—JOY HARJO
Yaa’teeh—“It is good” in Diné
Kwira Va—“We are one” in Rarámuri
Cualli Tonalli—“Good day” in Nahuatl (although this can also be translated as “good destiny”)
In lak’ech, hala k’in—“I am the other you; you are the other me” in Yucatan Mayan
What binds these greetings, in the languages of a few first peoples, is the crucial awareness that we are all related—Mitákuye Oyás’in, in Lakota—every person, every animal, every plant, all living things. This is an awareness that has been devalued in our industrial and postindustrial world.
These sentiments stem from the indigenous mind-set that used to be the view of all peoples, from all lands. But with conquests, colonialism, the imposition of outside religions, and exploitative economic relations, much of this outlook is now considered archaic, irrelevant to a modern world, or, worse still, spawned of the Devil. However, I argue that indigenous thought, spirituality, and science (all as one, as they were never meant to be divided), such as the knowledge belonging to the first peoples of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, have deep pertinence to our current societal chaos and to shaping a new and just future for all.
I aim to move thoughts and hearts to the possibility of ancestral knowledge as a substantial guide to where we need to go—first, because every continent has native roots, including Europe, and second, because as the world spirals into worse crisis, this ancestral knowledge becomes a much-needed wellspring to source from as we negotiate the morass.
I will identify four key connections whose severance permeates the present time. In modern society, we have become separated from nature, from our own natures, from each other, and from the divine. I contend these disconnections are central to the inhumanity and disintegration currently confronting Native peoples and, I’ll venture to say, all peoples.
The first key connection is to nature, to the laws, rhythms, and energies all around us—in microbes, ground, animals, trees, clouds, moon, air, sun, stars, and more. In the past five thousand years of so-called civilization, we’ve become largely estranged from nature, its abundance and its powers. With large-scale manufacturing, mining, oil extraction, and such we’ve created a precarious world. We have false scarcity in our economies. Nature, if we pay attention and honor its parameters and possibilities, has the capacity to give back. It’s also in nature where one accesses the ancestral powers, the spiritual AC/DC to one’s personal potency.
“Technology [in tribal traditions] takes a radically different form than in the West because its intention is not to disturb the natural world,” wrote West African Dagara elder Malidoma Somé. “Indigenous people tend to be familiar with the sorts of technology that do not assault nature, do not compete with the natural order, and do not tend to show them as superior with respect to nature.”
Invasion, infusion, and infection by European powers was the single most important cause of the separation of Native peoples from what we consider the Great Spirit or Creator Spirit. This includes forced removal from the earth and sky systems that have sustained us for tens of thousands of years.
Indigenous people knew how to live on this earth, to only take what was needed, to replenish what was taken, and to cooperate and care for each other and the land. They had highly developed spiritual values and deep-seated tenets and ideas. They were the first humans to genetically hybridize a plant (maize—or centeotl, in Nahuatl—which became the basis of the world’s most important grain). In 1519, when the Spanish arrived to the clean and orderly city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, larger than any city in Europe, they marveled at the colorful temples, marketplaces, menageries, gardens, and canals, as well as amatl paper books, astronomical and mathematical prowess, and fascinating new foods. Only when gold was found did they degrade and denigrate the Natives, claiming they cut peoples’ hearts out and worshipped false gods—that they were “savages.” Besides enacting the rapid destruction of majestic structures, causeways, and housing, and many massacres, the conquistadors burned an estimated sixty thousand texts.
Of course, there were times when Native peoples violated their own precepts, waged war, carried out power struggles—they are human beings after all. But the consensus around the need to align with nature and each other has always been there, led by the feminine, the first energy, and sustained by the masculine, in the proper relationship between the two core energies.
The second connection we must restore is to one’s own genius, the unique internal designs and patterns we were born with. This is where “callings” come from, the act of tapping into the great passions of one’s life and evolving the character to carry one’s destiny to fruition. The Mexica, like other native peoples, understood this as tonalli—one’s destiny based on the energies present at birth and that play out, even with distortions based on nurture or lack thereof, throughout one’s “dreamspell” on earth. The fulfillment of this destiny derives from deep soul work, but also initiations and healthy community support, as well as quality of struggle so we can give “life” to life.
