These essays, produced and published over thirty years, are prescient in the prophetic tradition yet current. They reflect consistent engagement in Native issues and deliver a profoundly indigenous analysis of modern existence. Sovereignty, cultural roots and world view, land and treaty rights, globalization, spiritual formulations and fundamental human wisdom coalesce to provide a genuinely indigenous perspective on current events.
These essays, produced and published over thirty years, are prescient in the prophetic tradition yet current. They reflect consistent engagement in Native issues and deliver a profoundly indigenous analysis of modern existence. Sovereignty, cultural roots and world view, land and treaty rights, globalization, spiritual formulations and fundamental human wisdom coalesce to provide a genuinely indigenous perspective on current events.
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Overview
These essays, produced and published over thirty years, are prescient in the prophetic tradition yet current. They reflect consistent engagement in Native issues and deliver a profoundly indigenous analysis of modern existence. Sovereignty, cultural roots and world view, land and treaty rights, globalization, spiritual formulations and fundamental human wisdom coalesce to provide a genuinely indigenous perspective on current events.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555917388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 645,652 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Thinking in Indian
A John Mohawk Reader
By José Barreiro
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2010 José BarreiroAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55591-738-8
CHAPTER 1
Part I
Earth Spirit
The Creator's Way
One looks into the eyes of another to find oneself. Each of us finds an identity through the reflections of ourselves that we see in others. When we know what others think of us, we must either agree or disagree with that which they see. They will judge us by the standards by which they judge themselves. If they are not humble, they may consider humility a weakness. Such are the ways by which human beings place values upon themselves and upon others.
It is the Creator's way that all are taught to direct their energies toward the well-being of the unborn generations. This is a part of the natural way that all are encouraged to follow. The unborn generations' faces come toward us from our Mother Earth, still part of her flesh and spirit. They are the community of human beings whose welfare our actions today affects, and it is they who will judge the life that we who are living now leave to them.
And so, when we judge the life that we lead on this earth, we always try to do so through the eyes of the unborn generations. We cannot pass judgment upon the coming generations, unlike people whom we can see, however, and so we may never justify our treatment of them through arrogance or self-righteousness.
The Creator's law is the real natural order. Just as the Father Spirit combines with Mother Earth to form life, and as all living things in the natural order tend to form groups of families, so do extended families form nations. The nations, as seen by traditional peoples, are groups of families whose dedication is to the betterment of life for the future generations. We are taught that we must be real in our ways of thinking and behaving so that the nations may be real in the ways of the natural order. In that way, life on this earth as we know it will continue.
It is our awareness of the spirit of a common dedication to the provision of a good life for our children and our children's children that makes the nations real. Real nations provide for peace within the local community and also within the community of human beings because they exist in the hearts of the people, and peace, the unity of spirit and reason, is the natural condition of society.
Each individual is born into a family. Just as a living deer is the combination of a deer's body and spirit, so is a living family a combination of a group of related people and love. The spirit of family life is love.
A living family is a real family in the same sense that a living nation is a real nation. The young respect the old because the old provide love and wisdom and make family life real, and the old respect the young, for they too provide love and they represent the future.
An individual must view his or her existence in this world in relation to the things upon which he or she places value. Each human being at one time belonged to the unborn generations whose faces come toward us from the earth. A human body is composed of matter that was once part of soil, rocks, ocean, plants, and other animals, and all of those beings have spirit. A human being also has spirit, for a body without spirit is a corpse. A human being must be aware that his or her existence results from a combination of flesh and spirit in order that he or she develops an awareness of spirit. With such awareness, one may then come to understand the elementary truth of existence — that the human being has a spiritual relationship to the entire universe: to the sun, to Mother Earth, to serpents, and to other forms of life. But the knowledge of a spiritual relationship to all these things is merely the flesh of the Creator's way of life.
Awareness of something is not that thing's reality. Because one is aware of the existence of love does not indicate that one has loved. The human being creates an awareness of families and nations, but these things only become real when humans become real, when humans fulfill their individual obligation to attend to the spirit of the nation and the spirit of the family.
Individual human spirits combine to create the spirits of nations and families — but man does not create his own spirit or the spirits of birds or water or stars, for these are the works of the Creator. All things in the universe combine to make life as we know it, and just as one must act in a certain way to make a family real or a nation real, so must one live the Creator's way to realize a real life.
