A Day of Drumming with Native American Friends
I have had an experience of a
lifetime! It was great... the fresh air, the activities, the trip
up and the trip down. My name is Kati, a student at the Skowhegan
Middle School, and I had the opportunity to go to the Great Moose
Lodge in Millinocket to a Girls Unlimited meeting. Our Civil Rights
team arranged a trip to Mt.
Kathadin so we could meet with students from three different Native
American reservations in Maine.
Pictures taken at the Lodge We had an excellent
ride down with several stops, since we were coming from
Skowhegan. On the way we saw the most beautiful moose, it
just stood in the road and looked at us... what a wonderful
sight! It was very cold that day and we could see that Mt.
Katahdin had snow on the top. We got to the lodge
and when we walked in, we felt kind of awkward because the
other girls had been there since the night before. I am a
very social person and I really don't mind getting to know
people, but when I walked into the room, I just kind of felt
out of place. We first had to participate in a "smudging"
that seemed kind of weird, we had to bathe in smoke.
Smudging is a tradition before any meeting or gathering to
rid oneself of any negative thoughts or emotions.
We then played a game
where we picked an action connected to the first letter of
our name,for instance,my friend's name is Karla, so she had
"kind karla" and you also had to have an action, that was
really neat. We then played a game called "blind drawing"
where we picked someone to draw who we did not know, it was
funny because we looked at the person but could not look at
the paper. Further into the day I
felt more comfortable as we played "where the cold wind
blows" which was fun. There were a lot of different things
we found out about each other. After that, we had to
wait for this lady because she was bringing the masking tape
to build a hut. We had to build a shelter out of newspaper
and tape before lunch. The rule was that you could not talk
at all. The shelter was large enough for all of ..(you can
see pictures and a movie of this by clicking on the above
links) We ate chicken noodle
soup, sandwiches, and chips for lunch. After lunch we had a
long talk about drug abuse and what goes on in the
reservations. I can't talk about that because of a
confidentiality rule, but I can tell you I learned a lot
about different kinds of drugs. Then we had to go home and
we would have really liked to stay but we could not.
It was a long day, but
we left with a greater amount of appreciation and respect
for Native Americans!