Where the Past and Present meet

Roach’s office, isolated in the basement of the Music and Speech Building, seems like an oasis, with a large, light green couch and dreamcatchers, feathers and Telly Awards on the dark green walls. Roach was not raised in traditional Native American culture but says he embraced his heritage when he became older. He says he didn’t learn about particular traditions until he was an adult and sought them out, but the Native American spirituality was always there.

“It’s like breathing. It’s just who you are,” he says.

He discovered things he always did were actual traditions and prayers.

“They were longings I found homes for,” he says.

Shane Roach says he had a vision about this hairstyle and felt compelled to cut his hair this way. After he cut it, he found out it was the traditional style for shamans. {larger}

Roach says his haircut was in his dreams for a year before he made the cut: His head is all shaved except for a round patch in the back, which he ties into a ponytail.

“It gets looks, sneers and jokes,” he says, “but as soon as I did it, I knew it was right.”

Roach does not have a strong tribal affiliation but passes on to his children what he calls “pan-American Indian” culture. The stories he tells them and the prayers he says are taken from many different nations. Modern Indians are “an enigma, a paradox, a contradiction unto ourselves. Our traditional lifestyle can’t be lived today,” he says.

Roach’s great-grandfather was forced to relocate from Montana, where some of the Blackfoot tribe originated, to Oklahoma. But he ran away from the orphanage and ended up in Ohio. His grandfather died young, and a lot of things died with him—his grandmother was too busy raising the children to keep up traditions. Roach’s father was born in Stow, but when Roach was 5 years old, the family moved to the farmland of southern Ohio on the side of a mountain, he says. His father was a coal miner, and the family had a large garden and raised cattle, pigs and chicken.

“It was one step away from sustenance living,” he says, adding that they bought bread and sugar, but most of what they ate was their own.

“It’s like breathing. It’s just who you are.”

Roach and his family are avid powwow goers, he says. They travel to Ann Arbor, Mich., each year, which kicks off the powwow season. It’s another example of pan-American Indianism—at powwows, traditions of the Cheyenne, Cherokee, Navajo and many others are all upheld. Last year, a group of Inuit even came, he says.

“It’s indescribable,” Roach says. “Everywhere you look, it’s another Indian.”

Full-blooded Native Americans are rare, even on reservations, Roach says.

Does being full blood make you more or less Indian? Is a city Indian more or less Indian than a reservation Indian?

“You are who you identify with,” Roach says, explaining that observing traditions is a way of connecting with his past to find out who he is.

Roach keeps many Native American objects in his office, including the handmade piece shown on the wall behind him. {larger}

Native Americans don’t separate religion and state, he says.

“We see ourselves as one of many creatures in an environment,” he says, adding American Indians believe they are no better or worse than a rabbit or deer. “The deer gives food to us, just as we become food for other creatures when we die.”

It’s all very cyclical, like the medicine wheel or the popular dreamcatcher, he says.

“The goal of American Indian spirituality is to find your place in the world and be happy, where the mindset of Euro-centric spirituality seems to be to defeat, conquer and subdue nature,” he says.

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