Remember, initiation has at its core an awakening to soul. And soul is not just about reaching back and down. It also has a powerful connection to the future—aligning one’s soul with purpose that serves the world.
For many years, I’ve been addressing the deep separations affecting our youth under the “profits first” capitalist system. In particular I’ve gone to scores of impoverished schools, youth probation camps, and juvenile lockups, where I facilitated workshops, poetry readings, healing circles, or lectures. I appreciate schools and institutions that enlarge their vision of how to deal with our troubled youth, advocate for greater access to resources, and are staffed by courageous men and women.
I always have a great time with these young people, sparking intense dialogues and learning by listening to them. Yet, I must say, the separations they face are profound, punishing, and in my view destructive to their spirits and to our communities. What traumatized and raging young men, as well as abused and diminished young women, need is more community, more family; and if they don’t have a family or have a broken one, they need a healthy sense of it.
Native peoples know that youth also need elders—without elders, where are the sage men and women who can “show them the ropes” from past experiences as well as guide them through new waters and coming fires? Where are the important initiatory practices? The mentors? The latter word is an ancient concept, from Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus’s son Telemachus is without his father, lost and lacking internal strength against the predators who’ve invaded the kingdom during Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, it is Telemachus’s teacher, Mentor, infused by the feminine energy of Athena, who steps up to guide him on his ocean journey to find his father, which is really a journey to find his own genius and purpose.
What all youth need, especially the most troubled, is more connection, more stories, initiation, engaged teachers, and guides, led by community—not less.
In our so-called adult corrections and juvenile justice systems, I see the opposite going on. Even the psychoactive drugs we prescribe to ADHD children, or mentally ill persons, or the clinically depressed, result in artificial separation from one’s own powers and energies to cope and to change. I understand why, with major chemical imbalances, they are necessary, often lifelong. I have family members who have bipolar disorder and live with other mental health issues. Yet far too many times medications are prescribed when other natural and long-range connective strategies would work best. Instead people are simply expediently misdiagnosed and given pills as the end all, be all of care.
Why is this so?
Because this is what we’ve done to our whole culture—imposed ruptures from the fruits of our labor and creativity, from each other, from the energies in nature and spirit that sustain us, and prescribed a “pill” to make the pain of those ruptures go away. The current opioid crisis, originally stemming from prescription drugs even more powerful than street-class heroin, is symptomatic of these deeper disaffections.
This unraveling of the human-relational has penetrated our policies, laws, and history. It is exacerbated by divisions between races, economic classes, generations, genders, and sexualities—the powerful from the powerless, the spiritual from the material.
I cleaved closer to my Native roots a year after I sobered up, in 1993, after having been on heavy drugs for seven years as a youth and then drinking for twenty years on top of that. I’ve been through AA, NA, and Rational Recovery. They are all good. I still go to meetings from time to time, mostly to help others; I recently attended an NA meeting during ten days I spent in Spain in 2017. There are a few people I can talk to about my anxieties, usually those who’ve been through it. But I have to say it was Native American medicine, especially on the rez, that became my most powerful recovery “program.”
During the years I lived out my addictions, my soul/psyche was held hostage. I would do anything to stop the pain from the emotional and psychic losses and traumas I’d endured. I didn’t stop regardless of guilt or laws or the fact that I was hurting those I most loved. Bottoming out, which is its own special hell, doesn’t always do it. You also need an epiphany, some grace to arise in the darkest hour. Finding this epiphany required years of intense and sustained work to remove those lingering chains on my soul. You have to get to the bottom, to the knotted roots. Recovery doesn’t resolve addictions. It merely begins a difficult, and at times painful, process of not using or drinking. In time, you get stronger, braver, more capable.
To quit, I had to accept never-ending ache—numbness only meant my demise. Now constant pain is a constant reminder, a holy surrender. Life is pain. Pain is life. When the pain’s gone, so am I.
