6/24 NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN [Washington, DC]

And, suddenly, here it was: the end of the line. The last drop. The bitter end. The end credits. The bottom of the barrel. The final bow. The last of the Mohicans.

Too far?

The day was divided into three basic sections. I'm going to deal with each part briefly: as I said before, in many ways the Journey has already ended. Honestly, the day felt much less like a final verse -- rather, a coda. Also, as I am now home (hooray), I find myself increasingly anxious to move on; this is the most difficult that writing has been.

Part One: Setup
The setup was, simply put, incredible. It was nice to be admitted into the Smithsonian atrium hours before it opened, and to be recognized by the guards as an important person (wheee!), but the real thrill was watching the other key members begin to fill the space. For the first hour, every person who entered was a familiar face from some previous stop. There's Joe and Hunter from Michigan; and there's Lonnie from Chemawa; there's Jolene and her daughter, who we last saw in Idaho; the drummers from White Earth; singers from Mt. Pleasant; Horace and Ozzie, who saw us off on this Journey; Kitty and her crew from New Mexico -- and her crew from the East Coast, too; the little girl who sang with the drum group in Carlisle; and so many more: faces from around the nation who all gathered here today with a shared cause and a belief in healing.

If I could walk away with only one emotion, it'd be whatever it was I was feeling at that moment. Some pride, yes, but more a sense of openly-bemused wonder as I discovered that my life was a TV show and I'd just wandered into the cast reunion episode -- or maybe a "best of" clip show.


Part Two: The Ceremony

Besides the familiar faces, there were any number of normal museum visitors who came and went throughout the day, making the crowd more fluid than any we'd seen before. That was to be expected, I suppose.

Dr. Duran said something interesting from a linguistic point-of-view. In his theory, this level of white-on-red violence could only have been perpetrated by people of European-decent. The reason, he argued, is that Europeans have noun-based language and thinking patterns. This becomes crucial in dehumanizing the victims. If you're going to cut the fingers off a child, you must be able to see the child as an object, and the fingers as separate objects to remove. Otherwise, you simply couldn't go through with it.

Most Indian languages, by contrast, are fundamentally verb-based. There is no word for "child," and the very concept is difficult to grasp; instead, you have a person who is "childing" - a process, a motion through time. The way we speak has a deep impact on the way we're able to think; most people who speak Native languages as a first tongue go naturally to "living" when faced with a child. The objectification of the "person"-noun never occurs. Violence on a European scale simply couldn't occur -- human nature would rebel against the orders without a way of distancing one's self.

It's an interesting thought.

The best part of the ceremony was at the very end, when people were invited to say their prayers for forgiveness in front of the Hoop. It was a magical moment -- the seats had been sparsely-filled only seconds ago; in the time it took me to reposition my camera, every seat was suddenly filled. I have no idea where these people came from. Additionally, the atrium was filling with people standing around the edges, looking in, and every balcony and staircase to the top of the building was packed with faces. I stress again that I don't know where these people came from; it was as close to science-fiction materialization as I expect to ever see.


This is an extremely-rough cut, making it difficult to see the people on the balconies; they're too dark. They're there. And there's a lot of them.

Part Three: Wrap-Up

Wrap-up was strangely quiet. We had planned for some processing time, but Don was unable to get away from people asking questions and wanting a moment of his time. Eventually, Marlin ushered him out a back door to give him some time to himself. Maria was in charge of making sure that some of the guests made it to their hotels safely, and she left shortly afterward. Wayne and I cleaned up a little, then went to get gas for his car. We got horribly lost on the way.

And this is the way the Journey ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

We never got that debriefing time, and we scattered our separate ways to head back to our different states. I guess this is the way of things; Don is apparently already knee-deep in planning for a series of community-grief ceremonies, and Marlin and Wayne are likely to be assisting him in various ways. There's an awful lot of work left to be done in the world, and I think it's time for me to be back home, knowing I helped a little bit with one small piece.

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edit: Unfortunately, due mostly to Iran, the White House was pretty well booked up with responsibilities. In the end, no one arrived to accept our petition. Its time will come, however.