Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect in the Context of Cultural Diversity - Learning from Native American Philosophies with a Focus on the Haudenosaunee

Ntunnaquomen awassiishmattapsh yoteg, kekuttokaunta. ("I have had a good dream, come sit by the fire, let us talk together.") - From the Algonkian language of my Masachuseuck ("Massachusett") Native American ancestors, adapted from R. Williams (1936). So [the Peacemaker] passed from settlement to settlement finding that men desired peace and would practice it if they knew for certainty that others would practise it too. But first, after leaving the hunters [the Peacemaker] sought the house of a certain woman who lived by the warrior's path which passed between the east and the west. When [the Peacemaker] arrived, the woman placed food before him and, after he had eaten, asked him his message. "I carry the Mind of the Master of Life," he replied, "and my message will bring an end to the wars between east and west." "How will this be?" asked the woman, who wondered at his words, for it was her custom to feed the warriors passing before her door on their way between the east and the west. "The word that I bring," he said, "is that all peoples shall love one another and live together in peace...." "Thy message is good," said the woman, "but a word is nothing until it is given form and set to work in the world. What form shall this message take when it comes to dwell among men?" "It will take the form of the longhouse," replied [the Peacemaker], "in which there are many fires, one for each family, yet all live as one household under one chief mother.... They shall be the Kanonsionni, the Longhouse. They shall have one mind and live under one law. Thinking will replace killing, and there shall be one commonwealth." - The Message of the Peacemaker to the Mother of the Nations, during the creation of the Haudenosaunee or "Iroquois" Confederacy, adapted from Wallace (1986). Indigenous peoples in the Andean world today define this moment of redefinition through the concept of Pachukutiq - literally the turning about of the times. In Quechuan and Aymara thought it means a change of direction. - Guillermo Delgado-P (1994) Introduction A major problem of the 21 st century will be the crisis of diverse, often-competing social/cultural identities among people uprooted by corrosively powerful global economic combines. This crisis will be significant not just in itself, but because it has the direct consequence of undermining coordinated resistance to the destructiveness of global systems of power. In an era rushing toward mindless materialism, propelled by powerful, unfeeling economic syndicates that uproot both body and soul, more and more people will seek refuge in compartmentalized forms of social identity. However, the search for safety in such sealed compartments is by itself largely illusory. Fragmented, isolated, and unknowing of, or hostile to, one another, such isolation leaves people more, not less, vulnerable to the very forces of destruction from which they seek escape. Yet, the strong desire for rooted affiliation is not the source of the problem. The real difficulty is not that people desire such grounded affiliation in a culture, religion, community, cosmology, or philosophy. Rather, as Simone Well, writing in the dark days of exile from Nazi domination, observed in her book, The Need for Roots, "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul" (1952:41). The real dilemma we face is the lack of constructive and mutually respectful interaction among those diverse settings, rather than the diversity itself. Confronted and often confounded by a crushing, globalizing monoculture, supported by willing national elites, and imposed from the core regions of economic power, we are for the most part not becoming better-connected peoples despite "mass communications." Instead, we are being broken down into ever more atomized elements subordinated as mere uncommunicating parts of "mass culture. …