Indigenous Links
Resources related to Indigenous Wisdom
Representing the voices of both native peoples and their non-native
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Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers with H.H. Dalai Lama |
Contents
Articles by Non-Natives and Initiates
Thanksgiving Address:
Greetings To The Natural World - This translation of the Mohawk version of the
Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address was developed and published in 1993,
provided courtesy of Six Nations Indian Museum and the Tracking Project.
A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau de no sau
nee Address to the Western World Autumn 1977 - This may be the first
authentic analysis of the modern world ever committed to writing by an official
body of Native people. It is a
cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically
powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America.
It is, in a way, the modern world seen through Pleistocene eyes. The Hau de no see nee position is
derived from a philosophy that sees The People with historical roots that
extend back tens of thousands of years. It is a geological kind of perspective,
which sees modern man as an infant, occupying a very short space of time in an
incredibly long spectrum. It is the perspective of the oldest elder looking
into the affairs of a young child and seeing that he is committing incredibly
destructive folly. It is, in short, the statement of a people who are ageless
but who trace their history as a people to the very beginning of time. And they
are speaking, in this instance, to a world which dates its existence from a
little over 500 years ago, and perhaps much more recently than that.
Spiritualism:
The Highest Form of Political Consciousness
The Hau de no sau nee Message to the Western World
How the Conquest of Indigenous Peoples
Parallels the Conquest of Nature by John Mohawk 10/97
Voices from White Earth:
Gaa-waabaabiganikaag by Winona LaDuke 10/93
Indigenous
Mind by Winona Laduke
A
Native View Of Nature by John Mohawk - An interview by Charlene Spretnak
The Ice Is Melting by Oren Lyons 10/04
First Nations and the
Future of the Earth by
Rebecca Adamson
The
Leadership Imperative, An
interview with Chief Oren Lyons 2/07
Honor and
Care of Our Sacred Planet
Care And
Feeding Of Snow And Earth by Woody Vaspra, President,
World Council of Elders
Restoring Our
Relationship With Mother Earth - Interview with Tom Goldtooth by
Kim Ridley 11/11/07 - "Climate change affects everyone, but it has a
disproportionate impact on indigenous communities, especially on our rights to
practice our culture and to access our traditional food systems.”
Ancestral Mandates and
Spiritual Voices: Our Journey On the Sacred Path To the Next 500 Years - Spiritual
Elders of Mother Earth
Apocalypse No! An Indigenist Perspective by Juan Santos
People's Agreement: Final Declaration of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 2010, led by President Evo Morales
Indigenous People
Demand Voice in Climate Talks by Haider Rizvi 11/28/08 - London-based Minority Rights Group International warned that a new
climate change agreement would be "seriously compromised" if
policymakers continued to shut out the voices of those most affected by global
warming. According to MRG's new report, the impact of climate change hits
indigenous communities hardest because they live in ecologically diverse areas
and their livelihoods are dependent on the environment.
The Rights
of the Land: The Onondaga Nation of central New York proposes a
radical new vision of property rights by Robin Kimmerer
11-12/08 - When they finally got
their day in court, members of the Onondaga Nation argued that the land title
they’re seeking is not for possession, not to exclude, but for the right to
participate in the well-being of the land. Against the backdrop of
Euro-American thinking, which treats land as a bundle of property rights, the
Onondaga are asking for freedom to exercise their responsibility to the land.
This is unheard of in American property law. Above all, the land rights action
seeks title for the purpose of ecological restoration. The legal action
concerns not only rights to the land, but also the rights of the land, its right to be whole and healthy.
Go Green, Save the
Indigenous
by Tarjei Kidd Olsen 3/10/08
Challenging Indian Land Trusts by Michelle Chen 2/18/08
Apaches Rise to Defend Homelands
from Homeland Security by Brenda
Norrell 1/10/08
Mohawk
Warriors support Lakotas' withdrawl from US by Kahentinetha Horn 12/25/07
Chief Big Foot Riders Return
To Wounded Knee, Freedom 12/24/07 Media Advisory
Lakota
Sioux Secede From US, Declare Independence by Bill Harlan 12/21/07
Descendants
of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US 12/20/07 Lakota withdraw from United States
War Paint
and Lawyers: Rainforest Indians
versus Big Oil Greg
Palast investigates.
Hopi
springs still in danger by
Cyndy Cole 12/2/07
Botswana government
targets Bushman hunters
The
Bushmen of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve have been forced from their
ancestral lands in a wave of evictions by the Botswana government.
Penan - The Penan live in Sarawak, the
Malaysian part of the island of Borneo. The Penan are just one of the tribal
peoples of Sarawak, but they are the only
nomadic tribe. Since the 1970s,
all the tribal peoples of Sarawak have had their land taken to make way for
logging, dam construction and oil palm plantations - driving them into towns where
they are reduced to abject poverty.
