About Raven

   

Greetings I am Donna Raven Long ( AKA Raven ) 

 I came from a medicine family.

My great- great grandmother was a medicine woman who healed with herbs and sometimes stones or crystals. But mostly she was known for hands-on healings, which is the majority of our medicine. In our family our medicine was passed down from grandmother to granddaughter.

I didn’t always know I carried medicine in me. But the medicine knew. It was in my blood. In my bones. In the way I listened to the wind and watched animals speak without sound. It was in the way I stood still. In the way I knew things I hadn’t been taught.

But there’s a moment—every healer has one—when the medicine doesn’t just live inside you, it calls you to it.

That moment came when I was eleven years old.

We went on a school field trip to a reservation in Narragansett Indian reservation. I was so excited. I’d never been to a reservation before, but I felt something pulling me there before the bus even started. Like something on the land was waiting.

After we toured the reservation, they brought us to a large field by the cliffs overlooking the ocean. A big white tent stood in the middle, filled with long tables and chairs where we were supposed to sit and do crafts. Kids were chattering, laughing, and weaving colorful placemats.

But I couldn’t sit yet.

The cliffs called me.

I walked out toward the edge. The wind shifted. And suddenly—I felt it. Not just air, but presence. A warmth, a knowing, a silent welcome. Something wrapped around me, not physically, but spiritually.

 I felt at home in a way I never had before.

Not just comfortable—rooted. Like I had been there a hundred times before in other lifetimes, in dreams, in memory. As I stood there, I had a vision: I saw myself standing in that same place, dressed in buckskins, wind in my hair, feet firmly on the land. I wasn’t just a visitor—I belonged there.

Everything else disappeared. The noise, the tent, the children. It all fell away. All that remained was the land, the spirit, and me.

That was the first time in my life that I truly knew where I belonged.

When I eventually returned to the tent, something in me had shifted. The world felt thinner, more transparent. I wasn’t the same girl who had stepped off the bus that morning. I was walking with two souls inside me—then and now—woven together like roots underground.

We were instructed to weave placemats. I sat down, picked up the materials, and my hands moved like they had done it a hundred times.

 I finished mine before anyone else, without help. It was perfect.

I remember thinking, “That wasn’t just me.”

And when we boarded the bus to return to school, I was quiet. Sad. Not just because we were leaving—but because something deep and ancient had opened inside me, and I didn’t want to let it go.

I silently cried the entire ride back to school.

That afternoon, when I got home, my grandmother arrived from work holding something in her hands.

It was a small

 hand-beaded turquoise medicine bag.

She placed it in my hands and said, “Someone told me to give this to you.” She never said who. She didn’t need to.

I knew.

And then she told me 

 We come from a medicine family. A French Mohawk bloodline.

The medicine passed from grandmother to granddaughter. Always.

She told me about her grandmother, a powerful medicine woman named Geneviève Tremblay, who healed with herbs and energy and sacred knowing. She said Geneviève passed the medicine to her, and now… it was my turn. 

She told me I had always been different. Sensitive. Dream-filled.

 She said the land had always spoken to me, that animals understood me, that I listened with more than my ears.

That was the night I started seeing things more clearly.

 That was the night the spirit grandmother

 began to speak to me.

Not a ghost. Not imagination. But presence. A voice that was ancient, kind, sometimes firm. She spoke with purpose and truth, like someone who had known me longer than I’d known myself. And I named her. Gave her a name to make her real in the world.

 Because in my family, spirits are not distant. They are relatives.

my Grandmother passed years ago . To this day I still receive insights ,visions, guidance and knowledge from both grandmothers. I believe we must always honor our Ancestors. They are the ones who paved the way for us to be where we are today.