Indigeny & Energetics

"Indigeny & Energetics" - Primary Literary Supportive Texts:

2011-12-18T22:03:00.004-05:00

Healing Wisdom of Africa - Malidoma Some'

God Is Red - Vine Deloria, Jr.

Recovering the Sacred - Winona LaDuke

Original Instructions - Edited by Melissa K. Nelson (Bioneers)

Dreaming the Council Ways - True Native Teachings from the Red Lodge: Ohki Simine Forest

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar - Martin Prechtel

In the Absence of the Sacred - Jerry Mander

Modernity In A Minute

2011-11-02T19:05:00.001-04:00

If human history was lived out in one day, modernity will have existed for about a minute - on which we now base our uncertain future.

Trees

2011-10-30T19:08:00.001-04:00

Trees breathe out what we breathe in. We breathe out what trees breathe in. We should do more to preserve the life and safety of trees.

John Henrik Clarke - christianity before christ

2011-10-10T12:49:00.003-04:00

This video is offered as information for support and discussion of indigeny, Africa, white privilege ("Patterns of Privilege"), predatory christianity, colonialism and imperialism.

The Eagle and the Condor in Prophecy: Where Does Columbia Stand?

2011-09-20T12:40:00.006-04:00

A number of sources point us to the prophecy of the eagle and the condor, in which and when the eagle of the north (the capitalist, intellectual, technological, brain-based USAmerica) will fly the same skies, in harmony with the condor (the communalist, wholistic, spiritual, heart-based indigenous cultures of the "south", South America). This is an important and telling prophecy that comes from the spiritual awarenesses and visions of peoples that hold life dear, that hold people dear, that hold nature and Spirit dear. This is a prophecy that has seen unity not only of just the "north" and "south", of the United States of America and South America, but of all peoples in a world showing deep rifts between technological globalist corporatocracy and indigenous and marginalized (people taken from their land/spirit/culture-power-base).

Problems with engaging this beautiful prophecy, if even the eagle north is willing and able to see the necessity for unity, change and wholistic harmonious life, come up simply in the popular notion that indigenous peoples hold no real and functional wisdom that the capitalist, modern, digital-technological world can and should learn from and thereby enact change because of. Repeated, constant, persistent disrespect and devaluation of indigenous ideas and cultural practice, the infantilizing of modern "noble savage" is a deadly pattern that stands in the way of the capitalist north fully embodying the medicine of the eagle.

Current review of pagan writing, dominated by Europeans (and understandably so, but oftentimes the obvious must be stated) speak of a connection to the goddess Columbia. Hellenist blogger Cara writes the following:

"From the beginning, when Columbia was first revealed as the Goddess of this land, She was seen as a guardian of freedom and a generous granter of plenty. In early depictions of Columbia, she wears the cap of freedom and holds a cornucopia. The eagle and the rattlesnake are sacred to Her."
http://politics.pagannewswirecollective.com/2010/07/04/columbia-patron-goddess-of-the-united-states/

Simple questions arise here. What's inside that cornucopia? Where did the bounty come from? Who harvested it, this bounty from "America's" bosom? What does the eagle mean to her, to her adherents? Is the eagle's medicine the same as that as revealed to the Native peoples who revere the eagle with more sacred knowing than the colonists old and new who would destroy the eagle's populations and habitats? If Columbia (reportedly named after Criminal Columbus) is a guardian of freedom (though reportedly named after Criminal Columbus), why has she been so silent in the throats of those to whom she revealed herself in defense and liberation of the Native Americans and Africans who would be crushed under the weight of the nation that claims her name in its capitol.

What troubles me about the above quote and the continuing article is that it implies a pagan (indigenous?) perspective that allows itself to join the politically disintegrative, destructive energetic of the USAmerican colonial imperative, laying itself over the indigenous Native American cultural dynamic that is primary here in this land, a sort of paganized manifest destiny. It seems that Cara and other pagans are joining the "this land is your land. this land is my land" chorus while merging their spiritual ideology with USAmerican capitalist and colonial ideology. This is not to say that some Native Americans haven't joined that ideological thrust for their own survival or through their own blind complicity born of the same political violence and disrespect that has energetically affected us all. Africans have done this, too. The European populace has done this in spades and continues to walk the earth of Turtle Island as if they are actually in ownership of it. I am saddened by people who say they love "America", but haven't spent even a day walking on its back in harmony with its sacred energy.

A Blackfeet chief has said, as from the book, "The People: Native American Thoughts and Feelings":

"Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals; therefore we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because is does not belong to us."

This is deeply instructive to us, especially as Indian Country Today Media Network has this year reported on how and why the Lakota persist in refusing the billion dollars being offered for the sacred Black Hills.

"Sioux Forgo $1B, Continue Fight to Reclaim Black Hills" (ICTMN Staff February 15, 2011"
(http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/02/sioux-forgo-1b-continue-fight-to-reclaim-black-hills/)

The BBC also covered this story stating:

"Why the Sioux Are Refusing $1.3 Billion

Members of the Great Sioux Nation could pocket a large sum set aside by the government for taking the resource-rich Black Hills away from the tribes in 1877. But leaders say the sacred land was never, and still isn't, for sale."
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/north_america/july-dec11/blackhills_08-23.html)

This continued, indigenously informed Native American perspective speaks to the embodiment of the condor consciousness and challenges directly the idea that the capitalist and mercenary ideology of USAmericanism is a foreign concept to this land, Turtle Island, and its people, those who have been here longest and best (do we really still need to say this out loud?). It also points us to a fundamental dissonance with some of the stated dynamics of the engagement of Columbia and how her adherents are patriotically supportive of the exploitative politics of the state that has overlaid its politics, culture, religion and people over that of the original inhabitants.

Cara goes on to state the following:

"From the beginning, when Columbia was first revealed as the Goddess of this land, She was seen as a guardian of freedom and a generous granter of plenty."

Which and whose beginning does she speak of? Who was Columbia revealed to and have they heard her spiritual message clearly? This anwers are up for brisk debate. I can only imagine what the Native peoples might have to say about this. Neither Cara nor the other pagan writers except for Galina Krasskova (who has recently and not so recently leveled similar critiques of this confusion) has even mentioned the presence of importance of their relationship to indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

It is clear that even the rank and file "(US)American" is unaware of the deeper symbolism of eagle medicine and how it calls us to higher, clearer and more spiritual understandings of ourselves and our relationship to Spirit. "(US)Americans" veritably pimp the conceptual eagle as they destroy the energetic, living being. The USAmerica populace is still struggling to get to a place where it can even live out the prophecy of its eagleness fully, though as far as I understand the prophecy and how it's been communicated, the indigenous people are being remarkably kind to those who carry this allopathic, symptom-submerging "medicine" of the northern eagle of this hope-filled and powerful prophecy.

If the northern eagle is going to fly - respectfully and harmoniously - with the condor of the south, of the indigenous world, then it must engage the eagle in its fullness, not in the narrow, patriarchal and militaristic bravado-machismo that dominates pop culture. The people of the capitalist world must also learn something very important and seemingly very difficult from the condor. The condor (interestingly enough, still holding on here in the north after having been decimated in numbers to only sixteen birds at one point) is a bird that represents and embodies the medicine of purification and transformation, a powerful relationship between life and death, the physical and spiritual worlds. The condor looks death in the rib cage and pulls its sustenance from the rotting carcasses of that which, if left alone, would only spread illness and imbalance. The condor plunges is head into all that scares "(US)Americans" the most - that which must change for the good of all life, mortality and death itself, the visceral connection to Spirit that brings radical self-appraisal and transmutation of disease-state thinking and behavior so as to create new beings and lifeways in which imbalance and injustice are destroyed.

USAmericans in general and some elements of the pagan community in particular are still in dire need of understanding the nature and needs of the land upon which they stand, of the people who have sustained and maintained the sanctity of the land upon which they stand. There is little, but growing understanding of how people's behaviors are affecting the health of the earth and of nature and her human inhabitants. Even with all this northern, eagle knowledge and data technology, USAmericans seem to be blinded to the dynamics of their own presence, their destructive behaviors and ways of thinking and speaking. White privilege seems alive and well as USAmericans allow their government to opt out of and derail international agreements on climate change. It is alive and well as indigenous people come under arrest for protesting the Tar Sands oil pipeline (along with Darryl Hannah, James Hansen and other Europeans) and as they chain themselves to heavy machinery to halt the destruction of sacred forests and as they fight in courtrooms and boardrooms for access to Ancestral lands, waterways and mountains (like Mount Graham, attacked by the University of Arizona and vatican so that an astronomincal observatory could be erected).

The condor, the heart-centered indigenous energetic would call us all to do something else that is hard for modern people to do freely - to feel. There is a message of empathy and deep, reconciliatory observation and contemplation here, exemplified in the winged stillness of the condor on the rising thermals. There is a message, a call to see and feel more deeply, more fully here, to feel with fullness that which is of us and not of us, that which is physical and that which is spiritual, not just the data-driven religiosity that seemingly ignites the destructive nature of the DC40 predatory fundamentalist christians that have raised the hackles and fears of the pagan community in this current spate of activity and self-advocacy.

"The goal of DC40 is to effect “eternal change in our nation’s capitol so our elected officials can govern from a new position of uncompromising light and understanding as we change the spiritual atmosphere over Washington DC forever.” This effort is variously named DC40, Forty Days of Light Over D.C., and 51 Days of Reformation Intercession.
The change DC40 wants to make is electing leaders who fear the Christian God and “find that compromise is not the way” as it is impossible to “compromise with unrighteousness.” The “uncompromising light” refers to a statement released by Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, which says God’s word should be the legal authority in the United States and Christians should acknowledge no other, “no power to purpose or accept any compromise of the promises of God, and we declare illegal in the earth any action or any people, Nation or nations that undertake what is contradictory to the Word of God.”
(http://pncminnesota.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/dc40-to-pagans-we-release-the-power-of-blood-covered-light-over-you/#comment-1273)

The pagan and the larger, more deeply developed indigenous communities have a valid reason for concern here, if only in the political realm. The pagan statements coming to the fore with regard to the DC40 initiative though are not ringing a bell of clarity and liberty in the face of the larger historical injustices created and sustained by people of European descent on and in the lands and cultures of Native Americans and Africans, those injustices that created the nation whose bombs now burst in so much of the air above this earth, whose amber waves of grain get traded off as economic and (im)moral leverage against neo-colonized nations and peoples hungry for food, clean water, sovereign control of their Ancestral lands and their own freedom and liberty defined their way as their goddesses and gods and spirits led them to define.

Europeans the world over, but maybe especially the ones now living in (spite of) Amerique (an indigenous term related by Jan Carew in his important book, "Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Birth of Racism in the Americas", meaning the "land of the winds"), are challenged to get their minds and actions right, to look beyond the comfortable ramblings about red stated an blue state, beyond the minutia of conservative and liberal, beyond recycling and not recycling, beyond what level of standard of living they deserve no matter what effects that standard has on people the world over. Europeans, "whites" are in dire need of developing the will and ability to thrust their heads into the heart space, the failing rib cage structure, the rotting carcass of the nation they seem to think will last forever, the systems of racism, sexism and classism they seem to think will last forever, their modern lifestyles and lifeways that they seem to think will and must last forever even though they - mathematically, physically, spiritually, materially, ethically - can't. Other peoples who have followed this mistaken and misguided path of "unlimited growth", "better living through chemistry", destructive and short-sighted modernity have a similar task, though their path to clarity might have some different cultural dynamics in which to operate; their levels of cultural reconciliation may not be so abysmally deep.

Cara goes on to entreat Columbia:

I ask Her to guide us – our country seems to be at a crossroads and is facing difficult times. Our nation’s identity and ethics are muddled. "

On this I agree with her, but more than the nation, the people's identities and ethics are muddled. The "melting pot" and the "salad" have failed in their process of the amorphous unity they alluded or eluded to as they miss the very ground of unity that indigenous spirituality (energetics) helps us to understand. If we engage the spiritual dynamic of spaciality as Vine Deloria correctly suggests, we will have the ability to understand our environmental, ethical and social responsibilities. The Dagara inform us that it is the earth energetic that gives rise to our identity as indigenous beings in relation to All that Is. We can't ever assume to suggest that we "know" the land without the deep consideration and respect of the original inhabitants (who are still here) and how they have come to understand the land and how to live upon it. We can't ever assume to embark on political paths that continue to disrespect those upon whose lives and cultures the USAmerica has consumed and fed so fully, so gluttonously.

Columbia and those who revere her must reconcile themselves with the spiritual energetics of the land, still full of the Ancestral bones of the Native American nations and tribes. They can not place themselves in a position to alienate and injure their tenuous relationship with Native Americans and African by parading another, though more paganistic, symbol of manifest destiny over the bodies and cultures and histories and spiritual traditions and Ancestral responsibilities of the people who paid the highest price of survival here. The people of the north must embrace eagle medicine, must be clear about their lack of and hope for intellectual clarity. The people of the north must be able then to hear, respect and engage condor medicine, the winged path of the heart, the flight of the brave, able to come down to earth and plunge headlong into their own cultural shadows, that which must be changed into something else much less toxic to that which is and those around them.

"The earth was created by the assistance of the sun and it should be left as it was...The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man's business to divide it...I see the whites all over the country gaining welath, and see their desire to give us lands which are worthless...The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land the measure of our bodies are the same. Say to us if you can say it, that you were sent by the Creative Power to talk to us. Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit. If I thought you were sent by the Creator I might be induced to think you had a right to dispose of me. Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours." - Chief Joseph, Nez Perce ("The People: Native American Thoughts and Feelings")

Is the USAmerica, its people, the people of the modern north, the industrialized, capitalist world ready to engage the indigenous prophecy, the call to unity? Can these modern people see beyond their own privileged barriers to see a world that might look much different than the one they think they see now? Can the pagan community begin to see itself with much more spiritual and political clarity and use its powerful spiritual traditions to truly liberate itself from its own confusion and isolation? Is "(US)America" truly the land of the free and the home of the brave or is it actually the nation of the unwilling, the reticent, the narrowly-defined, the exploitative, the afraid?

What will become of the prophecy of the eagle and the condor...and where will Columbia - and her adherents - stand?

Letter to EWTN re: Doug Barry's "savages" comment on international television

2011-08-29T09:44:00.005-04:00

August 22, 2011

Doug Keck

Executive Vice President

EWTN

5817 Old Leeds Rd.

Irondale, Al. 35210-2164

Dear Mr. Keck,

On August 18th, EWTN’s Doug Barry made an impassioned and inflammatory statement about the targets of roman catholic evangelism on the live “Life On the Rock” broadcast from Spain, referring to these targets of missionary work as “savages”. Only seconds before this antiquated, reprehensible and patently racist statement, Barry rhetorically queried a guest on the World Youth Day show, “We have a whole world to conquer for Christ. Don’t we?”. This sort of language is clearly a throwback to the pathologically criminal acts of Christopher Columbus’ 1492, not that of an enlightened and professionally informed and progressive 2011.

Barry’s statement, though brief, was highly insulting and unbecoming of a supposedly educated and responsible telecaster. It was immature at best. One could expect nothing less than a formal apology and public retraction for daring to utter such a horrific statement about non-roman catholic peoples in a world still struggling for pluralism, tolerance, justice, understanding and compassion.

In 2010, a report was made to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concerning the christian “Doctrine of Discovery” that validated the voyages and crimes of Columbus and other conquerors and their historical and current repercussions. That indigenous peoples were the object of those crimes brings clarity to the insensitivity and arrogance of Barry’s comments of August 18th. His statements come out of a history of oppression, privilege and violent coercion that are appalling and repulsive to an enlightened mind and loving and compassionate heart. His words are even more horrendous as they were uttered in front of thousands of young people, let alone the whole EWTN audience at that time. Because of the presence of the pope, the eyes and ears of the world were upon Madrid and sadly, possibly more so on your cable channel.

What is said in the confines of your rectories, churches, sacristies and board rooms is one thing, but the blatant disrespect and disparaging of huge swaths of humanity in front of EWTN’s audience is quite another.

Doug Barry’s comments are highly unethical, immoral and carry the verbal resonance of historical crimes against humanity. Clearly this is exactly the language that accompanied some of the most heinous of these kinds of crimes, many initiated by the works and likes of Christopher Columbus.

I am calling for a public and mediated apology for and retraction of his comments. Considering the deep insensitivity and lack of professionalism magnified by the international reach of EWTN’s broadcast, anything less would simply add modern insult to historical insult to colonial injury. If the vatican is to be considered a respectable member of the United Nations, its official and unofficial communicative functionaries must treat their international colleagues and other world citizens as though they are also due a substantive level of respect and consideration.

Additionally, the “Doctrine of Discovery”, from which Barry’s comments find firm foundation must be illuminated, engaged in media discourse and beyond and must be recanted and brought to reconciliation as was respectfully asked for by the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers in 2008 (who were, by the way, summarily dismissed by the same papal office from which EWTN implicitly derives its ideological, theological and moral mandate).

Women and men of deep, functional religious virtue and insight should normally need no external barometer outside of their connection to their own spiritual source and community to inform them of the error of their own ways. This letter is to serve as a reminder of the transgression that Doug Barry, the “Life On the Rock” production crew and EWTN already know was committed. Righteousness cannot be claimed where empathy and compassion and the possibility of genuine acts of contrition are not in evidence.

I look forward to your timely reply given the grave nature of the offense and to the quick and substantive engagement and resolution of these clear areas of conflict. Thank you for your time and principled consideration.

Yours in the quest for justice,

Ukumbwa Sauti, M.Ed.

Adjunct Professor, Cultural Media Studies

Initiated Dagara Elder

ukumbwa@gmail.com

cc:

Bay State Banner

Boston Globe

Boston Phoenix

Huffington Post

"...reconciliation..." (originally posted on "...how deep the water...", Jan.26, 2011)

2011-08-24T11:08:00.002-04:00

...reconciliation...

...I sit here at a computer, projecting thought streams into a virtual world, terrestrium digitalus, one that gives deep homage to repetition, to sameness, that bases its very process, its very reason for being on only two numbers, nothingness and unity. Maybe those numbers point us to the essence of the world's diversity, to the essence of the world, the yin yang dance of complementary forces that call us into deeper question of our place within it all...and where we must someday more so be.

Outside the window, there on the other side of my digital portal is the actual world-wide web - of life, of experience, of feeling, of nature and Spirit and soil and bone and water and leaf, coyote, squirrel, hawk, raven and worm. Outside that window lies a frozen lake of tears, hiding a world's-age of memories inside the stone-cold casing that allows us to walk like that mythological ghost-man from Nazareth. Outside that window is everything we've ever wanted, everything we've ever feared and needed and destroyed.

But we play with that destruction, those fears, those wants and desires in our virtual worlds, echoes of what was once real to us as our bodies cry out for justice as we force them to live at the portal of the virtual. We carpally paralyze as our hands are made more for chopping wood, skinning rabbits, soothing babies and welcoming friends than diving into the shallow bay of repetitive motion, sending ones and zeroes into the constant scream of consciousness that may be merely beckoning us to do that act of modern resistance - to go outside and play.

My body finds in it a simple, but tenacious growth, a widening of the midsection that brings some of our deepest adolescent and uninitiated fears to bear in the pages of women's magazines and men's magazines and health magazines and late night infomercials, "as advertised on TV", our banner ads poking and prodding our waistlines and our now wasted minds left dormant because we forgot to keep them both engaged as we wallowed at the portal of the digitally unreal...or at the altar of televisual god, a nasty, vengeful, ubiquitous god. So we attack the midsection, battle the gut with wheels and electrocution belts and lipid-burning pills and life-system bypassing choke chains, melting creams, salves and solutions that send incendiary messages to the part of the body that is more the effect than the cause.

And at the altars of modernity, we lie in abject torpidity, tired-blood offerings to our own social pathological demons, beleaguered by what we think life is, or worse, what it was, raising inaction, inactivity, inactivism to new and lofty heights of deism that have never been seen before and would have been the very scourge of any sane and conscious society. But we wallow on, de-activating the brain in ever-quickening spirals downward, downward, downward because we can't actually fly, more so because we've forgotten our kinship to the crow than that our wingspan is insufficient to be carried into ecstasy on the breath of our Ancestors.

We watch our children, the innocents, the tender, beautiful ones, kill us. They break our hearts. We damn them for not knowing. We scorn them for not seeing. We malign them for not becoming. We report them for failing, for shooting each other with impunity and we impune them when they use the very tools we created for the purposes we made them. We scream at them, even in the silence of our neglect, to do as we say, not as we just did to them. We lock them up in prisons because they disappointed our expectations. We lock them up in schools because we've forgotten to trust, forgotten to divine that they already know what they need to remember. We lock them up in our faulty, dusty, moldy, rank and file expectations because we fear we will lose the life of that child within us, but who dies from that self-same prison imposed upon it by all of the children who drive cars and dig mines and build bridges and run stock markets and who brutalize motherhood who never grew up in the first place.

