I saw a cuzzin tag one of my posts with "wâhkôtowin", which is great timing, as that's the first teaching I wanted to share!
My Cree people don't really have a name for our religion.
(Side note, why do some religions get to be religions and ours are just "spirituality" 👀)
But if I were to choose one Cree word that really encompasses my people's culture and spiritual beliefs, it would be wâhkôtowin.
I often see wâhkôtowin translated as "the act of being related" or "interconnection"
But to really understand wâhkôtowin you need to know a little bit about the Cree worldview, which has a LOT in common with many other Indigenous nations.
My people are animists, which means we believe that that spiritual energy exists in everything. We believe that spirit exists not just in humans, but in animals, plants, rocks, water, clouds, wind etc etc etc and that all of these things contain life.
We believe that all life is sacred. A person is no more or less sacred than a rabbit, a rabbit is no more or less sacred than a bit of parsley, which is no more or less sacred than a mountain, a bug, a daisy, a whale, you get what I mean?
Wâhkôtowin acknowledges the connection between each of these beings.
Now, you may wonder: if all life is sacred, how is it okay to kill and eat another life form? Or for my American relatives: how can burger be wâhkôtowin?
That brings us to another connected teaching. Natural law. And one of the basic laws of nature is that life consumes life.
It is natural for the bison to eat grass. It is natural for me to eat the bison. When I die, it is natural for the worms and bacteria and fungi to eat ME. When the molecules that make up me are broken down into the soil, it is natural for the tree to soak up my nutrients.
Not to be Elton John on main, but basically this is a circle of life kinda deal!
Wâhkôtowin teaches us to acknowledge that circle of life. If I cut down the forest, the bird has no where to build its nest, which means there's no... I dunno bird poop to fertilize the grass for the buffalo, WHATEVER, I'm running out of organisms here
My point is, there is no action that any organism can take that doesn't have an impact on another life. And those impacts build up into a great big interconnected web of WÂHKÔTOWIN!
So how do we apply wâhkôtowin to our modern world?
Let's take the example of my shitty plastic ruler. I bought my shitty plastic ruler at the dollar store. An underpaid teenage cashier rung me up, and it was probably another underpaid teenager that stocked the shelves. My ruler was probably dropped off by a delivery person, driven there by a truck driver, came over the ocean on a big ass boat, was manufactured by a team of (probably also underpaid) skilled laborers in China. That plastic is made out of petroleum, the crude oil formed from the fossilized remains of teensy weensy microorganisms that lived millions of years ago!
How many lives is that? A bajillion? A bajillion different life forms, all with their own individual histories and needs and experiences, all coming together to produce my shitty plastic ruler that I paid a buck fifty for at dollarama.
How can we honour all of those lives in our use of the shitty plastic ruler?
We don't waste! We take care of our belongings so that they last. We don't take more than we need. We treat the underpaid teenage employee with kindness. We advocate for the rights of the laborers, truck drivers, and delivery people. We refuse to support damaging resource extraction practices. We don't buy the newest model of shitty plastic ruler every year as a status symbol.
Wâhkôtowin teaches us to be mindful (and even demuuuuure) of the ways that our actions impact not just the humans near us, but our world as a whole.
So I'm gonna share as many Gaza fundraisers as I can. Because wâhkôtowin.
I'm gonna share my change with the homeless relative downtown. Because wâhkôtowin.
I'm going to learn about the people who are different from me. Because wâhkôtowin.
I'm going to try and reduce how much I consume. Because wâhkôtowin.
And I'm going to do my best to teach all of you how much this land and its history mean to my people, and try to spread my hope that there is a better way for all of us to live, if we remember that we really are all related. Because wâhkôtowin.
THE NATIVE AMERICANS USED EVERY PART OF THE BUFFALO. USE EVERY PART OF THE SHITTY PLASTIC RULER.
