How Spirit Travels

It was during my second and third years that I began to study the lives of saints.  Through my education I was introduced to the life story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a young Mohawk woman who lived in the mid to late 1600’s in what is now upstate New York.  She was the daughter of a Mohawk chief and Algonquin mother of Catholic faith.  At age four her parents and brother died all of smallpox. Kateri survived but was left nearly blind, with facial scars and physically weakened.  Her uncle, also a Mohawk chief, took her into his family. Kateri lived among her people at Caughnauaga. When a Jesuit priest established a chapel there, she remembered her mother’s devotion to the Holy Mother and Jesus.  Kateri sought out the new community where she was profoundly affected by her study and prayer.  Kateri was baptized at age 20, much to the protest of her uncle and Mohawk community who did not trust the Black Robes.  She had to flee for her life to a Catholic mission near Montreal to follow the spiritual path that called her so strongly. 

Kateri’s short but deeply devoted life continues to inspire millions of people today.  Upon her death at age 24, the deep scars on her face disappeared and her face glowed with light.  Two priests bore witness to this miracle.  Kateri Tekakwitha is today Saint Kateri.  She was canonized in 2014 by the Catholic Church. 

My teacher is deeply devoted to Kateri – called the Lily of the Mohawks.  When I studied with Sundance, I joined the Kateri Society in Caughnauaga and ordered a small, white plaster statue that I put on my altar.  I collected religious cards and books about her short life.  The spirit of Kateri is sweet and pure.  Many people have received divine intervention for loved ones through prayers of intercession to Kateri. 

During this period, I made two personal shields with white lilies prominent in the design.  Kateri’s relationship to Christ, the Lily of the Valley, was not lost on me.  At one point I asked Sundance: “Why would Kateri become so devoted to Christ when she had her own spiritual tradition through the Mohawk?” Sundance only replied:  “That is your koan.”  I learned this meant a question that cannot be easily answered, one that an aspirant may attempt to answer over a lifetime. Through Kateri I have come to understand that spirit is a bridge across religions through the principle of Love.

While visiting my daughter at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in 1992, I found a copy of Interior Castles, St. Teresa of Avila’s description of her spiritual development.  She details her spiritual experiences in altered states of consciousness that occurred often during deep prayer.  Numerous eye-witnesses record St. Teresa’s levitation during prayer.  As I read her personal testimony. I was reminded of Jesus’ remark “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” (Biblical reference)

I felt a certain kinship with her as she described her personal attempts to purify her mind to reach states of ever more purest forms of love and compassion.  Interior Castles dramatically outlines the fire of will it takes to purify one’s thoughts and feelings to achieve a natural state of loving kindness.  Much of my training in Yuma dealt with identifying and working through personal weaknesses such as jealousy, ambition, dishonesty, and attachments. 

Finding her spiritual journal acted as an affirmation of my work. 

St. Francis of Assisi’s’ life also influenced my thinking and continued recommitment to spiritual discipline.  I related strongly to his recognition that wealth lay not in one’s possessions but in the Creation.  St. Francis truly embraced the Bill of Rights that includes animals and plants and the Earth as well as humans.

He was so human. Yet he was able to achieve spiritual heights.  I love him for that.  His life continues to inspire me.  In his lifetime he ranged from being the “bell of the ball” in the opulent world of his influential family to running away from the battlefield when he first confronted his inability to kill in the name of God.  He endured a dark time of terrible depression for failing to fit into the roles his family and society expected of him, and he became dangerously ill.  He finally revoked the wealth of his heritage to adopt the life of poverty and service.  But far from being the inward focused ascetic, he engaged in life with an ebullient spirit that drew devoted followers to him.  His special compassion and affection for animals is celebrated by millions of people in festivals to bless and honor pets, livestock, and wild animals.

As I studied the biographies and journals of saints across the ages, I realized that following a spiritual path is to swim upstream against a world lost from the truth.  During the time of my education in Yuma, the lives of these holy women and men encouraged me to follow my own intuition. I felt surrounded by gentle and loving spirits as their life stories came alive in my imagination.

At one point my teacher began to give me her empty cigarette boxes. One day we mused over how they could be recycled and put to good use.  She suggested to me that I decorate these little containers and devote each one to a quality or value I was working to perfect in myself. 

