40 Days of Peace Day Thirty Six
Indigenous Reciprocity
“It is said that the Creator gathered together the four sacred elements and breathed life into them to give form to Original Man before setting him upon Turtle Island. The last of all beings to be created, First Man, was given the name Nanabozho. The Creator called out the name to the four directions so that the others would know who was coming. Nanabozho, part man, part manido—a powerful spiritbeing—is the personification of life forces, the Anishinaabe culture hero, and our great teacher of how to be human. In Nanabozho’s form as Original Man and in our own, we humans are the newest arrivals on earth, the youngsters, just learning to find our way.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass
What is it… to become Indigenous to a place?
It is said that Creator gave Nanabozho some tasks in his “Original Instructions” to walk in such a way “that every step is a greeting to Mother Earth.” We say now, to “walk lightly on the Earth”. He knew that time is not linear, but a circle. “Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself -its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were, will come again. In circular time, the stories of Nanabozho and our Indigenous story tellers, are both history and prophesy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophesy converge -the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.”
Looking back to the history of the place we live now, let us take pause to acknowledge (to accept or admit the existence or truth of) the past, and how the past effects today, to find our place in the sacred circle, and to seek to become indigenous to this place we call home.
We live in a country that calls itself, “the land of the free, the home of the brave”, and when I read these words there is a sinking weight I feel in my gut, a lump that grows in my throat. This land that I am standing on in this very moment was cared for by the Lower Creek and Cherokee Native Peoples. I think of them when I’m in the field sitting. I hold them close to my heart and ask these ancestors for guidance in how to restore relationships and bridge the gap in a good way.
I live in a city where the team mascot is a “Brave”, where the tomahawk is a not only a symbol worn proudly on merchandise but “performed” as a chopping motion to celebrate the teams scores and wins. The fact that this offends me and my Native relatives may not be of concern to you. But the fact that it never occurred to millions of fans that naming their teams mascot a “Brave” and celebrating joy by raising your hands in a “tomahawk chop” is confusing to me… I can’t comprehend. And yet, it paints a picture of our disconnection from truth and from each other, it reveals the story that has been told in schools and books, a story that is missing truth, a story told by colonizers who came here to follow their dreams but in doing so, stole the lives, the land and the culture of the original care takers of the Americas. The truth helps us understand how our country is still divided and lost in the ways of a system of colonization instead of naturalization.
There is a calling within in me to be a bridge between two worlds, to connect the past and future,
to mend fences and restore our relationship with Nature,
to invite everyone I meet into the circle, to listen and grow together.
I believe that the misunderstandings that divide us could be healed with thoughtful conversations,
an open mind and willingness to throw out our beliefs and stories we learned in a broken system.
We cannot go backwards, so how do we learn from the mistakes of the past
and perhaps learn to all become indigenous to this place we call home?
Since our stand as Water Protectors at Standing Rock in 2016, we have invited several relatives to come east and visit us. Last year a dear friend of mine came to visit and our first stop was Atlanta. My friend was so excited about his visit but soon after his arrival I realized that the environment here was causing him suffering. The culture shock was more than I had expected. As we traveled around the city, he quickly realized that no one we met looked like him. He also felt the earth beneath our feet and the history of genocide and colonization came flooding his memory. There are no Native communities left standing here, not even a reservation… our Native relatives were murdered and/or moved west off this land.
He saw how the people colonized this place with buildings and highways and walls. He didn’t understand how we didn’t know all our neighbors, yet our houses are so close to each other. He felt a great sadness here and I felt it with him. I took him south to Charleston and the experience was the same. My heart broke… again.
How do I help bridge these worlds in a good way?
When we landed on the Cannon Ball river, on the Standing Rock reservation in 2016, everything in my Being told me I had been here before, that I knew this place and the people. I felt safe, loved, nurtured… a great peace in my heart.
I called my parents and I remember exactly what I said, “I feel home. I feel like everything in my life has led me to this time and this place. I can’t come back right now.” And so we stayed. And in the months and years that have followed, I have grown and expanded in ways I am eternally grateful for. My Lakota relatives are the most generous, loving people I know. They have graciously shared their stories, their food, their homes, their friendships. I am who I am because of their shared gifts, friendship and love.
