Wind River Medicine

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-The tidy, bare homes and scruffy yards of Wind River Indian Reservation reflect a tough existence where strong winds, extreme temperatures and little moisture limit the possibilities for livelihood.

Here, Stanford Addison is a horse gentler and spiritualist. He works from a wheelchair and lives on a small piece of land, where modular homes, horse pens, and old cars mark the fringe of the expansive Wind River Range.

He is one of about 5,000 Northern Arapaho, or Iñunaina – descendants of a people pushed to the southern portion of the Reservation in 1878 after wars with the white man, and one particularly barbaric U.S. Army offensive called the Sand Hill Massacre.

Ethete road, which leads to Addison’s compound, passes the shiny new sign for the Little Wind River Casino, a large blue truck-stop-style convenience mart and the American Indian High School. Then, as quickly as it began, Ethete is over.

Turning onto 17 Mile Road, and then onto a gravel road, I found Addison’s small blue modular house flanked by a horse corral, several cars and a trailer home. An ever-changing number of relatives, neighbors, white visitors and horses occupied the compound during my visit.

When I arrived, a dozen American Indian children were having a water balloon fight on the front porch and wheelchair ramp, where an older boy was relentlessly soaking three shrieking little kids.

“Are you the reporter from Jackson,” the kid asked as I approached the house.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing what was about to happen.

I clutched my camera and quickly backpedalled, while he and a couple of cohorts launched balloons at me, which exploded at my feet.
“I’ll tell him you’re here,” he said, and went inside. The balloon attack was a friendly welcome.

I walked through the kitchen and into a dark room where Addison was lying on his side, smoking a Kool Filter King, a menthol cigarette held by a home-made wire loop attached to a black handle. A couple of tubes snaked out from under his atrophied body, mostly covered by a sheet. A remote control and cordless phone lay by his head and a small square of light shone through the open window on his face.

“Hey,” he said. “How was the drive?”
He spoke in a simple and welcoming cadence.
I told him about the water balloon fight.
“They didn’t try to hit you did they?” he asked.
Of course they did.

“It’s Friday, so they’re all excited,” he said.
There are always kids around, he said. They like to come over and ride horses, or just hang out and play.

“Usually, when I’m in my wheelchair, there’s way more than that.”
“It’s a crisis center,” he said with a chuckle. “I just try to show them that there’s something else out there.”

Addison tells me that he’s not a medicine man, but he must be called a healer and a spiritual leader for the Northern Arapahoe.

People from all over the world come to learn how to gentle horses or sit in his sweat lodge, a dome of wool blankets around a pit, into which hot rocks are shoveled to facilitate prayers. Addison won’t give many details about what happens in the lodge.

“I can’t talk too much about it… it’s like, you have to experience it,” Addison said. “Words sometimes easily misinterpret things.”

He is anxious, fighting off anger, because he has been bedridden for weeks, and can’t have a sweat until next Wednesday.

The phone rings every few minutes, sometimes a phone call asking when Addison will be ready to have another sweat, while some are calls from young Indians trying to locate a friend, and some are calls from reporters.

A recent book by Lisa Jones - Broken: A Love Story, has increased their frequency.
“With the book out, I’m getting calls all the time,” Addison said. “I already got three calls this morning, just from people wanting to come do an interview.”
Humble, Addison pretends he doesn’t understand why there is so much interest in him these days, but it is because he is a quadriplegic wise-man who smokes menthol cigarettes as an offering to the Spirits and plays mentor to twenty-somethings in Insane Clown Posse T-shirts, teenage girls who blare hip-hop in his living room and a bevy of squealing children. He is like a shaman for the 21st century.

And there are also the well-known horse clinics, where ranchers and housewives alike learn to gentle wild horses. The people who come to learn his techniques are often the ones who are broken.

“When they come over here and do a horse they get that connection, they sense what we are, that we are connected,” Addison said.
Other people just come.

“Like the guy from London, I call him London Dave, he had a dream about me in London and he came over,” Addison said. “And he kept on telling me, ‘Man I had a dream that you were the one and you was going to actually …  going to give, like, advice,’” Addison said.

“He would try different things, like, spiritual things, and he could never really feel I guess what he wanted to feel out of them, and then when he came over and met me then he saw that it was possible every day to connect with your creator,” Addison said.

“The one from California … his parents had just told him that he was adopted, and he had a dream that there’d be a man in Wyoming who could help him find his parents …  his real parents,” Addison said. “And four days later he was talking to this guy who’s my nephew who was down there in California.

“And he was telling his dream and my nephew goes ‘I‘m from Wyoming,’ he goes ‘Do you know anybody in Wyoming.’ And he said ‘Yeah, my uncle lives in Wyoming and he can heal in different ways.’ He just asked for directions and he drew him the way on a matchbook, and the found me.”
“And what happened when he got here?”
“Uh, I helped him to find his parents.
“Really, did he find them?”
“Uh-huh.”

But Addison said that he no longer acts like a psychic, a gift for which some people abused him, he said. They wanted to know things like whether their brother would survive cancer, or maybe if their father was going to die soon, if their father had a will, and if they were in it.

Instead he offers his sweat lodge, horse knowledge, mentorship for young Indians, and his medicines, which sit by his bed in leather pouches.

Addison told me about his childhood, about being a rowdy teenager who could take two steps and jump up and kick a basketball net, and who had anger about mixed signals sent to him by native religion and Catholicism, and anger at school about racism.

