While reading The Sacred Tree many things came into my mind. First I thought of all the knowledge and the truth that could be (and hopefully will be) applied to my personal life. On a second level, I kept thinking of the people I wanted to share this book with: my family, friends, relatives, teachers… I could not help but read a certain passage and think: “Oh, my father would love this” or “ this or that friend could really use this bit of knowledge here”. I believe there are so many irrelevant or even damaging discourses in contemporary life, that when you finally stumble upon something good and important, a tiny flame of hope sparks within yourself, and you just can’t wait to share it with any person patient enough to listen. That’s me, at least. This time, however, I went beyond the point of wanting to share the teachings of The Sacred Tree with my relatives and friends.

I have been living in the United States for almost two months now, but I assure you that is not nearly long enough to forget the city and the country I left behind me. My city is one undergoing a war, it’s a city with so much hatred and so much violence, that good people have to struggle really hard every day to keep just the amount of hope necessary to continue with their lives. We avoid watching the news and reading the newspapers, we close our ears to the shootings on the streets. We pretend that we don’t care as long as our family is OK, we pretend it will soon get better. We learn how to take care of ourselves, and pretend that is enough of a fight.

Reading The Sacred Tree, and doing the bit of research on the Four Worlds Development Project, made me re-think the whole situation I’ve been living with for years. It made me realize I’m tired of pretending. No, it is not OK, and it will not be better until we change it. And there is a way of changing this, the way of the Sacred Tree. My community has the power to heal itself. Since I discovered that, I’ve been daydreaming about writing to schools, telling them of this wonderful book, incorporating its teachings on my social service with children, spreading the word.

The problem is, both public and private schools are now afraid of touching the spiritual aspect in the classrooms. They ignore the emotional and spiritual parts of the human being under the flag of freedom of thought and belief. They would never agree to teach a book that states that we have many gifts, bestowed upon us since our birth by the Creator. Well, I believe it is the deliberated exclusion from this aspect what makes communities sick with hate and violence. Our emotional and spiritual self must be nurtured and guided, so that we can learn about love, kindness, generosity and compassion, and so that we understand that we are connected to everyone and everything in this life. This has nothing to do with religious affiliations, or with the freedom of our thoughts, this is about ourselves developing as complete, balanced human beings. If and when we can do that, I am absolutely sure things will get better, not only in my country, but everywhere.

The Four Worlds Development Project

The back cover of The Sacred Tree explains that the book was created by the Four Worlds Development Project as a handbook of Native Spirituality for Native American people. I grew curious over that fact, since that means we are not only reading a book about indigenous people and tradition, but also directly addressed to them. When I realized that, I immediately started asking questions. How was this book written? Who are the people involved in writing it? What is this project all about? What are it's goals and how are they intending to achieve them? And most importantly: who is they? Who is running the organization?

Well, I did not find answers to all the questions, but I did find some answers and I would like to share them here.

"Four Worlds International Institute for Human and Community Development" was born as a result of a gathering of native elders and community leaders held on the Blood Indian Reservation in Alberta, in 1982. In this gathering, forty leaders of North American tribes deliberated about the social devastation of the tribes caused by alcohol, drug abuse, poverty and a sense or powerlessness, and strived to find a solution for all this.

The elders came up with a plan to restore tribal communities to health and strength through four simple principles:
1. Development Comes from Within - the driving force for change, healing, learning, growth and progress must come from within the indigenous communities.
2. No vision, no development - if people cannot visualize health, it will be hard indeed to create it.
3. Individual and community transformations must go hand in hand.
4. Wholistic learning is the key to deep and lasting change - learning is at the heart of sustainable human change processes and human beings are multidimensional (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and volitional).

I think these principles show us why we should learn to listen to our elders. It seems to me that we no longer appreciate the voice of the old, caught as we are in the frenzy to move forward. But there is a lot of wisdom in those four points, not only for Native American communities, but for any community of the world.

Besides the four principles that became the pillars of Four Worlds, the elders proposed a strategy of action, based on their spiritual and cultural knowledge system. This world-view included the beliefs that:
- The spiritual and the material are inseparable and interdependent.
- Everything is related to everything.
- Healing depends on our capacity to understand ourselves.
- Human beings already have within themselves, as a gift from the Creator, the power to transform and heal.

With these beliefs, Four Worlds started to work creating projects and programs to support tribal healing and development.
These initiatives include:
1. The Four Worlds International Institute of Indigenous Sciences - which includes research, training and education and development.
2. The Four Worlds College of Human and Community Development (and this reminded me of the discussion we had last Thursday).
This program is supposed to be: community based, with practical orientation, fully accredited (bachelor, masters and Ph.D levels), interdisciplinary, culturally appropriate and value driven. About values, I found they have a very interesting approach: "The Four Worlds College is founded on the belief that education is not neutral. We believe that learning for sustainable living into the twenty first century must be connected to processes of spiritual and moral renewal, oriented to developing healthy relationships between human beings and the natural world and must be connected in a hands-on-way with real life human struggles for personal, organizational, community and global well being."
3. The Four Worlds Elderhealth Program - created to solve the crisis on Native American Communities on the death of many elders and the subsequent loss of valuable knowledge.
4. The Four Worlds Centre for Development Learning - located in Canada, it concentrates on working with communities, organizations, agencies and governments to solve critical social and economic problems.





