Travels In A Sone canoe is a luminous story, two journalists from National Geographic on assignment in Indian Country cross an invisible boundary between two worlds, two different visions of reality -- and find their lives transformed. In a stunning and probing narrative -- part adventure tale, part reflection and epiphany -- the authors of Wisdomkeepers embark on a dramatic "spirit journey" into the living wisdom of Native American spiritual elders. When, nearly twenty years ago, a darkly enigmatic Cherokee herbalist approached Harvey Arden and Steve Wall with the proposition that they join him in a study of the lives, wisdom, and spiritual practices of Native America's fast-disappearing "Old Ones," the veteran writer and photographer found themselves thrust, despite their own hard-nosed skepticism, onto a mystic "path of the Wisdomkeepers." After receiving "signs" foretold by the Cherokee, they set off on a journey of spiritual discovery through another world, called Great Turtle Isl Dennis Banks I had enjoyed Arden and Wall's "Wisdomkeepers, " so something else by these two, I thought, would be just as good. "Travels in a Stone Canoe, " however, exceeds my expectations. It's not just another book by whites about "the poor" Indians. It's almost a reversal work -- as if it were the story of two whites by Indians! Their trip took me along with them. I wished I were on the Stone Canoe myself. Leonard Peltier "Travels in a Stone Canoe" is even better than "Wisdomkeepers." Havey Arden and Steve Wall capture and interpret the true Native American philosophy of life -- a life that is real, a life that we have lived for thousands of years. "Travels in a Stone Canoe" is a gift to future generations. I strongly recommend it. Whoopi Goldberg Once again, into the world with Steve and Harvey, and once again they return with a message we all can understand and be part of. But will we? These two say, "Try." Harvey Arden, retired senior writer for National Geographic, produced some of the magazine's most memorable stories during his tenure. Several of his articles have been reprinted in Reader's Digest . Steve Wall, a documentary photographer, has worked in more than forty countries, primarily for National Geographic magazine and books. His work has been featured in the United States and international publications and exhibited in galleries, museums, and collections in more than eight countries, including The International Center of Photography in New York and the Gallery of the Union of Artists in Moscow, Russia. Chapter 1 "Harvey, I've met this Indian...." Nothing has been the same for me since those simple words were spoken. My life's real work had abruptly and inexorably begun, and I was merely annoyed. Looking back now, nearly two decades later, I try to reconstruct how it all began, how it came about that we -- two unlikely white journalists -- became runners stumbling between two worlds, spirit-journeyers on the path of the Wisdomkeepers. Events that seemed isolated and utterly unconnected at the time I now see as parts of an emerging whole. What's more, the whole itself keeps changing, as do we. The ever-shifting parts dissolve and reform, metamorphosing in and out of each other as in a dream. The pieces of memory come floating back at me. There was Steve Wall, who got me into all of this, and there was Two Trees, who envisioned this spirit-journey in the first place and who remains a dark and unsettling enigma to this day. There was the Maestro's mystic condor in Peru, and there was Frank Fools Crow's miraculous eagle at Wounded Knee. There was Leon Shenandoah, who taught us there was a path, and Mathew King, who taught us there was a set of instructions for following that path. "Original Instructions for being human," he called them. There was the eagle's feather and the owl's claw -- the signs that Two Trees predicted we would receive and which assumed a special metaphoric power for us as they propelled us onto the path. And then there was me, yanked out of the ordinary and flung into it all despite myself, protesting and complaining all the way. I remember that pale gray morning in late November 1981. A light snow was falling at an angle past my seventh-floor window at National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C. I was at my desk writing an article for the magazine about the return of the Sinai Peninsula from the Israelis to the Egyptians ("Eternal Sinai," April 1982). Just six weeks earlier I had stood some twenty-five yards from Anwar Sadat at the moment of his assassination during a military parade in a sports stadium outside Cairo -- not quite the usual stuff for a National Geographic staff writer and, since my article wouldn't be published for many months, hardly a major news scoop. But I was properly shaken by the incident, seeing some special if indefinable personal providence at having been present at that vortex of history. I remember, moments after the first