Indigenous Consciousness as a Basis For Activism
Indigenous peoples globally, although tremendously diverse in the expression of traditions, do share some similar foundational values, based on the relationship with the Earth. Expressions of traditions are determined by the local environment. For example, my nation, in Anishinaabe centered philosophy, water holds great spiritual significance. We, Anishinaabeg are surrounded by water in the Great Lakes Territory. Indigenous thought always perceives the Earth as a living, breathing, conscious being, whose sacred duty it is to care for the ones living in, on and in relation to her, including humans. In Indigenous thought, humans are considered to be part of creation, not above it, as in the “dominion over all things” foundation of westernized philosophy.
All Indigenous Peoples have our own creation stories, our own genesis. These stories consist of two elements: 1) How we were created, and 2) How we are to live on and with the living Earth. This is commonly referred to as Original Instruction. Original Instruction involves concepts of reciprocity, always giving back, gratitude and caring. This assumes an intelligently caring creation, where all parts are aware of and care for all other parts. There are succinct spiritual statements within Tribal Nations that express these philosophies. Among the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota, “Mitakuye Owasin” means “All My Relations” and is a call to remember the relational precepts of Original Instructions. Anishinaabeg have “Mino-Bi-Maadiziwin” which translates to “The Good Life”. These are calls to remember Original Instruction and to remember the responsibility of our place in Creation.
In these philosophies, Indigenous knowledge is profoundly expressed. We are the Original Peoples of the land. We all trace our lineage to creation. We are made of the Earth. Our blood and bodies have gone back to her generation after generation, until the Earth is also made of us. This is why environmental degradation is so painful to us. We actually feel the pain in our bodies and spirits when we see any violation of the Earth as all. Because Indigenous Peoples are forced into the global market with only our resources and labor to negotiate with, we often find ourselves in the “either-or” conundrum of economic development or cultural survival. It is the ultimate irony that since our cultures are dependent on our relation with the land, and we must sell the resources in the land, we become economically dependent on our own cultural destruction.
Nevertheless, we remain connect to the expressions of cultural life and economic subsistence lifestyles everyday. We are who we are, the Original Peoples of this land with the encumbent responsibilities and obligations to her. Our cultural teachings and heritage live in each of us through our genetic memory which some of our elders refer to as “blood memory”. This identity is the source of knowledge and spirituality, which we can call upon to guide our values and ethics in all that we do.
Even though our access to our own Indigenous knowledge has been violently interrupted by colonization of the Western Hemisphere and its’ accompanying brutality towards us, it lives in us still. There are many people who carry and hold the specific teachings for us. The knowledge is available. For example, many Indigenous Nations have prophecies, such as the Seven Fires of the Anishinaabe (each fire representing a period of time), which foretold of the situations that we find ourselves in currently. Within the teachings are also the ethical responses that are available to us to guide us through our complex environmental and economic situations.
To operate from the cultural identity and Indigenous knowledge is always a position of strength. It is movement toward sustainability, healing, integration of wholeness for Indigenous peoples as well as models for all people of our beautiful Earth Mother.
Fear
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
~ Marilyn Ferguson (1938-2008)
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1970s. It wasn’t Brooklyn’s finest decade. Drugs, gangs, vandalism and street-level violence were part of everyday life. As a youngster my daily fun included being robbed, chased and assaulted with primitive weapons (for example, knives, baseball bats and brass knuckles, although not all at once!). To get a sense of New York in those days, I recommend renting the movie “Death Wish,” or the original “Taking of Pelham 123,” recently remade with John Travolta as the lead bad guy.
Children learn to accept their daily experiences as normal, so we didn’t complain much. As a result, the adults in my youth were somewhat oblivious to the risks we confronted. I walked (round trip) about three miles to school. During the hours between 3 and 6 p.m., I could have been anywhere in a maze of 200 square city blocks, up to God knows what. Cell phones didn’t exist so there was no way to “check in.” Our parents (who were educated, responsible, and intelligent) didn’t fret much, despite the growing awareness that crime and violence were spiraling out of control. When I said I was “going out” that meant I could head off in any direction I chose, to do anything I wanted, as long as it was not illegal. This might involve crossing busy highways, scaling and climbing over the diversity of broken urban terrain, picking up things that were rusted and filthy (including, for example, live ammo), investigating abandoned cars or houses, and taking the subways and busses to wherever they went, miles away from home.
