CAROL: Is there such a thing as non-native people?

JIMI: I don't think so. The question is native from where? Also, where do you think you are from and where do you feel connected to? I can say I am native to Cambridge, Massachusetts, because I've been here all my life. I look around and I see a lot of other people that I do not consider to be native to this area. That's a judgment on my part because I have been here for X amount of years and you have only been here for a fraction of that. So from my perspective you are not a native. But from your perspective you may have only been here for five years and feel really connected — more connected than you have anywhere else. So you feel this is where you are from because it is part of your home. It's a matter of perspective. 

CAROL: You have been working with drumming and the dancing community for how many years?

JIMI: Almost thirty years.

CAROL: You once said you experienced a similar kind of "rights" issue with the African drumming community.

JIMI: Yes. Babatunde Olantunji came to the United States in the 50's to pursue graduate degree studies in political science. He had this album Drums of Passion, and after a few years he fell in to teaching drumming. He started reaching out to African Americans thinking that he would bring some of his culture — our culture — back to the people here that were removed from it. Being African and being African American are two different worlds. The Black Power movement was also becoming more powerful around that time and some of that was about trying to get away from the stereotypes of being jungle bunnies, barefoot, with grass skirts in the jungle. What Babatunde was teaching was a very primitive art form and it did not really fit with the image of the modern black man, so people were somewhat shunning it. As a teacher, then, he went out and found people who would accept him as their teacher and a lot of them were white. They had been learning from him for many, many years so those people now, years later, want to teach. And they are white. What has happened now is there are a lot of African Americans that have not been connected with a culture, do not know how to drum, do not drum, and then they see white folks drumming. Then they feel these people are ripping off our culture. There is a real dilemma there. Of course, there are a lot of African Americans and other folks here that have been with the drum for many years — many of them have made their life out of it — but there are also a lot of white folks that drum and have been drumming for many, many years and have gotten a lot out of it. Who is to say which can teach and which cannot?

CAROL: The drumming that you are using, how does this relate to shamanic practice?

JIMI: I believe anytime anyone picks up a drum and starts drumming, there is energy. Whether they are aware of that or not is another thing, but they raise energy. My belief is drumming and dancing around a fire is the original church, the original nightclub, and that is why people are doing it again today and it is still fresh and new. All the nightclubs and theme parks that come along are trying to emulate that energy and that essence, but there is no substitute.

CAROL: What is that energy and essence?

JIMI: That energy is drumming and dancing around a fire and feeling safe and open and allowing yourself to trance out and go on a journey that just pulls you out of your body. It is just beyond words. It is more of a feeling. What we do around the fire is create the safety and create the space that allows people to do their shamanic work, which is dancing the truth and being witnessed.

CAROL: If this is a Native practice that has been practiced for generations or hundreds of years, does that mean their culture owns it or is it open to white urban cultures like ours?

JIMI: The drum is from all over the world. The drum is universally used in all spiritual practices to connect with the spirit and raise energy. I feel that everybody has the right to that primal essence. We all have a heartbeat. We all walk in rhythm. We all have a natural rhythm inside of us that, in large part, the Western world has become disconnected from. Now we are finding our way back to it. I believe that any culture that does not evolve and grow is a lost culture and becomes dead. We need to pass this information on to people who feel moved to teach. We need to teach whoever will listen because the teachers want to pass on their knowledge. I think that goes beyond skin, it goes beyond culture and it should be accessible to anyone who wants to seek it. When we start limiting it, that is when we really start going against the flow.

CAROL: But what about the way that these teachings are coming into white urban cultures, through commercial means, through buying the teachings? It is certainly not the Native way and does not seem respectful. This seems to be where the problem lies.

JIMI: I, too, also have problems with that because what I have been taught is that anyone who calls themselves a shaman is not one. You are shaman because people come to you and feel the energy of your ability to heal people. They trust you. Some of that is intuitive and some is learned. We have appropriated in our culture many things from the Native and indigenous cultures-—the Constitution, our way of government—things that people are not aware of do come from those traditions. The problem is that a lot of our own people, a lot of Native people, have been disenfranchised from their culture, and now they see other people picking it up. They feel cheated.

CAROL: And rightfully so. It needs to be balanced.

JIMI: The beginning of the healing is for us to come out of the denial that the annihilation of Native cultures happened. And let's come out of the guilt that it happened because guilt paralyzes people from action. Let's recognize it for what it is so we can heal and move on together. There were three hundred or so treaties with the U.S. government and the Native people here. Every single one of them has been broken.

CAROL: How do you put a value on that? That damage can never be repaired.

