Articles—
We believe
that all peoples of the world are precious resources, all
ways of life are worthy of preserving, and all ways of knowing
add value to our well being. The information in the articles
that follow illustrates these beliefs and show why the issues
that face first peoples of the world are important issues
for everyone. |
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Now
is the Time, by John Broomfield
Diversity has intrinsic beauty and is the source of creativity.
We must cherish and nurture diversity in landforms, life forms,
cultures, ways of knowing and styles of expression. As Charles
Darwin revealed long ago, organic diversity protects life by
providing flexibility for evolutionary adaptation in perpetually
changing eco-systems. Cultural diversity is equally indispensable
as a pool of alternative codes of human existence.
"No single culture or ideology can bring salvation to the
earth," declares philosopher Raimundo Pannikar. There are
still many around the world who would dispute this, and fundamentalism
in religion and science is their response to a growing apprehension
of civilizational crisis. Fortunately, there are many others
whose response to the same sense of crisis is an increased awareness
and sensitivity to cultural diversity and a recognition of the
rich resources available to humanity from this varied pool of
experience. There is a growing willingness to explore other
ways of knowing to reconnect to older human wisdom.
This occurs at a time of reassertion of indigenous traditions
long suppressed by European and American imperialism and obscured
in more recent decades in the shadow of Western techno-science.
Colonized peoples such as Native Americans, Siberians, Polynesians,
Aboriginal Australians and Africans are reviving suppressed
shamanic and similar spiritual practices. There is a resurgence
of the teaching of this lore to the new generation and a willingness,
in some instances, to instruct outsiders as well.
In entering into their understandings of reality—their
medicine—we are being offered, along with spiritual learning,
an opportunity for the healing needed in a number of areas.
One is between us and these indigenous peoples, on whom our
ancestors, during the European and American expansion, attempted
genocide or at least ethnocide, the extermination of cultures.
Healing is needed also in our collective psyche, where we bear
the suppressed wound of the guilt of this ancestral racial crime.
A third is between ourselves and nature, which we of the modern
West similarly have attempted to dominate and exploit. In place
of our objectified, materialist view of the earth, the way of
the shaman offers a spirit connection with all animate and inanimate
forms. It teaches us to preserve "the Song of the Land,
the Spirit and Flesh of the Ancestors," as Aboriginal Australians
know it. It teaches us to honor the souls of the great winds
and the waters. It teaches us to walk softly with respect among
our green relatives, the trees; and to listen to the feathered
friends, the four-, six- and eight-footed, and all the other
companions who crawl and swim. "Mitakuye oyasin, to all
my relations," Lakota Sioux say with reverence.
The great good news the shamans bring is that we are not alone.
On a planet that is everywhere alive, conscious and inspirited,
humans have many wise allies for counsel and aid, if we are
prepared to listen. Native American tradition says that ancient
wisdom must be maintained "until Earth's children grow
Listening Ears." The great Oglala Sioux shaman Black Elk
prophesied that it was the fifth generation that would grow
Listening Ears. Black Elk was born in 1863. Reckoned from that
date, the time of the fifth generation is now. |
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First Day on the Tel Sheva Farm, by Sara, Bustan volunteer
The sun shines unconditonally this morning spreading light and bringing me a message of what it truly means to renew. Hope lingers everywhere and sings loudest in each bit of plastic peeled away from the earth; leaving a gush of thanksgiving from the land left breathing more easily now again exposed to the elements—the earth's restoration in the simplest of actions. Today, prayer happens each time I bend over to pick up a piece of garbage. I am bowing before the most High One and reciting a devotional mantra of energy and heart to the Earth.
Here the land quiets all my fears, my doubts, soothes the tension stored in the people—the repression so overwhelming, the politics of hierarchy like the heaviest stones. All of it I feel and sense and read in the space in between words I cannot understand. Somehow these doubts, which walked with me along the garbage strewn roads to the farm, disappeared almost immediately after arriving here. Here, where the birds still sing despite decades of neglect, where they sing sweetly as they do along the periphery of any bit of land where there is love between humans and soil.
The land is universal. So this land is mine too and it is my mess I clean and our seeds I plant. To love the web without borders is to truly weave one's self into it.
