I don’t know why I got to thinking about Del Logan. But it’s almost as though she came through the cloud of witnesses to sit beside me. This doesn’t happen. I’ve rarely felt the presence of my own parents or brother, though I have started praying for them, along with aunts and uncles. A letter Henri Nouwen sent after my mother died, said he’d pray she enter into the joy and peace of the Kingdom, so that’s what I’ve started: praying my beloved dead enter into that joy, that peace. Stephen Freeman in his essay, “Prayers for the Dead”says, “When we pray for those who have died and the forgiveness of their sins, we are asking the same thing, for their communion with God, whether broken or impaired, to be made whole. Of course, we enter mysterious ground in all of this.”
I don’t know why Del came by. Perhaps it’s because Braiding Sweetgrass is sitting on my to be read table. When I picked it up at Barnes, I saw references to the Onondaga tribe of New York that sparked my own memories. Maybe being a fan of Sherman Alexie, an accomplished literary writer and Native American who has been gracious enough to reply to my notes cleared my memories. Maybe hearing Martin Shaw talk about why he taps a drum and the stories he is permitted to tell from his ethnic heritage but not any American Indian stories because they aren’t his people. He has no right to the stories. Neither do I but I will tell you how Adelphina Logan touched my life.
But Del’s presence felt more like she was praying for me. She drew so close I opened Google and typed in her name along with “Onondaga matriarch.” I was shocked I found her so easily. Her picture was the first one in the Hall of the Elders at the Institute of American Indian Studies.
At the bottom of her biography, I discovered she had written a book, Memories of Sweetgrass, and found it on Amazon. I held it close when it arrived. In it, Del teaches the reader how to make Iroquois crafts like a cradle board or corn husk dolls or drums or a broom or cooking utensils. She has preserved traditional ways of making Iroquois material culture. (Seems like we’re losing the importance of real objects that connect us to our past with young people refusing their parents and grandparents’ stuff. Something doesn’t sit right about this.)
Someone should write her stories, I thought as I listened to Del Logan talk with my parents about her culture as a direct descendent of Telegua, Cayuga, Chief of the Iroquois. Her steel gray hair was bound in one of those braids that circles the back of the head like a crown. Her voice rasped, perhaps like the file my farrier uses to round out my horse’s hooves. She didn’t tolerate fools. I heard her confide in my mother about people she knew who had gone wrong.
Someone should write her stories. And someone did. There are two feet worth of her papers and artifacts at State University of New York at Oswego. A scholar of Native American lore, Joan Van Kueren asked for sabbatical to study with Del from 1969 – 1970, the same years I knew her. The precise reads: “As part of this process, Joan Van Kueren was immersed in culture and historical studies through the eyes of the Iroquois, lived with, learned from and assisted Del in her educational efforts both on and off the reservation. “Del” and Joan became close friends and collaborated to create a series of 32 interview/oral-history tapes, educational and craft materials, and a collection of traditional Iroquois legends told to children during the long winters.” She wanted to write a recollection of her friendship with Del, but the website says this project is outstanding.
My mother found Del through mutual friends and asked her to teach a class on Iroquois culture for children in her Helderberg Workshop, a school my mother started to show children that learning could be an adventure. My mother was an ambitious woman defying local educators who thought there was no way children would come to school in the summer on their own. My mother’s classes went from 60 to 600 students within ten years. The Workshop continues to this day.
In Del’s class I learned how to make corn husk dolls and learned that the Iroquois did not show people’s faces. In her book Memories of Sweet Grass, Del says, “Faces were never painted on these dolls since that was thought to give them life” (28). She also said, “It is felt that only the Creator may make a character, and character is revealed in the face” (25). When we visited the New York State Museum in Albany and saw the Iroquois exhibit, I oooo’ed and ah’ed over the skeletons laid in glass cases. I suppose that was the first time I’d seen human bones. Del said, “Oh no. It’s not right to put those people on display.” I was startled by her rebuke but heard how sacred our bodies are, how we shouldn’t be staring at someone’s bones.
