient, because how do you be an un-settler? Or how do you-- in Canada there's a process of reconciliation going on, and someone asked me once, "Well, when do we finish this? But how do we know if we're reconciled?" As far as I know, the Indigenous Science and Peace Studies program is the only one that's dedicated to that. But not exclusively for settlers. It's for all of us who have dissociated or disconnected from the whole, and, as well as for Indigenous people who want to work between the worlds and help create a creative membrane between these two ways of knowing. You could say head and heart. You could say Indigenous and settler. You could say black and white, male and female. This process of this water spirit that was on the rock that I was referring to, this is the one that will take us through, it's generative. 

Susana: You...  it's a lot of information right there, and I am I'm looking into the-- the time in between worlds. The time in between worlds and you talk about this power of the intellect and how the water spirit is the one that's going to take us through. What is it from the Indigenous wisdom and the Indigenous healers that you've encountered, you know, through your life, that could contribute to this times of bridging, times of going into another level of consciousness? What do we have to learn? 

Apela: I was asked when I was a young woman, a young academic, and I had a really good friend Hanson Ashley, a Navajo medicine, and I talk about our relationship in my book, and I asked Hanson one day, I said, "you know, Hanson, Christian people have transcendence as an aspiration, and Buddhists have enlightenment, but what do we have? If we're at the center of a medicine wheel, for example, what do we say we are?" So, he didn't really, he didn't know either. So, he said "I'm going to ask my elders." So, when he went back home to Navajo land, he asked the elders this question, the medicine people, and they talked about it for a couple of days, and then they told him this, they said, "grandson, that word you're looking for is normal." To be normal, to be in the consciousness, the rich content consciousness of Indigenous people is what keeps life going, and the medicine men and the healers can help us get there. They tell, they do it through stories. They do it through their presence. They do it through ceremonies. They do it through teaching, just to be with them. Maybe it's a hug. And the knowledge is transferred. 

Susana: You also talk about in your book-- that's a beautiful inspiring book for me, and I'm very grateful for it. Thank you so much for writing that book. You talk about the map of remembrance, right? And you come to creation story. And right now, you were talking about Hanson Ashley yourself, and I would like to read a quote that you put in Chapter 2 that is his. [Apela: Mm] He says, "when you are out of balance, you need to go back to the creation story of your people. At that place of creation emergence, you put yourself in balance, and from that place of creation tell your story in a new balanced way." [Apela: Mhm] That's a very powerful statement in that way. [Apela: Yes] And then you continue with questions in that chapter. You say "how do we find our Indigenous creation story and our place in it today? How did we lose it in the first place? And how do we find and complete our relationships with all of life and reconnect, especially if we've been cut off from our culture and ceremonial ways for generations?" So those questions are really poignant, and much of your book goes through answering these questions little by little, there are many people here listening tonight that haven't read your book, and I would like to ask you, you know, how do we start? How do we start, like, finding the creation stories? How do we start finding our place within it? 

Apela: The way back, it begins right now. If you're listening and participating in this broadcast in some way, you're already on the path. So, what would be a next step? For me, I'll tell you how it happened. When I grew up, I think I say it in the book too. There were only two things we had as Oneida people, because we had been removed from upstate New York to the state of Wisconsin, part of us. And by the time of my generation, there were only taverns and churches, and neither of them filled that emptiness of identity inside of us. So, my generation, through the American Indian Movement and other ways, we began the search to recover our identities. And we traveled around to many places before we finally, we finally came to the point where it was myself and Dorothy Ninham, and our children, and one old Lakota Elder, Rufus High Hawk, and he taught the young, the children, how to drum and sing, and we started doing ceremonies. And of course, what I thought at the time is, you know, we're not, we don't, I don't know if we're really doing this right, or, you know, it's hard when you've lost a lot in culture, and I think people today have an idea that American Indians are culturally intact, but the last 500 years, you know, it's been hell. And there's great losses that have been incurred and we're all trying to regain that.  

