Indigenous Traditions: Religion and Ecology (PDF)

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.) https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195178722.001.0001 Published: 2006 Online ISBN: 9780199892136 Print ISBN: 9780195178722 Search in this book Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 CHAPTER 12 Indigenous Traditions: Religion and Ecology  John A. Grim https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195178722.003.0013 Pages 283–310 Published: 02 September 2009 Abstract No one term in an indigenous language may exactly translate, or even correspond to, the English terms “religion” or “ecology.” The term “ecology” is used here to express indigenous knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, or traditional environmental knowledge. Despite widespread cultural losses due to colonization and industrialization, many indigenous peoples still hold to their creation stories as the basis of their traditional symbols and rituals of spiritual and ecological intimacy. These creation stories provide the cosmological context for knowing self, society, and world. The indigenous traditions of the Americas provide the majority of examples of indigenous religions given in this article. This article also examines indigenous lifeways and the fourfold embodiment: the individual person (or embodied self ), the native society, the larger community of life in a region (nature or ecology), and the powerful cosmological beings typically present in ritual actions and mythic narratives. Keywords: Americas, indigenous peoples, ecology, religion, indigenous traditions, rituals, creation stories, society, nature, indigenous lifeways Subject: Religion, Religious Studies Series: Oxford Handbooks Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online NO one term in an indigenous language may exactly translate, or even correspond to, the English terms religion or ecology. Yet something of the depth and variety of life-orienting interactions with bioregions and biodiversity, and the complex human-earth interactions in creation stories and ritual among indigenous peoples, can be communicated through these approaches. No one ritual action and no single mythic cycle among the diverse indigenous peoples provides a “text” or a “language” for understanding their religions. In fact, these genres may mislead an investigation of indigenous religious life that is primarily narrated, 1 danced, sung, heard often in silence, and ritually performed within the community of life. Thus, the experience of sacred relationships forged by indigenous peoples with the world suggests more lived and embodied modes of expression. Similarly, the term ecology is not used here to reference exclusively the scienti c study of ecosystems. Rather, this term is used to express indigenous knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, or traditional 2 environmental knowledge. The term religious ecologies can also be used to refer to these di erent cultural understandings of the interrelationships and interdependencies with natural systems developed by diverse p. 284 indigenous peoples. These forms of interactive knowledge may not be scienti c as that term describes Western modes of empirical, falsi able, experimental investigation. Indigenous knowledge has it own Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 modes of empirical observation, acquisition through lived experience, and testing in the context of one's community. Indigenous knowledge is traditional because transmitted from generation to generation. Yet, this knowledge is not static data but a dynamic, lived knowing that grows and adapts to changes. The sources of this knowledge are multiple. Indigenous knowledge might come from close observation of nature, or it might come from visionary and dream sources and endure as traditional environmental knowledge recognized by the wider community. In all settings indigenous knowledge is directly related to the natural 3 world. It is in this sense that it can be said that indigenous peoples live in a universe and not simply in systems of knowledge that characterize such separate academic elds as science, social science, or the humanities. Despite widespread cultural losses due to colonization and industrialization, many indigenous peoples still hold to their creation stories as the basis of their traditional symbols and rituals of spiritual and ecological intimacy. These creation stories provide the cosmological context for knowing self, society, and world. The values embedded in these stories are manifest in their passages through personal life crises, in community liturgies of renewal, and in their spiritual encounters with the transformations of weather, nightscapes, and landscapes. In other words, the stories are not simply a “narrative literature.” They are not merely data for a study that can be called “traditional ecological knowledge.” Rather, creation stories are heard as lived, embodied relationships with environments. Just as indigenous knowledge is embedded in local environments, so also it is at the growing edge of individual and community life. In diverse ways indigenous peoples explore and transmit creative engagements with the natural world and the larger cosmos in a frame that is labeled here as religion and ecology. This work presents an overview of these religious ways of indigenous peoples as embodied life. That is, one interpretive entry into indigenous religions is to explore personal, social, ecological, and cosmological realms as integrated dimensions of a uni ed body. Embodiment, therefore, is presented here as a phenomenological description found in indigenous religions as well as a helpful metaphor for understanding the relations established between indigenous peoples and the larger world. Narrations during rituals and statements that describe personal and social experiences provide materials for this investigation. Moreover, since the indigenous traditions of the Americas have been the focus of study for this author, they provide the majority of examples of indigenous religions given here. However, brief references from the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Paci c regions will be included to point the reader toward rich studies of indigenous religion and ecology in those regions. p. 285 It is important that these materials should not be understood as simply ethnography or objective narratives and descriptions of personal experiences. That is, the collecting of narratives by anthropologists and other students of culture as well as translated personal statements by indigenous spokespeople themselves can be seen in a broader context of lived embodiments. These statements, then, are not presented as essential, abstract proclamations of a static truth. Rather, these texts are themselves evidence of bodily experiences and interpretive re ections upon the interactive ow of native religious life with the natural world. In that sense, indigenous perspectives on the sacred provide new ways of thinking about the text of all our lives in 4 the context of the world. Indigenous perspectives serve to raise questions about the stories that place dominant societies in the world. What will be the capacity of those stories to draw people forward in meaningful ways? Are there stories that will draw all of us forward into a productive, sustainable future with the whole community of life? A irming the Diversity of Indigenous Peoples Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 Obviously no one people can be made representative of the thousands of indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, Australia, the Paci c region, and the Americas. Yet, there are “family resemblances” among indigenous religious experiences that allow an investigation of these plural forms of religious traditions among extremely diverse indigenous peoples. By positing resemblances among indigenous traditions, I do not intend to construct an “essential” indigenous religion. Moreover, the spiritual insights that have guided native peoples through the oppression that they have undergone for the past ve centuries cannot be adequately explained by analytical categories. An e ort is made here, however, to suggest that these expressions of lived relationship and intimacy with local environments are signi cant pathways for personal maturity, communal identity, spiritual ecology, and cosmological contemplation among the native peoples who transmit them. Moreover, awareness in dominant societies of the depth and conviction of indigenous religiosity has gradually made indigenous traditions important participants in some cross- cultural, interreligious, and global dialogues of cultures. Dialogues between peoples may be limited in their grasp of the full range of religious life and practice, but they can lead to deeper levels of empathy and increase understanding of religious di erences than many p. 286 strained sociopolitical exchanges. Dialogues, hopefully, are conducted so that they do not deprive participants of their critical awareness or their particular perspectives. Two points are seminal here. First, discussions of indigenous religion and ecology are typically framed in the language and categories of dominant knowledge systems. What would dialogues look like if they were framed in indigenous ways of knowing? Second, the romanticization of indigenous knowledge can blind dialogue participants from realizing the struggles of native communities themselves to realize their own values and ideals. In that sense, there is no question that indigenous peoples at times also su er from problematic motivations that blind individuals and communities, driving them toward oppression of one another. Local indigenous communities are certainly not free of their own forms of oppressive authority, gender inequity, and power 5 manipulation. Yet, for some students the signi cance of indigenous religions may be their capacity to maintain intimate, meaningful, and sustaining human connections with the local bioregions while struggling to realize their 6 humanity. For others these native traditional religions describe intense religious practices and spiritual experiences that are comparative to those that invigorate the world's