SWEATLODGE DEATHS, TRADITION & PROFITS pt.2

I don’t see the light of wisdom in the saga of the sweatlodge deaths a couple weeks ago in Arizona. I just saw CBS anchor, Harry Smith, interview Dr. Barbara Bunn, of Texas, who survived James Arthur Ray’s sweatlodge ceremony. It was a short interview but it was packed with pain, and revelation. Her telling dove into the viewer’s minds on different levels. A doctor, a blond, a solid individual with a rugged beauty struggling to fashion her words to convey the bewildering experience into a framed image of the contradictions of a ceremony gone awry. Her struggle to control her emotions and be as articulate as possible fell away recollecting how distant and uncaring the pourer was then and now. She said, “He abandoned us!” That interview was over an hour ago, and my own emotions are struggling within me trying to grasp the picture of an ancient ceremony gone to hell.


Dr. Bunn was Kirby Brown’s roommate. Ms. Brown died in the lodge, in a ceremony where people were not allowed to leave when the door was closed. Dr. Bunn said on the 5th round someone was unconscious.


"I can't get her to move. I can't get her to wake up," Bunn recalls hearing from two sides of the 415-square-foot sweat lodge. Ray's response: "Leave her alone, she'll be dealt with in the next round."


Her early morning interview describes a man, after the 6th round, whose eye blood vessels had burst. She saw people trying to resuscitate people for as long as fifteen minutes. She paired people up to sustain life, and created a system to keep people conscious by calling their names, and making sure no one was left alone feeling abandon. At this point she became more than a doctor. She became a mother insuring that the sense of abandonment dissipated into hope of living. How many of the survivors lived because a mother’s spirit resurrected the urge to live, and not wallow in the hopelessness of being abandon in the panic of darkness, and extreme heat?


At some point a discussion, and then action must begin among Wisdom Keepers, and others of similar kilt about the spirit, the mentality, and the consciousness of the Conqueror’s spirit dominate in white males. It is part of the spiritual responsibility of women, I sense, white women, in particular, to become deeply engaged in this work. It is fundamental to the change we need as a nation, as people, The world suffers from this aura. This paradigm dominated Mr. Ray’s lodge ceremony, and the abandonment Dr. Bunn painfully described is an attribute of white male entitlement, and the privilege of this paradigm. This paradigm rests in the bosom of conquering species, men, and brokers of power.


I am a man. I understand this paradigm. What man born in these times does not understand that this belief-system we are taught is a right to rule and dominate? But this paradigm is parceled out differently in American culture. Privilege goes to white men, and opportunity goes to other men, and hope of being a man to others. It was parceled out different to Black men. Until African-Americans were given full citizenship in the late 1960’s the right to protect our families hung on the whim of a white man’s or a white mob’s inclination. Native-American men were parceled out a different kind of male dominant medicine. It hinged on the brink of joblessness, and a deep sense of owning land with no ability to become a man who provides for his people as a warrior, a farmer, or a landowner. Chinese men were not allowed to have their families in the country as they built railroads. In place of wife and family prostitutes were sent to them after hard backbreaking work. And nowadays Chinese, Japanese, and Korean men operate from a different sense of privilege through economics, business and money. And this story goes on.


Being a man requires thought, and introspection. It, like patriotism, cannot be accepted superficially. So profound a state of being is manhood that it requires initiation, ceremony, and training from within the inner terrain of being to the outward touching of the world. Men, like me, need to perform as men, as Elders who understand, in depth their masculinity, their powers, their role, and relationship to Earth, Spirit, woman, family, children and the sacred spaces of the Wombs they come from and enter in a lifetime of being a man.


It is not an easy task being a man for ordinary men a mere breathe from a primal state of being a boy. But without our intervention how will women feel confident enough to enter into their powers, their medicine into the development of boys into men, and men into Men? It is a fearful thing for women to enter into this arena without the preparatory work of men like myself to pave the way into the core beliefs of men, and their creation stories. Without the balance of mother’s energies, mother’s words, and her own struggle against this structure the birth of a boy into a man is crippled, stunted by an ill constructed birth canal.


These are my words, my thoughts.

~Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

http://keeperofstories.blogspot.com/2009/10/sweat-lodge-deaths-tradition-profits.html