Awareness of spiritual relationships (the flesh of spiritual existence) combines with spirit (undefined but manifested by active individual and collective dedication to the laws of the Great Spirit) to produce human life.
Real people (among Haudenosaunee or Iroquois, onkwehonwe) have more than an awareness of the relationship of spirit to matter, for they strive to live the Creator's way and that experience of living leads them to a spiritual life.
We see manifestations of the Creator's way all around us in the wind, the rocks, the mountains, the rain, and our spirits are often lifted by the incredible beauty of these things. The spirit of the human being also produces beauty in the things that he or she creates, in the family, in the nation, or in carved stone or wood.
It is the Creator's way that mountains rise and fall, rivers change their course, islands appear, disappear, and reappear in a new form — but always there is maintained a spiritual consistence throughout the universe. That way is not theory — it is living and all the universe experiences that life.
Experience — not words — defines life in the real world to real people. Experience verifies again and again the laws of the Creation. One learns from water as one learns from hawks or deer. The actual experiences of learning the ways of the Creation come when one learns from a real hawk, and not from the image of a hawk. From a man-made image of a hawk one learns about the creator of the image, and from a real hawk one learns of the plan of the real Creator. One knows that a hawk is a spiritual being enacting a role in the Great Plan of Life, that it is spiritually one with deer and man, and only from the hawk may a human being learn of the nature of that relationship.
That is why it is not possible for a person to find a spiritual life through written or spoken words. To discover one's relationship to wind, one must experience wind, and to know the spirit of the sun, one must experience the sun. To discover a spiritual life, one must experience spirit, and that means one must live a spiritual way, both personally and in the human community.
North American people were once given a spiritual way of life, handed down from generation to generation orally, so that the People changed, the way of life did not. Then as people began to move away from their personal spiritual commitment to the Creator's way of life, concern for the future generations faded, the spiritual strength of the nations faded, and even love within families began to disappear until grandparents no longer lived with their children and brothers no longer cared to help each other.
That is why, in so many of our communities, the ceremonies seem to have become meaningless and have lost their reality. These ceremonies were handed down through the visions of a people who lived the Creator's Way, and the spirit of those ceremonies can only be regained through the visions of a people who again live a spiritual life, one that goes beyond the power of words, a life that is real.
It is the Creator's Way.
All Children of Mother Earth ...
All things that are, are of the Creation.
The Creation is the earth and the sky, the grasses and the trees, the birds and the animals. All things of the Creation carry on in their own way, and the way of the beings of the Creation is the way of the Creation itself.
The Earth carries on in the Earth-way in the Creation. When the Sun rises in the eastern sky, he brings light and warmth to the body of the Earth. And when this happens, the Earth breathes, as a living being breathes, giving forth a breath of life to the other living things on the Earth. The Earth is a living being, and from her body come many other living beings. That is her way in the Creation — the way of the Earth Spirit.
It is because the Earth Spirit carries on in this way that Life as we know it exists here. The Earth is Mother to the Life that exists on the Earth. In the Natural Way, the Creation's Way, to all the life on the Earth she is Mother Earth. Mother Earth carries on in the way of the Creation, and therefore there is Life.
The Mother Earth is a Spirit. She is an energy force that shows itself to us in matter, and we call this matter Earth.
That is the way of the Creation — many energy forces in this Creation manifest themselves to the People in matter and are, therefore, real. This is the way of the Spirit, for they are often manifested in matter. Thus, are the spirits often real. In this way, the Mother Earth is real, for she is a real being, and because she is a real being, she is also Mother to real beings. Because she is a spiritual being, she is also Mother to spiritual beings.
Thus are the grasses and the trees that exist upon the Mother Earth both real and spiritual beings. They exist, and they exist in a way that follows the ways of the Creation. They also make life as we know it, in this place. If the grasses ceased to follow the way of Creation, if they ceased to grow and to provide food for the other things of this place, Life as we know it may cease.
