“Seasoned Travelers” on the Heroic Journey

Vine Deloria, Jr./photo credit: WikipediaThe Native American resistance to the Dakota Pipeline Access has received attention nationally and internationally in recent days. The bulldozing of burial sites and sacred sites stirred immediate and immense opposition among peoples of all skin colors. As reported in Indian Country Today Media Network, three agencies of the Obama administration (Dept. of Interior, Dept. of Justice, and Army Corp of Engineers) have stepped in to temporarily halt all construction of the pipeline 20 miles east and west of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. As I write this, Congressman Raul Grijalva, AZ, a ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee in Congress, is heading for the Reservation to review the complex processes involved.

In light of these events, I include next an excerpt from my upcoming book, From Egos to Eden (available 2/6/17), that includes reference to Vine Deloria, Jr.(1933-2005), a Standing Rock Sioux, lawyer and professor, who so helpfully interpreted Indian activism in the last part of the 20th century.

Click to read more ...

The Spirituality of Geographical and Economic Conquest in the U.S.

I’ve come to realize that assessing an economy’s spirituality is essential to determining whether that model works on our one planet home. For example, the conquest of the First Peoples on our continent by Europeans has become only more abhorrent to me the more I have realized the spirituality that was used to justify this conquest and expansion into other people’s land. The “wild West,” the invading European settlers claimed, was like the Promised Land that the Hebrew people headed for after their exodus from Egypt.

I have visited some of the Spanish missions along the West Coast of the U.S. Each time my gut aches about how European Christians enslaved First Peoples to build the mission complex. In crass violation of Indigenous ways, the European, MultiEarth expansionists, forced their technological worldview on the First Peoples. The sustainable agriculture of Indigenous people was scaled up through technological enhancements for greater productivity in the short run. Children of the First Peoples had their culture and language schooled out of them even as they were indoctrinated with Christianity by missionary teachers completely unable to appreciate or comprehend the sacred worldview they conquering.

Just as the spirituality of conquest undergirded those early events, it has continued in U.S.-Native American relations into the present. The OneEarth ways of Native Americans do not fit with the MultiEarth views of Progress, Growth, and The Market. But any path of Progress that so genocidally excludes the First Peoples and their OneEarth worldview is no path I want to walk. I ask, “What moral and spiritual authority make such behaviors over centuries okay?”

My desire, still not achieved, is to walk a OneEarth path as well as traditional First Peoples do.

Holidays "Invaded" Our Schedules; Facilitated Break from Blogs

Today I feel ready to return to this blog. I was surprised to see that Dec. 17 was my last post here. I hadn’t really planned on taking a break. That I did so, speaks to the wonderful powers of Solstice, Advent, Channukah, Christmas, Christmastide, New Years, Epiphany, Kwanzaa, or whatever other themes and days you may have marked. How sacredly interrupting they are, these seasons! I’m grateful that they impact me as strongly as they do, even though not every moment is comfortable for me. Not by any means.

As we begin 2013, new consciousness is growing even as old consciousness digs in. Nielsen ratings show Fox News losing audience; Rachel Maddow gaining. Indigenous Peoples are rising up in Canada with the “Idle No More” movement, adding to Indigenous witness showing up in Mexico, Australia, and elsewhere. More people are daring to believe that an economy other than the global one is possible. Extreme weather is changing consciousness as well, raising up One Earth living as a standard on which people are agreeing. Earth will not be endlessly violated by rapacious economics.

Because of all the bubbling and roiling underway in the huge cauldron of human consciousness, the seasons just past have been stronger than usual days of remembering and changing. Earth is sending clear messages on where she is heading. They’re dark messages for the global economic paradigm of the moment, but I’m loving the possibilities for living interdependently with all life on our planet. 

So as I log and blog into 2013, I anticipate reading your comments.