As I know there hearts to be generous and loving to their very being, I know that when the first peoples came to this land, they would have been greeted with a warm welcome. I have listened to the oral history from grandchildren of the ones that lost their lives to genocide and greed. It is not the story you will read in your public school textbooks. And it resonates as truth. We must share the truth.
I believe that just like the sacred spiral is our opportunity to return to the wounds of our past, the mistakes we made and lessons to be learned… we can spiral back to the wounds of our past as a nation, and make right the mistakes of the past. How do we participate in the Great Healing with humility and love? I believe that acknowledging the truth is a good first step. We can’t continue to push our issues under the “family rug” if we want to bridge the gap that divides our nation and ultimately our world. How do we share our gifts to walk hand in hand as allies, as sisters and brothers?
“After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, ‘The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they are staying or not’.”
Perhaps our work is to set aside the ways of the colonist, and learn how to become Indigenous to this place. I can tell you who our teachers are. I can point us in the direction of wisdom and truth. If we want to heal the earth and return to a world made of gifts, a world of reciprocity, abundance and harmony, we can look to our Indigenous roots, our elders and story makers, and to Mother Nature herself… they hold the medicine for restoration and renewal. I am a humble student.
The first man and the first peoples knew their role was not to control or change the world as a human, but to learn from the world, how to be human.
Do you know the names of the trees and birds and insects that are Indigenous to your home? Names are the way we build relationships. When we’re making new friends, clearly its important to ask and remember their names. I play a game where I say a new friends name over and over 3 times in my mind, to remember. Are we this conscious with our plant and animals relatives?
“As human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”
Mitakuya Oyasin. We are all related. All things are related.
When we get to know our neighbors, our relatives, what do you think happens? I can tell you… we fall in LOVE them and this love causes us to protect them, to care for them, to nurture them, to know them with our hearts.
Have we lost our way, “trying to do it better?” We thought it was a good idea to grow one crop over thousands of acres, to use chemicals on our foods, to create factories for food, to build neighborhoods instead of communities... Nature already had a system in place to take care of us all. Instead of co-creating with Nature, man decided to create a system to control nature. And within 100 years, dis-ease from foods has killed more humans that anything else.
We have evolved from “hunter gatherers”, which is a good thing. Every stage of our existence has taught us something valuable. But AI (artificial intelligence) is here to stay, and its a gift to us…. IF we use it in a good way, with the knowledge of Indigenous wisdom, in co-creation with Mother Nature. But how?
How do we become “indigenous to a place and co-create with AI and use our gifts for good? Anything can be used in a good way, or a bad way. Money is not evil, its a tool for trade, an energy to be shared.. for good or not for good. We can still live in a world made of gifts and trade our gifts in a good way.
When we use our gifts to follow our souls purpose and when we share our gifts and money energy in an equally balancing exchange known as mutual reciprocity, we step into the river in Divine flow.
Have you ever felt that feeling of magic and ease when everything in your life just seems to happen with ease? When everything is flowing, abundance is given and your thoughts just seem to unfold into your reality?
This is Divine Flow.
Divine Flow happens when we are using our divine gifts in a good way, aligned with our purpose, trusting that not only will the net appear but the river will carry us along the journey with ease and joy! As we use our Divine gifts and choose to BEcome indigenous to the Earth we call home, we simply… flow like a river… all of us together… each a raindrop united in the ocean.
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” – Rumi
We are finding our way back home, looking to nature for models of design. Asking Mother Nature to teach us how to be architects of the Great Healing that we so desperately need now.
“By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers,
we start to become indigenous to place.”
Finding our gifts and our purpose is the first piece of the puzzle. “To carry a gift, is to carry a responsibility. The Creator gave Wood Thrush the gift of a beautiful song, to sing the forest good night.”
Every being with a gift. Every being with a purpose.
