I graduated from The Ohio State University in 1992 with a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. I had every intention of going to graduate school. At the time, I was working an internship in Archaeology with the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) and had also worked in Cultural Resource Management (private archaeology companies performing archaeological survey for government, energy companies, and other businesses required to perform and Environment Impact Study (with environmental, historical, social, archaeological, and other components). I had also taken part in a summer field school excavating a rock shelter in Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky.

During this time, I had the opportunity to meet some key Native American figures in the Columbus, Ohio Indian community. The gentleman I worked for at ODOT, Jim Addington, had connections in the Native American community and was an important connection between the Archaeological and Native American Community, even if the other archaeologists in the state didn’t want it. Jim was persecuted, quite unfairly in my opinion, heavily. Other professional archaeologists berated him for his connections to the NA community. I never understood why. It was like he was a “traitor”. In my thoughts, he was helping the very people these archaeologists were wanting to study, albeit their long pasts.

I had attended a NA powwow the fall before. I was quite amazed at what I had experienced! The drums, the colors of regalia, the dancing… it was quite profound. But it was Jim, who introduced me to the people. There was an archaeological conference going on in Pittsburgh that I was planning on attending. Jim asked me if I would help out and take some folks from Columbus over to meet him in Pittsburgh. I was to pick them up at Capital University. At the prescribed time, I drove over and went to an office. The name on the office plaque displays “John Sanchez”. I knocked on the door and went in to meet 3 of the biggest guys I think I have ever had the privilege of knowing. John Sanchez was a Yaqui native who was a professor of Economics, I believe. Another gentleman I met that day was Dan Jimerson, a Seneca from Salamanca, who was running the Xenia, Ohio Indian Center with his then-wife, Kay. The third gentleman I met that day was a man who had such a profound influence on my thought and actions that I think of him every day of my pitiful life. Dr. Asa Primeaux, Sr., Ihanktonwan Dakota, representative of 89 Tribes. That’s how he introduced himself to crowds. He was given an honorary doctorate from Capital University and helped bring the traditional spirituality of the sweat lodge and pipe to 89 tribes who had lost their own. It was in a hotel room that weekend that I took part in my first pipe ceremony. Asa was a very well known Inhanktonwan Dakota spiritual leader. He had gone through some pretty tough times. He had been a rodeo clown and a rez cop among other things. He had been an alcoholic but his traditional spiritual ways had pulled him out of the gutter and he now devoted his life to helping people, to keeping the old traditional way of life alive. There were people who did not appreciate him. He did prison time for supposedly selling eagle feathers. He didn’t do this. In prison, he ministered to the Indian prison population. The warden himself said that this man didn’t belong there. He was an extraordinary man.

That experience led me down a path of self-discovery and thought-provoking experiences. I met many extraordinary people in the last 30 years. None more extraordinary than a man whom I’ll just refer to as Ken. Ken was a “grandson” of Asa’s. Asa taught him the traditional ways of Ihanktonwan spirituality and he eventually earned the right to run ceremony by going “up on the hill” and receiving his altar in a vision. Without going into too much detail (this is not an ethnography), this experience was quite ethereal and transformative to Ken. I’ve known Ken for about 30 years now and am honored to call him my friend. Ken is one of those people who you might call an “old soul”. He has a wisdom of life beyond his years, but at the same time, he’s just a normal human being who happens to be able to communicate with the “spirits” of this world. I’m not trying to put him up on a pedestal, mind you, but I’ve seen things in Ceremony that are amazing. I might go into some of these things later, but don’t expect a detailed, blow by blow because this is not the place to learn of these things. Native American spirituality is something you can only experience to learn anything about. Writing about it does not do it justice. Also, more in line with this blog, to understand the experience fully, you must be able to put your mind in a different place. You must put away everything you have learned from a Western perspective. You must forget your “Christian” viewpoint and try to look at God differently. You must look at the “Sacred” differently. This “philosophical” epiphany has changed the way I look at life, at how people interact with themselves, their environment, and just life, in general.

