OSEU Two: April Fallis– Choosing to Walk the Red Road

Learning how to… when I had my struggles and all that was going on…I went to treatment… I had my children, and I went to treatment. I knew that something had to change for me. And so, I went through the whole thing…45-day treatment in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa. That’s where I went into an inipi, a sweat lodge, for the very first time. It was like… oh my gosh… this lady that came in… and I did not know her name… I can't remember her name, but she had long black hair and she had a white dress on… and she sat by the door… and we… all the women came in and she talked to us. And I remember that moment right there when she was talking and… this feeling came over me. Like, “Oh my God, I'm okay. I'm gonna be okay.” This is…this is what it's like. Mom would talk to us about it, but she would never, ever…we never ever attended anything like that. So…like back and forth now… something would happen… and I'd go back and I'd think, “Okay, wow. This is the way we did it.” But that night, when that happened, it was like…and they told us before we went in there, you know… you might go back to your rooms and you might have a dream that you never ever had before. And those are the kind that you pay attention to because your dreams are telling you and they're real. So I was like, ok… didn't think anything… go back and… well I had that really refreshing or refreshing when you, when we came out of the sweat lodge. It was like… like I took a deep breath and I don't know… it's because of what she shared with us in there and how it was gonna be and how we were gonna feel when you came out. But I knew that was a good feeling and I was in the right place. So, we go back and… a couple nights later, I had a… my dream was… it was…for me then… at the time I didn't understand it, but when I think about it and I talk about it, I get choked up. But the dream was that I went into a sweat lodge, and there was money instead of rocks. There was money. And then my mom was up above me and she was saying to me, “You're doing good my girl. I'm proud of you.” You know, like that. And there was like three doors… there was three doors and… oh no, two doors... I'm sorry. And I was looking. I was like, “What's going on? You know?” Or, “Why is this happening? This ain't supposed to be like this.” And in my dream, I was thinking that so, when I woke up, I was in treatment. So when we went into our in our group, I wrote my dream down like they told us to… and they shared… and they took me to a medicine man. Well, they didn't take me to him. We had a meeting with them and I shared my dream with him… and he did not know my mom, my family or nothing. And he said, “Is your mom okay?” So I said, “No, she's sickly. She has diabetes. And she was blind.” And he said, “Well, she's going to see again. Your mom's going to see again. And she's happy that you're… you're walking this way. She's,” and he said, “The road means that there's two roads you can take and it's up to you which one you're gonna take. You can walk on the red road… with the red road… or you can go the other direction. That's totally, entirely up to you.” And doing that… and him answering the questions the way he was… he said “The money, he said. “You have to be really, really careful nowadays.” He said, “There's people out there that are going to try to influence your mind, or they're going to want you to pay. They're going to ask you to pay something.” He said, “And those are the ones that you pray for. We can't tell you who it is. We don't know who it is. But if that happens, then you're going to remember.” And he shared with me what I needed to do about… the ties I needed to make and this and that. And so, I did that and how many days I had to do it. Okay, so that was in ‘86 when I was in treatment. I came back and…three year later… I lost my mother in 1989. three years later. And my youngest daughter, Hildegard, was born on the day that we buried my mother. So…I… to me it was a blessing. And even when they took me in, when I was going to have a baby, I was like, please let me have a little girl. Please let me have a little girl. Cuz I had that on my mind with my mom. So when we were in there and… they let me stay awake…part of it, cuz I had a Caesarean…but I still didn't know what I was gonna have… and so when they told me I was gonna have a little girl, I start crying… just loud and, “Thank you God, thank you God, thank you grandfather.” And I was saying like… talking like that. And they were… they thought they were hurting me cuz they were asking, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” And I say, “Yes, I have my mom back.” You know, like that. So, and when I thought about that and when it…when I was back in my room laying… and I was thinking about the dream… and I always go back to treatment. I always remember everything that I learned… I go there. I mean, that's where my mind goes. And when I was talking to him and he told me, I said he knew. He knew that was going to happen. And I had to do these other things to prepare myself for when it happened. Even though my mom told me, she said… told us kids, “You never can prepare for death. You can never prepare yourself. It happens. Snap your fingers and your… I strongly believed if I didn't have those tools and those teachings from… the two…that was running the treatment program, Rick Thomas, and Gene LAST NAME… if I didn't have that and they didn't help me with what I had to go through, I probably wouldn't be sitting here.