We are not meant to do it alone and we can’t do it alone. Becoming indigenous to a place is to look to our indigenous relatives and cultures that once called the land we stand on, Home. They knew each plant by name and they knew each plants gift to us, their medicine was known by everyone. They lived in community and understood that we are all related, each with a gift and purpose that when contributed and traded, or shared in the community, supported everyone. Mutually beneficial.
We can learn from the lessons of the Great Law of Peace and from the Honorable Harvest…
NEVER damage Creation… never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being… never take the first…
“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”
To become indigenous is to grow the circle of healing to include all of Creation.
“Sweetgrass, in a long braid, offers protection to a traveler.. A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it. She doesn’t give her gift only to some.
Sage, mshkodewashk, the sacret plant of the west, cleanses and washed away fear.
The first man, Nanabozho learned that in the duality of all things, he had a twin brother who was committed to making imbalance as Nanbozho was dedicated to balance. That twin had learned the interplay of creation and destruction and rocked it like a boat on a choppy sea to keep people out of balance. He found that the arrogance of power could be used to unleash unlimited growth -and unrestrained, cancerous sort of creation that would lead to destruction. Nanabozho vowed to walks with humility in order to try to balance his twin’s arrogance.”― Robin Wall Kimmerer
Here is the lesson of one of Native cultures… to help us heal and restore balance not only within ourselves, but in the collective and all of nature. Are we listening? Are we willing to become SEEKERS instead of followers?
In healing myself, I heal the world
We must learn to walk lightly on the earth, to walk humbly and balance the two sides within us all, the shadow and the light, the false self (ego) and the true self… to balance the arrogance within us all with our humility.
How can we bridge the past and future, mending the generational trauma of Native peoples, the descendants who still bear the weight of grief from the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, mass genocide and cultural theft at the hands of religion, greed and colonization? How do we support the healing and share our love and gifts with our Native brothers and sisters, our descendants of the slave trade…?
I do not have all the answers by any means, but I walk the path to use my gifts to love and lift all my relatives, to find my place in the circle and to share truth and knowledge compassionately. I am a seeker.
I also see that in finding our collective purpose in the land and in food, connects us all, and even so, unites us in the greater cause of restoring land and relationships.
No amount of time or caring will change the past. Our history is in the past and though I wish I could go back in time and change it all, I can’t. And even though I wish I had a magic wand to take all the suffering from my Native relatives, or that I could take it and carry it for them, I can not. I’ve tried.
I have come to see that just as we each have a purpose and gifts to serve our purpose, EVERY single human living on the planet in this time has a great purpose to serve in the Great Awakening. And every one of us is responsible for our healing. I can’t heal you. I can’t fix you. No matter how much I love you, its up to you to choose your journey and heal your wounds.
For so many years, I was crying out for someone to help heal me. And yes, my teachers and guides came. Their love and knowledge helped guide me on my healing journey, but I was the only one who could do the work. I had to face myself and step out of the space of being a victim of rape and abuse and being harmed by western medicine and big pharma… I had to feed the good wolf within my soul. I had to step out of fear and anger and blame and resentment, into hope, truth, humility and love.
“YOU ARE NOT WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, YOU ARE WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO BECOME.”- Carl Jung
Do you know how powerful the compassionate act of simply listening and being present with someone is? Without giving advice or judging or comparing yourself to them… but simply listening in love… Do you even know how powerful this act is in restoring relationships and healing the soul?
It took me over a decade to even speak the things that happened to me. I shared with a very few, Monet’s father and a couple friends, who I swore to secrecy. I know now what a weight I asked them to carry for me. My shame and fear ruled my entire life at that time.
And when I finally opened myself up to share my story, many times I would pass out or have a panic attack that would surely embarrass me, causing me to withdraw even more. And often when I would share my story, the person listening would quickly want to offer solutions or share a story of someone they knew who had also been abused. I understand that they wanted to help, but many times all I needed was a place to share my truth, for someone to sit with me and carry my suffering with me, even if for just a moment. It was a heavy weight to bear and before I had tools to face it, the weight of it all kept me bound to my bed, shut off from the world.