So, settler communities, aren't the only ones trying to regain the creation story and our place in it. American Indians are revitalizing it too. So, anyway, for me what happened is that the ceremonies that we were doing, the pipe ceremonies, for example, was up in an attic of an old house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the beer-producing capital of the world. [both laugh] We worked at the American Indian Council on Alcoholism. It was also the American Indian Movement Headquarters. So, our ceremony was in Dorothy's old house, and it was just she and I, the elder, and our children, and it's in the dark and then spirit lights would come in all around us. And we would hear voices in our- high pitched little voices. And then sometimes animal spirits would come in, and you could smell them, and the floor would heave up and down. And when certain spirits- I don't want to say the name out of respect. But certain spirits would come in the windows would go up and down on their own, doors would slam, right? And we thought that's normal, but we didn't know. And actually, it is normal in the authentic ceremonies, but it doesn't happen for everybody.  

And soon, we started having a lot of visitors come to our ceremonies from what you would say, more culturally intact tribes to witness this, and to add to it, right? And that's what taught me the most important thing, that culture, that sacred power that we've lost, you can get it back. That was the first thing that really opened my eyes and my heart, filled me with joy, but then there was this other part of myself, a part that's, at the time I would have said French ancestry, like my grandfather spoke French. And always I felt like going into ceremonies, which were illegal until 1978, and it happened that I was a student board member on the organization that American east coast group, and the- they fought a line of cases, developed a line of cases. And then penned the American Indian Freedom of Religion Law, and I got to be in on all those deliberations, and they also did the American Indian Child Welfare Law, they wrote that as well.  

So, wonderful, wonderful experience for me to, to be immersed in that, and to see what it takes to get back, to get back our sacred power when it's been suppressed and taken, right? But I heard elders at the same time. One time an elder said, the problems of our world, and at that time, the world was seen pretty much because of laws that kept Indians on reservations without having to stay there and get permission from BIA to leave and so forth, Bureau of Indian Affairs. So, in my generation we're all starting to come out meet each other and kind of shake off the hell of a few hundred years of genocide, right? And as we're coming in contact with each other, the problem was viewed as a problem between Indians and white people, right? It wouldn't be settlers and whatever, settlers and Indigenous today. So, this elder said to me, he said the problems of our world can be solved, when the white man remembers again who he is, then we can sit together as equals and work on our differences. I thought well, that's a strange thing to say. We're the ones who lost most of the continent. What is it that the white man has to do to be equal? And then another thought came, he saying, when the white man remembers and I said, whoa, then that means the French side of me can remember my French Indigenousity and that, those, those two thoughts, that the power of loss we can get it back, and the white man can remember, that inspired my work and my life. 

Susana: That's beautiful. So, what I heard is that by means of ceremony and gathering, we can also get back the lost ways. 

Apela: And the main lost way is our conscious, being conscious in the web of relations that we live in, and this gets to women's knowledge, too. 

Susana: Yes.  

Apela: The reason that it's a water spirit is, it's a new life comes through a womb, and the womb has waters in it, and the fetus in the womb looks like a lizard, just like the water spirit that's written on, inscribed on that rock, right? 

Susana: Yes. Yeah. And you say in some, at some point also in the book, that you had been hearing for a long time that it was time. The elders were saying it's time for the women. This is the time for the women to lead.  

Apela: Yes, that was for the about the past 10 or 15 years, elders all over the world were saying it's time for the women to come forward now. 

Susana: Yes, and so when you know, I just come back again to the times that we are in right now, the times in between worlds and the birthing of a new consciousness through the water and through the feminine raising, and in you know, I don't know exactly what form it's going to take, but it's like that knowledge of interdependence that I see in what you're conveying right now, that the woman, women carry in, you know, very deeply within. 

