Teachings 5
These days our elders tell us to live for the people; the time for giving up our lives for what is right is past because there are better ways to do things available to us. Education is one of the most important of these ways. there are a lot of resources open to Indian Nations today. And yet, the Indian culture is virtually dead today. The extinction of the Indian way of living from the heart for the people, that is the traditional view of spiritual life, is about extinct. There a few traditional elders left. Just 2 and 3 decades ago, the Indians on some reservation were traditionalist by majority. Now you have to search around quite a bit to find anyone who knows those ways. When you find one you will know it because ‘knowing is living’; there can be no separation in belief and practice in the old ways of looking at things. If someone only knows it but doesn’t live it, then it is extinct; they are remembering something that is dead. But a few still do know the old ways. Mostly they are very elderly; in their 80s and 90s. The old traditional people were tough and lived strong into old age; they were sensitive and gentle emotionally but tough as nails physically because they liked to be out in nature. In fact most of the generation of Indians that were around when modern houses were being built, only used them for storage. They felt constricted and ill in modern houses. They wanted to be outside in the fresh air. Traditional Indian homes were always open to the outside air. Also they are made with prayer. They are really churches, places where Indian ceremonies take place
Traditional Navajo elders, the few that we have left, roll in the snow when they get up in the morning. They pray with Tadadeen or corn pollen to the rising dawn sun and ask the Holy beings, especially Hayoth kath Dine’ e or the Holy Dawn Being, for a good day. This corn pollen is a life prayer. Traditional Indians first put some on the top of their heads and then in their mouth before they make their prayers and toss it four times toward the sun. When this corn pollen is shaken from the corn tassles in gathering it. It clings to the body and hands, and as the breeze lifts this pollen dust up into their air, it travels to other plants and cross pollinates them. This is an example of how traditional life works with ecology. Corn pollen is a pray of potential. The pollen is the potential of new beginnings; it is the life force that causes the corn to fruit. It is like the yeast that leavens the bread of life. The traditional ways work so that life continues for the people, for spiritual and physical sustenance, in the form of food and prayers, harmony and positive thinking. The lives that traditional people live is part of the ecology of the land; they live in a way that integrates with nature and increases natural and human prosperity. Nature and humans can live cooperatively to the benefit of both parties. Of course, Indians know that they are part of the Mother Earth, part of Nature by birth and design; and that it is beautiful. It is a beautiful way to live, by living and practicing these ways. We have all lost a lot by straying so far from our home, which is our close and personal relationship with the Earth, Our Mother. The Earth will always take care of us so long as we take care of her. Wild Nature and man can have a mutually beneficial relationship that will never end as long as the Earth generates life for man; as long as the Earth lives could be what we think of as forever. a few billion years is equal to forever in our minds because we can’t understand it; our lifespan is so short. So what we are talking about is life. Life means something different to different people. Many people have not found spiritual harmony. They do not have a spiritual love of Nature and the Earth and other human beings. They do not live their whole self as a gift of love to others through God. God lives within each person. A pierce of the light of the original fire, the First Fire of Creation, dwells within each living being. It is the energy and the stardust of the original moment of creation. The energy is our life and the stardust is our bodies. It all came from a single, infinitesimal point. The whole universe was one undifferentiated energy, one invisibly small pin prick of unfathomable power. That light opened up in a split second and unfolded into the universe and all things in it. That light is the first fire. Its energy moves through all things continually; it the the pulse of life, the divine motion, the Holy surge that stirs within the universe and paints the images of existence in all places at all times all around us and everywhere. We are part of that Holy expression, we are formed of the essence of Love in images of beauty. We are flowers of the Goddess, as the Huichol say it. In the Navajo way it is said that ‘in every direction there is a man and a woman standing facing each other.’ This is beauty. It is Life. The equilibrium between opposites is where life is blessed for humans. It is where we belong. Heat and cold, dark and light, Hard and soft, heaviness and lightness; between them, in the center is where humans find life for themselves. These can be thought of as male and female; between the two is where a child is born. The Spirit can move anywhere, everywhere is good for the Creator of everything. For a human we need to ‘walk in balance’; we need to stay where life is good for us. this is true for our body and mind, our emotional state and our spiritual equilibrium. We are lucky to be able to survive at all; the powers that make it all possible are far to great for us to manage or comprehend. We cannot go near the sun or away from it into outer space. The one place would freeze us. The radiation would destroy us. The other, the sun would incinerate us before we could ever reach