Night after night the dreams came. For over seven years teachers, animals and stories came to instruct me. I called it Night School.

I dreamed of broad valleys, a wide blue lake, tumbling rivers and towering peaks. I did not know where it was. I understood only that the place might be connected to a being I had also dreamt, part bird, part human and taller than any creature I had ever known. He wore a headdress of white feathers that cascaded down to the dusty earth. I called him Bird Chief or White Bird. I assumed he was a figure from the world of dreams.

I did not know that the dream world is real and that its intelligence and beauty sometimes intersects with the fabric of our daily lives. I did not know that what we in the linear non-indigenous world call history is a living thing with agency still wanting to be seen and heard.

As I drive into the valley, it opens to wide meadows rising to the mountains where snow has fallen halfway down the hillside in May. I pass the curve of the creek with the split rail fence and the magpie where years ago, I recognized that I had arrived at the land shown in my dreams.

The dreams that visited knew this particular cosmos of earth, sky, river and the humming bones of the old, old ones. 

The winding road takes me into the town of Joseph, incorporated in 1887, and named after the chief who in 1879 was himself in Washington, D.C., pleading for the right of his people, the nimíipuu (or Nez Perce as they were named by the French) to return to the town bearing his name. But it is not his original name. It is the name he and his father before him were given by white settlers. Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it (Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt) and his father were both chiefs of a tribe which followed the guidance of dreams in the tradition of the prophet Smohalla, and were thus named after another dreamer, Joseph, of the bible.

It was dreams that had brought me here years before. There was no map, no manual for how to proceed, only following the next step laid out by the night time visitations where land and people slowly began to make themselves known to me.

Outside of town, the lake opens, long and shining in the sun. The mountains of pines rise on two sides of the glacial bowl to the treeless snow caps above. A rivers pours into the basin and is greeted at her mouth by old and young cottonwoods dotting the beach. Place is precise. The dreams that visited knew this particular cosmos of earth, sky, river and the humming bones of the old, old ones.

The mountain pulls me. I feel the tug of the rock face, the short spit of an outcropping overlooking the valley that beckoned me years before when I came to the land I had been dreaming about. But I have forgotten how to get there. I park at the trail head and enter the forest. I am soon crossing the wooden foot bridge above the roiling river and begin to climb the trail that switchbacks up the mountain’s face. It’s a slow walk. The sky grows lighter with the growing day. Jays and chipmunks and small orange butterflies dart about. The hollow hoot of a great horned owl calls from higher up the path. I want to breathe in all of it – the mountains, the snow, the river growing longer as I climb higher, the thin air, the sun warming it all.

Deer trails appear to my left and right, but I’m not sure which one will lead me to that rock face. I’m watching, but not too hard. I’ve let go of getting anywhere. I’m drinking mountain and it’s going to my head. Another lightly worn animal trail forks in at the right. A robin jumps to the intersection, tilts her head and starts a long chirping song. She flies a few yards onto the fork and I follow. She flies further along the vague trail and I take a few more steps. Now she flies a longer distance and I call out, almost in amusement, “Are you guiding me?” With that she takes off straight down the corridor of matted grass and disappears around the bend. I follow her direction and make a turn at the curve. There ahead is the ledge. Bushes have grown up on the outcropping, but there is still a small shelf where I can sit down.

It’s a spectacular spot. Even amidst all the natural extravagance, the place makes you gasp in astonishment. The neighboring mountains are now closer. Small streams of avalanche run down the steep snow carrying the sun as they tumble. The valley to the right goes on forever following the river that disappears at the horizon. The sky is closer than it’s ever been and deep, deep blue.

Doubt had been a frequent companion, when I came here the first time. I wondered if I could trust the navigation of the dream time teachers and allow my mind to become unmoored from the anchors of what I had previously assumed. But now, here on the ledge, all questions and labor fade away and I melt again into the land. Mountain and I become each other. I cannot imagine how the mountain misses her people. The ones who loved her and named her, the ones she fed and uplifted, the ones who are buried under her long shadow, generation after generation, for unnumbered years. Sometimes up here, I can hear the mountain humming. Maybe she is calling out or maybe it’s her song. I don’t how she keeps on being beautiful with everything that went down.

Love and beauty and vision are all wrapped up with each other in this place. It was here years ago, unexpected, unplanned and unbidden, that a burnished copper horse half galloped, half flew, down the valley, his hooves clamoring louder and louder until he slid to a stop in front of my knees with his wings still fluttering.

He carried me on his back as I gripped his rusty red mane. We flew and flew northeast over countless hillsides and forests and prairies. We arrived amidst barren rolling hills covered with snow. There White Bird Chief, stood among his people scattered everywhere, dead in the snow of a battlefield. He spoke to me then, simply and directly, “These are my people. Suffering cannot be separated from beauty.” It was only later and several years after he had first appeared in my dreams, that I learned that Chief White Bird was himself a chief of the Lamátta band of the nimíipuu who lived in the 19^th century near the Salmon River in what is now Idaho.

When more dreams led me to the barren undulating hills of Montana, I recognized where the vision on the ledge had taken me. The battlefield of the Bear Paw stretches out in a sea of grass, green, yellow or brown depending on the season or the absence or presence of rain. A dirt path guides the visitor in a loop with small signs pointing the way. The gaping eddies of sorrow are everywhere, the air unquiet, almost trembling as if everything and everyone might suddenly speak at once.

The government had forced the tribe off their ancestral lands, away from the bones of their forebearers and the beauty of their valleys. After five months and over a thousand miles of fleeing the US Army, after elders and children had been killed, after horses gave out, after Chiefs Looking Glass and Toohoolhoolzote had been killed, after the children became sick, after warriors and their leader, Ollokot, lay dead in the field – it was here in the October falling snow, that Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it of the nimíipuu handed over his rifle to Colonel Miles and General Howard. It is here that Chief White Bird escaped under the cover of darkness with some of his kin whom he guided the remaining 40 miles to Canada in the days that followed.

There were few people there when we visited. The snow was again falling. No one spoke. The wind seemed to speak without translation. I whispered the songs that came through me, part prayer, part a muted keening.

Now on the mountain ledge hundreds of miles from the battlefield, I am back again on those barren hills of the Bear Paw. The snow is coming down and White Bird is standing as the warrior he is, still guarding his people. I hear the robin chirp and open my eyes to a white butterfly drying her wings in front of my face. For a moment, she is here with me on the ledge and also with White Bird and me on that Montana ground. She has become the snow, falling and falling with her countless white wings upon the dead.