Apela: I think for people listening to this call tonight, or you know, I'm thinking of women with children, thinking of single-parent families, and the way my life worked out, I was able to travel the world and network Indigenous healers and by way of, by childhood prayers. I say in the book how I grew up with a lot of alcoholism and violence and I would go to sleep at night just like vividly, like vividly, vividly imagining various ways my family could be healed and how we could come together again, over and over and over and over. And that childhood desire and envisioning my healed family, that has taken me so far that I, besides my bachelor's degree, which I was the only American Indian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at the time, and then I went up for a Masters and then even a PhD, and the way that those doors opened for me were in direct response to that childhood prayer. I didn't see it at the time but looking back it's really, really clear. I talk a bit in the book, too, about seeing the sign, how I should how I knew I should go for my PhD program. Actually, it was a literal gold sign hanging on a university stairwell, right? So, for women,  

for women right now? What if you're working 9 to 5, you have kids, you're a professional, whatever, where you can start is this, you make an altar and on the altar you have representation of each of the elements, and then you do something that's sometimes difficult for people. You have some pictures of your family, maybe your grandmother, your grandfather, however far back you can go, and sometimes people don't like to do this, because every family has difficult people in their lives, and maybe they don't want to do that. But that's where the gold is, and then you start researching one of your family lines. Like, if you're French or Polish or of that descent, you take one of those lines, in the US people often have four, five, six nationalities, but a nationality's a political designation, it's not your cultural identity.  

So, you're going back, the idea is you're going back to your tribal identity, and you're finding your creation story because as women, like, we create people. We have help, but that's what we can do. So, the creation story has particular relevance for us. And for me double so, because on the Onᐱyoteʔa∙ká side, our creation begins with the sky woman, so it begins with the mother, and that orients people in a different way. When you come at it that way, you know, what I, this is getting off the track a little bit, but not completely, when I'm in Central Asia or Siberia with Indigenous people. I was shocked because there was, we were having a fire ceremony and they asked me to start it, and even in my culture normally it will be the men that do that. Women take care of like the fire in the house and the men take care of the public fire. Right? So, this was and then they said, well, no in our culture the fire ceremony is Otiney, it's a woman, and then I started thinking, wow. Wow, what if the sun and the fire was a, was a woman? Can you think how different it would be? [Susana: Yeah.] We think father, son, holy ghost, the holy spirit. What if the sun was a woman? Same thing in Japan. The Amaterasu Omikami is a woman, right? The whole Earth would be different, with that understanding. So, anyway, getting back to the creating an altar. 

Susana: Can I say something like very short there? [Apela: Sure!] Also coming from my own, you know, German ancestry, right, in German the sun is Die Sonne. Yes, yeah, it's also feminine. And their moon is. Yeah. It's a masculine for the moon. Just bringing that up because I imagine that in other languages, we also find that, though. It's not pervasive. 

Apela: So, you have a, you have a, a candle. I have one here. You have a candle on your altar. You have a glass of water, which is important. You have something that represents the wind, can be a feather or a fan, but if you use a bird or a bird feather or something, try to get it to be from a bird that also exists in your homeland, in one of your homelands, right? And so, water, wind, air, earth. You have a pottery or something on your altar, pictures of your ancestors. Since it’s just past Day of the Dead, it’s easy to think of these things and how to make an altar. But it doesn't have to be exotic. It has to be functional, right?  

So, you can sit there and just think, or be quiet for a while, and call to your ancestors. And here's a good way to do that. You go and find a tree, and again try to find a tree that exists in one of your ancestral lands, and you make an offering, and you ask that tree to help you to find your ancestry and your creation story. And also, if it's been a long time since anyone in your family's done that, you need to make an apology. I'm sorry that we never remembered you for so long, ancestors. And I really, I really need your help now, and it, you know, if you're willing to help me then, you know, I won't forget you again in the future. Something like that. However it feels right to you. And your leave that offering can be some milk it can be tobacco. You know, if you want to use American Indian way to get you started, but don't commit to it. You could do that, too, or you can use a clean like, German, you could use ale that's as clean as you could get it, or Anglo-Saxon too, and you make that offer, you ask for help. Then you maintain your altar.  

And meanwhile, if you know that you are of Polish or Nigerian, or South African descent, you start researching, what do the traditional clothes look like, and even if it's medieval and more folk art, look at the symbols on it. The symbols will tell you what plants are important. What directions are important. It will bring beauty back into your life as well. And then watch your dreams. So, when you do these things, when you make your offering and you keep your altar, and then it's also really good to look at rock symbols from the land that your ancestors come from, and keep them around you, because they have a strong psychic impact on us. Just, if you're like me, and when I began to study the rocks which were like my ABCs of holism. It's like I'm not getting it, it's not telling me anything, and then I'd be with elders, and they would take just a glance and they knew what it's saying, right? Yes, it took years, and I finally can do a few, right, I always have to fight my academic mind, too, that's part of my disconnect.  