On June 30, 2018, I celebrated twenty-five years of being clean and sober.
To be clear, society has created and enabled most addictions. On the rez, alcohol, drug, and suicide rates are higher than anywhere else. Not far behind are so-called inner cities, migrant camps, trailer parks, and homeless encampments. Mixed in are those affected by broken or unhealthy families, mental health conditions, and rootlessness, as well as cynical social policies to let drugs and drink permeate destitute communities. For Native peoples, you have to add the enforced ripping apart of traditions, tongues, ceremonies, stories, and relationships. After several generations, genetic propensities drive most disorders.
Societies should provide treatment for anyone who wants it—stop criminalizing and debilitating the addict. Unfortunately, our society thrives on addictions. It’s an industry; people profit from our pain. For example, liquor stores abound in the poorest neighborhoods, selling high-potency drinks manufactured especially for alcoholics—we called them “short dogs.” I can tell you the brands from my day: Night Train Express, Thunderbird, Ripple, MD “Mad Dog” 20/20, and more, many made by big-time wineries like E. & J. Gallo (although they don’t publicly say so).
In addition, all the addictive drugs anyone wants can be obtained on most streets, despite our multi-billion-dollar “war on drugs.” For decades, heroin tore through the poorest enclaves, with “uppers,” “downers,” and LSD thrown into the mix. PCP, crack, and crystal meth have all appeared since the 1970s, when President Nixon began his drug war. Now opioids, manufactured initially by major pharmaceutical companies and presently more cheaply in Mexican drug labs, have inundated more abandoned communities, including middle class and poor white areas. In 2016 alone, opioids, including fentanyl, killed 63,600 people; the highest death rates were in states like West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.
What’s common in these communities is there are hardly any free health clinics, bookstores, or decent spaces for community members to create, to learn, to stay healthy. It’s easier in these areas to buy drugs, alcohol, and guns than to buy a book. I must also add: a good share of the “recovery” industry gets attached to the gaps and empties, and often makes excessive revenues from private and public funds.
Society has to be held accountable. But to stop using or drinking . . . that’s a decision only one person, at the hardest time in their life, can make. It’s still an individual choice, one day at a time, every day and every time that choice comes up. There’s no way around this. At the same time, society and lawmakers should stop making addictions solely an individual problem with only individual solutions. The courage to begin recovery is rarely found alone.
In most of Europe, drug addicts are treated with a measure of dignity. In some countries they are given safe places to use, with clean needles, under supervised care (so they don’t have be in the street with dirty needles and at risk from shooting up who-knows-what into their veins). If they’re ready, sobriety treatment is through a nearby doorway.
Free, universal, quality health care should be everyone’s right, including the right to be free of addictions. People do become sober, even in the most addictive environments. Can you imagine how more powerful this country would be when the individual’s need to heal is aligned with a society that is all about healing?
The third connection we need to restore is to have respectful and meaningful relationships with others. Start with the Golden Rule: treat others as you want to be treated. Most spiritual practices have this idea as a core value. Caring for others in spite of disagreements, as well as different customs, orientations, and languages, we learn to respect each other as part of the greater human family. We learn to give and care instead of take and detach. There are too many predatory relationships, even in families, but also in nations, religions, institutions, and corporations. There is no need for judgments based on who has money, a certain skin color, or the “right” sexuality, belief system, or gender.
Everyone is valuable.
Often we forget why we need spiritual and moral engagement. It’s not so you become a better Christian, or a better Buddhist, or a better Muslim. My motivation for following the Red Road is not to be a better “Indian.” The aim is to be a better human being: decent, autonomous, interrelated, and whole.
Jesus Christ never said, “Become a better Christian.” In scripture, Jesus says, “Love God above all else,” “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Blessed are the poor” . . . in other words, Jesus, like most spiritual teachers, provided parables and principles to help anyone bring more beauty, truth, and goodness into the world for everyone.
Of course, doing this will end up making you a better Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Native spiritual practitioner. This is the essence of all spiritual practices. Every “way” leads to the same place—a compassionate and more connected humanity.
