Philosophy
Love, Hope, Faith, and Charity: Bringing the World together, one heart at a time, to save the Earth, and our indigenous people.
The hour is critical; our elders are disappearing from us rapidly. Only a few (one, two, or three) elders remain on many of America’s many reservations who speak Indian language fluently (There are a few exceptions, but UNESCO predicts that only 10% of Native American languages will survive to the middle of this century; that is, 2050).
We live in a moment of the threshold of extinction of Native American culture. We have to do something now, or we will loose thousands of years of wisdom in the making, forever. Together, we can change that, and save something for our children to live for; something truly worth learning.
The situation is so severe, that little has remained of the original belief systems (Cosmology), and practices (praxis), of Indigenous life throughout much of North America. The Axis has been broken; native peoples are rarely capable of sustaining themselves through traditional sacred foods; thus their connection to the Kosmos is impaired.Our Mother of Life, the Earth, is crippled, sick and dying; she is no longer supremely valued; she is no longer considered the sole supporter of the life of our people; our relationship with her is being forgotten. Our natural ecological means of survival, kept within the wisdom of our elders, fades with the passing of each traditionalist. Ecological Indigenous knowledge is rarely transmitted to younger generations; it is not being practiced (as a means of livelihood).
The Traditional mindset that the ancestors—who walked American soil for millennia—held close to their hearts and lived by; the nurturing eyes of villages whose visions fed the life of the land; and the visions which shaped the spirit of this natural world; are virtually impossible to recover upon extinction. Ancient cognitive powers developed, methodically and spontaneously, through countless ages of generational discipline (in a context of communally-driven ecological science) are drifting into oblivion.
The most that we can do now, is to save what remains, here and more especially, in surviving indigenous territories of the world. We may eventually (when the timing is right) be able to regenerate—throughout North America—the ancient, everlasting spirit of ecosystem peoples; through communion with that spirit where it still lives—elsewhere on Earth. The indigenous spirit is strong in the remote wildernesses of the Earth, where ecosystems are abundant and healthy; where people still nurse from the breast of Mother Earth. They know their Mother intimately; for she feeds the people directly from Her own hands, and they sleep on Her belly (and dream dreams of her).
Here, where nature dies, much hope is lost. In brown waters nearly devoid of fish, upon torn mountains where coal smog hovers like a poisoned crown of thorns, on vacant prairies where buffalo and wolves are but a ghostly memory, the spirit weeps only dry tears.
It must be remembered that many of these elders speak of days when flowers grew knee high in today’s deserts (Hopi), where fish-filled rivers made it appear like you might walk over their backs across the water, when a family of deer would walk up to you without fear, and birds occasionally blotted the sun from sight—like a great looming cloud which stretched the horizons.
To us, who never noticed these things, yesterday is as good as today; but to them, a bleeding wound festers deep in their souls. When others show no concern over these matters, they feel estranged and alone. They feel disregarded like the Mother Earth whom they dearly love; and they fall silent like her, whom they respect with their very lives.
The few of our Traditionalists who remain with us today, find comfort when we appreciate them, and share their concerns; thus we can show them our support and help them to rekindle hope. Hope comes from action; when we see something good happening we find a moment of hope.
Hope sprouts as the root of unwavering faith; faith unfolds and upholds branches of kindness, love’s foliage; the joy and happiness of love grow into sweet blossoms of charity. Charity is a fruit; inside that fruit are contained the seeds of hope.
It is up to us, really; whether we want to do that or not. Every little bit of support, every kind gesture, every prayer, goes a long way. The more we common people help them out, the more confidence we will all have; their future is our future.
A little hope goes a long way; in fact hope itself can make the difference. Despair and hopelessness have afflicted our elders relentlessly over the years. We see a lot of pain in their eyes. Many have simply given up. It is a painful situation that they are in; it is happening everywhere, wherever we go, wherever we look.
Though our elders, these powerful spiritual beings, these great treasures of humanity, remain collected and reserved—due to inner fortitude and patience—the collapse of Native tradition is a message that we commonly hear them talking about. However regal they may hold their statures, in honor of their ancestors, the suffering that they struggle with personally, is unremittingly deep.
HopeBut I want to tell you something:
Several years after the Navajo people at Big Mountain had been driven out of their homelands through relocation (act PLU-931 (I think the bill was called that)), and settled in a strange and unproductive land, I thought to do something. I was largely traumatized from this event, and had been in a similar state of shock for a couple of cruel years. Then something came to me.What I did was to visit elders around the area, and ask them for seeds. The elders always have seeds; they save them in jars. There were seeds of pumpkin, squash of many varieties, corn in all colors, cantaloupes, melons, and all kinds of beans. These seeds are thought of like ‘little children’; especially the corn. They say, “If you see a kernel of corn lying on the ground, pick it up. It might be cold. Take care of it, it is our future.”