I see a vast wasteland of the bodies of what we would call, what we could call, what we should call women and men, mere and rotting echoes of the spirit within. They are the walking dead in the night of the living, crawling out of the shadows for their forfeited life-blood pacts with the Creator, slavering after the elixir of life at the jugular well. Our telescreens dance with images of the zombied and and the vampirical, the ones who can't live without the others, the last living things on earth, running from the light, from their own death, from that which will pass them into physical oblivion even though that is the only way life can continue. The sapling grows out of the cool humus born of old bark and branch. What kind of hell is it in which the tree of life eats its young?

True pathology is not born, it is made, even if it shows up in the twisted body-mind of a newborn terminator-seed baby. Atrazine cocktails, the insanity of pharmaceutical aquatic concoction, poison-water amalgams of experiments gone bad, but cheered in great pomp and circumstance like the naked emperor in his new clothes. What kind of twisted kool-aid have we conjured for the kids? Living lives of disconnected, not asked, not told fantasies of something long gone, but waiting in our hearts' shadows, beckoning the vampire to walk through its twilight and back into the substance of a new day. The crime of the centuries has been committed and the smoking gun will always be responsible to the one that forged the trigger.

And we've integrated the virus into our very lives. We have committed them to the eternal Inquisition, to the mawkish embrace of the iron maiden, chained her to the boiling cauldron of our own demasculinized machinations into which we daily commend her spirit. If she floats we will kill her. And if she drowns she has killed herself. She asked for it. She is mine. She is mined for the liquid gold of her tears, her fossil-fuel blood spilling, killing her children. She is raped in her ability to give life and we will sell her tears in the twisted, dime store narrative of our own tragic buffoonery, drink from her cup that runneth over with her own endless capacity for acceptance and the making of peace. We have walked on her moon and left upon it the garbage of our mechanism, the spawn of the ma(n)trix. Her pill will be blue and she shall consume it verily, thusly and without fail, without hesitation, without protest, without consideration. This is the word of the lord. This is the world of the lords.

The penis was never a license to kill or to blind oneself to the gift in the hand that fed you or to destroy the essence of that which gave you life with that spiteful, sybaritic, saline solution of scientific human blasphemy.

Reconciliation is not the dizzny-fictional apparition of glowing castles, awakened walking-dead princesses or Powhatans and Pilgrims both marked as savages. How dare we act like this is so! Reconciliation is not the psychic-trauma-insult to colonial injury of some so-called truth panel pseudo-Khosa-celebre that leaves the crime yet unpunished, wounds bleeding out into continued township bloodshed and the sustenance of gated cities within nations of disenfranchised warriors who thirst for water, arable land and sweet succulent quiet soothing healing living breathing justice. Reconciliation is not the feel-good process that requires us to close our eyes to reality or to the corporeal nature of our own regret, frustration and grief. Reconciliation is not shallow forgiveness. Reconciliation is not giving up...or laying down...or giving ground...or giving in.

Reconciliation makes things real. It requires us to realize with real eyes what is, what was and what must be. We must be able to reconcile the dysfunction of a society that places great importance on the sustenance of virtual realities and in those same instances is destroying the balance of the natural systems upon which all terrestrial life depends, forsaking the real for the virtual, the actualized for the fictionalized, the Creation for the manufactured, the body for the robot, the ghost for the machine, the baby for the bathwater.

Reconciliation unifies experience. We must be able to unify our concerns for our own looks, our waistlines, our health, our lives and that our lifestyles are creating our wasteful styles and broadening waists. Our bodies are not the criminals, but we have criminalized, to some extent, the clarity that brings us to bravery that brings us to enacting the kind of change in what we eat and how we eat and how we move and why we move so that the beautiful ways we look and feel and are and become are born of the beautiful ways we treat each other and grow and cook and nurture food and nurture and grow life within our homes and villages, communes and communities.

Reconciliation requires the bravery and courage inherent in the execution of human responsibility. Reconciliation requires us to love the children more powerfully, most powerfully, who take up our arms and kill each other, whether in the villages of Uganda and the Congo, the inert-cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles or the quaint, peaceful, idyllic and idealized communities of New Hampshire and Colorado. The children, the truant students, the inattentive fifth-graders, the violent gang members, the pubescent mass-murderers, the disrespectful teens, the ignorant mall-rat vermin consuming our high-fructose commercialism are not the problem, but the symptom of our own inability to reconcile the history of the modern manufacture of commodified youth, the recipients of every neuroses and disease, social or otherwise, that we adults could blindly and sometimes not so blindly create for them. Reconciliation calls us to look our children in the face, beaten and bloodied by and with our own hands and weapons, and see ourselves.

Reconciliation is redemption. Reconciliation is the ability to put our own mistaken identities of childhood and adulthood into the solitary confinement of historical memory and to forge into a new relation with the child within and the child without. Why is it that modern culture refuses to consciously and compassionately initiate its youth into adulthood, that we leave them with cinematic visions of the back seats of '57 Chevies and six-packs of beer and HIV-free and nubile blanched bodies as opposed to concretized stories of bodies-become-battlefields and nations-become-decivilized-warzones and futures-become-forsaken-dreams of drunken fathers and mothers pimped-out for their thoughtless, thankless ability to love? Why do we not teach them to envision a world boldly beyond the confines of our own spiritual disability? Why do we not prepare them fully and courageously for the world that we have actually created, but for the one we still fantasize about, but don't tell them because we were too busy dropping them off at soccer, dance class or into the hands of the cult of surreality tv. We don't have time. We are busy. We create a vacuum of parenting, mentorship and elder guidance and direction and we will allow our children to be sucked into that vacuum, to fill it with their grief turned depression turned anger turned self-destruction turned destruction. Reconciliation requires that we stop "teaching" and start listening because we've learned to trust that children come into the world with things we need and we won't figure that out from the results of a bastardizing, standardizing test. A gift is a unique expression of the understanding of one life form to, for and on behalf of another life form. Children are a gift for us. Our communally responsible adulthood, our Eldership, is a gift we have kept from giving to our children as they require. We are the shit of the next generation and we can continue to be a toxic-body-waste or turn ourselves gently over in the cultural compost heap of history and allow the hope of future generations to be fertilized by the gift of our death and the gift of what then will have been a life of love and purpose, responsible to time and space, to the sublime, to grace.

Reconciliation is a river bed through which men will make fertile the sacred forest of their own desacration by the volume of their new-found tears. Reconciliation requires us to look deeply into the mythology, real and imagined, of masculinity, of the maleness, of men, of what they think and what they do. It requires of men that we be singularly and communally able and willing to hold our psychic phallo-weapon in one hand and embrace the body and soul of those victimized of rape in the other. Reconciliation requires us to see, in our mind's eye and in the flowering of our cultural expressions, at the same and simultaneous moment of plausible and achievable absolution our birth mother and our earth mother - that our birth mother is our earth mother and that our earth mother is our birth mother.

Reconciliation requires in all of us that we see the unity in our actions and inaction, in our thoughts and in our behaviors, in our statements and in our production, in what we say we intend and in what we see clearly that we have caused to come into being. Reconciliation requires us to make peace, but not simply take the privilege of power and tell the disempowered that they have access to power, but still make it ultimately and tragically impossible to live peacefully on the land or in a house or with people who love and understand them or drink clean water or grow and eat food that actually is alive and sustains life without selling your body and soul to a machine that does not know your name, but can map your DNA as if we were toys for genetic-rape, tools for patriarchy's prostitution of everything sacred and repositories for drugs so vile that we rob our children of their spirits, their childhood, the food from their lips so we could stay high for one more day.

Reconciliation calls us to write history books that tell the truth of the world that exists in reality outside of the pages.

Reconciliation demands that we tell and disseminate stories that have everything to do with not only the world that truly is, but also the world that we know must and can truly be.

Reconciliation brings us home to the realization that we can not espouse one idea and act in such a way that devalues and unravels, confuses and distorts that idea with dissonant behavior.

Reconciliation is the act of seeing something that needs to change and grow and heal and then creating and manifesting and sustaining that change, that growth, that healing.

Reconciliation behooves us to be honest with each other in ways that our modern, anti-cultural story says is dangerous, damaging and damn-near impossible.

Reconciliation means we may actually have to talk about religion, about religions and their place in our past, present and future and if they should have and hold that same place in our present and future.

Reconciliation will be the perfunctory destruction and dismemberment not only of the ideas and ideology of sexism, racism, classism, ageism and homophobia, but also the structural, social, political systems that validate, maintain and sustain these social diseases.

Reconciliation does not exclude the possibility that we must destroy something that we wish to not even fleetingly gaze upon for the deep, corporeal and earth-shattering emotions it engenders within us.

Reconciliation does not exclude the eventuality that the enslaved might have to set fire to the house of the enslavers.

Reconciliation does not eliminate the necessity for us to come out on the other side of the process slightly or wholly and fundamentally changed for all time.

Reconciliation will bring us to the realization that we ultimately and finally need each other - for everything.

Reconciliation is fucking hard.

Reconciliation must be understood, felt, touched, created, nurtured, created, remembered, enacted, made real, made now, made eternal.

Reconciliation is one of the qualities, one of the energetics, one of the sacred facets of the Spirit of water, Kuon, in the cosmology of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Ghana.

And so it is that reconciliation is yet another water story. The spirit of reconciliation is in the water. The hope of reconciliation, of peace, of unity, of clarity, the healing nature and spirit of who we are as humans becoming human as Spirit embodied - is in the spirit of water.

In the Spirit of Water...

Patterns of Privilege

2011-07-19T00:21:00.019-04:00

The goal of this work is to address some of the challenges of privilege, inspired by the difficulty with which many people engage and make difficult the eradication of racist, sexist and heterosexist privilege and oppression. The dynamics presented below affect people deeply every day and affect also, deeply, on many levels, the lives of indigenous people.

~~~~~~

Patterns of oppression reveal people of privilege who feel comfortable and called to raise issues about that oppression, 'play' with the concepts of that oppression and then retreat back into the dynamics of their privilege, no matter what the effects on people who have been adversely affected by their momentary playfulness. Their privilege is the ultimate hiding place and ultimate insult to those they purport to educate or support with their conceptual rantings.

There is a co-opting of terms, of language, of the loci, the geography of transgression, even the bodies of the oppressed. The privileged lifestyle, the repeated destination of retreat, is marked by seemingly universal access to cultural production, means of production, increased levels of affluence, means of communication, communal, regional and global, increased access to electronic and digital/mechanical technologies, education, no matter how narrow, and, most dangerously so, to the very populations, especially their children, that have been at the more difficult, knife-like edge of that oppression.

Too many times do well-meaning and not-so-well informed and empathetically empowered people attempt to raise issues of race, gender and/or sexual orientation from places of privilege and power without understanding the human cost of oppression, particularly to the oppressed nor their own part in sustaining and validating that oppression. It is one thing for people who share that social privilege and power to work out their necessary process amongst themselves, which has often been a suggestion of many marginalized populations. It is another thing for people of privilege and social power to project themselves into the culture of people who have been negatively affected by that privileged oppression without a clear idea of how their participation becomes a double-negative for the oppressed.

There are two elements that can help us to understand the complex nature of these relationships that obscure awareness of the simple, but often difficult ways of decreasing or extinguishing the presence and effects of privilege, if that is even the goal.

1) Discourse on privilege

Ignorant and insensitive discourse is a common way that people of privilege mistake their presence and possible eloquence for functionality. Having heard the stingy annual sound bytes of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech (or even having read a book about him, even if written by an African person) does not qualify one to innately and sensitively understand the conditions of the people for whom King was working nor the people who now still hope to reap the benefits of those who tirelessly continue to work on his behalf. "like"-ing King on facebook does not mean one can hold up their end of a conversation about race or class in the midst of people who have lived at the 'wrong' end of racism all of their lives. Even African, Native Americans or Latinas that live in large homes and/or "good neighborhoods" have most likely struggled, sometimes unconsciously, against the disempowering effects of racism and class expectations due to racial confusion.

People of privilege sometimes rightly wish to break down the structures and systemic behaviors and language. The way this comes across often displays an ignorance of the terms of oppression and a substantive lack of knowledge and will around what the dismantling of privilege actually means. Additionally, the oppressed have long asserted that those attempts are feeble, even when eloquent, and are not about a substantive restructuring in the first place. There is often leveled a charge that the privileged class will never give up, or better, share the instruments of power, access and control in a truly democratic and compassionate way, no matter how christian or spiritual-but-not-religious they claim to be.

This element of discourse on privilege is key as it often directs the actions and policies that people in power or who take power (as many oppressed people do and will always continue to do) exercise and enact day to day. The fundamental confusion of "reverse racism" and around "diversity" is an example of this. Again, talking about diversity does not create diversity unless the structures and systems of privilege are loosened, democratized or destroyed.

On another level, how people talk about race, gender and other issues is important for being able to engage people on multiples sides of the issues toward substantive change. Jokes about these serious issues are often unwelcome across the barriers of privilege and access and can continue to be harshly polarizing particularly when intended humor is not expected, appropriate, welcome or well executed. Creating effective context is necessary not only in the social relationship, but also to frame the statement as effectively delivered humor. Anything less is insult to injury or patent reinjury.

This reinjury is possible when ignorant, ill prepared and unempathetic people of privilege engage in serious debate with people from oppressed and marginalized groupings. First of all, there is a great likelihood that most people of privilege assume that everyone at the discussion table has gotten there under equal terms simply because everyone is present physically. They may forget or be blind to the closeness of oppressive energies to those locales. A woman may have just been eyed invasively, disrespectfully by men in the surrounding office. A transgendered person may have just come from the bathroom after cleaning the spittle from a born-again christian off their coat. An African woman may have just been stopped at the front door by a security guard assuming stereotypically that she was a member of the custodial staff. Obviously, much more pernicious events may occur in the lives of disempowered people, but the aforementioned are enough to raise the price of attendance for some and not for others.

While meeting at the table of social discourse, people of privilege often assume that their stories show up with equal energetic import as those that come from oppressed people. Their own privileged reactionism often send them running emotionally to conceptual safe havens, to talk of diversity without acknowledgement of their complicity with ethnocentrism and systems of exclusivity, to talk of gay rights without challenging their own fears, prejudices and participation in biased media portrayals in the simple, but profound act of supporting advertisers who sponsor anti-LGBT program narratives, to grand pronouncements that the discourse should or can not included emotions of anger or that the discussion is merely, but blessedly exploratory and non-binding on official structures. People of privilege often say good things and do no good things to challenge the systems and behaviors of their own privilege and power.

There is truth in the tome that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. And that path is paved also with bad intentions and poor execution of intentions. Africa is replete, if not complete(ly overrun) with predominantly European christian missionaries who televise images of impoverished and dying African children, having traveled there from some amorphous and abysmally high "ethical" road, without even a nod to humbly and correctly dismantling the colonial systems that created that abject poverty and third worldism upon which those hellevangelists now feed. Less continentally, roman catholic schools make bold assumptions that education and salvation can come successfully bundled along with white jesus, racist textbooks and a faculty that may not look anything like the student, internally or externally.

Likewise, discussions of abortion, sexual harassment, rape or feminism/women's empowerment in general easily become reactionary, retorted to with misplaced and injurious jokes, social references and out and out ignorance to the quantitative and qualitative effects of sexism and patriarchy's intimate proximity, frequency and ubiquity. When one realizes at a particular point in his life that all the women he knows have been sexually assaulted in one or more ways, shapes and forms, it should not be assumed that that might be an isolated occurrence. This kind of awareness illuminates another facet of discourse, getting out of the way and listening.

Privileged people live in a society where their stories, message and philosophies and ways of processing information are dominant. Televisual and cinematic entertainment features far more stories of people of economic means by percentage than those people actually exist in society when compared to oppressed, poor or marginalized groups. This dynamic may, in fact, be a good partial definition of what it means to be marginalized or on the other side of the barrier of privilege. This access to and control of popular culture bleeds over into the societal culture in a way that leaves discourse on privilege largely unfulfilling and unfulfilled. Stories of or by people in poverty, grounded narratives of or by women and their socio-political challenges and of or by the LGBT community are more difficult to interject into and hold in the mainstream as space is not frequently made for these stories, partly due to persistently negative economic consideration and when they do, they are often filtered through the minds and sensibilities of people in privileged positions, gatekeepers, rendering those narratives co-opted and off the mark.

Likewise, even personal and group conversations can be hijacked by the larger mediated conceptual forces and by overvaluation of even particular communication modalities (why African parents have often disciplined their children to "speak right" when in the non-African community...would Obama have been groomed as such and elected if he had spoken just as eloquently in "ebonics"?). Privilege empowers the privileged to speak and speak often, again with the dust of the elusive ethical high road all about their wingtips. Privileged people feel very confident, if not called, to set the tone, define the agendas and guide conversation. In deed, they most likely own the building (or city) the meetings are held in or run the organizations sponsoring the gathering.

People who have experienced trauma, disrespect, oppression or systemic disenfranchisement are often keenly aware of where they are, sensing quickly whose house they are in or where their feet are. Body language, vocal tone and the temperature of the inner environment often communicate powerfully and quickly who is in charge. There can be a simple, but complexly executed solution to this discursive power disparity. Privileged people must be able and willing to listen, to get out of the way, to forego their fantasies of social eloquence and functionality to allow for the voices, narratives, ethics and actions of the oppressed to come forward, if indeed that is the goal.

Privileged people often take umbrage to that suggestion, overestimating their global self-worth and undervaluing the globally liberating power of something that they clearly do not know enough about, but could if they only took the time and space to truly build empathetic skill in this area. A particular online discourse revealed a man of European descent and a certain level of access to productive economic industries, to be markedly discomforted at the suggestion that much could be gleaned, learned and advanced from his simply being quiet, being in a place of receptivity, merely allowing someone else to have a turn to speak so that a new, unfamiliar voice, to him, could be heard. His reaction was not surprising and was sadly familiar. He was in a place of discomfort and related it to censorship, however distantly. If he had been willing to entertain more than the thought of that suggestion, and he wasn't, he might have entered into a powerfully cathartic experience moving through that discomfort that is just the barest breeze compared to the constant buffeting hurricane winds of oppression and multiform violence, to enter a rite of passage through his own self-maintained portal of privilege that may have opened not only his ears, his eyes, but also his heart.

The narrative of oppression and the narrative of privilege and power are particular stories in the larger narrative of humanity creating its next great fruition. The imbalance of privilege and power exerted by well-intended people is a tremendous block to the process of not only substantive enlightenment, but to the practical manifestation of liberating ideas and behaviors that will ultimately bring peace, respect and real empowerment to those that some of the people of privilege are perceived to care about so very deeply.

2) Emotional blockages

The second element that reveals the challenges of privilege yearning for change comes in the area of human emotions. When people of privilege get challenged to face and hopefully transform their imbalance of privilege, invariably emotions are raised, ranging from anger to anxiety to fear to sadness and embarrassment. They can also feel pressured, pushed, squelched, dejected, isolated and hurt. These emotions and feelings and often contextually new sensations are important to face, move through and strive for clarity and deeper empathy with. What many, if not most, privileged people fail to realize is that they are simply beginning to tap into the range of emotions created first and foremost by the systems, structures and behaviors that they have recreated and continue to sustain. Privilege, born of racism, sexism and heterosexism, is a wholly dysfunctional and devolutionary energetic way of being that is destructive to all humanity.

Secondarily, and importantly, the responses and emotions of the oppressed are subjugated, reviled and repressed by people who were trained to think that their reality is fundamental and primary, a fallacious premise at best. As stated earlier, privileged people usually subordinate the narratives and actions of the oppressed. Additionally, privileged people are resistant to learning, understanding and deeply taking into their consciousness that they are just beginning to see and sense the tip of the iceberg or, better, volcano of emotions and feelings that oppressed people have lived with all their lives, missing and misunderstanding yet again, their emotional relationship with the oppressed and constantly presuming the level to which they expect the oppressed to be required to care for them in those instances.

The oppressed are not required and should not have to be required to attend to the burgeoning emotions and stories that are bound to, duty bound to come from the minds and hearts of people of privilege. Neither should marginalized people be constantly required to tell their stories of violence and oppression, reentering that emotional nexus, simply to help privileged people get to their next level. Again, being open to that message, patiently and compassionately, can help reveal those stories in the best interest of the oppressed (which privileged people must learn to realize, and this is fundamentally important, is in the best interest of everyone).

There are many, many marginalized people who respond with abject anger and disdain at the suggestion that privileged people are having "some feelings" about learning about oppression, their complicity in it or the feelings of the oppressed toward them. This is bound to happen. Why should they be required in any moment to care for an attacker who seems penitent, but still holds the weapon in their hand? History reveals this to be an old and tiring story.

Also, there are many recipients of oppression that feel called and make the choice to hold space, to witness the transformation of privilege to a deeper humanity. This cannot be required of any person or it will turn into yet another privileged power play. Additionally, powerfully, there are those that will actively engage and support people of privilege in their necessary process of transformation, renewing, redeeming their relationship to humanity and themselves as a whole. These, generally fewer, people have made a choice not only to move forward on the decidedly difficult path of privileged people, but also to own and hold their own stories and integrity as they do so. The privileged must understand this, that these people have chosen, powerfully, to do this double-duty and, to some degree, take on the slings and arrows of a dysfunctional segment of society that most likely became dysfunctional while slinging arrows at them. Their openness and willingness and human ability to assist in this process may be limited and often requires them to advance into the larger world of growing consciousness where they necessarily might need to reengage their own process, yet again, but with people who truly understand them and can support them to the fullest possible extent.

So, in retrospect, oppressed people may have, at least, these three responses to the awakening consciousness of privileged people coming into a more deep and full humanity: 1) anger, revulsion and disdain ("I don't give a damn what they feel. They're on their own."), 2) a passive witnessing or space-holding presence ("I hear you, but I don't want to get into with you. Now what movie are we going to see?"), 3) open, active support and engagement ("What can I do to help? Let's do this the right way."). All of these are possibilities, options and choices for oppressed people and any one person or group may go through this range of responses at or through any given time. It may be completely safe, wise and productive for people in conditions of social and economic privilege to assume that their path to a deepening humanity and more compassionate human relations will not include the direct help of oppressed and marginalized people.

Heterosexuals should be about the business of first finding other heterosexuals who are expanding their awarenesses. They should be willing to search farther and longer and wider for those educational resources, books, videos, documentaries, podcasts, speeches and lectures that will bring them new clarity in their search for new meaning and new sensitivity to others' and their own sexual orientation. They may not be invited into the LGBT inner sanctum, if you will, and if they are, they should be grateful and realize that their lives and the way they live them must necessarily change.

Men should be about the business of finding other men who are expanding their awarenesses and have some substantive facility with the real, grounded issues at hand with regard to sexism, feminism, patriarchy, chauvinism and misogyny. They must be willing to avail themselves of the great body of academic, anecdotal and historical work on these issues, giving way to the easy attachment to the gender status quo, an illusory safety that affords real power to no one since it subverts real power from so many. Men may not be invited into the inner sanctum of general or specific womyn-space, but they should be grateful, humble if they are and appreciate the opportunity to come into a deeper manifestation of their wholeness.

Europeans, caucasians, Whites must be about the business of finding others who are expanding their awarenesses around issues of race, culture, class and privilege. There are growing numbers of organizations dedicated to exploring the real, historical, political, spiritual and emotional dynamics of being and projecting whiteness in the world. There are numerous Europeans who are doing the necessary work to deepen their concepts of themselves and their identities in the interest of being equal players on the stage of human development. Privileged whites, Europeans must be willing to hear hard stories, difficult narratives and be willing to move with and through their own possible guilt and hurt in a new way, beyond disrespect and reinjury of the oppressed and/or people of color toward a new socio-political maturity that includes a necessary gutting and restructuring of particularly entrenched systems and practices that have previously afforded them great, but impermanent benefits and fortunes. History books must be rewritten, history not revised, but truth finally and powerfully told without the insecure, immature filters of the quasi-mindset of privilege and imbalanced concepts and systems of power. Europeans, Whites, caucasoids may not have doors freely flung open for them into the inner sanctum of the rich and varied cultures of those we call people of color, even if they are Harvard anthropologists with more Ph.D.s then common sense. But Europeans should be highly grateful when those doors are opened, no matter how narrowly or briefly, as it affords them a rare look into the greater totality of the human experience and allows them an opportunity to step more fully into their own humanity, previously seriously squelched and limited by the false sense of superiority and a thousand other pathologies that racism foments. These particular people of privilege must ready themselves for fundamental change they've never seen the likes of, actively, constantly formulating and manifesting with or without them like the fires mysteriously broken out in the kitchens of the plantations of chattel slavers. This change will require massive, difficult, but refreshingly liberating restructuring of social, political and economic systems and behaviors and relationships that have become horribly entrenched through centuries of human folly and particularized myopia.

People of privilege have a lot of hard work to do and deeply. The necessary nexus of most of that struggle may be in their own circles. It is after that time and work that currently separate circles of human culture can truly combine, conjoin and unify. Their expectations must change. Their behaviors must transform. Their willingness to accept and validate the experiences of those on the other side of their privileged barriers must develop into a deep, vital part of the total necessary process of the destruction of their patterns of privilege toward the creation of a new social paradigm of unity, harmony and true respect and freedom.