Let me say this another way: How many “good” Christians do we know who go to church every Sunday, spout scripture like there’s no tomorrow, follow laws and pay bills, but are cruel, intolerant, and dismissive of others? You can also find people like that among followers of the Torah, the Qur’an, or even Native American traditions. It’s good to respect ritual, liturgy, and custom, but remember these are secondary to the aim—an open and honest heart; close, genuine relationships; and healthy social integration.
While Christianity is the predominant religion in the United States, it is also scattered, at odds with itself. The more institutionalized churches have amassed wealth, power, and influence. The powerful Catholic Church has been racked by extensive child abuse, predominantly sexual, going back centuries. Churches are also steeped in politics, man-made disputes between those who see Jesus as a revolutionary, bedraggled man of the people and those who consider him a Republican.
It has been stated many times that people cast God in the image of themselves. An oft-mentioned example is in a Paris, Texas, cemetery where a statue of Jesus Christ has cowboy boots. In order for Christianity to be taken in by Europeans, Jesus became “white”—which he couldn’t have been if he existed at the time he is said to have existed, as an Aramaic-speaking Jewish Nazarene of present-day Palestine. Mother Mary arrived in Mexico in 1531 as the brown-skinned, Nahuatl-speaking “Virgen de Guadalupe.” The same is true in other religions—the Buddha, originally from India, in Japan looks Japanese.
In June 2018, psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced a study of 511 Christians viewing various faces to determine what they imagined “God” to look like. The upshot: they chose, for the most part, a face that looked an awful lot like themselves (whites tended to make God white; Blacks had God appear more black).
Beyond God’s appearance, a similar case can be made about God’s supposed disposition. If people are mean and intolerant, so, in general, is their “God.” If they are open and kind, “God” tends to be as well.
Some might say there’s nothing wrong with this. Secular interests and images always imbue religious ones. This is because for “modern man,” material conditions are primary. But for so-called ancient people, the “other world” was primary. It’s important to fuse the spiritual and the material into our lives. This connective relationship is paramount—and has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican, right or left. It’s about what’s right or wrong—a moral center that maintains respectful and meaningful relationships with Creator, nature, each other, and our own being.
I’ve personally witnessed many a religious institution full of pageantry and splendor and devoid of spirit. And I’ve been in nonreligious settings with plenty of heart, vulnerability, ritual, and fellowship, where spirit is tangible and flourishing.
However, politics has pushed right-wing, mostly white, Christians to fanatically misrepresent their own texts, overlooking passages that counsel them to be kind to strangers, as they may be angels, and even ignoring many of their own experiences as Irish, German, Eastern European, or Italian migrants. For them, the politics of fear and division is overriding Jesus Christ’s own teachings. And, I must point out, many Christian churches in the United States supported slavery, Jim Crow, Black Codes, and even the lynching of Blacks—around 4,500 Blacks killed from 1870 to 1950 that can be counted (many more were killed, but records weren’t kept or were destroyed).
I’m not saying all churches or religions are bad. For years I’ve allied with faith-based organizations and spiritual practitioners in gang peacemaking, recovery work, and addressing poverty. I’ve been in talks and trainings with the Reverend William Barber, a Christian minister from North Carolina. He heads the movement for Moral Mondays, Repairers of the Breach, and cochairs the Poor People’s Campaign with the Reverend Liz Theoharis, building on the powerful movement Martin Luther King Jr. spearheaded before he was killed. For a few years now, I’ve been on steering committees and coordinating bodies of the PPC, taking part in rallies, gatherings, and actions. This movement calls for the elimination of poverty and ending environmental and social injustice, as well as the war economy. Rev. Barber has noted there are some 2,500 passages in scripture focused on want and human-based suffering, and less than a handful on issues advocated for by right-wing evangelicals.
“There are false prophets who make merchandise out of the people,” Barber says of the right wing’s hijacking of Christian values, with millions of dollars at their disposal. “These people are religious—religiously committed to the dollar. This is heavily funded heresy.”