Susana: Right. 

Apela: So, then what happens when you're doing that? How do you know you're on the right track? Well synchronicities it’s one good thing like a book falls, a book falls on your head, it’s Woman Between the Worlds. [laughs] 

Susana: Exactly! [laughs] 

Apela: It's like that. Or you find a newspaper someone left on an airplane seat or something, you know, or you bump into somebody who tells you something, or they start to happen more and more, and then the dreams come. And if you ask the ancestors, I always, when I ask for help, I always say for good purposes, because of course there are spirits or forces of nature that can really hurt us, too. 

Susana: Yes. 

Apela: So...if you, if you listen to sound, pay attention to music from one of your homelands. can do it as well. Watch what you start paying attention to, be conscious of it. And if you can have someone else to share this journey with, all the better. Not everybody's going to come to the University for Peace, and get a master’s or a PhD, but these things I'm saying, we all can do men and women alike. And especially if you have children in your home, you can sort of keep the candle at a distance, but you could put toy animals or something on your altar as well, for animal spirits, something that your children can relate with, you know. 

Susana: I also wonder, you know, about the wisdom of the of the children, you know, and how when you start intending certain things and put your altar right there, you know, there is also this, these words, this wisdom coming from them that feed into your search. 

Apela: A few years ago, one of my daughters took me out for lunch. It was my birthday. And I don't know, I was probably turning 70 or something at the time, and my granddaughter, who was about nine, she was sitting across the table from me. And of course, she had her phone. She's playing a game, right? And she just looked up, and she said, "Grandma, there's no such thing as old. It's just if you want to do something, do it," and she went back to her game.  

Susana: Okay. 

Apela: All right. [laughs] 

Susana: A full rewiring right there. With just a simple sentence. [laughs] 

Apela: Download, download…okay. Got it.  
 
[laughing] 

Susana: Yes, so beautiful. I'm curious about, you know, in this process of setting the altar and like and connecting the ways that you've said and doing the prayers. What's the relationship to the place that you live? You know, that's probably not your ancestral place. And also, what's your relationship with the ceremonial cycles that were part of that place? If you are not within that tradition. 

Apela: Yeah, I... for me, the way I've been, I've been really blessed if I stop and think about it, because the Onᐱyoteʔa∙ká part, really has helped my French part to remember. I said in an earlier conversation with you that I'm able to go to France every year for ceremonies and there are Occitan Indigenous people. They're still speaking their Indigenous language despite the ravages of Roman invasion and 700 years of Inquisition. You know- 

Susana: It's incredible. 

Apela: -still and they're not the only Indigenous people in Europe. There are Indigenous people everywhere in the world, right. So, if you're able to get to know some of these people, maybe through social media or something, that's good. But for most people, you know, it's hard to find the time to create relationships like that, to find them and create them. But when you start on this process, they began to show up. That's one thing. The other thing, of course, is just how this call began, acknowledging the land that we're on for, right, where I am right in this minute, I'm in southeast Alaska. I'm on the land of the Tlingit people, and one of my mentors was from here, Daanawáak. There's a whole chapter on him in the book. 

Susana: Yes, right. 

Apela: So, I was blessed in the sense that I got to travel around a lot, be mentored by lots of elders and then be in Indigenous ceremonies where I grew up in Wisconsin. The ceremonies had been because of the oppression of American Indian spirituality and culture in the United States. When the ceremonies came out, they were like fresh, like before the invasion they were done, they were strict, too, and that gave me a really good grounding for my life's work, and, and it gave me a low tolerance for New Age craziness and dissociation. And what's particularly not a good idea to do when you begin your authentic search for your ceremonies and your identity, it's really good to not take bits and pieces of other people's culture to find your own. When I was young, you couldn't even burn cedar, all the practices were suppressed. Now, you can go into bookstores to buy smudge sticks and they'll blend up, what I saw some today blended with lavender, blended with copal, but it's- don't do it. Don't do it. You know, if you don't know what your own people did and you need to use cedar or sage to begin with, when you make your prayers to- I'm using this until I find my own. 

