Surviving in Two Worlds: Contemporary Native American Voices
by Lois Crozier-Hogle and Darryl Babe Wilson; photographs by Giuseppe Saitta; edited by Jay Leibold; assistant interviewer, Ferne Jensen; foreword by Greg Sarris. Copyright © 1997. By permission of University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.
Surviving in Two Worlds brings together the voices of twenty-six Native American leaders. The interviewees come from a variety of tribal backgrounds and include such national figures as Oren Lyons, Arvol Looking Horse, John Echohawk, William Demmert, Clifford Trafzer, and Greg Sarris. Their interviews are divided into five sections, grouped around the themes of tradition, history and politics, healing, education, and culture. They take readers into their lives, their dreams and fears, their philosophies and experiences, and show what they are doing to assure the survival of their peoples and cultures, as well as the earth as a whole. The following excerpts, drawn mostly from the section "We Can Have New Visions," highlights four of these leaders' thoughts not only about their history and present conditions, but also about what a livable future would hold, not only for Native Americans, but for all of us.
Roxanne Swentzell: Hearing with Our Hearts
Roxanne Swentzell, from Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico, is a highly accomplished artist who specializes in sculpting human figures out of clay. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums around the country and was featured in the frontispiece of the Smithsonian history of North American Indians. She lives with her husband and two children in a two-story solar adobe house in Santa Clara, where she participates in the pueblo's ceremonial dances and feasts. A farmer as well as an artist, she co-founded and helps to operate the nonprofit Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, which experiments with sustainable living systems. She was interviewed by Lois Crozier-Hogle and Ferne Jensen.Most of the people here at Santa Clara Pueblo don't have anything to do with the land, with the place, anymore. They go off to work from eight to five just like everybody else and they want their new car and their TV and their VCR. What they really want is to be middle-class white Americans. I've watched this area and the Indian culture slowly disintegrating into white America during my lifetime. What that means is you go outside of your community for everything, and so you open the door for someone else to rule your life. Everything falls apart eventually if you put it all in that basket.
It can't stay the way it's going because nothing is in the hands of the people anymore. Nobody has a center anymore. Nobody grows their own food, nobody makes their own clothes, nobody builds their own houses, nobody takes care of their own family--they send their kids off for someone else to raise.
I don't know if people have to go through the cycle of going clear to that end and saying, "Whoa! This isn't where it's at," before they come home again. Or, hopefully, they can take a short cut home. I think most of the people in this country have already gone way out there into materialism and they're saying, "No. It's not here. Let's find where it is." So they are looking at Native Americans and people like us because we have been spiritually in balance--or seem to have been there recently.
Some Native Americans are doing this, too. I find it in a lot of the younger generation of the Indians around this country. They have seen much of the white world and realized that it isn't where it's at. So some of them are trying to come back, at least to what is left of their Native culture.
They are trying to find where they belong, where they fit in. My generation is of the children who were raised in the white world knowing that we came from an Indian world. We were raised in the white world by parents from the Native world.
Some of us found that there was nothing out there in the white world. Some of us are now asking what our Indian culture holds for us. We want to get back to ourselves. That is our true home. It's time for everybody to get back home, not just the Indian people. The whole world needs to get back home. But at the same time, remember that home isn't just another image or culture to get attached to.
That, to me, means being able to focus again, to not be blinded by the images we are given. We are all constantly being thrown suggestions of images of what we're supposed to look like, what we're supposed to be like, and how we're supposed to dress, how we're supposed to live in this world.
Look around and you will start to notice just how much of this world is a subliminal message. I'm talking about images of all kinds from every culture--although many are from Western culture. Those images are poured into every world. That makes us all feel unloved because all of us--white or Indian--aren't accepted for who we are.
What we need to do is see the world again for what it is, not through images created by someone else. And when we can see ourselves for who we are instead of as an image, we are loved again. And the whole planet is loved. You cannot hurt anything when you love it and it loves you back. When there is respect for what things are, there is love. Then the planet will live again. I feel like we're so close to completely destroying it. We have to revive it again because it's almost dead. Right now I think a lot of people are realizing that we can't keep going the way we have been. There's so much pain in this realization that it takes us inside ourselves. Hopefully, the next phase is to go completely inside where we can find ourselves again.
That may be painful, but we have to go through to the other side. It's a process. You have to go through the steps to get to the other side, to come out of the suffering of not being ourselves. I do not mean yourself with an image attached to it such as "Indian," "white," "banker," "artist," etc. I'm talking about yourself as an individual with the ability to be a part of this whole universe as you without a title attached, without a name or culture to hide behind.
When you take all of these off, what is left? That is who I want to reach.
You find yourself not through images but through your own heart.
It doesn't matter what culture you come from, it's going to be the same "way" that ties us all together. There will be a place for us in this world when we make a place for ourselves inside of us. There will be a wholeness but also a love for the self. There will be a kind of clearness because of the honesty that comes with not having images.
