This exploration of Native American traditions proposes a diagnosis for the disconnect modern humans experience from nature and considers traditional Native practices as potential therapy people might take up to heal the rift. The Native American “way of being in the world” – what Luther Standing Bear calls “Indian mind” and Joseph Couture refers to as coming to “‘know’ as an Indian knows, to ‘see’ as an Indian sees”, is in my view, a kind of “nature consciousness,” an elemental component of Native American religions. Nature consciousness embraces the whole of the environment and nature, and everything in it, in one community of life.
For Native American author and religious scholar Vine Deloria Jr. “tribal religions have a natural affinity with living creatures in a fellowship of life.” The Hopi, for example, “revere not only the lands on which they live but the animals with which they have a particular relationship.” (88) The great disconnect, or alienation, of whites from nature, Deloria points out, has its fountainhead in the way Christians interpret the story in Genesis, with man reigning supreme over all other creatures. Indian tribes, on the other hand, view all living beings as sentient. Animals are “people” in the same way that human beings are people. Plains Indians considered the buffalo as a people, and Northwest Coast Indians regarded the salmon as a people. This “recognition of the creatureness of all creation,” an attitude that opens the door to relatedness with every part of creation, is what Indians have that Westerners lack. For some tribes this relatedness even extends to plants, rocks, and natural phenomena considered by Westerners inanimate. Deloria quotes Walking Buffalo, a Stoney Indian from Canada:
Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they’ll talk to you if you listen…I have learned a lot from trees; sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit. (89)
One unfortunate symptom of the Western alienation from nature is the chasm between “wild” and “civilized,” a chasm that leaves the white mind fearful of wilderness. But in the Indian view of the world there was no fear of nature. Luther Standing Bear put it this way:
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the white men was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.
One other aspect of the human-nature disconnect is Western obsession with scientific thinking that prejudices Indian religious beliefs as mere superstitions. In Deloria’s experience, Whites consider Indian dances for rain, for example, to be mere superstitions, and songs to make corn grow as absurd. But Deloria points out that white people believe they can make plants grow with music, suggesting perhaps that Indian tribal religious practices integrate certain truths only recently acknowledged by science. It seems imprudent to think it absurd or superstitious that one can learn to hear the trees talk. For Deloria, naturally, “it would be strange if they did not have the power to communicate.”
For N. Scott Momaday, a Native American author of Kiowa descent, the Indian “con-conceives” of himself in relation to the landscape. Momaday sees the Native American ethic with respect to the physical world as reciprocal appropriation, “appropriation in which man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience.” Momaday’s “appropriation” is about moral imagination. As Momaday sees it, we are all, “at the most fundamental level what we imagine ourselves to be,” a conception that seems to sit well with the notion of nature consciousness. The Indian thinks of himself as a being in relationship with the physical world. He “imagines” himself in terms of that relationship, an attitude evolved over many generations as an integral aspect of cultural memory.
In the 1930s, Luther Standing Bear described this aspect of cultural memory when he wrote: “The Lakota was a true naturist — a lover of Nature.” Lakota loved the earth “and all things of the earth;” the soil was “soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.” In contrast to Lakota nature consciousness, however, the white mind does not feel toward nature as does the Indian mind, a discrepancy Standing Bear attributes to child-rearing practices. Growing up, Standing Bear would see white boys gathered in the city street “jostling and pushing one another in a foolish manner…..aimless, their natural faculties neither seeing, hearing, nor feeling the varied life that surrounds them. There is about them no awareness, no acuteness.” In contrast, Indian boys were “naturally reared…alert to their surroundings; their senses not narrowed to observing only one another.”
In Standing Bear’s Lakota world animals had rights, and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved animals, and took life only to the extent needed for food and clothing. Indian nature consciousness precluded “antagonism toward his fellow creatures.” The Indian and the white man sense things differently “because the white man has put distance between himself and nature.” What Standing Bear learned from the elders is that “man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard.” (197)
In 1985, Nuu-Chah-Nulth elder Mabel Sport wrote to the editor of the tribal newsletter about the local Bull Head Derby, a recreational fishing tournament common in the Pacific Northwest, held to encourage children to take up recreational and competitive fishing. Mabel Sport had this to say (in part):
I am compelled to write and let people know of the teachings I had as a child concerning the bull head. I get very hurt feelings inside whenever I hear about the Bull Head Derby. As a child I was taught about the sacredness of life. The natives believe that every living thing has a spirit. The bull head is the guardian of the waterfront and rivers. It keeps the water clean [and] guards the small coho fry until maturity. The more plentiful the bull heads are in the river, the more plentiful the fish. (Anderson, 62)
Mabel Sport’s feelings mark the relationship Northwest Coast peoples have with animals as an emotional connection, founded on deep mutual respect. In Native American Indian beliefs some nonhumans have powers far exceeding those of ordinary humans. Some animals move with ease in worlds inaccessible to humans: deep water, the air above, or the underground below; others sacrifice themselves as food. In Indian minds they are all “people.”
We can now propose a diagnosis for the human-nature disconnect as the lack of nature consciousness, delineated by these discrepancies:
- Lack of kinship and harmony: Native mind is a state of being in harmony with all living things. In the words of Luther Standing Bear this way of being is in “…kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water.” Non-natives, on the other hand, view nature and non-human life as separate and inferior, not kin.