Susana: Okay. Okay. I'm just like curious about this too. And I know I have two questions here. One, one of the questions is, you know, there. I'm thinking of the Native American Church. 

Apela: Yes. 

Susana: And you know how you have, you know, the possibility of being invited to ceremonies, right? There is also the sweat lodges, you know, that are happening from different traditions that you also are invited. And then making people at CIIS, you know, like go into getting to know these old ways. Maybe like, scratching the surface and some like, like, linger around this way so that they learn more, right? When you're saying don't use, don't use cedar or, you know, if you don't know what you're doing, like to what extent, you know, where I just want to be respectful in this question and asking you like what are the dangers of that? And what are things that are opening up, also, now for people who really are looking for their own roots, you know, and go into their own roots through borrowed traditions. 

Apela: Yeah. Borrowed is a nice word for it, stolen is another. Not so nice. So, how do we find that when we're genuinely looking for our own ceremony and our own authentic identity and someone invites you to a sweat lodge or peyote ceremony? You can go, but then I would ask you, who asked, if you go in there as, like, this supplicant. I'm a settler. I'm so lucky just to be here. I'm an oppressor and, and the half of me that's white, I can say that, because I used to feel that in ceremonies. Sometimes, I'd be the only mixed-blood person in the teepee, or in a ceremonial room. And I could feel my presence, my mixed-blood presence cause, like, anxiety, or resentment or I could feel it in the room, you know. [Susana: Yes.] But the good part about that was that it spurred me to know, so what is this white part of myself? Who is this oppressor? And how do I make peace with this being?  

So, I would say if you're invited, you have the chance, go in. But when you talk to people, or introduce yourself a woman who works with me, I was telling her, I said, you know, since Europeans or whoever came to America, American Indians have been asking, "who are you?" and to this day nobody answers, right? So, who am I? I'm Onᐱyoteʔa∙ká and I am Gaul. I'm an Indigenous woman, right? So, if you're going to these ceremonies, this woman working with me is a really smart woman, has background in diplomacy and works for The United States government, everything you said, you know, I told her when she was coming, traveling with me to Kyrgyz people and I said, so when you're asked to introduce yourself, you can't just say I'm Apela from Chicago or whatever. So alright, so she's got it. If you don't know who you are. There's just like you have to do things to get on the internet. You have to like login, you have to all the…if you want to go into Indigenous knowledge, elders are going to test you, because they have to figure out how to talk to you. And I also write about that in my book, too, I had a horrifying moment after, it was in Southeast Alaska. And I traveled to meet this elder and another Tlingit friend who's also Chief, took me to introduce me to this Eko Clan man, and I was adopted into Raven. So, the two moieties.  

So anyway, I'm freezing cold because I went on a sea plane, I went down a skiff, and raining, blowing, and I was shaking with cold. So, we get into this house on an island here and here's Cyrus Peck, the elder, shock of white hair, and sitting there. We get into like the mud room and then here's the wood stove, but Cyrus is in an easy chair, he was in his 90s at the time in front of the stove and over here's the couch. So, we're standing here and then my, my dear friend, Richard Dalton said, you know, he introduces me, and then and then the old man looks up and he says, hmm, and at the time I was married to a man named Morrison, who was a Haida, and so the Eko Clan patriarch, looks up and he says Morrison, hm, we have a nephew over there. And I said oh, that's wonderful. And I'm standing here cold, cold, shaking, shaking, and there's a silence. And after a while. It's like you could, in my mind you could hear a clock go tick-tick-tick, and I went wow, I supposed to say something. What am I supposed to say? Oh my God. I'm supposed to know who the nephew is. I don't know where came- somehow my- oh, Paul Morrison! Who had been dead before I even arrived, 20 years before, I mean I heard it somewhere. So, I said may I sit? He says, yes, sit down. 

Susana: Yeah. 