I then set out. I took the seeds around the silent, suffering of the neighborhoods, and asked to plant gardens. Pretty soon, I’d have one or two or three people out there with me, helping me to plant a corn field on their house lot. We planted corn in the old way; four steps and three seeds, and we used a planting stick. That’s the old way.
Pretty soon a lot of children were joining in, or just standing around watching. A lot of happiness got brought up from this planting. The corn means ‘hope’. Everyone took good care of their gardens, and they matured and flowered with a lot of beautiful corn, squash, and melons, and so on. We were all delighted with the unusual kinds of fruit that these elders had been hiding away in their homes and storage sheds. An air of enthusiasm, and interest in these gardens, took over the neighborhoods.
To be honest, this was one way I worked myself out of the confusion I was in; my despair had been heavy; it felt it was killing me. Now, It is one of a handful of memories of things I’ve done that meant more than anything else I’ve done in my life. The dark clouds began to clear, and the sun shone brightly over the land. I felt a true, uplifting happiness that I still wonder upon today. All that from just planting corn.
Also, a few of those families began to use Indian traditional ways again; they started to come back a little here and there. One family, the one who lived in the home where our little project began, began building a hoghan in their backyard later in the week. Then they called on a relocated medicine men who lived in the area, to perform a sing, a hoghanji or house blessing ceremony, in that hoghan.
The homes of those relocates' did not have any hoghans in their neighborhoods before that. In fact, most of the people were pretty much hibernating inside of their homes; just staring out windows. We were all licking our wounds in heavy silence. This was the first one I saw built. It meant a lot to everyone living out that way.
That is how important hope is. A small sunbeam of hope can penetrate through the darkest, gloomy day and brighten up our minds and hearts. That little bit of hope, even a seed or two of it, can even change lives; I know, because I felt it change my own mine life. That’s how powerful hope is. The teachings of the Native American Church are: Hope, faith, love, and charity. These four things can change the world. They can even save it. They might be the only thing on Earth that has that kind of power. When we are looking for healing, those are the things that we want to plant in our hearts.
CharityOur philosophy is the one that says, “an ounce of medicine is worth a pound of cure.” We, the TLG, are committed to helping ensure that the peoples of other indigenous nations, don’t suffer what Native American people here have suffered . This isn’t easy: Its an ongoing battle or never-ending uphill race; as Native people, the Earth over, are being exterminated yearly. The situation isn’t pretty.
Nonetheless, there are native tribes, out in the remotest parts of our Earth, who still maintain true indigenous ways of living. They still nurse from the breast of Mother Earth; they are ecosystem people; who live in the same communal settings that have existed since the dawn of human life (Nothing else human has endured anywhere close to that long; and Nature keeps what works).
These last intact cultures keep a way of life, and a vision of the world, that has survived virtually unchanged for over ten thousand years. Many of these tribes live extremely close to the ways our Native Ancestors once did here. Most of us don’t remember what that was like, we’ve never even seen it before.
Our communities are no longer self-governing in the old way; we are organized from the top down politically, instead of through ceremonial, collective gatherings. In America, the tribal people of Alaska (Arctic), are pretty much all we have left that is similar. In Quebec, and parts of Canada, the situation is similar to that of arctic Alaska. There are still nomadic, forest-dwelling and tundra-migrating, hunting people in those places. The situation is even better in Mexico; but even there, tribes there are facing pressures of extinction.
Our philosophy is to work with what is left. In America we are devoted to serving the last of our Traditional elders and spiritual leaders. They have been largely put down, put out and left out; excluded from the political hoopla. There isn’t much there—in that scene—for them anyway; that isn’t their way, it’s not their thought pattern.
It doesn’t mesh with the way of life that they believe in; its a foreign import; its useless to them. We choose to help our medicine people as well. They are often ignored, overlooked, and neglected, now days just like our traditionalists and spiritual leaders; they are in the same situation. No one wants to give them anything anymore. They can’t ask for money if they are traditional; and so they help out for nothing. That’s not right.
In the old ways, you gave back without anyone asking. Now a few have started to charge money, and that upsets our traditionalists; it disturbs them because it is a grievous taboo; it breaks the spirituality of the old ways. It makes them impure. These things might seem small to most people, but they really hurt our traditional elders, they crush them; to them it is very, very serious.
