Prospero's Books

With the whole tribe or whole earth in mind

In his book A Time before Deception, Thomas W. Cooper writes (p. 93) that native peoples around the world have "specific moral standards for communication." Those he lists are provocative standards for all of us who speak or write--that is, all of us:

1. listening fully with the heart, no matter how trivial or wrong the discussion may seem;
2. not interrupting another's communication;
3. not walking between conversants;
4. speaking softly, especially to elders;
5. speaking only by invitation when among a group of elders;
6. avoiding slander and defamation of all kinds;
7. communicating as an individual (contributing independent ideas to the council) first, then communicating in synch with the group (once policies have been set);
8. truth-telling;
9. inner communicating (morning and evening sanctification, periods of guidance) must precede outer communicating, openness to the Great Spirit is essential;
10. communicating with the whole tribe or whole earth in mind so as to honor others.

The Hoop of Life

At Changing Places, Donna Woodka reprints a poem attributed to Dave Chief, an Oglala Lakota. It's interesting that the Judeo-Christian tradition tends to see the unity of all living things vertically, in a "tree of life" or a "great chain of being," while this Native American writer envisions . . .

The Circle

The Circle has healing power. In the Circle we are all equal.
When in the Circle, no one is in front of you. No one is behind you.
No one is above you. No one is below you.
The Sacred Circle is designed to create unity.
The Hoop of Life is also a circle.
On this hoop there is a place for every species,
every race, every tree, and every plant.
It is this completeness of Life that must be respected
in order to bring about health on this planet.
To understand each other,
as the ripples when a stone is tossed into the waters,
the Circle starts small and grows…
until it fills the whole lake.

The animism of the alphabet

Scott London has posted a fascinating interview with David Abram, writer, environmentalist, and magician. One of Abram's observations:

Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!

It's outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It's an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it's animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

In fact, it's such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.

(Thanks to Tim at Pop Occulture for the reference.)

God's dog: more than a palindrome

Fred Alan Wolf, in his book The Spiritual Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), writes that the trickster "comes to us as the shadow, that strange and complex set of traits we all have but hate to admit to" (220). He continues:

Since the soul within each individual often appears as the trickster, does anything like this occur to a society or perhaps to the world as a whole? In Native American traditions, such as the Navaho Nation's, the trickster appears during particular tribal rituals. The trickster/shaman dances and often acts the fool to remind the tribe to take an appropriate social action, usually one the tribe has been ignoring out of fear. Once the trickster has appeared, the people laugh and realize their collective folly.

. . . . The Coyote, although it weighs only about thirty pounds, is feared and distrusted by sheep ranchers in the United States and other countries. Yet it is considered to be God's dog by the native American peoples. They believe that to kill and skin the coyote releases its spirit and further upsets the balance of nature. To them it is as if we are killing a messenger from God. Perhaps we are.

The coyote is the trickster—the wolf we don't fear and the dog we can't trust—but has elements of both dog and wolf. The animal is bold and foolish, cautious and fearless, blending chaos and harmony. To some the coyote-trickster, existing in reality and myth, plays it both ways—calling both heads and tails when the coin is flipped. The coyote teaches us it is a mature elder and a reckless child. It is a clown, a force of nature, and a messenger (229-30).

Warriors

A surprise at Ft. Defiance Indian Hospital last week was that I was asked, for the first time in more than thirty years, for my military enlistment and discharge dates.

Of course, one reason for the question may have been to satisfy Federal bureaucratic requirements in this Public Health Service hospital. But I was told that the question was asked because of the great Navajo respect for military service.

If any people have reason to hate the U.S. military, it's the Navajo. A few elder Navajo remember the first-hand stories told them as children by survivors of the Long Walk. But I was told that Navajo have a higher rate of military service than most other populations in the United States. The main reason, I was told, was that the Navajo so value their land that they are willing to fight for its protection.

Most revered of all veterans, of course, are the few surviving "code talkers." And so they should be. We are all in their debt.

Desert hospitality

I saw a card this week with a proverb attributed to the Navajo:

Always assume your guest is tired, cold, and hungry, and act accordingly.

I thought of that saying today when we visited Wupatki National Monument, with its well preserved ruins of (possibly) Sinagua pueblos. The one pictured here is Wukoki Pueblo (which, by the way, figured in the film Easy Rider). On the trail from our car to the site, I was glad that Bette had brought water for us, and I thought about what it would have been like, when Wukoki was inhabited, to have arrived there without water. I hoped that the inhabitants would have assumed we were thirsty, and acted accordingly.

Arabs are also renowned for their hospitality. Does desert life inevitably give birth to this cultural value?

A force greater than human choice

An intriguing paragraph from Stephen Trimble's The People (see What I've Been Reading):

Each [Navajo] family has its own separate relationship to the sun—a more intimate relation with nature than with each other. Even when HUD houses or trailers stand alongside a hogan, the new houses generally face east. It's as if a giant magnet swept through and aligned every structure with a force greater than human choice (136).