Apela: Otherwise, we weren't going to talk at all. So, I tell all these things to my associate Beth, and we get into this yurt in Central Asia, and it's filled with shamans. And after I talk and do my thing, and we're talking and they say so, who are you? And she says, I'm Beth from Baltimore, she said, that's near DC, and then she caught herself. Like, oh my god! [both laughing] Look, so we have a standing joke, whenever it gets to one of these rough…I'm Beth from Baltimore. So, anyway when you meet native people and if you're asked to a ceremony, maybe you can't say my tribe is Tutan, or my tribe is Gaul, you know, because you're just starting to remember, but you can do better than Beth from Baltimore, you can say I'm Beth and my ancestors came from New Zealand or my aunt, whatever, you know, at least get a start with the nation-state and then work through your mother's line back, you know. 

Susana: Yes, so of place, you know, that brings me back to the question about, like, place and you know, you're talking about, okay, yeah, for example, like you come from New Zealand, right? But that's place, right, again, it's orientation. It's like, where are we coming from? What land that we connected with the way the originally? 

Apela: Yes. It's like, for example, if you're from Scandinavia, and your last name is Berg, B-E-R-G, and you look into it, you say mountain. Okay. Well then you say I'm Beth from the mountain in Sweden, right? So, I always encourage people, like, look at your family name, too, what does it mean? There's so many ways that the ancestors are calling to us and the Earth is through sacred sites pulsing with energy, wanting to bring us back into accord with these changes, profound changes in the dynamics of creation. 

Susana: Yes, and that brings me also to another question that's related to ceremonial ways, and has to do with the spread of psychotropic plant medicines into the West as well, that come from, you know, particular traditions, you know, and you talk in your book about your participation, teepee meetings and in that way. And what we have right now, it's you know, the profile, the ways in which in old times, the ceremonies were held have been mixed. And there are many, there is a diversification of settings, I would say, right? That also, like comes together with the renaissance of the psychedelic movement, you know, for therapeutic purposes right now. I wonder what, what are your thoughts around that, and what would you advise to people that are participating in these ways with these powerful medicines. 

Apela: When I was in my doctoral program, and I also went to, I was going to peyote ceremonies, really ancient forms of peyote ceremonies and some of the practitioners have been five generations running these ceremonies, you know, but it could be the same like with sweat lodges and all the ceremonies that were opening up when I was young and they were really authentic and it's really strict. It's hard for me to see the misuse, I'll say, or casual use of these powerful plant medicines, but why it's hard to see is because the people, I have so much compassion, because of my own search and journey for identity, for people who have this longing to reconnect, to be whole, to feel the presence of the sacred in ourselves and in life, right. That's a real cry. And then sometimes all a person can find is these one-off, 10 times off versions of authentic ceremonies, and when people do that it's like, you're settling for so little.  

And the, you know, there are times where, when I was young, and I wrote my PhD about Native American addictions. And I said, well, at that, the cure for the addictions would be the return of our ceremonies and our sacred ways. And then I, I talked about peyote, because American Indians had to fight really hard to maintain that ceremony. And the only way to do it for a long time, was to talk about it as Native American Church, to sort of present it as a church. It happened in Oklahoma. And it was a compromise, but it was a way that kept the ceremony going. But in some ways, it was a bad compromise, because when you try to mix two different traditions, say, like when you have an authentic peyote ceremony, in the morning, when the woman brings in the water and the three kinds of foods, people are of one mind, and it often happens in conversation after the food, you find out that you all received a certain message.  

One night I was in a ceremony. It turned out, we all received messages about the water. Another time, the first vision I ever had it, I went to this mountain, and I saw these rocks and that mountain mentioned, like, I'm right there in this territory now, right? And that was the first time a vision came to me, and then a few years later, I came to the same place in reality. I want those results for people who are searching for their power and not…I don't know, not some further dissociation from ourself. I don't, you know, I don't know what to say to people who, if that's all you have. And I have people say, many people say, like, well, you know, I did it with really good intentions. I fasted first, whatever. Okay, but it's dangerous because these ancient ceremonies like the chants and so forth. They've been fashioned over thousands of years and the chants that are going on, that, your mind is changing. The medicine is working with your spirit, your consciousness is changing, and the chants take you to the place you need to go to your that inner most sacred light, and then bring you back. And then if you get when you go in like the Hanson Ashley quote, and I can remember being in a peyote ceremony, and my Western mind would get me in trouble because I was always fighting the medicine, you know, this mind and that would make me sick and I would throw up right, because I had to get that out. So, they had like tin coffee cans, and they used to call me can head. [both laugh] And so, advice I'm giving, I came to it the hard way, right?  

