a true story about “the beginning”

Mitakuye oyasin seems to be our recurring refrain in NW class. We’re all related, but to what? The whole community. That includes not just people and animals but plants, food, and medicine, and genetic information stretching back into pre-history, and humans of the future, and post-humans, and and and…

And even invasive spiritual traditions, evidently. Greg Cajete recalls the “Saint’s house” of his youth where Catholicism was celebrated alongside traditional Pueblo values. That’s pluralism, again, and if you ask me that’s a good thing.

But does it flirt with relativism too, or with something even less committed to the truth, in which competing propositions about the cosmos are not merely “true for you and true for me,” respectively, but in which all differences are submerged in an indiscriminately assimilated melange of “tradition and age-old practices”? Or… is it just a prayerful expression of the hope that we might all one day learn to just get along?

“Children are our future,” I thought, is as close to a universal cliche as there is. But Cajete claims it as a distinctively indigenous attitude, along with a Howard Gardner-esque “multiple intelligences” view of pedagogy… and this on the heels of contending that “tribal man is hardly a personal ‘self’ in our modern sense of the word.” This is an interesting attempt to cut through familiar battles between communitarianism and individualism. He even speaks the Emersonian language of “self-reliance” approvingly  at one point, while still affirming the tribe’s pervasive imprint on every member of the community. Does he pull it off?

Seeking and finding life, “that place that Indian people talk about,” is another core aspiration. Being “at home” in this world was Carl Sagan’s definition of spirituality, too. What a fascinating convergence.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

In other words, we are all connected. Life’s an extraordinarily inclusive symphony. The universe makes a big sound.

What’s sacred to a child? Well, in my experience just about anything can be. Children are more readily at home in the present than most of us, at least ’til we get our educational snares into them. But Cajete has in mind the words that compose stories, which– also in my experience– are so enchanting to children. Parents of small children who don’t treasure a nightly storytime ritual are missing out on one of life’s most incredibly special experiences.

Striking contracts and covenants with plants sounds a little out there, but I guess it’s simply an application of the will to build stronger communities in which we would all coexist in respectful mutuality. But plants? Really? Well yes, suggests a story in the Times. “Plants Like Life Too.”

I’m a little uneasy about the indigenous tendency to chalk illness up to “improper relationship to the natural world, spirit world, community, and/or to one’s own spirit and soul.” But a healer’s gotta start somewhere, and maybe we can agree that pure medical materialism is just too narrow.

“In the creation myth of the Inuit, the first man is born fully formed from a pea pod.” That’s one example of Cajete’s meaning when he says native myths mirror the reality of human biological evolution, though the mirror image seems a little cloudy. Less, perhaps, than in some other creation stories.

I notice that YouTube is teeming with more-or-less-cleverly produced creation myth videos. Very entertaining…

…but I have to wonder why it’s so hard to find good renditions of the actual facts of creation as we’ve come to know them? Speaking of Carl, “let me tell you a story about the beginning”:

So, on Carl’s reading mitakuye oyasin means the differences between species and lifeforms (let alone persons and peoples) on this planet, this place, are insignificant. We are related means we are one. So why can’t we all just get along?

Tags: Carl Sagan, creation myths, Symphony of Science