religions. Most importantly, for native scholars the recovery and maintenance of indigenous knowledge may be focused on regenerating indigenous communities rather than on implementation and storage in the knowledge systems of dominant societies. What is immediately apparent in traditional native religions is that both narratives of spiritual experiences and religious practices transmit extraordinary encounters with spiritual realms that are not separated from ordinary life lived in relation to local bioregions. Thus, to talk about indigenous religious traditions it is necessary to situate them within their lived communities, or lifeways. Lifeways in Indigenous Traditions The term lifeway is used here to suggest the close interaction of worldview and economy in small-scale societies (a cosmology-cum-economy society). Lifeway is not used to suggest a romantic imaging of indigenous peoples as separate from global economic developments. On the contrary, contemporary reserves, reservations, preserves, parks, and the remaining land bases of indigenous peoples are typically set within dominant societies, such as India, Bolivia, Botswana, Malaysia, or Ecuador. This is the case even in the indigenous nation of Papua New Guinea, where highland and island indigenous groups struggle to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 7 maintain their land base from mining extraction and logging exploitation. Thus, indigenous lifeways often stand in stark contrast with modern nation-states and multinational corporations, whose mythic values of p. 287 individualism, unlimited extraction, and global consumerism constantly entice indigenous youth away from traditional values. In critiquing categories of dominance, however, it is important that indigenous 8 modes of survival not be denied. Among these creative realms are mythic expressions of the relationships between individuals and communities, between humans and the fecundity of life, and between humans and the cosmos. Lifeway can also be used to describe the vital and diverse interactions of urban indigenous communities. Many urban native communities maintain signi cant relations with their homelands while inextricably involved with, and often dependent on, the global marketplace. These urban indigenous communities still preserve core experiences of lifeways that enable them to construct themselves in traditional ways and to accommodate outside in uences. Certainly, the “water wars” in Bolivia provide evidence of coherent communities of urban Aymara and Quecha peoples struggling against privatization of a shared natural 9 resource. Indigenous peoples as diverse as the Dogon of Mali in Africa and the Bunun of Taiwan in east Asia struggle to preserve traditional ceremonial life in the face of increasing forms of ecotourism based on the exotic 10 other. In some national settings there is no hesitation to encourage the marketing of indigenous ceremonial life. Thus, masked dances, giveaways, birthing, habitat, and life-cycle practices that build on clan and lineage reciprocity to constellate core lifeway experiences are often subject to the intrusive presence of outsiders. The recovery of indigenous voice in determining what is appropriate and what is not appropriate for outsiders to know or to see constitutes signi cant dimensions of contemporary indigenous religion and ecology. Rather than having been lost or completely subverted by the political, social, and economic values of dominant societies under which indigenous peoples have had to survive, core lifeway experiences continue to be transmitted and reinterpreted by creative indigenous individuals. Thus, April Bright of the MakMak (Sea Eagle) peoples, of the Marranunggu language group in Northern Territory, Australia, gives expression to the lifeway concept when discussing what “traditional ownership” meant to her mother: “Traditional ownership to country for my Mum was everything—everything. It was the songs, the ceremony, the land, themselves, their family—everything that life was all about. This place 11 here was her heart. That's what she lived for, and that's what she died for.” Embedded within ownership, then, for this MakMak elder, as transmitted to her daughter, was not simply individual control of private property or separate knowledge systems of collected data. Rather, ownership appears to be interwoven with diverse forms of indigenous knowledge. The land and knowledge of the land are centered in one's personal body and interwoven with the social body, the ecological body, and the cosmological body. Similarly, the lifeway context does not reduce religious language, ritual, and roles, such as that of the shaman-healer, to realms of specialization. Rather, the knowledge base from which these activities derive is p. 288 understood as derived from the ecological and cosmological whole. The descriptions of indigenous elders ow from a lifeway context that is larger than simply social or anthropocentric values. This is evident in the description of indigenous knowledge given by indigenous scholars: Perhaps the closest one can get to describing unity in Indigenous knowledge is that knowledge is the expression of the vibrant relationships between people, their ecosystems, and other living beings and spirits that share their lands. … All aspects of knowledge are interrelated and cannot be separated from the traditional territories of the people concerned. … To the Indigenous ways of knowing, the self exists within a world that is subject to ux. The purpose of these ways of knowing is to reunify the world or at least to reconcile the world to itself. Indigenous knowledge is the way of living within contexts of ux, paradox, and tension, respecting the pull of dualism and reconciling opposing forces. … Developing these ways of knowing leads to freedom of 12 consciousness and to solidarity with the natural world. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 This striking statement presents the insights of Canadian First Nation scholars and is not given here as a panindigenous perspective. Yet it highlights the connections of indigenous knowledge to the way that life is lived by a people in their homelands. The ways in which the ux and tensions of life are embedded and resolved in religion and ecology are ongoing questions for this eld of study. Lifeways and the Fourfold Embodiments Indigenous lifeways express an intimate relatedness between the individual person (or embodied self ), the native society, the larger community of life in a region (nature or ecology), and the powerful cosmological beings typically present in ritual actions and mythic narratives. Collectively, this fourfold interpretive context helps to open up interpretations of indigenous religions and ecology rather than reduce them to single explanations. This fourfold interpretive context also seeks to ground native religions in the “text” of local place. A re exive metaphor of “text” can be helpful insofar as it places indigenous religions in a context that is analogous to, yet strikingly di erent from, the criteria of literate texts, theologies, or institutional chains of transmission used by many other religions to validate their religious traditions. What is intended is an inscribing onto the reader of indigenous interactive awareness, for example, of sound, verbal expression, and place in indigenous lifeways. This mix of sense knowledge and conceptual thought as p. 289 interactive process is akin to some notions of text in Western understanding but with the additional nuances that ecologists and cosmologists bring to their understandings of place-as-text. Lifeway points toward the intertextuality of native religions, namely, that which brings together such distinct sacred actions, occasions, and concepts as chants, embodiments, and sites. The concept of lifeway, then, is not simply another “unit of analysis” in a rational study of cultures. Rather, it is an interpretive e ort to express indigenous understandings of human-earth relations as an interactive and pervasive context that outsiders might label religion. Issues in Understanding Religion and Ecology in Indigenous Lifeways Studies of North American Anishinabe peoples of the Great Lakes region often note references to the natural world and to unmediated experiences when indigenous elders describe sacred encounters. Ahnishinahbaeótjibway author Wub-e-ke-niew interweaves person, society, community of life, and spirit forces when he distinguishes the generative character of his peoples' lifeway or Mide: The Ahnishinahbaeótjibway Mide is a way of living in harmony and community; a facilitation of each person's Sovereign relationship with Grandmother Earth, with Grandfather Mide, with the Circle of Life which encompasses us, and with the Great Mysteries of the Universe. The Mide is experienced, it is directly connected to Grandmother Earth; they are married. This is where we 13 come from. The multivalent term Mide of the Great Lakes woodland people Ahnishinahbaeótjibway remains untranslated here because it is presented as a compilation, or synthetic expression, of their knowledge of life. Mide as a way of knowing is gendered by this author in English as male and as a holistic presence. His overview is also suggestive of the four embodiments—somatic, social, ecological, and cosmological. Mide encircles and pervades all of life. Moreover, the experience of local place transmitted by this term is expressed in intimate kinship terms, namely, as Grandfather “married” to Grandmother Earth, and in cosmological terms, namely, the “Mysteries of the Universe.” We can call this an integral lifeway, then, to emphasize the embedded character of sacred teachings and practices among native peoples in ordinary life. Yet, ordinary life is also understood as pervaded by powerful forces. Integral lifeway is marked by personal responsibility Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 to an experienced cosmological balance or harmony directly related to local place and people. This lived p. 290 community ideal may foster intense visionary experiences of sacred forces in contexts di erent than the experiences that occur in religions marked by literate scriptures, institutional hierarchies, and theological orthodoxies. Indigenous