Wordle
Today, I live in a quiet, orderly Pennsylvania suburb with my wife and our four children age 5 to 14. It is the safest place I can imagine. In fifteen years, I have never witnessed anything illegal, nor experienced even the slightest worry about crime or violence. Nevertheless, the adults in our community have scared our children to death. Our local public schools teach children how to avoid kidnappers, sexual predators and bullies. A recent seminar focused on avoiding cyber-stalkers, presenting the Internet as yet another terrible threat. Our children have absorbed the message that they live in an extremely dangerous world. It hit me one day when my son, then eleven, didn’t want to walk alone to a neighborhood store several blocks away because “something might happen” on the way.
Given my childhood, this fear seemed preposterous. But upon reflection, I realized that I myself had acquired an irrational need to know exactly what my kids were doing at every hour of the day, and to know that they were always 100% safe. I had begun to feel uncomfortable that they would try to cross a four lane road to go the ice cream store near where we live. An adult needed to help with that, right?
Some might say (including me) that I’ve become a paranoid nut, but frank conversations with other parents of my generation reveal the same underlying emotion: fear. We are worried to death that our children will be hurt out there in that awful, mean, cruel world. Indeed, having bragged about the safety of my neighborhood, I am now imagining that I will be struck down in some ghastly, random act of violence. It would serve me right for being so disrespectful of the dangers!
The modern media is at least in part responsible for our pervasive fear. The 24-hour video news cycle guarantees that the most hideous and despicable acts of mankind will not only make headlines in all their gory detail, but will also be morbidly enshrined in novels, movies and television shows. Today we have not only CSI Las Vegas, but also Miami and New York, so that serial killers and sociopaths can entertain all parts of the country. Meanwhile on Fox’s 24 nuclear bombs and biological weapons go off and mortally wound the heroes, even superman Jack Bauer.
And of course, there is 9/11, played, replayed, commemorated and serving as the backdrop for every serious conversation about national security. With 9/11 seared into the national consciousness, America today is not only home of the brave, but of the suspicious, worried and wary. Every day millions of travelers are reminded about the pervasive threat of death at the hands of terrorists masked as fellow citizens. That was the goal of the terrorists, right? To scare us.
But fear is also relative. In the 1970s, in the midst of the cold war, each day we faced the prospect of total nuclear annihilation. At risk were not just our little lives, but all life on earth. The famous Flintstones cartoon featured a comic character from the future, the “Great Gazoo,” sent back to the Stone Age as punishment for inventing a switch that could obliterate the universe. Mutually assured destruction did have its perverse comforts. There was something oddly reassuring in the idea that if one of us would go, so would we all. And not just us, but also the dogs and the hummingbirds. We speculated that the roaches and rats would survive as mutants. Do you remember Charlton Heston’s final chilling line from Beneath the Planet of the Apes?
In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.
Somehow the prospect of our universe snapping out of existence put all the small dangers we faced in perspective. Compared with instantaneous extinction of all life, global warming and terror seem like manageable threats.
Mark Twain said that worry is paying interest on a debt you may not owe, a thought my grandmother repeated to me. Lately it seems our post-cold-war, post- 9/11 zeitgeist, with its dreaded mushroom clouds, dirty bombs and pandemics, teaming with bizarre serial killers stalking this No County for Old Men, has produced a mountainous debt of paranoia, serviced at subprime interest rates of worry. The worry payments drain our spiritual capital reserves, pushing us to the brink of cultural and community bankruptcy, a state that leaves us with nothing but to cower inside our mini-fortresses, with our 2nd Amendment guns and duck tape, watching late night cable-TV experts whining “what a world!” in front of spellbinding touch-screen displays.
Aristotle, perhaps the most famous philosopher of the subject, thought of courage as the rational mean between fear and confidence. In his view, the courageous were not fearless. On the contrary, they were fearful, but marshaled the inner strength to move forward in the face of it, confronting risk head-on when reason justified the cause.
