Skip to content

Category: Turtle Island

Generations Lost

Published by mhelbert on February 6, 2020

Yesterday I reflected a bit about how nature and nurture can conspire to bring about dysfunction. See here. There is no doubt that we all carry baggage that was put upon us by those who came before us. Nor is there any doubt that we will pass some kind of burden to those who follow.
What is important is that we recognize that for what it is and accept our own responsibility in the process.
And, I think for most people who, like me, belong to the dominant culture there can be a real possibility that we can have a pretty good and fulfilling life.

But, what if the damage was not within a couple generations?
What if those who were hurt were not damaged by their own human frailty?
What if that hurt was imposed on them by forces well beyond their own abilities to cope?

Imagine with me that you are out on an errand. Perhaps shopping for food to feed your family.
Suddenly, men with guns walk out of the shadows and force you into a van.
They take you to some private dock by the ocean where they chain your hands and feet and force you onto a small ship.
Onboard, you find several hundred others like you. They are chained and packed together like so much cargo.
For, that’s exactly what you all are.
Cargo.
After several weeks at sea, and after much sickness, hunger, thirst, and death, you finally make landfall.
Forced from the ship you are taken to a warehouse.
There, men who look nothing like you and who speak a strange language that you cannot understand are pointing and shouting.
Some of them come up to you and force your mouth open so they can inspect your teeth. They poke and prod you in places that are private.
Humiliated, sick, hungry, and without hope, you soon find yourself in another vehicle that takes you to a large factory where you are put to work.
Long hours and little food become your life.
After some time, you find a person with whom you begin a relationship.
Those with whom you work and live celebrate as you and your new-found partner begin a life together.
Soon, children are born.
There is Joy, albeit guarded. You are still held captive. Those who lord it over you make sure that you never forget that you have no rights…no life…outside of the work.
Then, one day, your partner and children are gone.
They have been sold in order to pay a debt.
Your heart is ripped from your chest as you wail and mourn this loss.

Now, multiply that for generations over more than 200 years.

How great is the damage that has been done to generation upon generation.

And, we dare say, “That’s all in the past! Get over it!”?

Or, say you and your people have lived in a certain place for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. You have culture with deep roots in the soil, in the lakes, in the trees, and in the other creatures who share the land.
One day a group of strange people with weapons enter your village.
They tell you that the land you are living on no longer belongs to you.
You must move or be destroyed.
They force you and all of your people to travel by foot for days upon days upon weeks.
Many of your friends and family fall by the wayside. Unable to keep up they are simply jettisoned by your captors as so much refuse.
Eventually, you are released into a new land that looks nothing like where you came from. Your life, your culture, your heart is gone.
After awhile, others come along and tell you that your God is no God. That you must accept their god or you will be destroyed.
More of your life ripped from you and trampled under foot.
Soon, others come and gather the children.
They take your sons and daughters, your lifeblood; your hope; your future and take them away to boarding schools.
These are places where the dominant culture says that they will, “kill the Indian and save the man.”
Your language and culture are systematically destroyed in front of your eyes.
And, there is not a thing that you can do about it.

We DARE say to these people, “Oopsie! Sorry! But, you’ll get over it. Just get a job and start earning a living. Then you can be happy! Just like us!”

How deep are the hurts for these Generations Lost?

Can we not have empathy?
Cultures and lives were destroyed because of greed and lust for power.
And, now we wonder why there is rampant drug and alcohol use within these communities? We seem utterly surprised when some of these people rise up with guns and harm themselves and others.
How blind must we be to think that after all that these Human Beings have been through that they can simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get on with life?

I have no answers. My people have created this mess. So, I actually have no rights to even suggest answers.
The healing can only begin when we stop talking and start listening.
Listen to those who are hurt by generation upon generation upon generation of abuse, mistreatment, death…genocide.
Let them guide us in how we should, or even IF we should, be part of the solution.

One thing that we can do, though, is to stop trying to tell these People how they should feel and act. It is Their pain, not ours. It was their lives and cultures that were ripped from them.
Not Ours.

Leave a Comment

Indigenous Spirituality

Published by mhelbert on January 9, 2019
http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org

One of the basic tenets of Western Christianity is that only those people who believe in Jesus as the Son of God can be saved or accepted by God. They cite especially the text in the Gospel According to John where Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me.”

That does sound pretty exclusive.