it. Even on this earth where we are in a place of perfect fragile balance, life cannot live too far up toward the sky or too far down into the soil. Even birds only fly up for a while before landing and even earthworms don’t go very deep and come back to the surface again. It is the shimmering glow of twilight, between earth and heaven where humans thrive. It is the Biosphere which is rich, luxuriantly rich, in life. The Biosphere is a very thin skin that is wrapped around the planet’s surface. We must be humble. We are not so clever to push our boundaries far. Even the greatest, more astonishing of human feats, may impress us as proof that we can defy natural law and the order of things, but the order of degree of any exception is laughable. Even if we make an unsinkable boat; or travel to another galaxy and find conditions of life that work for us, we have done nothing very spectacular. We still drown in water and we still depend on ecological laws made lukewarm by nature in order to survive. Nothing has really changed at all. No matter how many human records we break to push the limits, we will never escape our simple human boundaries, except perhaps for an insignificant instant. Our self-impressive tricks are more like slight of hand magic than anything else; they only serve as quaint deceptions of our real condition. Even if a man could endure the extreme heat of the sun, a feat that will never happen, he would starve to death if he attempted to stay there. Yet of course, such a superhuman feat would cause such world-wide applause as to make everyone believe that we were achieving some kind of break through and were on the edge of independence from God and Nature. This is silly since the entire Universe is nature. We are nature and God creates through nature; physical laws, vegetable laws, quantum mechanical laws, biological laws. The problem is that many people actually imagine that they can separate themselves from nature and that they would somehow find a kind of freedom. Nowhere does anything exist that is not Nature; even the force of light and black holes are nature. Freedom is only found in following God’s laws for us. Contentment by serving our own communities, joy is nearer to us than our own pulse and breath; it is in becoming one with God’s destiny for us. Humanity must stop trying to outwit God and finding ways to deceive nature. The only one that we deceive is ourselves; we create mass confusion and schizophrenic breaks within our own heads. We can deceive others, and we can deceive ourselves but the only one we can never deceive is God. We will face Him in the end. Our deceptions will stand before God to judge us. God sees our tricks in the bright light of day; they are written in reality; they are recorded in front of God when we manipulate truth. God is watching us and we will one day be watching God look into our eyes while we chose to weave our webs of deceit. These webs curse our very soul. That’s why we have to forgive ourselves. Forgiving is cleaning up the mess and moving on. We clean it up best we can and make a prayer about it so God can clean up what we cannot and then continue on. Still those moments, even though we free ourselves of the negativity that we created, leave an indelible mark on our spirit; they are recorded in our mind and history. We have to live eternally we all that we made in our moments on earth. They form the shape of our soul. If a tree grows twisted later in life it will keep that twist. To remove it would kill the tree because that twist IS the tree, and the rest of the tree will grow differently accordingly to that twist. This is how we make our souls. They will shape our eternal consciences. A missing conscience is only one that a person cannot face admitting. They are hiding it deep in a sleepy death-like trance because they cannot suffer it. It never goes anywhere, and at death it will open out and be consciously experienced. We want to uncover such things here on earth. We want to pursue our spiritual development here. “What we gain on earth we gain in heaven, and what we lose on earth is lost in heaven.” it will define our reality forever. There is no deception at all. What exists is what exists; we only fool ourselves. In the end we will see plainly what is and what was and what will be resultantly. We will see the future as the generations of new humans move on through this earth; we will see the marks that we left on them. They will not erase. Our fingerprints will bless them or otherwise, and eternity will shine it light on all of that; every time the sun rises and rolls over the face of the living earth. That’s why we need forgiveness. We can not gain love again without forgiveness. They go together; they are inseparable. Forgiveness is the only way we can get free of these things. They become like a negative magnet and draw us back into them. Forgiveness is how we release ourselves. We let go and allow the right way to return to us again. We turn back toward service to God. Joy will brighten our sorrows in time if we give them all back to the Life Giver for repair. We cannot really love ourselves or others without loving God. The human is a sacred creation from birth and will always be sacred in what it is. Still it can never be perfect. It can reach a state of perfection, it can enter into a sacred motion, and carry blessing through it. It can be one with the Holy oneness, but it can never be that Oneness itself. It can become a beautiful mirror of God, but it cannot be God. We can love the mirror because we see God through its power of reflection but we can never love it perfectly because it is not God. Only God can be loved truly. They say that if we love God and we love nature, then we will love the human. Through God we will love our self. Through God we will love each other. That is the only way.
