Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] JOHN MOHAWK An interview by Charlene Spretnak

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] JOHN MOHAWK An interview by Charlene Spretnak
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:36:23 -0700

A NATIVE VIEW OF NATURE
JOHN MOHAWK An interview by Charlene Spretnak
http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/articles/mohawk.htm

In American Indian culture, attention to nature is a spiritual
seeking. The natural world is our bible. We don't have chapters and verses;
we have trees and animals.

YOU HAVE SAID that Native American teachings about how to live on this
Earth could apply to all peoples. How much do you think the dominant
culture can really hear of Native American spiritual teachings?

A part of me wants to tell you they can't hear anything: the dominant
culture is too busy dominating But people can grasp the idea of our need to
celebrate. Celebrating the reality of the creation builds the human spirit.
When we think about the beauty of nature, it stirs our spirit to want to
enhance that beauty, to celebrate it.

The need to celebrate the creation doesn't seem to me to be a highly
debatable thing. It doesn't seem to me to be a terrifically difficult idea
to transfer. The important thing is for people not only to understand why
we Indians honour the creation, but to understand why they themselves need
to do it.

Do you think the reason people resist celebrating the web of life is
because of the culturally implanted fear that nature is out to get you?

Absolutely. All the Western fairytales portray the natural world as
foreboding and dark, a place where Hansel and Gretel got lost, where
Sleeping Beauty was surrounded by thorn bushes and an immense forest, where
Snow White was lost in the woods with the Seven Dwarfs. Nature is presented
as a place where you could get lost forever and starve to death and be
attacked by any number of creatures. The reason it's so important to get
people to cease fearing nature is that negative emotions invade one's
ability to think clearly. People who are afraid of nature have much more
difficulty defending it than people who are not. All of those negative
emotions give you permission to enact violence on nature.

I'd like to ask you about spiritual practice. Many people look to
Native American cultures and see you've had an unbroken line of
creation-centred spiritual practice for thousands of years.

Our ceremonies begin with an acknowledgment and greeting to the
creation. When people thank God for the food on their table, how about
adding a couple of things to it? How about giving thanks for the birds and
the trees and the waters and air and earth? That brings everybody's mind
right to the place it should be.

"God" has been presented as an anthropomorphic being, and male at that,
who presides over some kind of kingdom somewhere. In the native tradition
the Creator has a less specific personage, if it's even a personage at all.
The Creator could be time or space or energy or all of those. The Creator
could be everything there is. And the Creator could be our dream. But
whatever it is, we don't know, so we ought to be humble about that. Arid we
ought to be humble because we are really the tiniest little speck on a
little star in a not-very-large galaxy, on the edge of other galaxies that
may be among billions and billions of galaxies that we've never heard of
and never will. Ultimately the universe is infinite.

Now you don't derive ritual out of anxiety; you derive ritual out of
experiences. If you have a positive experience, then you celebrate it.

My culture's ceremonies came out of things that happened. Some of it
happened a long, long time ago, and we're still celebrating that. It's
perfectly obvious why one would celebrate harvest. And we celebrate
specific harvests. For example, the Iroquois celebrate the green corn as
opposed to the harvest corn. At the place of cultivating food in the garden
you join in physical and spiritual unity with the creation. Raising food
brings you to a daily experience of seeing life grow, and that's important.
It's like going to church: one should perceive it as an opportunity to
celebrate the wonder of life.

What about animals? Chief Seattle said that if all the animals
disappeared from this continent, humans would die of a terrible loneliness.

The problem is that our relationship to the animal world is not poetic
enough. There was a time among Indians when the animals were perceived as
people who live under the forest canopy and who run about on four legs. If
you think of them as anything else, they ultimately become disposable. If
you cling to the logic that the animals are less precious than us, then
they get less and less and less precious, until they're not precious at
all. We Indians also thought of ourselves as animals. That's why we called
ourselves turtles and wolves and bears and deer.

Animals provide us with a play for the spirit. The animals provide us
with their good humour. We could learn from them how to live here. Most
people in the dominant culture don't spend much time with animals, so
animals become an abstract idea. People who live with animals would have no
trouble perceiving them as another race.

The natural world is our bible. We don't have chapters and verses; we
have trees and fish and animals.

The creation is the manifestation of energy through matter. Because the
universe is made up of manifestations of energy, the options for that
manifestation are infinite. But we have to admit that the way it has
manifested itself is organized. In fact, it is the most intricate
organization. We can't know how we impact on its law; we can talk only
about how its law impacts upon us. We can make no judgment about nature.
When Indians talk about natural law we mean the sun comes up in the
east and goes down in the west. And the rain falls from the sky; it doesn't
go the other way. And if you throw an apple off a building, it'll land on
the ground. We know that these are going to happen over and over again, so
to get in step with that and be in harmony with it, not only its time and
space but its biology, is our task. If we fell out of touch with that which
synchronizes life for us, human life would end. The world-view that Indian
people live by is spiritual. Our attention to the creation is our spiritual
seeking of it.

The Indian sense of natural law is that nature informs us and it is our
obligation to read nature as you would a book, to feel nature as you would
a poem, to touch nature as you would yourself, to be a part of that and
step into its cycles as much as you can.

John Mohawk is a Seneca Indian activist and philosopher.
He is a professor of lndian Studies at the State University of New York.

Charlene Spretnak teaches at the Californian Institute of Integral Studies,
San Francisco. This is an extract from a longer interview published in
Creation magazine.







  • [Livingontheland] JOHN MOHAWK An interview by Charlene Spretnak, Tradingpost, 01/26/2005

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page