One time, however, during a particularly tense council meeting, the resolve softened, and he tried to introduce a moment of mindfulness. Meditation Teacher, Writer, Member, Fort Sill Apacheĭuring his 16-year tenure as chair of the Fort Sill Apache, in Oklahoma, Jeff Haozous kept strict boundaries between tribal matters and his meditation practice. Then in that moment, I’m home.” Hear the Call of the Land If I can sit with mindfulness and kindness, until I can come back inside my experience, come back inside my heart. “When I get lost in the activity of my mind, when I get wound tighter and tighter and tighter,” Corrigal says, “if I can remember Jim and put myself in my own mind, I can pick up my trail more easily. “I just sat with him for half an hour,” he told Corrigal, “until he could come back inside himself.” “When you found that boy,” she asked, “what did you do?”īeset with fear, the boy could neither walk nor talk. Then I can pick up their trail more easily.’” The way he phrased this connected Corrigal to mindfulness, even as it touched on distinct Indigenous ways of knowing. “What he told me has become a lifelong teaching for me-the teaching that brought me to meditation and the teaching I sit with, every time I sit on the cushion: ‘When I look for a lost person, I put myself into that person’s mind. In that first conversation, Corrigal asked Settee how he had found the boy. He lived that completely,” Corrigal says. In Settee, Corrigal saw a quality of loving presence that belonged to both the Indigenous culture she had inherited and the meditation practice she would embrace: unconditional care and love for all beings. And with his friendship, he helped her find her own way home. “Hearing that story, I imagined myself lost and Jim finding me.” Years later, then a young adult and filmmaker, Corrigal met and became friends with Settee, who had last seen her when she was an infant. “I grew up on that mystery,” Corrigal says. No one, not even the other trackers, knew how he had done this. For two hours and across miles of muskeg and bush, he tracked the boy. Several minutes passed in stillness before Settee took off at a fast clip. On the third day of the search, on ground trampled by the search team, on the edge of Kingsmere Lake, where the boy had last been seen, Settee stood. Finally, Settee, who lived in the Fishing Lake Métis Settlement, which he had founded for displaced Indigenous people, was asked if he would join the search. The next day’s search ended without success. Corrigal’s father assembled a search party and they fanned out, but at nightfall, the boy remained lost. On one occasion, when a little boy went missing, Settee, considered the best tracker in the region, was off duty. They and other First Nation and Métis people knew well the land they had been displaced from, and their generosity and compassion showed in their willingness to assist in search and rescue when a visitor was lost in the bush. The two men, both wardens, worked together in the park. When he did talk, Andy Corrigal told his daughter stories about Jim Settee, Cree elder, social activist, and tracker.
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When I first encountered mindfulness, I thought, “This is our teaching, our Indigenous teaching of how to be in the world, how to be in connection with the world.” Jeanne Corrigal Fortunately, I eventually realized there was communication happening, without talking.” But in the bush, he was completely connected to everything around him. In the early days, I wished he would talk. “We would just sit at the edge of the meadow or sit by the spruce tree, not saying anything. From her father, she learned lessons about nature and listening. The daughter of a park warden, Corrigal grew up in Saskatchewan’s Prince Albert National Park. “When I first encountered mindfulness, I thought, ‘This is our teaching, our Indigenous teaching of how to be in the world, how to be in connection with the world,’” she says. Last year, she and three other practitioners led the first Indigenous Peoples Retreat offered at IMS. Practicing since 1999, she trained at Spirit Rock and Mindful Schools and recently graduated from a four-year teacher training program with the Insight Meditation Society (IMS). There she leads a weekly sit, and teaches a variety of classes, including “Indigenous Presence” and “Unwinding Whiteness,” a course that offers white students an opportunity to recognize and understand racialized conditioning. It is the tale of a little boy, lost in the Canadian bush, and the Cree elder who found him.Ĭorrigal, who is Métis, a Canadian of mixed Swampy Cree and Scottish ancestry, is the guiding teacher for the Saskatoon Insight Meditation Community. Guiding Teacher at Saskatoon Insight Meditation Community, MétisĪt the heart of Jeanne Corrigal’s practice and her sense of purpose as a meditation teacher lies a sacred story.
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