Life Promotion

[In conversation with Zahgausgai, Elder John Rice]

 “I can remember my grandmother lived in a small shack.  It wasn’t very big, but it had two rooms, a kitchen and then a bedroom and living room, it was kind of hard for her because it was really small. In my dream I went to visit her, and she was really happy that I came to see her.  When I walked through her kitchen and went into her living room it was full. The only way I could say it, there were thousands of people in that small room, it was just full of people.  I couldn’t understand how such a small house could have so many people in it.  But it was my grandmothers, so I went along with what I was seeing.  After looking around the room at people, I can remember specifically what kind of people I saw. They seemed like all kinds of people, they weren’t just Nish, they were a mixture of people.  My grandmother said, come on with me. Well, she actually said, John Isaac, come with me, that was my name when I was a little boy because my father’s name was John. They called me my grandfather’s name – John Isaac.  She said, come with me and we went into her kitchen, and there was a corner cabinet in her kitchen, and she opened it up.  When I looked in there, that little cabinet had no dimensions, it was immense, it was so big inside.  So what she did was pull out this roll and the eagle feathers were in this big long roll, they were rolled horizontally and in between each tip and in between each stem was an orange orb. There was no physical connection. The orb was between each end and every other feather. And so that’s what she did, she took that roll of eagle feathers, and she started unrolling and from what I saw her doing, as she unrolled that roll of feathers it looked like it was never ending, it looked like it went on forever is what I saw. As she pulled all that out, it was just the way she looked, it was like one of those looks like this was certain. Or this is the truth.

The term in Ojibwe we say geget, it means the truth and that was the essence I got from her from her at that time. Then when the Eagles staff came to feather carriers, those are the elements you in it. Ed and I talked about what would it be, feather carriers in leadership for life promotion, and they would be eagle feathers. And we know that the eagle feather symbolizes life. When you receive an eagle feather you’ve been given life is what our teaching says. So in this roll of feathers that came out, that’s what it meant, unlimited life would come from feather carriers, it would go on forever that is the sense I got from that dream.

But also that color orange in the but they weren’t. They weren’t physical things, they were orbs, they were energy of orange color. In that color orange, they are just like on the Miikans, you see this semi circles at each end, one is sunrise and one is sunset, and at the center of those is that color orange, the centre of a new day and the end of the day, so that’s what I saw at each of the feathers.  The eagle feather itself you hear various teachings on it, the stem that goes on the middle. There’s little things that go off to the side. I saw that but I also saw the Miikans were in each feather, beginning of life, transitioning from the end of life is what I saw in that. So that was the dream. The big thing from that dream other than it being my grandmother, was her little house and how it housed so many people.  In my dream they weren’t spirits are actual physical people but there were just thousands of them in her little room. That was the same with the cabinet that held the roll of feathers. It had no size, it was huge inside. And she unrolled the feathers, you could see that the roll went on forever. Those are some of the elements that are in Feather Carriers, that it’s forever, when we do what we’re doing in terms of life promotion, that’s forever our people will pick that up again. The way we were before.”