The Way I Was Taught

Description

“The Way I Was Taught” is a coming-of-age story set in rural 1950’s America in which a white, ten-year old, preacher’s son, dealing with a severe emotional trauma, follows a path to recovery and “Well-Being” given him by the traditional teachings of neighboring American Indian Elders. It dramatizes the contrast, through the eyes this boy, between Christian ways and traditional Seneca ways.

Halfway through his “eleventh walk around the sun,” Hunter Koenig was nearly killed by a bull which caused his mother to have a miscarriage. As she spent a year recovering, in Hunter’s mind the accident was his fault, as was his parents’ subsequent divorce. His custody was granted to his father, a chaplain on an Indian Reservation in Upstate New York.

Hunter was sent to live at the reservation orphanage where he was ridiculed and called a coward. Orphanage cook Minnie One Knife took him home to live with her father and grandsons. Over the next two years, the love and teachings Hunt received from Gramma Minnie and Great-Grampa Haksot, along with some profound dreams which bonded him even more closelyl with the Indians, restored him to “wellness.” He was ultimately sent back to live with his mother after being “doctored” by a medicine man and shown his “reason for being” to be a bridge between the world of his family and the Native American “Earth People.”