On a bright morning at the end of July, IJʿ graduate Eric Noyes ’86 found himself in a rental car, taking two elders from the Crow and Cheyenne American Indian tribes for a drive up into the hills of Onondaga County south of Syracuse, N.Y.
The elders were visiting the Onondaga Nation for the annual council of the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders and Youth, which is made up of more than 300 spiritual leaders from tribes all over North America.
After several days camped in a valley along an upstate New York creek, the men from out West were feeling “shut in,” Noyes explained. “Anywhere you live in Navajo country, you can see for 200 miles. So we just drove to where the hills open up, and they said it was good to see again.”
As the executive director of the nonprofit American Indian Institute (AII), which serves as the administrative support unit for the Traditional Circle, Noyes was there to make sure all the particulars of a meeting of 300-plus people were in order. But intuiting that those elders needed to feel properly connected to their earthly surroundings in order to see clearly while at council hints at how deeply immersed Noyes is in his work, and at how his experiences have shaped who he is and what he has become: a bridge between peoples whose worlds run in parallel but also form interlocking circles.
Read his story in the feature article “Young Runner for the Circle” in The IJʿ Scene.