SHOOTING A STORY, DANCING TO REMEMBER, RIDING YOUR PRIDE,
AND MAKING NEW REALITY

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The Apache people of the Southwest use names and stories as tools to enter and illuminate the moral power of the land.  The elder Nick Thompson explains that historical tales are used to prod people into living appropriately:  “We shoot each other with them, like arrows”.  If the person who is shot with a tale changes his or her behavior, that person will have a lasting bond with the place described in the tale.  After a relative or friend has told the tale, the place becomes the moral force that draws people back onto the Apache path.  Benson Lewis explains, “I think of that mountain called ‘white rocks lies above in a compact cluster’ as if it were my maternal grandmother”  
Twelve years old, living in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, the adventure novelist Karl May (1842-1912) shot me right in the heart with his tales, just as effective as he did many.  I bonded with the real or symbolic places, the wholeness of tribal life and relations and the moral goodness of the quest.
To this day I lament to my now fourteen year old son:  “why does law-enforcement kill, if you can knock a guy down or shoot him in the knee cap, like Old Shatterhand did” 
“Why kill at all, if you can shoot with a good story”. 
A continent away from the Apache, Karl May’s grandmother also knew how to “shoot”.  “And it stuck, it lasted”.  One particular story, the fable of the lost and forgotten human soul struck little Karl deeply.  “I really, really wanted to find it”.
Grandmother told Karl he was a lost soul too.  “But I’m not lost”, Karl rightfully objected.  Indeed, the gifted boy was firmly rooted in the way of the sacred. 
He saw more than all the adults around him.  He saw the souls, nothing but souls. 
And he and his siblings knew every single frog in the pond behind their home and knew that the frogs knew them too.  He might be little, but he knew the meaning of the greeting of the Sioux people of the Great Plains - Mitakuye Oyasin – all my relations or we are all related.  He was a heavenly child, not lost at all, but the adults around him certainly were. 
As an adult May met more people who thought he was lost, while in fact they were lost themselves.  Ignorant and unwilling to leave their comfort zone, they shot the enlightened messenger, instead of learning the valuable lesson.  Some of these people marked Karl May a criminal, or afflicted with conduct-, dissociative-, or other disorder. 
By using the labels they showed an inability to look for a deeper meaning and purpose of the behavior.  They blamed the victim and colluded with the perpetrator, adding insult to injury.  In reality the labels fit the people in Karl May’s environment. 
Father beat his children mercilessly with tools specially prepared for the violent occasion.  In enlightened countries nowadays, this is a crime by law.  Father failed to recognize his only son as a person in his own right.  He saw the boy as an extension of himself, to be of use in making up for his own personal failures, unhappiness and unrequited longings. 
“He wanted to fulfill in me, what was not fulfilled in him.  He had placed all of his hopes in me…what he could not achieve.”
Not yet two years old Karl was faced with a frightening loss of sight and then at five he had to learn to see again.  “My childhood came to an end now, at the age of five.  It died in the very moment I opened my eyes to see.”  Hardly recovered, father ripped the boy from the safety and protection of grandmother’s love and her hopeful stories.  And then forced insane demands on him, while he bribed the school, even the school inspector, to collude.  He also took the child prodigy for hours to the mire of the local inn.  “I never had what was commonly referred to as “boyhood”.  I was never granted a genuine, real school-mate and boyhood friend.  I became a stranger to my grade, a severe psychological calamity… in respect to my soul it meant a severe painful deprivation.
He (father May) thought I belonged to him.”
Imagine how disorienting this must have been for the little boy, how intensely overwhelming, given the already dire situation, his character and his sensitivity. 
Father’s behavior shows malady of conduct, while the entire town is an accessory.
Although grandmother fostered Karl’s genius and future and mother fought for his seeing eyes, they did not protect him from father’s attacks or excessive demands, even though both were Christians and loved the boy.  Imagine how traumatic this must have been.  What does love mean if it does not protect innocence from violence?  What is love worth when it does not speak up for the ill-treated child and expresses indignation?
How does the boy come to terms with the living hell, if the torment is not seen and acknowledged by his protectors?  How does he deal with the betrayal? 
In their stoicism both grandmother and mother showed strength, yet also a great capacity for denial and dissociation. 
Between the violence, the endless suffering, the hard labor, the assault on the soul and the silence and complicity of the women, the world became unbearable. 
Jean-Paul Sartre writes that genius is not a gift but a way out that one invents in desperate cases.  Carl Jung at twelve learned to induce a fainting spell when faced with stress.
It kept him home from school for months until he was ready to face the ills in the world. 
Ingmar Bergman at the age of seven did not distinguish between magic and reality.  He told a friend that his parents sold him to Schumann’s circus to be trained as an acrobat, together with Esmeralda, the woman on the horse he had seen in the circus, the most beautiful woman in the world.  He was removed from school and severely beaten for the admission.  Nobody bothered to understand why he said what he said.
Karl May fled the madness of his environment through a fugue state fueled by wish-fulfillment.  This was not a foolish escape of a man who could not face reality. 
This was putting highest wisdom and creativity to work in finding the healthiest navigation in a soulless world.   Amnesia and imagination invented a way through and out for May, just like his books invented a way through or out for all of us.
Stalin and many other tyrants shared similar trauma with May.  Stalin even shared a bout of smallpox, which marked him for life on his face and gave him the nickname “Chopura”, the “Pockmarked”.  Haunted by the violence and betrayals of their childhoods, the tyrants, however, were too afraid to face the past and confront the original perpetrators.  They are the weak ones. 
They chose to act on the fears of the injured little boy inside the grown man, through reversing the roles and becoming the aggressors, over and over mindlessly doing what had been done to them.  Their souls lost or dead, they squandered the gift, made new victims and merely delivered the same old, vicious merry go round of rage and defeat.
I believe that genius is a gift AND a way out AND transformation.
Karl May had the wisdom and fortitude to honor the gift, break the chains of fate, and make new reality.  Karl May’s genius is like Luc Skywalker’s genius: you follow the vision and rise above the environment, no matter how brutal the odds. 
With that he shoots the arrow of ultimate triumph and transformation!