The one thing I liked the most about all this, which by the way sounds fantastic to me, is the fact that it comes from within the Native American community. Phil Lane, one of the authors of The Sacred Tree, is the President of Four Directions International and the International Coordinator for the Four Worlds International Institute. He is member of the Yankton Dakota and Chickasaw tribes.

I cannot help but feel, after reading about Four Worlds and Phil Lane, and the beautiful projects going on, that there is, after all, hope for this world to be healed. It is a wonderful sense of hope.



Here is the Four Worlds web site, in case you want more information: http://www.4worlds.org/

Not enough words

When the Europeans arrived to the shores of the New World, the people living there were surprised, sometimes even afraid, because nothing like that had even happened before. The things they saw were so strange that in most cases they didn’t have words to describe them. In the text of Josiah Jeremy we learn that the Micmac people one day saw “a singular little island, as they supposed, which had drifted near to the land, and become stationary there”. The singular little island was, of course, a ship, but Indians had never seen ships before. The concept of a ship was incomprehensible for them, and so they struggled to describe what they saw as best as they could. In the text of John Heckewelder on the arrival of the Dutch, it is said that the some of the people thought the ships to be a very large animal (probably a fish) while others considered it was a very large floating house. In Mexico, the great aztec emperor Motecuhzoma received news that there was a mount or a big hill drifting in the sea, not quite reaching the shore.

 

When the Indians finally saw the European people in their shores, they found they could not understand that either. The newcomers had different clothing, language, skin color, hair color (and they had a lot of that one) and eating and living habits. They were far too different from them. And so, in some places they were thought to be gods. The Micmac at Manhattan, according to John Heckewelder, believed that the captain of the Dutch ship was Mannitto, the Great Being, that had come to visit them: “They are lost in admiration, both as to the color of the skin (or these whites) as also to their manner of dress, yet most as to the habit of him who wore the red clothes, which shone with something they could not account for. He must be Mannitto, they think, but why should he have a white skin?”

The Aztecs in the valley of Mexico also believed at first that the Spanish were gods. They had the legend of Quetzalcoatl, a god sometimes represented with white skin, who had gone away through the sea with the promise to return again someday. So when Hernan Cortez found his way through the mexica empire, Motecuhzoma obviously thought he was Quetzalcoatl.

Too late did the Indians realize these were not the gods they waited for, but only people with an amazing destructive power.

Montaigne and Brant

So, when I started working upon this post, I was determined to identify all the similarities between Montaigne’s essay “Des Cannibales” and Joseph Brant’s response to the question about indian vs. white civilization. I have never been happier to announce that I utterly failed. Well, to be quite truthful it was not an utter failure, I was just wrong in my approach. You see, there are some arguments that are indeed very similar in both texts, however, there is one consideration I failed to make. Whereas Montaigne had only heard about the New World and its people, Brant had actually lived in both worlds, and so he can sometimes give a more accurate perspective on the same topic. 

So I would like to do here, instead of just accusing Brant of stealing a white man’s essay, is to point some of the similarities and differences that I found between these texts. The first one is about the application of the “laws of nature”, which are deemed more perfect, than those of white civilization:  

“The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours.”  - Montaigne.

“(…) and will only observe, that among us, we have no law but that written on the heart of every rational creature by the immediate finger of the great Spirit of the universe himself” - Brant. 

As we can see, Brant is writing about these “natural laws” that Montaigne mentions. However, while Montaigne is taking a merely natural (biological?) viewpoint, the indian perspective is not only related to the natural but also to the supernatural. It is the “great Spirit of the universe” who wrote those laws on rational creatures, and that has a clear spiritual connotation. Here Nature and Spirit are linked in a way that Western civilization could never completely understand. 

Then, let us consider this second set of quotes. (The first one is Montaigne’s, the second comes from Brant). 

“I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of.”

“We have no prisons - we have no pompous parade of courts; and yet judges are highly esteemed among us, as they are among you, and their decisions as highly revered; property, to say the least, is as well guarded, and crimes are impartially punished. We have among us no splendid villains, above the control of that law, which influences our decisions; in a word, we have no robbery under the color of law” 

I will agree there is only a vaguely similarity (if there is one at all) between this two fragments. But I wanted to compare them precisely for that reason. Montaigne’s view is idealized and what he’s describing is pretty much an utopia. Some parts of it are true, others seem quite exaggerated. Brant, on the other hand, has a more centered position. Though still idealizing Indian society, he talks about judges, property and crimes. Its is not a perfect society, and its not as “primitive” as Montaigne would like to think, it’s just a better one. Of course, it would be only fair to mention here (though it may appear somewhat obvious) that Montaigne and Brant are not talking about the same people (for Mohawks, as far as I know, were not cannibals), nor are they speaking from the same century. Still, their point seems to be more or less the same. 