They say that we will be as we make ourselves. If are attracted to the stone we will be as the stone. If we love the plants we will be as them. If we are moved by the animals are spirit will be that way. If we are attracted to the human then will have that station. The human contains all of the creation within it; it is the sum of all the kingdoms of creation. The power of love which is the holy spirit can be awakened in us. If we follow the way that the Creator set down for us then we will become animated by the force of love and we will be a holy expression of God on this earth; we will be a reflection or a mirror of God. Money, or gold, is a mineral element. Many people find this the ultimate attraction in all of life. That is what preoccupies them daily. Their soul will reflect that and they will be as the mineral kingdom within the spirit world after death. That is not to say this is bad, since the mineral world is the foundation of things. Still they will not experience the power to grow as contained in the vegetal world. They will not see nor hear as the animal does with it senses. They will be blind and mute and deaf to everything else within that glorious world of inflatable mysteries. All truth and all reality and all creative potential and all beauty lies within that realm; all existence proceeds from and returns to that holy mystery. The mind of a human can unravel the deepest mysteries and the most profound and wonderful visions. The heart can beat in breath-taking beauty and love. If it be possible I wish to have access to the holy mind when I reach that place where God’s own presence pervades. It is here to, and it is ours to follow here, if we so choose to. Whether or not we can stay on track, and follow the good red road as Indians call it, while we live on this earth, or not is for none to say. The price is all we have, given in the spirit of love, to serve the well-being of our relatives. It does not cost much because the reward that comes from such a life is love; that degree of love is otherwise unattainable to us. Jesus said, “my yoke is light, and my burden is easy.” The pearl of great price is the kingdom of God. What is our life worth? The more blessed our life becomes, the more it is worth to us. If we live out of balance, then life has little value in our mind. If we grapple with selfish aspirations and let the weeds of ugliness invade our spirit, we do not even so the reason to push onward and continue. Life lived with purpose-----------If we refine our life and beautify it by beautifying the lives of others, we have breathless moments of love that join and unify us to each other and we taste something of the fruits of God’s paradise here on earth. We love so profoundly and deeply that to see unkind acts in like curdle our conscience like sour milk; we are affected by the lives of others so that we can feel the pain and sadness they feel as well as the joy and wonder that they experience. Our connection to God keeps us in a blessed way and our center remains rooted and unmoved; but our emotions move to the same frequencies and rhythms as the humans and the earthly life around us. To be affected is a sign of living spiritually; to remain rooted is to hold fast to the truth of the Spirit. The giving of our beings to serve the future destiny of humanity is that root; and a tree with roots will, in its own season, bear fruit. The amount of fruit that a tree yields is not important. It is the act of bearing fruit that is everything. We produce fruit and blossoms of the kind that we are made to; and in the amount that we are nourished. We do not have control over that. Our is to grow; it does not matter the size we have attained, only that we are growing. Movement is life. If we stop growing, we die; it doesn’t matter that we are 45 feet tall when we die or 2 feet tall; dead is dead. As long as we are growing we are alive; being alive, all living things are equal. We are not to judge ourselves or others as to how well we produce nor the worth of what it is that we are capable of creating. That is according to the design of God. That is God’s business. We must leave those things to God, what we do not understand, and trust. That we offer our lives, whatever they may have to offer; and offer it all, in the best way we know how; that is all that is counted. All degrees and titles, all wealth and skill or ability disappear and will be no more. What is left is the heart. Our own heart is what we will never escape. the only judge that remains to judge us is ourselves and the standard is the truth of what we did and how we lived and what we became, and love is the balance that will determine whether we are a stone or a soaring eagle, or a human mind reflecting the thoughts of God throughout eternity; the mind of God is a holy pool and the thoughts of God are creative springs issuing up from the depths of love and beauty and wonder and spilling over in the rainbow lit waterfalls of eternity. They ripple through the universe to give it a heart beat. God is in love with the creations of time.