~~~~~~

Frances Cress Welsing and others on White Supremacy

The following 3 videos are of Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome:

(The above videos are parts 2, 3 and 4 of 19 videos. I skipped part 1 as it was mostly the introduction of Dr. Leary. Please consume all of these videos)

Chris Hedges: African-Americans and The Failure of The White Liberal Class:

"working very hard on a pretty little song of love"

2011-05-22T13:05:00.003-04:00

This line and these lyrics are from a song on Hugh Masekela's "Black to the Future" cd/release. Though the lyrics are beautiful and intention and clearly positive in nature, I am most engaged by that line, "working very hard". I feel that phrase very deeply as I attempt to look out of the confines of a limiting and myopic dominant cultural context through filters of confusion, illusion and delusion to a future now of enlightened human community engaged in its own process of spiritual, emotional and socio-politcal validation as empowered beings on an earth spoilt by a temporary, but fundamental break from sanity. I can relate to the writer's suggestion that these beautiful, necessary and essential projections are difficult, that there is hard work involved in the process, not only of the song, but the living out of that content and context of love and harmony

One might even suggest that these lyrics represent a "pie in the sky" attitude, an air of ungrounded liberalism and a negative connection to "idealism' (I love/hate how capitalist corporatocracy jerks its knee to the very idea of ideals!). If we are to look even a breath beyond the re-grounding of indigenous social and spiritual strength on the earth, the inevitable destruction of rampant patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism and machine-culture (and the inevitable failure of the "inevitability of 'the singularity'"), we would be able to see the harmony, peace and love that this song projects and that each of us has the ability to envision even from within some of our most limiting and limited perspectives. Even the seemingly insane assertions of the recent failed rapture predictions seem to be born of a deep desire to be in a state of harmony, peace and love with the god and saved-ones of their narrow-minded choosings.

How that played or plays out is not so important in this moment as this one phrase that speaks to me, speaks to us of sweat, of toil and frustration, even in the midst of the sonic and reverberant beauty of the song as moves through the air and into my water-based being. It is very telling that even this song is difficult, that coming up with one that the "whole wide world" could sing is a difficult proposition.

It's important to remember the context of the creation of this song. Hugh Masekela is the son of indigenous traditions in a nation, not so different from the United States of America in its intentions and historical similiitudes. Hugh Masekela gave and gives voice to a people grounded historically and spiritually and ancestrally in a place upon which a new and destructive paradigm was violently placed, subverting the sovereignty and cultural power of indigenous peoples in a tremendously wide swath of geographic space on a continent upon which this sort of tragedy was not unfamiliar. Hugh Masekela has given voice to a struggle in a place where even the indigenous name of Azania has become unfamiliar and foreign. So we can be clear, even though Hugh Masekela may not be a Zephania Motopeng or Mangaliso Sobukwe or Stephen Biko, that Masekela is aware of the grounded reality of the dire conditions into which his/our people have been thrust by the machinations of settler-colonialism and capitalism on a continent that Kwame Ture had always asserted would have developed beyond the cultural limitations of the capitalist context due to the near universal and deep cultural engagement of communalism and conscious interdependence.

That Masekela's lyrical songwriter is working "very hard" is understandable and behooves us to consider the hard road ahead as we look into a future in which we can joyfully and fatiguedly say good-bye to discrimination, prejudice, known well, all too well, in the Azanian context. When an Azanian says its hard to write a song of love that the whole wide world to sing - believe them. It also brings to the fore a need to respect that forward and positive vision of something beyond the destructive nature of the present ideological and structural regimes that dominate our unconscious and consciousness and clearly make it difficult to even see over those seemingly distant horizons.

There are trees that we are intimately in relationship with that obfuscate our enraptured view of the sacred forest of our human becoming. And that tree, the same tree that breathes out the very oxygen that we (need to) breathe in, is not in and of itself our enemy. It is our temporocentrism and geocentrism that prevents us from seeing beyond, through and in spite of the necessity to live amongst those ideas, beings and people that often seem to be our immediate, persistent and selfishly-defined vexations.

"I’m working very hard on a pretty little song of love
for everybody to sing
a song of love (for everybody)
for the whole wide world to sing
about love and happiness, peace and harmony...
for the children of tomorrow, the fishes in the sea
the birdies in the sky, for the creatures in the forest and the jungle...
good-bye discrimination...let the world be ruled by love and happiness
good-bye prejudice...good-bye"

It is no small thing that an Azanian is "working very hard" to create and sing that universal human song and it is informative that it is coming yet out of the struggle for liberation of an indigenous people.

And there was a universal song sung on the earth before this recent and temporary derailing of the indigenous world. There was a song sung in all of the forests, across all the plains, from each and every mountaintop, across each lake and river and ocean. There were constant, persistent and abiding songs of love and respect sung about the earthly and the spiritual reality of life and the concomitant challenges that that reality daily revealed. There was an indigenous human song that resounded clearly, mirroring the heart beat, the pulse of the Great Mother earth, having been borne of it, in it and in harmony and resonance with it. There is still a song of indigeny that lies within all of us. We are borne of it, in spite of the disrespect of it and with all wondrous and idealist hope and possibility that we can again be in harmony and resonance with it. There is yet a song of love, of peace and harmony that the whole wide world can sing precisely and simply because there was and remains a dwindling connection to a multiplicity of songs of love, peace and harmony that the whole world sang for the children of our Ancestors' tomorrows, for the fishes of the sea, the birds in the sky, the creatures of the forests and the jungles.

We ARE the children of our Ancestors' tomorrows.

When we (re)learn these, our songs of love and harmony once again, we will realize that our children will learn them quite quickly, so much so that we will come to the easy assumption that they already knew them somewhere in their bones, in their DNA. And as we sit with them, beaming with pride at the hope, power and wisdom in their voices, we will come to the understanding that the human Ancestral song in their bones, in their DNA, had to come through us. We will then truly know that we simply forgot to remember the songs still alive in our indigenous human soul, that we are carriers yet and still of those songs of harmony and peace and that they were, are and will remain songs of love.

May we receive sacred assistance from all directions to work very, very hard, again, on these songs, better still, the song of love that the whole wide world can sing.

(posted also as such at http://culturalmedialiteracy.blogspot.com and on facebook)

Code Name "Geronimo": USAmerican Insult to Indigenous Injury

2011-05-05T10:40:00.006-04:00

The recent killing of Usama (what happened to O-sama?!) bin Laden has raised many emotions and concerns around war, death, patriotism and faux-spirituality. As the media slowly reveal the many layers of cultural pathology, one particularly painful and troublesome issue came into the light of justifiable scrutiny. ABC news recently reported that the military operation that was launched to find and kill bin Laden was named after a prominent and important Native American, Geronimo, raising other, more grounded levels of critique, resistance and emotions around the continuing disrespect of Native American culture, history and tradition.

I took the opportunity to share this online report on my facebook page:

Some may think it a small thing, but it pisses me off, too. Why not codename McVeigh or Bernard Law or Washington, some real criminals?

From "The Note: Washington's Original and Most Influential Tipsheet"

Codename: 'Geronimo' for Osama Bin Laden Mission Angers Some Native Americans

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/05/codename-geornimo-for-osama-bin-laden-mission-angers-some-native-americans.html

"As the country rejoices over the killing of Osama Bin Laden, many Native Americans have different reactions: shock, dismay, hurt.

That’s because the Navy SEALs used “Geronimo” as the codename for mission to capture or kill Bin Laden.

“It’s another attempt to label Native Americans as terrorists,” said Paula Antoine from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota."

Educator and friend (facebook and otherwise) Melissa Kagle responded, "Indian country is pissed" and shared the following information:

"Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs, on Behalf of the Haudenosaunee: This is a sad commentary on the attitude of leaders of the U.S. military forces that continue to personify the original peoples of North America as enemies and savages. The use of the name Geronimo as a code name for Osama Bin Laden is reprehensible. Think of the outcry if they had used any other ethnic group’s hero. Geronimo bravely and heroically defended his homeland and his people, eventually surrendering and living out the rest of his days peacefully, if in captivity, passing away at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1909. To compare him to Osama Bin Laden is illogical and insulting. The name Geronimo is arguably the most recognized Native American name in the world, and this comparison only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about our peoples. The U.S. military leadership should have known better. It all brings to mind the August 13, 2010 statement by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg advising then Governor Paterson to “get yourself a cowboy hat and a shotgun” to deal with Indian affairs. This kind of thinking indicates little progress in a mature social development of United States leadership."

(http://blog.nativestrength.com/?p=4612 )

Please check the above link for more salient indigenous perspectives.

We have good reason to be pissed.

Energetic Rectification

2011-04-03T16:59:00.003-04:00

The concept of energetic rectification speaks to the necessity for humanity to not only reopen their intimate relationships with nature and spirit, but to reconcile past indiscretions with respect to that traditional relationship, making energetic amends to Spirit, to nature and the earth herself. This is required not only because it is the right thing to do, but in that it is also that which will heal our indigenous soul and rededicate us individually and communally to living as though we are a part of nature, not simply a dominating and parasitic animal in the beautiful, delicate web of life.

Throughout our modern exploitation of nature and the earth, we have taken, stolen much energy from nature, from Spirit, from our animal relations (consider the numerous decades of mechanized livestock farming). Energetic rectification is the process of returning that energy based on the concept of reciprocity to make good our relationship with All That Is. This is a scientific concept as much as it is spiritual, ethical and social (for one or more of us to engage in energetic rectification benefits the larger society as benefactors of the empowered energetic balance of nature upon which we all depend). Energetic rectification can be created through ritual, through offerings, prayer, song, dance and other forms of intentional engagement within the naturo-spiritual context. Much of the work that the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers do can be categorized as energetic rectification as they are spreading knowledge and techniques that help all of us rekindle right relationships with Spirit and/in nature.

http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org/

We must be willing to learn about people such as the 13 grandmothers ans so many other indigenous people, so many other people practicing indigenous traditions and technologies, what they do and how and why, what the effects of their intimate relationship with nature, informed intimacy, brings about so positively in the world and in their communities and hearts.

There are many stories alive in indigeny that educate, inspire and motivate us toward energetic rectification. This is one of them:

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2011/03/hopi-call-for-prayer-to-restore-balance.html

Singularity ≠ Unity

2011-03-21T12:39:00.017-04:00

So-called "artificial intelligence" has been around in the popular consciousness for some time now. Without a need for deep clarity, this and many concepts float about in the information glut that we call modern mass media, particularly with respect to the information super-sidewalk (so named by me more so for how we use it rather than what it is). "AI", like these other ideas and physical/social processes often represent corporate/industrial initiatives that become part of the social lexicon without proper social and communal critique to discern with deliberation if we actually want to move forward with them as a major cultural element.

Singularity is one of these up and coming ideas that many say is inevitable. It deserves greater social engagement particularly with respect to indigeny and energetics as it challenges and devalues the bases of indigenous (and all other) relationships to the world and the cycles of energy that have kept humans alive and whole for eons. Modernity has revealed itself as an ideological and systemic challenge to indigeny in its insistence on supporting concepts of "better life through chemistry" as seen in post-"world war" II industrial society and machine-based processes and processing as being 'essential' to human life, inevitable and preferable to almost all previous ideas and processes. Consider the functionally symbolic metaphor of "artificial imitation processed cheese food" being called "American" cheese. In addition, ideas like singularity have the full support of the capitalist corporatocracy and the imperialist ideas and structures that keep it alive. Numerous indigenous perspectives have shown these larger ideas and structures along with the machine culture and the chemocracy to be ultimately flawed, fallacious and failing concepts with respect to humanity, nature, the earth and to grounded spiritual development.

In my cultural media literacy work, I have often "joked" about the possibility of whether my students will have to choose between having a USB or firewire port being installed into their newborn babies. I have done this to provoke thought and discussion and a deeper awareness of technological trends and the easy social acquiescence that seems to come along with these technological systems. We have a much more intimate relationship with our digital technologies, computers, internet-capable phones and game consoles than we have ever had and seem absolutely pie-eyed no matter what new gadget, communicative tool or digital panacea comes down the pipe.

During one of these conversations with my students, one of them informed us about a concept called singularity that he explained to be a technological ideology of that inevitable and even more fatally intimate relationship with human performance enhancing hardware and software physically incorporated into the bodies of humans. In a way, my hopefully provocative sarcasm in class was a low tech suggestion as people like Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Warwick assert that not only is it possible, but desired to place micro-chips and other computer-based, nano-technological, digital hardware into the brain and body, along with the assumed benefit of bionic prosthetics that would be even more accepted than cosmetic plastic surgery is now.

The presence and projection of singularity is disconcerting for a list of reasons that cut to the core of the rationale for engaging indigeny and energetics as a real and integral, dominant part of the human experience on earth. As a particularly clinical and corporatist endeavor, computer/digital technologies in their creation and use embody a system of thought that allows for manufacturing (I dare not say "creation") and marketing for the sake of manufacturing and marketing. This expression of modernity has an unclear air of technology, the machine, human hubris over nature in a way that has led to the domination, or better yet abuse of nature much to our own detriment. Even though the proponents of singularity project this inevitable trend deep into the future, it is an inherently short-sighted idea that assumes a built-in pathological inadequacy to the human being with no discernible discussion of spiritual concepts or ramifications.

Kevin Warwick, as interviewed by Socrates on September 26, 2010 for his singularityblog.com website states the following:

“...I do see humans as being very, very limited in what we can do and the sooner we get into post-humanity and cyborgs and so on, the better, really...well I don’t know that I do want to save humanity (interviewer laughs). The sooner we get done with humanity and move on to something that’s a little bit better, so be it. And to me, the singularity is about moving on from humanity...getting humans living through the singularity as cyborgs...we come out of it as something a lot better, when we say bye-bye to humans unless there’s a few of them around that still want to live on islands and something and don’t cause any problems.”

http://singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com/kevin-warwick-on-singularity-podcast-you-have-to-take-risks-to-be-part-of-the-future/

It would seem immediately that Warwick has no sense...then clearly no sense of the energetic nature of the naturo-spiritual(-human) dynamic. The limitations he sees in humanity as a whole (if he even indeed sees humanity in a wholistic way!) are astounding even simply in the above quote...that tragic quote. What Warwick says is tragic for two key reasons. First, Mr. Warwick clearly has led such a narrowed, uninspired and disconnected life that he seems to have no faith in human nature, no faith in the resilience of humanity and no understanding of the depth of the naturo-spiritual dynamic within which humans, much like him, have been nestled warmly for millions of years (temporocentrism is a terminal ailment for Warwick). Second, it is also clear that Warwick is not a student of history (which can give rise to temporocentrism), at least not of the Zinn, Clarke or Deloria variety, and he has not learned any of the amazing stories that truly define the human indigenous experience.
[author's note: I clearly do not know Kevin Warwick personally and have never met him. I sincerely hope that he has never experienced the kind of personal or social/ancestral trauma that could cause him to feel so little hope for humanity, so little compassion for others and himself as to say what he has said above.]

What Warwick is suggesting, along with so many others supportive of the narrow-minded idea of singularity, is that the only way humanity can advance, that the only way we can experience progressive redemption is through an even more intimate relationship with computer-based, digital technologies. Keep in mind, Warwick and many others are suggesting that we we literally become the machine, so much so that we have them floating around in our bloodstream, our brain or that we have parts of us, million-dollar-mannishly, that are computer-based mechanical prosthetic technologies. While it is clear that these technologies are helpful to many of us who have terminal or chronic, serious diseases, physical conditions and disorders, it is not clear that these technologies are necessary to remediate the "problem of humanity". There is no basic and terminal, fatal flaw inherent in the human being nor the human becoming. No matter how deeply the christian ethic of original sin has become secularized in modern, industrial society, humans are no more flawed than the programmers and technicians who would be creating the hardware and software foundation of this singularitists', uber-geek fantasy. That said, what "flaws" do exist in humanity cannot be coded out of the process of manufacturing this virtually redemptive mistake.

It must be remembered that the idea of singularity comes out of the same capitalist, machine chemo-culture that created the pharmaceutical cartel that rushes poisons to market and refuses to test for the mixtures of its chemically explosive devices (read their warning descriptions recently?) and sits quietly by while reports come in attesting to the presence of said pharmaceuticals in the drinking water and reservoirs across Turtle Island - simply from the urinary tracts of the drugged. It comes out of the same non-indigenous socio-economic system that gave rise to a natural resource extraction and exploitation debacle that has brought humanity and many other species to the brink of extinction (if not over that boundary) and seriously thrown off the balance of many of the global and regional natural processes that keeps everything alive. It also comes out of the same system that gave rise to the computer glitch.

Said on the WBUR FM 90.9 webpage for their interview with Ray Kurzweil:

"Tiny computers in our brains, artificial intelligence, maybe even eternal life. It’s not science fiction, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil, it’s the future."

