You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them Spoken by a Crow elder to Gary Snyder.
Indigenous perception may not only be poised to reassert itself if we just hunker down to the earth again, but it may also be a natural mode of perception for human beings. Certainly it is instinctual to children.
A friend of mine, Brian, related to me how, as a boy growing up in a rural area of Illinois, a raven used to come to him in his dreams. It taught him the kinds of things ravens know, and with Brian upon its back, would take him flying over the landscape surrounding his home, showing him hidden things in the forest. One night the raven took him to visit an old broken-down carriage from the previous century, decaying silently in an unvisited part of the woods. Upon waking, Brian bound out of bed and raced out to locate it, following the raven’s instructions. It was there, sure enough, right where the raven had shown him.
For my friend, the visitations of the raven were a special gift, a source of love and companionship his family couldn’t give him. “I actually looked forward to dreaming more than I did waking,” he laughed. “That raven was my best friend.” It is certain Brian needed kinship with the animal world to survive: his father abandoned him and his brother to the streets a few years later.
His bond with the raven was broken, just as such magical perception has been educated and persecuted out of children and whole populations for centuries now, when he made the mistake of revealing the wealth of his inner world to his family. They scoffed. They ridiculed him. They suspected his sanity. The seed of rational doubt and shame planted in his mind, the raven faded away.
Yet there is plenty of evidence that, even as adults, we can recuperate from the suppression of our native perception. We may even make these crossings into the indigenous mind and not even fully recognize its implication.
As a young man, I had the opportunity to join the members of Ring of Bone Zendo for a Buddhist retreat in the wilderness of Death Valley in California. It was rigorous. We got up and began meditating well before dawn in the freezing cold and practiced silent mindfulness throughout the day’s blazing heat as we walked, ate, and worked together. At night we sat in meditation again for a couple of hours beneath the stars, finally crawling into our sleeping bags in the shivery cold again, sometimes with light snowfall dancing in the beams of our flashlights.
After many days of practice, my perception started to loosen, to shift from the habitual, and I became susceptible to teaching from the ancient land. The moment came one evening as a primitive stone tool found on the desert floor made its round from hand to hand.
When it came to me I held it, and feeling how it nestled familiarly in my palm, the hand that had once carefully fashioned it upon the shore of a lake vanished long ago in geological time reached over the centuries to touch me.
With a sudden physical vertigo, I saw and felt the constellations in the sky of my mind wheeling backward, beyond 1492 into the time depths of this continent.
Wrenched free of the artificial, vision-constricting European time-line that had been forced upon my native perception of the world, I understood that my country, the United States of America, which my school textbooks had hammered into me was the most significant thing to ever happen to the Northern hemisphere, was a flash in the pan compared to the ancient cultures that inhabit it as their own.
I believe that day I became the first of those in my English and Danish lineage to set foot in the sacred topography of the New World, receiving the seed of an indigenous, native intelligence within me. Eventually, it would lead me into the Amazon rainforest as an apprentice in the tradition of shamanic medicine.
In this epiphany, I was perhaps being inducted into a lineage of Westerners who have gone native. The founder of the Buddhist community I was practicing with was, in fact, the same poet quoted above, Gary Snyder. Snyder also wrote, “For the non-Native American to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.”
This meditation on our innate potential to go native again is excerpted from our forthcoming book, Awakening our Indigenous Mind.
Works Cited
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004 (pgs 41-42).
I would LOVE to be able to tweet & post your insightful articles on-line to both Twitter and Facebook….what say you??? We need you and your perspective in these turbulent times Sweetie. Please consider my heartfelt request.
Much Thanks,
Karen M. Boda
LTBB member
How lucky for you to have become Indigenous without ever having to have experienced colonization, racism, etc. How miraculous for you to have received “the seed of an indigenous, native intelligence within me`,`without having been part of an Indigenous family. “I believe that day I became the first of those in my English and Danish lineage to set foot in the sacred topography of the New World, receiving the seed of an indigenous, native intelligence within me.“ – yes, I`m sure your English and Danish ancestors were more interested in “receiving“ other things – the land itself, resources, etc – laying the ground for their future generations to have the good fortune to eventually be able to miraculously `receive` the knowledge and understanding you are getting in life. I`m not sure if you realize how exploitative and ignorant this post comes off as.
Dear Elina, I very much appreciate this note. Yes, I am walking a fine line in claiming that, even for the ancestors of Euro-Americans, our indigenous souls can still be reclaimed. Perhaps it is right to accuse me of hubris.
There is no denying the grievous history of exploitation and genocide, rampant destruction and arrogant blindness that has followed in the wake of the Western European drive to subjugate the natural world and the Earth’s inhabitants. As I watch my daughter blossom as a little girl, everyday I worry about the inheritance she will receive from such short-sighted folly.
At the same time, I would challenge your assumption that I, and other descendents of European immigrants, have never tasted the consequences of colonization and racism. As a child left in a children’s shelter at age nine, I experienced the penal system first hand, and growing up in juvenile halls, foster homes, and on the streets learned what it meant to be colonized in my soul. I was intended to be on the margin, a criminal, a remnant — and the system was prepared to deal with what it had manufactured in me. A lot of profit stood to be made by my degradation, and folks were lining up to feed on my and other children’s souls. If this isn’t colonization, I don’t know what is.
I want to suggest to you, therefore, that some Euro-Americans may be smart enough to understand the consequences of systematized oppression, and can renounce the power that such systems bestow.
But this still leaves the issue of whether a descendent of a cultural group that produced the Nazis can reclaim his or her indigenous self.
There are two answers to this question, I think.
The first has to do with my most recent work, to uncover the overlooked indigenous consciousness right at the origin of the literature of Western civilization — in Homer’s Odyssey. My forthcoming book, The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience, works hard to show how indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West, and how the native way of viewing the world—that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected—can be found hidden throughout Western literature.
Indeed, I believe that the Odyssey, emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing
song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
As Martín Prechtel has asked,
Are most of the allegorized, dramatized, literalized, sanitized, boring, overly historified rituals and written stories, only jealously guarded fragments of a pushed-aside indigenous intactness which all people, in this increasingly displaced world, have hidden somewhere in their bones as an unremembered legacy in which an intact living story still waits to come into view?
I believe this. I believe stories, true stories, can re-member our lost indigenous intactness. In terms of the over-arching human trajectory, 98% of our existence as homo-sapiens has been indigenous. The European break with that indigenous intactness is a brief spell, that I believe we can recuperate from.
My second answer has to do with how communities imagine their identity. Werner Sollors, in Beyond Ethnicity, articulates two ways of imagining communities: those based on strict genetic descent, and the other based on volition and choice. The first is a closed social group, which one must be born into to be a member of. The second is open, and welcomes those who share its interests, passions, convictions, or faith. And, of course, there are the degrees between. Communities, such as indigenous ones, that involve deeply committed life-ways naturally give a long trail period of initiation and apprenticeship to those who feel called to join. I believe that indigenosity is something learned, is a cultural inheritance, not a genetic one. I would therefore suggest that there is no genetic, biological barrier separating any human being upon this planet from indigenous consciousness.
Perhaps you are right. Perhaps my words smack of hubris, of conceit, and I am espousing an arrogant cultural appropriation of life-ways that are not native to my people.
I hope not. For my child’s future, for all our children’s futures and the lives of all beings on this planet, I pray not.
RT