Barber insists that deep societal and economic change to end poverty is a moral imperative for Christians. If I’m going to collaborate with any religion—and I’m interested in all of them—this would be why. Again, the churches are divided, and much to many people’s chagrin, it has to be this way as we reach the “end times”—but not the “end of the world”—of former epochs and stages of development and grow into what’s new and arising.
Still many Christians, including evangelicals, are decent and respectful and act in line with their values. They won’t justify inhumane behavior by misquoting their own scriptures. Christians have also been behind the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the fights for women’s equality and immigrant rights. We simply cannot have revolutionary change in this country without Christians at the heart of it.
The fourth connection we need, then, is with the divine. This includes what some people call God, Allah, Jehovah, the Great Spirit, or Brahman. The names are legion, but these names are not as important as what they represent. What I’m talking about is the universal sacred tapped into when one is most aligned with one’s genius and the genius of the world.
You don’t even have to believe in God. You can be as scientific and secular as possible and still find the divine in all things, all arts, all relationships, all humanity and earth. It appears in poems, songs, sculptures, painting, and dance. It shows up anytime, anywhere, especially in timeless moments, whenever the temporal opens up to the eternal. I feel this connection when I write, when I’m in ceremony, meditating, or giving back to my community.
I’ve also felt this way on a foggy mountaintop, or while watching a hummingbird suckle nectar, or when my wife places her hand in mine. Again, this connection may or may not be about church. The depth of healing in oneself and around us is in the distance one travels between the worlds. For many Irish, it’s in “the craic”—a crack leading into the other world—after a long day’s work; in a darkened pub; surrounded by friends and family; steeped in talk, song, and humor; while holding a hefty mug of Guinness.
When you have disciplined and engaged spiritual and/or artistic practices, when you interact purposefully and joyfully with authentic relations, you know what I’m talking about.
With these four key connections, we can renew and rebuild our families, states, and cultures. These connections run counter to the current global capitalist society that is based on exploitation, oppression, power, and war. We don’t have to keep feeling shallow and disheartened, forced to live pointless lives full of delusions and disappointments. Again, ancestral knowledge must not be dismissed as outdated or quaint tradition. This is not about archaeology, a study of the past, or romanticized notions of indigeneity but about living truths and myths that resonate with the present and future. In these dark and uncertain times, it can show us a way.
There is a story, told to me while I was in Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara, about a Rarámuri man who left the canyons to live and work among the “civilized.” Priests and others insisted this was what the “gentiles” must do—“gentiles” being a term used against native peoples who were neither Catholic or evangelical, who mostly lived traditionally, speaking their own tongues, being relatively healthy, never beating their partners or children, eating mainly the three “sisters” (corn, squash, and beans), and walking for miles to get around.
Off on his journey the man went, traveling for days on end, till he reached Chihuahua City. He ended up in La Tarahumara, the native ghetto, and tried to find work. All he found was poverty, drunkenness, and prostitutes.
Without work, or working for little or no pay, he was better off stealing. He turned to thieving, brawling, and drinking. He tried romance, moved in with a woman and had babies, but soon the fights between him and his partner became constant and violent. He left her alone with the children and scuttled back to the street.
Soon the man was arrested for pickpocketing and ended up in jail, where prisoners were locked up and left to their own devices. He became a predator, setting up scams to survive, abusing the vulnerable and weak. After his prison time, he ended up homeless, in rags. One night, while inebriated, a group of men attacked and stabbed him. He found himself in a dirty hospital, as other patients moaned in the crowded room and people lay in corridors waiting to be seen. He was later released, but needed a cane to get around.
After being gone for years, one day the man unexpectedly entered the ruins of a small church in his old village. Jesuits had abandoned the church decades before. A new priest tried to get it going again, but there were no pews or pulpit, the roof leaked, and supplicants sat on the floor for prayers. The priest, a mestizo man in a robe, looked askance at this weary and unkept stranger. He frowned and asked the stranger what he was doing there. The man responded he wanted to find God. The priest shook his head and spat, “You’ll need to get civilized first.”