“They’ll go into our brains through the capillaries, interact with our biological neurons, put our brains on the Internet, give us vastly greater memory and problem-solving capability, keep us healthy from inside, augment our immune system,” Kurzweil said."

http://radioboston.wbur.org/2011/03/21/ray-kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is undoubtedly a technical genius, but his futuristic machinations leave a lot to be desired. His projections, though completely plausible on a materialistic level, are totally devoid of an embrace of the sacred, of an embrace of divinity in humanity and in nature. I wouldn't be surprised if he shared some of the basic philosophical tenets of judeo-christianity, but whether he does or not seems inconsequential in his quest to change the nature of the human energetic enough to filter its innate ability to sense and heal its own internal and external world through the sieve of nano-technology and microchips. It seems that Kurzweil has no inkling of the enormous capacity the human being has for self-regulation and self-healing (and communal healing!) when you simply take away the constant injurious nature of the modern socio-politico-pathological world. It seems Kurzweil does not know that the cancers and sicknesses and diseases that are plaguing even us entitled and privileged USAmerican patriots are created and, at least, exacerbated by the stresses and environmental disruptions and degradation of the last one to two hundred years of anti-life. The very social system that created these diseases also created the technologies and ideologies of the singularities. If Ray Kurzweil was possibly more interested truly in the redemption of humanity than his own notoriety, he might be more willing to support technological restraint along with a deepening spiritual and environmental engagement that would hasten and catalyze the creation of a liberating OLD world order, one that acknowledges the deep human connection to nature, the analog world, the world-wide-web of life incarnate as earth, water, blood and bone, branch and butterfly. It seems he would rather send alight a mechanical version of the variegated fritillary, complete with servo-controlled flight systems, than to be a humble part of sustaining a world in which butterflies, frogs, fish and osprey find vibrant support from the teeming abundance of a world ecosystem allowed to humbly balance itself without the deadly effects of excesses in mining, extraction, exploitation, contamination and infection that a computer-based modernity seems so completely empowered and emboldened to set in motion.

Singularity, as a social disease, can not be divorced from the capitalist concept of unlimited growth, yet another narrow-minded mistaken identification of the human as overlord of a simplistic, reductionist's nature. The modern misconception of a desacralized, violable judeo-christianized natural world is anathema to our indigenous lifeways, indigenous technologies that allowed for an abiding functional and practical respect for nature and other human beings so that all the interconnected systems of life could flow and grow freely, even with the high-tech levels of management that have recently come to life with regard to traditional Native American environmental stewardship (as referenced in Mann's "1491" and Outwater's "Water: A Natural History"). To date, I have heard nothing of Kurzweil's or Warwick's interest in any of these technologies, even though those indigenous agricultural/social/spiritual technologies have a much longer, better record of sustainability and for harmonious inter-relationship and integration with the humans that developed them. The resource exploitation and e-waste on the front and back end, respectively, of the medium-tech computer/virtual information industry should be evidence enough that singularity might not even have its one wobbly leg to stand on in proving to an awakening (or is it ensleepening into a virtual dream-world a la droid cinema and follywood movies streamed on wide-screen televisions?) techno-matrix-populace. Yes, the singularity is the blue pill.

And singularity is not unity. It is highly questionable whether the proliferation of cellular wireless "smart" phones, the internet and social networking websites has really helped humanity get beyond some of its deepest problems of alienation, disconnection and disharmony. Though we can access emails, images, videos, news, international and global events in split seconds, "connected" (now the modern mantra) to our loved ones, friends and family through persistent text messages, chats, tweets and rolling stati, more fundamental social and personal issues are just as persistent. Our reactionary fears of truly engaging the healing and sustenance of community, inabilities to invest fully and emotionally in friendly and romantic relationships and a deepening fracture between children, teenagers, adults and elders, more crippling and traumatic than the neat images of market niches would convey. Singularity is a terminal distraction away from that which holds the key to human social unity and spiritual harmony with sacred nature.

Jerry Mander, in "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television", asserts that it is the modern tendency to create artificial environments, ranging from office buildings to supermarkets to digital virtual realities, that is the danger of our losing our ways of knowing, our ways of organically sensing the world that not only has created us and our culture but, has been our teacher, our harmonious cosmological travel partner, our primary, if not only, home.

Mander says the following:

"Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us." (pg.68)

Mander challenges us to recognize our natural environment as our primary locus of cognition, the primacy of the corporeal and esoteric world around us and within us as being a sort of epistemological ecosystem that is dependent upon all of its elements working in conjunction and in its natural balance, not filtered through the auspices of a mediated digital matrix. We are even behooved to consider singularity as an attempt to actually make us the medium itself. If we are to have computer-based nano-technologies inside of us or otherwise permanently conjoined to our physiology, we in essence and in function become a veritable medium of digital communication. We would cease to be humans (if Warwick had his way) and would become the media themselves, fused into the datastream (of course, a matter-of-fact factor of singularity) of bits and bytes, controlled by the whims of the servers' impulses and the programmers' caprice. The control/power deferential issues would be astronomical.

Neil Postman's "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology" offers powerful insight to put the limiting concept of singularity into its correct perspective. Postman likens technopoly to to yet another controlling structure that allows for our continued persuasion and manipulation to the changing ideological requirements of an already oppressive socio-economic reality...or better, surreality. Postman supports Mander's projections of this kind of technological with relationship to the naturo-spiritual (-human) dynamic saying that:

"It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it "thinks" better than we can." (pg.111)

Postman, though probably not particularly talking about singularity in 1992, asks us soundly, along with Mander, to question the issue of singularity's inevitability and to revisit our commitment to being more fully human rather than more partially bionic.

This challenge to singularity, the questioning of its utility and projected function is clearly required. The self-serving nature of the technopoly and it's corporatocratic parents must be put, at least ideologically, in check so that we don't end up passively adopting a truly and ultimately invasive systemic being into our collective and individual human body. What singularitists say is unquestionable, for one, merely because it exists can not be accepted blindly and out of hand because skilled marketers and techno-pundits are able to put an effective spin on it for the gluttonous consumption by a melancholic public.

David T. Kyle, in his important book, "Human Robots and Holy Mechanics: Reclaiming Our Souls In a Machine World", outlines the path for a successful battle with the machine culture that is the progeny of the last 50o years of human (under)development. He, refreshingly, points us toward the defeat of the machine's dominance over our human and external environmental nature. He plants our feet firmly on historical ground as he states the following:

"If the Machine's culture is truly beginning to break down, perhaps our evolutionary step is really a returning to the archaic, to that which is call the primitive within us. Returning to this primitive (or original) part of ourselves would be a step into a knowledge and experience that has been hidden deep within us, a spiritual energy that has been waiting to be released at this time." (pg.166)

Kurzweil and Warwick clearly have no interest in this "original" human experience, other than codifying it in binary so that we can play it back as a saleable, controllable data stream. Their arrogance would soundly put our connection to that essential human legacy in serious jeopardy, compromising if, most likely, forever (IF they have their way).

Kyle goes on to broaden his perspective, relating the advance of Postman's technopoly as a serious breach of human development to its indigenous roots, its indigenous soul and the key nature of that root's role in the continued positive growth of human culture. Kyle states the following:

"The indigenous peoples of the planet may be the guardians, the holders and the releasers of this inward flow of connection to the consciousness of the species. To destroy the indigenous people with the Machine's all-consuming complexity would be to destroy the access to the potential knowledge that could awaken our awareness for radical change in behavior." (pg.166)