communal life has been the subject of intense scrutiny and interpretation by mission-oriented academic scholars and accomplished ethnographers in historical, theological, and anthropological forms. Yet, they often describe the lifeways of native communities in narrow ways using outsider terms and the categories of dominant societies. Stereotypes of the Indian (Americas), Dayak (Indonesia), Adivasi (India), Orang Asli (Malaysia), or Aboriginal (Australia) person have varied widely from pagan savage, primal ancestor, noble hero, or childlike victim. These stereotypes have often been accompanied by views of native communities as void of individual religiosity, civilized ethics, or developed intellectual ideas. Insightful and creative individuals were not expected to arise from indigenous settings, which were perceived as socially limited, superstitious, and so tradition heavy that they disparaged innovative thought. Major obstacles to our understanding of indigenous lifeways are embedded in the ways that statements by native elders and leaders are understood. There is a need to appreciate anew how indigenous thinkers express their own sensual, symbolical, and logical modes of knowing. Dialogue requires that dominant societies cultivate understanding of the wisdom traditions of native religions. Participants in dialogue need to bring participants into their most profound re ections upon themselves, their societies, their natural surroundings, and the universe. The reversal of some stereotypes of indigenous peoples in dominant societies has been due in part to more insightful ethnographic writings. These empathetic descriptions have played important roles as texts that activate new ways of cultural understanding. However, it is now quite clear that the actual voices of native individuals and communities have been the leading resource for understanding indigenous ways. Indigenous elders have become increasingly more vocal in presenting their positions in national and 14 international settings such as the United Nations. In many cases indigenous oral narrative teachings are now being studied and described by scholars who are themselves indigenous. This collaborative work of native and nonnative scholars has provided sapiential insights into contemporary life by particular indigenous peoples, as well as a deeper understanding of shared human values. Perhaps the most serious limitation in understanding contemporary indigenous peoples arises from the anxiety of nation-states regarding political sovereignty over native lands. Such anxieties are often manipulated by dominant societies to press for absolute control over indigenous homelands. As a consequence, indigenous peoples in the late twentieth and early twentieth- rst centuries have experienced increased pressures on their cultures and homelands from nation-states, multinational corporations, local entrepreneurs, and displaced settlers. In an earlier period of hegemony, for example, the mythic image of p. 291 Manifest Destiny in the United States legitimized expansive pressures to exterminate and to remove Native Americans. This symbolic view of a religious destiny fueled an imperialist myth that imagined indigenous peoples as disappearing races. Indigenous peoples in South America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Africa, and Central Asia now watch in horror as elders, who transmit the storied knowledge of their lifeways, die at the hands of intrusive individuals and institutions or from introduced disease pathogens. These are contemporary tragedies that directly relate to the dismal histories and colonial legacies throughout the world. Many indigenous peoples in the Americas—such as the Macuxi of Brazil and Venezuela, the Nasa peoples of Colombia, the Huarani and Achuar of Ecuador, the Lacandon and other Mayan peoples of Mexico, the Anishinabe and Shoshoni of the United States, and the James Bay and Lubicon Cree of Canada—see their homelands being devoured and their traditions desecrated. In these regions multinational corporations identify as resources what for indigenous peoples has been their homeland. Often the corporate world cooperates with nation-states in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 asserting national sovereignty over indigenous lands to facilitate extraction industries. In some instances extractive economies have been taken up by tribal governments themselves in the face of massive unemployment on reserves or reservations or as a means of employment when traditional hunting or trapping fail. Indigenous peoples not only search for their political voice, but they struggle to maintain viable lifeways that have at their heart both thick subsistence relations with their homelands and views of reality that engender integral lifeway experiences. Ironically even the academic discipline of anthropology, which has raised critical awareness about indigenous peoples around the world, provided ethnography in an earlier period that substantiated evolutionary readings of indigenous religions. It is still possible to nd forms of “penetration anthropology” solicited by multinational corporations or national governments used to subvert indigenous political activism and cultural self-determination. On the other hand, more recent anthropology, following methods such as “social justice advocacy,” “postcolonial,” or “postmodern” agendas, critiques the global 15 market economic agendas that exploit the homelands of indigenous peoples. Through all these exchanges native peoples have ensured their own survival through an amazing variety of assertive and adaptive projects. Their survival, often in desperate material poverty brought about by forced reductions of their homelands and by continuing exploitation of their resources, has been nurtured by profound communal religious sensibilities. Both the threatened survival of indigenous peoples and their reliance on their spiritual worldviews are evident in a statement delivered by a member of the Mapuche political organization, AD-Mapu, in 1984 to the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Chile: We would like to point out that the Mapuches have a SACRED and COLLECTIVE concept of the earth p. 292 and all it produces. There are no concepts like private property, commercial value, or constantly changing technology that industrial societies have. The religious and sacred dimensions have a global and general quality in Mapuche culture. To alter any aspect of Mapuche culture is to alter the sacred spirituality of Mapuche people. Traditionally, for the Mapuche the earth is part of life itself and it also has a sacred dimension which encompasses the existence and culture as a whole of Mapuche people. With this in mind, it is easy to see the vast damage caused to the spirit of the Mapuche people by the division of sacred and collective land. The consequences are unpredictable for the future of the 16 culture of this people. The Mapuche recognize fundamental di erences between themselves and the mainstream society of Chile. Mapuche emphasize collective ownership of land, personal relationships with sacred dimensions of the bioregion, and cultural continuity in transmission of Mapuche traditional environmental knowledge. This is in striking contrast with the national drive for historical and technological change often based on massive public works projects and the commodi cation of resources. Often deprived of political legitimacy by the judicial processes of the Chilean nation-state, the Mapuche have been subject to the economic rapacity of multinational developers intent on building hydroelectric dams. From a critical perspective it may appear that the indigenous leader cited above idealistically describes Mapuche “sacred spirituality” as timeless and unchanging. Still, the Mapuche concern is to have a determining voice in making choices a ecting their future rather than in having changes forced upon them by outsiders. In this statement, then, Mapuche activists speak from deeper traditional values regarding place and homeland than from valuation of private property or commodity exchange. They speak of sacred cosmology in which their relationships with speci c places in their homeland legitimate cultural and subsistence practices transmitted by the people. These insights ow from the Mapuche worldview and rea rm their lifeway as it is practiced. The holistic wisdom of these indigenous peoples, it is argued here, constitutes an alternative vision of development based on their sustainable relations with their homelands Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 over centuries of habitation. The rationale here for a study of indigenous religions is not to describe religious activities for re- presentations outside their cultural matrix or to suggest that a discussion of indigenous spiritualities can explain those religions away. Neither is the intention here a subtle form of penetration theology in which indigenous lifeways are studied by evangelical groups with the sole objective of subverting the integrity of those native religious practices through conversion techniques. Nor is this study intended to draw out esoteric, privileged information from native informants so as to store ethnographic data in the computer information highways of mainstream cultures and use it as an intertextual prop in the contemporary assault on indigenous cultures and homelands. What, then, is intended here? p. 293 This essay on indigenous religions and ecology seeks to stimulate public intellectuals and interested readers in re ning and deepening, in appropriate ways, a broader understanding of these lifeways that will bring about more positive policy decisions for these peoples. This work also attempts to interest readers in further attention to indigenous thought and practice as presented by native scholars in their own studies. Toward that end, this work recommends indigenous perspectives as integral and primary voices in the emerging dialogue of religions and ecology. The writings of native thinkers and the spiritual experiences of native practitioners introduce into this dialogue alternative visions of sustainable development and care for biodiversity. Furthermore, such a dialogue fosters respect, advocacy, and