"Dreams"

​... Analyzing Tommy Orange's There There

Dreams for Indigenous Peoples are sacred! When Author Tommy Orange describes, "The bullets were premonitions, ghosts from dreams of a hard, fast future," than added that, "The bullets moved on after moving through us, became the promise of what was to come, the speed and the killing, the hard, fast lines of borders and buildings," we believe Orange is using the idea of sacred dreams as a way to communicate the deepness of the metal bullets that killed our ancestors that could have been part of a dream or prediction of the similar metal cities that would one day try to kill the urban Indians too. 

Before his passing, Author Vine Deloria Jr. contributed a profound book dedicated to Indigenous Peoples that reveals eyewitness accounts and immense power behind the Sacredness of dreams.

Deloria Jr. shared that, ​“Our ancestors invoked the assistance of higher spiritual entities to solve pressing practical problems, such as finding game, making predictions of the future, learning about medicines, participating in healings, conversing with other creatures, finding lost objects, and changing the  course of physical events through a relationship with the higher spirits who controlled the winds, the clouds, the mountains, the thunders, and other phenomena of the natural world” 

​In Chapter One of Dreams-The Approach of the Sacred  Deloria Jr. said, "Initial and unexpected contact with the Great Mysterious power must have come prior to the development of ceremonies and rituals for seeking a relationship with the spirits. We can imagine the surprise of the first person having an unusual, and perhaps prophetic, dream and then discovering that it accurately described an event that came to pass in his or her daily life. Surely, here was reliable information, but from an unknown source that could not be summoned at one’s pleasure. How eagerly people must have yearned for similar dreams that would guide them in their daily lives!

New Tribe Rising editor Angie Ford's copy of Vine Deloria Jr. well worn book is one of her favorites. About "The World We Used to Live In" she said, "I found it very enlightening and soul moving."

​Today, we place special emphasis on the experiences of the vision quest, but surely dreams must have preceded this ritual. That the experiences of the vision quest had a close relationship with 

Author Vine Deloria Jr. Credited as being one of the greatest religious thinkers of the 20th Century. Photo from https://www.colorado.edu/law/vine-deloria-jr

dreams is certain, since many tribes refer to the vision quest encounters as “dreaming.” This nomenclature, of course, makes it nearly impossible a century later to distinguish between the
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​ceremonial and ritual experiences and the messages received in dreams that come to us at night. Sometimes, an elder, relating his dream, would emphasize that a vision appeared to him while he was in a waking state; other times, there was no clarification. Thus, when we are reading the old accounts of unusual happenings, unless there is qualification, we simply have to guess how the experience came about.

Not unexpectedly, dreams represent a significant percentage of the material we will examine and lead us to conclude that in the old days, the ordinary person had as much opportunity to receive special messages as did the people who sought out the experience in visions. One common thread of the people interviewed seems to be that having received some powers in a dream, the benevolent spirit would continue to provide information and songs that would enhance the individual’s capability. A person might well be told in dreams that it would be necessary for him to undertake a vision quest to expand his knowledge and receive more powers. 

In his ""The Sacred Intrusion" on page 9, Deloria Jr. added that, "The dream was not the only means by which the higher powers revealed themselves to people. Equally important were those intrusions of the sacred into people’s everyday lives in ways that startled them. Being keen observers of the natural world, the people could quickly tell when something was amiss from the response of birds and animals to disturbances or the sudden changes of weather patterns."

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Work Cited
https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/world-we-used-to-live-in
https://www.colorado.edu/law/vine-deloria-jr
Deloria Jr., Vine and Philip Deloria. The World We Used to Live in: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men. Fulcrum, 2006.

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