The Arrow Maker

Yesterday I read transcript, posted by another practitioner, that described a life as an native american. It talked about counting coups, the practice of gaining status by acts of bravery (or foolishness) in battle, and a victory over a mountain lion that gave the person powerful spirit for the rest of his life.

This story strongly resonated with me, reading it gave me goosebumps from head to toe. I immediately had a sensation of how it felt to hold a bow in my right hand, drawing the string with my left. I felt the strain in my arm and the smelled the string near my nose. (In this life I’m left-handed, and the few times I’ve used a bow, I held it in my left hand.) And I had a strong sense of familiarity with the process of attaching a stone arrowhead to an arrow shaft: cutting the slot, inserting the head and wrapping it carefully so it’s perfectly aligned with the shaft so it will fly true.

The more I thought about it, the more details emerged: In that life I had no family, only my mother. I never married. I was no good as a hunter, but I was good at making things, bows and arrows. Every hunter was expected to make his own tools and weapons, but the fact is that some men were simply no good at it. They might be great hunters but lousy at making weapons. So they came to me. I was a necessary person to have around, though it was slightly shameful to for them to admit that they needed to get their weapons from me. It was ok to use my arrows because they were the best, but not because you couldn’t make a decent arrow to save your life, or perhaps you were just too lazy to try. My arrows were just about the best, so almost everybody was happy to use them. That’s how I earned my place in the tribe. My status was a bit fuzzy as I was below the hunters and warriors, but exactly how low depended on how the egos were flying at any particular time.

That was a short life. I died relative young, even by their standards, not much past thirty. It’s not clear how I died, but it had something to do with falling backwards so the my upper back and shoulders hit hard on a large rock. Afterwords, I saw myself lying flat, my shoulders on the rock and my head dangling backwards, unsupported, with my mouth open and eyes staring,.

I get to wondering about that life. Their social life was probably as complex as ours today, with many subtle cues, obligations and duties to pay attention to, in order to find and fit properly into their place in the tribe. They may seem simple and boring to us, but they had plenty of tasks necessary to survive in, what was essentially, a stone age culture, and a rich history of myths, legends and stories to occupy their creativity.

I can’t help but think about Counting Coups. What does that say about a culture? For instance, does the fact that status depends on bravery in battle mean that war must be constant, in order for young men to earn their place? And what does that say about the purpose of battles? Are they to settle disputes, or are disputes created in order to have battles? Is perpetual war an inevitable result when a society values sacrifice and bravery in war more than peaceful pursuits? Is that why we always seem to be at war with somebody, about something, because it’s easier to advance blatant selfish interests in wartime, when you’re beating the patriotic drum about some scary monster, than when everybody’s home and safe and jus trying to get on with their lives? It seems to me that the leaders who proclaim most loudly their respect for the armed forces, always seem to be the ones that are most likely to send them into harms way, for some increasingly trivial reason. And anyone that points out the foolishness of what they are doing is unpatriotic and disrespecting our troops. Will we ever learn?