I now know what it means to have vision. To have vision means to be able to see beyond that which lies strewn and broken in all directions, to the place where all is possible.
The long groan and drone of camels in the distance re-awakens me—pulling me back into prayer, back into work—as the song of the roosters on the streets of early morning ushered me into this holy day.
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Finding
a Sense of Home, by Judith Hamilton
It is more and more uncommon for modern people to be from
a particular landscape. Rootless, we move from place to place
as though the land in which we live is virtually disposable
and certainly interchangeable. This dissemination reveals
the fundamental instability and spiritual blindness of modern
civilization. With mercantilist mentalities, as modern Americans
we believe one can buy and sell everything. But for American
Indian cultures, existence in this world is a spiritual pilgrimage,
and the landscape itself is spiritual.
To rediscover the spiritual landscape surrounding us, we must
first realize our role in that landscape as spiritual pilgrims.
A pilgrim is one who goes on a journey to a holy land, to
a sacred land, and from the time of the first European settlers,
America was seen as a New Jerusalem, as a new holy land, as
a potential paradise, to which the Europeans were pilgrims.
Unfortunately, this sense of pilgrimage—of making a
journey to a holy land—quickly was converted into a
desire to conquer, to own. But by definition, no one can own
a pilgrimage. Rather, such a place gives freely to all.
In the spirituality of the American Indians, one is irrefutably
from a particular spiritual landscape, and to be separated
from that place is to be separated from one’ s spiritual
origin. The Pottawatomi were driven from the Great Lakes to
Kansas several generations ago, but the elders still speak
of their homeland by the Great Lakes. So too, if you speak
of home to a dislocated Puebloan, she will speak of the open
horizon she has lost. If you speak to a dislocated Macaw,
he will speak of the great trees of home. This homesickness
is a spiritual homesickness. Dislocation is in many ways the
most destructive of the means to destroy the spirituality…of
all peoples.
To be born of a particular spiritual landscape, to be a pilgrim
within it, means that one travels through life as through
the landscape. One’s purpose on earth is not to own
or control the natural world, but to deepen one’s character
and to realize spiritual truth in one’s own life.
(Gallagher, Winifred. The Power of Place: How our Surroundings
Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. New York: Poisedon,
1993. pp. 201-214 and Casey, Edward S. Getting Back Into Place:
Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1993. pp. 22-39.)
Before contact with the Europeans, American Indians’
lives were bathed in the light of divine revelation as it
is manifested throughout the virgin landscape. The ritual
symbols of lightning and otter, bear and turtle, hawk and
deer, mountains and waters, remind people of their origin.
To sing a sacred song, to dance a sacred dance, to wear sacred
clothing, to make a sacred journey—all these things
and all the actions of daily life as well—in the end
remind us that we are all beings made of the landscape. The
meaning of tribal culture is not just that indigenous peoples
and the earth are one; it is that both humanity and earth
have a spiritual origin and meaning. There is a mysterious
unity between people and their landscape, between people and
the creatures around them. This unity is of a subtle kind,
not easily explained. But understanding it is essential if
we are to find a sense of home. (Momaday, N.
Scott. Man Made of Words. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
1997. pp. 118-123 and Tinker, George E, Clara Sue Kidwell,
and Homer Noley. A Native American Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis,
2003. pp.140-148.)
Attachment to the homeland is a common human emotion. Its
strength varies among different cultures and historical periods.
The more ties there are, the stronger is the emotional bond
through ceremony, ritual, language, and the understanding
of community. Landscape is the home of ancestors, the dreaming
place where every incident in legend and myth is firmly fixed
in some unchanging aspect of nature—rocks, hills and
mountains, even trees, for trees can outlive human generations
or homeland for animals. (Momaday, N. Scott.
Man Made of Words. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997.
pp. 113-117 and Tinker, George E, Clara Sue Kidwell, and Homer
Noley. A Native American Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2003.
pp.126-129.)
Storied landscapes are surely not unique to the American Indian.
Storied places are elaborately woven together on a cultural
loom that joins every detail of the landscape within a given
community of memory. If we omit the storied experience of
the place, we lose the power it exercises on the imagination.