Also, the communities saw to it that our medicine people were taken care of. Now people are only looking out for themselves, for what extra they can get, and everyone just forgot about our medicine people. “We can’t eat tobacco”, is how one medicine man put it. So lest they vanish from us, we need to help them get taken care of.
Its strong that they persist in their ethics and don’t charge money; it shows just what kind of heart they have; how they hold true to the old ways and suffer for us to keep them alive. They are truly proof of the power of these ways, but we can see how its killing them trying to do this; starving, and being neglected, like that.They never say, “no, not today”, because spiritual tradition doesn’t allow them to refuse someone in need. They patiently, kindly, do the medicine work required; for hours, or days or all night. But being taken advantage of, with nothing being given in return, is just abuse. It cuts deep into their spirits; it darkens their well-being.
The Traditionalists of the Americas program was designed with these people in mind. We help our medicine people, our Spiritual Leaders, and our Traditional elders. You can really help make all the difference in world by helping us help them. A little generosity can make for a lot of gratitude; a little appreciation, a sparkle of hope, can heal bleeding sadness, or lift a month of loneliness.
So that’s what we’re looking at in the United States; that’s the way our work will accomplish the greatest possible good (We can’t accomplish everything that we’d like to do; we can’t help everyone; we have to go where the spirit calls us; where it still lives).
We choose to save others similar to ourselves.But that’s not the end of the story. By working to save other indigenous communities; who are in the strangleholds of extinction, but have managed to remain intact and pure until now; we offer ourselves a chance. We create an opportunity to renew ourselves. Because we can recreate ourselves through our children. Our children is who we think of first, because they are our future.
When our youth come into contact with kindred indigenous cultures—who live like their own ancestors did a couple hundred years ago—they may recognize the light with familiarity, and get renewed. Reborn, as Jesus put it. They may remember the beauty that their own people once had; because it is strong in their genes: Genetic memory. Such experiences stay with you a lifetime, the ones where you connect to something through your DNA.
Through the Native youth program of the TLG, native youth will be given the chance to volunteer in projects that benefit other communities of indigenous people the world over. Some say the war is over, but we maintain hope; we have to, so long as we have our youth. And as my dad says, “We’re still here (still living on the land we have always had). We haven’t gone anywhere yet.”
Love“There has been so much suffering of our people, and so much lost, that its mostly fragments of practices, and collections of songs that we keep.”, that’s the way some one of the elders put it. Across much of North America, the spirit and praxis (ceremonial life within ecosystems) and cosmology are little more than fading memories.
We seek to save our spirituality (SOS as chief and board member Tom Dostou articulates it). We look to save others like ourselves. These people, with similar ways of ceremonial life, keep the original sparks of our own spirit kindled in their community hearths. We find our old spirit dwelling there in their midst; they who still know the Earth Mother as intimately as our ancestors once did.
By engaging our youth, our children, and ourselves, in helping them; by interacting and sharing with them; we will find peace ourselves. Seeing how they still live, eases our own suffering and gives us hope. Those ways, that we left behind us (not of our own choosing), still keep a faint pulse; they are still just beneath our skin, and near to our hearts.
We have been relocated, genocide, dispossessed, and denied; then, after that we were displaced, and then confined. It’s no wonder that we got misplaced and confused. The power of forgiveness lets us live; forgiveness is power to love. Love is the spirit of life; and when it lives, we live. (We pray for the souls even of those who did our native people wrong in the past, in some cases the victims were our very own great grandmothers; but today is a new day; perhaps today there is room for God to forgive us all.)
Sometimes the best thing to do in these situations, is to reach out and help others; even with the last pulse of strength; with the last flutter of your heart’s last beat. Because In saving them, we save ourselves. And isn’t that true for all of us, as humans? We receive help when we give help. You help yourself in helping others first*; yes, kindness goes a long way. We can’t really understand the power of love; but it can move the mountains. Its really our souls that we have to save, before anything else. And by helping others, we find our own healing; and we become complete again.*Never mind that the non-Indian world says different (you have to help yourself first; This is never the way our elders told it, even if it is a cliché today. That shows, painfully, how little of the native teachings that popular society adopted; they did get the constitution and democracy at least; maybe the spirit will still find a way to regenerate the masses: We need this spirituality. I keep hope of that nature. “the love you get is the love you gave... today.” at least someone got it.
Chief and Board Director Tom Dostou will soon be adding the script that corresponds to Faith.