Aristotle got it right. The courageous live fully despite fear and risk, not without it, recognizing that the quest for total security yields a terrible reward. Security’s prize costs us everything we cherish, because life’s greatest gifts - freedom, love, friendship, creative expression, adventure, the growth of the heart and mind - require vulnerability. As Tom Jones wrote poetically in The Fantasticks, “Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” Seeking a full heart, the courageous brave a hurt.
Americans must recapture the true meaning of courage. True courage does not obsess about security. We who live in the “home of the brave” must not sacrifice freedom to avoid risk. Let your children cross the road by themselves. Let them get lost and explore the city and the frontier. Go to a “dangerous neighborhood” and strike up a conversation. Take the bus late at night and walk home in the shadows. Go to a foreign country and live with strange people who think differently and might hate you. Someone is probably going to get seriously hurt. But someone might also experience the thrill of actually living.
Recovery or Renewal?
When “bubbles burst”-whether in our financial or personal lives-we have choices to make. Do we just feel impoverished while mindlessly waiting for the next bubble to inflate our bank accounts and our egos? Or can we mindfully pause to absorb painful lessons so that not just recovery but something better can emerge? These challenging times provide opportunities to transform adversity into promise through our courage and compassion.
Renewal connotes something more personal, demanding and ongoing. It is a journey and sometimes even requires starting all over.
What’s the difference between recovery and renewal? When I’ve got the flu, recovering means regaining my health. If I’ve lost a sum of money in the stock market, I’m eager for the Dow Jones to rise and recover my losses. But renewal connotes something more personal, demanding and ongoing. It is a journey and sometimes even requires starting all over. One clue to renewal is how it is the intention behind an ongoing Benedictine ritual: monks stop whatever they are doing seven times a day and go into the chapel to get quiet and listen. Then they go back out and invest themselves in the world again. Their constant desire is for their outer purposes to be renewed by their greater spiritual calling.
Our new President’s “no drama” demeanor appears to serve our collective yearning for renewal in our public life. In a recent news conference a reporter fished for a sound-byte by asking why it had taken the White House two days to respond to yet another piece of bad financial news. President Obama thought calmly for a moment before saying, “Ed, it’s because I think it’s important to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” The president’s pause demonstrated not only a capacity to recover from an in-your-face question, but also about his commitment to the renewal of civil public discourse. Rather than responding to confrontation in kind, a few well-chosen words invited everyone to take a breath and get a fresh grip on reality.
Bringing calmness and focus into our active lives is a supreme achievement. It’s never a one time “been there, done that” accomplishment. Like the daily practice of Benedictine monks, it involves a commitment to personal and collective disciplines that connect with a timeless power not inherent in the recovery of our material possessions or the assertions of our ego, but found in the continuous renewal of our awareness. As Parker Palmer has said, “Scarcity is the logic of the ego, while abundance is the logic of the soul.”
It is for us to develop a ‘prospective mind’, a mind not fixed on perpetuating the status quo.
For several decades Thomas Homer-Dixon has made it his business to research humanity’s capacity to deal with the complexity it has wrought. “We simply don’t have a vision of an alternative economic system that isn’t oriented toward unending material growth,” Homer-Dixon says. “Until we have an alternative vision, we won’t give up the one we have.” His answer is challenging but promising. It is for us to develop what he calls a “prospective mind”, a mind not fixed on perpetuating the status quo, one that instead is “comfortable with constant change, radical surprise, even breakdown….” In an ever-changing world, recovering what we think we’ve lost is a futile pursuit. But cultivating prospective mind, in our personal lives and in our civic life, helps us to be courageous in facing current realities and creative in beginning anew. Prospective mind invites us to embrace the more challenging yet more promising task of seeing with fresh eyes.
Recently a National Public Radio reporter went looking for silver linings in the financial clouds. One person interviewed said she was glad because Americans can now “drive fewer miles, build smaller houses and live bigger lives.” This citizen imagines the “largeness of life” less in physical quantities and more in spiritual qualities. That’s looking for abundance with fresh eyes.