Yeah. So, what I would wish with people doing all these alternative things, it's like I really, really say, don't stop there. Don't throw your mother and grandmothers away. Keep the search, find out what's authentic to you. And when you do like, an elder told me this when I was a young woman, and he said, because I thought in my mind like, I read, Carlos Casteneda, Don Juan, and at the first book, he had at the back he says how he's getting his PhD and all this, and then he becomes a shaman. I thought that's what I want to do. That's the very thing I want to do. Okay, right. Well, this elder, he set me straight on that, he said, "Girl, you ain't no shaman. If she was going to be a healer, you would have been that at birth the elders would have seen that." He says, “but don't worry, if the ancestors give you a little piece to do, you do that piece and you'll be completely happy and fulfilled.” [Susana: Yes.] And that's it.  

So, what I do between the worlds. Like I never wanted to be between the worlds, I wanted to be in my Indigenous world, right? But now they're one. And they're separate, and that's the story of that water spirit. What my husband's people, the Hawaiians called them Mo'o. They're opposites and they're the same. And standing in the paradox with consciousness is what brings in the overtone or the spirit or the life we're looking for. Yeah, you want to alternate consciousness, fast, here they drink salt water. It isn't about self-gratification, really. It's about that deep, deep longing for authenticity. For, like, why do you exist? Why do I exist? We have a purpose. We're here, right? So, when we do that, the Earth starts to heal, when I be who I am. 

Susana: Right. 

Apela: And there's all kinds of help. We have that lineage. We have ancestors for generations. Just waiting for us to say, would you help me? Bam, the door opens, and in and they come. 

Susana: I wonder in your book too you talk about, you know, your journey with cancer. And so there's also sickness, you know, in that, on Monday when we had a chance to talk, too, you were talking about trauma, right? And right, the shadow aspect of trauma, and the light aspect of trauma as well. And, and I wonder, you know, what are your thoughts also about going into wholeness, find deeper identity through these tests, like sickness, like as a teacher in that way. And trauma. 

Apela: Yeah. Yeah, there's no way to it but through it, you know, that's basically what it comes down to. And for me, I started having dreams. With my first bout of cancer, I had breast cancer twice, and I've been healthy for many years now, but when I went the first time I had cancer, breast cancer, I started having dreams. And in the dreams, there would be a woman, a caucasian woman with this kind of light brown hair, and she would be like one point she's running through woods, looked like redwoods, and somebody's chasing her like trying to kill her and she's looking for safety. And it would just be dream after dream. It was so obvious like that white part of myself. My, my grandmother might, whatever, all the women, they're like, acknowledge me, acknowledge me, right? And those dreams really made me conscious that I needed to really look at that.  

So, I was teaching at CIIS, at the time, and one of my colleagues, Daniel Deslauriers, coming from Quebec, so fluent French speaker, and I said, we're out in the redwoods where we taught our classes in Indigenous Mind, or traditional knowledge, rather. I said, okay. I'm going to make a prayer Daniel, and because Canadian French is based on a really old form of French, and I reckoned that my ancestors from France that came into Quebec in the 1600s would respond to that language. So, I'm going to say a prayer in English, and I want you to say it in French, right? And the students from CIIS and myself and Daniel, we held hands in a circle, and I made this prayer to my ancestors and said, I want to forgive me for being, just what I said, and please help me find my way back to you. So, the dreams that, the trauma of cancer, that opened that up for me.  

