From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Sarah Austin-Ginness.

In this episode, four stories about being stuck. Stories about being frozen, caught, and basically unable to move forward.

Our first story from Alistair Bain takes place on the pulpit of a church in Oklahoma,

and he developed this story for a moth main stage in Texas that was presented along with the San Antonio Book Festival.

Here's Alistair Bain, live at the Moth.

I'm from the Eastern Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma, but I've lived in Denver, Colorado for quite a few years.

I have a friend that also lives in Denver, who's originally from Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation.

A few years ago, we got talking about how homesick we were.

And he suggested that we could go spend a couple of weeks with his grandma, who said he didn't visit nearly

enough anyway. So we made our plans. We got in the car for the 12-hour drive, and on the way

there we talked about everything we missed. Frybread and pow-wows and stomp dances and hearing our people

speak our own languages. By the time we got to Oklahoma, I was so happy to be home. We were maybe

three or four miles from his grandma's house when he said there were a

couple of things he maybe should tell me about. The first was that his grandmother might not be

particularly fond of Shawnee people.

This was because of a thing that had happened between our tribes in the late 1800s, which might seem like a long time ago to some people, but she remembered.

The second thing he said was that she could be a little bit persistent about inviting people to go to church with her on Sunday.

Right away, I knew what he meant.

In modern-day Oklahoma, Native people have an eclectic array of spiritual beliefs.

Some follow our traditional ways. Others have joined various congregations.

I grew up with an Irish Catholic mother and a Shawnee father, and so I was very open to all kinds of different spiritual beliefs. But as I'd grown up, it was our traditional ways that it's spoken to my heart.

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