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This map shows you which Indigenous lands you’re living on.
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| BY Rob Brezsny (SUBSTACK) |
Our Indigenous Roots
Even if our forebears arrived in what we now call Americas in the 1600s, and our predecessors have lived on the continent for the last 14 generations, we can all trace our ancestry back to some group of Indigenous people.
Maybe your people were Celts who lived in what’s now Austria during the ninth century BCE. Or perhaps your biological line was Jewish Egyptian three millennia ago, or Chinese as far back as the ancient Xia Dynasty, or Mycenaean in the Aegean area of what we now call Greece circa 3200 BCE.
One fact is indisputable: In a literal sense, every one of us has Indigenous roots. At some point, our ancestors fit the official definition of Indigenous: “a culturally distinct ethnic group that is native to a particular place.”
Let’s go further. Mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade tells us that whether or not we know our own Indigenous past, we can and should strive to be in close touch with our inner Indigenous person.
What does that mean? Meade says we can benefit from seeing the world through an Indigenous perspective, with a reverence for nature and receptivity to the teachings available to us from the non-human intelligences of animals and plants as well as the spiritual realm.
Here’s the sticky part. Even if we have not personally participated in damaging the Indigenous cultures of the land we now live on, our destinies are defined and shaped by the fact that those cultures were damaged. Everything we do is built on the results of the damage.
When most of our fellow Americans came of age, our education included little about the calamity committed against the native people. If the evidence for the desecration appeared in our history textbooks, it was dealt with cursorily. We grew up with a carefully cultivated amnesia about the tragic origins of the United States. The story of African American slavery was almost equally suppressed.
Our hypothesis is that this amnesia, this failure to fully acknowledge the roots of our civilization, dampens our ability to be, as Michael Meade recommends, in close touch with our own inner Indigenous person.
We may not feel guilt, remorse, and shame on a conscious level. But like all suppressed emotions, they churn and burn in our deep psyches, alienating us from the Indigenous perspective we all need.
And yes, we need that perspective if we hope to reverse the juggernaut of humanity’s ecocidal ways—and preserve our earthly paradise for the generations to come after us.
On a personal level, we need a full, generous communion with our inner Indigenous person because it has tremendous power to keep us grounded. It potentially provides us with essential support in our lifelong labor to ensure our mind is anchored in earthy practicality.
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Malidoma Patrice Somé was born into the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso. At a young age, he was kidnapped by Jesuits, but eventually returned to his village to undergo an initiation rite into manhood. Later he emigrated to America, where he taught his unique blend of modern and traditional spirituality.
One of his featured themes was the hardship that Westerners’ souls endure because of the destructive impact of the machine world upon the spiritual world.
He suggested that there is “an Indigenous person within each of us” that longs to cultivate the awareness and understanding enjoyed by Indigenous people: a reverence for nature, a vital relationship with ancestors, and a receptivity to learn from the intelligence of animals.
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To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.
—author and activist Arundhati Roy
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These are a few questions our inner Indigenous person longs to know and takes action to discover: How well do we know the land and the ecology of the place where we live, including its history? Can we name ten local species of trees and plants? Ten species of birds and insects? Do we know the story of the geological past? What are five bodies of water near us? Do we know which Indigenous people once dwelled where we do now?