Though I might suggest that singularity would represent more of an oversimplification than a complexity, its effects would cut to the core of what it means to be truly human, to be truly
connected to the world-wide-web of life and, indeed, to our own particularly human ways of knowing, of feeling, of sensing the amazing, physical and spiritual world inside and around us. In deed, it would be a major disruption to the unity that indigenous and many non-indigenous people wish to sustain and advance with each other and with the sacred world in which we live and because of which we live. It is that unity and unity consciousness that is a major context for the healing that can and should take place within human culture. Our current, modern failings are showing us that we can not live with out it. And singularity is not unity.

~~~~~~

Mander, Jerry, "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television", Quill, New York, NY 1978

Postman, Neil, "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology", Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1993

Kyle, David T., "Human Robots and Holy Mechanics: Reclaiming Our Souls In a Machine World", Swan Raven & Company, Portland, OR, 1993

Thoughts on the Tsunami of Modern Technology and Myopia

2011-03-15T14:45:00.005-04:00

An interchange inspired by the On Point/NPR broadcast on the nuclear plant challenges being dealt with by the Japanese people after the recent earthquakes and tsunami:

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/03/15/us-nuclear-industry

“ANY technology, for energy or any other purpose, that leaves as residue TOXIC WASTE, is inherently flawed, no matter what the $aving$ are. Your experts handily dodged the deeper question posed to THEM about their way of spinning this human tragedy....a tragedy lived out by the mere presence of so many working nuclear plants right now. This issue goes beyond energy, beyond electricity and balance sheets. Because we can pretty up the picture doesn't mean that there is not a deep tear in the underlying canvas. Nuclear power is a horrible mistake in principle and a sad statement of modern myopic arrogance in practice.”

Cory (in reply to Ukumbwa)
“Fine, what is your solution? Do you propose a candle lit agrarian society?”

“Cory, unluckily, your questions point to that myopia I speak of. Most people who espouse the modern mistake have no real clue as to what the options are. You seem to want to define humanity by its tools and that is a modern mistake. We have much to learn from the longer history of indigeny on this earth as opposed to the short time that modernity has been making it's grand mistakes. And if this is about ME having a solution, then we are wrong again, though I may be able to voice the generalities of human genius. That human genius does not belong to me. Our modern problem is one of simple math. These technological and social choices do not add up. And to get to your "point", if we actually were adult enough to do the math and live as though we were actually world citizens in a delicately balanced universal eco-system, as all indigenous cultures have recognized, we might just find that living in candle-lit agrarian societies IS the way to avoid the serious and deep disease and stress states that modernity has so "proudly" created and, at least, that we may have to seriously rethink and retool and pull away from many of the functionally flawed technologies that the academic/scientific/corporatist complex has created and championed. What if candle lit agrarian societies actually WERE the best way to live on the earth in a sustainable and peaceful fashion? Would you have the maturity to let go of your modern technologies to live in a way that would suggest respect and love for future generations....say, seven generations or so?

Your question is actually, though, such a limiting and desperate reach for the "blue pill". It feels comfortable to be able to lie back in the ideological "asendency" of modern thought and pseudo-convenience. The lives of privilege we lead are the result of lives and eco-systems oppressed in other areas...we live at the behest of enviro-benefit displacement. There is a core inside of us that know that this can not continue any longer, no matter what people with nice titles and letters after their name say (and I have a few of those letters myself). We have yet to sit down and come to terms with the real effects of our actions in this world...as a modern social group. And when (or if?) we do, we may just find out that a radically different way of being is required if we aspire to be able to look our children in the eyes and be able to tell them that we've done our best, that the world we're handing over to them is a safe world. We can't do that right now and you know that. We all know that.

If we continue on this path, our children will curse us as they consider looking into the eyes of their own children. We are making deep mistakes. There are traditional ways of being on this earth that are tested by time and the sanity and groundedness of the creators of those traditions. Those ways are manifold. Though there may yet be some usable ways of being and creating and relating that come out of the modern experiment, history shows us that those indigenous traditions are the most reliable. We must learn to adapt them to our current realities in these challenging times.

And if that means candles, then we better figure out why all the bee populations are decreasing so drastically.”

We can only hope that the multi-level tragedy in Japan comes to a healing and consciousness-raising resolution that is a lesson for all of us. May the dead find solace in our continued work to increase the quality of life on all levels for all people, so that none of them may have died in vain.

Review of "Masai: The Rain Warriors" - as submitted to alibris.com

2010-12-08T21:10:00.006-05:00

""Masai: The Rain Warriors" is a beautifully, sensitively shot and rendered film that seems to have its feet firmly and fluidly grounded in the warm red earth of Kenya. All too often, when a film produced in Europe or North America about Africa or indigenous people reveals itself on screen, it exposes so much of the patronizing nature of the dominant political and cultural colonial discourse, telling more a story about the teller than the subject. The lens of "Masai" at once becomes the viewpoint of the Masai themselves, showing their challenging and tender, intimate indigenous life in the context of being the subject of deep consideration and not the object of brash, patronizing scrutiny for the sake of assuaging neo-colonial guilt (e.g., "Dances with Wolves") or for mere financial gain (e.g., "Avatar").

This look into the life of the Masai is refreshing, empowering and informative, enabling the viewer to genuinely feel as if they have "been there" for a time and had a common experience, if only through a cinematic window. There is much of the indigenous experience of life that is illuminated AND validated here, not held up for narrative and audience ridicule in conflicting cultural statements (done very well in "Avatar").

The story is simple, compelling, ultimately human and spiritually-inspired. The journey of the young warriors at the behest of their wise elders is a powerful connection to the legacy of respect for those who have earned life's tenure on this earth. It is immediately heart-warming to see youth not only carry their traditional culture with genuine and functional passion, but to also acknowledge deeply their elders AND their youngers, seen so beautifully in a ritual scene before they head out into the savannah to hunt down Vitchua, the uber-lion that embodies their supreme god. The path of these warriors is marked well by a masculine sensitivity unconventional only to modern colonial (this includes the USAmerica!) and colonized mindsets.

In addition to this newly empowering, though antique, way of being and becoming men, the positive story of womanhood and femininity is also embedded in the dreamy awakening of one of the lead warriors' into the troupe's desert salvation. The confirmation of the wise woman healer and her importance to the life of not only the village, but our world, enlivening the divine feminine in real-time, is very entrenched in this film.

"Masai" is an important cultural statement. Though we are still in need of validating and distributing widely the stories of indigeny by indigenous people in a modern world that does not yet remember itself and see itself as the progeny OF indigeny, "Masai" is a tactile and real expression of a part of the indigenous experience that is not only enlightening, but entertaining and emotionally moving. This is a good story told well about a subject often not represented with compassion and clarity.

Expect to have a cinematic experience that deepens understanding of the human experience. We need more of that."

Energetics: A Fiery Perspective

2010-10-14T11:45:00.016-04:00

In "The Healing Wisdom of Africa", Malidoma Some' writes the following:

"When a culture is caught on fire,...they rush ceaselessly forward with a consumer's mentality, they pollute everything in their way, conquering and destroying anything that interferes. Fire culture promotes consumerism and cultivates scarcity in order to increase restlessness, then uses the restless, burning psyche as energy water to increase production and consumption. Meanwhile the culture on fire is fascinated with violence. As a matter of fact, violence proves to be highly marketable and stimulates the fiery nature of the culture as a whole. Consequently, a fire culture is a war culture. It sees solutions in terms of fire and conflicts as fire that can be resolved with more fire. Such a culture will require a lot if water to heal." (pg.171)

Some''s perspective is important, salient and functional as it shows the genius of the indigenous mind/heart-set in understanding the emergent nature of social conflict and the path forward to true resolution of some of the deepest problems presented to us by modernity, that which has deemed itself more important than all of that that has come before it, which, again, for the record amounts to a quantitative deficit of about three million years. The qualitative deficit is of a more voluminous nature.

Fire carries within its physical, physiological and meta-physical make-up an energy that has a particular imprint on the environments, material and ideological content and systems that come into contact with it. Modern science actually does a good job in quantifying some of the effects of fire, heat and other manifestations of molecular excitation. Where modern science and, thus, modern culture falls short is in the validation and engagement of the deeper understandings of the effects of fire in our bodies, our spirits, the World of Spirit (which science is just beginning to sheepishly acknowledge, mostly due to the residue of it showing up on their machines and meters) and our productive and social systems. The above quote points us powerfully to a more expansive understanding of the role of energetics in sensing pathology, hopes for healing and resolution and providing a context for a deeper spiritual understanding of our presence and processes in the world.

Energetics, the sum total of knowledge and embodied practice of spiritual work in the indigenous context, is well defined by the Dagara perspective as shared by Some'. The nature of fire is clear in the increased freneticism that capitalism and it's number one son, consumerism, creates. One can see this in the rapid pace in which capitalist production creates and manufactures new and often unnecessary items for the sake of itself, for the sustenance of its own life, just as a fire will quickly heat anything close to it and will find ways of turning it into new fuel, bursting it into flames within minutes. If we are victims of this fire out of balance, and the Dagara perspective would say just that, then it stands to reason that the rapid pace of urbanization would be a concomitant result of capitalism as it wants us, its willing kindling, to be as close to each to each other as necessary, so that the heat growing in one of us can effect the energetic nature of others around them. Another element to consider in this urbanization is the increased occurrence and acceptance of violence. Not that urban centers are the only bastions of violence, for lynching of Africans in America happened in the blessed bosom of nature's rural surroundings and the physical debasement and destruction of women has tragically known no societal barriers, but we can see, if we choose, how urbanization fits neatly into the incendiary plan of capitalism.

One need look only to the increasing occurrence of new software, digital technologies and pharmaceuticals into the limited social consciousness. All three of these industries suffer from sometimes fatal and oftentimes debilitating outcomes born out of the lack of proper testing, consideration of side effects, research and even quiet consideration and observation that would come from a more watery energetic perspective that Some' suggest is the hope for healing in this larger sense. Most members of modern society would clearly agree that these technologies and products are rushed to market without proper and sensible consideration, but an understanding of the energetic nature of fire would help us see why we feel to busy, too rushed, too driven to engage the fleeting remediations of spark-fast instant gratification that keep us from engaging the cooler prospects of a slower, larger, broader, intelligent understanding of ourselves and the forces that effect us so deeply and fatally.

We might look to the humbly short, but provocative animated documentary, "The Story of Stuff", to help to ground our connection to the reality of Some''s offering here. This challengingly simple expose of the process of natural resource extraction, manufacturing/processing, commercialism and disposal makes surprisingly accessible the view of capitalism's blind and insatiable burning consumption of all that it can get into its factories and big-box stores. On that note of consumption, consider that even capitalism is agrandizing the process of consumption of small stores, banks, media systems and markets by larger, hotter, more mean and mean configurations of capitalist power and uber-masculinized prowess, much like the nature of any fire, looking for any opportunity to find and be fed by more heat, more fuel, more powerless kindling (and what is kindling, but the small disembodied pieces of wood cut off from the tree of life) that can be subsumed into the combustive fracas and made into an inferno with no hope of release into the cool waters of peaceful sanity. We could also go to sources such as Nkrumah, Rodney, Nyerere, Shakur, Chomsky, Perkins, Zinn and many, many others for this, but we needn't unchain those coyotes here. Annie Leonard's discourse is deep enough to get us to the next level of the game.

Mythology and pop culture "news" is full of fire metaphors with respect to war. One would have to fully understand the energetic of fire to see how difficult it truly is to turn around the war machine (probably a combustion engine...no thank you, Daimler), what energies are necessary to abrogate and remediate it and also what would a world without dependence upon war and fire look and feel like. An energetically informed perspective is necessary to fully assess the energies at play, to find their sources and to effect change in a serious and fundamental way. If we don't understand fire and its energetic nature, we don't understand ourselves.

Though we can gain much from a look at the Dagara perspective, we must see also that many other cultures contribute to our understanding of the energetics of fire. We can find much insight from the cultures of the Quichua in Ecuador with their embrace of the sacred volcanoes, many if not all of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (north America), the indigenous people of Hawaii, China, India. Where there is a fire god, goddess or spirit revered, there is also fire energetically understood with a deep, embodied understanding I define as "informed intimacy". Modern thought would still suggest that indigenous people, "primitive" people engage nature and especially fire out of some sort of ignorant-childish, primal fear, but anyone on the receiving side of that sort of brazen, ignorant disrespect would clearly say they've been...well...burnt.

Energetics recognizes the spiritual power that defines and animates all things, abstract or concrete, corporeal or esoteric. Energetics expresses and seeks to give context to the power and importance of the indigenous perspective on the spiritual, inspired nature of the universe and that it, in and of and because of itself, is a key and indivisible part of the indigenous conception of life, nature and All That Is. Energetics is inseparable from indigeny. Indigeny is inseparable from the human experience. Indigeny is inseparable from the future of humanity on this earth.

Indigeny and Energetics: The Why of It...

2010-09-24T12:53:00.015-04:00

There are (at least) two important and related reasons why Indigeny and Energetics is important to me and hopefully, as an idea and more than an idea, to others. It is simple in its intellectual abstraction and quite complex in the projection of its present and future manifestations to engage the old, tested, tried and true concepts that surround and ground indigeny and spiritual underpinnings that have kept it in its state of balanced power for the millions of years that it has been developing, growing and defining itself. At the moment, these two dynamics present themselves as a key binary or juxtaposition that helps us to understand the necessity of embracing the fundamental indigenous nature of humanity and how the break from that relationship to land, nature and Spirit, the dissolution of the "naturo-spiritual (human) dynamic", has affected us as a global human body and a universal Spirit embodied.

1) Indigenous cultural life and spiritual traditions have been interrupted, distorted, distracted, destroyed, dismembered and derailed by the colonial, mercantilist/capitalist, patriarchical, secularizing process of modernization set in motion by Europeans and others in the last more than five hundred years. Even current news and other reports about indigenous people show clearly that issues of biopiracy, environmental abuse and land misappropriation, of intercultural violence and oppression, capitalist pathologies, of racism, sexism, homophobia and classism are indeed, still, weighing heavily upon the compromised resources of indigeny all over the world.

Whether it is the attacks upon Ngobe life and culture by the mining companies, the brutality of the neo-colonial police against the Samburu, the continued dissolution of Dagara culture by French-led imperialistic modernity or the sustained and criminal holding of land, resources and intellectual property of the Native American peoples from Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Bay, the insidious nature of modern, scientized, capitalist anti-life wreaks havoc on a body of culture, a humano-spiritual legacy that is the life-blood of our existence. This life-blood pumps powerfully driven even in the presence of the medium-techism of computers, artificial intelligence (boy, that title should tell you something about its efficacy!), virtual reality (and isn't THAT a hint and a half?!), android phones, iPads, ebooks, genetic engineering and other forms of materialist, scientific god-ism. This life-blood is pumping, though, with great difficulty, through neo-pseudo-cultural veins impacted with narrow discourse, confusion, distraction, media-deification and the onslaught of secular cultural practices that devalue life, devalue and desacrate nature and humanity all at once - as all is related, all are related.

It would be one thing to be able to confidently go along with the modern, liberal, christo-secular assertion that modernity is a natural(ized) development out of the primitivism of inferior indigenous realities. How many times have we had to listen to the cruel joke anthropological insult that indigenous people are simple, child-like (as if that is actually a negative thing to be?!) and without "industry" and proper modern accumulative motivations? After all, when the European invaders were showing up on the shores of Amerique, many saw 'nothing' being done with the land, that it was empty of mercantilist conjurings and machinations, that it was devoid of the death-kiss of their currency-god.

It is another thing to recognize that modernity is being pulled into the intellectual and spiritual vacuum of its own creation, drawn back to the rainforests of South America to beg cures for modern-made diseases of excess and sinful imbalance that run rampant despite the stated power of the information super-sidewalk. So many modern people are turning toward indigenous spiritual traditions for healing, for socio-spiritual change, to balance the madness and sometimes to make themselves look good in front of their friends or to soothe their own subconscious selves for the sins of their forefathers and foremothers. So much of the work around global cooling is dependent upon recognizing that the indigenous people had it right before "we" made it wrong. Even though we generally aren't admitting it, sustainability is an indigenous concept at its core, in its essence and modern myopia and obnoxious intellectualism prevents us from acknowledging that FACT and, thus, truly enabling ourselves to manifest the concept in a grounded and conscious, informed and humble way. Modernity is turning to indigeny for its own salvation, but at this moment, is doing so, in many ways, as a slaveholder would turn to its captives to help it put out the fire in the master's house. And there are many people engaging Native American and other indigenous traditions for the absolute right reasons, in the best of ways. For this, we can be truly grateful to Spirit and the Ancestors for leading back onto the path Home.

2)The power-in-balance legacy of indigeny is a continuous timeless river of incontrovertible life-giving water. Indigeny is still here. Indigeny is not going away. Indigeny is not just a good idea, but the best way for us to be and become. Modern narratives revel in the last of things like "Mohicans" and "Dogmen", as if the positive valuation of those last, disempowered, but glamorized, romanticized relics were the primitivized reincarnations of the god of individualism that is the lyrical hook in the chorus of the swan song of it anti-creation narrative. Modernity and all of the containers and contained that it has spawned is the historical anomaly, even in the face of the beautiful artifice it has kept up (you've seen "Matrix", right?) and the intellectual bullying that keeps us saying 'yes' to its constant insanity. Modernity is the alternative to the conventions of indigeny and energetics. It is, again, simple and correct to say that, popularly, indigeny is 3 million years in the research, development and implementation process, that it is a system that not only DID work, but DOES work, hence the harried and humbling searches for the "new" (and improved?) in the old, for the "hot" in the cool river of timeless circularity that indigeny represents and is. Indigeny was not only a good idea, but it was and is good practice. It is that philosophical and practical way of being defined by a full-frontal, deep-immersion engagement of the balance of All That Is, of all the things that we have been trying to capture on hard drives, in coded computerese, in his-story books and our modernized minds in the interest of regaining, again, that balance that was there before modernity set it on its historicized, temporal ear in the first place.

Indigeny in general, as I've always said about Africa in particular, would have been fine without the criminal incursion of the "new idea", the "improved" and christianized concept of the European business model, which USAmerican corporatocracy is just a more organized synthesis of. Indigeny didn't need to be destroyed or deterred to be proven "right". It did not need the burden of such proof...and did not deserve the pain and horror of such proof, still being played out in the villages and towns of developing and developed (can we really call them that?....seriously?!?) machi-nations. What indigeny represents is much bigger than the substance of modernity and capitalist patriarchy. The image of modernity seems much bigger and it must be understood in that perspective. What we are seeing is sleight of man, the artificially intelligent virtual fooling of the senses through quantitative overload and overstimulation (see what Mander has to say in "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) which actually shuts us down, numbs us and is exactly what is sending us running roughshod into the eco-tourized rainforests and sweat lodges and African villages (or worse, into the glamorized African "safari" because Africa is just a hell-hole of humanity with some really great animals to look at...do you see how functional this modern mind and eye-set is?) for our dear and waning lives.

Indigeny and energetics would still be alive and well today if modernity had never been thought up and thrust upon the world, upon the loving Earth Mother, like the hyper-masculine phallo-weapon that it is. And not just because of this gendered energetic imbalance, we are called to re-engage, re-value, re-validate, re-empower the feminine in all things, in men, in women, in those that entered humanity on multiple sacred points on the gender continuum, the gatekeepers. We must bring indigeny back to its original and then a new vitality. It will never be the same, but it must ever be. To allow it to be destroyed is to allow ourselves to be destroyed. We must allow the life-blood of humanity to flow powerfully again.

And what is one of the greatest causes of death in the modern world, other than the metastasization of unexpressed grief? Heart disease.

If indigeny dies, humanity will die. Energetics, the sum total of all of the spiritual praxis of indigeny, is the heart of indigeny.

Indigeny must live. At the very, very least, modernity must get out of the way.

Asatru URLs

2010-07-29T22:35:00.004-04:00

I am providing a few links to Asatru sites to further the discussion and information around European indigenous traditions and current spiritual and social manifestations. I was honored to hear a presentation by an Asatru adherent at Franklin Pierce University. I will be writing about that presentation and Asatru soon. Thanks!

http://www.asatru.org/
http://www.runestone.org/
http://www.erichshall.com/asanew/newtotru.htm

Spiral Dynamics at First Glance: The Twisted Linear from the Circular Perspective of Indigeny

2010-06-01T17:00:00.002-04:00

My first awareness of spiral dynamics came out of conversations with two respected colleagues/friends who are both on powerful spiritual and social paths of growth and work. Initially, there were perceptions that spiral dynamics was a helpful tool to navigate at least some of the challenges that our modern world faced us with. As the core of this work became exposed, there were certain ideas explicit and implicit in these conversations that were troubling with respect to indigeny and energetics. Interestingly enough, both colleagues stated a disdain for how indigeny rebuffed modern technology and scientific advancement, fallacious in one instance and apologetic and short-sighted in another, suggesting that modernity is without fundamental flaws and that acceptance of such and its outcomes must be assumed. Upon closer observation of the writings of the creators of spiral dynamics, it became quite clear that there were many more short-comings than grounded progressive ideas. The main SD website (http://www.spiraldynamics.org/aboutsd_overview.htm) does state that “this is not a hierarchy of wisdom or decency or even intelligences, much less happiness and worth”, suggesting a universal nature of it’s way of seeing the world through “ways of thinking about human nature”, already defining universality by a narrowing filter of intellectual cognition born out of the modern euro-center. Indigeny incorporates, truly wholistically, the core human facets of intellect, spirit and emotion as indivisible, though understandable as separate entities. Indigeny does not base its growth on disintegrating one from the other. Energetics requires that they be unified. Spiral dynamics, according to the website, states that, “it reflects a variety of worldviews and conceptions of what life is about, but it doesn’t suggest any one as the ideal”. It seems to elude the writers that this actually does represent a particularity of European, modernized ideology that thinking in and of itself is primary for human development, with all due respect to the important writings and work of John Trudell (Trudell focuses much on the practice of clear, independent thinking, but most always assumes its presence in the larger wholistic indigenous context of human experience). The focus on the cognitive and psychological is in itself a limiting and damaging factor, particularly when connected to their application of the cultural/personal developmental levels or memes in a vertically defined spiral. Spiral dynamics is a twisted linear system of thought-bias, literally and figuratively and presents particular problems when looked at through the perspective of indigeny and energetics.

Spiral dynamics presents itself as being largely ethno(euro)-centric in nature as it speaks presumptively about the value of cognition (as opposed to emotional and spiritual value) and the importance of the psychological understanding of human thought and behavior. SD seems overly dependent on the eurocentrically defined modernistic concept of thought and the brain as the highest form of human development.

In addition, there are impressions of SD as short-sighted, narrow-minded and degrading to the indigenous genius that had driven the human relationship to the world for most all of human history and its highest levels of communal and ethical thought and practice. At another level, spiral dynamics presents itself as bordering on being racist (due, in part, to its relegation of indigenous ideas to lower thought form categories, seemingly straight out of colonial/christian ideology) and, at the very least, patronizing. It is, by design, highly derivative, but insensitively so since it does so without the courtesy of acknowledging the indigenous so-called memetic presence throughout the spiral’s upward contortion. Though the website states that any society might hold numerous elements of the spiral at any given point, the hierarchy of the spiral devalues, also by design, elements (particularly in the purple “indigenous” meme) that must be held in some state of equality with other levels if any society is truly to be understood and projected into the future as viable and/or desirable. If the spirally-defined hierarchical effluent is an unconscious outcome, it is even worse for those seeking clarity through its rose-colored (and turquoise-colored and purple and green and beige-colored) glass.

The ever-expanding spiral is reminiscent of the capitalist idea of unlimited growth, a blight upon the discursive and practical history of humankind and key to the blinded arrogant nature of capitalist globalization. It could be easily surmised that spiral dynamics is even a doomed hypothetical exercise simply because there is no practical resolution to the growth dynamic. Indigeny places a high value on the circular, the cyclical, not the twisted linear idea that is the core of SD. It is this cyclical, circular understanding that enabled indigeny to sustain life for so long through it’s understandings of the close relationships of life and death (ancestral continuum), energetic and material reciprocity, shared abundance and communalism. Linear thinking allows cultures (seemingly those that glorify the elements of the upper tier memes) to extract enviro-benefits (natural resources) without thinking of or caring about the consequences of such beyond the consolidation and proliferation of monetary profit. It is this way of thinking that allows workers to be patently used as means to the end instead of circularly understanding the need to truly provide security and abundance out of their labor. Linear thinking allowed christian domination of indigenous peoples worldwide without looking back at the presumptive core tenets of love, compassion and “doing unto others...” enough to notice that their own claims for religious, if not spiritual, ascendancy were impossible, negated by their own destructive cultural and political actions and inactions in the face of imperialism and colonialism. One need only look at the linear process set in motion by the christian-inspired political and economic schemes of the criminal Cristobal Colon amongst so many others.

