Learning from indigenous people about how to be indigenous...

Crow people...

If you begin to identify with animism as a way of being in the world and perceiving your world, then you begin to see that the world is full of people. As Graham Havery puts it the world is full of other than human persons. A few moments ago I was sitting and reading in a very nice local bakery, with a native plant garden in the back. My attention was drawn up wards to the power lines by the voice of a Crow cawing and growling only in the way a Crow can , at mail man walking by.
"You tell 'em Crow!" I thought to my self.
The Crow then spoke louder at some Crows down the street, who called back to him and he left, flying to join them. I could not help to think that this Crow was a member of a Crow tribe, family or community ( or murder) of local Crows. They were Indigeous to this place, native tribes, among many other than human natives tribes living as one with the bioregion I live within. Crow tribes, Raccoon tribes, Fir tribes, nomadic Red Winged Black Bird tribes, clans and collectives of sentient exstentions of this earth. All interconnected, living expressions of the earth and sky.
I started thinking of how many people including my self have, in the attempt to learn how to live as a native to the place we live have only sought guidance from the natives of our own species, human tribes, "indigenous people" to this place or even to other places. The term "indigenous people" rolled around in my head for sometime...
"Well the Crow is a person, Crows are indigenous people. Why not just learn from the other than human indigenous people?"
In fact many human indigenous peoples have origin stories of learning from the other than human people on how to live, a story that is relived through their daily lives, through ritual, ceremony and just daily activities, such as hunting gathering and the cultivation of small crops. All of life assisting each other in the act of being.
Many of us have looked continuously for education on how to live as a native, how to be an animist, or a shaman, from the indigenous people of our own species, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes inapproriately and naively appropriating, and emulating cultural practices and life ways of other groups of people ( the ways of bioregions other than your own, and your own way of relateing to that bioregion), sometimes adopted into traditions and life ways within or outside of their own bioregion. Many times we hear the words of indigenous peoples decrying these practices, elders speaking out against their traditions being practiced by people that are not of their tribes ( not of their bioregion and not with their own established bioregional relationships), and making the request that we learn our own way of being native.
My feeling has always been to respect these requests and go to the source of these ways, the inspiration for these life ways and discover my own way of being one with the land and sky. We still need teachers though! When I approach many people who are earth focused spiritual practitioners this is the point that is often focused on. We don't know how, he have lost our traditional ways of living as one with the earth and we need guidance. I don't doubt that, I feel the need for guidance all the time!
In many of the native origin stories animals ( as well as plants and all other natural beings, mountains, stones, rivers and forces of nature...) took pity on humans, because they were ill equipped to live in the wild and just pitiful beings to look upon, they offered themselves to their younger relatives the humans and decided to help them as best they could, teaching them how to live, gifting them powers so they could live well and be aware of spirit, they offered their bodies and skins to them so they could be well and warm and fed. They taught them religion, and crafts, langauge, everything humans persons learned they learned from other than human persons, who were their elders.
Looking at that Crow seeing him as an Indigenous person, an elder that had been here before humans had ever learned to dance or speak or be, reminded me that we need to go back to the beginning again, ask the the other than human indigenous people of our bioregions to take pity on us and teach us how to live. Our obsession on learning and communicating with only our own species has created much folly, identifying other humans as the only source of knowledge and wisdom has severed us from the natural world so to speak or at least we have lost the ears to understand its speech.
It was inspiring to know that we are surrounded by indigenous tribes of other than human persons who are willing to assist us in living well, if we approach them with the respect we would give to any elder of our own species. I have come to feel through my communion with the spirit of place, the bioregion I live within and all the other than human persons I live with, that there is a desperate need that nature has to speak with us, to help us live in balance, to help us become native. Almost a crying out to get our attention! The Crow I saw today was most definitely telling the passing mail man something, quite possibly a joke by the sound of her voice!
Through taking on the perspective of a Bioregional animist there is no end to the wealth of information, wisdom, and wellness we can gleam from the cultivation of intimate relationships with all of the other than human teachers and compatriots of our bioregion. There is so much help available to us, so many relationships waiting to made, allegiances waiting to be developed to help us become native to our bioregions.

The parable of the box

Sitting on the salmon box

The parable of the box by Derrick Jensen....

" The box is full of salmon, and a man sits atop of this box. Long ago man hired armed gaurds to keep any one from eating his fish. The many people who sit next to the empty river starve to death. But they do not die of starvation. They die of beleif. Everyone beleivesthat the man atop the box owns the fish. The soldiers beleive it, and they will kill to protect the illusion. The others beleive it enough and they are willing to starve. But the truth is that there is a box, there is an emptied river, there is a man sitting atop the box, there are guns, and there are starveing people."

Low synergy cultures or "aggressive cultures reward actions that empahisise personal gain, even when and especialy when that gain harms others in the community."
"Nonagressive cultures eliminate the polarity between selfishness and alturism by makeing the two identical: In a "good" culture, the man atop the box from the parable above would have been scorned, despised, exiled, or other wise prevented from damageing the community. To behave in such a selfish and destructive manner would be considered insane. Even had he concieved such a perposturous idea as hording all of the fish, he would have been absolutely disallowed because the box was held at the exspense of the majority, as weell as at the exspense of future generations. For him to be a rich and influential member of a "good" ( high synergy culture) culture, he would have had to give away as many or all of the fish. the act of giving would have made him rich in esteem. But he never would have been allowed to strip the river. There would have ben no fear with the regard to the "gift" of fish, for social arrangements would have made him securein his knowledge that if his next fishing trip failed his more succsessful neighbors would feed him just as this time he had fed them." Derrick Jensen A Langauage Older than Words...