So, missionaries and colonists took their understanding of God and the Gospel and went out to the uttermost parts of the world in order to make disciples of all people.

It looks like the right thing to do. From a certain point of view.

A point of view that I no longer find tenable.

As I walk among friends from diverse cultures I find that God has already shown up to them. No, not like with Jesus. But, truly the influence of Creator is not the personal property of Christians or Jews. Creator has touched the hearts and lives of billions of other souls in ways that we in the West just don’t seem to understand.

And, THAT’S OK!

We don’t need to understand. We do, however, need to love and encourage each of these cultures to cultivate their relationships and understand of God. We can do that without imposing our Western culture on them.

So, I have no problem sharing this link to a group called, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. These women have a heart for Creator, Creation, and all those who call this big piece of space rock home. I believe that they have truly experienced God. Their Way, Truth, and Life may look different than mine. That doesn’t mean they are wrong.

So, I invite you to click on the above link and check them out. Who knows, we may all learn something!

Leave a Comment

You Will Be Assimilated

Published by mhelbert on June 16, 2017

Everyone likes a good story. We grow up with Aesop and Little Red Riding Hood. Stories that contain some kind of moral. There are the stories of Christmas with that old elf in Red. Stories of wonder. Tales of ancient heroes and travelers. Stories of adventure. All good stories capture our imaginations. They carry us to distant lands and worlds. They, in a way, form connections between us and the characters, our past, our lives. Stories can evince within us an emotional, even spiritual, identity with our world and ourselves.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “it is affirmation that story is true and takes us beyond the facts into something more real.” More real than our empirical Western minds can describe. For story unveils the true world that facts and figures cannot possibly discern. Things that reveal the deep longing for that which is truly “real”. The Germans gave us a word to describe this: sehnsucht. This may be defined as “Spiritual yearning; a longing after a higher, unbroken and eternal world in which something that is adumbrated in the images of stories – and in life itself truly perceived – will be real, and a conviction that that world is one’s true “home.”

So, what is story? Why is it important? Do we have one?

I think that many of us, in the U.S. particularly, don’t appreciate the power of story. Or, at the very least, we don’t recognize it in our lives and culture. In most parts of the world there is an ancient culture that has nurtured it’s own indigenous story for many thousands of years. We can look at the indigenous nations of North America and find a rich heritage of story passed from one generation to the next for over 10,000 years. These stories were born out of intimate relationships with Creation, especially the Land. Deep roots grew into the rich earth where indigenous Nations dwelt. This is spirituality that flourishes in gratitude and relationship to each other and every part of the Cosmos. Creator God was busy building God’s own relationship with these people. In a very true sense, Indigenous people understand the mandate to steward the land and its resources.

But, what about us? What is our connection to this land, the beings who live here; the People who live here? I don’t think that we who came across the ocean have a story. Well, we do. It’s a story of conquest and murder. We hail from people who, like the Borg of Star Trek, came to assimilate anything and anyone. “Resistance is futile.” Our fathers uprooted themselves and left their stories behind. In fact, I think that many of our ancient stories were lost as we assimilated another one. We took and owned the story of Israel and her Messiah. That story became ours. We even changed the Jewish Messiah, a Semitic man from the late Temple period, into a white savior with long brown locks and a Roman nose. By taking Israel’s story, her connection with her land, and making it our own we were cast adrift from any true moorings to our own land and history. And, without those deep roots to original cultures, we cast about for any other story that could fill the void of our loss. Yeah, Israel’s story helped. But, it wasn’t quite ours.

As we came to this land, new to us, we brought our assimilated story. This story formed our thinking and our way of life. The grafted connections to an ancient Near Eastern people had mutated and became a story of conquest. We overwhelmed the original inhabitants of this land through force and deceit. We stole their land and their lives in the name of our story. We then worked to assimilate these people. In the words of Steppenwolf, ‘the whole world’s got to be just like us.’

In the process of assimilation we attempted to graft onto ourselves the stories of the Original inhabitants. We appropriate what is rightfully theirs and made a cheap mockery of them and their story.

What would happen, though, if we honored their story as THEIRS and learned from them? If we let them tell their story and, if they were willing, to share in their wisdom and understanding of this land? Maybe we could be equal partners in the care and stewardship of this land. I’ve often thought about the Europeans’ so-called divine mandate to colonize these lands. What if there truly was a divine mandate to sail to these shores so that WE COULD LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED HERE. Instead, we came as rude intruders who burned and destroyed. Our Christian lust and greed decimated the people and laid waste to their land.