CONVENTION ON BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY (CBD) Distr. GENERAL UNEP/CBD/SBSTTA/10/INF/21 (17 December 2004)
The 2001 edition of the UNESCO World Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing estimates that perhaps half of the world's languages may currently be endangered in varying degrees. Some scholars' prognosis is that even as many as 90 per cent of existing spoken languages may be extinct or near extinction by the end of this century.(Center for Economic and Social Right, New York, 1994) p. 1. See below: Cultures are closely identified with languages, and language survival is often used to indicate cultural survival. More than half of the world's estimated original 15,000 languages have disappeared already. Unless important measures are taken to protect indigenous peoples' rights and cultures, linguists and anthropologists estimate that only 5 to 10 percent of the some 6,000 to 7,000 languages are expected to survive the next 50 years.
Ethnologue lists 417 nearly extinct languages as of the year 2000 - that is, languages with only a few elderly speakers still alive. This means that these languages are no longer being transmitted to the younger generations and thus, as the older generations pass on, the languages will cease to be spoken. Of these “nearly extinct” languages, 161 are spoken in the Americas (particularly the United States of America) and 157 in the Pacific (principally Australia). Asia has 55 “nearly extinct” languages, Africa 37, and Europe seven. Nearly all Native American language, excepting Navajo, are Endangered languages.
Natures earth-moving breakthroughs, her great evolutionary leaps, like the birth of a child, occur suddenly and spontaneously. Arising along a gradient of gradual development her greatest creations have arisen in moments of punctuated brilliance. These were symbiotic events, cooperative, restructuring and unifying. They resulted in an entire re-ordering of what before had been.
What once was thereafter became the clay and fiber of what would be. Two, three or four creatures became one. In many cases, the former were dissimilar, contentious, rivaling opponents. The predecessors merged mutuality and recombined their elements into a new alliance; independence became interdependence, wholeness's became sub-components in a greater paradigm, a more able and powerful construct: In the creative evolution of the Eukaryote (the plant and animal cell) complete beings became active organs of one in an astonishingly novel, marvelous and powerful new being. The self-subjugating sub-units sacrificed components of themselves to increase the efficiency and grace of the new totality. They conjoined to serve and be served by one another as parts of a higher dimensional being. This collective tissue mass of individual cells, each a collage of sub-individuals, is flesh, tissues, bones, eyes, brains and nerves and the skin of all animals, it is the tissue of all plants, trees, whales, butterflies, bats and eagles, all worms chimps and humans and fungi. In macro masses cells clump in masses as liver and lungs, heart and bowels; they form specialized assemblages in which they eradicate genetic aspects of themselves and activate others further in order to become part of the tissue of something more then they themselves, in isolation, would otherwise be; something more cooperative and complex. Nature does not achieve her most ingenious inventions through steady competition, competition merely tests the advantages of her products. Natures ingenious breakthroughs arise out of symbiotic alliances that unify disparate, contradictory components into a single, mutuality new entity.
Mutualism is the great Eureka of the Holy Mystery. Today indigenous peoples and technological peoples must fuse to form a new organism . The earth, humanity, and the sciences of Humanity, both modern and indigenous, must coalesce to generate a radically new entity; a new Being-- never witnessed by ancient eyes, never imagined by the profoundest modern minds... Should western society yield itself to indigenous society, it will learn to assimilate the powers of holism. Should it simply allow indigenous society to survive, the ancient wise of that culture will assimilate western technologies and western thought in a way that it is only capable of achieving. Rather than become eroded and extincted by forced pressure and abuses, it will absorb western ways into its own ways and character; it will make the western mind Indigenous. It will make the technological culture in its own image.
Its truth is a point of singularity where all of life’s aspects coalesce in a framework of sensibility; the family is the basic unit or founding block of society just as a population of species is the unit of ecological niches needed by the greater ecology of the planet. The woman is the center of the family just as the earth is the center of all life on the planet. The spirit creates harmony and cooperation which weaves the units together into a grand schemata whose design inspires brilliance and joy, impractical knowledge suitable to a superior means of existence. The sturdy of the indigenous model or Gaea allow for humans to make refined systematic modification that tune nature and human means toward ideal efficiency. When our focus and intention are enlightened and correctly placed, results are forthcoming; and they are honest, solid and enduring.
Regardless of the greatness of our aspirations, humankind must be rightly educated if it is to have positive lasting results; Indigenous knowledge, spiritual, material, intellectual psychological, and holistic has wisdom capable of guiding the tools and technologies of modern science in a steady, beneficial way. Indigenous ways have power to center and ground the modern world and give it vitality and meaning. The modern world has the means and ability, the Indigenous world has the vision and beautify and wisdom to guide those tools to a heroic purpose and high cause for humanity. We must listen to our spiritual leaders and to the great men of our age to achieve a pathway in which all will ultimately prosper, world-wide.