JIMI: When the trinkets were given for Long Island it was just a miscommunication. The Native people were not selling the island. They did not own it in the first place. They were given these gifts to share. But the sharing was impossible because there was a wave of more settlers coming behind the original settlers. It was just more than your imagination, until there were people everywhere.

CAROL: How could we go about rectifying the past?

JIMI: By relearning our history. Every major event in history up to the present has pretty much been a lie. People need to hear the truth. They need to hear what really happened between the settlers and between the indigenous people here. 

CAROL: What is the truth?

JIMI: The truth is that a lot of people were fleeing Europe during the time this country was being settled and they came here. They saw land ripe for the picking. It started with Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus said ' I call these people in deus.' In God. People of God. Never had he seen people in such perfect harmony with their environment.

CAROL: That is in the history books. What is not in the history books?

JIMI: The last line he said was "These people will make perfect slaves."

CAROL: (Gasp) How chilling!

JIMI: That's just the tip of the iceberg in historical information that people in this country need to be aware of.

CAROL: You related to me a very extraordinary story about what happened in 1992 during the 500th anniversary celebrations of Christopher Columbus. Could you tell that story again?

JIMI: The Spanish government had a project of replicas of Columbus' ships — modern replicas with motors and other modern amenities. They were touring around the world as a tourist attraction charging people to go on the boats to see them. I took this as a personal offense, because to do this again 500 years later and celebrate it and make all this money on an atrocity, that is wrong. There were a lot of demonstrations in the cities where these boats landed. One boat. The Nina, was coming to the Children's Museum in Boston. I called the museum director, told him who I was and that I wanted to bring a few people down to drum and chant some prayers, have a small peaceful action, and educate people on the native story of Columbus. He said that sounded fine, but was a little cautious, rightfully so. They really did not know what boat was coming. It ended up not being one of the Spanish government's boats, but a private boat of nautical historians. They wanted to duplicate Columbus' voyage with the technology of the times. They were not propping up Christopher Columbus as a great person, but a great navigator. These people wanted to see how he sailed across this way with the technology of that time so they built an exact replica of his flag ship, down to the tee. By the time the boat docked at the museum, our little action had turned into a big one with a lot of people, including some AIM factions.

CAROL: What is AIM?

JIMI: The American Indian Movement which is much more militant and has local chapters all over the country. So some folks that were affiliated with them came up and wanted to have an action also. The "500 Years Is Enough Coalition" group with me were leafleting the tourists coming on the boat, kind of slowing things down but not really stopping them. In other cities, groups had thrown blood on the replicas of the Spanish government and there were some nasty demonstrations going on. We did not want to do this here. We wanted awareness. 

Someone asked me if I'd like to meet the Captain. His name was Captain Morgan and they said he was a very reasonable man. I asked him if he would allow people to come on the boat and smudge it. He said yes. Then the people from AIM asked if they could go on the boat with us so I told them they could. I felt it was very cooperative. Then I discovered that some members of the AIM group were going to stage one of their own political actions and run their flag up on the ship. In nautical terms, when you drop someone else's colors and run your own, it is a serious show of force, conquest.

So I told them, I got you on the boat and now I hear you are going to do something else. Why don't we ask the Captain instead of just doing this?' They said ' What do you mean, let's just ask him? He won't let us do that.' So I said ' He is letting us on the boat, let's just ask him.' So we did and the Captain said, 'Give me the flag, and I will put it up along side of ours.'

It was all very powerful. There were about two hundred people on the dock that day and they really heard and saw what was going on. The native elders got on the boat along with our drums and we did our little ceremony. We got to educate a lot of people that day with no force whatsoever.

When we left the boat. Captain Morgan asked us if we would write something up that explained the indigenous perspective. They would put it on the boat right next to the log with copies for people to take in all the ports that they were going around to. They called us from Venezuela to say they ran out of flyers and could we sent them more!

So I have seen it is possible for us to raise awareness and maybe bring together a healing for what has happened. The reason why Native Americans object to non-native people participating in their sacred ceremonies is because all of this stuff has gone unrecognized. The healing has to start there. It is possible and it can happen.

There is so much of value in the native cultures. I would love for native people to be learning native ways. But you know, what if it is not native people? I would like it to be somebody.

Jimi Two Feathers is the co-founder of Earth Drum Council in Concord, MA and was the co-coordinator with of Harvest Gathering '97. 

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Carol Bedrosian is the Publisher and Editor of Spirit of Change Magazine which is located in Grafton, MA. To contact Carol call 508-839-2228, fax 508-839-1173 or email SpiritPub@aol.com.