I always felt like my tribal grandmother, who was married to my abuser, chose me to teach things. I won’t repeat the word she called them to respect culture. I felt like she chose to teach me how to see because she knew he was hurting me and in her own strange way it was her way of teaching me to protect myself.
The funny part of it is, she could’ve protected me, but chose not to because what was happening to me took the abuse off of her, so maybe she was teaching me in thanks for absorbing the abuse she had dealt with for decades.
First, she taught me how to see, for her it was playing cards, for her grandmother. It was palms, many of the women in our tribe used different methods to see, and I was very good at it. When I moved back here to Connecticut, I would read for Tribal members during our cultural week, some of the things I could see shocked even me when they were proven true.
Two examples but there are many.
One was a Tribal leader, he sat for his reading and I was so confused so I just started talking and I said this doesn’t make sense to me, but I hope it does to you. I told him that around the first of the year people would see him differently, like as a different person they wouldn’t recognize him and that he was hiding. As I was telling him these things his face went blank and he held my hands and he says you have no idea how right you are, but you will when the time comes. It turns out he was getting ready to do the show Undercover Boss, even his own son didn’t recognize him.
The second was a young man going off to college, I had been reading for him for a few years and I asked him if he was planning on playing sports and he said yes, and I told him he was going to break his left leg and then he needed to protect it. That is exactly what happened. He broke his left leg in the game.
I was very good at seeing, but there was something I was much better at which was using the shadows to solve problems. There were rules to using such things, only to be used when all other remedies were exhausted. She taught me that sometimes it doesn’t work right away, but if the spirits agreed with my request they would act at the right time, that my job as the one calling on those spirits was to to be clear and truthful with my intentions, be persistent, and show them that I would not give up on Justice. I will never use what I was taught again, but I can tell you that there is power that we just can’t see or touch, that listen and will do what we ask of them when the time is right and if the circumstances are right
I focused all of the spiritual energy I had every day on one person, once I moved away and joined the military could no longer be a buffer and the target to protect the young girls in my family or the young girls in his neighborhood so every day I did what I was taught , used the words with intent, and my minds eye envisioning him laying dead in the middle of the road, the road he walked down so many times holding my hand leading me to one of his hiding places so he could abuse me.
When I got the call that he had died, I asked my mother how it happened, and she said he died in the middle of the road and then she told me exactly where and it was the place I envisioned.
That’s when I realize that what I was taught was powerful and that I should never use it again and I never have.
I feel like I was given a gift that I was only meant to use once, the results allowed me to not live every day in fear, not of what would happen to me, but what would happen to someone else. I like to believe that the day he died other young girls were saved.