This proved to be a powerful and very personal process for me – a psychological return to the womb, a deep, interior reworking of my relationship with myself and with the world of which I was a part.  Inside each little box I placed affirmations or objects that symbolized the virtue I was studying.  Eventually I made about twenty golden boxes focusing on love, honor, will, honesty, determination and intent among others.  Each was a little masterpiece.  I kept them in a special box, my treasures of the heart.

Much of my work was conducted in this manner: quiet and personal, invisible to an observer.  My teacher was a master at guiding me through this time.

TO READERS: This is the last of several posts along the path of sharing with you how the places where we live influence us in profound ways, mostly un-appreciated. Yuma, Arizona became a sacred place for me through my four years of study with two indigenous teachers. I commend each of you to think about the place or places that have been generative in your life’s path of learning about yourself and the world in which we think we live.

Saint Frances of Assisi

Saint Theresa of Avila

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

My daughter briefly lived with me in Yuma and was deeply loved by Gabe and Sundance, my teachers. She bought Sundance and me rosaries made by Carmelite nuns which I treasure to this day. Every now and then I return to my Rosary and pray. The scent of the roses that make up each bead are as fragrant as the day I received this meaningful gift, 4 decades ago. My daughter is precious to me. While she didn’t understand the depth of this four year spiritual path her mother embarked upon, she respected it. I am blessed.

Continued…meeting Earth and Sky

And then I had an experience lifted out of time and space in a rundown, dusty thrift shop in Winterhaven, Arizona when Sundance suddenly asked to visit it.

There among stacks of old books and magazines, a cacophony of throw away objects from locals, Sundance found several volumes of the Stockholder’s Board of the Hudson’s Bay Company founded in 1670 primarily for the fur trading business and colonization of North America by the British.

Gabe Sharp served nearby at the Quechan Indian Reservation as a social worker fulfilling his dream of helping his people – the Colorado River Indian Tribes – to return to health and wellbeing someday.  In the little dusty town of Winterhaven, in a disheveled second-hand store, we touched back in time through historical records that graphically outlined plots to seize native lands, and the purposeful use of alcohol to facilitate the process.

At times like those I often felt as if I entered another reality where my teacher and I traveled time channels to the past.  There we sat together, carefully reading these documents out loud, and making runs to a local library or consulting texts from her wonderful library, to learn more about the history of colonization in North America.  There it was in black and white and without any reservation – the blatant conniving of grown men who recorded their reservations, knowing it was wrong to outright seize land from people who had done nothing other than welcome them to their country. 

European culture would introduce a world view so different and with grave consequences on the natural world and a way of life that would later inspire our fledgling republic. The shaking of the Earth is still felt. Today in Canada, native people continue to resist the forces of progress and its underlying economic values.

We were shocked by the recorded discussions between original board members who felt some tinge of guilt about seizing ownership in the name of the King.  In fact, they feared he would not go along with it, so they planned a scheme to get Prince Rupert to make the declarations.  We laughed to read the names of these men including one Richard Nixon.  Though both of us, my teacher and I, knew about the facts of this early colonial period in what is now Canada and northern New York State, we were incredulous to read the actual discussions and plans by a small group of men who would crush nations to get at trees and animal fur. Another evil evident in these meeting notes was the discussion about use of alcohol to manipulate tribal leaders.

The Doctrine of Discovery and the policy of Manifest Destiny derive from these forays by powerful nations to justify taking other nation’s freedom and resources. This has been justified based on power and dominance, and a profound misunderstanding about human’s relationship to Nature. The stockholders utilized religion and power as their rational for violating the natural rights of nations and the Earth Herself.

These then were the ways in which over the four years of study I lived near my teachers so we could do research together. I spent days out and about in the Yuma area with my teachers when I could observe how white culture treated them and explore my own assumptions and automatic thinking about culture and race.

