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/