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I was born in Canada - my Finnish parents had both emigrated there - My father as a war refugee.
The city I grew up in, was just such a mining town, built on land taken forcibly from the Algonquin people. I grew up around people who bothered me greatly in their spirit. They seemed full of darkness and emptiness. Miners and drunkards who wasted their lives away in misery. And yet, they always spoke harshly of native people and used pejorative slang and accused them of being nothing but gasoline drinkers and glue sniffers who were human trash. It was difficult sometimes not to get caught up in these beliefs and rhetoric, but I remember mainly that whenever native peoples were portrayed in the media, I found something that I resonated with in their lifestyle, a certain kind of straightforwardness and simplicity. I felt "this is right."
It's easy to talk about this Hollywood cliche of the "noble savage", because there are good and bad in every culture. But you can see when a culture is healthy overall, and when viruses of the mind and spirit have rendered a culture diseased and corrupt. So. I took a vague interest in native americans. But nothing more. This was all 15-20 years ago. Then the winds of change began to blow, as I moved across the globe myself.
Immediately, I got into contact with someone from my old hometown through a friend who began to provide me with freelance work. It turned out that a very large percentage of the work involved various First Nations groups all across Canada. This is when my understanding first began to grow.
Here is the next piece. I grew up in a Christian home and went to an evangelical church. The idea of "God" made sense to me, and the spirit world did as well, since I had personal knowledge and experiences of it since childhood. They just came to me, outside of church. It was never anything indoctrinated into me by them, and they would have called my experiences imaginations. My own mother did not know how to handle them. For instance, as a child one night, I saw a scroll appear above my dresser cabinet next to my bed, with strange symbols on it.
At 24 years old, one year before I moved, I had felt the pull in my heart to stop going to church. To my parents this could only be interpreted as "falling into sin". In truth, I felt that I was not getting closer to God there, but that was what I wanted. It was stunting my spiritual growth. I received a powerful vision where I was transported out of body, into the church building. A man in a suit was trying to beckon me to the front, and I refused, crying out to God instead for help, in my head. As I knelt at the bench, a voice spoke to me. It assured me that what I needed to do was find my own voice, and not follow these rituals. A being of light took my hand outside the church doors.
I never felt comfortable with the Christian practice of speaking in tongues. It felt like it was "not me". Christians tried to convince me that I WOULD receive this gift. Many years went by and I did not receive it. It felt forced and fake.
Years later I had a dream, where I was again in a church building. This time it was filled with faceless men in suits. They beckoned me over, and I approached. One held out his hands, and showed me an object. I looked down and it was a tribal mask, the appearance of which I still remember. As I studied the mask, it sensed my confusion and explained: "This is you."
One of my interests became the study of belief systems of cultures and indigenous peoples around the world. I became interested in plant based healing, and use of chanting for both spiritual and physical healing. I began to practice it. This chanting became my own way to call out to God, to heal, to express myself spiritually. I was finding "my own voice". These prophecies and dreams were coming to pass.
Some years ago, my dad died. We never had a very good relationship. There was a lot of regret and sorrow involved. The war he escaped made him a hard man, and the modern culture I grew up in separated us in knowledge. A while after his death, a dream came to me:
I found myself in the air, with sharp vision like of an eagle or a hawk. I soared over the trees, and over the waters under a blue sky and bright sun. As I scanned the landscape below, something golden caught my eye. It was a hat, on top of the head of a man. The hat was fur, and with a feather in the band. I was drawn to it, and began my descent. As I drew closer, I realized who it was - it was my father. He was standing, surrounded by a group of native men, by the shore of a lake. He was in conversation with them. I landed next to him, and transformed into human form. I was my childhood self. I looked up at them all, and hugged him and said "let's go home."
This dream brought me the warmest feeling of peace inside. As I eventually read about all these connections between Finns and native American tribes later, I knew that somehow it was true, and that there is some connection there in my blood. I know "who I am".
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