7 Ideas for Integrating Altered States of Consciousness from Fools Crow
James Welch is psychedelic
I taught Fools Crow in 9th grade English because of its psychological strategies for resiliency, but as I started using psychedelics, I realized the novel was also a brilliant roadmap for integrating altered states of consciousness. The novel, published in 1986, tells the story of a young Blackfoot man who comes of age just before settlers and the U.S. Government push his tribe onto the Reservation. As a drug writer, I admire Welch’s immense skill in depicting altered states of consciousness.
Some other writers I know, and some of my students, treated the extraordinary vision scenes in the novel, of which there are many that play an essential role in the plot, as akin to magical realism. Whilst Welch’s historical details might have been accurate, some of my students couldn’t understand the protagonist’s visions as real. But, I’d argue, Welch depicts altered states in Fools Crow in more vivid detail, and with more jarring effect, than the “real” reality in the novel. Using the genre of historical fiction amplifies this effect, especially since the pages-long vision scene at the end foretells real, albeit often-left-out-parts of American history: the decimation of the bison herds, the starvation times of the Blackfeet, smallpox, and Native American boarding schools, among other U.S. colonial events. The protagonist, named White Man’s Dog at the beginning of the novel but renamed Fools Crow once he proves himself honorable, regards his visions as real and more important than information he gets from consensus reality.
Instead of seeing Welch’s altered states as quaint Native American stylistic choices, I think we should try to understand them as the novel asks us to: as real and true.
There’s a certain kind of colonized imagination that laughs at the idea of visions or dreams coming true. Beware of these types of posers. You can spot them by their pretentiousness, which always causes the disease of ignorance.
This novel is trying to transfer a type of consciousness, it’s just that so many people don’t get it. Here are a few ideas I’ve gleaned from it:
1. Spiritual strength and power come from humility. The characters with the most healing and visionary powers in the book are also the humblest characters, such as the many faces man Mik-api and Fools Crow. Unfortunately, this is not a characteristic many popular psychedelic renaissance figures share with the novel.
2. Dreams give literal instructions and warnings about life. Dream interpretation is serious. In the novel, telling or not telling one’s dream can lead to death. Being able to recall and tell your dreams accurately is regarded as a skill. Following this dream sense is necessary for becoming an adult.
3. Information from dreams and visions has greater weight than information from consensus reality. When information from dreams or visions crosses over into consensus reality in the novel, it’s treated with even more significance. In Fools Crow, like in my experience, information from dreams or visions coming into real life is terrifying. I rarely heard psychedelic facilitators discuss this phenomenon and instead such an event was treated as a defect in the client, as potential evidence for schizophrenia or that the client shouldn’t have used psychedelics in the first place. Yet people with many DSM diagnoses would have been treated as a healers in his culture, my former teacher said.
4. Dreams are premonitions. Many, if not most, of the dreams in Fools Crow come true, especially those dreamt by the protagonist, who is surprised, terrified and mournful when his dreams come true. Another adolescent character in the novel who gives up on following the instructions in his dreams eventually exiles himself from his band, living a lonely, mean life on the run with a violent gang. Fools Crow, the one who humbly follows his dreams, gains more power and becomes the hero of the novel, far surpassing his friend.
5. The more the characters faithfully follow their dreams and visions, the more powerful they personally become. The more the characters follow their dreams and visions, the clearer, more powerful and longer their visions and dreams become. When the novel starts, the protagonist has had a vision about his animal helper, but it was regarded as weak because the animal didn’t fully so itself to him. Over the course of the story, Fools Crow gains the ability to see and interpret his dreams and visions more clearly, to the point when animals begin talking to him, giving him complex instructions. The last vision in the novel carries over through multiple chapters and contains dozens of scenes, showing the character’s increased ability in the visionary world. I guess being visionary is a muscle you have to flex.
6. The visions and dreams work on a meta-textual scale to cope with the trauma of colonization. That is, one of the novel’s structural devices—its depiction of altered states of consciousness—works to undermine the colonial narrative even as it predicts what the colonizers will do to the Blackfeet.
7. The life of a healer is lonely and not to be envied. “By the time he was thirty-five he knew he would not marry again, that the opportunity would not present itself because the people somehow feared his powers,” Welch writes of Mik-api, the many faces man in the novel. Just as healers are left alone, their knowledge comes with great responsibility. Fools Crow wishes to stop the vision at the end of the novel, feeling he has seen enough, but he knows such an idea is naïve. “He had seen the end of the blackhorns and the starvation of the Pikunis. He had been brought here, to the strange woman’s lodge in this strange world, to see the fate of his people. And he was powerless to change it, for he knew the yellow skin spoke a truth far greater than his meager powers, than the power of all his people.”
So many people want to be healers, facilitators, psychedelic guides, shamans, the new guru these days. I remember a time when I wanted to be too—there was a time when I wanted to be like my former teacher. Now I’m mostly afraid that I am.
What do we do when everyone wants to be the guru?