“Is it the end of the world?”
The thirty-something Cherokee woman asked me, sitting across the table at the mission.
“It feels like everything on the reservation is falling apart and the world is, too,” she said.
To her, there were two worlds. The one “out there,” which was more desirable than the one “in here.” Until now, that is. The lifelong destination of her dreams, the world I had come from, the one that held the strange mixture of oppression and opportunity, didn’t seem much better than hers. The boundaries had become blurred and she didn’t know what to make of it. She was in need of a Holy Woman or a Beloved Woman, to interpret the signs. Aren’t we all?
We long for this Wise Woman, the one who turns the end of the world into a new beginning. But where has she gone? We read about her in the Bible, we hear about her healing, her songs, prophetic insights and stabilizing force in tribal stories, but can she still be found? This question is what brought me to the Qualla Boundary of the Cherokee Nation and it’s a question that has haunted me most of my life. Where is the woman “out there” who feels like the one I have “in here,” inside of me? I began my journey with the ones with whom I share ancestry, the Cherokee.
Sally (her real name is undisclosed) was one of the few women who agreed to be interviewed. Their resistance was understandable. Exploited by society’s hunger for the exotic and rare, they were clinging to what little threads of identity remained past the thin veil of the Hollywood generated images that brought in tourism dollars. It was all they had left, and it was a thing to be protected.
Apparently, my application for interviews was still on hold at tribal council. But Sally agreed to speak to me because I was a minister, she was hoping to be one herself. She heard I was on the hunt for the memory of the Holy Woman, in Bible and in native cultures. To me, the Holy Woman had become almost extinct, but I had read stories about this type of woman, call her an archetype if you will, in Bible and in native history. I hoped to discover remnants of her to bring her influence to my own faith, to shed light on how these women might have functioned in the tribal cultures whose stories haunt the unexplored territories of the Bible. If we could get a glimpse of her, maybe we could believe that she actually exists, maybe we could say with more confidence, “here we are.”
Holy Women or in Cherokee, “Beloved Women,” were the property owners, not the owned, women warriors, prophets, owners of crops and lands, negotiators, judges, matriarchs. I was given this definition of a Beloved Woman when I asked the tribal historian for his understanding of her role in Cherokee culture:
“The Beloved Woman is an important community figure among the Cherokee people. The wise woman bestowed this role acts as a one-woman legal counsel and judicial authority over all members of her tribe. Her word is law and all people must abide.”
It would be a miracle if this woman survived.
When the early American settlers came, the men were shocked that they were forced to negotiate with Cherokee women for goods and food. It didn’t fit into their scheme of how the world worked. If a society wasn’t patriarchal, to them, it just wasn’t civilized. It hadn’t been that long ago, relatively speaking, a few generations back. I wanted to know if anyone remembered, or if anyone was still carrying on this tradition.
I began with the question, does the “Beloved Woman” still exist or has she become a force of the past? Her feminine powers brought into submission through patriarchy, as in many dominant strains of my own Christian tradition? I knew that at one time, the Cherokee tradition had revered these women as tribal leaders, judges, warriors, property owners, prophets and healers. But did she still live, if only in ancient memory?
We sat across the table in the fellowship hall of a quaint, stone church in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountain range. The mission, constructed in the 1950’s, was what remained of the Methodist efforts to bring Jesus to the Cherokee, an effort begun out of the early 1800’s missionary zeal of the circuit riding preachers. I guess the Methodists were not aware, in the beginning, that Jesus had already appeared to the Cherokee almost two thousand years prior. But even Jesus, the one in the Cherokee legend who was known as “the great healer that walked the earth,” and the Methodists, as powerful as they were at the time, couldn’t stop the Great Removal. All that was left of the mighty nation that once roamed the entire southern region freely was a stamp of land known as the Qualla Boundary and an identity that lived somewhere beyond the pages of history books; somewhere beyond the layers of intergenerational trauma, in the river, in the land, in the wind, in the lost women who were once “beloved.”
Sally told me that she had longed to take a spiritual journey but she felt trapped. I encountered a similar sentiment in each of the woman who agreed to speak to me. A deep, unmet spiritual yearning that seemed to run parallel to the beautiful, winding river flowing through the mountains, constant and determined. It was something that each of them felt intensely and yet also felt sealed off from, as if they were not allowed access to the beauty of their own souls. It was as if this spiritual desire that ran through them belonged to someone else from another time. As if their very identities were the property of an elusive power they couldn’t even name.
Though these women were connected to one of the richest spiritual traditions on the continent, Cherokee spirituality, they somehow struggled to make the connection at the soul level. Sally felt bound by many things, her husband’s illness, her mother’s recent death and her many children who had taken what she called “bad roads,” succumbing to the rampant drug and alcohol epidemic that plagued reservation life. But more than that, there was a kind of binding of her spirit that she struggled to give language to, to her, it was only a distinct feeling she could name as “the end of the world.” The blurring of the boundaries between the “outside world” and the “inside world.” I told her that when it feels that way, when it feels like something important is crumbling, then something more valuable than money, property or power is usually wanting to be born. Something old, a hidden treasure, wanting to be discovered.
Like the woman in Revelation 12, the woman at the end of the world, clothed with the sun, golden, full of light. She had to endure the epitome of suffering in order to give birth to something new. All the while fighting off a dragon. I wanted to tell Sally that she was that woman, that we all are, at one point or another in our lives as we embrace the terrifying freedom of the birth of our very own souls in the world.
But the Holy Woman would have understood these things, she would have interpreted them for the women of the tribe with her songs, stories, healing and her prophetic insights. The Beloved Woman would have made the end of the world feel normal.
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When I asked her about the tradition of Beloved Women in her culture, she said she didn’t really know of any. She grew up in a time in which it was dangerous to be native. She had always felt disconnected from Cherokee culture and though her grandmother spoke the language, she only spoke it among trusted friends. To be Cherokee was to remain hidden, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to keep your true identity a secret.
I wonder if the bones of the Holy Woman are buried in the spiritual longings of these women. Longing to connect with the grandmothers who spoke their language freely.
I wonder if the Beloved Woman is walking alongside the “great healer who walked the land,” two thousand years ago, gathering her medicine in the mountains, fighting off the dragons, clothed with the sun. Singing her songs as the boundary between the end and the beginning fades. Giving birth to something old.
Maybe she is still alive in us all.
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