Drawing by Del Logan, From Memories of Sweetgrass
At the museum the Iroquois masks frightened me. I didn’t know they are like icons until I read Del’s explanation, how they remind the viewer of the message the mask is portraying. She explains the “Crooked Face” mask reminds the viewer how humans were not satisfied with the Creator’s presence but became proud and said man created the world. He challenged The Creator to a contest: who could move a mountain the farthest? When man peeked at how the Creator was doing it, his face was caught by the moving mountain and smashed. Del says, “In our services the wearer of this mask provides an impersonal reminder that we must be humble and honorable in our dealings with others and ourselves. The stories symbolized by our masks could be compared to the parables of the Christian Bible” (61 – 62). About the Spoon Mouth mask she remarked, “They say it is a curing mask, that we believe this mask has potency to cure the ill. Our people are not willing to correct someone else’s mistakes or misinterpretations” (62-63). She explains how the mask is connected to Iroquois knowledge of how herbs and plants can heal. It is a reminder to take care of our bodies.
My father tried to convert Del to Christianity. We took her to Word of Life, a bible camp in the Adirondacks that played a huge role in my childhood spirituality. But I remember her kindly saying, “I believe the same God.”
It was 1970. The barn rafters stood like presences as I swept the dust off the wood floor. Tears and snot rolled out of me. I don’t remember what grief was driving me that day. A sobbing prayer to be healed? I was a healthy kid but knew there was something broken in me, the Lord needed to repair. A prayer to become more myself along the lines of the popular song, “I want to be me, I want to be free?” A prayer for my friends who didn’t know Jesus? A weeping over not being well liked in school? I don’t remember. All I know was that my tears dropped down to a quiet I could not explain, like how Jesus says he will wipe away our tears at the end of time.
(Some 50 years later I feel badly for my mother whose daughter took the preachers’ preaching seriously about how people were doomed to consuming fire if they didn’t know Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. I walked the mile long road crying my prayers after dark, after the evening news. I kept a list I read down with a prayer. I took seriously the doctrine of original sin, knew how I was not innocent from a toddler. My mother got stuck with a child who had the gift of tears, when neither of us knew how that was a spiritual gift.)
I heard Del’s car drive up. I walked out with that quiet but I would imagine she saw my tear streaked face, how tears dampen a person’s face, pulling it downward, making it looked washed, like rain washes the world, while the clouds are still there. I walked out of the barn and greeted her. I don’t know if she hugged me or not. My family was not one that hugged. She may have read that reserve. She handed me The Golden Book of Horses. It still had the sticker on it: $3.95.
Del inscribed it: “To Katie (She underlined To and Double underlined Katie) Wish you many happy days with your horses. Lovingly Del 1970.” Well that was a blessing that extended down through the years until today. Because I’ve had many happy days with my horses both when I was a young girl exploring remote valleys. The first time as a married woman I got a horse, I found a community at the barn that felt like family, and friends that lasted for thirty years before they flamed out. And the second time I found some women who were happy to walk our horses through the local forest preserves and tell the stories of our lives. And now I have a mare who stands at the barn door, ears forward, happy for my company.
It’s funny how important inscriptions can be. A friend of this blog commented the other week how she was listening to Annie Dillard and how she thought my style rivaled hers. I am reminded of the post card Dillard sent in response to my mailing my collection of poetry to her, where she said, “she liked and enjoyed” the poems. I was negotiating with (fighting over) the things my family left behind with my brother’s widow. My brother had not changed his will. Dillard’s card became a pivot point where I decided to follow my lawyer’s advice and beg off the argument. I turned away from something ugly and petty because of that little sentence by a writer I admire. (My brother’s widow and I settled. Probably the best thing I got was a broken child’s table and my mother’s doll. One day I’ll tell you about the doll.)
My mother wondered if a mound that swept up at the bottom of our sledding hill was was an Indian burial ground. The people who owned our farm before my parents, told stories about chasing off Indians who had camped on the hillside. The mound did not look like a geologic formation so Del and I walked down to take a closer look. I remember the heat and the sweat of walking. We looked at a natural spring that oozed out of the ground making a small wetland. We looked at the river that quietly moved around the flat’s borders in the shape of a Coca Cola bottle mouth.
Del picked up a piece of shale and wrapped bark strips around it, making an ax. In Memories of Sweet Grass, she writes, “our people would obtain bark during the time from the first or middle of May until the third week in June. During this period one can be fairly sure the tree will heal; at any other time the process is forced and the tree may be destroyed” (39). I am struck by the Iroquois care not to destroy the trees they used to make bowls and cooking pots.
