review by Susan Salter Reynolds

“Not only horses get broken around here,” writes Lisa Jones, a journalist who was almost devoured by a remarkable assignment on the West. In particular, she is writing of the Wind River Range in Wyoming where her subject, Stanford Addison, lives.

“Everything does, starting with the ground itself. Millions of years ago, a new mountain range broke through the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, leaving the original range’s broken remains leaning against the flanks of the Wind River Range.”

Jones, 42, was sent by Smithsonian magazine to profile Addison, “a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho reputed to be able to talk rank beginners through the process of breaking horses.” Addison, a “bad boy outlaw” into drugs and women and cars and horses, survived a violent accident when he was 20. The broken-down “res ride” he was in collided with horses on the road one night. His spinal cord was cut at neck level. Addison came to in a hospital surrounded by white people and a multitude of visions. His reputation as a spiritual healer grew. After finishing the article, Jones went back to spend five years researching this book. In Addison’s presence, she was broken, found some happiness, was often afraid and more often confused. Regardless of what you choose to believe about her story, doors were opened. Addison and his world, she writes, “were jewels, but dark ones, rich with the blood of people and horses and dogs that died for nothing, for carelessness or a flash of anger or too much drink or no reason at all.” Jones, the self-deprecating journalist (“Why couldn’t I shut up? Why did I get so nervous and yappy?”), locates herself beautifully in a story that is hers and not hers. This is her first book. We look forward to the next.

See LA Times

The Woman’s Day Reading List

“This memoir, by a journalist who went to Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation on assignment and stayed off/on for four years, revolves around Stanford Addison, a wheelchair-bound Native American spiritual healer and horse breaker. Mixed in with his tale are a brief history of the Northern Araphos tribe, the heartbreaking reality of modern reservation life and Lisa Jones’ own journey of personal and spiritual growth. But, more revealing than the author’s insights gained from sweat lodges and the nuggets of wisdom that Addison provides, is the honest range of emotions she is unafraid to acknowledge. From the guilt she feels as a white woman on a reservation to the lust she has for a man that is not her boyfriend, these sentiments she shares show the reader that we are all nothing but our feelings if we cannot understand, and eventually, control them.”– Meghan Ahearn

For their full list of recommended reads, click here.

I’m in the beautiful, misty, cool, confiding mountains of western North Carolina. Taking lots of walks, eating lots of pork, spending time with my lovely in-laws and my husband, the golf-crazed Buddhist. And here’s a terrific blog link by Molly Brown, which offers a nifty free drawing for my book.

Molly Brown blog

The event in Jackson was lots of fun — my friend and photographer Sarah Kariko (www.sarahkariko.com) started it all off with an exhibition of some great photos of Stan and his world, then Stan, his family and friends sang to open the entertainment on the stage. When it was my turn to read, it was slightly terrifying on
the big fancy stage with lights in my face, unable to see anyone or hear anyone laugh at the provocative parts of the book about my early discomfort at Stanford’s power, and my racial fears… I was poking fun at myself, but zounds it was scary because I heard no laughter or sympathetic murmurs or signs of life whatsoever. At bookstore readings you have eye contact with the audience… I thought all 300 people may have just gone home, disgusted. Stan SHONE onstage –really confident and accessible when he spoke (he did a long Q&A with the audience, which had many horse people in it). some people CRIED
during the songs he sang with family and friends. He had the crowd in
the palm of his hand… afterwards, people bought lots of books and
had apparently been really moved by what I read. The afterparty was pizza and people and cigarettes in Stan’s
motel room. So, YAY! The above picture is of the walk-through the day before the event. Stan is second from left, amid friends and family who came up from the Wind River Reservation.

woke up in a motel room in Jackson Hole. Tonight is the mother of all readings. Stan will speak, Sarah will show photos, 500 people are expected,including a few truckloads from the Wind River Reservation. Wowsers! ( Click for Info)

This youTube video features Lisa reading the book’s preface over slideshow of photos taken of Stanford, his family, horses and home. The photos were taken by Teresa Neptune and Sarah Kariko.

I have a reading in two and a half hours at the Boulder Bookstore. I also have a wicked headache and a sore throat and I sound like Leonard Cohen, who is, at least, the greatest folk singer and vocal artist and poet of the last century and maybe this one too. Be with me, Leonard. I don’t even have the wits about me to upload a picture of you. Sorry.

Here’s a pretty nifty review in the Boulder Daily Camera

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/may/30/broken-arapaho/

AND

if you want to hear a streaming interview with me on KCFR’s Colorado Matters, click here.

AND

if you want to hear me read in person, come to the Boulder Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. on Monday (tomorrow) evening.