The real sad part of this story is that we are the same as our ancestors. Nothing has changed.

We have no story of our own. We have no roots. As the French say, we have no raison d’etre. When will we humble ourselves and seek the forbearance of our Original hosts? I believe that our very survival rests in the wisdom and knowledge of these people. They have the true story of how to live here.

Can we set aside our murderous arrogance long enough to listen?

 

 

Leave a Comment

A Date with Ladyfinch

Published by mhelbert on June 18, 2013

Sitting in my backyard on a warm, summer evening. A good book in my hands and my favorite potent potable on a table next to me. The sun was warm, but not too hot. There were clouds building to the West, harbingers of storms moving in from the western Great Lakes. At this moment, however, all seemed good and right with the world.

As I read, I kept one eye on the bird feeder in the yard. It’s not much. An iron post with two hooks. On one is an Oriole feeder filled with home-made nectar. These beautiful orange and black birds are like so many people, they have an insatiable sweet tooth. One cup of white granulated sugar in six cups of water. Put it out and watch the fun!

On the other hook hangs our seed feeder. A not quite cylindrical glass container with a ‘roof’ and a seed tray into which the seeds flow from three openings under the glass. We get many visitors. Besides the ‘regulars,’ the Sparrows and Grackles, (I can’t get these folks to stay away. They show up and throw the seeds all over the ground), there are Cardinals and Blue Jays. Occasionally, I’ve seen Flickers and Red-Headed Woodpeckers. And, of course, there are the Finches. The two varieties that frequent or buffet are the Goldfinch and the House Finch.

Of these two, the House Finch is the most regular visitor. They usually show up in small groups, a male or two and two to three females. The males have red-hued feathers on their heads and necks. Many times they arrive and bless us with a song before they jump onto the seed tray and collect their wage. Having been a practicing musician, I know how that works. You show up, play and collect your money. These pipers, however, work ‘cheep.’ The coloring of the females is rather non-descript. Browns and grays with some darker streaks. They don’t seem as vocal as the males. But, I’m no ornithologist. My observations are somewhat limited.

On this particular evening, I looked over the top of my book and pulled my readers down on my nose, the better to see the feeder fifteen feet away. A female was sitting in the seed tray looking rather comfortable. This struck me as unusual. Birds commonly land on the feeder and stand on the edge of the seed tray, grab a snack and fly off to enjoy it. Sometimes, they stand in the tray. But, always, they stand. All of these birds are a bit on the skittish side. Standing, they can quickly escape any threat. This female was sitting! Well, at least as near as birds can sit. She quietly nestled herself into the tray and leisurely picked away at the shelled bounty around her. For no less than five minutes we enjoyed the evening together. I, in my lounge chair, she lounging in the feeder. We were like two old acquaintances gathered in a living room. No words were spoken, but communication took place. She told me that she was grateful for the snacks. “This café provides some of the best black sunflower seeds in the neighborhood. Oh, and the millet is to die for!” I told her that she was more than welcome. “I am delighted,” I said, “to offer you the hospitalitie du maison, my dear Ladyfinch.” My still, quiet presence soothed her apprehension and fear. Her presence and posture told me that she felt secure. Even with a human in the room!

In those few moments I experienced a small taste of Creator’s blessing. I imagined a time before time when the Native People roamed this Turtle Island, a world where all of Creator’s children lived in harmony. Ours, however, has become a world of dysfunction and destruction. Fear has leeched into every cell; every molecule. We even fear and war against the sun, moon and stars. The small creatures of the world fear humans and each other. We humans fear the small creatures…and each other. We are afraid that the economy will falter, or worse. Some are paralyzed by a fear of stepping out of their homes.

Has it always been this way? Some say no. They say that there was a paradisiacal garden very long ago. However, humanity, attempting to grasp at the Divine, brought ruin and destruction. Others say that the cosmos has always been a dangerous place. The fears and phobias that we strive with are deeply ingrained in our very DNA from tens of thousands of years of trying to survive. I’m not sure. One thing I am sure of, for about five minutes on a warm, summer evening Ladyfinch and I shared peace and contentment.

What experiences have you had interacting with God’s good creation? What kinds of things cause you to fear? Feel free to comment without fear.

2 Comments