The truth is simple; it is plain if we look honestly. We can only see ourselves perfectly. We are the only ones we really need to see clearly after all. If we pay too much attention on others we loose sight of ourselves; if we loose our own way, we won’t see anyone else clearly anyway. Our eyes will go crooked. If we set our hearts on serving God through serving humanity and find love to lead us in our course, we will find many beautiful blessings in our lives. If we look to follow what leads us into service through God we will be touched by what is Holy. A blessing will pervade our own magical realm and life will move energies about us for the hovering of angels and sacred spirits. The ancestors of our people will stand before us and the holy souls of the unborn will be our rearguard. We will move with their prayers. Their blessings will touch down about our lives and the sacred mother earth will hold us close within her spirit. Beauty will be before and behind us and above and below us and all about us. When we loose sight of our purpose we loose our light. All that we achieved is only valuable if it is blessed. If it looses its blessing it can curse us also. We can be undermined by our own greatnesses. We must be careful. We must walk in a prayerful way. If we fall from the good red road or loose our state of spiritual harmony, we may realize it because we are not moving towards blessed things that serve humanity and the future children and our Mother Earth who looks after all. We must watch ourselves carefully and see what we think and say and feel or do. We must be a guardian over our own selves so that we might catch ourselves when we get caught in dissonant patterns, or disharmony. We must avoid disharmony because it can harm us and our relatives. It can be called ugliness. It is not safe to get into that. It will poison us and it can cause accidents or illnesses or even kill; that’s how serious it is. The most dangerous way it can show up is in backbiting. Backbiting can injure the spirit of participants and of the person who is targeted. Only if they have protection against it they might be immune to its harm. In the Navajo way we say, “Do a Jinee da”. It translates to “Don’t back bite”. or don’t say those things. I remember how traditionalists took these things very seriously, even gravely. If even a hint of questionable conversation, what might now even be thought to be ill will by most people, but where the discussion of someone became questionable somehow, someone of the traditional minded persons would stop it right then and there. They would say it like a warning, maybe with a little of a hushed lower than normal voice, “Do a Jini da!”. Then everyone would be silent, head looking down. No one would move for a while because of almost like a reprimand or warning that maybe something was going into a questionable direction. These are good ways to live. It is good to be careful. Us humans need to live in a thin area of God’s creation where life is good for us. We only live in this place God made for us and so we need to take good care of it. By keeping on the look out to make sure we don’t harm each other spiritually, we can become closer to God which is the only place it is worth working toward. It is our life. We can choose harmony or dissonance. There’s a reason we don’t like sounds like the feedback from a microphone. They capture the feeling of imbalance which we know can injure our souls. When we are moving with the right spirit and looking beyond our own ambitions to helping this world be better, then we are at peace inside. If we begin to loose our focus and don’t care about being a part of the blessings that God created for us to work with in this world then we will hear it in our own minds and know the truth. We will look at others and begin to find a problem if we can find one, or imagine a problem for someone else. We want to justify our lack of spiritual ambition and so we need to convince our self that we are good, or better than we really are. We look for someone that we can find a fault with to lift our self up. This cannot lift us anywhere but we can trick ourselves when we want to trick ourselves. We have to be willing to be tricked like that. Similarly we will find faults with others who are working to help others or have some cause that will be helpful in our world. Our spirit does not like that these persons shine light that makes our true condition visible to us. We need to discredit them so that they will not make our truth known plainly. We feel it as jealousy or envy or malice toward them. Even hatred maybe. This is because we cannot stand our self. The Holy Essence has a way for us to live and we are disobedient to our own well-being and joy. So we get a life that has no joy. We feel bad feelings and put them on others that make us see our own state of being. That is why we put down or laugh at someone who we think we can portray as less than us. That way we reassure our self that we are doing well. If we find ourselves doing that we must know instantly that we have lost our pathway and poisons are getting into us. This is how we can get hurt or our relatives get hurt.
