What I'm All About
Roy Wilson
My name is Roy Wilson. I am an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian tribe. I was born with an Indian father and a non-Indian mother. I have Cowlitz blood, Chinook blood, Yakama blood and Iroquois blood.
In my tribe I served for thirty-two years on the tribal council, almost a third of a century. I served as Chairman of the General Council in 1970s, and in the latter years as Chairman of the Tribal Council. I also for many years have served as the tribal spiritual leader in the old tribal traditional ways.
When I am called to speak to different kinds of groups my topic depends on the type of group I am speaking to. For example when the Women Engineers of America called on me to speak to them, I talked about our Indian cliff dwellings—five, six story high cliff dwellings in New York—and that same period of time had, their tallest buildings were two stories. Our Indian engineers were superb, and our Indian irrigation systems in the Southwest and numerous other Indian engineering feats of interest.
When I'm in high schools, colleges or universities and I'm speaking to psychology classes, I may speak about Indian shamanism, whereas if I'm talking to history classes, I may be talking about pre-White contact culture, post White contact, and the current demise.
What I do with the different areas in speaking depends on the group that I am talking to. When I go to most places, like for example, if I go to churches and speak in churches, I may come right out and let them know that, though the Great White Father had played his role in oppression of Native Americans, the greatest oppressor of the Indian people ever had has been the Christian Church. Then I go on to tell them about similarities and dissimilarities between the Native cultures and Christianity.
Most of my time is spent in colleges, universities, churches and some groups from different origins who want to know about the Medicine Wheel. I find that the Medicine Wheel—many times what I do, I tell them that the group that I'm there to talk to—I tell them that there are ancient Indian legends that say, "In time the White man will call for the Indian to bring healing to them." I believe that the healing for the world will come through the Indian Medicine Wheel and its teachings.
When I give the teachings of the Medicine Wheel I show the similarities between these teachings and the teachings of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islamand the teachings of Brahma. What has happened is that these people, after I give an introduction from one night a week for six weeks, many times they want to go more deeply into the teachings. Some of these have been meeting for ten, eleven, and twelve years now. From one group it grew to two, and three and four, to where now there are twenty of these groups, and we now call them Clans of the Medicine Wheel Tribe—Twenty Clans of the Medicine Wheel Tribe and it's gone international.
We started here in the Puget Sound area where we currently have well about a dozen of these groups—one in Yakama, five on the East Coast and one in Ireland and it just keeps spreading out wider and wider. The people here move to other parts of the world and take the teachings with them and start groups there. I believe that the healing for the world in its diversity will find the unity through our Indian teachings, the healing that is there.
That's basically my life as a storyteller and teacher. Many of the teachings come through the ancient legends and so we tell our stories. Most of the time I'm telling legends from my own tribe, though now and then I use legends from other tribes depending on the situation or the interest of the group that I'm speaking to. That basically tells who I am and what I'm all about.
©2004 Wisdom of the Elders