Washaka: The Bear Dreamer

It was the edge of winter 2005 and I was casting about looking for a new story idea. I like to write in coffee shops and was sitting near a window scribbling in a notebook when an Indian man about my age came to my table and asked if I was a writer. I told him I was. He introduced himself as Leon Hale and asked if he could sit and tell me a story. We shook hands, and he began. Leon told me about a dream he has had for many years. It is always the same dream; full of rich detail, sounds, smells, and sights. In the dream, he is a young Lakota boy living in a tipi village in the early 1800s just as the huge westward migration of Europeans into Indian country was beginning. Leon said that sometimes when he wakes up and finds himself a grown man living in a trailer house, he is disoriented and confused. Within minutes, I knew I would write his story.Over the next year we recorded Leon's dream and I went to work writing the story, adding detail and, in essence, entering a new world. The relationship between Little Chief and a white boy he named Mato Ska took shape and came alive.