Both texts have also the claim about cruelty, which I will not quote, for it is fat too lengthy. But while Montaigne boldly says that its is far less barbarian to eat a dead roasted man that eating one that’s alive (making a reference to the cruel methods of punishment in Western society), Brant affirms that Indian torture is never as painful as the horrors of white men’s prisons.  The french man is talking from an intellectual and moral perspective, the indian is talking from experience, but they both seem to agree that at the end, cruelty is a matter of perspective.  

Finally, we find the sentence about which culture has earned the most being called “savage”. Not surprisingly, the verdict is the same: 

“We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.” - Montaigne

“Cease to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty, than they.” - Brant. 

In my opinion, even if Brant’s speech is conventional, even if some of the arguments are very much like Montaigne’s, his text also provides some new insights on the topic. The audience Joseph Brant is addressing is clearly white, and he needs to abide to the formal and thematic conventions of his time. So, the way I see it now, it is not that we are not hearing an “authentic indian voice” (whatever that may mean) as much as that we are encountering an Indian man striving to meet us half way, so that we may understand all this a little better. 

Alexie, reading.

             Sherman Alexie reading and talking. I enjoyed this enormously. Hope you will, too.

Healing Humor

I knew The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven had definitely made it to my top-ten books after I finished reading the first story. I find myself drawn to this book over and over again. I think I must have read the introduction at least five times. And I’ve laughed every single one of them.

This collection of stories has some sort of powerful magic, indian magic. It touches places within me that no book had ever touched before. Yet it is not one of those dreadful books Kafka talked about, the kind that “wound and stab us”, that “affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide”. This is not one of those books. Or, now that I think about it, maybe it is. Maybe it does wound me, maybe it wounds me terribly, with unparalleled force. But at the same time, it offers what none has ever offered before, something both ordinary and extraordinary, even magical: humor. Healing humor.

Now, now… there’s hundreds of thousands of books that offer nothing but humor. Surely I cannot mean that this one is the first one, the only one. I don’t, and I do. Alexie’s humor is not merely satirical or parodical. It does not convey the truth, it does not exaggerate reality, it does not wish to hide the pain. Perhaps it does, but it goes beyond all that.

In Alexie’s words, “Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds”. Oh, I love that metaphor. I love it because it implies that even the best sense of humor in the world is not strong enough to ease the pain accumulated by millions of people for hundreds of years. It won’t stop the pain, and it won’t stop the devastation of the land, of the culture, of the soul. But it can save us all by allowing us to heal, by offering just enough time to sit down and begin to forgive. The mere possibility of forgiveness is already enough of a gift, because it allows one to hope in situations where there’s no room for hope anymore.

The pain will not go away, but the wound will not be infected. Perhaps the wounds will remain open for hundreds, for thousands of years, forever. But they will not be infected. And we’ll survive them all. If that’s not powerful magic, I don’t know what it could be. And I don’t think Kafka was so lucky as to ever encounter a book like this one.

The Renaissance of Lying

Being who I am, this week my irresponsability took the form of a book I should not be reading. In a way I don’t care to describe, I happened to stumble upon a dialogue piece, written by Oscar Wilde in 1891. It is The Decay of Lying, and it discusses the nature and prerequisites of Art (with a capital A), and criticizes Realism as a formal and thematic movement. I was so fascinated by Wilde’s witty and familiar rhetoric - with the power to convince me of just about anything - that I could not put the book down for a long time. And while I was reading, it startled me just how much of what Wilde was saying reminded me of Sherman Alexie.

In The Decay of Lying, Wilde writes: “Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.”

Well, I see in Sherman Alexie that cultured, and fascinating liar whose aim is “simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.” In the Introduction to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie gives us, I think, a beautiful example of the nature of the literature liar:

“Junior”, she said, “People are going to think that really happened.”

“But it did really happen, Auntie. At least the mouse part. It’s a true story.”

Sherman Alexie is writing about his own life. He is taking his experience as a major source for his stories, and yet, at the same time, he is lying about everything. He is a trickster, a great liar, capable of turning a fistfight on a party into a devastating hurricane. He is both wise and silly, truthful and deceiving. He understands - perhaps even better that Wilde was ever able to - just how greatly we need lies in literature… and in life. After all, Wilde knew nothing about being “a poor Indian boy growing up in an alcoholic family on an alcoholic Reservation”.

And, for that matter, neither do I; but I cherish Alexie’s lies nevertheless. His stories and his characters are more real to me than the real Alexie, with his real alcoholic family and his real alcoholic Reservation. Life and reality have no meaning whatsoever unless we create a story out of it. This is why Thomas Builds-the-Fire is such an endearing character, and why The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire makes such a wonderful story. Because it is all such a big damn lie. It is Art.