THERE IS ONE CORRECTION I WANT TO MAKE, SINCE IT HAS BEEN REPORTED TWICE NOW THAT I DON’T BELIEVE THAT STAN CAN CURE CANCER. THAT’S NOT THE WHOLE STORY. I KNOW SOME NORTHERN ARAPAHO PEOPLE ON THE RESERVATION WHO CREDIT HIM WITH HAVING CURED THEIR CANCER. I BELIEVE THEM. AND I HAVE A WHITE FRIEND WHO WENT TO THE RESERVATION FOR HEALING, AND SHE’S STILL GOT HER CANCER. THE DETAILS ARE HERE IN A Q&A I DID WITH CAROLINE LEAVITTVILLE FOR HER BLOG EARLY IN MAY:

I have to ask: while in a sweat lodge, you witnessed a cancer coming out of a woman’s body. How is that woman now?

This woman, a good friend of mine who happens to be white, was suffering from a particularly virulent strain of breast cancer that had spread to her bones. She was near the end of the year the white medical doctors had predicted she had left to live and arrived on the reservation gulping Oxycodone (a powerful narcotic pain reliever). After the sweat lodge I refer to in the book, Stanford said we’d gotten the cancer out, but if she continued with chemotherapy, she would die. She felt better than ever after the sweat (sweats, actually — she, me, and about a dozen friends made two trips to Stanford’s in which she did four sweat lodges each and a third trip where we did one sweat before we were stopped by torrential rains), and then went home to Kansas. Cultural conditioning being the unstoppable thing it is, she went back on chemo. Awhile later tumors were found in her brain. She is still on chemotherapy. Her sight is starting to go. But she has lived two years past her predicted survival date and is still dancing at parties and being generally delightful. And she’s not on Oxycodone — she makes do with a couple of Aleves a week. And her doctors think she’s a marvel.

What happens in Stanford’s sweat lodge is unknowable to me, but I do think the attitude of the person there for healing is very important. It’s not a magic wand he can wave over just anyone and BAM, heal them. But it’s a healing method friends of mine on the reservation take very seriously, and it works for them. I know that for me the sweat lodge is a hugely mentally healing process.

For my whole interview with Caroline, click here.

THANKS TO SARAH KARIKO (www.sarahkariko.com) for letting me use the above gorgeous photo of Stanford in the corral, with Pinta

I had a really enjoyable interview with PJ Nutting of the Boulder Weekly on Sunday, and it hit the stands yesterday. If you want to read the whole very nice thing, you can find it here:
http://www.boulderweekly.com/20090528/artsculture.html

But the part that made me happiest to read was this, because I’ve never written this:

“Really embedded in (the economic and physical difficulties of life on the reservation) is a spirit of surrender, and we don’t have it. I always thought I did. I thought I was easy-going and nice, but up there I realized what an absolute control freak I am. I was constantly knocked off balance. They live in an unpredictable world…(they) can’t just throw money at a problem and make it go away. They didn’t have a sense of entitlement to a certain outcome. They just have to go with the flow in a really constant way, and it makes you develop some faith. The car broke, the dog died, there’s no dinner — it didn’t take much for me to go into a total tailspin. I’m so used to having my needs met like that.

But here’s a man who’s a quadriplegic and who just keeps giving. His health is always in flux, and violence always happens or is about to happen. But he’s so surrendered to his own fate, and in that surrender, he gives every calorie of energy toward helping people in a place where so much help is needed. The man is amazing. I don’t want to say Christ consciousness, but I’ll say it. I’ve never met anyone remotely like him.”

My office chair, kindly holding a few things for me

Okay, so I’ve had four readings, and all of them were wonderful. The Tattered Cover/Colfax one was extremely well-attended, which i attribute to the fact that my sister and mother collectively know every living being in East Denver, and they were all there. But, gosh. My senior prom date was there (that’d be you, Steve Epstein), the parents of all three of my high school best girlfriends were there, my very own dear sister Greta flew in from San Francisco. It was fantastic! It was pretty much standing-room only, and I found to my extreme happiness that I LIKED answering questions about race, power, class — all things I thought I’d sprint away from as fast as my little pink feet could carry me.

After this incredible high came the days after — my sister flew back to SFO, the house looked like its been hit by a bomb (see picture), our beloved cat of 15 years died. God. That was so hard. He’s still laid out in state on our (secondary) kitchen table, on dry ice, surrounded by candles and flowers. This is what happens when you’re married to a Tibetan Buddhist, who believe it takes three days for the soul to get its bearings, pack up, and actually leave the body. It’s actually really nice to have Sandy around for a few more days. He was a sweet, courtly, adorable cat — definitely the most mellow member of our household — and I cry about him pretty much every other hour.

Then, two days ago, Stanford’s sister Arilda called to tell me Stan’s back in the hospital. He went on Tuesday, in an ambulance, with bad stomach pain. This dealt a death blow to any lingering exuberance I might have had about the early readings, and the fact that our book is being carried by COSTCO! and all the great feedback we’ve both gotten…

Gain and loss, the Buddhists say. The wheel never stops turning. And, as Stan so gently told the mare in his corral the first day I knew him: “I can’t save you.”

So I’m balanced, if walking around the house between my getting-all-gorgeous garden and exploded office and dead cat is balance, if hearing good news about the book and bad news about Stanford’s pain level is balance.