I live in the USA since 1985, a decade in New York and now on the beautiful North Shore of Long Island.  When traveling, I include the underbelly of suffering on Native American land.  It has been an eye-opening journey. 
Christopher Columbus and others who intruded upon of the Americas before and after him did what Ingmar Bergman’s and Karl May’s environment did: they never bothered to understand the deeper meaning and purpose of the culture they encountered.  They were lost, just like the ones who threw the labels at Karl May.  They were mindlessly looking for gold or profit, adventure or distraction, disconnected from eternal wisdom, refusing to learn the lesson of unity and freedom and the sacredness of life and land. 
I might have been just twelve when I read the Karl May books, but I instantly understood the connection between silencing the child and obliterating the Aborigine.  
Small wonder Karl May became their spokes person in Europe.  He experienced the same prejudice and persecution, the same broken treaties and identity theft. 
Even the infection with smallpox was common ground, albeit the American Indians’ deliberately orchestrated through biological warfare: the blankets given to them. 
Here too we can speak of insult added to injury, given the sacred and ceremonial value of the blanket in Native American tradition. 
Just like May’s environment, organized religion colluded with violence and enslavement, causing devastating damage on and off the reservations to the natural and sacred tribal ways, in the name of God and bible no less.  Who was savage now. 
Who was living wilderness.  Who was reversing the role and becoming the aggressors, just like the tyrants, doing to the Native Americans, what had been done to them.  Who was merely delivering the same old, ages old merry go round. 
There never was a wild west.  There were uncivilized white men. 
The first people of the Americas were healthy people with a democratic government consisting of the Counsel of Elders.  There were no tyrants, no indulgent or war-crazy monarchs, there was no ownership of land, no taxes, no hunger and no pollution. 
There were no prisons, no locks on doors, no orphanages.  Abandoned children were adopted and punishment for children did not exist. 
Benjamin Franklin who lived close to the Iroquois Nations took their concept of union and liberty and applied it to the U.S. Bill of Rights.  Yet the Iroquois League never received credit, to this day their contribution is not acknowledged.
It is hard to believe, but as late as the nineteen seventies Native Americans were murdered in astounding numbers, especially in the Midwest.
I have crossed the border of Nebraska into South Dakota on my way to Pine Ridge Reservation with a Native American family and was baffled by the state of near panic caused by the excessive police presence on the highways around the reservation.  Never having to witness an unpredictable violent storm or lost my home in a tornado, I was puzzled by the state of alarm weather forecasts caused on the reservation too.  Yet I soon understood that the memory of deadly violence by nature and the memory of deadly violence at the hand of men, were, justifiably, deeply burned into my friend’s brains.  They are, understandably, a traumatized people and there are Native men who inevitably internalized violence and betrayal, repeating this onto their women and children.
Many Nations do well, yet the poverty on some reservations is shameful and has been repudiating the notion that the US is a super power, long before the economic system collapsed.  Some families wonder every day how to keep the gas tank full or their old cars running, some Indian land suffers third world type infrastructure and visiting my adopted family, who’s Elders speak the Lakota language, I am forever buying groceries. 
Frank Suniga, a Mescalero Apache Elder from Oregon and others from Northwestern states, have been fighting for a national day that recognizes tribal heritage.  This year they got their wish, but only for this year.  In the meantime North America has been celebrating Thanksgiving Day since 1863.  The celebration is attached to the fact that the American Indians kept the pilgrims alive with turkey and other foods.  There is not much to celebrate or be grateful for vice versa and this is overlooked since 1863 too. 
Most Americans are not aware that they collude with the perpetrators year after year, as they celebrate Thanksgiving Day, adding insult to injury for Native Nations.