Christopher Peters: The Art of High Mountain Medicine
Christopher Peters is executive director of the Seventh Generation Fund, a national foundation that supports Native American renewal at a grassroots community level with grants, training, and technical support. He is Yurok and Karok, as well as Hupa and Tolowa. He has worked with community development and grassroots organizations serving Native Americans for over twenty years. He talked with Darryl Wilson about the "World Renewal" traditions of his people and the discipline of high mountain medicine and prayer.If you could teach enlightenment through stories and legends, people might begin to think, "I can be happy with myself because I live this life and I have this relationship with the spiritual world that is gratifying to me in the most complete way. I don't need material wealth."
Certainly the generation that is coming now has to be taught this way. When our kids look at television nine hours a day, we wonder how much we are actually involved with them. Whoever programs television formulates how our children think and react.
The religious rights of Native people also must be protected. The authorities have been searching for ways to establish a law that says our religions aren't protected by the First Amendment on government land. They are more concerned with uranium or coal mining and all of the other minerals.
I think Americans have to look at the ethics of their religion combined with their own hypocrisy before they can begin to clean up the environment. They need to look at ethics within their belief system on a massive scale. But what is going to bring them to that? We are in a situation now where we have maybe fifty years before we reach a point of no return, where we can't fix the situation. We are getting really close to that point right now. There is a significant need to change. There has to be an optimism saying, "Yes, we can do it. We can change the direction of development." If we don't get that, then we have to accept that we are going to die.
For a lot of non-Indian people, the optimism for living isn't there. Vine Deloria talks about people who believe in Armageddon. If that is rooted in their religious philosophy, if this world as we see it now is going to come to an end, then there is nothing for the future. We have to say, "This world is not going to come to an end. It is a living thing. It is a spirit. It is our mother. It is going to live on and on, forever and ever."
If people can come to the understanding that the world is not going to end, then we can start changing some of this thinking. But as long as the basic philosophy is, "Hey, the earth is going to come to an end anyway, and when it does I'm going to heaven and walk through the pearly gates and live in eternity with God"--if they believe that, then they can go ahead and drill for oil, cut down trees, and destroy the whole ecosystem, like they are doing right now.
I would say we have a major task, as Native people, to change the white people. Because we are in this ship together. As much as I would like to say, "Let them do what they want to do," I can't. Because we have to realize that we are all in this together.
So our optimism is tied, largely, to our ability to change the mindset of the dominant society. That is a really significant task, if you consider the fact that for the last two hundred years the dominant society attempted to acculturate us--to make us think the way they think.
A small minority, a small percentage of Indian and non-Native people still retain optimism--a knowledge that we are going to live on and on. To continue for Seven Generations is one way to say it. But the thought that we are going to continue for One Hundred Generations or Ten Thousand Generations has to be put into people's minds, too.
Jack Forbes: We Can Have New Visions
Jack Forbes has been a leading writer and scholar in the field of Native American studies for over forty years. He is chair of the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. With Powhatan-Renˆpe, Delaware-Lenˆpe, and other tribes represented in his ancestry, he is working to preserve the Lenˆpe language, in which he writes poetry. He co-founded D.Q. University, an institution run by and for Native American scholars; has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship; has been a visiting scholar at Oxford and other universities in Great Britain and the Netherlands; and has written more than three hundred books, monographs, articles, stories, and poems. He was interviewed by Lois Crozier-Hogle.Luther Standing Bear said that people who are alienated from nature will be living in a brutalized world. It makes me mad sometimes to read articles about ecology today where they don't mention a single Native American in the history of the so-called modern ecological movement. Luther Standing Bear was writing all of these things in the 1930s, and much more fundamental things than most ecologists are writing today.
In any case, what has happened to a lot of Native American communities is that they have lost a sense of belonging to the natural world. Then what do they have left to belong to? Do they belong to the world of McDonald's and Burger King? To the world of VCRs and pop music and making money and alcohol and soft drinks?
The world of consumption is a very unhappy world. I don't know very many classes of people that have been able to be happy by consuming. Even the rich. But especially people of Indian background, because they're usually poor to begin with. When they become part of the world of materialism and consumption, their life is one of constant frustration. On the edge of poverty and on the edge of plenty. They get a check, they buy a lot of things, and all of a sudden they're poor again. Over and over.
I think that is one of the most horrible things that has happened to Indian people--the spread of an exploitative way of looking at the natural world. But still, fortunately, in almost every Indian community the old way of looking at things survives. The future must be built on that.
It's true that we've lost a lot, and we can't do everything our ancestors could. But we can recover and we can rebuild and have dreams again. We can dream ceremonies just like they did. We can have new visions. We don't have to give up just because we've lost part of our tradition and culture. We can still find the essential things in our life and make them work for us.
And they don't have to be perfect. It's just like learning to speak your own Indian language again. The first time you speak it, it's not going to be any good. You know you're not going to pronounce things correctly. People are going to laugh. Let them laugh. Unless you try, you'll never learn.
One of the things I hope for is that one of these days we will have a kind of a world in which there won't be large states. People can live in smaller communities in more democratic ways, in a kind of federalism based upon the principles of traditional Native American confederacy, like the Iroquois and Delaware. Where small communities come together to solve their problems, there are no big powers to trample on other people.
