The Stories Dream Catchers Weave: Chapter 20 Heritage and Honor 

The Stories Dream Catchers Weave: Chapter 20 Heritage and Honor 

Soon I had many unique, beautiful Dream-Catcher designs.  I began to show them to retail stores that specialize in metaphysical themes, selling a few, consigning a few, but always a bit apologetic that I was a white guy "doing Indian things".  During a pre-Christmas holiday in Texas in 1993, I wove several and took them to stores and sold them, wove more that evening, sold them the next day, and so on.  In a little more than a week I sold over $1400 in Dream-Catchers to nine stores in Austin and San Antonio.  When I returned home I planned a marketing excursion to Wisconsin.  Then there were sales journeys to Chicago and Seattle.  I developed a catalog that I could send to shops around the country--but I was always carefully avoiding conflict about being a white guy doing "Indian things." 

Looking for new topics to teach in adult enrichment classes, I submitted a proposal to teach Dream-Catcher weaving.  My first class in 1994 was very popular. The next fall I had full Dream-Catcher classes in most of the adult enrichment programs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.  Each class was a unique entry point to connect with nature and celebrate the Creator and the Creation.  In the first three years I taught over 3,000 people how to weave, including Native Americans, in Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, and California.  Over 200 adults identified themselves as having Native heritage had wanted to learn how to weave Dream-Catchers but were unable to find anyone in their neighborhoods or on the reservations who could teach them.  At least this "white guy" could return some of the "Indian things" to the people who had given so much to the world.    

Then one summer I took the Dream-Catchers to my family's reunion to show what I had been doing, and soon some of the eldest of the family began to reveal some hidden and "embarassing" secrets.  Even my mother was surprised.  My great-grandmother was half-white and half-Indian they said.  Born in 1861, two years before the Sioux Uprising in southern Minnesota, she had married a white man in 1881 and disappeared into white society.  Safe from racism and whiteman's hatred of Indians, nothing was mentioned of Grandma Bertha's dark skin, high cheek bones, and straight, jet-black hair, although some people had referred to her as "Buckskin Bertha."  My mother was never told of her heritage, but when my Dad's father had returned from a visit to the new neighbors who had moved onto the farm nearby, he reported that a "family of Indians" had moved in.   Although my Mom was one of the fairest of the fourteen children, several of her brothers and my cousins are very dark-skinned with profiles that are amazingly "Indian."  I was stunned.  And ecstatic!  I wasn't just a "white guy doing Indian things."  It was my heritage, too!  I was told that I was probably part Ojibwe. 

One day in 1996, my Ojibwe friend, Wabishkie Wun (White Feather), asked me to take him to the reservation to attend a conference that was being held at the Rediscovery Center.  Native American students and professors from several regional colleges and universities were there to meet and rediscover their heritage.  Since I usually carry weaving materials with me, I began to work on a Dream-Catcher.  Students saw me weaving and asked if I would mind if they watched.  Soon I was demonstrating Dream-Catcher weaving to several of the participants.  White Feather wanted to come back the next day and I brought more materials.  One and then another asked if I would show them how to weave a Dream-Catcher.  Before lunch I had ten or more students weaving Dream-Catchers.  One of them gave me the traditional gift for a teaching--tobacco.  Later a professor gave me an heirloom pocket knife.  That evening at the powwow, they gave a bag of gifts to each of the elders. I was given the same gifts.  I was speechless.  As they began the honors dance the elders beckoned for me to join them.  I was truly honored.  I was not just a "white guy doing Indian things."  They understood and appreciated the value of the artistry and spirit that underlies my work.  Dream-Catchers had made a dream come true.  

At the Heritage Center, a museum in central Minnesota, I drummed and gave a talk on the Dream-Catchers and their stories. One of the educators I had met at the Rediscovery Center was Dr. Nancy Harles, the administrator for the American Indian Center at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She had come to hear me speak and afterward she invited me to speak to a group of 72 Native American students and faculty on Energy Healing. Students later commented that they especially appreciated how I told stories and "related science to the spirit world, or the disunion of the two," that "everyone has the ability to do this, they just need to discover it," "learning how to see it [energy] in a more scientific way, how to FEEL it," 'expanding beyond our parameters," "such a wonderful, different way of thinking, good mind set and challenge to current ways of thinking," "opening the mind; knowing my connection." Many of these students were in pre-med and pre-nursing so their new insights could blossom in their careers.

As a member of the Native Arts Circle of Minnesota I learned about an Internet site that displayed museum quality works of indigenous peoples.  When I called them they said that although they had not found any Dream-Catchers of sufficient quality to warrant exhibition on their web site, I should send photos.  In September of 1997 they called and said that these Dream-Catchers had been added to Trophies of Honor: Art Chronicles of Indigenous Peoples, an educational exhibit of the internet, hosted by Mississippi State University and by Griffiths University in Queensland, Australia.  This project chronicles and preserves natvie cultures and art by presenting museum quality works for study and exposure of the culture on behalf of indigenous peoples everywhere. You will see early examples of my work there.

That same year I was a storyteller for the National Native American Very Special Arts Conference in the Minneapolis Convention Center. I showed my Dream-Catchers and told Native children of the Dream-Catcher stories I had been given.

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