I was invited to sit at a drum. The leader was a big N.A. man with long black hair. He was showing me a pattern of call and response that was slightly different than on the sundance drum. Songs were passed around the drum, each person in succession calling up a new song. The person would call out the pushup for the song, repeat it, then the group would sing out the pushup, repeat it, then go into the song. The songs were a bit on the longer side and would not go back into the pushup. I spoke with the drum lead who was teaching me the process and songs and one of the songs he brought up sounded like a sundance song and he knew what song I was talking about. It was then I realized that this was a bear drum and these were bear songs.
This group was basically welcoming me into one of them. They gave me a stick that was very unusual. It was shaped like the representation of a rising bird, like a line with a triangle in the middle. It was very old, wrapped in leather and had fringe on it. You would never know it was a drum stick. It was beaded, and decorative, but very very old. It had been used a lot. The leather was very dirty white colored, or very washed out tanning. After using it for a while, we stopped drumming. For some reason, I jammed the point into the ground. I couldn’t imagine why I thought this was a good idea. I ended up breaking the tip. I told the person who gave it to me, and apologized. They didn’t seem to care.
