An amazing exchange between Cree novelist Jessica Johns, author of Bad Cree, and an interviewer on NPR. Ayesha Rascoe: So I understand you started writing this story after an instructor told you that writers should not write about their dreams. Like, that wasn't a good thing to do. So why did that comment send you in the absolute opposite direction?
Jessica Johns: For Cree people, and the way I was raised, the knowledge that I have about dreams, is that they're incredibly important. They're a way of communicating with our ancestors. They're a way of knowledge production. My whole life I've been taught to listen to my dreams and interrogate them and to, you know, know that they're very valid forms of knowledge and forms of storytelling as well. So to have a prominent professor who has been, quote-unquote, "successful" in so many ways in the writing and publishing worlds, give this advice to a roomful of aspiring writers - and, you know, he was a white man - it really - it made me mad. I mean, I don't think in writing there should be any hard and fast rule anyways. But I was just like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Dreams are valid. In fact, I'm going to write a story about dreams that validate them in all their beauty and wonder and knowledge.
Naturally, this spurred me to purchase and start reading Jessica Johns right away. While gripped by Bad Cree (I'll return to that) I also went looking for previous sources on dreaming in this tradition. Fairly thin pickings from the literature I have accessed so far, but I plucked out some interesting passages from early anthropologists.
Dream Naming among the Plains Cree, or Nehiyanak
Alanson Skinner, who traveled with the Plains Cree in 1913, reported:
"When a child is still young it is customary for the parents
to call upon four old men to ask them to give it a name. This is done when the
child is about one year old the parents gather a quantity of clothing and other
presents and a lot of food. Then four old men whom the parents have selected
because of their fame for powerful dreams and for their war exploits are
invited by a runner who bears them tobacco and a pipe. Each tries to dream from
then on, and when the appointed day arrives, the four men appear at the spot
designated where the parents have prepared a feast and where the other guests
are assembled.
"When all is in readiness a pipe is filled and given to the
spokesman of the elders who rises and addresses the people. He tells them of
whom or what he has been dreaming and gives the infant a name that has some
reference to his visions or to one of his adventures in war. He then turns to
his three assistants and afterward to the people in general asking each to
repeat the name aloud and to call upon the namer’s dream guardian to bless the
child. After this there is a feast…
"Sometimes a child was sickly and the doctor on investigation
would dream that it was wrongly named and prescribe a change if the diagnosis
was correct the child would recover in from a day to four days."
- Alanson Skinner, “Notes on the Plains Cree” in American Anthropologist New Series, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1914), pp.
68-69.
1899 photo of Native American Girl with bone breastplate in the Library of Congress
Your Great Self Hunts You in Dreams
According to Frank G. Speck, pioneer ethnographer of the Naskapi and eastern Cree, it was through individual dreams, not collective rituals or medicine plants, that contact with a greater soul-spirit is established, bringing life guidance and the means to master the spirits of animals in the lifelong quest for food. In the dialects of his informants the term “atca’k” meant soul or spirit. The human soul in its animate, active state was referred to by the proper name “Mista’ peo” or Great Man. Speck found the same concept in many Algonkian communities throughout the Northeast. He concluded that virtually all religious activities were undertaken to cultivate and satisfy each individual's own soul- spirit: “The hunter's success in avoiding sickness, in feeding his family, in prolonging his life, in building a good reputation among his friends, depends upon his bodily conduct in harmony with the positive requirements or the negations of his Great Man.” And these are revealed, primarily, through dreams.
- Frank G. Speck, Naskapi: The Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula (Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1935).
Photo: Frank G. Speck in a dog sled on Lake St. John, Canada in 1930.
Dreaming the Hunt
“The East Cree believed that a hunter's success in securing any form of game was all ultimately dependent on the consent of the animals, who, in friendship to man, allowed themselves to be taken, and of the spirits believed to influence their behavior, distribution, and availability. Dreams were the vehicle for communication with these spirits. The dream visitation occurred under normal conditions of sleep when a spirit ‘comes towards the hunter” in his dream and appears as a person and talks to him This was his powatakan.
" The significance of dreams as a means of communication with the spirits was underscored by the emphasis placed on remembering the content of one's dreams in exact detail. The Cree said that if a man could no longer remember his dreams upon awakening, he could no longer hunt.”
The animals of earth, water and sky were al said to have their Caretaker. The Chief or Caretaker of all the "clawe3d ones" on earth was said to be MemekweSiw's, literally "Little Dog", the great Bear spirit. An old Cree man said "I can't hunt any more because though I dream I don't remember them when I get up in the morning/" However, he told in fine detail how Bear came as his powatakan (dream visitor) and showed him where a young bear would be waiting for him to take its life on his first solo hunt. He put on his best clothes, making his best appearance, killed the bear with respect and, with the help of his father, hosted an eat-all meal in which the bear was thanked and prepared to be reborn.
- Regina Flannery and Mary Elizabeth Chambers , “Each Man Has His Own Friends: The Role of Dream Visitors in Traditional East Cree Belief and Practice” in Arctic Anthropology Vol.22, No. 1 (1985), p.3
Illustration: Bear Visitor by RM with AI assistance
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