Joey Roo
Joey Roo joined us as a former practitioner of old Native American tribal beliefs in the Lakota Tribe. I just want to say that it has been a treat having her with us, so without further delay, I’ll let Joey take it away:
A short bio, eh? I’m verbose, so I’ll try to keep succinct here.
My belief system was one you had to be born into. Elders identify the children they believe will become ‘medicine carriers’, as my grandfather identified me, by vision, he told me, before I was even born. My life, it was told to me, was mapped out by ‘the spirits of all things holy’, and I would not be free of it…I was told, it would always use me to its purpose.
Fear not, though reader, for those same elders had me convinced I was going to be ‘different’ than the other ‘medicine carrying kids’, telling me being a female changed things from the ‘normal’ boy-choice, and that I also had to be a ‘bridge’ or ‘conduit’ between our old culture, and this mainstream one……and so, I found a deep love of science while I was in school.
I excelled in my studies, was part of a gifted education program for most of my schooling, which only stopped when my family moved us to a small town, with no gifted education program. I tested high in college entrance exams, and nearly went to MIT, or Harvard (I was accepted, both places, and offered help to financially afford it via scholarships)….but then, there was that ‘belief’ system again. I became convinced that my fictional deity needed ME in particular, more than Law, more than theoretical mathematics, cosmology, or quantum physics (all of which I was very interested in, and couldn’t quit learning about)…but I went the other direction, with a little help from my elders, of course.
Instead of going to university, I traveled for a couple of years, teaching, lecturing, running seminars, and ceremonies all over the US and Europe with my father and by myself on occasion. I took time to go to a small, Native American college for a couple of years, before burning out under too much stress (I was also involved as ‘the face and voice’ for my campus in a tough environmental fight that pitted the students against the city/county, besides all of my studies). I then traveled again, teaching, lecturing, conducting ceremonies, often with my father, often without, and we expanded our reach to Australia. It was then, that I met my first husband and father of my children as I traveled in the US, I settled down, and kept my leadership local, for the most part.
Through all of this, all of those ways that I’d been taught, were evolving too, you might say. At least, they were in my mind. I was using the things I picked up here and there, about science, psychology, evolution, to justify my beliefs by saying, in my mind….get this…a thousand times, more probably, I said this to myself……
‘Science is catching up to what my ancestors already knew’…..
Whoooo, man!! THAT was going to be the single-handed self-concluded, justification that I just clung to what I thought I knew for as long as I did. Any and all dogma, was just falling away over those years…slowly, but surely. Every year, in retrospect, I had to struggle more to excuse my continued belief in something I should have been WAY too intelligent, skeptical, and analytical to have fallen for…after all, I could blow metaphoric holes in dogmatic, organized religions, I could ‘convert’ people from those religions, into my own, less-dogmatic, more environmentally friendly religion. But STILL I believed it….
I believed it on stage, in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people….I believed it when my Dad died…I believed it when my first husband died…I believed it when I thought a miracle was sent to me in a second husband….I believed it when he died too….I believed it through all of the many darknesses, that threatened to swallow me…I believed it through the incredible experience of birthing two beautiful babies, 6 years apart…I believed it at every good moment, and bad moment.
Then my son was diagnosed with Diabetes, and I was forced back into researching things. I went back to science, and suddenly everything began to change. I found out that the food voucher program they’d put me on during my pregnancy with my diabetic son, was NOT advocated that Native Americans eat that way, and when I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, I wasn’t informed that would increase my baby’s risks for diabetes. We all ate the same in the house, and no one else was diabetic……it wasn’t a creator at all….it was real world stuff. There was nothing magical, nor mystical….it was all right there on a screen in black and white. Facts.
Science, you might say, ‘saved me’ from putting one more ounce of energy into sacrifice for a creator, and started me on 2 years worth of re-familiarizing myself with biology, physics, chemistry, critical thinking, skepticism, logistics, through independent study, as I continued my auto-didactic ways of learning.
I searched through youtube (thanks to my kids, who clued me in) and started watching little ‘sciency’ vidz just for fun, and then I happened upon Dr. Richard Dawkins’ youtube videos. At first, it was like a repulsion, and fascination with what he was saying at the same time….like those ‘sweet n salty’ snacks that don’t know what to be in my head. I suddenly found myself really angry at someone I didn’t even know, because how DARE he love nature as much as I do, but without God?! Of course, the algorithm on youtube, brought up other atheists, and then I discovered Christopher Hitchens.
If you’ll pardon me saying, Hitch was every bit as pissed at organized religion for the way it damages the world, as I was, and cursed it just as much as I do too.
I had this moment…about late-January, I’d say…so roughly 4 months ago now (It’s MayDay of 2017 as I write this), that the phrase in my head changed.
“My ancestors were pretty smart for a people who’d never flushed a toilet, and would’ve thought my Android phone was magic….”
*Laughing*…..hours later, I knew I was an atheist…
Months after that, I knew I couldn’t go it alone…I’d need the living people. And so I’m here, with you living people behind the screen.
Thank you TCP for being there.
Tags: Lakota, Native American