We live in a time when many are unaware of, or doubt, the reality of unseen consciousness and the ability we each have to access it. But sometimes, extraordinary events occur that cause even the most skeptical to pause and reconsider. Here is a remarkable—and true–story of one woman’s inner contact with her ancestors that recently resulted in her winning a half million-dollar MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant!
Meet Jessie Little Doe Baird, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts. (The Wampanoag were the first Native Americans to meet the Puritans when they arrived in the 1600’s.)
In 1993 Ms. Baird experienced inner contact from her ancestors, delivered through a prophetic dream in a language she did not recognize or understand. “It lasted for three nights and I couldn’t get out of it no matter what I did. Every time I went to sleep it picked up where it had left off. At some point in the dream, I was really afraid. I tried to stay awake but eventually I had to sleep and I was back where it started and after a while I just decided to go with it and not be afraid. It was really a long dream.”
Ms. Baird heard the spirits of her ancestors speak in their lost native tongue, repeatedly saying to her, “We are here.” Once she was able to decipher the language in the dream, Ms. Baird understood that her ancestors were asking her to revive their lost language of Wôpanâak.
Greatly affected by this experience, Jessie Little Doe undertook the project of reclaiming the lost language. And no small project: she had no college degree at this time, but set out to obtain the necessary education, graduating from MIT with a master’s degree in linguistics in 2000. Over the last 17 years she has developed a dictionary of Wôpanâak, reconstructing the language from centuries old documents written in Wôpanâak, including a 1663 translation of the Bible, old wills, deeds and old correspondence.
This all began with an inner contact nearly two decades ago. On September 28, 2010 Jessie Little Doe Baird was one of 23 people world wide awarded a genius grant for herself, no strings attached, and a separate $530,000 grant from the Federal Administration for Native Americans for a master-apprentice teaching program. Her ancestors’ language, completely lost for generations, will be taught in grades Pre K to 12 in a new Wampanoag school to be opened in 2013.
When we keep an inner ear to the ground, so to speak, we open ourselves to the possibility of everyday miracles. We live in a world that is rich and wondrous beyond our rational understanding, and which offers us many resources for insight, understanding, and problem solving, both through our rational capabilities and as well through our inner access. It is in the integration of our thinking and rational faculties with our non-linear inner assets that we hold the prospect of building a better world. It need not be an extraordinary event when inner awareness delivers real time contribution to our present, physical, concrete incarnational reality and experience.
For more about Jessie Little Doe Baird go to these links:
Janine (Xy08) says
Wonderful story, Susan. Guided by in-sight. ; )
Harv says
What a wonderful and inspiring story- inner awareness and rational, western education combine to bring an amazing gift that will last generations.
Ruth Laura Soper says
Inspiring story. Thanks for sharing it.
susan says
It is indeed inspiring, isn’t it!? Another detail that is rather impressive: Ms. Baird’s mentor at MIT was a well known scholar in linguistics, who was also a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the co-founder of Rhode Island–and it was Roger Williams who over 3 centuries ago was instrumental in disallowing (supposedly for religious reasons) the native language that Jessie Doe Baird revived. Full circle.