The grasses, too, are real beings. They carry on in certain ways, grass ways, and their ways are life supportive. Each blade of grass is real, and each is a manifestation of the Grass Spirit, the energy force that exists upon the earth and that is shown to us through the existence of that species of grass. Thus there is upon the earth real grass and an energy force manifested to the Creation that we call the Grass Spirit. It is an energy force that has great power, for within the grasses there is a power to heal and a power to bring beauty. The grasses hold the Earth together, and they are beings to which the animal life is tied. It is their way of being that they are spiritual participants in the process that is Life in the Creation.
Thus, Life as we know it depends upon the Spirit of the Grasses, that their spirits be kept strong and powerful and that they be able to maintain balance on the Earth.
And as we look about us on the Earth, we see that there are many, many other spirits, and that they too are participants upon the Earth. We can see that there are trees and that they are manifestations of the Tree Spirits that exist on this place. The oak tree is a manifestation of the Oak Tree Spirit. That power alone can come to be an oak tree. And as we look about us, we can see that the Oak Tree is not a spirit unto itself, for the Oak requires the Mother Earth upon which to plant its feet. But the Oak Tree is a powerful Spirit, and as with all things in the Creation, it so operates with the other spirits to create Life on this planet, including its own life. The Oak Tree has a way of being in the Creation — it is a part of the Creation. It too participates in the process that creates and sustains life in this place. And those ways are manifested to the rest of the Creation in real ways, for the individual oak is real. Its body is real and its leaves are real and its way of being in the Creation is real. This is the way of Nature — that its beings are real beings and that the ways of those beings are real ways.
The Spirit of the Oak has a power to participate in the Life-producing processes of the Universe. We can only say that the source of that power is a Great Mystery and that the power is manifest through the Spirits of this Universe. That is why we say that the Sun is a spiritual being, that it is real, and that it manifests the Power of the Universe. We know of that Power because we are able to observe the many ways in which it is revealed to us through the Spirits of the Universe. In this way, the Sun is also a messenger whom we sometimes call Father and sometimes we call Elder Brother.
The Elder Brother Sun is also a messenger of the Great Mystery, and through the Sun's ways, we come to know of a way of the Great Mystery. And this is also true of the Spirit of the Grasses and the Spirit of the Oak Tree. We speak of the source of Power of the Universe as the Great Mystery. All that is manifested to us by that Power is named by us "the Creation." That which is the source of the Creation we call the Creator; when we say Creator, we mean the Spirit of the Creation. The Spirit of Creation is manifest to all things in that which created Life.
The Human Beings who walk upon the Earth are beings of the Creation. They are spirits also, a part of the processes that support Life. If we look about us at the Natural World, we can see that many people call themselves the Natural or Real People. The People who call themselves by these names know that they are a part of the Creation — they know that they are real in the way that the Oak Tree is real.
In the same way, there is seen to be a Spirit of Human Beings that is recognized by the Real or Natural People. The Spirit of the Natural People is said to be of the Mother Earth, and the Real People know that all the People who walk upon the earth are brothers and sisters, for they share the same Spirit of the species and they are all the children of the Mother Earth.
All the beings upon the Earth follow the Natural or Real ways — the ways of the Creation. And all of those beings are related in that they belong to the family of Creation. They support one another. The Oak Tree gives of its oxygen that the Rabbit may breathe, and the Rabbit gives of its flesh that the Fox may live. And the Fox, in death, returns to the Earth from which the Grasses feed, and the Grass gives of it flesh that the Rabbit may live. All things, in their real ways, support life. It is only when beings leave their real ways that they cease to support Life — that they break away from the Life Cycle. It is the way of the Creation that all things exist in real ways, and in the world of human beings, it is necessary that all things maintain real ways for all life to continue as we know it.
The Natural People have a great reverence for Life, a great respect for all living things, for they are a part of those living things. They know that the flesh of the grass is the flesh of their ancestors, and they see their own lives in the lives of the trees.
This respect for the Natural World is a manifestation of great wisdom, for it is based on the knowledge that from the flesh of the Earth will come their own flesh and that of their future generations. And they know that they must be respectful of the living things on the earth, for they (as the Oak Tree) all represent a power to sustain Life. And if that power is destroyed (as when the Oak Tree is destroyed) the processes of life on this planet must be weakened, and if the spirits of enough things that produce Life are destroyed, all Life as we know it must cease.