While studying with Sundance, she introduced me to her Catholic faith through the life of Blessed Kateri who subsequently became Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Kateri was known as the Lily of the Mohawks. I learned to pray the Rosary and made an altar in my bedroom. When I joined the Kateri Society based in Fonda, N.Y. they sent me several Kateri objects such as a necklace, a history and prayer card. I added these to my altar along with a small statue of her. She is beloved among Catholics and native peoples. This may seem like a profound contradiction, but you’ll understand why when I post the next insights I made about the fluidity of Spirit.

To be continued …

Resources:

National Constitution Center

Hudson’s Bay Company

Mohawk History

I meet Earth and Sky

I met Earth and Sky in Yuma.

Below is an excerpt from a time when I studied with two Native Americans. Gabe Sharp (aka Running Water) was a college professor with Arizona State University and a social worker at the Quechan Indian Reservation in nearby Winterhaven. Louise Etienne, his wife, was an artist and teacher known as Sundance Aquero. Gabe was born on the Mohave reservation in Parker, Arizona and Sundance was born in Montreal to a French mother and Mohawk father.

They offered workshops to individuals and groups about indigenous worldviews and tribal history. I had always been curious about Native Americans because our family includes a part Cherokee relative in my mother’s lineage. (For readers, my last name, Feathers, is Scotch-Irish.)

During my formal education, there was practically no information or simply wrong information about Native Americans in the U.S.A’s formation and history. I did not encounter the abundance of printed material from tribal nations until I became an environmental educator as my teaching career blossomed to new venues.

Science was my way of knowing, partly because my father was a big influence on me. He studied physics and loved all the sciences which he shared with me as I grew up. I knew about water cycles, turnover of matter, population dynamics, biodiversity, etc. but something about the sacred nature of God’s creation was missing from this way of knowing. Gradually, I turned to indigenous perspectives about living on the land as it was abundantly obvious to me that our capitalist values about land, water, sky and people could plunder a landscape when it exceeded some internal set of rules which I now understand to be species relationships described by Robin Wall Kimmerer as reciprocity, i.e. give and take that observes the limits of a particular place to maintain its healthy and enduring function. One of my favorite and most insightful American conservationists about the ethics of living well on a piece of land—Aldo Leopold—described the essential dichotomy between European and Indigenous perspectives:

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we believe it is a commodity belonging to us. When we see land to be a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. ~from  A Sand County Almanac, Foreward, Oxford University Press, Special Commemorative Edition, 1989.

But in 1990, I had yet to read Leopold’s great works. I just knew something was essentially wrong and out of balance about how we used Nature for profit. I’d personally witnessed the decapitation of mountains for mining coal in Appalachia, my home, and living near the Colorado River and Imperial Valley were living proof logic was not an underlying principle for intelligent use of our natural resources in the U.S.

Below are excerpt’s from a memoir, The Little Book of Wisdom, unpublished but under copyright law.

When I began my exploration of truth and justice with indigenous people, I began by examining the nature of these principles in my own life.  This is the story of how I came to face the truth about my life and discover the true nature of Western culture as reflected by contemporary Native Americans whose nations had lived in North America for thousands of years. What I came to see first revealed itself in the English language. My teachers brought out a huge dictionary in my mother tongue as the first text in ultimately four years of intense study. 

With guidance I first studied how my culture expresses dominance in its language, inherited from empires. After instituting values of equality and justice before the law, our government has preferentially applied them in practice. I kept a little notebook of this study which I gave to my teachers.

Next, they suggested I read three books: Basic Call to Consciousness, God is Red, and a novel, The Loon Feather.

Basic Call to Consciousness by John Mohawk contains an address from the Haudenosaunee to the Western World. The book is still in print and is the best comparison of indigenous perspective from European perspective that I have studied. It also contains the founding story of the Haudenosaunee (Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Huron, and the Seneca) nations’ compact for peace and governance. You would know them as the Iroquois Confederacy, a name given by French fur trappers and continued in U.S. use for centuries. It is this body of law and principle that Benjamin Franklin studied with tribal leaders and later presented to the early colonial governments as a good plan upon which the 13 colonies might structure their new nation.

God is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr., is considered the seminal work about Native perspective on religion. It repositions humans from the dominant species for which the universe was created to being just one among many species interrelated and dependent on each other.