(Lane, Belden C. Landscapes of the Sacred. Baltimore: John
Hopkins UP, 2001. p. 59.)
In the belief systems of many of the American Indian peoples,
the earthly call is the voice of God, the creative power that
lives on and inside the earth. (Deloria, Vine Jr. God is Red.
Golden: Fulcrum, 1992. pp. 88-89). American Indian peoples
must not be the only ones who remember the agreement with
the land, the sacred pact to honor and care for the life that,
in turn provides for us. At the beginning, there was nothing
and something came from it. It is the mystery of the limestone
floor of sea that rose up to become land. (Momaday,
N. Scott. Man Made of Words. New York: St. Martin’s
Griffin, 1997. pp. 127-131).
“The
search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were
being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing.
Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness;
and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange
place, but the path home . . .”
Peter Matthiessen, Author
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Restoring
Life’s Fabric: The Biological Bottom Line (excerpt from),
by David Suzuki
In the late 1970s I decided to do a film about the long battle
over logging on the Queen Charlotte Islands, ancestral land
of the Haida. I interviewed loggers, politicians, CEOs of forest
companies, and environmentalists, one of whom was a Haida activist
who had led the battle against logging for many years. I asked
him: “You’ve got over 80 percent unemployment in
your community. Many of the loggers are Haida, and the non-Haida
loggers shop in your stores, helping your community economically.
So why are you against the logging?” He answered: “Once
the trees are gone, we won’t be Haida anymore. We’ll
just be like everybody else.” It was only later that I
realized that he had opened a window for me on a radically different
way of looking at the world. What he was saying was that the
Haida don’t end at their skin or their fingertips. The
trees, fish, air, and water are all part of what makes the Haida
who they are. The land embodies their history, their culture.
The very reason why Haida are on this Earth is told to them
by their connection with the land.
And ever since then I’ve been a student, privileged to
travel to many Indigenous communities around the world, and
even in the most impoverished, dysfunctional communities there
is a palpable sense of a need to remain connected to the land.
Aboriginal people around the world refer to the Earth as our
mother and say it gives us birth by creating us from the four
sacred elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Throughout time,
people have understood that we were deeply embedded in the natural
world and dependent on it. Our songs, our stories, our dances
told of that relationship, celebrating where we were, where
we belonged on this planet and our need to act in the proper
way to keep the creator’s gift to us abundant and productive.
We’ve forgotten that in a very short period of time, and
now people like me have to rediscover it and learn from Indigenous
teachers.
As I reflected on what I’d learned, I realized that we’ve
framed the environmental problem incorrectly. There is no environmental
problem out there that we’ve got to regulate our interaction
with. We are part of the environment. What we do to our surroundings,
we do directly to ourselves.
© David Suzuki. Reprinted from Bioneers
Letter, Fall/Winter 2004, Vol. VII, No. II, page 9-10.
Bioneers Annual Conference
Contact: Bioneers toll-free at 1-877-BIONEER
website: www.bioneers.org |
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Preserving
Our Collective Human Heritage, by John Mohawk
Native
American studies as a discipline proposes that there is an
intelligence in the cultures of the indigenous people of the
Americas. That intelligence is crucial to the survival of
humanity today.
I would
recommend that you go on the internet and point your browser
to the key word “snowball Earth.” Web sites will
come up with a discussion about the belief by scientists that
there was a time 600 million years ago when the whole of the
planet was covered with deep ice. It goes on to state that
the big question they’ve had was: How did the Earth
escape the ice? The answer, they think, was that volcanoes
erupted over millions of years and spewed forth what we now
call greenhouse gases. Those gases eventually heated up the
Earth, the Earth melted the ice, and we began to have the
whole process of life kick into gear. There was a great flourish
of evolution that took place in the millions of years following
the meltdown, and we can almost imagine what the world might
have looked like so long ago.
Then came another moment when it is believed that our species
originated and radiated outward from somewhere. It reached
a point where there were enough people concentrated in some
areas that is was no longer possible for hunter-gatherers
to just keep radiating. Something must have happened, and
our best bet is that it was climate change—probably
a more arid climate that forced people to consider trying
to control their own food supply.
