Career Story: Rolling Thunder
Some careers do not always include income generating work. As is the following case with work consisting of advocacy for native American causes, teaching and healing. Rolling Thunder was born as John Pope in rural Oklahoma outside of a town called Big Cedar in the Ozark mountains in 1916. Born with a Cherokee father and a white mother, his paternal grandfather was a chief and medicine man. Growing up during the Depression Rolling Thunder roamed around from tribe to tribe learning from and studying from tribal medicine men including the Sioux, Crow, Chumash, Miwok, Tuscarora, Paiute, and ended up living in the Western Shoshone tribal region of northeastern Nevada. He called himself an inter tribal medicine man.
Rolling Thunder was a healer, political activist advocating for Indian rights, a speaker and a teacher. He was controversial and spoke his mind, shared his beliefs and perspectives and was not always accepted or appreciated by either some of the tribal community or the American government. He was given his Indian name of Rolling Thunder as a child when running wildly with abandon outside during rain and thunderstorms.
John Pope ended up settling in Carlin Nevada close to the Western Shoshone Indian reservation and close to the sacred Ruby Mountains. He was married to a tribal woman named Spotted Fawn (also known as Helen Pope) and had two sons, Buffalo Horse and Spotted Eagle. While living in Carlin, Rolling Thunder was known as John Pope and worked as a brakeman for the Union Pacific railroad to provide his family with their income.
I first learned about Rolling Thunder by reading Doug Boyd’s book by the same name, published in 1974. Doug met Rolling Thunder while presenting to his employer, the Menninger Foundation at an event in Council Grove, Kansas in 1971, where Rolling Thunder gave a talk and a healing demonstration. Boyd was able to get funding from the Menninger Foundation to study Rolling Thunder to learn of his abilities and philosophy and to also learn about medicinal plants. Boyd spent one year with Rolling Thunder. One of the causes that Rolling Thunder was actively involved in was stopping the destruction of the pinion forests in the mountains of Eastern Nevada. The seeds of the pinion pine were a staple of the Shoshone tribal diet. These forests were clear cut by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on tribal lands to provide more grazing land for ranchers. Rolling Thunder and others were able to film the clearing of these forests and share the videos with senators in Washington D.C. who raised awareness and were able to stop this. Another issue Rolling Thunder was passionate about were Native American rights such as the taking of native children and raising them in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools; taking them from their families and not allowing them to speak their native languages.
Rolling Thunder became an in demand speaker in the 70’s and 80’s. Speaking and giving healing demonstrations at the University of California Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, the Association for Humanistic Psychology in San Francisco, World Symposium on Humanity in Vancouver, British Columbia and a speaking tour to Europe including Austria, Sweden and Denmark. He became quite popular with the music and arts culture of the time with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart creating a solo album called Rolling Thunder and served as a consultant to the popular Billy Jack films.
Rolling Thunder founded a native American spiritual community based on his living in harmony with nature near his home in Carlin, Nevada called Meta Tantay which lasted for roughly ten years. Visitors ranging from Buckminster Fuller, the Grateful Dead, Tibetan monks and young vagabonds and others from all over the world visited Meta Tantay.
When Rolling Thunder’s wife Spotted Fawn died he became despondent and his own health left him as he turned to alcohol and became diabetic losing one of his legs. His second wife, Carmen Sun Rising Pope who edited a compilation of his lectures called Rolling Thunder Speaks cared for him the last years of his life before he went to, as he called it, the Happy Hunting Ground. He passed away in 1997 peacefully dying in his sleep at his home in Carlin. I’ll leave you with Rolling Thunder’s words on healing; “I believe the healing force contains the strength of the Creator-or-Great Spirit-as well as the energy of the thunder and lightning, and that of all living beings. I sometimes also ask the stars or the sun to help me, or I may call on the great medicine men and tribal chiefs of the past. As a medicine man I attempt to bring such forces together so they’ll convey their healing powers to the sick person.”
Sources:
- Rolling Thunder, by Doug Boyd
- Rolling Thunder Speaks, A message from Turtle Island, edited by Carmen Sun Rising Pope
- Mother Earth News, July 1981; Rolling Thunder, Native American Medicine Man
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