Of course traditional societies always have ways to get thing back in harmony and corrected. These ceremonies bless the whole world also. By bringing one person back into harmony the family and clans are restored to harmony too. This reaches out to the whole tribe and the world also. Traditional Indians and Indigenous societies all over the world are using prayers and ceremonies to try to restore balance to our world all the time. They are trying to keep our world from going into dissonance and being destroyed. This is what worries us nowadays because they are all going extinct and our own traditional people in this country are disappearing. These ways are being lost and no one is following them much anymore. We are praying to find a way for this situation to slow down and turn back. We need to protect these people who are trying to keep the Earth and humanity in a blessed way and not loose the way that the creator set down for human kind to live. That is what the Tree of Life Guardianship came about to seek help in doing. Protecting these traditional people and keeping the Earth alive and getting things back to a place where life will continue on and be able to give good things for the generations who are following our own footsteps on Earth. We can help them to help us make it all work out by protecting the lands that they look after and steward and by supporting them in their ceremonies and prayers to help us and keep the Earth in order and in balance. Anything we can accomplish we consider a great blessing and a gift. Each action can have an eternal effect. It all adds up to make a huge difference that may make ‘the difference’. If enough people have a change of heart we will need to have a lot of gratitude, first to God, and then for one another. We can also be grateful to ourselves that we got to be a part of this and were blessed to help make a difference. Something that really mattered while we lived on this earth. That something is something that we will carry on into eternity with us. We will be able to look back on it and find where and how we touched the earth and the future generations in a good way. We will find there a little paradise where our spirit lives and the memory of that place will be a garden that we can forever find great pleasure in recalling. We will observe the changes and the beautiful things that pass down through many generations of humans and fan out to reach into the lives of those they touch. Each act has endless repercussion and goes on indefinitely. Our potential good will last forever. We must come together and make that good as one for each other. That is the kind of oneness that Jesus taught and it is how our ancestors lived for one another here on this American continent, on this Earth a long time ago. A few remain with us still today; they are the echoes of the grandfathers and grandmothers, the whisperings of the spirit of all good. God talks to and through us, the people He has fashioned of light and of clay. This opportunity to bless ourselves is wonderful. I will tell what I was told by a young man who is my friend. He said, “If an opportunity comes, reach out and get a hold of it, because you might never see it come back again.”All of the wars and small pox and starvation could not defeat Traditional Indian society. That is why there are still some here with us today. They keep living the spiritual way of life that their relatives were living at the time of the invasions. They show how strong love and prayer is. Even great armies and deceit and trickery did not conquer them. Yet, the seduction of the materialistic world is kidnapping more children than boarding schools did. The temptations have gotten to the youth and they haven’t been listening to the elders and the spiritual teachings anymore. That’s what is mostly killing Indian beliefs. In fact, over the last couple of decades some very strong traditional parts of America have been disintegrating. It is temptation and greed that have crept in and changed the youth before they could get enough understanding to know how blessed and special these cultures are. What has been happening, is the youth don’t have wisdom yet and are taught to mock the old ways. The traditional spiritual leaders have been stripped of political power for 2 hundred years, but they still kept honor in the heart of the communities until recent decades. when temptations for an easy and fun, irresponsible life got in there and started capturing the attention of the young through television and interaction with nontraditional youth, that’s where the war to survive as ‘true Earth people’ started to be lost. As the youth became disillusioned with Native ways of life, because of too many commercials, they saw how the traditionalist had no power in the world anymore. They saw how the ‘old ways’ were about building self-respect through self-discipline. But the market world says, ‘Why do that when every thing’s free? Why expose yourself to the elements when we have blankets?’
The part that really hurts most of everything that I’ve seen happening is that many native people criticize the traditionalists. they get cut down in a million ways, and it seems like it never stops for them, they hardly get a rest from it all. I carry a deep sadness over it. When I think back to the abuses that materialism did to our elders through their own relatives that’s the thing that is sadist to see. Probably every Indian and every kind person who cares and has been in, ‘on the ground’, on the Earth, knows what I’m talking about. Its pretty hard to talk about these things. They hurt too much. But in the silence of our hearts, we all pretty much know. The strong traditionalists have been the subject of more attacks and more hatred than anyone else has endured. The ones that really stood up and lived the Indian way of life are always ridiculed greatly. And seems like few ever cared much for so many of them.
I was saying some things about Thomas Banyacya, about people accusing him of getting rich and all the other hurtful things that were commonly being pointed, like arrows, and shot at him. I don’t know how many of those arrows hit him and hurt him, but I myself heard a lot of bad words and negative judgments about him in the villages near where he lived. I can tell you that he didn’t deserve any of those arrows. He was a very genuine and respectful, respectable man. He had a good heart for the people, all people, and even those who said those things. Also what was said proved false. No one even checked the situation out to see if he was off course or not. and if he was, the right thing to do is to help him, even if it is to give him hard words directly to his face if he was really far in the wrong. No one even looked into it, and all someone like I knew to do was soften us things by adding a good thing about him. In a week or two, if his name came up somewhere, you’d hear those angry things spinning around again. and the fact of these things, what was being said, is that they were contrived. They were rumors that certain unknown people were making up about Thomas, and David Monongye, Dan Evahema, and other spiritual leaders and traditional chiefs living there on the mesas. I know that Martin Gashweseoma went through these same things too. In fact, all of the traditionalists were starting to be looked at as backward and useless at those times.
