Fragment of this morning's dream: I saw two tipis at the base of a mesa, or the foot of a butte. The left tipi was painted in brilliant colors, turquoise and gold and red. The right-hand tipi was covered in raw exposed hides rubbed with soil, as if to camouflage it. From a distance it all but disappeared against the soil of the cliff wall behind it. In fact, I didn't see it at first, as I peered through whatever dreamoculars I used to observe the scene.
A group of four or five Indians walked away from the tipis, to the left across the landscape, crossing in front of the butte. They wore colorful clothes, bright turquoise or red skirts and shirts and shiny metal armbands and earrings, and yellow cloth bound their hair.
It made no sense--Plains Indian tipis in an Arizona landscape, with Hopi or Navajo inhabitants. Neither area relates to my own tenuous genetic links. My mother's father's father was Fox, a tribe driven out of the black forests of Wisconsin in the 1800s to central Iowa reserves. My father's mother's mother was Cherokee, of a remnant that succeeded in keeping to the wooded North Carolina hills when the rest were forced out to Oklahoma. I have studied Plains cultures, though, always, partly because that information was most abundant and available, and partly because I so loved the Plains, the unimpeded trajectories of the tall-grass prairie.
So intellectually I know better than to plant Plains tipis against a Southwestern landform and people them with Hopi. Either my intellect doesn't inform my dreams, or a part of the message, if any, lies in this discrepancy. And it's conceivable, now that I think of it, that the Natives were the out-of-place elements, as the butte or mesa easily could have been in one of the Badlands areas of the Dakotas. And this would make them Crow, probably.
5:48:41 PM 
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