LITCHFIELD – A psychic told Levi Gallant she was an Indian princess in another life, killed by an arrow through the chest.
There’s an unexplained scar on her right side, about the size of an exit wound.
Maybe the psychic was right. Gallant thinks it’d be fun to believe that, anyway.
Since learning at 17 that she is part Chippewa, Gallant’s embraced the culture, learned bits of recipes and beliefs, and taken to filling her home with baskets, sculptures and gold-rimmed plates that celebrate American Indians.
There are sights and sounds: A favorite tape of flutes, drums, birds and water called “Canyon Trilogy” by R. Carlos Nakai offers steady background music.
It’s calming in a life that gets chaotic. She home-schools two teenagers and works as a traveling aide, helping elderly clients with details like shopping and cleaning.
“Trust me, (the tribal music tape) is very hard to find if you lose one,” Gallant said.
When the family moved into their home here in 2002, her husband, Timothy, remodeled the interior in natural woods and built shelves for display space.
She’s lined them with plates and little hand-crafted figures – warriors, medicine men – and hung dream catchers and medicine wheels.
“Going all the way to camp at Starks, I’ll stop at every little place,” she said. Back-road antique stores, flea markets. “Anything nature and Native American, if I can have it, I’ll get it.”
Up at camp, where she used to keep part of the collection, Gallant, 47, has practiced boiling herbs and roots for tea, using willow and alder bark and Indian recipes. (She tested it on herself first to make sure no one got sick.)
Add a little orange or lemon peel and it’s good for a headache, she said.
Gallant has the Native American 10 commandments posted on her wall and says she tries to live by them. The first: “The Earth is our mother, care for her.”
She’s started digging into her own genealogy. The Chippewa tribe was around Illinois, she said.
“There was a story in my family: My great-grandmother was kidnapped, fell in love with (the Indian man), had children and it went on from there,” she said.
Gallant’s also started to get into local history, reading up on Mollyockett, a healer and hunter woman from the Oxford Hills area. “But I still have an awful lot to learn and the rest of my life to do it.”
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