And the Natural People know also that they are both observers of the Creation and actors in the Creation.
Throughout the Natural World, the beings are responsible actors. They do not strive to respect the Natural World only in their minds and hearts (although they do this), but, rather, they try to make their lives a celebration of life.
Thus, do the Natural People see beauty in the things and processes that support and produce life. They call their ceremonies of the seasons "celebrations," and they ritualize their version of the Real World by showing greeting and thanksgiving to the things of the world. Truly, the Creation has provided all things real humans should want or need. Does it not provide flowers and songbirds to delight the human spirit? Is there not food and sweet air and beautiful water? Are not the rivers and the trees and the eagles of incomparable beauty?
Are not these things beings of the Creation, supporters of Life? And do they not lift the human spirit? The people of the Natural World are the spiritual proprietors of the Universe, not because they possess the things of Creation, but because they celebrate them. That celebration is an active one. The rituals of Life-Celebration are not the actual celebration, but a reflection of reality. Just as the grasses have a way of being in the world, so do the Natural People. The way of being of the Natural People is the active participation in the daily celebration of the Life-supportive processes. That is why they do not call theirs a religion, but a Way of Life.
The Natural People know that the Human Beings who walk upon the Earth are also spiritual beings and that each individual is a manifestation of the Human Being Spirit. And they attempt to enact with that spirit, as they do with other spirits, in a Life-supportive way. The Natural People know that to respect other human beings means to participate in the Life process with them. Thus, to them, love is not distinct or separate from respect, and respect means participation. To the Natural People, respect means love and participation in the process of Life. And the processes of Life are not limited to human life — rather they extend to all Life, to all the living things on the Earth. It would be contrary to the ways of the Natural People to participate in ways that deny people an access to the celebration of all life or that are destructive to another life species.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thinking in Indian by José Barreiro. Copyright © 2010 José Barreiro. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword: Remembrance of Sotsisowah, August 30, 1945- December 10, 2006, Oren Lyons ix
Introduction: John Mohawk's Essential Legacy: "The Sovereignty Which is Sought Can Be Real" José Barreiro xiii
Part I Earth Spirit
The Creator's Way 3
All Children of Mother Earth 7
Hopi and Haudenosaunee: Sharing Prophetic Traditions 14
Wild and Slow: Nourished by Tradition 20
The Sacred in Nature: Mythology Can Change Our Minds 24
Enduring Seeds 27
Indians and Sugar: Thoughts on Nutrition, Disease 29
Part II Indigenous Economics
The Darkening Horizons 43
Our Strategy for Survival 53
Present Potential, Future Reality 60
Indian Economic Development: The US Experience of an Evolving Indian Sovereignty 65
Sovereignty Requires New Institutions, Problem-Solving Skills 76
Regaining Control of Our Lives: The Promise of Appropriate Technology 79
Technology As Enemy: A Short History 91
Small, Indian, and Beautiful: Development through Appropriate Technology 104
Part III Nation and Governance
The "Disappearing Indian": Twentieth-Century Reality Disproves Nineteenth-Century Prediction 111
The Future Is the Family 118
Indian Nations, the United States, and Citizenship 130
Review: The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development 141
Review: American Indian History: Five Centuries of Conflict and Coexistence 144
Part IV Native Rights
The Confusing Spectre of White Backlash 153
The Great Bowhead Controversy: "We Are the People of the Whale" 161
The Longest Walk: Vignettes of the Day 170
The Iroquois Land Claims 182
Rights of Indigenous Women Are Advancing on Several Fronts 188
Part V Political Philosophy
Traditionalism: The Wave of the Future 195
Traditionalism: An Organizing Tool for Community Survival 203
Marxism: Perspectives from a Native Movement 213
Racism: An American Ideology 224
Thoughts from an Autochthonous Center: Postmodernism and Cultural Studies 232
Thoughts of Peace: The Great Law 240
We Are By Nature Social Animals 249
Western Peoples, Natural Peoples: Roots of Anxiety 259
Words of Peace-A Six Nations Tradition 271
Clear Thinking: A Positive Solitary View of Nature 274
Afterword: A Constellation of Memories Katsi Cook Barreiro 279
Credits 281
Index 283
About the Editor 291