4

PATHWAYS TO KNOWING

Before digging more deeply into my awakening, it is important to provide readers with a conceptual map of the four types of encounters with the Native American heritage and wisdom that I have experienced and observed around me. I think that such a framework, explaining the variety of ways we come to know and understand things, is often missing from writings by Native Americans. As a result the general public confuses, conflates, and unnecessarily mystifies different modalities of Native American experience. Too much of this experience is mistakenly thought to be beyond the reach, or even full comprehension, of non-Natives. Regrettably, much of the contribution of our indigenous cultures is viewed as too remote and too esoteric to apply to mainstream living. Such distancing and othering of Native Americans marginalizes indigenous people. It relieves those in the mainstream from having to examine their own beliefs in a new and challenging light.

Here then are the four types of encounter I have engaged in during the rediscovery of my Native American heritage.

Visitations and Connections: The most astounding and sometimes the most perplexing encounters involve wonderful, unintended, and typically unexpected, visitations of ancestral spirits. These are great rarities and great gifts. Equally thrilling, but typically more gentle, are direct connections with the natural world, moments when the consciousness of other living beings, flora and fauna, becomes accessible. The psychology, biochemistry, and neurology of such encounters with natural kin are explored in great detail in Stephen Harrod Buhner’s works about plant intelligence and teachings: Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Into the Dreaming Earth and The Secret Teachings of Plants: In the Direct Perception of Nature.

Observation: A far more common encounter with the wisdom of Native American culture comes through intended highly conscious, close observation of the world of nature and the lessons that flora and fauna bring, if we take the time to see and listen. A Native American child first taught me to do this, and my cousins have joined as guides and inspirations. It is often difficult to distinguish between wisdom imparted by a visitation and that which arises from careful observation. I believe that these two modes of knowing often overlap. As noted earlier, this mode of experiencing the world around us is exemplified in the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss.

Reflection: This mode of coming to know and understanding requires time and critical self-examination, even an element of skepticism. It often requires asking ourselves hard questions: “What did I just experience?” “How much did I really see or hear?” “What part of what I experienced was the result of my too willful conjuring out of some personal need rather than receiving an unsolicited gift from outside or by looking beyond myself?” And of course, the most challenging and rewarding question: “What does it mean?”

Black Elk, a famous Sioux medicine man and later in life a Catholic catechist, asked himself these questions over the entire course of his lifetime. Not only was he constantly skeptical of visitations, but his family, elders, medicine men, and priests also questioned and examined Black Elk’s visions. Such reflection was a routine part of living in a Native American community. The questioning became more intense when Native American culture encountered, and sometimes collided with, Christian settler culture. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson navigates these culturally sensitive issues with great respect and sophistication. The 2008 annotated edition of John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks is also a rich source of information on spirituality at the intersection of indigenous and European cultures. This edition contains Raymond J. DeMallie’s notes on Neihardt’s embellishments and deletions from the original stenographic record of interviews with Black Elk.

Storytelling: This mode of coming to know is profoundly social rather than introspective and private. By sharing or publishing knowledge and wisdom we have been given, we become teachers and conduits of culture. As every teacher knows, we only really begin to deeply grasp what we think we know when we see if and how our experience resonates with others as we attempt to speak of it. Our friends, families, and communities challenge and confirm us. For Native Americans with millennia-old oral traditions, storytelling comes naturally. For others, this is nearly a lost art form. If we are all, Natives and non-Natives, to rediscover our past, understand our present, and create a better future, we must become better storytellers and better story listeners.

Fig. 4.1. Ways of knowing

These four ways of knowing intersect, overlap, and inform one another. I struggled with various diagram shapes in an effort to portray the interconnections visually. I first experimented with a pyramid. It did not work, because that image suggests a rigid hierarchy of knowing. Nor does a pyramid allow each of the four modes of knowing to intersect, as they do continually.

Appropriately, the wheel came to me as the best pictorial representation. It is also an image from my ancestral heritage—a medicine wheel or a sacred circle and fire used in ceremony. The result pictured below does not include the four directions, sacred plants, or colors traditionally associated with a medicine wheel. That will not all fit in one image, so I leave it for fertile imaginations to embellish my image and complete my work.