One time he choked a math teacher who called him a dumb Indian.
“He went all limp on me and all the other students were kickin’ me, pullin’ my hair and tellin’ me to let him go,” Addison said. “I didn’t squeeze him off long enough for him to die, though.”

Because of the incident, he had to get his GED at a boarding school in Albuquerque, N.M., where he continued “causin’ trouble.” He was a karate expert who sold pot, acid, and coke, and robbed other drug dealers. He caroused with women.

“I was arrogant. I don’t know … I didn’t care about anybody’s feeling or how I was conducting myself,” Addison said. “I didn’t really care what the elders were telling me either … I was still trying to hold on or fight for a cause that didn’t’ exist”
“What was that cause,” I asked
“I don’t know, I guess it was to fight the white man.”

“Right now what is there left between you and the white guy to settle?” I asked.
“It is the understanding,” Addison said.
That is his mission, to spread understanding.

At one point in our conversation, the wind outside picked up and light and breeze washed into the room from the big bright valley and over Addison’s pocked face and the skin of his bare chest. We each had a Kool, which he stores in a black cigarette case with silver dice printed on it.

He watched The Food Network on a large TV, his eyes wandering to it every time he tipped back his traveler mug full of diet orange soda.
Addison described one of the times, before his accident, when the spirits first beckoned him. He was out for a ride on the range behind his house.

“I was doin’ a horse… I was getting it started, and I was taking it out in the hills. Back then there were no four-wheel-drives on the reservation and I saw this person on a ridge out there. I was wondering ‘what the heck are they doin’ all the way out here, man,’ I had already driven six miles.”

I start headin’ over there because I thought maybe he was down or something. So when I got over, there was nobody there, there was like a little structure, a sweathouse or like a little dome,” Addison said.

Mystified that the man had disappeared, he left a cigarette as an offering and rode back. The spirits kept trying to communicate to Addison, but he wouldn’t listen.
“I was having dreams, and I’d see different things but I wouldn’t pay attention to them,” Addison said. “It was kind of like the wind, you know, you don’t see it but you know it’s there.”

Four nights before Halloween of 1979, Addison had a dream in which he saw himself in a car accident.

“I shoulda got smart, I shoulda learned to love, I should have did something to, you know, to release it in a good way instead of holding it in, carrying it and making it stronger, you know by drinking and getting rowdy,” Addison said.

On Halloween, the truck in which he rode flipped, and he became pinned under the doorframe. The first emergency responders jacked up the truck, which slipped, dropping the truck back on him and severing his spinal cord. He lost the use of his body, besides some movement in his arms and his head.

He says that other Indians on the reservation who have become paraplegic only lived for a few years longer, put down by sadness and a lost will to live. He was trying to expedite that process.

“I was trying to end my life, because I didn’t … like what the results of the accident, so I didn’t think I could live,” he said. He was trying to “put out the light.”
“I was afraid for people to see me because all my friends, every time they saw me they would start crying because they didn’t like the way that I was,” Addison said. “And I’d always look at the things that I couldn’t do, you know, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t get on a horse, I couldn’t do anything.”

“I kept on lookin’ to see what I had lost, and one day I was sitting there and watching one of my friends from South Dakota do this horse and I was like ‘that horse is getting real mad and frustrated’,” Addison said. “I started looking at the things I could do, because I could see the mistakes he was doing to that horse, makin’ it buck, so I started to tell him what I saw and he started listening to me and we started working together.”

In 1983 Addison had discovered his intuition with horses.  From there, his spiritual knowledge has grown, and medicines have come to him. He has been asked to run for tribal council a few times, he says, but he doesn’t ever want to run.

“I was like, ‘Man, I don’t want to have to do that, because then I’d have take sides,’ and when you start taking sides, you start thinking about yourself and not other people,” Addison said. “And that’s what these medicines came to me for is these people, and I want to do the people’s work.”
Addison gestures to a few leather pouches at his bedside.
“So what are those medicines?” I asked.

“They’re just the medicines that I’ve got,” Stanford replied. His knack for literal humor is uncanny. But then he continued.

“Some are from plants and some come from animals. They’ve been gone for a while cause they said the way the world was turning that it was too fast and they would easily come back in their own time … you know, so they won’t be abused or misunderstood,” he said.

“My grandpa had medicines, but he didn’t want to leave them to anybody, because of the way things are going. Especially with these cars, you know how fast they can go, like it used to take ‘em a day and a half to get from Ethete to Riverton, and now it takes 20 minutes,” Addison said. “Things were moving too fast for them to produce medicines because where the medicines come from, it’s real slow.”
He uses “they” to refer to old elders, to spirits and to things. It is confusing, but his point is that the spirits were returning to inhabit the medicines, and make them potent again, after they shied away during more hectic times.
But questions about the medicines, like the sweat lodges, didn’t reap much information.

“Eyhh, there’s stuff I could tell you, but people won’t understand it, or take it the wrong way,” Addison said.

The objects in the bag are just the shell of the medicine, Addison said; for instance, a piece of cedar as protection or an herb to treat bronchitis. But the spirits inhabit the objects, and that is their filling and that’s where the power comes from, he said.

I wrangled myself from the dark room because I though Addison was getting tired.
I wondered at the seven hours I had driven to spend two with this magical man, Stanford Addison, who didn’t stare into my soul and tell me its purpose, even though I thought he was going to. Instead I had a Kool and a lot to think about.
“Come back for a sweat, man,” he said as I walked away. JHW

Courtesy Sarah Kariko
Stanford Addison

PERMALINK:
Wind River Medicine | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

Leave a Comment