At daybreak, the Black Eagle Child Settlement—home for fifteen hundred tribal members—protrudes as a geographic anomaly against the flat, rural horizon of central Iowa. When seen from the west several miles out, especially along Runners Bluff, the Settlement resembles a tree-covered island encircled by monotonous vistas of cornfields, pastures, and grazing livestock. If it weren’t for the gray, rounded hills that rise slightly above the drifting layers of fog from the Swanroot and Iowa Rivers, we would be indistinguishable. Literally.
In these few hours before the fiery orange sun ascends the wooded terrain, replacing the foggy shroud with clear daylight, it seems as if this place, my home, is momentarily surrounded by the wide, sweeping waters of an invisible ocean called eventuality. If you look down further into the drifting fog and think deeply about dreams that make you prepare to leave for an unknown destiny, an inner sense of fear never fails to conjure a serpentlike image of a Supernatural seeming to pause in its wondrous swim before flicking its massive tail. In the boil and wake created by the mythical sentinel, treacherous waves crash noisily along the shores of our borders. On occasion, the “shadows,” or souls, of certain individuals lose their footing here and tumble headfirst into the surf. You wouldn’t think it, but the consequences of a single loss upon our clan-based society is devastating. More so when we are few to begin with.
Yet, this metaphorical earth-island is where three generations of my grandparents—wa wi ta wi, on either side—flourished in order that we would have a chance at some undesignated point to carry on where they left off, performing errorfree ceremonies to guide believers through the murkiness of the Cosmic Earthlodge. This, according to my limited knowledge, was the original wish of Bear King, the Settlement’s founder: to find a sanctuary where generation upon generation would flourish and maintain the customs that would forever identify them as Black Eagle Child.
What makes our tribal homeland distinct is the fact that a small Algonquian dialect-speaking world has been in existence here, legally, for the past 140 years. As startling as it may seem to some, my great-great-grandfather, through his status as a living divinity, secured the initial purchase of property from the state of Iowa in 1856.
That’s where the “legally” comes in.
After centuries of warfare with the European newcomers in which our predecessors barely pieced themselves back together, my grandfather, who was a young O ki ma, or Sacred Chieftain, provided the answer by implementing his exclusive birthright to obtain acreage in our former dominion. Since a government-enforced order of exile had to be defied to facilitate a return to a region that was once the source of fierce territorial contention, solidifying the destiny of the Black Eagle Child people was not easy. But after persecution by different-colored flags that would have made others succumb, splinter, or simply vanish altogether, our acquisition of real estate was the only logical solution. And this could come about—and it did—only through the wish and actions of a single but blessed person by the name of Bear King, Ma kwi O ki ma. That was his exclusive role as a savior: to rescue us from suffering and ensure our survival.
If it was provincial isolation that Bear King sought, he and his grandfather could not have picked a more desolate midwestern hinterland—the middle of Iowa—to conduct the ongoing affairs of a tribe. It is said my two grandfathers based the Settlement’s location on a story, a ji mo ni, told by an ancient hunter who was once approached by two underworld goddesses informing him that people would one day make their homes on these hills. Declining the goddesses’ offer of immortality, the hunter returned to the winter Mississippi River encampment and conveyed with astonishment what the Supernaturals had said.
Long before any name was bestowed to this fertile country, back when the soil was black, moist, and untainted, our grandparents many times previous were well acquainted with the trees and saplings that stood here in abundance. They were also aware of water transparent and sweet to the taste. As the strong summer wind rushed enchantingly over the adjoining prairies, making peaceful sounds, they remembered the ancient hunters story, which they then gave to their grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond until it reached the ears of Bear King’s grandfather.
It was on the northwestern tip of Runner’s Bluff that Bear King’s emissaries, after a long arduous journey from Kansas, camped before setting out for the state capitol in Iowa City. They carried with them a written message asking the state legislature permission “for Bear King, the Boy Chieftain, and his followers to acquire land and reside peacefully in Tama County.” In a historic turnaround of the attitudes of the era, the Boy Chieftain’s request was granted in 1856.
While it is generally a rarity—even today—for a tribe to become property owners in the United States, Bear King, whose name is remembered today only in the prayer-breath expelled by elders of the Earthlodge clans, was futuristic: He raised the necessary cash and made the authorized proposition to the government higher-ups; he was then given a deed to said property. On the surface, the transaction probably sounded acceptable, but it was also an outright capitulation of ancient customs and beliefs. Yet, for what was ultimately received, it was a momentary acquiescence of values. Without much intrusion from the Newcomers, the Black Eagle Child Nation was guaranteed at least a chance to thrive on its own.
Beginning with the revelation given by the goddesses to the living divinity status of my grandfather, spiritually interwoven factors brought us out from the nightmarish exile of the Kansas prairies. Through our stories we were brought back to an area familiar to our predecessors. For the Boy Chieftain, Bear King, figuring out the intricacies of a farming enterprise replete with barns, silos, machinery, and knowledge of grain and hog prices was the furthest thing from his thoughts and intentions.
My maternal grandmother used to say it was crucial we have a place of our own. Listening intently, I learned that our lives were dependent upon a plethora of animistic factors immersed in ethereal realities.
Basically, she instructed that the very ground on which we all stood, Grandmother Earth, was the embodiment of a former Supernatural being. She was all of nature, this Grandmother: She was the foundation for rivers, lakes, fields and forests; she provided homes and sustenance for insects, birds, reptiles, fish, animals, and human beings. She held everything together, including the clouds, stars, sun, and moon.
Our sole obligation, my grandmother instructed, in having been created in the first place by the Holy Grandfather, is to maintain the Principal Religion of the Earthlodge clans. It was agreed eons and eons ago that if these ceremonies were not performed, the world would no longer be held together, the elements of wind and ice would whirl together and splinter us apart. Our forgetfulness, in other words, would become part of a chain of natural and man-made catastrophes—flag wars and ecological suffocation—leading to the end of the earth. And the people who so connivingly and viciously sought to make us forget ourselves by subjugating us, the Euro-Americans, would be the root cause.
It is therefore prophesied that by making us forget who we are, they inevitably kill themselves. . . .
Edgar Bearchild