The other thing which I say in the book is there's a point going through radiation. Where right near the end of it. I got so, so ill that I thought I was dying, and actually, I was because they bring you right, right to the point of death and I was laying on the table. And looks like an umbrella on an arm was sweeping over my body and it just has this high-pitched, like, whine. Like that, even lighter though, and it went over me like that. And I was thinking as that was happening, the feeling in my body. I'm lying and my whole body felt like it was starting to rotate. It would have been, like, in a clockwise direction, but as it's rotating, I could feel my spirit sliding off. And I thought in that moment, I am dying, and I was in the process. And to my surprise. I look down at the floor and said, Mother Earth. I love you. And okay, so, and then the radiation stopped, I got off the table, and I made it to the bathroom. I didn't want the doctors or nurses to see how weak I was because I thought they might make me stay there and didn't want to stay there. Right?  

So later on, I get myself home and I walk into the door of where I was staying, which was a beautiful apartment right on the ocean on Maui, friends had given that place for me to stay while I was recovering, and I walked in the apartment, I couldn't even stand to open, put the key in the door, I had to lean against the outside of the building to put the key in and I got in and slipped around the wall on the other side. And I was laying back like that. And the wind coming through from the ocean went bam, slammed the door shut, and because of that some boxes that had been sent to me from where I had lived in Canada had arrived and a black briefcase cloth, briefcase, sort of, fell open, and this paper slid out and like I don't even know if I'm strong enough to pick it up. [phone rings in background] So, I leaned over, and I picked up this piece of paper with, sorry, there's a noise. [phone rings in background] Anyway, I picked up this piece of paper and there were notes from Pete Catches, a Lakota elder who had talked at Stanford in Indian Studies week. And what he was talking about is how, how the Sun Dance used to be, and how he said, it's not like now where young people show off their scars and everything. He said in the old days that people were really humble, they felt the pull of the Earth and her love, and I realized what just happened to me. I felt the pull of the Earth and her love. I thought, I'm dying from this cancer. And that's, I'm going to the Earth. I didn't get, I'm alive because she held me here.  

And then the next thing that happened is I am upstairs in the bed, and I got really sick and the skin started breaking down on my breast and it was just oozing lymphatic fluids. It's just, I was just a wreck. I was so weak. One day I only could take one phone call. That's how weak I was. And I had to get off the call and I was sitting there, you're like, laying in bed. Whatever. I'm so I'm sick. I'm, maybe I'm dying. But I'm so bored and I can't do anything. And I had this stock proof dissertation from a Mohawk student, Brian Rice. And he's from the same Iroquois people that my Oneida people are from. There's six different tribes, right? So, his dissertation was just papers, and it was that thick and I reached down, I was so weak the papers, just all what I could pick up just slid out of my hand on the floor and there were only like two pieces left. And then I looked at the two pieces in my hand and Brian had, was, he was writing about our Iroquois creation story in this part, and he was putting it in more modern English because all we had in English was early ethnographer reports, and just boring and stupid, you know, so, so he was updating it so people could feel, if you can't speak Oneida or Mohawk, here's the better English that's closer to the language. Right?  

So, I picked it up and I read a part of the creation story I never heard of and it's when the sky world is, when the sky woman is still in the sky world. And she has a task she has to do, she has to fry this corn mush, which is we like corn a lot. Corn, beans, and squash are three sisters for us. So, she has this job she has to fry this corn mush, and it's for a man in her family, like her uncle. And when she's frying it. I'm reading this. As she's frying this it's the grease splatters, and hits her body and her skin peels. And I'm like, I'm reading it with my skin peeling on my chest and then I started to cry and laugh at the same time. I said, live or die, I'm on the right path. I'm in the path of the sky woman, so can't go wrong. 

Susana: Can't go wrong. 

Apela: And that's the first place. I think that's the first moment I found myself in my creation story. It wasn't an abstraction, wasn't an ideal, I was in it, and I was alive. 

Susana: Yes. 

Apela: And I am. 

Susana: And you are, look at yourself right now, thank goodness. [both laugh]  

Apela: Just let me say this [Oneida chanting/singing] thank you, ancestors. 

Susana: Apela, thank you so much for all this conversation, for your wisdom, for carrying your ancestors, too, for waking up that call inside, as well through your own quest. You know, the way that you talk and speak and. Yeah. I'm really happy to have had this conversation with you and to share it with all the audience and the people that are gonna come later as well to listen to this. 

Apela: Yeah. Well, thank you. And yeah, it's good, really good. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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