This essay I got from David Cavitch's anthology of "Life Stories". This book is for An Analytic Reader.
Michael Dorris(1945-1997) was a leading writier of fiction and essays about American Indian life and social issues. Educated at Georgetown University and Yale University, Dorris was a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth College.
In The Broken Cord (1990) he recounts the circumstances surrounding his adopted son's struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome. His essays, from which this selection is drawn, were collected in Paper Trail (1994). Cloud Chamber (1997) is his last novel.
In most cultures, adulthood is equated iwth self-reliance and responsiblity, yet often Americans do not achieve this status unitl we are in our late twenties or early thirties -- virtually the entire average lifespan of a person in a traditional non-Western society.
We tend to treat prolonged adolecence as a warm-up for real life, as a wobbly suspension bridge between childhood and legal maturity. Whereas a nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota teenager was expected to alter self-conception in a split-second vision, we often meander through an analogous rite of passage for more than a decade -- through high school, college, graduate school.
Though he had never befotr traveled alone outside his village, the Plains Indian male was expected at puberty to venture solo into the wilderness.
There he had to fend for and sustain himself while avoiding the menance of unknown dangers, and there he had absolutely to remain until something happened that would transform him.
Every human being, these tribes believed, was entitled to at least mone moment of personal, enabling insight.
Anthropology proposes feasible psychological explanations for why this flash was eventually triggered: fear, fatigue, reliance on strange foods, the anguish of loneliness, stress, and the expectation of ultimate success all contributed to a state of receptivity.
Every sense was quickened, alerted to perceive deep meaning, until at last the inerpretation of an unusual event -- a dream, a chance encounter, or an unexpected vista -- reverberated with metaphor.
Through this unique prism, abstractly preserved in a vivid memory or song, a boy caught foresight of both his adult persona and of his vocation, the two inextricably entwined.
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