This has stuck me so many times as to be the natural ethic that can emerge from a people that view the world as alive, as full of persons instead of objects.

For those of us that have choosen or felt the call to be animist people or for those fo us that have felt the call to take eon the role of shaman, we know that so much work needs to be done! We can no longer allow or encourage people to sit upon the box. Whether the box is filled by food, knowledge, or any other human or other than human need, we can no longer support this unsustainable system.
Bioregional Animism aserts that we are our bioregion, we are an expression of our bioregion mind, body and spirit, an exstension of our bioregion, like the fingers of a hand. The wisdom and knowledge we gain through this awarness any thing we have cannot be owned or viewed as our own but instead it is viewed as another liveing exstention of the
bioregion itself, of the earth, sky and of the entire cosmos. We can no longer keep anything in the box and still call our selves animists or shamans or earth loving people.

All must be free.

The Eagle and Salmon viewed here are local members of my bioregion. The photo was taken on the Squamish river, by who I have no idea but I thank them, and I thank Eagle and Salmon for simply being...

Transrational Bioregional linguistics...The language of the land

Please check out transrational bioregional linguistics on my tribes blog


Transrational bioregional linguistics is just the simple act of listening to the land and learning to speak as it.
Out of the 6000 known languages in this world one is lost every day at this point in our history. I need not point out how much is lost when a language is lost, an entire way of knowing and relating to the universe dies, along with much, much more.
With the amazing loss of ecosystem-human relationship dynamics that occurs with the loss of each language, it is important that we begin to know the languages of the land again.
Thomas Berry said...
"The universe is composed of subjects to commune with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice." "Some how we have become autistic. We don't hear the voices."-Thomas Berry...

Perhaps we do actually hear the voices but we don't understand the language any more. Transrational bioregional linguistics attempts to remedy this.


TRANSRATIONAL BIOREGIONAL LINGUISTICS:

This is something that has been coming back to me more and more lately as a really important idea. I know you may have noticed my love of big words here. But transrational bioregional linguistics is I guess the best way I can express my experiences in terms of an idea. A simpler way of putting this would be 'rediscovering the language of the land and sky we are but expressions of. From what I have learned from four years of long dancing is that we are as Beautiful Painted Arrow put it " the land dancing". In his book Ceremonies of the living spirit, he discusses that each region has its own language, and that native languages are an expression of that regions language. This was inspiring when I read this because it was something I had been thinking about my self, it was actual something I was experiencing. In those moments of existing in liminal space, feeling my oneness with my surroundings, I would verbalize words that were not english they were not any language I had ever heard before actual. It was not glossolalia or speaking in tongues either. The words had a felt meaning not a definition attached to them relying on a rational approach to language. The definition of these words didn't feel all that important at first, they just flowed from my mouth, and I spent time feeling them out intuitively realizing the meaning. The first that kept coming through me was this " Da shooska heysk" over time I paid attention to when I would say this sentence, why, and I paid attention to what it felt like to say it, the felt meaning of this sentence was "this is spirit" but do not take this as a translation into english really. Though I have attempted to do so, translation rarely does a language justice.
I began realizing that all I needed to do was open up and commune with my surroundings and I would hear the words within me, I could verbalize these words and I began to realize that within the felt context of these words was a different way of knowing and thinking, which cannot really be translated into english, but can be felt and known by others who 'tune' into into the feeling/knowing themselves.
I started to realize that the words coming through me were the language of the land and sky I lived within, the other than human beings that I shared this spirit of place with would commune with me in this way as well, I could ask them their names and hear these words in my head, I could ask for a translation into english to help me understand the language, but as I said this never really did the words justice, each bioregion and place offers a diverse way of perceiving the world, of thinking and being, that may have similarities to the english tongue but are drastically different.
I started to realize that the only way to really start learning this language was to begin speaking it and helping other's in my bioregion to establish the same intuitive discourse with the land and sky and all of the other than human persons we co-habitate with. This is the project so far. I have shared the idea with others and had pleasurable results from a friend in the UK who tuned into the same type of I suppose you could call it intuitive linguistic perception. His poem was published my blog here.... bioregionalanimism.blogspot.com/20...tml Its called Inviroment.
This was very encouraging it showed that others could do the same thing, they could feel and know the land in the same way, but in a way that reflects the amazing diversity of the land itself.

There are many good reasons for developing new languages, especially in this way. First and foremost is to preserve and perpetuate a perceptual and cognitive diversity based upon an ecological sensitivity. Resisting the devastating effects of an encroaching mono-culture. Secondly I feel that it helps us give up the systems of control we have learned and perpetuate through the way we think and behave. By asking what an other than human persons name is we recognize that being is a person, not a thing to control, be a rock or mountain, or tree, or force of nature, or frog, or a bioregion itself, or even the moon. When you name a thing you take away its freedom to exist as a free, autonomous, intelligent being. When this happens it is as the old saying goes "to name a thing is to have power over a thing". Many of us are beginning to see that having power over instead of power with has been a source of suffering for not just human persons but other than human persons. so with in this way of learning a language of the earth, you do not name, you learn the name through transpersonal modes of communication.
Transrational bioregional linguistics is a co-creative way of learning about the natural world and your place in it, it is the act of giving up our domination of the natural world starting with the place it all began, in our minds and hearts, in the way we relate to the world and all of our relations.