Behind that rests a couple of things crucial to Indian philosophy. One of them is the sense of humility. A sense that you are dependent upon the earth, that you are utterly dependent upon nature and other human beings. If you are truly humble, you won't force yourself or your ideas on anybody else.
The other side of that is respect. If you understand yourself and your place in life you will respect other human beings and other living things. Respect is what will build a world that is peaceful and democratic. Only respect. To take the time to solve problems in a way that they can be solved--by talking with people.
I am particularly interested in political independence for Indian people. This means having their own land and territory, a chance to live their own lives and preserve their own languages, to be free to follow a spiritual path.
A part of the rehabilitation process for Native American people is becoming involved in a spiritual movement, in tradition, and in working with non-Indians to save the earth. But the earth will not be saved until non-Indians as well as Indian people come to really believe and understand their oneness with the world around them. I think that is absolutely essential. We must teach people how to love. We must give them the right to love.
Carlos Cordero: Reviving Native Technologies
Carlos Cordero (Maya) was born in Mexico City, and has studied at the University of the Americas there, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at a number of other California institutions. After coming to the United States in the 1960s, he became a leader in developing the idea of an ethnic studies curriculum, helping to create models for alternative schools and to implement at the elementary level a system called Escuela Calmecac. He served as president of D.Q. University from 1983 to 1994, and continues to be engaged in research to document and advance the knowledge base of indigenous peoples. He was interviewed by Darryl Wilson, with a follow-up interview by Giuseppe Saitta.There is a fundamental difference between the European concept of humanity in the world and the Native concept of spirituality. They are not only incompatible, but antagonistic. Indians, and certainly my mother's people the Maya, never defined humanity as being out of a state of grace with the universe. We weren't kicked out of paradise or any of those strange things. The Maya strongly believed in a reciprocal relationship between humans and the Creator or creators. Along with other Native peoples of this continent, they talked about a rootedness, a sense of belonging on this planet and in this universe. The creative force was expressed in a manner that "humanized" the existence of people.
To be human among the Indians is to be spiritual. To be spiritual among the Europeans is to transcend the human world. They have said that they are separate from the Creator. So that which is spiritual cannot be human. From an Indian perspective, that is bizarre!Ä
The dynamic of the European cultures is one of obsession with control. Control not only of the environment and other populations, but among themselves. The pre-Columbian Indian concept was that control was the communion between humans and the Creator, humans and their environment, humans and humans.
So the change that needs to happen to heal the earth can't come from the European cultural base, but must come from the Original Native bases that re-establish an inner psychic equilibrium with each other and the environment.
This harmony is needed by a highly technological society that has produced weapons of horrific power it cannot control. With all of his exo-technology--the extension of the senses through outer technology--the European has atrophied his internal technology, his natural human capacities to be in balance and in harmony with nature.
The Indian knowledge-base--culture, science, and philosophy--has technologies of ritual and ceremony. I am using the word technology in a modern sense, which is unfortunate. We should be having this conversation in the Indian languages. Realities are so complex that modern European languages are not useful instruments to convey the experience we are discussing here. One of the things that we must do is to make a concerted effort to accomplish the revival of Indian languages. They have that inner technology.
If we allow the Indian model to revive and be useful, the disparity between humans and technology will begin to diminish. Then the ability to conceptualize contemporary problems--the environment, the ozone layer, ecology, science itself--can emerge. You would have scientists who come from a more harmonious and balanced sense of who they are as a people.
Scientists of the world are a minority. Why is that? We should start to think about why science is so rarified and scientists are so rare. Indian cultures encourage the development of science. But when the invasion took place five hundred years ago, there was no moment for Indian scientists to develop responses to the infections.
The time has come, five hundred years later, to engage in science based on the Indian culture and re-establish natural solutions to the problems created by civilization in the past five hundred years.
I believe the ego-strength of Indian individuals and communities will return. It has never really gone away. We know that in each Indian community people with great ego-strength have always existed. In the next thirty years we will see larger numbers of these individuals coming back and flourishing, to the benefit of their community and the whole world. I am very optimistic that the Indian will play a significant role in the life of our planet.
The first step is the declaration of the right to education for all people. We must believe that to be human is to be educated. We must say that we cannot tolerate one human who is not educated. Nothing can change unless we accomplish this. Right now there are artificial barriers between us and our access to education at all levels. The Indian knowledge-base is tolerated in the colleges and universities of the dominant society only as an exotic curiosity.
We need to give Native people a place in the sun--literally and figuratively. Native people must have a land base. There is a difference in psychology. A psychoanalyst says that you must have a couch to find your ego boundaries and ego strength; Native individuals and populations must have land. Not land in the European definition of ownership, but an unbroken ability to connect with the essence of their humanity, based on a natural connection with the earth, the planet, and the universe.
To the degree that America denies Native people contact with the land, it will succeed in the destruction of the American Indian. Allowing the Native people to have the direct sensory contact with nature will guarantee survival of the Indian people. Having an actual place where you can be where you want to be is without question one of the things that we can do to revive the present human state of lost self-esteem.
©1998 Talking Leaves
Winter 1999
Volume 8, Number 3
Visions of an Ecological Future