[MD] Teachings of the American Earth (Part IV- Final)

[Heather Perella]

Pine Barrens... Tom Brown opened a school in Florida,
too.  

shaman community:  Zen sangha
vision quest:  meditation  
cultural stories (remember Jumping Mouse):  koans
sitting on a mountain:  sitting on a mountain
smoking sacred, staghorn sumac pipe:  tea ceremony
fire:  everyday life
    

familiar heart,
SA


     [x]
> Arlo and anyone who is interested,
> There is a school in new jersey dedicated to the
> teachings of the old
> ways in a way for modern folks to participate in
> Without pestering your local Indian tribe ..
> It teaches everything from survival to philosophy..
> I've read Tom Browns books since I was a boy.
> Check it out @  www.trackerschool.com
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
> [mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org] On Behalf
> Of Arlo Bensinger
> Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 9:37 AM
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: [MD] Teachings of the American Earth (Part
> IV- Final)
> 
> This is Part IV of the Introduction to "Teachings of
> the American Earth,
> Indian Religion and Philosophy" by Dennis and
> Barbara Tedlock.
> 
> =========================
> 
> But it is not enough to share the visions of others
> [all this talk about
> Quality isn't Quality? -Arlo]. Over much of North
> America, young Indians
> are encouraged and even expected to seek their own
> visionary encounters
> with the other world. Indeed, the seeking is a
> prerequisite for
> adulthood itself. In some tribes, the first attempt
> may be made as early
> as age five, and in most it has to be made before
> adolescence. Among the
> Beaver, in the Mackenzie Basin, boys and girls go
> out alone to seek
> direct contact with the other world through the
> medium of animals.
> Ojibwa boys go into the woods to learn "seeing and
> hearing," to "fill
> their emptiness."  Among the Winnebago of Wisconsin,
> in a series of
> quests, both boys and girls went out to seek the
> blessings of a
> multiplicity of beings, "the spirits ... of the
> earth, those who are
> pinned through the earth, and those underneath the
> earth; and . . . all
> those in the waters, and all those on the sides of
> the earth." On the
> Plains, both men and women fasted for visions
> repeatedly throughout
> their lives, and sImilar fasts took place in some of
> the Pueblos .Among
> the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast, relationships
> with the beings of
> the other world were inherited, but even so the
> inheritor had to go on a
> fast to establish a personal acquaintance with them.
> Wherever there were
> secret societies, the initiate had to have visions
> of his own in order
> to rise to the highest ranks.
> 
> The American Indian's insistence on direct, personal
> religious
> experience remains preserved when he comes into
> contact with
> Christianity: he finds it difficult to accept
> experiences of the other
> world which are said to have happened two millennia
> ago and which are
> attested to only by a book. The Peyotist takes this
> problem into his own
> hands; as a Comanche once put it, "The White Man
> talks about Jesus; we
> talk to Jesus." Hearing this, J. S. Slotkin
> concluded that the Indian,
> epistemologically speaking, "is an individualist and
> empiricist; he
> believes only what he himself has experienced."
> 
> An empirical attitude toward the other world is a
> difficult one to put
> into action. It requires an emptying of the body and
> the mind, a
> humbling of the self before all other beings, "even
> the smallest ant."
> It is not as though the Indian were "close to
> nature" and therefore
> found such an experience easier to come by than
> ourselves; he speaks of
> the journey as carrying him to "the edge of the Deep
> Canyon," and he
> feels it as nothing less than death itself. While he
> is there he sees a
> universe where everything is not only animate, but a
> person, and not
> only a person but a kinsman. On his return from the
> journey he is
> reborn; he is no longer the same person he was
> before. 
> Having seen for himself the reality of the other
> world, he now has what
> William Blake called "the double vision," as opposed
> to "the single
> vision" of Newton. Alfonso Ortiz describes this
> double vision in the
> teachings of his Tewa elders, who "saw the whole of
> life as consisting
> of the dual quest for wisdom and for divinity." It
> is not that the
> Indian has an older, simpler view of the world, to
> which we as Newtonian
> thinkers have added another dimension, but that he
> has a comprehensive,
> double view of the world, while we have lost sight
> of one whole
> dimension.
> 
> The difference between the Indian view and our own
> is illustrated by an
> exchange which took place not long ago between an
> old man and a
> schoolboy in Montezuma Canyon on the Navajo
> Reservation. The boy asked
> where snow came from, and the old man told a long
> story about an
> ancestor who found a mysterious burning object and
> looked after it until
> some spirits came to claim it. They would not allow
> him to keep even a
> part of it, but instead put him to a series of
> tests. When he was
> successful at these tests, they promised they would
> throw all the ashes
> from their fireplace into Montezuma Canyon each
> year. 
> "Sometimes they fail to keep their word, and
> sometimes they throw down
> too much; but in all, they turn their attention
> toward us regularly,
> here in Montezuma Canyon." With the story over, the
> boy had a retort:
> "It snows at Blanding, too. Why is that?" The old
> man quickly replied,
> "I don't know. You'll have to make up your own story
> for that." To the
> anthropologist who had witnessed this exchange the
> old man later
> commented that "it was too bad the boy did not
> understand stories," and
> he explained that this was not really a story about
> the historical
> origin of snow in Montezuma Canyon or in any other
> place, but a story
> about the properly reciprocal relationship between
> man and other beings.
> He attributed the boy's failure to grasp the story
> to the influences of
> white schooling.
> 
> It would not have been the Indian way for the old
> man to have given the
> schoolboy a lecture about the true meaning of the
> story then and there,
> although he clearly could have. The proper exegesis
> of the story, if it
> comes, can only come from the boy's own experience
> in life. As Larry
> Bird, a young Keres, explains, "You don't ask
> questions when you grow
> up. You watch and listen and wait, and the answer
> will come to you. It's
> yours then, not like learning in school." What we
> learn in school is
> never ours; lectures by the experts can never
> produce in us the light
> which comes when suddenly and all alone, we know
> [Zen? -Arlo]. In our
> growing reliance on formal education, Beeman Logan
> tells us, we have
> come to underestimate our own potential as human
> beings:
> 
> You don't respect yourselves.
> You don't believe anything unless you can read it in
> a book.
> You have to learn to use your eyes.
> You have to learn to see with your eyes shut.
> 
> When we reflect about the way Indian religion has
> been studied, we can
> see the single vision in action. We have studied it
> solely with the eyes
> open and kept it outside. Our museums place
> once-sacred objects on
> display, so schoolchildren can examine their outward
> forms. 
=== message truncated ===


 
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