With reference to indigeny and energetics, spiral dynamics belittles and devalues the sweeping, expansive nature of the indigenous dynamic. Modern society is already dangerously biased against the “primitive” and “superstitious world” of spirit beings, “ancestor worship” and nature-love, afraid of the transformative nature of the embrace, again, of the intensely spiritual life, one that calls one to attention in all spheres of human endeavor, a truly and deeply cultural integration of ones ethics that leaves you no real choice, but to walk on your correct path. SD also defines emotions as being of the lower order. Emotions are at the center of healthy and sane indigenous life, expressed beautifully in the eagle and the condor prophecy that comes out of indigenous south America, stating that the world will not be in harmony unless the intellectual focus of the North (read “west” or capitalist/industrial) learns to fly in unity with the heart focus of the South (read indigenous, wholistic, integrative). In the light of this, it seems as further insult and even more pointed separatist, disintegrative discourse that spiral dynamics relegates indigeny to one of the lowest, earliest memes (even though some of it’s core concepts are in the turquoise meme), seemingly clucking it’s all-knowing tongue at this lesser expression of human ability. This statement of Clare W. Graves is not only deeply implicit in the (downward) spirally bombastic text, but is explicit in statements such as the following:

“...what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower order behavior systems to newer, higher order systems as man’s existential problems change.” (http://www.spiraldynamics.net/about-spiral-dynamics-integral.html)

This statement is glaringly self-serving, pompous, short-sighted and intellectually immature as it relegates the historically and temporally voluminous experience of human development and endeavor to an old, “lower order behavior system”. This hierarchical myopia comes screaming out of the deleterious philosophies and praxis of European capitalist-imperialist hegemony, even from the more genteel rantings, but injurious behaviors of the christian cartel. The cultural disdain of indigeny is astounding and is made worse by the statements of some of spiral dynamics’ adherents that take issue with how indigeny rejects modern technology. Even those ungrounded reactions are short-sighted and uninformed. Indigeny has never patently rejected modern (read electronic/digital/materially productive) technologies. On the contrary, indigeny has made good and productive use of the computer platform (Zapatista, Tibetan use of internet, Hawaii-based indigenous people’s server initiative, Sami youtube videos,...), the modern media (Four Directions Media, Mayan and other indigenous radio programming initiatives/ culturalsurvival.org,...) and even the burgeoning area of indigenous-concept t-shirts increasingly showing up on the internet, in retail stores and at powwows.

Spiral dynamics, as formulated and expressed, is unacceptable as a functional, sensible, expansive, integrative way of seeing the world. At another level, and I might add that according to spiral dynamics this is a lower order behavior to look at the universe of life as integrated as unified as this was developed and given foundation in what is called the purple meme (stage 2 of human development!), this reductive anti-system splits away from indigeny some of the elements that indigenous people have held sacred for thousands of years and have brought bravely into this modern construct of cultural dog-eat-dogism. For example, the orange meme (3 steps up the ladder of consciousness according to spiral dynamics’ developers) claims that the “brain/mind coping capacities” and now able to “test options; maneuver” (http://api.ning.com/files/ U3wc*eXIx*aWcb6vs3K5FZ*89qHLby-6lFhVfnyRY2QXjYTViRxgS9* cGCeqgOhdy4LXJXztS8-DtiI4k9-UrUYtyY3OxfSF/Spiral_Dynamics.jpg) in some way heretofore unseen or unexpressed in early historical memes (though they claim fluidity of these memes, they are all marked by historical time periods). If indigeny has been anything, it has been able to test and put into perspective a mind-boggling host of material, social and spiritual options and maneuvered itself through time and space in harmonious and challenged/challenging ways for millennia. To simplify and disempower the indigenous idea and praxis by lowering it and its wholistic (emotional, intellectual, spiritual) nature to a lesser and lower order “behavior” is defining the very ignorance inherent in spiral dynamics’ position. That some of their “higher order” elements are actually elements held in high regard and practice by indigeny, particularly in the so-called turquoise meme, shows the uninformed character of this work.

Spiral dynamics also falls short, and this is a major and glaring flaw, in not validating indigeny as the container/remediator for two of modern society’s greatest ills and current challenges. First, it is increasingly a common awareness that many modern scientists, chemists, biologists and medical doctors and desperately seeking the aid and knowledge of indigenous people (IK) who have always been aware of working with plants and other beings of nature for healing purposes. It is modern life and culture that has created the increase in cancer, diseases of excess and imbalance and other environmental and physiological pathologies beyond its own ability to bring them under control. It is these very same professionals who lament how important it is to document this knowledge before all the rain forests are gone at the hands of the very ideology that sent them scurrying into the bush in the first place. Second, it is now becoming clear, based on United Nations reports and other sources, that understanding and best practice with regard to human-accelerated global warming/climate change is to be found in the culture of indigeny and energetics. Somehow, indigenous people and their spiritual traditions, rife with “ritual ways”, “tribal”, “animistic” practices and “tradition” around nature, society and cultural production are somehow able to help modern folk with their most pressing psycho-social-spiritual challenge that they’ve ever created by their own hubris. The indigenous concepts of informed intimacy1, born out of the historic, spiritually-based and familial relationship with land and nature, the primacy and sacredness/inviolability2 of nature and parity3, respecting the diversity of form and function in nature (and, therefore, humanity) as a truly integrative ideological and practical process all express the foundational and powerful way that indigeny and energetics provide modern culture with a (if not the) way through the moral and behavioral impasse that modernity finds itself so deeply mired in at this key time in history.

Spiral dynamics is truly a newly developing “hypothesis”, a toddling concept in its first (..., second or third) awkward stage of defining itself, steeped in its own biased cultural grandiosity. It may yet, though, prove to be useful in some intellectual, theoretical way. It remains to be seen if it can fulfill the social mandate for change, congruence and dynamism that SD’s progenitors state is possible. Problematic in this projection is that the developers of this system seem tied to what they call “higher levels” of existence, understood by this writer to mean modern, scientific and technological means of thought and production as opposed to the wholistic ways of being and doing given long life in the conventional, indigenous world. Spiral dynamics is clearly apologetic of the modernistic shortcomings that the last 150 years of industrialism and capitalist intellectualism has wrought. That their website claims that SD is NOT “a religion, nor a doctrine, nor a dogma rooted in matters of faith” (http://www.spiraldynamics.org/aboutsd_ overview.htm) is probably a great thing since most mainstream intellectual/ideological works make fallacious assumptions that “faith” and “religion” (usually a christian bias) are necessary for human sustenance without incorporating the more core values of spiritual engagement and circularity grounded and developed in the indigenous milieu of energetics. We are better off not having the christian bias become explicit in the statements of spiral dynamics, though it is still implicit, as it would further narrow the possibilities for universality of application, an assumed goal of this work.

Even though it’s creators state that we shouldn’t get too bogged down in some of the more superficial engagements of the symbolism, it would be sophomoric to suggest that these symbols don’t have meaning in and of and possibly despite themselves. What they have done IS set up a system of symbolic representations that they say help others to manage relationships. That they dismiss off-hand the negative potentialities of this symbolic system, especially since they claim to be containers, not content, is again short-sighted and speaks more to the particularity of their own cultural filters than to any real and grounded engagement in the experience and needs of humanity. All of our experiences are connected to the universal, but not all of the ways by which we have experienced and processed human life and work are worthy of further propagation. Accepting matter-of-factly the presence of capitalism does not mean we should continue its programs and processes into a projected future.

If you have to have had taken their courses to understand the deeper intricacies of this system, then they were woefully mistaken in providing misleading and confusing symbolic materials that they knew would be misunderstood. In fact they claim it has happened in numerous ways, hence their “Caveats” page on the main site.

The “Caveats” page claims the following with regard to SD:

“programs depict complexes of flowing systems within people as life conditions in their worlds and internal neurobiological systems interact—our approach never puts people into pigeonholes or boxes”
(http://www.spiraldynamics.org/aboutsd_caveats.htm)

It might be correct that these memes actually represent fluid models of “biopsychosocial” systemic application, but the symbolic representation of their twisted linear structure, though they make claim that it is so much more than the memetic categories which make up the spiralized dynamism (which, again, is the very name of the process), does not speak to fluidity at all. Possibly the fluidity exists in the historicity of the memes’ development, but even that suffers from a lack of accuracy, unless even the years/periods attached to the memes are actually so fluid as to make them devoid of temporal characteristics at all. And then, what is one of these memes, if not a pigeonhole or box. It seems the progenitors of SD want it both ways, categories/containers AND fluidity/non-judgement. What they may actually have is non-clear. They go on to say, “Much attention goes to the superficial categories rather than the engine that drives human nature”. That may not have been the case if it weren’t based upon, however superficially and theoretically and hypothetically, memetic containers or, if you will, boxes.

“The models are elegant and sometimes others represent them as wrapped in details that contribute little of substance and only add confusion.”

Agreed.

It took only a three minute segment of the Link TV Global Spirit program, “Earth Wisdom for a World in Crisis” to define the ideological framework of indigeny and point to why SD falls far short of being able to, first, bring clarity to our understanding of indigeny and, second, to provide a cogent way to apply important indigenous concepts in a dominant industrialized, capitalist world and worldview faced by so many problems of its own making. Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, relating a story about having been asked, “what’s your bottom line?”, simply, though after much reflection, stated, “There is no bottom line”. In the worldview or “cosmovision” of indigeny and energetics, there is no economically-defined hierarchical level at which all accounts and assets organize themselves into some profit-loss statement. Chief Lyons said, “We live in the cycle”. This cyclical (circular) nature of the indigenous understanding and practice was underscored by Thomas Alarcon, advocate for the Aymara tribe in Peru, who stated, “Everything turns. Everything revolves. It cycles.”

Spiral dynamics represents the modern, “western” inability to allow or actively bring resolution to fundamental problems. If its creators/developers had been able to conceive the temporal element in a circular formation, they might be able to enact more fluidity in their own understandings of human dynamics and the value of the purple meme and other “lower order” concepts. It is exactly this idea of unlimited growth, symbolized by this upward-spiraling “open-ended” theory, like a plant that grows and then divorces itself from its roots, that is the crippling mindset that fights its own need to resolve itself, to see itself from a different point of view and then act as though it has actually learned something or experienced a substantial level of enlightenment. No matter what the deeper levels of SD are, they are indelibly linked to the devolutionary energetic of their own dominant symbolism. With regard to indigeny, it remains to be seen if spiral dynamics has the scope and ability to treat indigenous concepts and culture with respect or any level of clarity. If it can not do even this, it becomes even more doubtful that it can then hold the rest of the human experience in correct perspective, enough to support and enact real change and resolution in the world as opposed to prettified reform of failing social and political processes.

Indigeny can use all the allies that it can get. It seems unlikely that spiral dynamics is one of them.

Indigenous People Fighting Back Against the 2010 Olympics

2010-02-17T19:07:00.004-05:00

Reprinted from the facebook page of the Olympic Resistance Network:

The 2010 Winter Olympics will take place on unceded indigenous land from February 12-28, 2010. The effects of the upcoming Winter Games have already manifested themselves- with the expansion of sport tourism and resource extraction on indigenous lands; increasing homelessness and gentrification of poor neighbourhoods; increasing privatization of public services; union busting through imposed contracts and exploitative conditions especially for migrant labour; the fortification of the national security and military apparatus; ballooning public spending and public debt; and unprecedented destruction of the environment.

The Olympic Resistance Network is primarily based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories and exists as a space to coordinate anti-2010 Olympics efforts. In doing so, we act in solidarity with other communities across 'BC' - particularly indigenous communities who have been defending their land against the onslaught of the Olympics since the bid itself. Our organizing is largely being done under the slogan of "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land," while creating an opportunity for all anti-capitalist, indigenous, anti-poverty, labour, migrant justice, environmental justice, anti-war, and anti-colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents.

In addition to building ongoing educational and resistance efforts, we are organizing towards an anti-2010 convergence based on the call for an international boycott by native warriors - particularly at the Indigenous Peoples Gathering in Senora, Mexico in October 2007. We hope to see you all in 2010 to demonstrate our indignation and resistance!

ORN website (under construction): http://olympicresistance.net/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While so many are reveling in the legacy of what we perceive to be the Olympics, there is a courageous group of indigenous and non-indigenous activists, anti-capitalist/colonialist resisters and supportive people raising voices and serious questions about the socio-political and cultural effects of that legacy. There is a powerful statement being made, largely outside of mainstream media sources, that is informative on the capitalist, expansionist, globalizationalist, neo/settler-colonialist dynamic that underlies the presence of the Olympics in Vancouver and beyond this month.

The Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) and the Tent City residents have come under great pressure from the Vancouver Police and other authoritative forces during their occupation of the area near the olympic village. In addition, Democracy Now!, through Free Speech TV, has reported that numerous independent journalists deemed by the Vancouver and Canadian government to be supportive of the ORN and Tent City have been stopped at the Canadian/USAmerican border, detained and sometimes had their equipment seized. Amy Goodman, internationally know and respected anchor for Democracy Now!, was even detained and mistreated at the border. On one of the recent Democracy Now! broadcasts, a Canadian resident being interviewed on the show apologized on behalf of the government, moreso out of personal solidarity with Goodman, the journalists and the protestors than as any sort of official representative of the Canadian government.

Exacerbating the popular confusion around this issue of sport and indigenous sovereignty/human rights and justice, the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the Roman Catholic cable tv channel reported in their "Rome Reports" program that the Pope had sent a letter to the archbishop of Vancouver stating, "sports can make an effective contribution to peaceful understanding between peoples and to establishing the new civilization of love." Two things become clear in the light of the ORN's stance against the presence of the olympics. One is that the pope and all of his minions are ignorant of the olympic impact on human life and welfare in Vancouver. That might not be so surprising when we understand how closely related to capitalist and colonialist expansion the concomitant expansion of Roman Catholicism (in particular) and christianity (in general) is. Secondly, the pope and his vatican crew may be well aware of the effect of the olympics on the indigenous and poor populations in and around Vancouver. This would be even less surprising since the vatican has a history of intolerance and outright disrespect toward indigenous people. It is one of the political structures that has been forcibly ripping indigenous people from their lands and cultures all over the world, raping, pillage and killing indigenous people, physically, emotionally and spiritually. It clearly marks the vatican as, at the very least, a disingenuous socially retrograde structure. At worst, the vatican has a program of aiding and abetting the disintegrations of indigenous life and the spiritual energetics systems that indigeny has brought such deep foundation to around the globe over the last few million years. Equally as alarming, that the vatican has come out in support of the olympics' negative existence in Vancouver may help to obfuscate the populace's ability to see the necessity of supporting the Olympic Resistance Network and the indigenous people that are being actively and openly oppressed by the olympics, the Canadian government and other colonialist/capitalist structures (like the vatican).

"Vatican critical of Avatar's spiritual message" at CBC News

2010-01-14T15:35:00.003-05:00

The following is a comment left at that CBC News article page, 1/14/10:

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2010/01/12/avatar-vatican.html

Though the vatican did not write the review, per se, it has the implied nod and support of the vatican which carries a lot of influential weight for a lot of people. This is the important issue here - the INFLUENCE of the vatican and the Roman catholic ideological corporate bureaucracy. The vatican, the rcc AND the author would do well to respect the 3 million year old (at least!) tradition of indigenous culture and spirituality that has sustained human life for so so very long in complete harmony with what they call "God's creation". The rcc has borrowed/misappropriated so heavily from indigeny along with the vatican's oppression and exploitation of indigenous people and spiritual practice that continues to this very moment. We know clearly that the rcc and the vatican and the author of the review know nothing of intellectual clarity, ethical humanity nor the fundamental importance of cultural depth and necessity of the indigenous soul and it's place in the foundation of a functional system of spirituality, governance and cultural production upon this earth, past, present and future.

It is indigeny that has the duty of critiquing christian and roman catholic ideology and actions in the world, not the other way around. Once christian polity and its many followers finds enough clarity and humility to look inside itself and resolve its own deep, dangerous and violent contradictions and confusion, then we might be able to rely upon their inspired and enspirited input.

Peter Buffett's "Spirit" dance video - "Misleading..."

2010-01-14T13:44:00.003-05:00

This entry is a copy of the review posted on alibris.com about Peter Buffett's "Spirit: A Journey in Dance, Drums and Song" submitted on 1/14/10.
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Peter Buffett is an accomplished musician and music producer. While we can appreciate his attempt to form a musical and conceptual communion between indigeny (indigenous culture and spirituality, lifeways) and modern angst and challenge (born out of the divergence from the indigenous human developmental path), some of the resonance of the real that exists in his album, "Spirit: The Seventh Fire", is lost in the translation to video and to the physical/visual form of dance and movement. The album that inspired this video allows us to form a healthy process of exploration into the complex, yet simple conflict between indigeny and modernity and the disconnection of modern life and society from spirit, tradition and earth-based community and culture. The video starts off in a promising manner in the exposition of "Urban Overture", a creative and thought-provoking look into the modern machine-life that corporate sub-culture has created. The blockish movements of the European/USAmerican dancers are instructive for anyone seeking to have the gift of their awakening eyes and heart validated. This piece readies us for a deep journey into the inter-relationship of Western modernity and indigenous tradition - that never materializes or grounds itself in the performance. The performances of the "modern dancers" never equals the passion or the indigenous dance, not even with some other form of bitter-sweet beauty, framing the degradation that modernity has wrought upon indigeny and traditional societies. The European male modern dance lead never is given an intelligent, poignant or historically savvy way of kinetically relating to the presence and power of the Native American dancer(s) and thus never brings to the forefront the real engagement that needs to take place in the minds and heart of modern citizens. At one point, he literally and physically is left just taking up space as the weakened narrative suggests that some sort of inner and important transformation is taking place within him. It was sad to watch him sit cross legged in the middle of the stage, spotlit, as the power of the Native America dance and sound took flight around him, his fingers uncomfortably, ignorantly fondling a fake eagle feather. It was much more sad than thought-provoking in a moment that should have brought tears of initiatory joy to our hearts. Even the easy cliche of Native and modern dancers moving together as one was never cashed in on. Extra footage at the end of the tape revealing an interview with the choreographer left one thinking that the dance never had a chance to meet up with the great responsibility of the provision of clarity and learning about the conflict between the two cultural dynamics. "Tony Award Winner Wayne Cilento" was poorly chosen for this multi-plexed choreographic job. All in all, it seemed that Buffett's team knew more about it's own narrow viewpoints (however unconsciously), technically, creatively and conceptually - historically, than it did about how to gracefully, powerfully and insightfully create a union of thought and movement and sound that would truly be transformative and separate itself from the myriad of failed and flawed attempts that many Europeans/USAmericans engage in to voice a functional and instructive presentation of a relationship that still has so many dynamics to be resolved. Maybe one could have seen this coming with their use of Kevin Costner to introduce the video/dance recital. I'm sure none of the producers had read, or better yet understood, the deep levels of "white" power privilege and concomitant guilt that played itself out in "Dances with Wolves".

In addition, this presentation never gave voice or vision to the presence of indigeny living with and often in spite of modern culture. A Native American wearing blue jeans does not necessarily have to also be shown with a liquor bottle. There was no statement, other than the verbal/lyrical....eclipsed by the dazzling lights and mediocre movements...that indigeny belongs or lives in current time. It seemed to always show up as a flashback that all the modern-Costners of today could (mis)appropriate again and again for their own use, not for the highest good of all, all people, all living things, all our relations. Seemingly, Buffett and his team could not carry this one off, less so once they moved it from the much stronger statement of the purely musical presentation.

I was highly disappointed and will have to relegate this video to my robust and growing pile of cultural media studies samples that give us a more powerful idea of what and how not to create cultural communications than how to manifest creative and functional ideas that are validating to life, progressive social change and cultural clarity.

Burning at the Crossroads: Indigenous Tradition Burning in the Fires of Roman Catholicism

2009-12-22T00:10:00.007-05:00

It is with great regret, sorrow and abject anger that I present this photo to you today. It was taken at the Cultural Survival Bazaar at the Prudential Center mall in Boston on December 19, 2009.

Cultural Survival is an activist advocacy organization based in Cambridge, MA that provides multi-level support through numerous programs to and with indigenous people around the world. As stated in Cultural Survival’s materials:

“Through our programs and campaigns we help them get the knowledge, advocacy tools, and strategic partnerships they need to protect their rights. When their governments don’t respond, we partner with them to bring their cases to international commissions and courts, and we involve the public and policy makers in advocating for their rights.”

Cultural Survival is one of the few organizations, and seemingly one of the best, providing functional and substantial ways for indigenous people to maintain, sustain and grow their cultural practices, lifeways and traditions in a world growing more hostile to them and the environments they live in. The bazaars are important fundraising opportunities for the organization and the vendors, which include indigenous people and non-indigenous people who represent indigenous organizations, groups and cultures. The bazaars are powerful in bringing not only the material culture of indigenous people worldwide into modern society, but also the idea of indigeny and the issues that surround and often engulf these cultures and people in conflict and struggle.

“Before the day is over, an Indigenous person will be killed or displaced, simply because he or she has a different culture. Before the month is over, an Indigenous homeland will be clear-cut, strip-mined, or flooded by a dam. Before the year is over, dozens of Indigenous languages will disappear forever, taking with them unique worldviews and a priceless piece of human diversity.” (Cultural Survival document)

It is within my deep desire to validate and support and live the indigenous idea and cultural mandate that my renewed anger and sorrow finds foundation. It was at the table of a Congolese vendor and his son that I found the statue depicted in the accompanying photograph.

A note was stuck to the statue with tape, written in red magic marker and read:

“Congo, the last Sakata mask (original) 100 years old”

Keenly, palpably aware of the tenuous hold many indigenous people and indigenous traditions have on this physical earth, I inquired as to the veracity of the note’s message. Through our struggle through multiple levels of translation of meaning, mundane and esoteric, it was stated that this was in fact the last statue of it’s sort surviving in that particular Sakata village. A chief of the Sakata had given it to the vendor. The vendor’s report implied that the chief did so in some moment of desperation. I inquired more deeply as to how this could be and why. The vendor’s explanation, moistened with generous, seemingly nervous smiles, hit me hard in a place deeper than my heart was used to going, but somehow knew the way.

All of the other remaining statues had been thrown into a fire by the Sakata at the insistence of a roman catholic missionary priest. Though I didn’t ask him details on the timing of this crime, it came across as having been a recent atrocity. It might be more interesting and melodramatic to say my mind reeled with a montage of emotional cinematic images of white hunters and jungles and lions and village women clutching wide-eyed children and subservient African men dutifully acquiescing to the European “bwana”, watching their lands and lives shrink in the wake of inevitable colonial expansion. This would have been all-too-easy given the persistent Follywood depiction of the christian, capitalist Europeans vs. indigenous relationship. No tender, yet somber, bitter sugarplum visions danced in my head. This was much too sobering an occurrence for the license of culturally irresponsible film-making as this was no mere movie. It was all too real.

The vendor’s story bored a narrow, but deep hole into my being, full of a painful dual resignation. Not only had the long documented history of roman catholic and christian barbarism toward indigenous people played itself out on its bloody, cruel, rationalized stage, but a late show act was still being enacted just under our own modern-day noses, too close to relegate it into antiquated dead memoriam or for comfort.

My throat closed as my head spun down from a reflexive testosterone drive to summarily “fix it” to a back-bent and sullen realization that any response I could muster at that moment could be lost in pressured, but measured emotional translation. His desire to sell the statue, hopefully to a museum, was no consolation to the ages-old legacy of the cross and sword binary that built itself so effectively on the dead bodies and disintegrated cultures of people who had welcomed these armed and collared bandits into their homelands and homes. I asked him how much he would sell it for, hoping that his number would have something to do with what lay inside my wallet. maybe I could go as high as half my bank account. Math didn’t matter here. Maybe he was fishing, car dealer style, as he quoted $800, $200 less than what he finally, really wanted for this priceless item, lone harbinger of a legacy that no dollar amount should ever have been allowed to define.

