Introduction

When I was a child, I heard stories told by my father and his sister about an Indigenous woman who, a few generations earlier, was part of our family, my great-great grandmother. They said her name was Julia Blake Lashua, sometimes called Jewel. My aunt said she was Mohegan. My dad thought Mohawk. Perhaps neither of them knew for sure. I have an old wrinkled black-and-white photo of her on my dresser wearing a simple calico house dress, her braided hair pinned to her head, standing in front of the old house in Ashburnham, Massachusetts where Dad and Aunt Dottie remembered visiting as kids. In the photo she looks a bit scary, a scowl on her face, her prominent nose aligning her head. Maybe not so much scary as hardened, revealing that she had lived through a lot of difficult stuff. I learned that her mother may well have been a full-blooded Indigenous woman, most likely from Trois-Rivières, Quebec, where my French ancestors, those who initially settled the first French colony in North America, married Indigenous women they encountered in the New World, needing companions and helpmates while they farmed or trapped or otherwise procured animal furs.

I felt my Indigenous roots early in life because of sketchy stories and an old photograph. Jewel is somewhere back there in my ancestral past, but I feel her reemerging now to guide me through another look at that vein in my soul. A piece of my origins. She urges me to finally tell the whole story of my lifelong tracing of those roots. So I will try.

My Spirit Name

When I was in my early twenties, I received my spirit name, Runningdeer—given from the Spirit World, telepathically, by an old Grandmother, as my true name. This was during difficult times as a very young single mother, a time when I was just beginning to learn about myself. I wonder if the name was bestowed by Ah Weh Eyu (Pretty Flower), an Indigenous Elder who appeared in my meditations at the time. Perhaps, or not. No matter. It was my name; and it had arrived just after I had shape-shifted into a frightened, fleeing deer in the woods, during my morning prayer walk, spooked by some unseen but felt danger. I took and wore the name and became more myself.

Several years later, I composed music to a dance-and-poetry performance piece titled “Three Origins.” You will read about this later in the book, but for now I’ll simply say that one of those origin pieces was simple and rhythmic, echoing the sounds and music of North American Indigenous culture. Just months before creating this music, I had ingested the psychotropic magic mushroom and spent a long night with my Indigenous woman self, growing from youth into young womanhood and on into maturity and Eldership. It was during that vision, full of color and emotion and power, that I relived my return, alone on horseback, to my burnt-out village and the ashes of all my beloveds:

I see the wide, empty plain

My people are dead

My people are dead

I hear the cold, even wind

My people are dead

My people are dead

I suspect, and still maintain, that I was that Indigenous woman in another lifetime. From that time on I have incorporated her life into my conscious self. I recognize her deep grief, which echoes from the past whenever loss crosses my path in this lifetime.

My name, Islene Runningdeer, does not appear on the official rolls of any First Nation of North America. But my identity is rooted somehow in the rhythms of Indigenous culture. I love the natural world in a way that feels ancient. I trust my deep inner acknowledgment of a healing capacity that also feels ancient and rooted in the Indigenous way of knowledge. I have endured my share of pain, both physical and psychic, in this lifetime. Perhaps my ability to suffer and rise again was injected into my soul from this connection with those people who have endured much, and still remain. Though my work as Musician Healer has been nourished by many sources, my Indigenous ancestors are an essential cadre of great support in this endeavor. I give them great thanks.

My sister researches our family genealogy and has data about the several Indigenous bloodlines that flow into the mix: Mi’kmaq, Huron, and Abenaki, all Northeast First Nations that intermingled with French settlers from the 1500s on. My mother’s ancestor, Chief Henri Membertou (born early in the 1500s), was a Mi’kmaq/Meti sachem (sakmow) and healer, who led his people during the earliest arrival of French settlers at Port-Royal, present-day Nova Scotia. Chief Henri Membertou married a Mi’kmaq woman, whose Mi’kmaq name is unknown. Chief Henri Membertou was his French-given name but his First Nations People knew him as Anli-Maopeltoog (Mawpiltu). He was my tenth great-grandfather. Membertou established close relations with the French, eventually adopting their Christian Catholic religion, while maintaining his Indigenous spirituality. At the end of his life, he was baptized, given the French name Henri, and was buried in a Catholic cemetery in 1611. It is recorded that he was conflicted about this decision. I am happy to know that he was. Remarkably, he was said to be very old, possibly 104 years.

Chief Membertou left us three songs, transcribed by Marc Lescarbot, a French lawyer who met the Chief during a year-long stay in the new settlement. I have copies of this music in my personal library, which I sing and play on the piano and recorder, as a substitute for Native flute. Membertou, a great chief, was also a healer, and I imagine him singing his songs to the sick and dying while caring for them. His spirit has been present, no doubt, as I have done the same countless times.

My father’s bloodline goes all the way back to Roch Manitouabeouich, Huron, born 1596. His name meant “Resembling the Creator.” His young adult life was spent as a trail guide and interpreter for Olivier Letardif, a French entrepreneur advancing the fur trade as personal representative and interpreter for Samuel De Champlain. He later settled in present-day Quebec, at the Sillery Settlement. Roch was married to Outchibahabanouk Oueou, Abenaki. Like Membertou, their descendants married French settlers, and his first child Marie’s marriage to a French settler is claimed to be the first-documented mixed marriage in the New World (1644).

The Indigenous bloodlines go way back in my family. But Julia Blake Lashua, the woman with the worn face and the calico dress, my great-great-grandmother from more recent times, still remains a mystery. She and her mother Fanny (b. 1850 and 1808) were born near Trois-Rivières, Quebec, a place which was, and still is, a blend of Indigenous and French coupling. I suspect the stories I heard as a child were true, and she was an Indigenous woman. My sister and I will keep digging.

The most surprising discovery has been a link between one of Manitouabeouich’s earlier French/Indigenous descendants and a bloodline that goes all the way back to 540 BCE in Egypt. I mention this, distant as it is, because of a life-long fascination I’ve had with ancient Egypt and all the mysteries embedded in that culture. It must have begun when my father gave me a lovely scarab bracelet when I was a teen, my first encounter with the Sacred Beetle, preserved in very ancient Egyptian iconography. My Dad had no idea that his family had deep roots in Syria, Macedonia, and Egypt, and that a woman named Cleopatra Gygaea was his ninety-seventh great-grandmother. It is amazing that, because she was of royal heritage, records still exist of all her descendants, all the way down to him and me.

The Origins of My Work

In the pages that follow in this book, you will read about four important origins that feed my profession as Musician Healer: North American First Nations, French, Indian, and Ancient Egyptian. All inform my creative inspiration. All are in my soul. All are in my work.

I hope this book will inspire you to amplify the power of your music-making with the potential to heal, to soothe, to awaken, to deeply move, and to spiritualize the experience of listening. It may even direct you to create unconventional musical work for yourself, as I have done. The most beautiful music we make becomes even more beautiful when it helps others. In this way, we become Musician Healers.

Some of the characters in the Egyptian, Seneca and Cluny stories in this book are fictitious. The names and personalities came to me through my dreams and imagination; however their stories are based on information about their times and practices, derived from scholarly research cited in the bibliography.

May my way of blending musical expression with service be a legacy to the young musicians who are considering how their music-making might meaningfully relate to a life’s work. I hope you will indulge me a great favor, and read this book in a thoughtful, questing way. Perhaps something new and useful will be revealed.

— Islene Runningdeer,

Vermont, USA, 2022