We found no arrowheads or artifacts that might have been turned up by farmer’s plows. (A few turns of the river west and the farmer showed us bags of arrowheads. That was on another exploration with archeologist Paul Huey, when he was looking for foundations of houses that had been marked on old maps.) Del said this wasn’t a burial ground though my mother did not believe her. She thought, If it was, would Del have told us? Now I wonder if a Viking settlement is buried there.
Here’s a poem I wrote in graduate school about this walk:
Miss Logan
Del spliced a stick and wove it around
a piece of shale to make a tomahawk
while looking for the burial ground
legend said humped our flat. She knew
through an absence of arrowheads that talk
was wrong. Her fathers didn’t bury there.
She made the gift to breathe peace, aware
Of who slept there. She laid it on the ground.
Maybe Del Logan has drawn near to nudge me to look at those old journals and see who I was at fourteen, an earnest kid who longed for people to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, argued with them and often berated herself. I cracked open my 1970 journal looking for what I might have written about her visit or that hard cry before she arrived. Funny, my first entry marked that day, April 26, 1970: “Del Logan dropped by. Whisper is much calmer now. It was clear today, temp 75 – 80.” That was the first week I was getting to know my new horse, Whisper and the year my mother resigned from running the Helderberg Workshop because she couldn’t control what people taught, that was contrary to her firm beliefs as a Christian. She also needed to make money to put my brother through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
When I worked in Christian publishing, I took the prints from Tom Two Arrows, who also taught classes at the Helderberg Workshop and had them matted and framed. He was a friend of Del’s. And set up a tee pee behind our big barn. It seems to me that was the summer the Iroquois held a pow wow at my parents’ farm to thank my mother for holding classes on Iroquois culture. I sat on the hay stubble, swatting mosquitoes and listened. I don’t remember if Del gave us the Iroquois Creation myth or Tom Two Arrows or John Morrette or Bess Hale, other Iroquis teachers. All I remember was a turtle carried the world on its back. They gave my mother corn husk dolls in a shadow box and a turtle pin. The turtle pin did not make it into my inheritance, but the corn husk dolls did. They bless our guest room.
Let me close with a poem I wrote the awful year my brother died:
A POSSIBLE SALE
My father said he’d sell me to the Indians, camped
on the natural bowl scooped by the Normans Kill.
The Ryders, who owned the farm before chased
them off the land, doused fires, picked up trash.
My father stood in his Jockies, hanging a tie on the linen
room door, the sun flecking his chest hair.
I walked to my room, shut the door sucked in
by the cabinet in a house of doors.
Once when I crouched against the kitchen door crying,
my father said I’ll give you something to cry about.
He gave me so many toys I wondered what doll it would be.
Hazel eyes and blond, I hoped she’d ride horses like me.
My parents invited the matriarch of the Onondaga tribe,
Del Logan, to stay at our house. I wanted to write her stories
before I could write; before she died taking them with her.
She caught me after crying in the barn, parking next to it
and gave me The Golden Book of Horses. She took me with her
when she walked our flat to see if it was a burial ground.
She shook her head. She gave my mother a hatchet
twisted from a branch and shale. My mother said she lied
to protect holy ground. Del said the bones arranged in a case
at the museum should be returned to earth not stared at
by curious children. She twisted cornstalks into dolls without faces,
saying a face was a person’s spirit not to be copied.
I would have sat in her back seat to Syracuse l
istening to stories about the great turtle,
the meaning of masks if my father sold me.
One more thing: This is the same father who loved me enough not to call me home when my mother died, even though my life outside of Chicago was bone dog hard and he grieved his wife so hard it wasn’t long before he followed her out of this life.
Maybe Del came by to nudge me to read these journals from a childhood that was too marvelous and too painful to remember because when my parents and brother died, I lost the stories. My journals don’t have the detail I would have liked, but they reveal an earnest young woman who tried her best to share good news. As I read, I laughed at my school girl crushes and how huffy I was at being teased. Most of those days I don’t remember, even people I don’t recall. But there are others, when I could settle and write the scene. Perhaps next week, I will tell you about another childhood friend or maybe my mother’s doll.