Sometimes the greatest gift we can give someone who is facing their fears and suffering, is to listen and offer to hold the weight of it with them, even if for a moment. An act of grace is not deserved or earned but given freely.
Grace reminds me of a world made of gifts, another lesson from nature I’m grateful for.
White Man’s Footstep
Native people’s have a name for the round -leafed plant we call Plantago major, the common plantain. It refers to the sole of the foot.
“At first the Native people were distrustful of a plant that came with so much trouble trailing behind. They also knew that all things have a purpose and that we must not interfere with its fulfillment. When it became clear that White Man’s Foodstep would be staying on Turtle Island, they began to learn about its gifts. In spring it makes a good pot of greens, before summer heat turns the leaves tough. The people became glas for its constant presence when they learned that the leaves, when they are rolled or chewed to a poultice, make a fine first air for cuts, burns, and especially insect bites. Every part of the plant is useful. Those tiny seeds are good medicine for digestion. The leaves can halt bleeding right away and heal wounds without infection.
This wise and generous plant, faithfully following the people, became and honored member of the plant community. It’s a foreigner, an immigrant, but after five hundred years of living as a good neighbor, people forget that kind of thing.
Immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that the native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small spaces, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but naturalized. This is the same tern we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country.” _Robin Wall Kimmerer
They pledge to uphold the law of the land, the one that is written on the heart and in each plant.
“Maybe the task assigned to Second Man is to unlearn the model of kudzu and follow the teachings of White Man’s Footstep, to strive to become naturalized to place, to throw off the mind set of the immigrant. Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. BECAUSE THEY DO.
As time circles around on itself again, maybe White Man’s Footstep is following in Nanabozhos’. Perhaps Plantain will line the homeward path. We could follow. White Man’s Footstep, generous and healing, grows with its leaves so close to the ground that each step is a greeting to Mother Earth.”
You are not here to work a 9-5 job and make a living. You are here with a divine purpose that co-creates the world we all desire, in a shared dream we have all dreamed. We do not want war or destruction or dis-ease or division. We all want peace, we all want to follow our dreams. We want to awake from the dream that is our current reality to the dream of our souls purpose.
We all want clean yummy food to share around a table with the ones we love. We are not meant to live in scarcity, in poverty or in a world made of walls. We are not meant to survive but to thrive in a world made of gifts.
May learn from The Plantain and Nanabozho, that every step being a loving greeting to Mother Earth, to be useful, to heal and use our gifts in a good way.
May we see ourselves in every plant and animal and human, to rise up in love and restore our relationships with each other and Mother Nature. Its all happening. I see it more and more every day and it lights the fire in my soul to keep moving toward my Souls purpose and to fulfill my purpose, not just for myself but for us all.
May I share my gifts in the act of mutual reciprocity and truly become indigenous to this place with ALL my relatives, in the sacred circle.
We are craving culture… we are called to know our roots and the history of our people. Preservation of culture is part of the beauty of our world.
One of the most beautiful gifts of our time at Standing Rock was the gift of culture. I craved it growing up. There was a longing in me for more than I was exposed to and every day at camp a new group of people would arrive and share their gifts of songs, prayers and dances! From all over the globe they came. Dressed in their regalia, they came to the sacred circle and offered their prayers and songs with us.
This was a part of my life that I will always be grateful for. With every new relative we met I felt my own roots grow and connect to each of them somehow. It gave me hope and filled with me gratitude. I realized how connected we truly are.
Trust me, I am very much aware of my privilege as a pretty faced, pale skinned girl raised by both parents in a home filled with love. My father raised us a preachers salary and we lived simply for sure. But, we always had enough, we knew we were loved, and I never had to worry about being pulled over or violated or judged in any way because of the color of my skin. I know my privilege.
I have a dream to live in a world made of gifts and a world where real beauty is in the rainbow of our skin color, the color of our eyes, and most importantly the Light of our hearts that is felt and not seen.
May we all wake up to
Remember who we are
and
Remember why we are here
I love you,
Sarah
Shams of Tabriz’s 40 Rules of Love