Uncontacted Tribes - Over one hundred tribes
around the world choose to reject contact with outsiders. They are the most
vulnerable peoples on the planet.
Tribal News from around the
world by Survival International
CENSORED: Censored and under-reported news
Message
from the Mayan Elders - February, 2006 by
Carlos Barrios
Mayan
Leader Announces 2012 Disasters
2012 Disasters announced as End
of the Mayan Cycle by Héctor Camero Treviño, 11/6/07
The Inka Prophecy of
the End of Time by
Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.
Hopi Elders Messages to the World
- In Their Own Words
Articles by Non-Natives and Initiates
Language
Separates Us from Nature by Chuck Burr 12/7/08 -
Every day, the global
communication revolution moves us further away from
nature. We have
sacrificed a deep intimate experience with nature, a household level of
knowledge of plants and animals, and a rich hunter-gatherer language. We have
gained something with no intrinsic value -- information and data experienced in
isolation. Once we realize how
poor we are in our detachment from nature, the Garden of Eden, we may well
yearn for a way back to a deep, whole, connected, wordless experience of life.
Thanksgiving We Can Believe
In by
Steve Hendricks 11/27/08 - America is not alone among nations in making
mythology of history. Myth comforts. History, which is to say truth, instructs,
often painfully. And it is a painful truth that the guns, germs, and steel of
our forebears precipitated the great bloodletting that rid Indian Country of
Indians and damned the few survivors to POW camps (now called reservations)
where they remain the poorest, most diseased, and worst schooled among us. The
link between our myth-making and their destitution is direct. For to forget
that our nation virtually destroyed theirs is to absolve ourselves of a duty to
make amends. We have been absolving ourselves for half a millennium now.
What Does Climate Change Do To Our Heads? by Sanjay Khanna 3/21/08 - If the environmental
degradation of the past hundred years is any indication, our contemporary
lifestyles, built on a dwindling resource base, have failed to acknowledge how
much the mental health of people is related to the health of ecosystems.
Revolution
of the Snails: Encounters with the
Zapatistas by
Rebecca Solnit 1/15/08
Race,
Sacrifice, and Native Lands by
Jonna Higgins-Freese and Jeff Tomhave
First
World, Fourth World by
Ralph Metzner
Sustainability:
Lessons from Indigenous Wisdom by John Perkins
How
Native American Foods Revolutionized Europe: Yummy Gifts to World Breadbasket by David Johnson 10/9/06
Plants
Of The Gods by
Wade Davis
Grandmothers Unite by
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt 11/8/04
In original tribal cultures, the Grandmothers' Council was honored as the final authority on most tribal matters, including the waging
of war. Now, wise voices converge to strengthen their message. See two trailers from the film
"For the Next 7 Generations: the Grandmothers Speak" below.
EDWARD SHERIFF CURTIS: One Man's Obsessive Pursuit Of
The Lost Tribes Of America by Benjamin Secher 6/21/08 - Edward S. Curtis
took more than 40,000 pictures, the best of which formed the basis of The
North American Indian, a vast ethnographic study, published in 20
volumes between 1907 and 1930. On the appearance of the first volume, the New
York Herald declared it "the most gigantic undertaking in the making of
books since the King James edition of the Bible".
Connections Between
Buddhism And Native American Practices - Interview
with Lorain Fox Davis and Tsultrim Allione
An Anarchist Study of
the Rotinonshón:ni Polity by Stephen Arthur - The traditional society of the Rotinonshón:ni
(Iroquois), "The People of the Longhouse," was a densely settled,
matrilineal, communal, and extensively horticultural society. The
Rotinonshón:ni formed a confederacy of five nations. Generations before
historical contact with Europeans, these nations united through the
Kaianere'kó:wa into the same polity and ended blood feuding without economic
exploitation, stratification, or the formation of a centralized state. The similarities between anarchism and
indigenism are being increasingly noticed, as anarchists find themselves in
solidarity with indigenous struggles from Oaxaca to Ohswé:ken.
The Plastic Medicine People Circle by Helene E. Hagan 1992 - The
author is a psychological anthropologist who has worked with Native American
issues and lived for four years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota
while working on an elder oral history project. In this article she details the psychological dangers to
non-natives who are duped into participating in the ceremonies and rituals of
fake shamans – both those who are supposedly Native American and those
who are obviously Caucasian – and the concerns of authentic Native
Americans regarding these “plastic medicine people,” whom she names.
A Theft of
Spirit? by Christopher Shaw 8/95 -
An exploration of Native views regarding the
expropriation of Native American traditions by white people, particularly the
New Age mix-and-match amalgamations of Native ideas that are often
marketed as indigenous spirituality, but could present a long-term threat to
Native culture.
From Mechanics to
Organics An
Interview with Elisabet Sahtouris
by Scott London – Once having decided that our task was to live like
a living system within a living system, it became obvious to me that indigenous
people know more about that than our Western culture does.
