----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003
3:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Tragedy
in Iran, too
Ray's in black, I'm
in blue.
Ed Weick
Ray:
Thank you for your statement
of our tragedy. It was clear, accurate and well
put. I would argue differently only in one
area. The knowledge is not lost anymore than the
shamanic universe is lost. You can find it written all over
the walls of the Sistine Chapel and I don't believe you can
accurately interpret the Jewish bible if you don't know the ancient
rules of writing that are still embodied in the Hebrew
letters. That is found in the ancient shamanic roots
of the culture of the Habiru as well and reaches all the way to the
Americas.
I'm afraid you've lost me here. IMHO, the shamanic
universe may continue to exist, but if there are no shamen around to
interpret it and make use of it, what's
the point?
You a have been talking to a traditional Didahnvwisgi
(Shaman) for several years Ed. There are two Cherokee
communities with full ceremonial calendars and several smaller language
ones in the New York Metropolitan area. We get a lot
of information as well from the network in Canada. There is
a lot going on as a result of some of the wonderful opportunities your
work facilitated.
I'm sure there are still people, apart from
academics, that may understand the universe in a manner similar to
the understandings of the ancient Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and Cherokees,
but there aren't very many of them, and when they die, there will be
even fewer.
We are not dying off now. We are
growing. My daughter has traditional native friends in
her college in Boston. Give up the vanishing American
myth. Its just that, a myth.
In the past thirty to forty years I've seen a
tremendous resurgence of Native power and culture in Canada.
Take a look at http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/native_claims.htm which deals with the power and
political side. However, I've also seen that to become politically
powerful, Native people have had to use mainstream political, judicial
and bureaucratic methods. I think there's may be a fine line
between using those methods and adopting them in place of earlier
ones. To quote one Yukon Indian leader when asked about
traditional land use: "Oh, we don't do that anymore," which is not to
say that many other aspects of culture have been abandoned or are not
being revived and strengthened.
If, in your reference to the Sistine Chapel, you are
saying that the "shamanic universe", the world beyond the world that we
can see, touch and smell, makes itself manifest through creativity
wherever that occurs, I buy the point.
No, I'm saying that the church was changed in its travels
around the world. It absorbed a king-size amount of Shamanism in
its theology from its connection to Judaism and the Romans brought
theirs along with it not to mention the Mithrians.
Shamanism is the base religion of the world and is built in the senses
and aesthetic discrimination. Shamanism had a lot to
do with many of the early Christian heresies as the church was
asked the questions by the native priests and
Priestesses. Shamanism has always adjusted
and grown and accepted. The individual vision has
always been the prime directive for all Shamans and it is very
comfortable with evolution and Darwin and has the ethic of living in the
present while honoring the past. That is why the Shamanic
regime of Kublai was the most religiously tolerant culture to date on
the planet. You can't be converted to
Shamanism. The Creator, Creative, Great Mystery etc.
and your genetics gives you your place in it. It must
come from an individual vision, enlightenment or
birthright. But you can dialogue and pass the
"medicine" around as long as it is honored. Its OK
with us that the Church has so much of our stuff in it. That
is why I can read the walls. On one level you are
right about the artists though. The great Wicasa Wakan John
Fire Lame Deer said that Artists were the Indians of the White
world. Don't think fragment, think whole and fire and
water rather than stone.
I see what you are saying now: the church, to be
meaningful to people and to survive, has to give attention to, if not
incorporate, the life-views and practices of people. I saw
this in spades when I attended church in suburban Sao Paulo and Jamaica
a few years ago. Both have a strong African tradition, and that
had to be incorporated into the music, the sermons, and the overall
presentation. It's probable that, ever since the Christian church
left the shores of Europe, its been on the defensive, needing to
accommodate, and needing to incorporate what the people believed.
I recall reading that saints became pseudo-Aztec deities (or the other
way around). It was not always so. For much of history, the
church was on the offensive. I almost gagged in my own church
yesterday when the Minister asked us to read the Nicaean Creed, a
piece of liturgical officialese which nailed down precisely what and how
Christians were expected to believe when Christianity became the
religion of Rome in the fourth century A.D. Knowing something of
the times and the bloodletting and persecutions that went on, I simply
could not read it. I have a book on my shelves by Jules Michelet,
the French historian, which documents how, in medieval Europe, the
official church eradicated all of the large and small dieties of nature
that people then believed in. As Michelet puts it: "Great Pan is
dead!"
But the shamanic universe of Michelangelo was not really
the same as that of Nezahuacoytl or that which inspired the ancient
Hebrews. Or was it?
Yes.
