In Nature’s Classroom with Indigenous Peoples
[Note: For non-Indigenous people to be taught by Indigenous people reverses the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the conquerers of this land as recorded through most of U.S. history. I wrote the following in From Egos to Eden: Our Heroic Journey to Keep Earth Livable, pages 191-194, (2017).]
All the schools I attended, kindergarten through grad school, educated me in the consciousness of MultiEarth civilization. Then, out in the job world, I strived to be “successful” by those standards. I compromised. I chose the lesser of two evils. I committed myself to jobs and projects through which I expressed my values as best I could. Through it all, my soul wanted something more.
So I sought out books, speakers, conferences, and conversations which pressed into different expanses beyond what I knew. Interested in healing, I took a new look at shamanism and how the world’s First Peoples understand Nature. I tried to understand episodes in which First Peoples, intent on practicing traditional ways, clashed with MultiEarth civilization, sometimes violently. The more I learned, the more I saw the continuing egoistic pride and ethnic or cultural prejudice of MultiEarth’s attitude and actions toward First Peoples. I recognized that MultiEarth civilization has never stopped vanquishing First Peoples. With that awareness, I became more interested than ever in First Peoples because I saw that their traditional ways are rich in the Earth-size living that all humanity needs to practice today.
Not that every Indigenous person practices OneEarth living. But those who continue in the traditional, Earth-centric ways of their ancestors are in the continuous stream of OneEarth living that predates the MultiEarth Civilization Project and carries into the present. Their persistence, even after centuries of engaging with a civilization that treats their ways as inferior, amazes and inspires me. The colonization of the minds of Indigenous children at boarding schools, where their culture was displaced by European language, dress, and customs, is a most egregious “civilizing” strategy used by the U.S.
Today, First Peoples continue to strategize ways to resist MultiEarth civilization—a way of living they are sure will fail—and to practice their traditional ways. Some, after getting lost in civilization for awhile, make great efforts to reconnect with their living traditions.
They and their traditions, I learned, live—meaning that they can change, adapt, yet, persist, by creative stubbornness to retain some of their languages, symbols, songs, dances, and rituals. These traditions, although differing in specifics based on their particular tribal culture, are all based on their belief that Earth shapes them in the ways of the Great Spirit. Wherever First Peoples live their traditions, they benefit, not only themselves, but all of us. With them, our joint quest for OneEarth living intensifies.
Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology…. has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional
native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there. —William Commanda (Mamiwinini; Algonquin), Canada, 1991. See “William Commanda,” Wikipedia.
Even minimal contact with the native peoples of this continent is an exhilarating experience in itself, an experience that is heightened rather than diminished by the disintegrating period through which they themselves have passed. In their traditional mystique of the earth, they are emerging as one of our surest guides into a viable future. —Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (1988), page 5.
The opening pages of the book, In the Absence of the Sacred, illustrate a widespread, unthinking prejudice non-Indigenous peoples express to and about Indigenous peoples.
Author Jerry Mander tells how his editor initially dismissed the relevance of a book he proposed on Indians. To the editor, a book contrasting First Peoples with technological peoples was a nonstarter: “Indians? Oh God not Indians. Nobody wants a book about Indians…. They’re finished. Indians smindians…. Mander, you’re some kind of goddamn romantic.” Mander’s editor expresses well the posture of the MultiEarth paradigm which has positioned itself as superior to the paradigm of Indigenous people for up to 12,000 years. (Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, 1991, page 2)
Showing all the eloquence of his advertiser background, merged with his activist experience, Mander, born to immigrant Jewish parents in New York, writes of the wisdom of First People:
Contrary to our prevailing paradigms, which assume that indigenous peoples throughout the world wish to participate in our economy, many Indians do not see us as the survivors in a Darwinian scenario. They see themselves as eventual survivors, while we represent a people who has badly misunderstood the way things are on the earth. They do not wish to join the technological experiment. They do not wish to engage in the industrial mode of production. They do not want a piece of the action. They see our way as a striving for death. They want to be left out of the process. If we are going over the brink, they do not wish to join us.
Throughout the world, whether they live in deserts or jungle or the far north, or in the United States, millions of native people share the perception that they are resisting a single, multi-armed enemy: a society whose basic assumptions, whose way of mind, and whose manner of political and economic organization permit it to ravage the planet without discomfort, and to drive natives off their ancestral lands. That this juggernaut will
eventually consume itself is not doubted by these people. They meet and discuss it. They attempt to strategize about it. Their goal is to stay out of its way and survive
it.72
Mander exposes key assumptions in the thinking of technological peoples to where, not only does much of the technology lose value, but the thinking behind it becomes unconvincing.
Mander has us wondering why the Civilization Project created by technological peoples gave up invaluable wisdom extant among native peoples worldwide. In the liminal space of the heroic journey we see how grievously wrong it is for the MultiEarth worldview to think that First Peoples are relics of the past in a modernization energized by what’s called “irreversible progress,” an egoistic phrase to absolve the bad moral choices involved in establishing MultiEarth globalization. Insecure egos do not admit this error easily. Such mind-changing moments happen, however, when the alchemy of change so prevalent in liminality does its work. There we can empty ourselves of chunks of MultiEarth thinking. We can overcome prejudices and recognize interdependences we’ve previously denied.
Writing this chapter comes at a time in my own journey when I am coming into the consciousness to see First Peoples and hear them in their own voices. Most of my life I’ve “known” First Peoples only in the voices of others writing about them. Patricia
St. Onge (Haudenosaune), author of the “Foreword,” is a guide to me in making this important shift. She showed me how in an earlier manuscript she felt talked about, but not there; and how important it is to speak of First Peoples in the present, not only the past, and in the struggles of now. She changed the tone and tense of this chapter and book.
The first voice in this chapter is that of William Commanda (Mamiwinini), spelling out the contrasting worldviews as separate trails, one of technology, the other of spirituality. Then I tell the story of two European-Americans: Jerry Mander writing a book on Indians, and his editor who with incredulity and raw prejudice shows how thoroughly confined he is to thinking in the MultiEarth paradigm. Mander goes on to write a book contrasting the technological and spiritual paths that Commanda distinguishes.
[Note: In the rest of the chapter I tell of my personal contact with Mayan peoples in Chiapas and quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist).