Burial Among My People
I took this photo on the Upper Iowa River, in the ancestral homelands of my people the Ioway, in Iowa before we were moved to the reservation in Kansas. I was on a canoe trip during my graduate studies in landscape architecture.
My tribe the Ioway used to make a hole up on some high place where the setting sun's rays would touch the grave. This was called "The Sun Bridge." At that moment, the spirit lifted from the body and traveled on the ray towards the west, where it crossed the crack that separated the worlds, and began to travel the Road of the Dead, the Milky Way, where each star was a campfire, and you would eventually find the fire of your own people.
The body was wrapped in a buffalo robe or blanket, and sat upright in the grave hole, with one's weapons, and a bowl of food and a gourd of water for the journey. Over the top was placed a willow mat, and then some earth over that.
My grandma used to wander the hills above Dupuis Hollow, the family place, on the Iowa Reservation on the border of Kansas-Nebraska, where it touched the Nyishoje, the "Muddy River," the Missouri. She told me once she fell into such a grave up on a ridge, her foot going through into the darkness below. They peered in, and saw the person in there, sitting in the grave from long ago.
The cool thing was that if you actually had been buried alive for some reason, you didn't suffocate. All you had to do was stand up, eat and drink, wrap the blanket around you and go home. Surprised relatives eh?