But this simple and enraging story had another twist, another level of destructive force to a culture already beset by arrogant religious charlatans. The vendor informed me, upon further inquiry, that this mask, these statues, held within them the energy, the power to support women in the birth process. The roman catholic christian tradition, “pro-lifers” by decree if not by definition, had convinced the Sakata to disempower this fundamental life process by taking away their spiritual technologies, their tools for focusing nurturance on this important moment in the development of the bond between mother and child, between the living and the newly alive. It seemed a fitting companion, though, to their legacy of rape of African women at the hands, loins and minds of men who claimed to be proudly, if not arrogantly, European and likewise christian, having long since largely submerged their own indigenous traditions under the philosophical contradiction of christian political and cultural structures. The council of Nicea was friend to no one.

After recovering initially from the shock of this man’s story, translated to me in a scarily matter-of-fact way, it became clear that I might be relegated to fighting this backward, inhuman practice far after the commission of the crime, far outpaced by the runaway train of missiological opportunism.

Taking a snapshot with a cheap camera barely felt like a fitting tribute to an icon of a powerful tradition of feminine spirit and healing, but it was what I had. The very thought of this spirocide brought me near tears in the following days and it was then that certain images started to rise in my consciousness. They were, again, simple and were instructive.

There was another bonfire, bigger, hotter, in the same place as the one that was set in that Sakata village to burn the hearts and souls and spirits of the Sakata to their core, deep in the bowels of a European-created hell. This fire, though, was heaped up with christian crosses, the kind that I and my sisters had on our walls above our beds above our own African heads for so many of our childhood years. They were the crosses that had the candles inside the with the little bottle to hold holy water so a priest could perform the last rites on you - on your death bed. I remembered they had cheap metal figures of Jesus, plated with some cheap yellowish metal to make it look nice. I remembered the ominous nature of these crosses as they hung over our beds, that they represented something threatening, foreshadowing an occurrence that I didn’t want to happen. The bonfire was heaped high with these crosses, hundreds of them, maybe more.

And I pondered the lesson of that image, that bonfire that would destroy as fire destroys, that bonfire that cleanses as fire cleanses, that bonfire that consumes as fire consumes, also pondering the blessing of fire, the baptism by it, the renewed, liberated life of a people destroying the process of their own destruction. I gazed into that fire and watched the piles of crosses, engulfed in the ancestral flame and felt the stark reprisal, the fear, the anger, the terror, the trauma of all those who would hold those crosses near to their heaving hearts. I could feel their indignant disdain trying - trying - to look down on me for the crime of having conjured up such an unconscionable scene.

And I pondered then, if it were even possible that these same christians, these same roman catholics, could imagine then even an iota of the psychic horror that the leaders and followers of their politico-religious tradition had meted out upon African people all over the continent, meted out upon Asian people from South Sea islands to inland deserts, had meted out upon the American people of Turtle Island and the continent to the south. I wondered if their bible held within it the gift of insight and clarity to be able to see inside, feel inside, be inside the hearts, minds and spirits of children, women and men that didn’t look or act like them, inside the lives, homes, villages, towns and cities that didn’t look like theirs. I wondered if they knew justice beyond the defense of the shaky foundations of systematic self-righteousness that seemed to be their legacy on this earth. I wondered if they could see this image of their beloved crosses burning, there on the ground in that same Sakata village, if they could also see that they were at an important crossroads of consciousness, of transformation, of cleansing, of the opportunity to empathize with the cultural terrorism of their own complicity in a political and ideological dominance that has burned across the globe with frightening speed and soaring temperatures, leaving whole cultures burnt, destroyed, traumatized, smoldering in the embers of their own flesh. I wondered if they would have the wisdom to be able to see through, burn through their own reactionism in the face of an idea that challenges their very presence on the earth - equally - as they have challenged - and then decimated - others.

And I couldn’t help but think of all the other crosses that have been burnt to terrorize African people released from chattel slavery’s bondage into subsequent social, mental and spiritual bondage all in the name of Jesus, in the name of their gods.

So I weep for the Sakata, forced, coerced, traumatized into destroying with their own hands their own sacred symbols and technologies. As they place their own statues in the fire, they carried with it their traditional, sustained reverence for the feminine divine that lived inside them all, as if they were sending Sakata womanhood to a hell not of their own making...and indeed, to my knowledge, African indigenous people were not in the practice of creating hell in their spiritual or physical lives.

Ponder, then, the image of christian churches full of roman catholics forced to carry their statues of their goddess, Miriam, placing those statues into the mounting flames.

Ponder, then , the utter arrogance, the audacity, the psychosis, the flagrant disrespect, physical and emotional violence of even the suggestion from the lips and life of a roman catholic christian man-priest that any people should sacrifice their own indigenous soul upon the fire of cultural hegemony and oppression. That priest, there in the Sakata village, knew not the meaning of the turning of the cheek or the true inheritance of the earth or the cleansing of his own temple unfamiliar.

The spirit made flesh, goddess made wood, of the Sakata burns on today, smoldering still, divine people drowning in tears pouring from ancestral eyes burnt by the smoke from the charred bodies of their own children.

A crime, upon countless crimes, has been committed. We all stand at our own crossroads, and at our collective human crossroads of cultural survival. I can still smell the smoke of our African mother burning, all of the masks, the statues that still lay burning in the villages. I try to wipe the tears of the one that remains.

Indigenous Wisdom: Healing a World in Crisis...A Video Gift from Family Estranged

2009-12-02T09:13:00.005-05:00

From the Global Spirit web page of Link TV:

"In recent years, more have become aware of the unique wisdom in the cosmologies and spiritual practices of indigenous societies. While this native wisdom has always been part of human existence, its teachings have remained outside so-called “formal” religions, leading to zealous missionary campaigns seeking to stamp out this “paganism” from the face of the earth. But with the dramatic increase in global warming, a thinning ozone layer and social alienation, many, including the United Nations, are realizing that native peoples may possess some critical keys to the very survival of our species and fragile ecosystems of the planet."

"Earth Wisdom for a World in Crisis", in its own way, IS the message. As has been said before, for us to embrace this indigenous wisdom, that knowing that flows, often with great constraints, from our deepest heart, IS the challenge of our time. It is the container for all of the discourse, all of the challenges that we face at this moment. All of these challenges, from the personal to the social and spiritually universal, present us with the requirement that we come to a clarity, not only in our micro-life, but in our macro-life, the realm of global, human social development and of spiritual proportions.

"western", capitalist, modern thought and practice brings us to a temporo-centric consciousness...or maybe it should be called an UNconsciousness...that narrows our thought, shallows our vision and individuates our concerns and intentions. If we live and breathe and think and work from a constrained place, our ability to sense reality is greatly curtailed. Equally as troubling, our ability to share the unique gifts that we've been given from Spirit, from the Other World, in a world that needs them, in a world that needs those gifts very, very desperately...in a world in crisis.

Our ability, with courageous intent, to broaden and deepen our understandings then, in compulsory fashion, our actions, informed by the deepest wisdoms and knowings of our indigenous soul, personal and collective, which still lives on in the bodies, minds, spirits, actions and voices of the people and traditions highlighted in this video, is our main task at this point in human history. Unluckily, this transformation of mind, spirit and behavior cannot happen in the breath of 54 minutes and 48 seconds. There is a period of integration, rumination, resolution that must occur for us to fully embody and inspire (in-spirit) this indigenous wisdom, largely forgotten and fully marginalized by modern anti-thought and inaction. But this transformation must come if we are to redeem ourselves to ourselves, our Ancestors who wait for us to open our eyes and hearts...and our children who expect so, so very much from us at this moment.

We must deliver this legacy to our children...and to ourselves, yet in this urgent moment before we become one again with the Earth that we have have lived in conflict with instead of in harmony with. And how do we begin this path forward, carrying the wealth of our indigenous past into our present and future, away from the temporo-centric pathologies of our narcissistic existence?

Listen.

http://www.linktv.org/globalspirit/wisdom

Thought for the National Day of Mourning, 2009...

2009-12-02T08:29:00.007-05:00

Gratitude, reciprocity to Tenbalu/Mother Earth and Wie/Nature....a 365 day a year necessity....we must learn to walk in that energy, conscious of the boundless generosity of Spirit, willing to tell the truth of our Ancestors and the genocidal conflicts out of which come the foundations of our unearned affluence.

"God Is Red" (Vine Deloria, Jr.) review for Alibris.com

2009-11-18T01:56:00.003-05:00

Required reading.....

...for anyone studying indigeny, energetics, indigenous spirituality, christianity, European religious history, culture, philosophy. This is a fundamental work in understanding the relationship of Native American/indigenous spirituality and religious concepts and their relationship to european christianity and the peoples that carried these two traditions. Deloria makes a clear and concise case for the reevaluation of the efficacy and function of christianity outside of its cultural space and in all of the geographic and cultural spaces it has been forced into. Christianity, in Deloria's critique, clearly becomes a brickish template slammed down upon the more culturally congruent and functional spiritual and religious concepts and practices that were created and practiced by Native Americans on Turtle Island (north America) as opposed to the avenue of ultimate salvation that christians have characterized it as. Deloria shows this to not only be fraudulent, but impossible because of the very nature of spiritual/religious creation by humans in time and space. "God Is Red" is a valiant representation of spirituality /religion as a functional, organic cultural production and relationship with Spirit, not merely a dogmatic exercise and tool for socio-political, psycho-sexual and imperial control.

Deloria's calcuation of the culturally divergent conceptions and uses of space and time shine forth as academic genius from his pages. This is key to his thesis.

If "God Is Red" is not on your reading list, your understanding of indigenous spirituality and religion may not be complete. It should be read in every christian seminary, school and missionary headquarters. If christian missionaries and developers of missiology would understand (largely a matter of openness and choice, not intelligence, of course), embrace and live the truths of Deloria's work in this text, mission work and other forms of proselytizing would cease for the betterment of all those whose cultures have been and are still yet to be depowered and destroyed by the unGodly superimpositiion of christian concepts and practices upon people's for whom these displaced and contentious ideas and lifeways were never meant.

Knowings in my bones... (#1)

2009-11-16T14:16:00.003-05:00

The presence of the indigenous soul in the modern human body is our most urgent project of social, personal and spiritual discovery.

Indigenous Wisdom: Healing Individual Alienation and Communal Decay

2009-10-15T13:54:00.004-04:00

Excerpt from "Healing Wisdom of Africa" by Malidoma Patrice Some'

"Purpose begins with the individual, and the sum total of all the individuals' purposes creates the community's purpose. The community thus takes upon itself the responsibility of nurturing and protecting the individual, because the individual, knowing her or his purpose, will then invest energy in sustaining the community. There is a certain reciprocity at work here, because the community recognizes that its own vitality is based in the support and protection of each of its individuals, especially in the constant support and reminding of each individual of his or her purpose. The individual, knowing this, in turn delivers to the community the gifts that the community has successfully awakened in him or her.

The presence of a community to awaken our gifts in us is necessary because the process of being born tends to erase our memory of why we came here. And the blindness that we have toward our purpose is progressive. Early in life you are still at that place where you feel that you might do something. Children's vitality and enthusiasm are reminiscent of the forces that motivated them to come here. Of course, the coldness of this world and the rather clear hostility that most of us encounter trying to survive discourage us from the ind of purpose that we were originally so enthused about. Even within the indigenous context, there is a need for ritual to make sure that the damage done to you by society, to the point where your enthusiasm is tampered with, is repaired, so that you can embrace your purpose fully. Being born into this world is a trying experience. Whatever enthusiasm you bring with you here can be toned down and radically edited simply as a result of being here. The time of physiological transformation when you are growing up is particularly trying, and in this process a toll is taken on your sense of purpose, including forgetting. All of these changes at the time of puberty have a deep influence on the dynamics of relationship, both with the unseen world and the world that can be seen.

Also, for most young people, the stark visibility of the seen world affects their perception of the unseen world. Discrimination begins when you say that you can touch this and that, and therefore the reality of the tangible. If you are not exposed to community ritual, you are vulnerable to growing away from Spirit, until you die. The physiological signs of puberty mark a time when a specific type of ritual is called for. one designed to reconnect the person with the world of spirits and their purpose, and this is what we call initiation. Later in the book we will speak more of rituals of initiation, but for now what is important is that rituals of all kinds help to reawaken the intensity that brought us here. Making ritual a part of daily life will help to rekindle the intensity that keeps us on the path of our purpose."

(pp. 34-35)

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The above passage begins to illuminate the solutions that lie mostly dormant as we are challenged by the continual alienation of human from nature/spirit and human from human, especially with respect to youth alienation from the larger society, defined sharply and tragically in the continuing occurrence of teenage boys committing murder and other crimes in an attempt to "self-initiate" themselves, to create community for themselves seemingly at any cost. This dynamic is taking place in the "inner-country" and the "inner-city".

Some of the essential work in this regard that is necessary in this and many other societies and communities is being defined and developed by people like Malidoma Some' and other Dagara Elders, Martin Prechtel and Michael Meade. Organizations like East Coast Village, Rights of Passage Council and Sacred Fire, amongst others, are moving community, ritual, nature and Spirit into the forefront of human consciousness and life in ways that are challenging the problems that modern life presents at their core.

No community is safe from the neglect and ignorance of it's own hidden pain and self-made trauma.

Our greatest communal legacy may yet be that we will be able to look back and say we faced our deepest collective fears, together, with spiritual intent, with courage and compassion.

Spirit, Indigeny and Modern Christian Missiology: A Short Ride on a Long Train

2009-06-23T16:29:00.004-04:00

It was a weekday afternoon and I was going home from doing some unjoyous errands and came upon a somewhat familiar, but conceptually incongruous sight, four young men dressed in black pants and shoes, white shirts, ties and the compulsory backpack - Mormon missionaries. They were getting on the same train as I was, but I made sure to get into the same car as they boarded, feeling much like a security agent sent to make sure that they would do no immediate harm, like a wolf patrolling the perimeter of its own forest homelands, sniffing at bushes, trees for signs of interlopers, dangerous to life and limb, family, child and nature's balance itself. I got on that train car with them to observe, to see if there were any new behaviors, any new evidence of their utility in a world gone modern, a world gone mad, to see if they would engage the passengers or myself, as they have in the past, to see if they were prepared to do harm or good.

I have come into contact with these young men in numerous situations. As a person who regularly gives eye contact to people in my travels and work, I have often become privy to the stories of homeless people, veritable life stories of contact-hungry people whose emotional or mental state we often would characterize as unstable, stories from people carrying bibles in their hands, scripture cards in their "briefcases or their religious hearts on their sleeves. Not all of them were Mormons, not all of them were mentally unstable, but many of them seemed to be wandering, aimlessly or aimedly, in the Land of the Homeless.

As I think back to these four young men, I am reminded of a number of my path-crossings with them. A few of these experiences come into focus now as I ponder, contemplate and calculate the primary role of indigenous cultural concepts and lifeways in the world's development. I am reminded of my great and deep feelings of trepidation, quieted anger and historical resentment as I watched these young men, or boys, without words, enter the train car and distribute themselves at least a seat away from each other, not unlike most young men in this society seen traveling together, too homophobic, insecure to sit next to each other and risk touching each other, keeping intimacy and genuine brotherhood at bay.

In yet another crossing of public transportive proportions, a pair of young, European (the only sort I've ever seen) Mormon men boarded a bus headed into deepest, darkest Roxbury, the predominantly African, Black or people-of-colored section of Boston, a city well known for its parochial demography, cut up into it's neat, yet contested sections of well-controlled diversity, carved by capitalist economy, modern classism and cultural momentum. I remember wondering even then, why just men, why not women...why the uniform....why wouldn't they dress as they might as they would go to the movies, if they ever went to the movies or as the people they so vociferously and dedicatedly sought to influence. I gazed upon them with resentment, with controlled and, then, controlling anger, seeing them as lead runners for an occupying force, a cultural, spiritual and political distraction, preying and/or praying upon a people, a population who didn't actually need them and who, most likely, in my estimation, they didn't even truly understand. It smacked so directly and powerfully of the christian missionary process in Africa, the violently coercive force of the forward military troops of and for European colonialism, with its concomitant cultural, spiritual, emotional, social, sexual, "racial", political and intellectual oppression that still lives like a rotting, but living zombie, watching from it's Washington D.C., London, Paris, Luxembourg and Beijing sarcophagi, seeking to forestall all genuine and independent inclinations of African people everywhere, let alone on this Boston bus or the neighborhoods it would whisk these two young men into that sunny afternoon.

I wondered why then in that day and age, was it necessary for yet another christian faction to come into "Little Africa" for it's pounds of religious flesh, its span of ever-increasing spiritual surreal estate amongst people that had been so completely stripped of their original, powerful and empowered indigenous roots and spiritual nature, supplanted by violence, not by intellectual discourse, out of compassion and understanding or spiritual comraderie or ascendancy. These African people were probably some of the most christian and christinized people on the face of the earth. It is well known that even now the face of christianity is changing most dynamically in the areas of the world least populated by Europeans, though they may hold strongest neo-colonial sway there. In short Africans, Latinos and Asians are the fastest growing groupings of new christians around the world. These two young men, bedecked in their workplace attire, were living, walking, fare-paying overkill. Roxbury didn't need them, replete with numerous christian sects of all ilks and sizes and influences and flavors. But there they were, fresh-faced and recently-pressed, ready to save African people from themselves for a god not of their own creation, as often stated by historian John Henrik Clarke, cultural advisor to El Hajj Malik el Shabazz (Malcolm X), but of their own historical coerced adoption, at home and abroad.

At that time, I was not yet aware of the depth of spiritual and cultural displacement that had taken place for African people with the onset of Euro-christian warfare, the legacy of power that would be disengaged from their hearts and socio-political structures, leaving them...leaving us...deep in alien territory, struggling to maintain our legacy of Ancestral connection, our relationship with nature and our relationship to our own stories of love, compassion, strength and spiritual ethos. that bus rode into Roxbury during the 80's crack epidemic. I'm not sure if those young men, the same age as those that would so devastatingly turn inward on themselves, killing each other so often, so brutally, "Black on Black", if those young Mormon men knew what to do with that Euro-political criminal legacy anchoring itself now in the minds of Africans generations and centuries-removed from their indigenous home, if they knew and could offer any more than yet another version of the same religious legacy that had watched, zombie-like, as they descended into hell.

Years later, but not many years later, I would be walking down a main street in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was a cool evening, darkening and quieting as I made my way back to Boston with a friend, back to the culturally and economically diverse, but gentrifying section of Jamaica Plain. We were "getting out of Dodge", as it were, when a Mormon tract was thrust in our faces by a seemingly friendly, but decidedly over-driven young man in black pants and white shirt and tie. I engaged him and his partner in time reciprocally to fend off his assumptive advances. Terse pleasantries exchanged, it seemed neither of us had lost a step, no rhythm displaced, but I can still remember the feeling of intrusiveness that accompanied the interchange. My friend and I might have only shared a passing greeting with the two young men in black, but were indiscriminately marked in that moment as being in need by people who didn't know us, who hadn't seen us long enough to identify the brand of our over-priced sneakers, but maybe long enough to place our faces into longer term memory banks to be recalled someday in a deeper exchange of human connection and compassion.

All in all, it seemed as though these young men also had someplace important to go, in a rush, though not overly so, but enough to notice...and they thought they'd throw out some of their bait to a couple of geographically convenient fish to see if they'd reel anything in. They didn't, but the hook snapped of in my jaw, in my craw, waiting to rust and fall out much later as as I chawed on numerous interactions such as this. Many more of them came from the Boston Church of Christ, which was known for gigantic churchish, revival meetings held then in the Boston Garden, too large for the average chapel. Their numbers seemed interminable as I bumped into BCoC reps everywhere, everytime, everyway imaginable, my freely-given eye contact making me a glaring target for their highest hopes for their conversion numbers goals. The BCoCies were often much ruder and more abrupt than the Mormons, but their approaches blurred, though no Mormon ever said, upon hearing my ever-challenging-to-some African name, that they'd instead call me "Adam". The rudeness of that interchange blocked the righteous and right (correctly applied) indignation deep in my throat. The anger passed, but the learning remained.

My anger had been re-upped for active duty as I walked past the living room of my parents' home to see two of these modern missionaries and an older Mormon counterpart sitting there, listening with rapt attention as my father, a deacon in the Roman Catholic church, explained to them, as it would be explained to me later, the finer points of how to approach the African community in USAmerica. It was not so much that my father was the one telling these people how they might best be influential to the African population in and around New Jersey, a formidable number to say the least. My father was at the time a vocal and empowered teacher of the African presence in and source of Roman Catholic doctrine, ideology and philosophical underpinnings. He championed the African historical elements of the Roman Catholic experience like very few others at that time, a time when non-European populations and control mechanisms were beginning to make themselves apparent in the Archdiocese of Newark and all over the world, the entrenched cultural momentum of the church showing it's bigoted and racist tendencies clearly to him and many others who dared to remove the planks from their own eyes (seemingly a very few) or who had their planks forcibly removed by nature of their cultural place as Africans or Latinos by a religious corporate conglomerate that did not value nor respect their presence in the world save for their regular and often stellar contributions to the ever-present collection plate and regular relinquishment of real estate the world over. My father was also relatively highly versed and enlightened in the realities of African history around the world, especially in USAmerica, so if these or any Mormons where going to talk to anyone about the African community, my father was one of the best ones in the world of christianized Africanity to hear it from, especially from the standpoint of a desire to protect Africans in a still hostile cultural environment, a necessity that exists to this day even with a quasi-democratically-elected president who claims multi-racial heritage, but is popularly considered Black.

My problem, again, with the presence of these particular Mormons in my parents' house was that they were indeed gaining intelligence on how to move "against" a population that didn't need them, already removed from the cultural container of their indigenous origins by a so-called-christian set of European nations before, during and after chattel enslavement in castles and ships named after their namesake, Jesus, himself. These particular, thoroughly-modern missionaries had a historical legacy that was playing itself out, continuing materially and ideologically on my parents' fine furniture. The horrid history of christian violence, murder, rape, abuse, cultural domination and degradation had not only knocked on the front door, but it had been invited in and offered a plate of vanilla creme sandwich cookies and orange soda (a stereotypical, but persistent memory I have from just about every Roman Catholic or christian fellowship apres-worship snack table).

Fast-forward years later to a very cold, wintery night in Lynn, Massachusetts. I was, yet again in proximity to public transportation, leaving the commuter rail station after a long and hard day at work. Lo and behold, as I am crossing the street and, I might add, in the middle of the street, a card gets thrust in my general direction. At the end of my energy and patience rope, I firmly said, "No, thank you!". Trying to move on, I realize two key things: 1) this man's hand is moving again toward me on a dark, cold, "tough city" street after I rebuked his advances the first time and, 2) this is the same man that thrust a Mormon tract at me in Waltham years ago. It was as if deja vu had been scientifically proven an empirical surety. I continued to move past him, not needing nor desiring to nor owing him a look in the eyes. My body/mind/spirit knew it was him from his voice and body language and mannerisms alone. I walked briskly home that night in a sort of reeling vertigo, anger and disdain and a bit of confusion raised clear and sharp as the single-digit temperature that cut through my bared skin and sensibilities.

My feelings rose, pushed hard by the legacy of cumulative history and personal experience, but crystallized by the realization that not only had the spectre of christian missionary intrusion found me on this dark and frigid city street near where I tentatively called home, but that, somehow, amazingly and maddeningly, this same Mormon man had gotten, yet more completely rudely and disrespectfully - another shot at me. I was non-plussed. I was mortified and pissed-off and turned inside out all at once, but not so completely as when my warming brain began to realize that there was a defensible case for having hauled off and clocked him right there in the middle of the street - and that I had missed my historical opportunity.

It was a structurally perfect case. A man, alone, gets off a train at eleven o'clock at night. It's cold. It's dark. It's a city with a reputation of crime and bad elements. "Lynn, Lynn, city of sin...you never come out the way you go in!" was the belabored mantra. An unidentified (at that moment) man, so an attacker, thrusts a hand at this man-alone with no one to assist him in this moment of violent, unwanted approach. The man dodges, but strikes his attacker, clear and sharp - and hard - in self-defense...self-defense!... then stands over his unconscious attacker and waits for the police to arrive as he holds the criminal, vanquished, righteously defeated. My Ancestors would be collecting around me, nodding in tacit approval, calling forward the legacy of missionary attacks to this night hundreds of years later, executed courageously by one of their now glorified sons, a modern tribal warrior, still clenching his fist in case the perpetrator flinched a finger or parted a lip to speak.