understanding of the diverse cultural ways of native peoples. In many settings indigenous peoples have stood up in legal, political, and social forums on both national and international levels demanding that their rights be heard and their ways respected. Increasingly, the mythologies of indigenous peoples of the Americans, for example, are being presented in regional court systems as bases for legal decisions. Gradually, these forums and dialogues have increased understanding of indigenous religions as complex, interactive processes of self, society, nature, and cosmos. Person as Somatic Center Implicit within this category of analysis are di erent indigenous cultures' views of what constitutes a self. Central to these discussions are di erent views of what constitutes a person. Foremost among these considerations we might foreground the relationships we call the human body, the senses, and the mind. In much of the nonnative world there is a radical philosophical separation between the body and mind that a rms a pragmatic “use” relationship with the natural world. This is most famously articulated as the Cartesian model and associated with scienti c objectivity. The separation of thinking ego from an inanimate world is not a “family resemblance” found in indigenous worldview perspectives. Thus, some attention to indigenous perspectives on personhood brings some insight into the relationships of self and world. Peter Chipesia, a Dunne-za elder of British Columbia, in describing the vision-quest experience of his people, points toward an embodied knowledge: When you are close to something, an animal, you are just like drunk. You don't know anything. As soon as this happens you have trouble thinking straight, like being drunk. Everything is just like when you see this animal it is as if he were a person. If you take water then, everything will get away from you and you will be a person again. You won't see anything. That is why you can't drink p. 294 water before you go out into the bush. When kids are about the same size as Joe (about ve), when they are just old enough to think, to talk, to walk … when they are older, the animal shows 17 them how to make a medicine bundle. Here, the young person undergoing the experience was not imaged as an isolated monad so typical in many Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 modes of philosophical individualism. Rather, the quality of “person” is presented as an emergent being in relationship with dreams, ancestors, and animals. Just as medicine bundles are gradually assembled with guidance from the spirit agents, so also personhood is assembled with similar supervision. Moreover, this relationship is not a dogmatic teaching that can be stated or written, nor is it simply the singular religious experience described by Chipesia. This knowledge acquired by individuals directly relates to the mythic stories of the cosmological spirits as well as to speci c animals in the environment. The work of implementing the vision is the maturing life path of the individual person in relationship to spiritual forces that have “adopted” him or her. This work of acquiring personhood is an embodied knowledge accomplished over years of interaction with the life of local regions. An expression of this embodied knowledge is evident in the vision-quest narrative of contemporary Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal. It was Cardinal's design that most signi cantly in uenced the nal plan for the Museum of the American Indian on the last public space on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Cardinal opened a 1989 interview with a description of the sweat-lodge experience that marked a ritual moment in his maturing quest. He spoke of his fasting, his awareness of the discipline required, and his “magical” experiences. Near the end of his interview he gave an account of a near-death experience that illustrates how his people, the Canadian Blackfoot, relate personhood to the beauty of life lived in relationship. In this quotation Cardinal responds to a numinous spiritual being who has challenged his self- con dence and pulled him out of his body: So I said, “I'm ready to go. I feel at peace with myself.” He said, “It doesn't matter whether you're ready or not, you're coming anyway. You're still arrogant you know.” “Yeah, I know, I'm a human being,” I said. So I nally went. It seemed like I was a part of everything, and I felt very, very powerful. I just wasn't there. The elder came out in the morning and he untied the lodge. He tried to help me come back with sweetgrass and whatever. I could hear him in the distance, “Come back.” He was pulling me back. I thought, “I don't want to go back. There's no way I'm coming back. Why would I want to go back? I'm already on the other side and if I come back as a human being, I'm going to have to go through death again. Why should I come back? Then I'd be con ned and limited and I would screw up and do all the stupid human being things. I'd be out-of-tune with myself and I'd have to go through all this pain and remorse and su ering. I'm already over here and why do I have to do all that again. p. 295 Besides, I'm free.” The elder said, “You have to come back, just to see this day. You've never seen a day like today. There's dew on the grass, and sun shining on the dew and this golden hue is all over everything. The clouds are all red. The sun is brilliant and the sky is blue. It's the most beautiful day. You have to come back and see this beautiful day. It's wonderful to be alive and walk on this earth.” I thought, “It is wonderful to experience life.” I said to that being, whatever it was, “Can I go back for a minute and see that day?” He said, “Well you're a free spirit, you can make your own choice.” I said, “I'll just check in for a minute and come right back.” I came back in my body and opened my eyes and saw that day. It was a beautiful, fantastic day. I never had seen a day like that. I'd never really looked. The elder said, “See what a beautiful day it is and how wonderful it is to be alive?” I said, “Yes, it's just beautiful.” He said, “Are you afraid of death?” I said, “No. I'm just afraid I ain't gonna live right.” He said, 18 “Then you're a fearless warrior.” Here the vision-quest experience brings an individual into a transforming experience that introduces new ways of self-perception as well as an altered vision of the world of space and time. This vision accords with the Blackfoot lifeway in its expression of personal responsibility, its embodied experiences of cosmological Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 harmonies, and its commitment to local place and people. This integral lifeway arises from the possibilities of personhood being reconstructed by means of intense spiritual experiences that occur during traditional rituals in which one's own body becomes closely identi ed with other embodied realms. Interestingly, ways of knowing are not limited to rational, analytical units of knowledge. In the example above, somatic, sensual, and holistic experiences of being bring the fasting person to an awareness of being “a part of everything.” He or she emerges in wonderment with the day's beauty. The esthetic experience described here is di erent than the contemplative act regarding art that has emerged in Euro-American cultures. That is, in the West in recent centuries the concept of art has arisen in part to ll the void of a materialist scienti c worldview emphasizing purposeless, objective reality. Blackfoot thought regarding the individual body and the mutually enhancing relationship of humans to the components of the “day” are strikingly 19 di erent than art as something that can be marketed, consumed, bought, or sold. An elder guided the fasting person based perhaps on his or her own somatic knowledge. The elder knew how to summon back the fasting person based on particular cultural expressions of the creative ow of the personal, social, bioregional, and spiritual domains. Embedded within the elder's ability to summon the youth back into ordinary awareness is some re ection of his or her own spiritual journey. Thus, an elder's gentle call across states of being may be seen as implementing a kind of cognitive map of the cosmos arising from his or her own initiating call-experiences. Years of ritual performance may have made that elder acutely aware of the “map” to be followed in vision quests. This path can also be understood as a path of intuitive thought on which a healer arranges symbols according to a personal, imaginative logic. Such p. 296 intuition-thought processes undertaken by shaman-healers in their rituals provide novel ways of organizing, thinking, and artistically imaging self, society, world, and spirit. One apparent observation is that these visionary experiences do not stand in isolation but demonstrate a means of social re ection and transformation. They provide insight into lifeways of native peoples in which conscious self-transformation is undertaken for spiritual development. Moreover, the knowledge that ows from such states is gained in ascetic practices undertaken apart from society, but their ultimate fruition is in coming to bene t the social body. Society In the religious expressions of many nonindigenous religious traditions the human-divine, or transcendent, relationship may be paramount while the human-to-human social setting of the visionary experience may be secondary. That is not the case in indigenous lifeways. That is, integral lifeways in native communities nd their deepest expression, con rmation, and contestation in the community sphere. In The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, Joseph Brown discussed several aspects of this social context of native lifeways, drawing on the Western concept of mysticism: Mysticism, insofar as it is a reality within these native traditions, is not, as the outsider has tended to view it, a vague quality of some supernatural experience that spontaneously comes to individuals whom Providence has allowed to live close to nature. Rather, such mystical experiences are rst of all prepared for, and conditioned by, lifelong participation in a particular spoken language that bears sacred power through its