Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201120217
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WAYS OF ANCESTORS GUIDE HIS LIFE
DAN ABBOTT doesn't want to just celebrate his Native American ancestors. He wants to live like them. That's hard to do when you work a white-collar job and live in the suburbs. But he's trying.Dan Abbott gingerly lifts a color-splashed cranium out of a cardboard box.
"You may just see this as a painted bear skull, but this has a lot of meaning."
Long locks of his own hair dangle from the beast's head. Clumps of aromatic sage and sweet grass are stuffed into the eye sockets and nostrils.
It is, Abbott explains, an object that holds great significance in Native American ceremonies.
"The bear is a very powerful hunter. Very strong, very knowledgeable about finding food, as well as finding medicine to help himself if he's sick. The Indians would follow the bear because they knew he knew the plants that would heal him."
Abbott continues to lift items from the box.
A rawhide rattle, fashioned by hand out of deerskin. Abbott shakes the instrument. Dogwood seeds inside.
Next comes a stone ax, carved from greenstone and lashed to a handle. Abbott gently runs his finger over the edge, sharp to the touch. It took him six hours to hone.
After that, another stone ax, much like the first one, only worn soft by the years. Hundreds of them. This one was yielded by the sandy earth of the Eastern Shore, where Abbott grew up.
"This ax is a war ax," he says, reverence in his voice.
He proudly notes how closely his ax resembles the original.
When Dan Abbott was a boy on Maryland's Eastern Shore, his grandfather used to tell stories about his Indian ancestry.
"But no one bothered to go into it in any depth. We just accepted at face value that we were descended from Native American peoples and it was obvious, in the facial features." The aquiline nose. The straight, raven-black hair.
Through his 40 years, Abbott often rolled the thought around in the back of his mind. Little things he liked to do reminded him of his heritage. Like the summer he spent scouring a field near his home for arrowheads. Or the long canoe trips he'd take, sometimes for weeks at a time. Or even his choice of a profession - an industrial waste-water engineer, helping to restore a wounded environment.
Five years ago, a cousin back in Maryland finally documented the family's lineage. For Abbott, the confirmation hit home like one of the black-powder rifles he had taken to shooting.
"It made a lot of things come into focus," Abbott says. "Thoughts, feelings, lifestyle. Why I was oriented to the natural elements, particularly the rivers and water in general. My ancestors, the Nanticoke, their life was spent on the water."
House shows devotion
Abbott's response has been to weave as much of the Native Americans' way of life into his own as possible. It helps that his wife, Diane, is part Cherokee.
Abbott sweeps his hand around the living room of his hillside Roanoke County home, two stoplights and a couple of hairpin turns from Cave Spring, the heart of the suburbs. The television blares.
"You can see we don't actually live as your ancestors live," he says. "But we do try to observe many of the old traditions and beliefs."
He pads around downtown Roanoke in moccasins.
For a time, he had no furniture in his living room, preferring to sit on wooden mats the way his ancestors did. Only Diane's back injury in a car wreck, which made strong back support a medical necessity, sent the Abbotts furniture shopping.
In the back yard, hickory saplings bend to the ground, the brace for a small hut he periodically covers with hides and blankets to turn into a sweat lodge, a ceremonial sauna the Native Americans used for purifying both the body and the soul. Rocks are heated red-hot, then water is poured over the stones.
"Steam erupts, and you do some sweating," Abbott says. "It's invigorating. You feel so tingly, almost reborn, like waking up after an extremely good night's sleep."
Throughout the house, signs of Abbott's devotion to his ancestry abound. The sharp-tipped lance resting in the rafters. He made it himself, just as he created most of his other Native American items. The bow and the quiver of arrows. The intricate beadwork that Abbott spends hours threading onto pelts he orders from a mail-order house - he's currently fashioning an otter medicine bag. Or the elaborate ceremonial pipes he has meticulously carved from soapstone - 100 hours of work apiece. One depicts an otter catching a fish, another an angry falcon. He figures they might fetch $700 if he wanted to sell them.
"When you actually sit down and create these things, you can really appreciate what it took to do it," he says. That, he says, connects him emotionally with his ancestors - as does his volunteer work at the Explore Park, where he dresses in a handmade costume and leads visiting grade-schoolers through the woods for a firsthand lesson about how the Native Americans lived in harmony with nature.
They are lessons he tries to live by today.
"It's a passion
In the basement, a harvest of twigs and vines is propped against the wall, the raw materials for baskets he'll weave by hand.
"There are three things you need to survive in a wild situation and survive very well: a sharp tool, the ability to make cords and the ability to make fire," he says.
Surviving in the wild has long been one of Abbott's fascinations, going back to those solo canoe trips.
Five years ago, the Abbotts even spent their honeymoon wilderness camping in the Blue Ridge. For 10 days, they lived off leaves and tubers, just like Native Americans would do when they went out hunting for days or weeks at a time. After several days in the woods, Abbott says, one starts to understand the forest and learns to be a part of it - much the way the Native Americans did.
This isn't a hobby, Abbott cautions, but a way of life. "It's a passion," he says. "To a great extent, it gives me a firm hold on my origins. It's hard to put into words. It gave me more direction, a firmer grasp on the true nature of my ancestry. Before, I always felt something inside, a great respect for the Native American culture and didn't truly understand totally what it was.
"I've always been very close to the Earth, camping, canoeing, hiking." With Native Americans, "I see people who were obviously very Earth-oriented, caretakers of the Earth, everything they did in life revolved around the great respect and love for the planet they had."
And now he understands.
"It gives me a real sense of being."
Keywords:
PROFILE