Earthquakes Of
Consciousness: How I
moved from advertising glamour to anti-globalisation fervour by Jerry Mander - How Mander came to write Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Economic Globalization.
"Re-learning"
what we've forgotten by Chris Maser
Animists: The Spirit of Place - An exhibition of
photographs and commentary by Phil Borges taken in Siberia, Mongolia, the Philippines,
Peru, and the Ecuadorian Amazon. 8/2000 - Animists:
The Spirit of Place reflects upon a time when we were all deeply bonded to the
place where we lived. The artist states: "It was a spiritual connection
seen to be vital for maintaining both the health of the community and the well
being of the individual". During the Enlightenment this spiritual
communication fell out of favour. There are only a few traditional cultures
remaining who spiritually communicate with their environment. These photographs
depict some of these people for whom the environment still holds a sacred
enchantment .... people who still know the The Spirit of Place. Includes quotes by photo subjects.
Indigenous Environmental Network
For the Next 7
Generations: The Grandmothers Speak
Earth Mother Crying! The Journal of Prophecies of Native Peoples Worldwide
Saq' Be': Organization for
Mayan and Indigenous Spiritual Studies
Saq'
Be' (pronounced sock bay) Mayan term
referring to the white/sacred road, the Milky Way and the spiritual path of
one's life.
Spiritual Elders of Mother
Earth
The Alianza
Indígena Sin Fronteras/Indigenous Alliance Without Borders
Snow Riders of the American
Indian Nations
Snow Riders Gallery of
Edward Curtis Photographs
Edward S. Curtis’
North American Indian Photographic Images
The Four Winds Society - Our mission is to
preserve the healing techniques of Inka Shamanism and bring them into the 21st
Century through classes and in-depth training programs.
The Earth is our Mother by
Tashunka Witko – With photographs by Edward S. Curtis, quotes and
music by Native Americans. Video 8:27
The Message – The Plantagon message to the leaders of the world from
the indigenous peoples of all nations, spoken by Oren Lyons, 1/13/08.
Oren Lyons: Value Change for Survival – Interview with Oren Lyons
on global warming, 1/09/07.
Red Crow Westerman -
Speaking To The World – Native
American History and the American Indian Movement
Indigenous Native American Prophecy (Elders Speak part 1)
The Worldwide Web of Belief and Ritual - Anthropologist Wade Davis is perhaps the most
articulate and influential western advocate for the world's indigenous
cultures. His stunning photographs and evocative stories capture the viewer's
imagination. As a speaker, he parlays that sense of wonder into passionate
concern over the rate at which cultures and languages are disappearing -- 50
percent of the world's 6,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to
children. He argues, in the most beautiful terms, that language isn't just a
collection of vocabulary and grammatical rules. In fact, "Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." (19 min)
For the Next 7
Generations: The Grandmothers Speak - 13 Indigenous women elders, shamans
and medicine women from around the world, have been called together to share
their sacred wisdom and practices. Can they light the way for us to a peaceful
and sustainable planet? This is a trailer for a documentary feature film in
progress.
For
the Next 7 Generations: Scenes from Dharmasala
Dispatches /Undercover in Tibet - Channel 4 British television station 4/4/08 - The indigenous people of Tibet are being imprisoned,
tortured, relocated, sterilized, and terrorized by the Chinese government. It looks like genocide. (48:26 min)
Wade Davis: Cultures at
the far edge of the world - With stunning photos and stories, National
Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the diversity of the world's indigenous
cultures, now disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate. He argues
passionately that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere,
but also the "ethnosphere" -- "the sum total of all thoughts and
dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human
imagination."
Jerry Mander talks about Paradigm Wars: Indigenous People's
Resistance to Economic Globalization. (56 min.)
Jerry Mander - Globalization
and Indigenous Cultures (4 min.)
Cultural
Freedom and Globalization - Audio with Jerry Mander
Referring to globalization as the “juggernaut of
homogenization,” Mander says that all indigenous peoples, as well as national
cultures, are threatened by this economic trend.
Tribal Channel of Survival
International
Apache Blessing
May the sun bring you new energy by
day,
May the moon softly restore you by
night,
May the rain wash away your worries,
May the breeze blow new strength into
your being.
May you walk gently through the world and know
its beauty all the days of your life.
We must protect the forests for our children,
grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for
themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees. ~
Qwatsinas (Hereditary Chief Edward Moody), Nuxalk Nation
Peace Maker said, “Make your decisions on behalf of seven
generations.” He’s telling you to look ahead, to not think about yourself. If
you can stop thinking about yourself and begin thinking about responsibility,
everything is going to get better. Immediately everything will change. But that
is not the makeup of the human mind. There’s always the evil twin. And there’s
always the good twin. It’s a daily battle. — Chief Oren Lyons
©
2009 Suzanne Duarte