What happened was that we chose to domesticate plants, but
domesticating plants has problems. For one thing, you can
domesticate only the plants that allow themselves to be domesticated.
That means that, of the 100 or so plants that you were used
to eating, only three or four subjected themselves very well
to domestication. So you’ve actually reduced your choices
of what to eat, as a desperate measure, because there wasn’t
enough food to eat.
But it then turns out that the foods that you plant in your
garden also have their own agenda, as all plants do. The plants
act in their own best interest. Plants, generally speaking,
produce chemicals in their bodies intended to keep them from
being eaten. Even the domesticated plants did that. So not
only did we not necessarily get the best plants, but we were
also domesticating ones that sometimes had defensive mechanisms
that made them not the perfect food for humans, as evidenced
by food allergies many people have to wheat or corn, for example.
Our species survived because we inhabited new environments.
We learned about the edible plants that lived in that environment
and how to live with those plants to survive in almost every
environment that is inhabitable. But it was primarily our
cumulative knowledge, passed down intergenerationally, that
made long-term survival possible. It’s what I like to
call our collective human heritage.
When I was growing up as a Seneca in the traditional Seneca
community, I was always struck by something about the Senecas
and the Iroquois. They’re what you might think of as
practical. You talk to them about something, and, if they
can’t actually see it, put their finger on it and touch
it—and if you ask them to have faith in it and believe
in it—they won’t. The old ones certainly didn’t.
Pre-Christian Native American thought did not require you
to have faith. In fact, it discouraged it.
Native American pragmatism is a way to thinking about the
world that demands that the thinker look at the outcomes.
The great quotes from Native American people are statements
such as, “Let us look forward to what we do today and
how it benefits the coming generations, seven generations
in the future.” It has a requirement that you look far
into the future and ask, “What are the results going
to be of what you are doing today?” That way of thinking
used to astonish the British who came to meeting after meeting
with the Iroquois, where the Iroquois kept asking them to
think, “What is this going to do in the future?”
The British: Think? The future?
When all those people arrived in all those ecosystems, their
problem was: How do I adapt to this place? What is this place?
They came to deserts—nothing there, a barren spot. Some
went to places that are dark half the year. Some went to places
covered with water and ice. Others went to places so dense
with foliage that you can’t see five feet. They had
come up with a culture that not only enabled them to survive,
but made them thrive. That is the marvelous capacity of our
species to survive.
The Indians of the Americas built civilization after civilization.
They built elegant irrigation complexes. They put together
more food plants, more cultivars than all the rest of the
world put together. For centuries and centuries, they fought
against climate changes in place after place, and in culture
after culture. Dozens of them left behind a record of that.
Some of them left behind some of the most sophisticated alternatives
for how to live in a place. Yet time and time in place after
place, they lost the battle. They lost the war over climate
changes.
When it comes our turn, when the climate change comes back,
here’s my question: Where’s our relationship to
those plants? Where are those plants? Everything that we learned
in this one interglacial period when things got warm gave
us a chance to fix things up all over the world. Yet all the
survival techniques we learned about our relations to cultivars
and food plants stands in peril at this hour. Our relationship
to wild plants stands in peril. The big human relationship
to our cultural heritage is on the verge of extinction and
we need to change that. There are still enough plants left,
but we don’t’ have enough humans in enough relationships
with enough plants to ensure that, when climate change happens—not
if it happens—we’ll have the knowledge to go on
from there.
Humans will survive the next climate change. Trust me. Humans
will survive anything. Not necessarily corporations, though.
Monsanto won’t survive it. But right now Monsanto produces
almost all of our food seed products and that’s the
problem. We have to move away from that. What’s occurring
in today’s world is a revolution in thought. It’s
about how human beings come into relationship with nature
so that people understand how nature can be hard on people,
and understand a bit about how it works, yet not see nature
as the enemy. The sophisticated practical knowledge of indigenous
peoples holds critical keys to making that transformation.
©
John Mohawk. Reprinted from Bioneers Letter, Spring/Summer
2005, Vol. VIII, No. 1, page 18-19.
