Beam me up, Crazy Horse
by Gilbert Oskaboose

Since my lifelong experiences with Christianity - and the ten thousand plus other man -made religions out there- have all been less than satisfactory, I have returned to being your basic born-again heathen.

I guess it's safe to do so. I don't think heathens, heretics and pagans are being put to death anymore, at least not here in this day and age in Canada. Scorned or pitied maybe but no longer crucified, burned at the stake, drawn and quartered or impaled on stakes.

A problem arises. Since my fall from grace has removed any opportunity of spending eternity in Heaven - in the blessed company of murderous Crusaders, paedophile priests and Christian brothers, Spanish Inquisitors, fundamentalist ayatollahs of the American air waves like Swaggart or Falwell and a motley assortment of history's ideologues, fanatics, zealots and garden-variety religious crackpots - I'm left with no hereafter.

I'm Ojibway, but not overly impressed with the Hollywood idea of a Happy Hunting Grounds Neither am I so ethnocentric or narrow-minded to believe that "God is red." If a Creator does exist - and all of creation shouts yes - then I chose to believe that awesome entity transcends humankind's petty parameters of race, colour and ideology.

That leaves me with three personal "visions" of the way things will be, assuming I don't end up as dust, or sputtering eternally in some great cosmic frying pan.

The first vision finds me "out on the land" as it must have been a thousand years ago. There I will spend eternity as a nomad, wandering that pristine "wilderness" on foot, horseback, dogteam, birchbark canoe, snowshoe or cedar dugout. I will run with wolves and speak with eagles. I will sit at the Great Council of the Onondaga, to eat sweet corn and listen to the elders recite the Great Law of Peace, race the wind across Arctic tundra with half-wild Inuit dogs, learn the Apache ways and visit with Mohican clan mothers. I will feast at a Haida potlatch and fast with the Cheyenne in their sacred mountains. I'll wrap myself in a Lakota courting blanket and tie a thousand ponies to her father's lodge. I will become one with the land and all of creation.

The second vision, equally exciting, finds me on the bridge - in the captain's chair - of a Galaxy class starship, the hum of warp engines under my feet and the babble of alien tongues in my ears. Destination: out there somewhere. Mission: to "boldly go where no one has gone before." I love that show and its notions of the Prime Directive [absolutely no interference in the existence of other lifeforms] personal honour, strength of character, respect, endless exploration and discovery of "new worlds and new civilizations." For me it embodies an old WWII fighter pilot's description of flight: "to slip the surly bonds of Earth, reach up and touch the face of God."

On the other hand, maybe I'll just become a teapot in a laughing ranch for aging space cadets, or a nice smooth, round stone in the last clean North American river - and sleep for a few millennia.