There have been high points and there have been low points since that first meeting. After my BA, I decided to try and earn a Masters, but I didn’t take the traditional route by applying to Anthropology departments at other schools. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed. This law provided for the protection of Native American graves and gave a framework for returning sacred items and remains in museums to the tribes they belonged to. In Ohio, there was much trepidation among archaeologists for this law. There were no native tribes in Ohio in modern times. In the past, the Shawnee, the Seneca, the Wyandot, among others made Ohio their home. Those named were of the last Nations in Ohio before the Trail of Tears era. By 1900, there were very few, if any, Indigenous people in Ohio. Having no voice, the archaeological community had their way with sacred sites, mounds, burial grounds, and village sites of the past. Some of these sites were left fairly intact and through providence, many were “saved”… Mound City near Chillicothe, The Octagon and Great Circle in Newark, Ohio, Serpent Mound near Peebles, Ohio. But many sites were wiped out… Much of the Newark complex is gone, a painted black hand on a cliff near Toboso, OH was blasted off in the name of railroad progress, many mounds were excavated to the ground and it’s contents either placed in storage in the name of science or traded away at the artifact auctions that pervaded much of the twentieth century at fairgrounds and hotels. I decided that I wanted to try and help foster the communication between archaeologists and Native Americans, so I enrolled in the Master’s program at OSU in Comparative Studies hoping to create a program that would help in this endeavor. Then, something happened that I didn’t expect. Life happened. I fell in love, proposed to this sweet, beautiful young lady, then became a father. With the feelings of needing to the right thing expected by my parents and my twentieth-century self, I quit school and took on a career in Information Technology to support my new family. I’m still married to that beautiful woman and she mothered two more children with me. So, with that, my intellectual self took a long hiatus.

Five years ago, I started my Masters in Information Strategy, Systems, and Technology from Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. I was thinking this would be great for my career, right? So, I took classes in IT Strategy, Information Architecture, IT Security, etc. But one of the classes had a final project to write a grant proposal for using technology to help an Appalachian community and their healthcare. I chose the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina and the health issue of Diabetes. My research led me to the discovery of a new branch of Anthropology called Medical Anthropology. This is the cultural approach to health care as different cultures and physical attributes of humans require different medical methods. The old western way of doing things, while effective, sometimes is just not enough. In modern medicine, we treat symptoms and rarely look at the root cause of illnesses. We treat diabetes, but why are certain communities more prone to obesity and the results of untreated diabetes? Why do some communities in the middle of farmland have so little access to healthy foods? An even more disturbing question… Why doesn’t our government look into these things and help these poor, often minority communities? Are they not “worth it”? I believe this is what started me on my current path of philosophical inquiry, spiritual introspection, and academic interest.

I’ve been reading about Anthropological Theory, Archaeological Theory, Philosophy, Social Theory, and other things. I’ve watched a lot of sci-fi with Dystopian overtones, reading Phillip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson. I’m a child of the ’80s, so Hair Metal progressing to NuMetal makes it’s way to my playlist. But I do have quite an eclectic taste in music. I also listen to Classic Rock, Blues (having seen Joe Bonamassa, Buddy Guy, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Jonny Lang, and Taj Mahal in the last year and a half), Classical, some Jazz, Powwow & Peyote NA music, as well as some Folk and Bluegrass. I grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek, three stooges and the Little Rascals. I went through puberty to MTV, HBO, and Atari.

I grew up in Cambridge, Ohio. Home to a large long-extinct glass factory and Hopalong Cassidy actor, William Boyd. Cambridge is a relatively small town at the intersection of Interstates 77 and 70 in Southeast Ohio. It lies on the edge of Appalachia and was on the edge of the fracking boom of the 2010s. Economically, it’s depressed. There’s not much in terms of industry, the oil and gas industry was its fuel in the 1900s, but that is waning. The local hospital is near closed. Racism and far-right politics prevail. Some of its highlights are the beautiful countryside that hasn’t been spoiled by the energy sector, Salt Fork State Park lies nearby, and the small town appeal of its downtown area, Victorian paper mache’ characters and Christmas lights are prominent during the Holidays. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Intellectual and Philosophical conversation is not a topic of discussion at the local comfort food restaurants and breakfast joints.

I am currently based out of the rural countryside near Zanesville, Ohio. I work as a project manager in the IT department of the local hospital. My three kids are now adults and pursuing their extended education and living their lives as best they can. Our extended family is spread between the other side of the state to the States of Washington, Colorado, Georgia, & Florida. My praying family has undergone a diaspora of its own and I am left to my nature wanderings and internal thoughts while working at my job, paying off my debts.

I hope that this blog contributes in some small way to the betterment of society and provides a glimpse into the simple life of a man living his life as best he can in this crazy world.