The Spirit Comes Into the Tipi as the Voice of a Beautiful Woman Shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I found myself living among the Kiowa Tribe in western Oklahoma. I developed a close relationship with one of the Kiowa elders and would sit and listen for hours as he told me stories. He also took me into the peyote meetings. Peyote is a hallucinogenic cactus that has been used for centuries by many of the tribes in Mexico. North American Tribes only began to use peyote in their ritual practices just over a hundred years ago. American Indians knew how to work with the forces of nature and could evoke the spirit of the plants to facilitate healing. All kinds of interesting phenomena would occur in the meetings. My friend was telling me one evening about how the spirit would come into the meetings. He said you would sometimes hear the voice of a woman singing in Kiowa when that happens. I thought that was interesting considering that Kiowa women did not sing during the peyote meetings. Some time later I was sitting in a meeting one night and I suddenly realized that I was hearing the voice of a woman singing in Kiowa. The voice was really beautiful. I then opened my eyes and looked around the tipi to see where this voice was coming from. There were only two women in the tipi that night. One was an elderly Kiowa woman and the other was from the Navajo tribe. Neither of them were capable of singing in this way. And then I remembered what my elderly friend told me some time ago.
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