The truth is that when Thomas passed away his family had hardly a dime to bury him with. That’s how much riches he had gotten a hold of and pulled together for himself. But like Jesus, there were few who have been as rich as he was. He was rich in his heart and he knew something. Something that few know well; it is very hard to know ‘it’; it is clean and simple; it is unknown to most people; ‘it’ is matter of the heart.
I think children know it better than anyone else on Earth. It is what matters, it is what we are in the end needing, and looking for whether we know it or not; our hearts will not rest until we find it, because that’s what we were created to find, we can’t not look for it. If we quest for money, the drive behind that business of getting money is really that same One thing. Love of others is the only one path that we can trust to find it. Romantic love lets us glimpse it, and the magic of ‘it’ flows through that experience. The hunger to be accepted and admired is caused by the need (deep within us) to find ‘it’ also.‘It’ is Oneness. Offering our lives in service to all humanity, our Mother the Earth, and the Ways of God’s teachings, is ‘how’ we begin to merge with that path. We each find our own way. We have to create it ourselves; we have to decide to do it and then give all of our energies and efforts toward that single purpose. There is no other way; there is no easy way out; we must find love in our work and we must work for God’s love.
What it is isn’t important but giving ourselves to God in some way, is. Then we live out our lives for this. We come to know ourselves and become whole. Our life makes sense; God puts the fingerprint of authentication on our foreheads and on our stomachs, and on the top of our heads at that point. As long as we remember to keep giving ourselves away to God, by searching to make this world a place for the future children to enjoy, we know we are following it, hunting it. And we will reach it, again and again, just like the Huichol capture it with each deer that they bring home.
The Huichol cry. They cry because of the sacrifice it made. They cry because they love it. They cry because they have found it. They cry because it means that their own lives will continue on. They cry because it means that they will be entering into ceremony and meeting the spirit of One like unto Jesus, who they call Kayumari. So right away, the deer is covered with sacred plumed arrows and beadwork and medicine objects and there are so many colors and feathers that this deer looks very beautiful to see. And everyone stands around it and silently cries.The medicine man chants the holy stories of this holy animal and everyone remembers these stories and they know they have been blessed by this deer coming. Then everyone circles around and the deer is given a taste of blue corn mush, and water, and then some chocolate and each person tastes some of it after the deer tastes it. It is the same way the people feed each other with their fingers. We put some of our food into our relatives mouth as they put some of it into our mouth. and then the inner circle moves and the outer circle moves the other way and we feed the next person as they feed us. and the whole circle feeds itself, and we are part of it, we are that circle.
The deer is what we feed each other as small blue corn deers in our bowls. and the deer and the people are one. Huichol are deer people. It is what feeds the people and unites the people. This circle goes around and around like the sun and the moon and the Earth go around forever. The Huichol have been doing at least 18,000 years now. The tears of Huichol fall like streaming rain which drips off the cheeks and onto the face of the deer.
The deer is the circle of the people. The Spirit of the deer, the Eternal Soul of Kayumari, has been alive in the circle of Huichol communal life since the dawn of time. This understanding of Oneness was once kept with all people when they lived Indigenous lifestyles; when they remembered the respect of life, respect of the Earth. Through God we must respect one another, as if we were all the parts of one body; fingers of one hand; leaves and branches of one tree. We are a oneness and God loves all of His children equally.
