memes

lol ... this is a great thread for this kind of stuff for me. I'm Indigenous Ojibway-Cree from northern Ontario and I grew up with these stories.

My uncle was born the raised in the bush for about the first 20 years of his life without much. This would be about a hundred years ago now. He said he learned to hunt and trap before his family could use firearms so he knew how to live out there.

He used to tell us stories of how our people used to have a ceremony called the 'shaking tent'. It's a small little shelter about four or five feet high where an Elder, spirit leader or shaman would go in, go into a trance and be able to communicate with the spirits or other shamans far away or even see family, friends or enemies. When we told my uncle about the internet, he wasn't surprised, he used to say, our people were already doing that a long time ago.

I remember one story he repeated often when we were kids. It was about how a young man upset a leading shaman who was too proud and boastful and the young man called him out. The shaman told him he was wrong to do that and that he was being warned that the young man was no in danger. The young man went away from them all with his family and days away and hundreds of miles away he went about his life. Late one night as they sat around his teepee resting ... a sudden flash appeared and a spear appeared out of thin air .. the young man was swift, caught the spear mid air and threw it back into the light. They said that mitchi-mindoo, the evil spirits were playing tricks again.

Months later, they learned that the shaman that had threatened him had suddenly died. They were told that he was found in his shaking tent one day with a spear in his chest.

I always just ignored this story as a kid ... but a few years before my uncle died, he repeated the story to me. He said the young man was his father, my grandfather and that he claimed that he remembered as a little child seeing that flash of light.

I was never able to really believe or disbelieve what he said or what he claimed. It was my uncle who was full of stories like this and we could never really ever tell if what he said was truth, legend, historical fact or just embellishment.