The Loon Feather, written by Michigan author, Iola Fuller, is a classic story which takes place mostly on Mackinac Island as a system of wealth based on unlimited extraction ends with the collapse of the beaver nation population. The Mohawk chief, Tecumseh, has been successful in a Pan-American alliance among eastern tribes to oppose the European theft of their homelands. Tecumseh’s daughter, Oneta, lives among her own people and the French and European traders on the island. Eventually she must choose between the values of her Mohawk people and those of her stepfather, a French merchant with the Hudson Bay Company whom her mother married after the death of Tecumseh.  While the author is of Euro descent, I believe my teacher, a daughter of a French mother and Mohawk father, believed the themes presented in Oneta’s story would work for my study of two starkly contrasting systems for living in the world.

And then I had an experience lifted out of time and space in a rundown, dusty thrift shop in Winterhaven, Arizona when Sundance suddenly asked to visit it.

There among stacks of old books and magazines, a cacophony of throw away objects from locals, Sundance found several volumes of the Stockholder’s Board of the Hudson Bay Company.

To be continued…

Resources:

Basic Call to Consciousness

Haudenosaunee Confederacy

God is Red

The Loon Feather Note that I have written a book review about the loon feather here.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A River Divided

From 1990 to 2008 I called Arizona home.

I had accepted a teaching position at Crane Junior High School in Yuma, Arizona. In turn, this would be an education for me beyond my wildest imagination. My degree in special education for students with hearing loss was a rarity. The administration decided that I could teach any kind of learning disability as well. It was a rich if not chaotic teaching experience for me and my brilliant classroom aide, a Yuma local.  

The Lay of the Land

The city had gained the name “the Crossing” when people traversed the Colorado River at Yuma into southern California during the Gold Rush. It was my first encounter with the river which is channeled to water America’s vegetables and grains in the Imperial Valley of California. Its precious water also flowed along quiet canals among date farms and citrus groves throughout the city of Yuma. My school was surrounded by broccoli fields and orange groves. The whole environment was blooming with diversity.

In many ways I felt at home in Yuma which is a sprawling western town with a mashup of cultures and languages. It is a major location for Marine, Naval and Army facilities. I thrived in the milieu and while there, I discovered the history and cultures of the region from my students and their families. They represented the Cocopah and Quechan tribal communities, migrant-farmer and military families, and locals whose families had lived in the region for generations. They grew cotton, dates, fruit and vegetables.

Most of my students spoke Spanish fluently but could not do so at the public school which observed a strict English-only rule. For some of my students, sign language solved the language gap, but for others it burned in their soul with indignation. The area’s history of settler dominance repressed Mexican and Indigenous cultures. Colorado River tribes were numerous up and down the river between Parker, Arizona near Lake Mead and down into Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. Their cultures had lived along the wild river for at least 20,000 years. They farmed in the rich silt left after the spring floods receded, leaving rich silt for planting. The ancient Lower Colorado River has been likened to a Nile culture. Curious about the river’s history and ecology, I spent my time exploring historical sites and learning from elders and regional scholars.

When I first encountered the Colorado, it was unrecognizable to me as it was sprayed at high velocity from circulating sprinklers across the Imperial Valley on the California side of “the crossing”. Precious water evaporated in the dry hot atmosphere before falling to the ground. Row upon row of lettuce, broccoli, and cabbages lapped up what water fell to the ground. As far as the eye could see, this preposterous apparition filled my windshield as I drove through the Imperial Valley at sea level.

My first sight of this phenomenon occurred as I descended from the Continental Divide atop the Laguna Mountains (6500 feet above sea level to below sea level at the base of the mountain and the vast plain of the Imperial Valley. I was driving my son’s El Camino, a great San Diego beach buggy but treacherous in a place as hot as the valley. By the time I pulled into a watering hole near Yuma, I was growing faint. My education in Yuma would include heat stress and heat stroke prevention and how to equip a car for travel through the desert.

