Deanna's Journey
The Soul's Quest
I was born at the foot of the Mission Mountains of Northwestern Montana and raised on the Confederated Flathead Salish Kootenai Reservation near the Moise Bison Range and the infamous white buffalo named Big Medicine.
This land is a very wild, out-of-the-ordinary place to grow up in.
My family faithfully attended church and I loved Catechism teachings after school. Elders in their beautiful regalia strolled past my home to church each Sunday. I remember their chanting of their ancient traditional songs from the front row pews. Their fine beaded moccasins and beaver fur-covered braids, fancy shawls and leather pouches set me back in time about a hundred years, happening just before Vatican II.
That was when mystery and frankincense filled the Mission
Ritual, the love of mystery, and the sacred seeped into my heart
My father took this photo in
1956 at the Arlee PowWow.
Each year the Fourth of July parade included natives dressed in full regalia prancing on Indian ponies through our little town alongside ranchers and cowboys on horseback, the fire engine sporting bathing beauties and fancy decorated race cars marked the beginning of each summer. Our senses opened to the rich ancient tradition of summer gatherings with the annual pow wow tipi village springing up just a short distance from my family home. My brothers and I made our own tipi out of blankets.
I laid awake at night longing to be an Indian drumming and dancing, throwing the gambling sticks and reminiscing about the magic of a life connected so deeply to the natural world. Being a white girl I was a minority in a school of native kids and I was deeply conflicted with purpose. When I was 12 my father bought a set of encyclopedias from a traveling salesman. He gifted me his love of reading so I poured over the 26 volumes where I was introduced to a world of extraordinary people, ideas and geographical wonders. People of the land lived around the world which made me wonder why I was white and felt homeless.
My early exploration of religion, spirituality, medicine
and indigenous ways was by living with indigenous people and
studying the pages of The Book of Knowledge.
At the age of twelve the longing for adventure set in.
Enrolled at the University of Montana, I was first a pre-med student, then changed my major to study to anthropology and archaeology. I learned more about humans, the body and sociology, medicine and indigenous ways of life. I was lucky to do more fieldwork abroad than classroom work. When I finished my undergrad I began the training of life—I came to realize that to study other people from an academic perspective was not cool, not my path, nor my right to do.
I became an entrepreneur, householder and mother. My teachers appeared twenty years later. Raising her children first is not an unusual way for a woman in other traditions to realize her spiritual calling.
One is often called to a spiritual path through sickness or tragedy
Fourteen years later, I fell two hundred feet down El Diente, a peak in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. The sky opened and a loud voice said to me, "You have work to do".
This was my calling • It was time to get serious
After this dreams and unusual visitations by other-worldly beings haunted my nights. I recognized that the Huichol god of fire, Tatewarí, had invaded my sleep as well as the deer people. I was being called to a healer's path.
I was hurt bad from the fall. My journey led me away from western medicine into the world of healers over the next ten years. I learned LomiLomi massage in 1994 and started the Healing Arts Cooperative.
I was told that it was now time to transfer the responsibility of
caretaking the world to the people of the west
I apprenticed with Rosita Arvigo, a healer living in Belize, learning ways of the Mayan women healers, their herbal remedies and women’s fertility. I learned the ancient Medicine Wheel ways of the Ande's from Alberto Villodo, and journeyed with John Perkins to Ecuador. I spent time with Alberto Taxco in the Andes of Ecuador and I met medicine people there and in the Amazonian basin. I received profound healings from Qe’ro and Shuar elders. All within a short period of time, the next year I studied Plant Spirit Medicine with Eliot Cowan, and apprenticed in the Wixarrika tradition of Western Mexico, to be a shaman seven years later.
A good relationship with weather would protect me from lightning strikes and storms as I pilgrimaged to the sacred places.
I met don Lucio in Central Mexico who warned me that I must be proctected from the lightning beings that would be after me as I sat on mountain tops as part of my apprenticeship with the Wixarrika. I didn't know what he was talking about until after I was initiated as a weather worker (called a granicero) in his little consultorio in July, 1997. Crowned with a white rose wreath while copal smoke filled the air greeting the clouds, I dedicated my life to work with weather at home in Colorado. Granicero workers from central Mexico witnessed the crowning onlooking Don Lucio's ceremony in which he announced in his thunderous voice, that I was adopted by Santa Barbarita, Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the sky, the heavens and universe, as family to the sky beings, lightning and thunder, hail and rain, clouds and wind. Now, as a weather worker I set out to learn the ceremonial ways of a weather shaman.
Follow Your Heart
Eliot' advise was profound, and continues to live in me
today as a key ingredient
for a fulfilling and blessed life
Don Lucio Campos in his milpa before greeting the weather.
Coyolxaulque, daughter of Quatlique who is ancient earth mother. She came to me in a dream before I had ever met her, flying in the sky as I watched from the window of my spaceship.
My Huichol teachers, Don Lupe Gonzales Rios and Eliot Cowan making sacred offerings.
After the crowning, my dreams of antlered beings and fire gods led me to the calling don Lucio had divined the previous year. I was called to the ancestral lineage of the Huichol people. Eliot introduced me his elder Huichol Mara’akame (shaman), don Guadalupe Gonzalez Rios. He and Tatewari, Grandfather Fire, authorized me to move toward two six year apprenticeships. I was initiated in 2003 and 2004 as a Mara’akame, by Mara'akame don José Sandoval de la Cruz, don Lupe's predecessor. Five sacred pilgrimage sites supported me and continue to support my work today.
During my apprenticeships I learned that I also had a calling to work with the soul of the living and the deceased. To fulfill this calling I faced a life or death test and was initiated to retrieve tonalli (a word for 'soul' of Nahuatl tradition) and to travel with the dead, guiding their tonalli to the ancestral homelands. This is work I offer under Funerary Rites and Tonalli Work.
These archetypal initiations provided a doorway to step into my healing practice and work with people from all walks of life.
I continue to deepen and develop my offering providing an
ancient but profound perspective to our people
The world opened further for me in 2022 to embrace complementary medicine of the Diné and Lakota people. Humbly, these gifts
are integrating with my Nahua and Wixarrika medicines.
We are all related.
With a lifetime of love for the animate world,
I completed my ordination as an Animist Minister in October, 2024.
Watch for Animist Ministry Offerings on line and live talks and workshops.
I've embarked on rounding out my work
with Ancestral Healing and Cultural Repair.
Stay Tuned!