vocabulary, structure, and categories of thought, and serves as a vehicle for a large body of orally transmitted traditions, all the themes of which also express elements of the sacred. Secondly, such mystic experiences become more available to those persons who have participated with intensity and sincerity in a large number of exacting rites and ceremonies that have been revealed through time, and that derive ultimately from a transcendent 20 source. Brown pointedly locates native religion in its social context. He criticizes those who approach indigenous Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 thought as a sentimental nature mysticism that derives spontaneously from proximity to untrammeled wilderness. He also critiques those who project mystical patterns from other religious traditions onto indigenous spiritual life. Especially signi cant are his emphases on preparation for spiritual experience in the ritual life of indigenous people and in the lifeway context of mystical experiences embedded in languages, arts, and kinship systems. Brown stresses the transcendent orientation in native lifeways, but a p. 297 di erent orientation is stressed here. Namely, this essay emphasizes the interdependence of both transcendent and immanent realms of the personal, the communal, the natural, and the cosmological in indigenous religions and ecology. These fourfold interacting spheres are especially signi cant for understanding the underlying source and articulation of religious knowledge among indigenous peoples. Rather than separating out religious knowledge from the “ eeting relative reality of the immediate world,” this essay explores the implicate 21 world of cosmological relationships folded into the rich array of lifeway activities. In this sense the mysterious unknown, or the divine power, in indigenous religions is neither simply transcendent nor immanent, but a holistic matrix that generates a deeper knowing of the observed world through the interacting spheres of the somatic, the social, the ecological, and the cosmological. A basic approach in this work is that the encounter and articulation in indigenous communities of a pervasive incomprehensible mystery in the cosmos occurs by means of multivalent experiences and historically changing symbol systems. The formulation of analogies, drawn from the local ecosystem, to express this mystery derives from an indigenous episteme. Episteme, from the Greek for “truth,” is used here in conjunction with the concept of embodied knowledge. That is, an indigenous episteme ows out of personal identity and community integrity. Indigenous episteme derives from spiritual forces that reveal themselves in and through local land and animal manifestations. Participation through bodily experiences such as fasting, visions, or dreams brings one into spheres of the personal, the communal, the natural, and the cosmic that engender an embodied knowing of the mysterious other. This embodied knowing occurs not simply in a contemplative absorption into the divine or a devotional union in religious emotion, but in bodily experiences that are synthetic and synesthetic. That is, encounters in one dimension of the sacred, such as ritual, enrich experiences of other lifeway dimensions, thus forming deeper metapatterns of meaning. This leads inexorably to enhanced ritual and symbolic articulations of cosmological mystery expressed in language that crosses thresholds and boundaries of intellectual knowing and sense feeling. This perceived indeterminacy of the sacred in indigenous lifeways is an active unknowing, or apophatic expression, that arises from e ulgent presence in the material world 22 rather than from denial of the inherent spiritual signi cance and complexity of matter. Apophatic modes of expression, or articulation by denial, have been used to give some coherence to the experience of the sacred, such as when people say that the sacred is not this or that. So also cataphatic, or positive a rmations and descriptions of the sacred, use metaphorical language from one's experience of the world to de ne major experiences of the divine. The tendency in academic discussions of indigenous lifeways has been to accentuate relations between humans and nature and to identify these traditions with cataphatic nature mysticism. No doubt this perspective helps to locate many native statements in a p. 298 comparative context similar to Western religious thought. However, a rich variety of deeply religious experiences are found among indigenous peoples expressed in cosmological symbols rich in both cognitive orientation and sensual, or a ective, ecstatic states. Indigenous religious experiences are not simply reducible to the language of the describable, or cataphatic. An apophatic lineage in any indigenous tradition is suggested, for example, in the powerful description of the angatkut, or shaman-healer, Igjugarjuk of the Caribou Inuit near Hudson Bay. He described the somatic deprivation of his arduous fast as well as the foods that puri ed him and the terrible period of solitude in speci c places in the landscape known to be associated with the cosmological beings Pinga and Hila. In Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 contrast to the shamanic performances of coastal Inuit, Igjugarjuk summarized his insight into wisdom: For myself, I do not think I know much, but I do not think that wisdom or knowledge about things that are hidden can be sought in that manner [a more cataphatic, performative style of healing]. True wisdom is only to be found far away from people, out in the great solitude, and it is not found in play but only through su ering. Solitude and su ering open the human mind, and therefore a 23 shaman must seek his wisdom there. Rather than collapsing real wisdom into a mystical retreat or individuated contemplation, the apophatic experience that Igjugarjuk described nds its deepest expression by bringing individual su ering and solitude into the social context. It is as if the shaman-healer stands as a symbolic presence of an experiential, embodied knowledge gained by personal loss or absence that can be brought back for people's welfare. The individual body, as the next example suggests, can embody realms of social meaning by means of both absence and presence. Language and sound in native religions can be revelatory sources; for example, an experience of sound or song can activate the sacred. A particular bird song or a speci c rhythm of the drum can be a sensual trope that activates a range of bioregional, experiential, and lifeway images. Cosmogonic myths among the Hohodene Baniwa of the Brazilian Rio Negro, for example, tell of the primal hero Kuai formed by the song of the supernatural jaguar Yaperikuli. Kuai's body emitted sounds as it was forming and later as it burned in a cosmic con agration. Baniwa songs are directly related to passages, openings, and transformations. 24 According to the Baniwa, songs can open the human body to invisible worlds and profound experiences. This overview of Baniwa views regarding song and drum sound manifest “ecological imaginaries,” that is, the capacity of local ecological places and life-forms to activate social imagination. Thus, social identity and orientation often draw on a complex language of sensual symbols such as Baniwa song that integrate the absent—that which was burnt in the cosmological con agration—with that which is present, namely, the p. 299 bird song and drum sound associated with places and life-forms. Ecological imaginaries are the deep networks of a ective association between bioregions and humans that surface in human imagination as 25 symbols and concepts motivating individuals and communities to action. Typically the syntaxes of these symbolic languages are cosmological in that they bring one into the whole, while the grammars distinguish spheres of person, community, the local bioregion, and cosmological spirits. The quest for synthetic connectedness is a crucial component of the gradual maturing process in indigenous ways of knowing. In this sense initial visions and mystical experiences open one to familiar images that may be parsed in ways that deepen individual awareness. The native religious vision may remain incomprehensible, hidden, or apophatic, until the other grammars of a fourfold interactive context integrate that knowing into a larger synthetic, cosmological vision. Later maturing experiences and visions of individuals, revealed to the community at appropriate times and places, expand what has become known of this mysterious incomprehensible presence. Usually this public sharing of private visionary revelations is not presented as a progression toward a teleological goal, but as the unfolding of the holy among the people. Secret shamanic languages among indigenous groups, for example, can be understood in this sense of language as processual and synthetic religious experience, rather than simply esoteric language techniques of individuals promoting arcane knowledge as economic advantage for an elite class. The lack of a literate canon caused indigenous religions to develop in signi cantly di erent directions than traditions that became based, in part, on literate communication systems. Among the speculations that these observations suggest is the development among many indigenous traditions of extremely diverse and complex interior mental states associated with oral modes of cultural transmission. It may even be Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 inappropriate to speak of an “unconscious” among indigenous peoples in the sense that no sharp psychic boundary separated what are called conscious and unconscious realms such as dreams. Moreover, spiritual experiences may have been more readily available to the larger community as the oral traditions suggest rather than being the exclusive practice of isolated individuals. Such a perspective on indigenous religions is developed in Lee Irwin's book The Dream Seekers. He emphasizes the act of indigenous knowing as the unfolding of a whole order in each particular dream and vision. Giving equal weight to individual and community in the cocreative work of elucidating visions, Irwin discerns patterns in the indigenous episteme based on complex