Lady Washington trading with the Chinook Nation on the Columbia River
I stood on the beach, watching Joe cry.
We called him Joe because we hadn’t the right to call him by his family name.
I never fully understood if Joe was like the other inhabitance of the continent I had encountered during my voyages. Those indigenous people often described being born with their names alike. I wasn’t sure if I fully understood, but it seemed that names were recycled – passed from one generation to the next, and that their names were not assigned at birth. Instead, a generic name was used, until later when a child displayed the traits of someone who had lived before. Then that child would be given their ancestor’s recycled name.
Animal spirits work the same way. A person doesn’t just walk into the forest, find a bear, and say, “I want to be cool like that.” Instead, you wear your animal spirit in the way you wear your own personality. Others recognized its spirit and are stuck dealing with it, so they associated that animal with you, because it is who you are.
I want to be a crow, but that doesn’t make me a crow. I can wear crow feathers; I can have crow tattoos, but my strengths and weaknesses are not those of a crow. Someone else had to tell me that. I didn’t get to choose.
I also know that wolves can and do cry, because Joe is crying as he stands on the beach, telling us a story.
It is a story of broken promises.
But don’t worry, this isn’t just another tale of broken promises, because what Joe is telling us answered something. This answer may now be the point of his story, but it answered a 200+ year old mystery.
Contained within it, Joe’s story revealed the location of a famous ship… and somehow his words, words spoken several centuries later, remembered the moment she sank so completely, that divers found her anchor less than 48 hours later…
… and in a time of fake news news, false images, and misdirection, it is important to remember that some stories are true.