Can Creativity Create Connection?

Melanie Maure
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

I am part of the ancestry who poisoned their stream.

This thought is a frequent flyer in my mind, and it returns as I close my eyes, lean my head back into one of the rough wood poles encircling the pavilion and holding energy in this space. This is not my first Powwow, it is my second.

I slide back three decades and recall the first time. How the drums banged fists into my chest, the singing clutched the nerve controlling my sensitivity to oppression, maltreatment, ignorance and shook it awake — and not in a gentle mothering sort of way. It was a bad-tooth zinger — ‘Wake up. Open your eyes. This matters. Do you feel it?’.

Thirty years ago, I sat high on a worn bleacher seat with a bad haircut and a brooding heart. I was in another place. I was another person. I was not yet far enough into the woods of life to describe, explain, or comprehend resonance of the soul. So I sat on my hands and tried to hide my tears behind flimsy young adult aloofness, all the while, spectacular, impassioned people pounded their story boots into the earth, swooped feathers through the air and put on colorful displays of passion and power, dance and song that could bring the most magnificent of God’s creatures to shame.

I knew so little. As it should be at 18. But I knew enough to recognize a people with roots so far reaching it took my breath. I knew enough to feel shame that my ancestry — the blood in my veins — was responsible for poisoning the stream of their spirit. I remember looking at my hands that day. The sun caught the bits of silver on my palm transferred to my skin from a Coors Light label only an hour before. Somewhere in my wiser brain, I knew; the DNA that makes up my long white fingers and strong pale hands is responsible for attempting to pull their roots. The guilt was salty in my mouth.

I could have. I likely should have. It would be interesting to surmise what would have happened to my soul if I’d stayed for more than 30 minutes that day. If I had let myself fall into it all — mine, theirs, ours, the history, the drums, the singing, the colour, the swirling, the resonance –at 18 years of age.

“I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

At that age, I was still acquiescing. The gravity of following my soul, or in that case — staying put because ‘this matters’ — had not yet landed.

Nothing else that followed that day stands out in my memory. The volume was turned down the moment I stepped out of that energy, the reception and resonance grew fuzzy. I can guess, with precise accuracy, I went somewhere else, stood in a circle with other people like me, got more beer label sparkles on my hands. And went back to sleep.

My slumber has slipped away through the years. As is meant to happen. Why else are we here, other than to evolve and wake up to find we are all the same stuff?

And now, as the sun presses against my closed lids, the drums bring my cells to their DNA laced feet, once again. I welcome the percussion into my chest, into my heart by way of my ear canals. Their voices speak in a tongue my brain has never learned, but my heart knows it, syllables by fierce syllable. I am still white. The blood in my veins is still responsible. But now, instead of hiding, I let the tears slide over my pale cheeks. Instead of walking away, I stay. Instead of diving into the sucking guilt and shame, I join the blazing joy I see in front of me and step into the whisper I heard three decades past.

“Open your eyes. This matters. Do you feel it?”

I answer by dropping to my belly on the grass, holding the camera to my green eye. I give of my gifts; I capture images of radiant, wild, divine roots as they dance and grow and draw from pristine streams. I see it is a fool who believes something this sacred could ever be destroyed.

To see more images of Creative Connection and the Similkameen Powwow go to:

https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/profile/1416462/

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