Bioneers Annual Conference
Contact: Bioneers toll-free at 1-877-BIONEER
website: www.bioneers.org |
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Why Art? by Aymara Falcón, Art Advisor, NGO Comunidad Tawantinsuyu
The most impressive thing I discovered when I began as a sculptor was the number of personalities that came out of my hands. Standing in front of that “resemblance” staring directly into his eyes trying to find an answer in vain, “Who are you? Where have I brought you from? Where and since when have you and I been looking at each other this way?” The extreme stillness of the clay was the answer. Finally, I understood that the Memory of Father Time remains inside of us waiting to be brought to light.
The archaic cultures “lived” art as a simple every day expression always well disposed to express the desire, the necessity, the gratitude, or the mere domestic servility. They were not so eloquent or demanding. They flowed according to the needs of the moment, not looking for future or glory and, nevertheless, they remained as cause of the irrelevant humility. Somewhere, the Venus of Valdivia is testifying her time. Somewhere else, rest stiff bowls bearing ancient flavors. Here the fumes of ancient Sacred Pipes haunt. From the stillness of age, mysterious looks protect our footprints not to be lost along the Path.
When art loses its cloak and sword, it becomes what it really is, Munay (feeling). And in that condition, acquire the necessary Power to cut, bind, and recover Memory. Ukhu Pacha (generations that trod this Earth), where the Mallkis are (our Ancestors, seed, and procreation), Kay Pacha (this Time), and Hanan Pacha (the Future Time) weave and unweave for us to get where we have to arrive. And it is from that visceral convincement, that I have become an accomplice attempting to help my People in the long process of Remembering.
I see with pleasure how women begin to talk about what was narrated to them or about what was not narrated but still remains in the ancestral collective female memory. The doll with two heads that I have seen, which no doubt resembles the Couple of Ancestral Mothers, that immemorial trace which must be the image that comes to those women from the Yarapa community, so distant from anthropology books or art studies.
One day, a student of our school shaped in clay a burial full of bowls, flowers, and small spheres simulating stones. Surprised, I asked him if that was the way his community adored their dead. He answered smiling, “No teacher, the dead are not buried this way”. Even more surprised, I continued with questions, “Then why did you think the dead would need all these bowls, if they already passed away?” The student started laughing, “When they return, they may feel hungry, so they can find something to eat!”. Our student is 10 years old. He hardly knows how to write his name. Who, if it is not Memory, is the one that works silently until it is expressed?
In the Occidental world, people merely whisper about our Sacred Plants. The stigma that persecutes them has turned them into something “forbidden”. Nevertheless, in the Jungle, the profane has a place at the Wiseman’s table. It takes its place again and, in the word of the most Innocent people, it returns to its Sacredness to be renamed as Medicine.
Why Art—because art and health are Twins. It is through Art that we attempt to heal, leaving beauty where there was pain. While Ukhu Pacha shows us the Path, Hanan Pacha illuminates it for the Kay Pacha’s harmony. There is no Memory that can resist any Art expression. That our women sing, dance, draw, and write because they are the ones carrying the flame of Transmission. Let us return to the Mamamanta* or to the Matria of the Mexican poet José Tlatlepas. A Mamamanta keeping the memory and enlightenment for the children of each Community to which we arrive, so they can remember, heal and share all they have received with many more children. A Mamamanta governed by artists and not by politicians. This is the commitment I have acquired with my Ancestors.
*Mamamanta: From the mother and for the mother—reminds us about the spiral of life in the Andes. That is the mythical millenary and the contemporary contribution of Maria Estelina Quinatoa, Curator of the Archaeological Reserve of the Central Bank of Ecuador, born in Otavalo.
I am very grateful to my Sisters Katia Gibaja and Maria Estelina Quinatoa for their contributions in the Quechua language. It is necessary that we re-encounter with our origin languages because they are the only keys to have access to the profound subtleness of our Knowledge.
[Click Here for Spanish Version] |
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One Heart, Many Rhythms is a non-profit organization that works in partnership with first peoples of the world to conserve and express the traditions of their culture. We believe all peoples of the world and their way of life are precious and worthy of preserving, and that all ways of knowing add value to our well-being.
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