#indigenous thought

[solace-philosophy]

Our present view of government, our avoidance of allegiance to high spiritual powers, and our exclusively scientific understanding of our world will continue to guide our thoughts and activities in the future and bring us to a complete collapse

unless we achieve more mature understandings of our planet, its history, and the rest of the universe. Much of Western science must go, all of Western religion should go, and if we are in any way successful in ridding ourselves of these burdens, we will find that we can fundamentally change government so that it will function more sensibly and enable us to solve our problems.

— Red Earth White Lies, Vine Deloria, Jr.

[solace-philosophy]

Religion, in any usual meaning of the term, ceased to exist in America long ago. Indeed, any higher deity exists for Americans only insofar as he or she can guarantee great sex, lots of money, social prestige (read celebrity), a winning football team, and someone to hate.

— Red Earth White Lies, Vine Deloria, Jr.

[solace-philosophy]

We have to out-think what it is that we are challenged by that oppresses us or whatever it is. The first act of freedom and liberation is the act of taking our intelligence back, taking our imagination back, our ability to think, that is the first step towards conscious liberation.

-John Trudell

[solace-philosophy]

Crystal clear tears of salt Come when my heart talks with sadness The tears flow my emotional rivers It’s no damn use to pretend Pain will not rise again

Crystal clear tears of salt Help my heart to feel for something When I do not want to Clear my vision see my peace Men don’t cry Indians are stoic I tell that to my heart to my eyes They just laugh at me and sometimes When my spirit hurts they make me cry

Crystal clear tears of salt Purify my memory help me understand This is not the beginning nor the end

— The Cleansing/ Red Earth Song, John Trudell

[solace-philosophy]

Humans are not in the world to succeed, to be more secure, to tame the Earth, to build big commercial structures or crash into them to find God; humans are not here to become comfortable, to purify themselves or anybody else, to become immortal or get their way.

Humans are here to become complex, simple-living beautiful things into which the Holy itself cannot resist crashing, because in the Divine collision of God’s desire with our beauty, the world jumps back into flower with all its detours, griefs, joys, pains, reliefs, breakthroughs, and ironies as its accepted petals.

— Martin Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart

[solace-philosophy]

If initiation is about culture and the modern world desires initiation, it will have to redefine itself.

A new culture would have to develop where humans and their inventions are not at the center of the universe, and where God too is not at the center. What could be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and we humans could sing and weep together as a team pushing magical words into that sacred Hole. Maybe together, the diverse and combined excellence of all cultures could court the Tree of Life back out of its frightened and fugitive existence in the previous layers where it was banished into the invisible by our scared literalist minds, dogmatic religiosities, and forgetfulness.

— Martin Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart

[solace-philosophy]

All modern people, no matter how superior or remote they feel themselves to be from this reality experienced in Long Life, Honey in the Heart, are suffering lives whose severe political and spiritual amnesia are the direct result of their having been raised by people whose ancestors were in the exact same way run over and torn from their original languages, music, clothing, and spiritual relation with the ground that fed them. This recognition should never be left idle as a simple understanding stored in the back of our minds and soon forgotten. This reality must be faced, habitually recognized in our every action, and continually healed over and over through collective capacity to not only feel and express the grief we find there, but to turn the grief into a life-promoting energy source that spiritually and practically fuels new cultures no longer dedicated to deadening our natural ability to think and feel, but able to live mortally and ecstatically in love with the ground that gives us life.

— Martin Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart

[solace-philosophy]

Without custodianship of cultural substance, the elders knew that the world would become filled with meaninglessness.

The mysterious spirit-made richness of the world would become filled with people with no stories, soulless objects with no substance, and a life of intolerable and efficiently maintained boredom, the modern world’s constant need to be entertained.

-Long Life, Honey in the Heart, by Martin Prechtel