In my dream last night, I traveled back in time to witness a scalp dance, like the one depicted by Paul Kane in 1847 (see above). In my dream, a recently widowed woman wailed and danced in the center of a group of other women from the community. They all sang, danced, and cried together. As the intensity increased, several of the women swooned and fell to the ground. I never saw a scalp, but somehow I knew it was a scalp dance. In any case, the feeling in the air was charged with raw, visceral emotion.
Clearly, I witnessed something powerful, but I didn't understand my relationship to the event. I finally asked my dream guide, "Why are you showing me this?"
He didn't answer. Instead, he waved his hand, and the scalp dance faded away into nothing. More than a hundred years passed in the blink of an eye, and suddenly we were standing in the exact same location, but then we saw the site as it appears in the present day. Where once there was a field, pine trees grew in abundance. A dirt logging road passed over part of the old ceremony grounds, and several HUD houses stood within a half mile of the old dance site.
Based on the landmarks in my dream, I got the impression that the scalp dance occurred near the present-day location of Elijah Road on the Spokane Reservation.
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