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SPIRIT
LODGE
LIBRARY
Myth
& Lore
Page
7
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Some of the 86 pages in this Myth & Lore section are below.
The rest will be found HERE
Chethlahe Call Back
Your Spirit
By Numa
David Chethlahe Paladin is a Navaho
Indian living on a reservation in Arizona. David would laughingly
say that his mother was a nun and his father was a priest. It
turns out his mother became pregnant by a visiting priest. She,
in turn, decides to become a nursing nun and leaves her son
in the care of the extended family of their tribe.
David and his cousin spend a great
deal of time leaving the reservation and going into town. They
drink a lot, and they think life is better in the white man’s
world. The local constabulary is forever returning the boys
to the reservation. By the time David is 13 years of age, he
is an alcoholic.
David and his cousin determine that
they are going to make it off the reservation once and for all
– and they do. They find their way to California, wherein
they lie about their ages and sign up for work with the Merchant
Marines, where David befriends another young man from Germany.
He also begins drawing; some of his sketches include the eventual
bunkers that the Japanese are building on the atolls in the
Pacific Ocean.
World War II is declared. The US
Army tells David that since he lied about his age with the Merchant
Marines he has a choice. He can go to jail for a year or enlist
in the army. David enlists. He is a teenager.
The army tells David as he is a Navaho,
they are going to drop him behind enemy lines and use him as
an information gatherer in their special services. David, using
his native language, is to relay his findings to another Navaho
in the army. Their language becomes a code that the Germans
are unable to crack, much less decipher.
David is dropped behind enemy lines.
Ultimately, he is captured and interrogated for information.
The German officers find him useless and direct that he be sent
to a death camp and executed as a spy.
Imagine, if you will, the scenes
we all have invariably seen of the railroad station and the
platform filled with lines of prisoners being pushed into box
cars for transport to the camps.
Here is David. He is being pushed
and shoved into a boxcar. There is German soldier behind him
saying “Schnell, schnell” (quick, quick). David stops,
turns around and looks at the German soldier. It is his friend
from the merchant ship. The friend recognizes David and ushers
him to a different box car that will send David to Dachau.
In the barracks at Dachau, David
sees an older man, a fellow prisoner, drop something. David
bends down to retrieve it. The guard, who has witnessed this
moment, asks David, “Are you the Christ?”
The guard then orders that David’s
feet be nailed to the floor and that David stand there with
his arms outstretched for three days like Christ on the cross.
Every time David would falter and crumple the guards would hoist
him up again. In the middle of the night, someone would sneak
in and cram raw, maggot-covered chicken innards into David’s
mouth.
When the Allies open up this camp,
they find David a mere shell of a man, weighing maybe 70 pounds,
and speaking Russian. They turn David over to the Russians.
David later speaks English and gives his name, rank and serial
number to the Russians who transfer him back to the US military.
David is sent to a VA hospital in
Battle Creek Michigan where he spends the next 2 years in a
coma. At the end of two years, his legs are encased in metal
braces, similar to what polio patients used. David, a young
man, maybe not even 21 years of age, is to be sent to a VA home
for the rest of his life.
David asks if he can visit his family
on the reservation. The answer is, “Of course.” David
literally drags himself onto the reservation. He meets with
the elders of tribe. They ask to hear his whole story. David
tells them every horrible thing that he endured. He is full
of anger, rage and hate.
The elders confer and tell David
to meet them tomorrow at a designated point on the Little Colorado
River. David agrees and at the appointed hour he arrives. One
of the elders tethers a rope around his waist; others remove
the braces from his legs. They hoist David up into the air and
as they throw him into the raging current of the Little Colorado
River, they say, “Chethlahe, call back your spirit or die.
Call back your spirit or die.”
David would later say that those
moments in the Little Colorado River were the very hardest of
his life. He had to fight himself for himself. And he was able
to see the big picture; he understood why things unfolded as
they did. For example, he realized that the raw chicken parts
were meant as a source of protein to sustain him so that he
might live.
David Paladin was thrown into the
river as a very broken – and broken on every level —
man. And David emerged out of the Little Colorado River like
the phoenix out of the ashes. He had metaphorically walked through
the fire, or, in this case, swum through the currents, and had
come out alive. He was born again.
And, that, dear ones, is what I think
healing is all about for each of us. It is calling home our
energy; it is calling home our disenfranchised pieces and parts.
It is letting go of the toxic and the outdated. It is reclaiming
ourselves.
David no longer needed his braces;
he became a shaman, teacher and artist and went on to work with
priests and addicts. He died in his middle years in the mid
1980s.
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Libraries
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INDEX
Page 3
(Main Section, Medicine Wheel, Native Languages &
Nations, Symbology)
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INDEX
Page 5
(Sacred Feminine & Masculine, Stones & Minerals)
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Copyright: Cinnamon Moon & River WildFire Moon (Founders.)
2000-date
All rights reserved.
Site
constructed by Dragonfly
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