This is what I learned from the Hopi spiritual chief, this teaching about what it is to be a human. The word Hopi, they said, is not a tribe exactly.That racism, which came like small pox contagions from overseas, is killing our Indian people. That is what the elders explain. They say, “Racism is killing our people. It kills the spirit of the Indian way.” Small pox was not invented by Europeans. It might have originated somewhere else like Africa or Asia. It is hard to know where it first got started. The European were infected with it when they came to America. It is a physical disease and like other plagues it killed a lot of people everywhere it went. Europeans were more used to it, like they were used to alcohol. By the time they came to America most European survivors had resistance to it. We cannot blame anyone for inventing it. No one wants things like that around their families. Racism is a sickness of the soul. It infects the spirit of humans and kills it. This sickness has been with humanity a long time. It has poisoned people everywhere, on every continent for thousands of years. Like small pox it got out of hand and became an epidemic, a plague, here in this country and around the world in modern times. There is no point in blaming anymore. Blame won’t cure anything. We have to work together to find a way to heal ourselves now. As soon as racism comes in, the old traditional ways go out; they leave. It is like a friend and a foe to the heart of traditional life. The friend, which is the pathway of the spirit, will stay until the foe enters. If we let the foe, which is racism in, the friend leaves right away. The old ways are about oneness, the unity of God with the human being and Nature. This is like the trinity. When they are one there is harmony. Humankind must be as one single being within itself. Humankind must move in sacred motion with God on the right path set down for us to live according to. Humanity must realize its Oneness with Nature and the Earth and the elements. It is like a divine ecosystem where all the parts work together to compliment one another and serve the needs of the entire system. Humans must learn to do this with each other by regaining the traditional Indigenous way of the heart. We must work together like life does in an ecosystem of Nature. We musts take care of Nature so that it takes care of us and we can continue on as a species of sacred beings that are able to mirror God. God set down the way for us to become one; one with God, one with man; one with Nature. The whole creation of God reflects God and man as a part of that creation, if he turns to the teachings of God, reflects the harmony of nature within himself. The human can enlighten reality as the sun enlightens the Earth, if he seeks his light from the true source of light; which is the first fire, which is God. That’s why racism is killing our Indian people as the traditionalists say. It makes us fragmented beings. When you divide yourself up from others you separate yourself from the center, from the circle. You can no longer be one within yourself; one with Nature , one with the spirit. There is nothing left of the traditional way of life but a shell--an empty shell. In the Hopi prophesies a time was foretold where a great destruction would come upon the earth. They call it the ‘Day of the Great Purification.’ They said that in that Day there would be villages or pueblos of stone built on prairie’s of stone. These villages would be so high that you could not see the sun when it rose in the East. In these villages of stone the people would wander without life in them. They would be as hollow eggshells. There would also be many Indian people there at that time as well who would also be as hollow eggshells. Indigenous ceremonies must be filled with the life of the people. If the people are dead the ceremonies are dead too. That is why they say that the traditional ways are a way of the heart. Anyone could be a traditionalist no matter what part of the Earth they come from. There are traditional Indigenous ways in Africa and Australia and even Europe which are Native to those places. They all lead the traditionalist from those lands to the same place that Native people of Siberia or Latin or North America find when they follow the traditional ways here. It is One heart. It is a place of reunion with wholeness, it is a return to the sacred.
David Monongye once told me that originally Hopi meant the people who lived as one with the Great Spirit. The word only means ‘peaceful people’. It never meant a tribe. Only the clans that ended up in Oraibi were mostly following the pathway of the Great Spirit and were therefore peaceful people. Not all of the people that reached Oraibi were really Hopi. Some were not. Still most were for a long time.
He said that the way of the Hopi was living in accordance with divine laws that instructed the people how to live and do things. One of the things that they had to follow as Hopi was that if anyone asked permission to live with the Hopis in Oraibi, then they were told to go back and pray about it.
They had to search their hearts and make sure that they were willing to live the Hopi ways of life. If they felt right about it they were to come back in four days. Then when they came back they would be taught about how a person must behave and conduct himself as a Hopi and then to leave and go pray about it again. Each time they were taught more of the disciplined life of a Hopi and the love, respect, and humility of being a Hopi and how Hopi must help each other out and all that would be required of them as a Hopi. On the fourth time, if they came back then they would be admitted to the villages and had to live as a Hopi. they had to participate in the ceremonial life of the people and plant corn as all traditional Hopi do.
It is a simple way of life to live but it is beautiful and right. David said that the people who came to the mesas as Hopi have mostly forgotten what that means and there are not many Hopi left today. He said there might be some Hopis out in the world that we don’t know about. A long time ago Tewa Indians came to the mesas and were eventually admitted. They are in Hano village near Polacca on first mesa today. They are Hopis even though they came as Tewa. People sometimes call them Tewa and the Tewa say they are Tewa also nowdays because everything is splitting apart. the Hopi ways are dying.Now some Hopi believe they are superior to other Indians too. And they think they are better than the white and black people. But they don’t live the Hopi way of life anymore and so they are not Hopi themselves. People who live according to the plan of the Great Spirit are Hopi; those who have fallen away from it are Kahopi (not Hopi). That’s what it means, as I was shared that understanding by spiritual leaders among the Hopi people.