relationships. He observes that among indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains of North America a greater totality of possibility and potential order is conceived as always implicit in any particular p. 300 set of discreet, observable phenomena. Rather than seeking to understand a particular culture through a componential, piece-by-piece analysis strictly determined by mechanistic or intellectual principles of hierarchical order and causal relations between parts, one begins by analyzing the process dynamics of an undivided wholeness from which identi able, stable, and recurrent patterns of only relative autonomy (rather than strict hierarchy) can be identi ed. These patterns, as explicit manifestations, represent “subtotalities” of meaning that can only be described in terms of their relative autonomy or relationship to other patterns of meaning. The fundamental concept is that rather than a xed world constructed out of a limited set of known, unchanging laws and relations in a static, deterministic manner, there is a world- process of ongoing explicit manifestations of an implicit, emerging, higher- order dynamics that continues to unfold over the generations through a series of reorganized perceptions coupled with new 26 interpretive perspectives. Irwin relates the indigenous episteme to patterns of external manifestation, or “subtotalities” similar to the fourfold interpretive context of the personal, the communal, the wild, and the cosmological. The indigenous episteme seeks to understand the cosmological whole implicit in events as a world process in which realizations in one manifestation a ect all the other subtotalities. In this essay, subtotalities can be understood as the fourfold embodiments of the individual body, the social body, the ecological body, and the cosmological body that cohere in an integral lifeway. Seemingly autonomous realities are perceived only as separable components so that an aspect of the underlying incomprehensibility might be glimpsed. Thus an indigenous religious experience of indeterminacy can be described not simply as an apophatic incomprehensibility, but as the mutual striving of the knowing visionary and the unknown mystery to come to an awareness of each other in the lived experience of the ecosystem. What is known by the visionary may arise from a community ritual or explicit ceremonial manifestation. The indigenous episteme serves to open the mythic tradition and the personal formulation of meaning in new analogies put forward by the visionary tradition. Both the mythic tradition and new visions are subject to the challenge of lifeway e cacy; that is, they are challenged to communicate their meaning and bene t for the actual life of the community without loss of their ine able and incomprehensible mystery. This contested ground between the visionary and the community does not simply depend upon personal narratives or normative social critique. Rather, the voice of local place enters into the emergence of indigenous religions in signi cant ways. Thus, the natural place—the realm of the more-than-human world—provides the setting for the human community to move beyond itself into the larger community of life. Indigenous modes of prayer often simultaneously empty the individual and society of personal and communal aggrandizement and prepare them for encounter with the cosmological beings in that place. p. 301 Ecological Body Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 One lifeway activity with deeper implications for understanding the close interaction of religion and ecology in indigenous worldviews is the “giveaway,” or “gift-giving.” Nuanced in diverse cultural lifeways, this worldview value of communal sharing ows out of a deep sense of the collective, interdependent character of life. While no one reading below speci cally discusses this ethic of sharing in indigenous communities, nonetheless, this cosmological value is folded into many of the statements. The basic point is that social relationships are established, con rmed, and renewed through the distribution of food and goods throughout the community. Even among indigenous communities with mixed economies and di ering forms of employment there is gift-giving. Urban native peoples often reciprocate gifts of meat from hunter- forager relatives by providing places to stay in town, along with meals and rides in city settings. Thus, indigenous relatives in towns and cities rea rm their membership in indigenous communities by 27 participating in the reciprocal ow of the life of the people. This collective reciprocal ow of community life need not be understood simply in an anthropocentric manner. The relationships between any particular indigenous peoples and the diversity of life in their homeland, or bioregion, are expressed in cultural particularity, yet shared characteristics allow us to observe that generally indigenous lifeways extend ideas of “person” into the natural world. In speaking of Anishinabe/Ojibway traditions, ethicist J. Baird Callicott writes: Plant and animal species are, as it were, other tribes or nations. Human economic intercourse with other species is not represented as the exploitation of impersonal, material natural resources, but as reciprocal gift-giving or bartering, in which both the human and nonhuman parties to the exchange bene t. Game animals give their skins and esh to human beings, who in return give the animals tobacco and other desirable cultivars and artifacts. The slain animals are reincarnated in the most literal sense of that term—reclothed in esh and fur—and thus come back to life to enjoy 28 their humanly bestowed bene ts. These reciprocal exchanges of the Anishinabe peoples with the plant, animal, and mineral world of their homeland arise from an integral lifeway. This has been transmitted by native peoples in their subsistence practices, their oral narratives, and their ritual calendars. As the homelands of these indigenous peoples come under increasing pressure, these deep relationships with diverse life in the region are not only stretched to the breaking point, but also activate various forms of political and environmental activism. In a recent study of indigenous thought, an indigenous intellectual observed that if non-foragers “gave gifts to the foragers without receiving gifts of food in return, they would shame not only the foragers but also themselves.” Is it not also the case that the members of the p. 302 Whitesands Indian Band would bring shame upon themselves if they stood by and did nothing while the habitat of those other-than-human persons with whom they exchange gifts is threatened or destroyed? After all it is through the exchange with gifts that one maintains one's membership in Ojibway society. Are not these other-than-human persons with whom they exchange gifts members of that society and entitled to the same respect and help accorded to any other member of the community? There is, we suggest, a moral obligation to protect the habitat of the moose, the beaver, the muskrat, and the lynx; the habitat of geese, ducks, grouse and hare, not just because members of the band wish to continue hunting and trapping, but because these other- 29 than-human persons are also members of Ojibway society. The authors of this powerful statement interpret the reciprocal exchange in the context of moral obligation required between fellow members of a society. However, the understanding of society obviously extends into the natural world. A further interpretation is that indigenous ethics is always accompanied by cosmology. Thus, this profound religious exchange of indigenous peoples ows from levels of commitment that are deeper and more widespread than simply instrumental alliances between reciprocal beings. In many ways it can be said that indigenous peoples form an ecological body with their bioregion. The ethical Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 and pragmatic orientations of indigenous peoples are a function of life experiences nurtured over generations in particular bioregions described in cosmologies. For some indigenous peoples, even hearing particular words and phrases of their cosmologies activates the possibility for relatedness with spiritual powers. It is the case that these embodied narrations of the world may be rejected by any given indigenous individual. If, for example, that member was taken at an early age from the matrix of cultural learning, such an integral lifeway may be completely unavailable to that native person. Where indigenous traditions have endured, however, there is often a holistic vision of the world that disposes one to see, experience, and embody a community of life with whom one shares an ethical responsibility. Moral responsibility for life extends also into ways of imaging local place. For example, the Daur Mongols of Manchuria in Central Asia are described by Caroline Humphrey as implementing and understanding modes of ecological perception that depend on movement. Humphrey draws on the work of James Gibson to re ne her sense of this ecological perception. Gibson identi ed an ecological approach to visual perception as one that “begins with the owing array of the observer who walks from one vista to another, moves around an object of interest, and can approach it for scrutiny, thus extracting the invariants that underlie the changing 30 perceptive structures and seeing the connections between hidden and unhidden surfaces.” In describing the Daur Mongols, Humphrey writes: The Mongols recognize this feature of perception, it seems to me, and they construct the sacred object [such as a piling of rocks or oboo] in such a way that it requires the subject to become conscious of the relativity of perception and to arrive at knowledge by means of bodily movement. p. 303 To achieve greater knowledge, that is, to perceive what Gibson called “invariants,” the viewer must be on the move. The viewer must accept the conditionality of his or her perception at any one point in order to understand the true nature of the object. This forces viewers to recognize their own spatial-temporal subordination in relation to the totality of the mountain. In various ways, the Mongols choose the mountain (the rocks, etc.) in such