The stranger beheld him for a moment, thought about this, and then, leaning with two hands on his cane, responded, “You know, Padre, I’ve been a thief, a liar, a drunk. I beat my wife and my kids, I spent time in jail, and later, without a roof over my head, I got stabbed and almost died . . . I think I’ve been plenty ‘civilized.’”
My oldest son, Ramiro, also became like that Rarámuri man in the story—trying to find his way in the “civilized” world of barrio-ghetto Chicago. At fifteen, he joined a gang. He later got kicked out of school, then dropped out and used and sold drugs. Within two years, he was involved in shootings, and he began his first prison term at seventeen. By twenty, he had three babies with three young women. After serving almost fifteen years for various convictions, including a thirteen-and-a-half-year stretch for three attempted murders, Ramiro was released in the summer of 2010. By then he was thirty-five years old.
At one point in his sentence, with years to go behind bars and numerous dangers surrounding him, Ramiro decided to get sober, remove himself from gang structures, and dedicate himself to his Mexica native teachings. He refused to go into any protective custody yard—he stayed on the main yards of various prisons. He programmed and received certificates and two associate of arts degrees. He even taught other prisoners how to read and write.
But Ramiro nearly didn’t make it out. Six months before his release, one of his daughters, then sixteen, was gang-raped. When he found out, Ramiro nearly lost it. He thought about revenge and other ganglike responses. Even though I was also hurting, I knew I had to stay centered and convince him not to consider any foolish acts. Ramiro had to focus on his release so he could help his daughter through the healing she needed.
To pray for my son, I went on a vision quest on the Pine Ridge Reservation, on the land of Ed Young Man Afraid of His Horses, who carries a respected Lakota name from the 1800s that in the original language meant “Young Man So Feared in Battle His Enemies Are Afraid of His Horses.” US authorities shortened it.
This hanbleceya (“crying for a vision”) was one of the hardest and most sacred acts I’d ever undertaken. In spite of my diabetes, which had just been diagnosed and was at a dangerous stage, I was left on the land, in the open, for two days and two nights, what Ed called the traditional way of counting the “four days and nights” of a vision quest (“day” is sunlight time, “night” is moon time, lasting twelve hours each, not twenty-four hours of day and night). I had no food or water, except for sage water each morning to help with the diabetes. Next to a tree, within a circle outlined by sage, I stood, sat cross-legged, danced, sang, prayed, and wept, trying with all my might not to sleep. In my hands I held a chanupa, a sacred ceremonial pipe.
Trini also did her own ceremony next to another tree, far from my sight. In another section of the land was my brother-in-law, a Yaqui-Rarámuri brother, Mexica danzante (Aztec dancer), Vietnam vet, and water pourer for the San Fernando Sweat Lodge located behind a sober-living home for parolees.
All three of us went through our own individual visioning experiences on “the hill” as rain poured, thunder and lightning filled the sky, and, at other times, the sun beat down on our heads. My Xicanx brother Tekpaltzin, from Chicago, helped set up the sweat lodge with Ed for when we came down. Also present were our young Native sister Katy Regalado, who had just finished her own hanbleceya, and her father, both originally from Peru, who stood by at Ed’s home on our behalf.
My thoughts and prayers the whole time, with all the thunder and water and darkness, were with Ramiro.
Ramiro stayed on track, although like most formerly incarcerated men or women, he’s had a hard time with “reentry,” including having doors closed on him around work. After his release, he spent three years on “paper” and finally paroled out in 2013. His daughter, whom I mentioned earlier, went through more changes, had a baby, and fell into crystal meth and other drugs. She finally agreed to embark on a recovery road to help her second child develop as healthy as possible during the pregnancy. After the baby’s birth, we weren’t sure my granddaughter would stay with the plan. So far, she’s remained clean. Ramiro’s other daughter also struggled with life and work, with two babies of her own. They are both now relating to Ramiro as best they can.
As for Ramiro’s oldest child, my grandson Ricardo, he didn’t talk to his dad until his early twenties when Ricky reached out. Father and son finally spent time together during the Christmas holiday of 2016—they had not seen each other in twenty years.