In its natural state, the Colorado River began as melt water that ran down through the Rockies, gathering size and speed, carving deep canyons in the red sandstone of northern Arizona. The river ran red where it dropped suddenly down toward the Sonoran Desert, flooding its banks in the spring as it flowed down into Mexico and emptied into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Where it slowed and spread from its banks, a delta region of marshlands formed that were places of high biodiversity. Plenty of fish and game abound. Indigenous fishers and hunters found a wide margin of mesquite tree forests on the banks of the river, as did French fur trappers and Spanish explorers. During the Gold Rush, however, these trees were cut down to burn in the steamboat business that developed to ferry gold hunters back and forth over the river which was a mile wide near Yuma.  Loss of this tiny tree forest meant fewer deer and loss of a foodshed. The mesquite trees release bushels of nutritious bean pods seasonally. Later, scientists discovered the pods, when ground and made into flour, provide natural immunity to diabetes by regulating blood sugar. Mesquite bread is still made and sold regionally. It is naturally sweet and easily digested. (I made pancakes from it). Legends record that people walked across the river on the backs of large fish.

The Lower Colorado River was once a thriving place of wildlife and river cultures. In our Anthropocene era, the river is most recognizable at its highest elevations where it continues to cut the stone of Colorado and Northern Arizona and carry it tumbling south. Lake Mead collects the lion’s share of water, but starting at Parker, Arizona,  water is pumped 700 ft into the air where it falls into an open canal system (Central Arizona Project or CAP) and travels by gravity toward Phoenix, then shimmies through and on to Tucson and drips into Mexico. The rest goes to Nevada and California. All these artificial truncations are due to something called The Law of the River. In short, this is the pact formed originally in 1922 between states on how to parcel out water to each.

Over decades and extensions of the canal system to accommodate burgeoning populations and infrastructure, the river no longer reaches the Gulf of California. It peters out above the marshy delta region and slowly dries up. Recent efforts by federal, state and tribal nations have managed to restore enough river flow to fill key areas of the marshland again. However, a regional 100-year drought is drying the land, while increasing temperatures from climate change have robbed the Rockies of its snowpack and thirsty alpine soil soaks up more river water reducing flow from the source.

At this writing, Hoover dam and Glen Canyon dam and their respective reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at historically low levels. Hoover dam was built in the first decade of the 20th century on faulty predictions of average flow. Calculations were made during an unusually high snowpack in the Rockies. This did not become apparent for many decades. Conservation of water did not start in earnest until about 25 years ago. Development pressures continued until, at present, 40 million people rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, farming and ranching, electrical generation and industrial uses parceled out among the seven western states in the Colorado River Compact. A prolonged drought, increasing temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns threaten this broad area of the United States.

Water is the limiting factor in a desert. My students and I gained insights about overharvesting a natural resource—the river in their backyards.

To be continued …

Route 66: America’s Highway

I grew up on Route 66.

For all practical purposes I was a gypsy girl traveling with my clan: parents, sisters, dogs and cats. Daughter of a career military officer in the United States Air Force, my gyroscope was set to travel over hill and dale. Before I graduated from high school, I had moved 21 times.

What kind of person can live in motion, on the road, always knowing each place is just for now, not knowing where the road turns until my Dad walks into the kitchen one night and announces, “Take down the wallpaper! We’ve got orders!”

Breathless, petrified, happy and sad, my sisters and I rush to the bookcase for the maps. Plattsburgh? Near the Canadian border, wow! Lake Placid and the Olympic village, skiing and skating! Subzero winters…far from Kansas…and my newfound friends…hmmm.

You either go with it or you resist fiercely. I went with it transforming like a chameleon, blending in wherever I went. Try-on the cultural mores, see how they fit!

Somewhere on those dark winding roads, with my arms propped up on the dashboard while all the clan snored, hacked, and wheezed through the cool night, listening to my father drone about his boyhood in rural Tennessee – a theater of stars,  hum of the tires on the asphalt, dad’s baritone voice and gift for storytelling, I fell in love with America.

This big land over which we continued to crisscross became my homeland. It included everybody – Southerners, Yankees, Midwesterners, Californians, Hawaiians, Native Americans, Emigrees, sophisticated New Yorkers, hillbillies and coalminers, and many religions, sects, and points of view. Places on Rt. 66 became points of navigation on my life’s map.

In my first 18 years on Earth I came to know the people we call Americans. And they all influenced me in some way, truly the melting pot. Yet it left me in search of myself. I was a gypsy girl who knew a lot about other people and little about myself. How did I feel, what was my way, my rhythm? I hardly knew. So, I began to search for “me.” That, in part, is what this story is about. It required that I sort out what I cared deeply about and to do so in an ever-changing landscape.