Even so, one can witness all through Indian country:  the American Indian is on the rise.
My favorite experience is attending the yearly Powwow, in late summer, four days of celebration and ceremony.  The families put up tents for shelter and sleeping and I sit in the circle listening to the drumming for hours, watching the dancing.  The sun beats down on the circle, women, men and children in full regalia, layered and heavy, mingle in all colors of the rainbow.  Even though the temperature may reach over 100 degrees, the dancers keep on dancing.  I marvel as I witness the survival of the American Indian spirit in every movement of the shawl, the shuffle of the moccasins, the sound of the whistles, the rustle of the cones, bells and jingles. 
Native American prisoners are allowed by law to practice their religion.  I once spend an entire day in a maximum-security prison in the Midwest, celebrating a Powwow with about 75 Native American prisoners, many of them young and incarcerated for problems relating to their substance abuse.  I talked with as many as possible.  One should never deny people’s personal responsibility, however, after hearing their stories the link with the devastating past was shockingly obvious.
Nevertheless, the first peoples of the Americas are breaking the chains of fate and rebuilding their Nations.  They are reclaiming their health through treatment in clinics for diabetes, alcohol- and drug addiction.  They are reclaiming their vitality through education and healing circles.  “It involves an opening prayer, followed by the expression of the emotional consequences of the misdeed by all who have been effected.  An Elder gives guidance from stories, traditions and ceremonies.  All of the parties involved, both, victims and wrongdoer, their relatives and friends, discuss and decide how to restore the balance and restore the damage done.” 
Robert Yassie, Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation, calls this “Hozhooji Naat’aanii – talking things out in a good way”.  He refers to the Navajo process as “peacemaking”, where, “the most important piece of paper is the Kleenex tissue for drying tears.” 
Karl May would have loved this peacemaking, which, if adopted wider in the US and in other countries, could bring healing all over the world.
Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, writes books and screenplays about contemporary American Indians with titles like Reservation Blues, The Toughest Indian in the World, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Smoke Signals. 
I am sure beside the Great Spirit, Karl May is smiling down on him from the skies.
Ron His Horse is Thunder, the great-great-great grandson of Lakota Chief Sitting Bull and Wendell Yellow Bull from Pine Ridge Reservation are helping children and young adults to get in touch with their Native American heritage through horse riding.
Riding teaches them to break the indoctrination – give up your Native American soul or else you will not survive – their ancestors suffered.  While riding the riders learn about their history, learn to be proud of their heritage and recover tribal community and tribal soul. It literally is a ride of passage and a preservation of the dignity and genius of the glorious American Indian survivor.
First peoples all across Indian land and urban Indian communities are shooting stories, dancing to remember, riding their pride and making new reality. 
They are the strong and brave ones. They follow the vision and rise above the environment, no matter how brutal the odds. 
With that they shoot the arrow of ultimate triumph and transformation!

Quotes and info from:    
*Teaching Spirits by Joseph Epes Brown, page 27 and 29
*Mein Leben und Streben by Karl May, from the English translation by Gunter Olesch,                 page 11-12-13-19-14-20
*Booklet White Buffalo Calf Society, Inc., serving the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota since 1977
*Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

This article is published in Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft.  Nummer 160-June 2009, Germany.
For more on the unforgettable Karl May go to www.karl-may-gesellschaft.de

For a German translation by Joachim Biermann click on the next article:
Wie man mit einer Geschichte schiesst, zur Erinnerung tanzt, zur Wiederherstellung seines Stolzes reitet und neue Wirklichkeit schafft.

For a Dutch translation by Sophia Wien click on the next article:

Een verhaal schieten, dansen om te herinneren, je luister rijden, en een nieuwe realiteit maken.