I'd have to think about this one a little
more. Michelangelo and Nezahuacoytl, the poet and philosopher king
of Texcoco, were separated by about 20,000 years of human history
and several millenia of different civilization building. What you
seem to be saying is that there is a common shamanic universe that all
creative people, no matter what their backgrounds, can tap into if they
but know how. I remain to be
convinced.
Native American contributions are
found everywhere and should be labeled as such if we got there first and
the rest of the world benefited. I do not claim that Indians
invented the bassoon even though Burl Lane the section leader for the
Chicago Symphony is Indian. But when you eat squash you
should remember it as a product of our deliberate agricultural
experiments that took many generations. The same is true for
many things taken for granted. My complaint is that it seems
a European never tires of taking credit but is not available for giving
it. You give lie to my prejudice. Thanks.
I don't like squash, so no
one will get my vote for it. However, I do like potatos, corn,
wild rice, Arctic char, fresh or dried caribou and muktuk. Again,
I'm not sure I understand your point, but I'm sure that many generations
of thought must have gone into perfecting all of these
foods.
You are right about the
Arts in Europe. But don't make the mistake of thinking
that the poor, ragtag elements of the societies that have been abused
and suffered so much under the European heel is all there
is. As they get more prosperous you will see
some very European like mistakes made by Indians as Indians and they
would have made the mistakes without Europeans. On the
other hand you will see the wonderful flowering of methods, ways of
thought, political systems, environmental values and a pedagogy based in
aesthetics and mastery that is totally opposed to 19th century
Utilitarian thought. They took our ideas and grafted them on
a tree that couldn't and can't sustain them. You need a new
tree of life. A new birth. (sorry I couldn't resist
the poke) If I were really just speaking the latest
new book I would flood the list. I have whole library
of books by natives and about our ways that are now being written and
published. Even the secret societies can be found on
the internet.
I'm in agreement on
this. I've already seen some of the mistakes - e.g. the erosion of
traditions of decision making and the beginnings of class systems and
western-type struggles for power among Native groups that had signed
land claims agreements, and the appalling attitudes of children who
spoke only English toward Elders who spoke only the Native
language. I've also seen it go the other way, pride in culture,
education in the Native language, the requirement that all bureaucrats
in Nunavut eventually speak the language, and Elders attending meetings
in the interests of the community to make sure that negotiators were not
selling them out. When I worked in northern Saskatchewan some ten
years ago, there were many references to a medicine person who lived in
Ile a La Crosse (sp?) who had brought about remarkable cures and had a
large following. The Medical Officer for Health for northern
Saskatchewan, when asked, did not deny that the cures, including cases
of cancer, were genuine.
But, to get back to the
point I was making, the huge and very rapid die-off of the population of
a place like Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), one of the largest metropolises
anywhere at the time (and the destruction of Aztec books), must have
taken a lot of knowledge and perspectives down with it. While
vestiges of that knowledge still exist, an enormous amount would have
been lost.
The last Great Speaker was
named Chautemoc and it meant spirit descending. The
popular translation was "dragging eagle" a diminutive.
When he refused to tell the place of the royal treasury to Cortez,
Cortez burned off his feet. The man healed and then
walked across Mexico on crutches telling the people that the books would
be burned and that they had to bury them in their minds, teach them to
the children and also to insert them in the Roman Catholic Church until
the time would come when they could be renewed. There
was even a calendar which I am not able to talk about. But
there is a Mexican politician with his name
currently. The beginning story of the
Aztecs was that the nobles came together to create a great fire to give
rise to Tonatiuh the Aztec sun. In order to make the sun
rise there had to be a sacrifice. The most beautiful
and wealthiest noble was elected to give energy to the sun but he went
several times to the fire and didn't have the courage. At
which point the ugliest one jumped in and provided the
energy. The wealthy noble was shamed and jumped in
afterwards as a second thought. Primal
stories are metaphors for societies. It is no accident that
the Aztecs took care of the poor and the ugly for they gave rise to the
sun.
I don't deny what
you're saying, but somewhere, long ago, I read a piece of Aztec poetry
that predicted the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the end of Aztec
civilization. The last two lines are all I can remember.
They went: "The city of books, of flowers, will soon be no more."
But perhaps you are right, yet the virgin soil diseases that ravaged
Mexico in the 16th and 17th Centuries probably didn't distinguish
between people who remembered and people who forgot. Both would
have died.
The situation would have
been comparable to having the population of Europe reduced by 90% during
the 16th Century and all of Europe's great libraries emptied and
destroyed. Could European culture have survived that?
In the Art and the songs Ed
and in the hearts of the survivors.
Well, you may be
right. Even though officialdom, whether secular or religious, no
longer recognizes the little people of the forests, meadows and fields,
artists and many ordinary people still do. Great Pan may not be
dead after all.
I've valued this
exchange. It's made me think about things I haven't thought about
for awhile.
Regards,
Ed