- Emphasis on exploitation and scientific thinking: For the Lakota, in the words of Standing Bear, “…mountains, lakes, rivers, springs, valleys, and woods were all finished beauty…birds, insects, and animals filled the world with knowledge that defied the discernment of man.” For non-Natives, on the other hand, generally nature is there to be discovered, classified, labeled, explained, dissected, and analyzed for human benefit.
- Dominant mind-think rather than heart-think: “I have come to know,” wrote Standing Bear, “the white mind does not feel toward nature as does the Indian mind.” [Italics mine] Mabel Sport’s complaint is one of emotional hurt, a response one might associate with empathy for a harmed family member, a kind of empathy not common with the white mind.
- Forgotten somatic awareness: Indian people lived in kinship with the land, with respect for its life-giving qualities (Mother Earth) as the source of all food, water, fire, and air; a kinship enhanced by sensing with the body – touching, smelling, tasting, listening, seeing with “natural” vision, and sitting and walking (often in bare feet) on the bare earth. White people have lost this sensitivity to nature.
- Neglected childrearing practices that imbue the lived social and cultural experience of the young with myth, tradition, and a land ethic.
Joseph Couture, a Canadian Aboriginal scholar, views “Indian Medicine” as optimistic and positive, and “discoverable by anyone who wants to ‘see’ earnestly and sincerely. Couture’s first experience with Indian Medicine, in the spring of 1971, involved a sweat lodge and pipe ceremony, a fast, and his first “Dream.” Couture went without food or water for four nights and three days, staying awake from dusk to dawn. On each of the three nights he had the same dream, the kind Plains Indians call “the Dream.” What Couture learned from the dream was what he calls “the true meaning of the Indian Way,” something conventional Christian mentality had kept in his mind’s shadow. As a result of his Dream, couture began to feel a “physical healing effect” in the sweat lodge and other ceremonies, now no longer affected by his conditioned “philosophical and spiritual disposition.” After the third repetition of the Dream, Couture notes:
My compulsive and apprehensive rational mind quietly settled into a waiting attentive mode, and with that came trusting acceptance of what began to be a deeply satisfying, in-depth Indian spiritual experience. (Indian Spirituality: A Personal Experience, 6)
It is not too presumptuous an assumption, I think, to conclude that what Couture is describing here is preparedness, and openness, to nature consciousness. Couture attributes this “waiting attentive mode” to his “absolute fast.” The fast, he explains,
…is a crucial moment, for it is then, perhaps more than at any other moment of conscious relating to Spirit, that one enters deeply into prayer and introspection, into experiences of inner and outer phenomena, into experiences of enlightenment and change. Ineluctable and ineffable moments these can be and frequently are. (7)
For those thinking “Indian Medicine” is an anachronistic and impractical practice, Couture reminds us that this is “Indian religion and spirituality as it is today,” and that more and more Natives are returning to Native spiritual leaders so they can return to Indian life principles. Indian Medicine is a therapy with potential to heal the human-nature rift through a process leading to knowing as an Indian knows and seeing as an Indian sees. Couture concludes Indian Medicine is
….as a process objective, requiring conscious sidelining of discursive reason, or the intellectual mind, to let intuition, or the intuitive mind, play. Doing this can lead one to a direct experience of the truth of the Indian Way, entering directly upon its Ground where knowing is being.
In this process a vital relationship is established with the “Great Spirit” or the “Creator,” concomitant with a feeling of balance or centredness that leads, in turn, “to a relationship with all manifestations of Being” and “gives meaning to all, to the self, to all components of one’s environment.” While Couture cautions it is difficult to describe the way the Indian mind works, he highlights that Indian Medicine brings about a unity of human and earth infused with one creative spirit. This “at-one-ness” with nature, a way of being that conforms with nature, “is the source of peace with self, for it is really a living in the Self, or self of selves, the Source of being.” For Couture, an essential consequence of the Indian Medicine process is a sense of silent “fulfilling communion,” a state of mind where analytical intellectual activity is replaced by intuition and dream activity. Such awareness is the “at-one-ness with Nature” Couture speaks of.
To pursue Indian Medicine without faltering, Couture emphasizes that whether one was raised in an Indian culture or not, elders are the ones to facilitate this process of spiritual learning in a relationship of apprenticeship. What the apprentice gains from this “learning-by-doing process” is the wisdom and capacity to shed the domination of the rationalistic mindset.
This brief exploration of Native American Indian religion proposes a therapy for attaining a way of being in the world we can term “nature consciousness,” a consciousness that embraces nature and humans as one whole. As Joseph Couture tells us, nature consciousness is available to anyone willing to pursue it diligently as a spiritual path under the guidance of elders. In a time when many Native Indians are rediscovering their traditional religious practices as therapy for their disconnect and sense of alienation from nature and culture, these same traditional practices offer non-Natives a healing process to bridge the chasm of nature-human disconnect and arrive at the harmony of nature consciousness.
Works Cited
Anderson, E. N. (1996) Ecologies of the Heart: Emotions, Belief, and the Environment. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Couture, Ruth and McGowan, Virginia, editors (2013) A Metaphoric Mind: Selected Writings of Joseph Couture. Edmonton, Alberta: AU Press Athabasca University. http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120198
Deloria, Vine Jr. (2003) (first edition 1973) God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing.
Momaday, N. Scott (1976) “Native American Attitudes to the Environment” in Seeing With A Native Eye. New York: Harper & Row.
Standing Bear, Luther (1978) Land of the Spotted Eagle. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.