From: Peshewegunzh <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia!peshe>
Subject: Re: Indian & European Spirituality
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 04:52:17 GMT

Original-Sender: Peshewegunzh <mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia!peshe>

Gary Trujillo wrote:

> The dispute ... seems to rely on assumptions that there is a choice
> to be made between understanding the world scientifically or by means of
> spiritual consciousness.

I do not believe in such a dichotomy; rather, that truth materially and
spiritually is fully integrated. Otherwise, either one or the other
become irrelevant, as shown by certain eastern religions which think nothing
of suffering or practical attempts to alleviate it, since it is an outer
illusion to their mode of consciousness, or western materialists who
may belong to a religious organization which helps them feel better only
in order to go on satisfying their daily material lusts.

It is well understood, (or sadly, was) by Indian communities that all
material things have a spiritual source. Even when this degenerated to
a life of fear seeking to appease various capricious spirits thought to
be attached or even synonymous with animals and plants, or localities, it
is closer to the truth than the completely sterile and mechanistic way that
alienated western culture expresses its misunderstandings of reality,
emptying the world of meaning and relevance. It should be realized that
both contain power since both express certain incomplete aspects of the
truth, but their inadequacies cause grave, yet differing problems for
their adherents in practice.

> My main aim in my previous articles was to ask what is meant by "Great
> Spirit" as it was originally understood by North American Native people.

Kahkewaquonaby, a respected Ojibwa leader, spoke in 1829:

"The white man believes in one God - the Indian believes in the Great
Spirit.

"The Indian believes in subordinate deities - and the white man believes
in angels.

"The white man believes in a future existence - a heaven and a hell. The
Indian believes in a future state of rewards and punishments."

> I find myself wondering whether Native spirituality is based more
> on an experiential understanding of deity than on codified belief, and if
> the connection of Great Spirit and the natural world is possibly due to
> a greater understanding of how the connectedness of all things in the
> natural world partakes of what we in the Western tradition might call
> "divinity," and whether this Native spirituality might, to a much greater
> extent than mainstream Christianity, understand the connectedness between
> this natural divinity and what could be called "divine" within ourselves,
> putting it more in the mystical tradition of something like Christian
> Gnosticism.

Experiential belief and codified belief can exist simultaneously, and
do not need to be in contradiction. In other words, a cross-cultural
experience of objective truth is possible, and reality a shared
perception. There can be no empowering change without a certain sort of
spiritual experience, and codifying allows practical objective evaluation
in the material world. The danger is that codifying alone can be empty and
hypocritical if it essentially denies the reality of the spiritual
experience by refusing it. That is one reason why I think a religion or
spirituality based solely on materialism is doomed to failure at carrying
out its ideals.

I think the failure of gnosticism, as I understand it, is its attempt
to separate the spiritual from the material, and also to make a mystery
of the spiritual that can only be conveyed through an elite. On the
contrary, to avoid mere codification of an elite's subjective experiences
every person must have such a unifying experience, which can then be
evaluated in relation to others, while still being highly personal.

> And it's quite understandable why, especially among
> the "better educated," there is so little interest or participation in
> organized forms of religious practice, unless it be "for the sake of our
> children," whom we may feel should be exposed to some kind of moral
> influence.
>
> Can we say the same of Native people?  Is this same trend of abandoning
> religious tradition as a function of education observable among indigenous
> people as well?

The problem with this question is that compulsory education as devised by
European America, as a kind of alliance between bureaucrats and industrialists,
for the peculiar social and financial goals of that elite group,
is equated with being "better educated."  That may not be the case at all, and
I myself am firmly convinced that it is not. The nature of this indoctrination
is such that the longer one is exposed to it and the more successful at
conforming to the process one becomes, the more one will tend to believe
absolutely what it teaches, and the more one will be willing to believe one
is at an advanced stage of understanding.

Such forms of indoctrination have been used against our Indian nations, quite
openly in the past as a way of destroying our viability as potentially
competitive and threatening entities. Indian ways were to obliterated and
their propagation was physically and legally punished. To this day, this
assault has not ceased. So it should be no surprise that if becoming better
educated is seen as abandoning one's Indian identity, or redefining it in ways
acceptable to European hegemony, that values scorned by the Europeans will
be of less importance to those subjected to such cultural genocide.

Those who are "well-educated" by measuring their compliance with European
educational and societal goals are most often those who, on the reservation,
take on the roles of acting as middlemen for the distribution of dependence
inducing European government social welfare programs, or by
becoming the Indians recognized as tribal governments by the European
governing agencies, a phenomenon discussed with attention to its
illegitimacy by Peter d'Errico and others. Obviously, by their association
with the powerful occupying regime, their economic and personal status is
enhanced, while their knowledge and experience of spirituality erodes. But
I think it is essential to question whether they really understand what they
are doing, as being really educated should imply, or whether they are
actually helping their nations in the short or long term. Recent experiences
on our reserve in Canada tend to prove rather dramatically that they are not.

> | I think perhaps that it might be time for European America to
> | relearn the particular spiritual values that might be shared from
> | Indians, with our unique experiences. Perhaps this message was
> | given to us for safekeeping for when the Europeans' children would
> | forget what it really meant.

Someone wrote to me about their noticing that Europeans often admire Indians'
respect for the teachings and views of our elders, while at the same time
ironically being only too eager to trash their own elders' traditions, not to
mention the elders themselves.


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