a way as to construct this situation, which emphasizes the qualities all such physical objects actually have, namely, immovability, solidity, and invariance. … Circular movement is essential in the ritual cult of mountains. Because the human movement involved in perceiving this invariance happens in time, the mountain's quality of “being” or “standing” is also conceived as a process—the process, if you like, of being the same. This is an intense preoccupation in the ideological concepts of social categories which 31 the cult at the oboo seeks to reproduce. Here not only moral responsibility but embodiment itself ows from a shared understanding of bodies in movement as beings in the world. The movement between di erent pilings of rock brings the Daur Mongols into perception of mountain as movement also. Thus, the ecological realm shares modes of perception with the human in indigenous perspectives that have amazing ethical implications. These ethical consequences are evident in the following example from the Apache peoples of North America. The Western Apache of New Mexico are known to name places in the landscape that are associated with established mythic and historical narratives. These named places and historical stories are used to “shoot” those who are irresponsible regarding traditional ways of life. For example, at the sunrise ceremony at which a maturing girl is initiated into womanhood, all the women are expected to wear their hair long. Hair grows from the body of a woman, expressing its inherent vitality and power. This embodiment of power is manifest in individuals but obviously connects them to the larger society and cosmos of power. These somatic and social embodiments also have meaningful ecological references for the Apache evident in this example. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 Anthropologist Keith Basso recalls the story of a young woman who inappropriately wore her hair in curlers to a ceremony initiating a girl into womanhood. He remembered how her grandmother later casually reminded her of a place of historical signi cance to the Apache. It was also the place in which coyote was said to have acted in an inappropriate way. This illustrates a traditional Apache mode of teaching ethics whereby an elder uses a historical story to “shoot” or lodge an ethical teaching in relation to a particular place. That young woman heard that story in a personal way and remembered her grandmother in relation to that place. For her, her grandmother was in that place of the coyote story helping her, shooting her, to live in a traditional way. Because the Western Apache continue to re ect on this capacity of personal experience, narrative and place remain with an individual throughout their life, constantly shooting them, p. 304 encouraging them to act in responsible ways. Basso notes that geographical features have served the [Western Apache] for centuries as indispensable mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of their history. … The Apache landscape is full of named locations where time and space have fused and where, through the agency of historical tales, their intersection is “made visible for human contemplations.” It is also apparent that such locations, charged as they are with personal and social signi cance, work in important ways to shape the images that Apaches have— 32 or should have—of themselves. Just as breath, sound, and naming orient some indigenous peoples to ecological imaginaries, so also the practices of perception in the piling of rocks and storytelling in other indigenous contexts are uniquely integrated into ecological place. Sensitivities among indigenous peoples to biodiversity in a region have been reported in such diverse practices as hunting languages in which animals are addressed in the 33 language of erotic love used between humans. So also these sensitivities are evident in the types of prayers that elders address to berries on the mountain before they are gathered and to clays in the ground before 34 they are shaped into pottery. A skeptic may respond that these are simply everyday, secular experiences and not necessarily religious experiences. The point is that these acts of reverence and respect open the possibilities for life lived in deep communion between humans and the more-than-human world. Indigenous perspectives on encounters with cosmological power extend into the whole community of life— speci c ecosystems and species, as well as nature as a whole. Though these intense religious experiences may not be meaningful or available in the same ways to all contemporary indigenous peoples, the possibility to live in the presence of cosmological beings remains open to those who continue these traditional practices. Cosmological Body The diverse cosmological beings of Native American peoples occupy a seminal place in indigenous religions. The pluriform world of spirits has been the subject of intense criticism and scrutiny by practitioners of monotheistic religions. Even the little that might be said opens up questions of religious appropriation. That is, for what ends are such issues being discussed? The unquestioned pursuit of knowledge so central to Western critical method is not generally a rmed in indigenous ways of knowing. Knowledge of spiritual matters is often highly circumscribed in indigenous pedagogy to those who have experiences in such matters. The contemplative paths of the Ahnishinahbaeótjibway Mide, for example, are not forbidden to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 classes or genders of the Ahnishinahbaeótjibway, but discussion of Mide activity and teachings is prohibited to the uninitiated because the words and practices are believed to be sacred and e cacious. They are themselves cosmological beings capable of numinous transformations. p. 305 Another viewpoint regarding the signi cance of cosmological beings in the fourfold interactive processes of indigenous religions are the observations of Roberta Blackgoat, a Diné/Navajo elder and activist who challenged the U.S. government's decision to remove all Navajo from the Black Mountain area. Blackgoat consistently brought her religious sensibilities to bear on this question of removal. With regard to the removal of her people, she said: This is the main thing that I can't set my mind on, … I want to have this understood what our religious act is, … to take care of this land because when we have a Medicine Man, we need to have him to do an o ering, … we o er to a tree, or even to a tree that's been struck by lightning, or a rock, or a spring, or a mountain, … all these things, it's not only to one place. We o er to a certain place for the rain or either for a Beauty Way, … and all these things, that's what has been given us by the Holy People and the Great Spirit. … We are strong enough to hold this room which he has surveyed for us, … and our Home Song, and this Mountain Song, … and now this is not being respected at all. I need to have this be known, … it's more important that our ways of being, having 35 a prayer still going, … and it's still sacred for us, … the way. The imagery here might be obscure to outsiders, but it is not obscure to the Diné. These images resonate with presence even in English translation. Could it be that the constructs that inform the terms religion and spirituality stand in the way of outsider understanding? That is, can these terms, as constructed by outside researchers in religion, adequately constitute the felt experience describe by Blackgoat? What does she tell us? What Blackgoat cannot comprehend is the threat of government agents who tell her that she and her people must leave Black Mountain. Moreover, they warn her that if she stays and dies no one will be around to bury her. She responds by talking about her responsibilities to the holy people as they have manifested themselves to her people on Black Mountain. Being strong is, as she says, “holding the room which [the holy people and the Great Spirit] has surveyed for us.” She and her Diné people have responsibilities as cocreators of the cosmological harmony (hozho). “Home Songs” maintain the hoganlike habitat of the earth, and “Mountain Songs” ensure the sustaining blessings of long life and happiness. This is the movement of ecological perception on a cosmological scale. Rather than arguing for justice and human rights from her own experiences or from her own life or that of her family, she argues from the responsibilities for the ways that are sacred, harmonious, and beautiful (hozho). This integral lifeway of personal experience and sacred play is evident in Blackgoat's words: I had a dream, … I dreamed that I was talking to these people, the wildlife people, Tigers and Bears and Lion, … they were listening to me, lying down, and they were looking at me and I was talking to p. 306 them in my prayer, … I was still talking when I woke up, … and so I think it's still a way of our sacred ways, so I do need to warn, or teach, our leaders, … so the policemen wouldn't handle us here, … having us, … throwing us around, … dragging us, out here on our own ancestral land. This is mighty hard, … spoiling our sacred ways, … especially our sacred bundles. We have sacred bundles that shouldn't be bounced, … they should be taken care of real easy, … have a song for it, … a prayer for it, with the animals, … it holds the animals, and it holds the humans, in this, the whole Indian 36 country. Rather than a piece-by-piece analysis, an understanding of the process dynamics brings us into a sharpened awareness of the cosmological beings—“holy people” in Diné contexts—whose dream Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 appearance gives Blackgoat the strength to endure the countless humiliations of the oppressed. Her talk brings to bear her own set of symbolic forces—holy people, ancestral land, sacred bundles—to warn her adversaries of powers greater than they realize. The powerful beings form one cosmological body that pervades the world of which Blackgoat speaks. Blackgoat, like so many indigenous peoples, lives in a universe, not simply in systems of national or corporate statistical identity. She, like so many religious gures of other ages and in other traditions, was vitally active