In 2014, Ramiro moved in with Trini, his two younger brothers, and me in the San Fernando Valley. To his credit, Ramiro has found the wherewithal to pull himself out of the abyss. He’s now a Mexica danzante, a mentor for young people and the formerly incarcerated, and a poet in his own right.
In September 2017, San Quentin State Prison’s GRIP Program (Guiding Rage Into Power), founded by Jacques Verduin, invited Ramiro and me to speak to two circles of prisoners, including a Spanish-speaking group run by Lucía De La Fuente Somoza. One was called the 790 Tribe, being some twenty guys who had a total of 790 years behind bars. We didn’t think the warden would let Ramiro in with all his felonies, but he was finally approved. I felt so proud being his father there as Ramiro spoke. He now has the courage, experience, and intelligence to speak wisdom and truth to anyone, anywhere.
Ed Young Man Afraid of His Horses, our great teacher and friend, passed on in 2014. I will always remember the spiritual work Ed did for Trini and me, including the tobacco-filled “Holy People” he had us make for our sweat lodge, when we needed this work the most.
Wopila! (In Lakota: “To give thanks”)
All this knowledge and experience informs what I’ve written about and spoken on for over twenty-five years. I’m conscious that my roots have entanglements—and I try to disentangle what I can from the rest, not cut them, although they are thoroughly enmeshed. For most Native leaders, teachers, and activists, this wisdom is one of the most important intellectual wells to draw from as we ignite imaginations to solve the economic, political, and social predicaments we now face.
These ways are called up to get us out of the habit of the environmental violence we’ve done, as well as violence to people—their cultures, their beings, their innate geniuses. Even modern science is catching up to the dense awareness and erudition of Native peoples that was accumulated before the onset of so-called Western civilization and has continued to grow since. Here I have to acknowledge the indigenous minds from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the rest of the world as well.
We need to get back to the ancestors to go forward.
How then do we make a crucial turn beyond the world that the powerful and rich, the corporations, a substantial military, and largely out-of-touch politicians have imposed on us? I don’t mind assigning blame—it’s warranted and documented. Somebody has to be held accountable. Blaming everybody means blaming nobody. However, not determining specific responsibility, with a precision about who or what has led us here, tends to lead to blaming those who have been largely victimized and terrorized into acquiescence. We don’t need to pretend there is no social class to point to for what has become of our planet. There are already enough apologists and enough subterfuge.
I’m also interested in real, lasting, and deep-delving answers. Leaving this issue at the level of blame is not resolution, it’s not resolve, it’s not revolutionary. We need a mythic imagination. In the United States, mythology has been pushed out of the cultural and social arena. In general, our leaders, businesses, and educational institutions have replaced such imaginings with material-based outcomes.
Mythology is not just made-up stuff, as the general public presently understands it; in our culture, myths mean “lies” and lies can become “facts.” Mythology consists of the stories—the “dreams”—of a community that contain sustenance for mind and soul, including lessons, directions, and guidance that can shine a light on where we’re at and where we need to go. You can’t take myths literally, as people have done with sacred texts. They are metaphors and messages for what matters.
There are many myths across cultures. Michael Meade has often related a Native American story about the world being a woven blanket. Its variants include an old woman on the mountain embroidering this world every day, with sun, flowers, birds, clouds, and people. Inevitably, there’s a black dog that climbs up the mountain and begins to unravel the blanket, inducing the night, the darkness, the shadowy and fearful terrain. Yet somehow a piece of that blanket remains, from which the old woman can reweave the world again the next day.
The Diné make blankets with an “exit” or “spirit” line, seemingly a flaw in a flawless weave. In fact, it is a line to the ancestors, the unseen world, that indicates there is always more, always a part of the old to save for the new. This is also true for what may have been destroyed, either by nature or man. Nothing is truly gone unless there is no more fabric left, no remaining memory, no exit line, no more to draw from. Natives on this American continent—and I mean from North, Central, and South America—know intimately and drastically such destruction.
Memory becomes a formidable exit line.