Grandfather’s Rainbow
Indigenous Worldview: Healing and Spiritual Connection, Memories, Dream: Grandfather’s Rainbow
When I was a child, my mother told me a story about how my great-grandfather, Jim Wash Accawanna, walked into the Rainbow. He was our Tribe’s Sundance Chief, Bear Dance Chief, a spiritual leader for the Peyote meetings, and a Medicine Man, Healer. At the time, I was still caught in a colonized way of seeing the world, unable to fully understand the depth of what she was telling me. When I heard his name, my mind jumped to the only reference I had—to the Lucky Charms cereal box, the cartoonish leprechaun, the rainbow I had been taught was nothing more than a sugary symbol of luck. I did not yet know how to see through the layers of colonial distortion, how to recognize the knowledge my mother was passing down. What do you mean? I asked, waiting for her to continue. She closed her eyes, as if reaching across time, as if pulling the memory from a place beyond words, and began:
When I was a child, I lived with my grandparents in a small cabin by the river, surrounded by tall cottonwood trees. I lived there because my father was an alcoholic, and my mother was trapped in an abusive home. My grandparents took me in. I was the oldest of twelve children, but my siblings stayed behind. Every morning, I would wake to the sound of my grandmother placing wood in the stove and making coffee, the scent filling the small cabin. We would eat leftover frybread with buffalo berry jam for breakfast, the best breakfast in the whole wide world.
One morning, before the sun had fully risen, I asked my grandmother in Ute, ‘Where is Grandfather?’ She answered softly, “He is outside, praying and fanning himself off.” That morning, the sky was still heavy from the storm the night before. The rain had pounded against the cabin, shaking its walls, making me wonder if the roof would fly away. However, now, the storm had passed. The air was thick with the scent of wet earth. The clouds stretched in heavy layers of gray and white, and the sun was slowly pushing its way through. I stepped outside to search for my grandfather, but I could not see him.
I walked up the dirt path to the road, then climbed a small hill of loose rock. When I reached the top, I looked down toward the cottonwood grove—and that is when I saw him. My grandfather was walking straight into a rainbow. A complete, brilliant arc stretched across the sky, and he stepped directly into its light. And then—he was gone. For a moment, time did not exist. Maybe it was a second, maybe an hour—I stood frozen, waiting, my breath caught between wonder and fear. Then, just as suddenly as he had disappeared, he walked out again. I ran back to the house, my heart pounding, but I told no one. Not my grandmother. Not my grandfather.
That entire day, I never left his side. Wherever he went, I followed. And every so often, he would look at me and smile as if acknowledging the quiet secret we now shared. We never spoke of it, but I carried that moment with me through my childhood and through the years that followed. Even when my parents came to take me back, I knew that if things ever got too hard, if life ever became unbearable, I could escape into the rainbow with my grandfather. That land, the cabin, the cottonwoods, the river—was more than a place. It was a portal, a refuge, a knowing. It held me in ways no person could. It showed me something more profound than words."
As an older woman, I can retell my mother’s story. I felt a shift within me; I was not just hearing her memory. I was experiencing it. The land had witnessed her, just as it had witnessed my great-grandfather, and is now witnessing me. This story was not just about my grandfather walking into a rainbow but about the interconnection between land, spirit, and memory. It was about understanding—understanding as our Ancestors did, in a way that does not require proof because it resides in the land itself.