Though I knew in my heart that this oppressor-approved fantasy was not the finest outcome for this brief, inopportune encounter with yet another christian missionary in the African midst, nor was it indicative of any personal response pattern that existed or would ever exist as part of my own heart, mind and body, I wrangled with the idea of the historical catharsis that would have been enacted by one functionally justifiable - and hard - punch to a christian missionary chin. I was livid as I told my friends the story, sure, as I did, that they probably did not share my zeal at the idea of dropping a man to the ground, missionary or not. I actually can't even remember their reactions, so caught up in my own instant, feel-good replay as I was. And as good as that punch might have felt, however fleeting, it wouldn't clear away the negative and continuing legacy of the christian missionary relationship with Africans or other indigenous people. Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, still hold dearly to christian concepts and disempowered cultural concepts of themselves, so many displaced from their physical, spiritual and cultural home. Even on the Motherland, Africans flock to christian congregations in astronomical numbers. It is in Africa that the largest Roman Catholic basilica outside of Rome, Italy was erected in one of the most impoverished countries on the contintent. The contradictions are interminable. And on Turtle Island, Native Americans still live in the shadow of christian boarding schools that stripped children from their families, cultures, from their security, self-esteem and ultimately from themselves, contributing to the deep social pathologies that are the scourge of the reservation system. The works of Winona LaDuke, Oren Lyons, Vine Deloria, Jr., Wilma Mankiller and Alfred Taiaiake are but some of the many who so clearly recount the history of violence and devastation at the hands of those that would call themselves "Christians". We have but to look at John Henrik Clarke, C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Seku Ture, Eric Williams, Lerone Bennett, Assata Shakur, Marcus and Amy Garvey and Malcolm X for that christian legacy as applied to Africa.

Only a return to, an advancement on behalf of and with a renewed embrace of the indigenous cultural and spiritual reality that has dominated the development of human history over our past three million years would be recompense enough for the tragedy of misplaced materials and intentions that has marked the adoption of foreign and culturally-ineffective spiritual and/or religious systems, structures and ideologies. The intrusion of christianity has predominantly come along with the oppressive colonial and global capitalist systems of economy, ideology and sociology. Winona LaDuke, in her excellently written book, "Recovering the Sacred", recounts in no uncertain terms the dangerous lifeways that have been adopted and sustained in and by this modern world of capital above human potentiality and indigenously grounded spirituality. Poverty, disease and violence have become hallmarks of daily life for so many First Nations, Native American and indigenous people, not only here on Turtle Island, but around the world. And though there have been many instances of genuine support coming from people and organizations purporting to be of the Christian faith, the overriding relationship of christianity and the missionaries that carry it around the world, into villages and neighborhoods and cities, to indigenous cultures has been predominantly negative and culturally damaging. In addition, Vine Deloria, Jr. in his trademark work, "God Is Red", details clearly how Christianity is ultimately devoid of its original functional dynamics having been pulled out of its cultural and historical timeframe and geographical setting to be transported about the earth in its current form. His book explains the necessity for indigenous peoples, particularly Native Americans, to hold onto and utilize the spiritual frameworks that come from their own cultural experience and the dangers that arise from giving those indigenous systems away for foreign systems that come from other cultural frameworks. Brenda Norrell's "Censored News" (http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com) highlights many of the realities of Native Americans in the modern world and many of the challenges that have arisen for these people in a world that forcibly projects foreign systems of thinking and being upon them. The contradictions become clear and unquestionable.

Enter then these four young Mormon men on a train. I'm not sure if their training for missionary work prepares them to have a deep understanding of the people they attempt to win over to their way of thinking. I am not sure if their teachers gave them a fundamental background in the reality of chattel slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism. I'm not sure if their education included compassion, caring, love and sensitivity. History clearly shows us that these virtues are not compulsory additions to christian life and work, though they seem to be major tenets of the faith in general, how and if they get implemented is another issue. The larger issue is that these missionaries and christian missionaries in general seem to have no concern for indigenous people's spiritual and cultural independence, displaying an arrogance and ignorance that are stellar in scope. The adoption of christianity by indigenous peoples has actually moved them further away from their most genuine historical relationships with Spirit, with the earth, with water, wind and all the elemental and nature spirits. This has been tremendously damaging to the naturo-spiritual human dynamic, to indigeny in general. Historical and modern missiology is, again, largely ineffective, if not dangerous to indigenous life and those, like Africans, who have been forcibly ripped from their indigenous roots, that which sustains and defines them. Missionaries have more important and more fundamental work to do amongst themselves, reconciling the contradictions that are the hallmark of modern christianity at large.

These particular four young Mormon men said little if anything to each other during their short trip. Maybe my energetic attention toward them gave them pause (not overstating my influence, but realizing the possibility of their intuitive abilities) or they were deep in thought of their duties ahead, just as I was that day as I considered my own upcoming initiation into Dagara Eldership....yet there watching these young men, officially called "elders" in their religious construct. This time, there was no anger, only concern for those young men and the work that they engage in, the effects of their missionary work in the world. Before they left the train, one of them looked up at me and began to put on that smile that I've seen so many other times before, but he backed off of what I suspected was going to be an amateurish attempt at small talk leading to religious proselytizing. He backed off nicely before he could display the arrogance that comes with some forms of ignorance, such as I have seen in similar situations, once begun by asking me about a book I was reading, then swerving conversationally like a drunk driver toward biblical allusions.

It was apparent that modern christian missiology was alive, structurally supported, but probably not well in that moment. This missionary process was and is problematic and dangerous to healthy human development. Humanity is still in need of a major transformation in its relationship to Spirit. Indigeny, indigenous culture and spirituality is the fundamental path back to that renewed, healthy human-Spirit relationship and the essential ideological shift that so many people world-wide, whether they are indigenous or not yet aware of their indigenous soul, are correctly and currently calling for and working toward.

Excerpt from "Environmentalism and Revolutionary Energetics: Monadnock, Oxbow and a Very Sad River in Chicago"

2008-12-02T19:37:00.006-05:00

"Environmentalism and Revolutionary Energetics:
Monadnock, Oxbow and a Very Sad River in Chicago"

Part One

This is an 'article' (I'm not sure what to call it) I wrote about issues of environmentalism and spirituality. It addresses concepts of indigeny and energetics along with religion, politics and even Ayn Rand. Stay tuned for further excerpts. Comments and feedback are highly regarded. US

"Put "environmentalism" into your search engine and see what comes up.

(long pause.... waiting for you to do as suggested.... ok...do it later...)

As I pondered the relationship of environmentalism and revolutionary energetics in the purview of the information supersidewalk, I was confused, surprised and disappointed considering my assumption of the positive nature of a movement or set of ideas named "environmentalism". Envisioning images of well-written picket sign slogans outside of corporate headquarters, brave and valiant, nay intrepid eco-warriors in Navy Seal-esque inflatables buzzing behemoth high-tech whaling ships on the cold, open seas and quietly powerful women setting up shop in beloved trees, I was summarily smited by such resources as:

"Environmentalism.com home
Links and articles analyzing the destructive religion of environmentalism."
"The Death of Environmentalism
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
In this remarkable report on how environmentalism became a special ...
modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ..."
"Environmentalism Refuted - George Reisman - Mises Institute
Environmentalism is the product of the collapse of socialism in a world that is ignorant of the contributions of Ludwig von Mises-a world that does
not know ..."
"The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: Environmentalism and ...
Argues that environmentalism uses false scientific claims to frighten the unwary , has a doomsday mentality reminiscent of Dark Age fanatics, ..."
(electronic search, Google, retrieved 10/25/08 from http://www.google.com/search?q=environmentalism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a)

The above links were not the only ones that came screaming bloody-humanity-murder off of my computer screen, but they were the ones that demanded the most of my attention. As a student of progressive and revolutionary social movements and politics (and physics), I know that there is always a reactionary backlash to any substantial progressive or revolutionary action or set of ideas. The presence of these websites on the first of many pages about environmentalism was a clear statement of the organizational power of these reactionary forces and, unluckily, a tip-off to a possible deficit of organization of the environmental movement, at least on the pages of Google.

I wondered why one of the first links, "environmentalism.com" was an anti-environmentalism page. Had no one in the environmentalist movement thought about, cared enough or had enough money or time to safeguard one of the main portals to information about one of the most dynamic and enlightening ideological thrusts in these modern times? Was the environmentalist movement merely a hodge-podge of under-funded and over-emotional neo-hippies sitting at their Macintosh laptops in their hardwood-floored group-domiciles in Cambridge, Austin, Oakland and Portland? I wasn't sure, but then I couldn't remember the last time I met someone who proudly and expansively bore the moniker of "environmentalist" on their sleeve or in their words (interestingly enough, my experience with "republicans" and "democrats" is much the same).

Perusing environmentalism.com, embarrassed that the ‘bad guys' had outbid ‘us' on ‘our' domain name, I found their reference to the Unabomber as an "explicit environmentalist" akin to the same extreme kookism that marks the globalization movement's characterization of anything or anyone remotely smelling, walking or talking like socialism (peoplism as I like to call it conversationally), a system which focuses primary attention and resources to the needs of humanity. Silly, right? Deep within that kookism reference, the parallel between anti-peoplism and anti-environmentalism was clear.

The nature of that first Google page could have also lent itself to the pernicious move of the capitalist corporatocracy toward the destruction of net neutrality, a real and current effort that threatens the democratic nature of the internet and would render non-tribute-paying (read progressive, socially-responsible and/or peoplist) sites imperceptible or virtually inoperational in the web realm.

Nefarious machinations of the capitalist corporatocracy (thank you, John Perkins, for a perfectly concrete and functional buzzconcept) notwithstanding for the purposes of this communiqué, there is an element of our human experience that is deeply missing from the somewhere-over-the-radar work of environmentalism and the steadfast legions of reducers, reusers and recyclers. The contemporary environmental/green movement is missing a major power dynamic in its attempt to bring balance back to our natural world. We find ourselves doing material things in relationship to our desire to "save the earth". We find ourselves doing political things, all be they rocks against a brick wall (not pessimism, but a reminder that if the rocks are numerous and big enough, brick walls can be reduced to dust) in the interest of creating a world free of rampant pollution and animal (including human) extinction. We find ourselves doing physical things, biking instead of driving fossil fuel vehicles, taking stairs instead of elevators, building green buildings instead of status quo office complexes to help cool a warming globe.

And we still find ourselves in the lurch of wholism and functional completion in our efforts to live in harmony, in balance with the very physical and naturo-spiritual reality that gave us birth."

Response to "Open Letter From Leonard Peltier to Barack Obama"

2008-11-26T13:07:00.003-05:00

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2008/11/open-letter-from-leonard-peltier-to.html

The following is a comment left at the above blog. At the time of this posting, it had not yet been approved. It is copied here to advance the discussion of indigeny and how these ideas are connected to current events in indigenous people's struggles for freedom and self-determination. As always, ideas are shared here to be a catalyst for greater clarity of thought and action in the interest of the highest good of all life. Approval of these comments by the blog poster/creator is not assumed.

"Thank you, Leonard, for you constant presence of clarity and power in the face of the oppression that continues, seemingly unabated, even in the face of the first president of the United States of America that shares African ancestry.

It is important, this symbolism that Obama represents, but it is more important that we, not only use that symbolism to inspire us to greater action and clearer thinking and discourse, but that, if it is possible, Barack Obama is held to the responsibility of the political and spiritual legacy from which he has been born and in which he is being held.

We should wait for no president, especially one of the United States of America, to do for us what we are to do for ourselves. But we must utilize his position and any positive moves he makes for the ultimate liberation of the human spirit and mind and body, beyond all limitations of state and non-natural law.

If Leonard Peltier is not free, none of us is free. If we stand outside his bars of incarceration and can clearly see him there, we are no more free for our ability to move about this yet colonially held land and spiritually-imprisoned earth mother. We lack the clarity of our own place upon this sacred earth.

Unluckily, and I hope this is not true, Obama may serve to be more of an intoxicating force, diverting our attentions from real work and real clarity and knowledge that was required before his appointment and will be required during and after. His symbolic presence is important and historical, but his actions are yet to be realized in the context of the most powerful force in human development, that of indigeny, the thought and practice of indigenous people worldwide, that which must be empowered and returned to.

May we be guided by the prophecy of the eagle and the condor. May we yet stand next to brother Leonard as we look back someday - soon - at the bars that once held him back from our physical embrace. May our footprints mingle softly on mother earth together with his as we watch the walls of injustice and spiritual and intellectual incarceration crumble, destroyed by the empowerment of indigeny and the functional support of people worldwide.

On to an empowered and unified indigeny.

Ukumbwa Sauti"

To add depth to this discourse, it is important to state that a number of Native American people have been asked to work on Obama's transition team. More information on this can be found at the following link:

http://missoulian.com/articles/2008/11/20/news/local/news03.txt

Condor and Eagle Prophecy - youtube

2008-11-24T03:08:00.005-05:00

The prophecy of the Condor and Eagle is a powerful message become real as we look upon the imbalance in the science and industry overdrive of the Eagle north and the nature/heart/spirit/mind/body orientation of the Condor south. I submit to you this youtube video that puts it in perspective. There are more like it there and many places to find out about this prophecy.

Many important issues are raised with this prophecy. Many discussions are yet to be had, especially in the USAmerican culture. The ramifications of this prophecy are not limited to the western hemisphere. There are global implications as the world moves through this challenging period of the faltering of industrial globalization in the face of climate change and environmental destruction and the promise of an indigenous-led spiritual/social/political renewal that marks the period of unified indigeny and revolutionary energetics.

Legal Rights for Nature!

2008-11-24T00:48:00.005-05:00

On Sept. 11, 2008 the Matter Network posted an article written by Erica Gies entitled "Legal Rights for Nature". Gies detailed the yet to come ratification of a new constitution that would include legal consideration for the needs of nature and its elements. Gies wrote:

"Ecuador has played host to major environmental offenses -- such as Texaco’s almost three decades of dumping toxic waste into waterways that sustain indigenous people – and, as a result, is primed to adopt such legislation. In a political reorganization designed to correct inequality and exclusion in government, the country is currently redrafting its constitution, which contains language granting nature rights.

These proposed laws seek to limit the economic activity of corporations and the state in favor of the common good, saying that no human activity will be allowed to endanger the regenerative processes of nature.

The Pachamama Alliance, a U.S.-based NGO that works with native Ecuadorans on protecting indigenous rights, suggested the language, which gained support from the indigenous and environmental movements, artists, media figures, and political sectors."

It is a joy to report that Ecuador has since ratified that constitution. As reported by Lynne Twist, co-founder of Pachamama, at a November 22 fund-raiser at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist church in Cambridge, MA, the completely new constitution now states clearly the need for anyone within Ecuador's borders to adhere to these laws. This adherence now includes Texaco which, as Twist noted, will now have to deal with this new, nature-empowered constitutional law after stalling for so long since the beginning of its legal wranglings. Sweet justice even before Texaco enters the court room.

Twist further reported that "legal rights for nature" amendments were being considered in Peru, Columbia and Bolivia, the latter of which is now headed by an indigenous president, Evo Morales.

This is an important move in the interest of indigeny as it formalizes in modern legal structures perspectives and practices concerning nature that indigenous people have been holding dear since the period of sovereign indigeny. Modern society, culture and political practice have moved markedly and dangerously away from the essential view of nature as key to the physical, social and spiritual culture of humanity. This move away from this essential viewpoint is the hallmark of the disintegrated indigeny/devolutionary energetics period in which humanity now struggles for clarity. The people of Ecuador, including, and importantly, the indigenous people of Ecuador, have made a powerful statement in the interest of nature in an era of climate change and backward capitalist cultural practice. They are to be applauded for this bold and necessary action.

Clearly, it would seem an ethical mandate that every constitution be changed to include such natural legal rights. One might only ponder for a moment to understand the sheer bedlam that would be created in the soiled ivory towers USAmerican corporate offices if the same were to be seriously proposed by a USAmerican electorate.

I wonder, in the post-election elation of our Obama love-fest, if said president-elect's administration would be so brave and forward-thinking to embrace just such legislative initiative. For many reasons, the ground for such may be more fertile in the southern climes and populations of this hemisphere, their ethical and political clarity more resolute, bravery in the face of blind, ignorant and purposefully destructive industrial momentum more powerfully - and beautifully - defined.

Indigeny and Energetics - Historical Framework

2008-11-23T23:53:00.008-05:00

This table describes the general and fluid timeline for the three main historical periods of indigeny and energetics. Exact years of demarcation are not as important as the ramifications of the functional dynamics of these time periods. The table is provided mainly to illustrate the progression of these periods and to identify the timeline. The table content is provided below for better reading.

.......................................

Sovereign Indigeny:
society internally directed and developed on familial land masses, communalism, organic communications systems Evolutionary Energetics:
spiritual technologies created and developed in tune with natural environment; use of ritual, herbology, vibrational/ energy healing techniques

Evolutionary Energetics:
spiritual technologies created and developed in tune with natural environment; use of ritual, herbology, vibrational/ energy healing techniques

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Disintegrated Indigeny:
society effected by increasingly globalized capitalism, cultural norms and traditions subverted and repressed, the machine age is borne out of capitalist demand for control of resources and over-production, globalization of mass communications technology and sub-cultural dissemination, environmentalism emerges as a political force

Devolutionary,
Revolutionary Energetics:
spiritual technologies supplanted with alien religious/ideological content, radical shifts in relations to natural environment & human health practices;
beginnings of reestablishment of and reeducation to traditional thought and practice, wholism, cultural compositing

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unified Indigeny:
Traditional Indigeny resurfaces in newly organized and interdependent, democratic structures, communalism and socialism, organic communications systems aided by digital communications technology;
(Organization of African Unity, International Indian Treaty Council, Organization of American States, Cultural Survival, New England Aboriginal Council – organizational examples of attempts at or movements of or toward unified indigeny and/or socio-political unification)

Revolutionary Energetics:
universal expressions of Indigenous Spiritual Technologies (Some’ et al); cultural compositing; naturo-spiritual/humanist traditions reestablished deepening concepts of wholism, adding external nature dynamic to concept of mind/body/spirit connection

g Definitions of some of the above terms (i.e., cultural compositing) will be provided in a later post. Be free to email me or post questions here. Thank you.

Indigeny and Energetics Definitions 01

2008-11-23T23:46:00.004-05:00

indigeny – indigenous thought and practice, ideology and modes of production and distribution that stem from a historical, familial and cooperative relationship with a body of land, the relationship with which gave rise to a set of values and traditions that are pivotal to sustaining the people within that cultural framework

sovereign – 1. indigenous socio-cultural reality as defined by the independent, autonomous development of cultural thought and practice, based in a particular geographical container, unencumbered by the degrading qualities of capitalist and colonial ideology, economy and modes of production that would come millions of years into indigenous cultural development, but effect gross and deleterious changes upon indigeny world-wide; 2. period in which indigenous socio-cultural reality/indigeny was defined by autonomous, independent development on familial land masses
disintegrated – 1. period in which cultural elements are conceptually devalued and/or physically destroyed, most always creating a condition in which the particular indigenous social structures and socialization patterns are fully or partially destroyed, destabilized and/or conceptually devalued; 2. period in which the values and practices that have sustained a society through sovereign indigeny are removed from or devalued in their state of integration in the lives of individuals and the society as a whole; 3. (disintegration) extraction, destruction of devaluation of traditional cultural elements and dynamics from the human social container that created, developed and refined them, often accompanied by the supplanting of foreign and/or antagonistic values and cultural elements by force or unethical coercion (e.g., Christian missionary schools in Africa, Asia or America); 4. period of indigeny in which ancestral, familial land was/is forcibly or otherwise coercively misappropriated and natural resources were extracted and exploited at ever increasingly phenomenal rates
unified – 1. indigeny as expressed during an intra- and post-capitalist period in which indigenous thought, practice and social collectives are in direct control of their own cultural realities and destinies and are supported, framed and enlivened by the essential features of their traditional past; 2. historical period marked by the dynamics of cultural compositing, socio-political reunification and socio-economic reorientation to communalistic modes of organization and production

energetics – naturo-spiritual thought and practice and healing modalities expressed in multiform indigenous frameworks, including,, but not limited to direct body work, ritual technological applications of natural elements, herbology, naturopathic medicine, spiritual healing technologies and invocation of and work with spiritual energies and beings, all of which involve the assumption of the union of the physical and spiritual realms (energetics assumes the oneness of the human and naturo-spiritual worlds)

evolutionary – energetics as defined and expressed by indigenous cultures before
the incursion of the destructive external forces of colonialism, capitalism and Christian-dominated religiosity
devolutionary – 1. medical, medicinal and energetic thought and practice that focused on suppression of symptoms, was defined by its exploitation of or separation from its constituent component’s natural qualities or orientation and whose effects (whether in production or application) were deleterious to nature and/or the recipient; 2. physical, emotional and/or spiritual healing modalities that give rise to substantial negative and destructive effects in the human individual body or larger social structure; 3. any medical or religious thought or practice dangerous or destabilizing to the ethics and practitioners of indigeny
revolutionary – 1. indigenous energetic thought, process and practice recovered
from a culture’s traditional past and often marked by new modes of production /or distribution, especially as a progressive response to the ravages of disintegrated indigeny in an effort to usher in new waves of cultural reclarification and reunification and the age of unified indigeny; 2. indigenous energetic thought, process and practice as expressed in the process of progressive projection; 3. Indigenous thought, process and practice that takes place and finds dominant expression during the age of unified indigeny

√ addendum to revolutionary energetics - environmentalism and sustainable agricultural movements are important steps toward and may be included within the framework of revolutionary energetics, but are not in and of themselves complete statements of this concept as they do not, at least in popular communications, include a naturo-spiritual dynamic; the concepts of revolutionary energetics and unified indigeny may find themselves in debt somewhat to the powerful ideological and material forces of the environmentalist and

Indigeny and Energetics Introduction 01

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This work around indigeny and energetics seeks to place indigenous thought and practice, including naturo-spiritual dynamics (nature and human spiritual development have always been partners in history), in its correct historical perspective, to empower indigenous people and others through a change in conceptual outlook and an opportunity to move humanity forward in time with the correct vision and intellectual and spiritual motives. Indigeny and energetics seeks to provide a place for the organization of thought and work that has been put into a tailspin by the forces and ideas of modernity/capitalism and the machine/industrial age, which the framework of indigeny puts into a correct perspective as a sub-cultural, functionally-limited and necessarily temporary socio-political dynamic.

Indigeny and energetics concepts are strengthened by the substantial and growing awareness of the relationship of capitalism/consumerism/ materialism to the continuing destruction of the natural environment, the home and sustenance of humanity on both the physical and spiritual planes. Indigeny has existed for thousands, upon millions of years - modernity for about 250 to 500 years at most in its infancy, adolescence and adulthood. Modernity is aging quickly, becoming outmoded, fraught with irreconcilable ideological and material conflicts. These conflicts cannot be mitigated within the offending system due to the nature of its shortcomings.

This blog is offered as a repository of the initial literary developments and writings of indigeny and energetics (concepts developed by Ukumbwa Sauti, M.Ed.) in particular and as a place for discourse on the issues of sustainability, environmentalism, spirituality, religion, media, modern culture and technology in general.

Ukumbwa Sauti is informed and guided by the works of Malidoma Some’, Alwyn Thomas, David Sprague, East Coast Village, Vine Deloria, Jr., Winona LaDuke, Jerry Mander, John Perkins, Kwame Nkrumah, Seku Ture, Malcolm X/El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Ted Andrews, Bernadette McDonald/Douglas Jehl, David Helvarg, George Gerbner, Ben Bagdikian, Don Jorge Tamayo, St. Suzan Baltozer and the millions upon millions of indigenous people who have contributed so beautifully to the great body of knowledge and work and life and living experience that we know as human development.