and engaged in the spiritual, political, and social struggles of her people until her death. Unlike the popular stereotype of religious practitioners as withdrawn into passive contemplation, this Diné woman manifested the concerns of a spiritually committed individual working for the well-being of her integrated community. For her the numinous cosmological body was formed by the material bundles, by the ritual performances, and by responsible attention to the vital forces that ow from and through the cosmological depths of life. Conclusion Study of religion and ecology among indigenous lifeways accentuates the spontaneities and immediacies of spiritual experiences within the fourfold embodiments. We know that these spiritual intimacies draw together into a holistic unity the human somatic, social, ecological, and cosmological realms. Spiritual kinship and reciprocity reach out into the animal, plant, and mineral domains of local space. Names and mythic narratives give personal and community identity to local places and mark sites of extraordinary encounter with the spiritual presences believed to have created, shaped, and guided the community of life. Indigenous religions provide unparalleled insight into this special knowledge of sacred ecology in such p. 307 documented expressions as the ecstatic knowing of vision quests and the community knowledge imparted in calendrical rituals. This knowledge is evident in traditional environmental knowledge of plants, animals, and landforms, as well as in resistance to the homogenizing visions of global consumer culture. These are not separate realms but together constitute insight into the regeneration of indigenous religion and ecology. Indigenous religions are holistic processes that move toward mature integration into a universe of presence. It is in this sense that it is said that indigenous people live in a universe. Individual experiences and their social manifestations in symbols and religious arts are themselves fused expressions inherently related to local ecological and larger cosmological realities. In this sense, indigenous knowing is synthetic, synesthetic, performative, and imagistic—drawing together the fourfold embodiments. Indigenous religions are the cocreative work of the human with the cosmological powers in which a ective, cognitive, sensory, and connative faculties give imagistic shape and force to the indeterminacies of the sacred. This process grows with maturity, resulting not simply in isolated spiritual encounters but in augmented communal ways of knowing. Indigenous communities struggle to maintain their knowledge traditions in the contemporary toxic mix of commercial homogeneity and extractive resource pathology that is often forced on them. The image of the canary in the mine has been likened to their state of well-being, but it is not simply the well-being of indigenous societies that is manifested. Nor is it simply that of human communities. Growing awareness of the creative ow in which indigenous communities socially, spiritually, materially, and intellectually participate gives religious force to the ever-widening consciousness of the plight of our planet. Notes Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 1. Regarding “text” as an interpretive genre, see Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (ed. P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). On the issue of alternative interpretive modes, see Lawrence Sullivan, “Sound and Senses: Toward a Hermeneutics of Performance,” History of Religions 26.1 (Aug. 1986): 1–33. 10.1086/463058 2. See George Dei, Budd Hall, and Dorothy Rosenberg, eds., Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 3. For a discussion of these three modes of indigenous knowledge, see Marlene Brant Castellano, “Updating Aboriginal Traditions of Knowledge,” in Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts (ed. George Dei, Budd Hall, and Dorothy Rosenberg; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 23–24. 4. It is appropriate to note the special issue of American Indian Quarterly 28.3– 4 (summer–fall 2004) entitled “The Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge.” This issue not only discusses indigenous environmental knowledge but also the position of indigenous knowledge in a decolonized future. p. 308 5. See, e.g., David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Di erence (London: Blackwell, 1997). 6. In this capacity see David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature (New York, 1992). 7. See Simeon Namunu, “Melanesian Religion, Ecology, and Modernization in Papua New Guinea,” in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (ed. John Grim; Cambridge: Center for the Study of World Religions, 2001), 249–80. 8. For “survivance,” see Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 9. See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2002); and an article by Juan Forero in the New York Times (24 March 2003), online at www.energybulletin.net/3502.html. 10. Ethnography on the Dogon from the 1930s to the present has generated a lively controversy largely based on the post– World War II fieldwork and publications of Marcel Griaule, especially his Dieu d'eau: entretiens avec Ogotommêli (Paris: du Chene, 1948); published as Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1965). A critique of Griaule's method and a discussion of the e ects of tourism on Dogon ceremonialism can be found in Walter E. A. van Beek, “Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule,” Current Anthropology 32.2 (April 1991): 139–67. 11. Country of the Heart: An Indigenous Australian Homeland (ed. Deborah Bird Rose et al.; Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2002), 15. 12. Marie Battiste and James Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage (Saskatoon: Purich, 2000), 35, cited in Deborah McGregor, “Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Our Future,” American Indian Quarterly 28.3– 4 (summer–fall 2004): 390. 13. Wub-e-ke-niew, We Have The Right to Exist: A Translation of Aboriginal Indigenous Thought (New York: Black Thistle, 1995), 198–99. 14. See, e.g., the roles of indigenous elders in presenting the U.N. Declaration on Indigenous Peoples. 15. It is important to note the work of Cultural Survival and Survival International in promoting the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. The important work of standing committees of the American Anthropological Association focused on intellectual, cultural, and legal rights of indigenous peoples also needs to be mentioned in this context. So also, mention should be made of the ongoing work of the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Society for the Study of Native American Religions, and the Indigenous Section of the American Academy of Religions. Though they have o en di ered over the religioeconomic engagement of indigenous peoples in the global market, these organizations have assisted their readership and auditors in confronting a broad range of indigenous cultural issues. 16. Quoted in Roger Moody, ed., The Indigenous Voice: Visions and Realities (2nd ed.; Utrecht, The Netherlands: Zed, 1993 [orig. 1988]), 119. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025 17. Robin Ridington, Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 127–28. p. 309 18. Interview with Douglas Cardinal in Intervox 8 (1989/90): 27–31, 44– 47; and in Dennis H. McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, Indian from the Inside: A Study in Ethno-Metaphysics (Occasional Paper 14; Lakehead University Centre for Northern Studies, 1993), 73. 19. A related Northern Plains society's view of these spiritual-pragmatic issues can be found in Garter Snake's Seven Visions of Bull Lodge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 20. Joseph Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 111–12. 21. Ibid. 22. The penetrating insight of Mayan numerologists into the concept of zero may have developed from reflections on the e ulgent faces of time; cf. Miguel Leon-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture (trans. Jack Davis; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 50–51. 23. Knud Rasmussen, Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimo (Report of the Fi h Thule Expedition 1921–24; Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boyhandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1930), 54–55. 24. Robin M. Wright, “History and Religion of the Baniwa Peoples of the Upper Rio Negro Valley” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1981), 382. 25. See Richard Peet and Michael Watts, Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, and Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996). 26. Lee Irwin, The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 23. 27. This point is developed by anthropologist Paul Driben and native lawyer Donald J. Auger, The Generation of Power and Fear: The Little Jackfish River Hydroelectric Project and the Whitesands Indian Band (Thunder Bay: Lakehead University Centre for Northern Studies, 1989). 28. J. Baird Callicott, “American Indian Land Wisdom? Sorting Out the Issues,” in In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 214–15. See also the work of A. I. Hallowell. 29. McPherson and Rabb, Indian from the Inside, 90. 30. James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mi lin, 1979), cited in Caroline Humphrey and Urunge Onon, Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003 [orig. 1996]), 88. 31. Ibid. 32. Kieth Basso, “ ʻStalking with Stories': Names, Places, and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache,” in 1983 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society, 1984), 44. 33. Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals (New York: St. Martin's, 1979). 34. Personal experiences of the author with the Yakima in Washington State and at Santa Clara Pueblo. 35. A statement from Roberta Blackgoat, Diné elder and relocation resister, on the occasion of the Beautyway Tour 1999. 36. Ibid. p. 310 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34392/chapter/291658318 by King's College Library user on 26 January 2025

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