Here then is one citizen’s story cast in the larger American odyssey – offered to the reader as a unique reflection of the great diversity and sometimes hilarious incongruities of American life.

I did not always appreciate the great gift of being an American. As much as people say they hate us, still people flood our shores. Yes, it’s to get a better paying job, no doubt, or to expand into the open space of freedom to pursue happiness. But for me it is about the landscape. This is Turtle Island of the First Americans, imbued with spirit and liberty. Even with the huge impacts of our consumer driven society, it is still a country that takes your breath away.

Come with me on a sweeping journey from coast to coast, a journey that took me into unseen realities behind the foreground of contemporary life. There, I found the America that drew me to her breast as a child. It was in a dusty western town in an American desert that I learned the true nature of Liberty when I reached back in history to the arrival of the first Europeans on the North American continent.

To be continued ….

Jimmy Dean’s Spirit Lives on On Historic Rt. 66

More on heat …

Grist Magazine published an article about the impact of heat on the human body’s systems and organs. I think this is a good time for everyone to understand the risks we face as the world continues to warm, mostly due to human made climate change. Here is the Link to the Article in Grist.

Below is an essay I wrote in 1999. I lived in Tucson, Arizona then but had recently moved from Phoenix where I worked at Arizona State University at the Center for Environmental Studies, now the Global Institute for Sustainability and Innovation. This shows how I tried to deal with the heat island effect.

midsummer-nights-dreamsDownload

A saguaro in the Sonoran Desert swollen with collected rain water which it can hold with expanded flutes on its limbs and trunk. Very shallow roots that run out from the giant extend for up to 100 feet or more to collect precious water.

Dealing with the heat…

ncceh-extreme-heat-event-health-checklist-web_0Download

Note on the graph you can read by Fahrenheit or by Celsius. The graph helps us understand how relative humidity can cause health impacts at lower temperatures. Be sure to read through the first document above about symptoms of heat stroke in children, seniors, and adults.

Note to Europeans: I have been watching news about what is happening there. I see so many standing or hanging out in the sun. Also, many people are wearing dark colors. Keep physical exertion minimal; swimming laps is not very effective because you are stressing your body. Get out of the sun into shade, wear white or light colored, light weight clothing, and hydrate over the day. Look for rehydration tablets with electrolytes. Understand how easy it is to get into trouble. Our bodies have limits on internal temperature. Read the guidelines above. Children are particularly vulnerable to heat as are seniors and people with respiratory disorders.

Look on Amazon by country for rehydration tablets or beverages with electrolytes.

Here is the Amazon link on U.S.

Here is the Amazon link in UK.

Here is the Amazon link for India.

Sit with Dr. John Mohawk as he discusses a living democracy and its renewal by each generation.

Dr. John Mohawk

“Mohawk was a major visionary of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Nations who played a singularly important role in fashioning the intellectual bridge of the traditional Indian movement toward the national and international community. Firmly based in the traditional Seneca Longhouse, he was a practitioner and master singer and orator. He was a writer, journalist, researcher, and lecturer. A specialist in the field of culture and community economic development and an activist and commentator on the cultural survival of indigenous peoples,.” ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mohawk

Helen Hunt Jackson –

Angie Debo:

Democracy is not a passive, one-time project. It is a living conversation among citizens of all ages in the service of a just and free society.

Environmental Costs of A.I. Energy Use: Report from UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health

Read the major points and Executive Summary of the report here:

UNU-INWEH-Report-The_Env_Cost_of_AI-2026Download

Watch a video from Democracy Now about Data Center development on Tribal Lands. Many governing bodies like Tribal Councils or City Councils sign nondisclosure agreements (NDA) with developers of data centers that prevent citizens from knowing what kinds of deals their governing body makes. Link below to segment.

Krystal Two Bulls, Executive Director of Honor the Earth is interviewed by Amy Goodman about tribal nations pushing back on data centers on their lands, many in water stressed regions such as Utah.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/22/krystal_twobulls_indigenous_lands_data_centers