ChrisD
In sounds to me like your relationship and attitude toward the land may have been more Indigenous than you think. Native scholar Vine Deloria Jr. once said that farmers could be considered having become “Indigenous” to the extent they have “responded to the rhythms of the land.” It goes very much toward Indigeneity being a social rather than a racial paradigm. Sounds like you are on your way.
You are very welcome Evan, and thank you for the beautiful words and insights. I have often been asked by students how to approach or act in situations where they either have been asked to join in an Indigenous ceremony, or even just want to connect on their own with nature in a relational way. I tell them that if they follow the 4 R’s they will be just fine. Respectful, Reciprocal, Responsible, Relationality. Those are critical in any healthy human relationship (just ask my wife) so why not in relating to the natural world and the Divine? It sounds like you have already figured that out.
Fantastic insight Daniel. The Indigenous experience and lifeway may be a lived relationality but is still merely one example of such as the other classes in this course show. It is perhaps more explicit than some others, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist in many other forms. As you suggest, we are already in relation, but we are not always aware of it, or nurture it. I think we each live in the world in a dynamic, fluctuating, spectrum between the extremes of the fully relational, and the fully mechanistic, depending on the context. One moment we may be on a mountaintop embraced in Love, Beauty, and Awe at the interconnectivity and oneness of all things…but we still have to get back in our car and drive home.
Hey Evan, I think it depends on how you define “Magic.” If you mean something “Supernatural” then Whitehead, and most Process thinkers, would definitely disavow it. If it happens, it is Natural. How Not? But I think the “magical” feeling you talk about he would totally affirm.
Very interesting and insightful Chris! I mentioned in class that Whitehead’s metaphysic draws the line between what is possible and what is not possible differently than does the mechanistic Cartesian/Newtonian model, which I think is uncomfortable to many. We tend to want to hold onto our dominant Western mechanistic model with our finger nails no matter what. But that doesn’t mean that you MUST believe in all that a relational perspective could allow for, just that many things are not ruled out a priori. The Inuit being able to know at a distance where the Caribou herd was moving in a new area is an example of this (as is the Rupert Ross story)–ruled out in a mechanistic view but I believe (as did David Ray Griffin) possible in an ANW relational view. Human (often Indigenous, but not all) reports from hundreds of years in the past to the present of such experiences does give at least anecdotal evidence to the possibility. And after all, Whitehead’s stated goal was to adequately account for ALL human experience, even though he knew that meant his philosophy may need to be updated in the future as more became known.
Indeed a “way to believe” or at least acceptance of the possibility.
My wife’s book in one of the article‘s bibliography, “The Medicine Path”, is an account of how she incorporated learning how to focus and participate in such experiences at will into her healing and wellness practice. For what it is worth, I was there and am a witness to these accounts and continue to be every day in her practice and those practitioners she has taught to do the same. Always amazing.
Sorry, the previous post was added to the wrong thread. I can’t seem to delete it.
Very interesting and insightful Chris! I mentioned in class that Whitehead’s metaphysic draws the line between what is possible and what is not possible differently than does the mechanistic Cartesian/Newtonian model, which I think is uncomfortable to many. We tend to want to hold onto our dominant Western mechanistic model with our finger nails no matter what. But that doesn’t mean that you MUST believe in all that a relational perspective could allow for, just that many things are not ruled out a priori. The Inuit being able to know at a distance where the Caribou herd was moving in a new area is an example of this (as is the Rupert Ross story)–ruled out in a mechanistic view but I believe (as did David Ray Griffin) possible in an ANW relational view. Human (often Indigenous, but not all) reports from hundreds of years in the past to the present of such experiences does give at least anecdotal evidence to the possibility. And after all, Whitehead’s stated goal was to adequately account for ALL human experience, even though he knew that meant his philosophy may need to be updated in the future as more became known.
Indeed a “way to believe” or at least acceptance of the possibility.
My wife’s book in one of the article‘s bibliography, “The Medicine Path”, is an account of how she incorporated learning how to focus and participate in such experiences at will into her healing and wellness practice. For what it is worth, I was there and am a witness to these accounts and continue to be every day in her practice and those practitioners she has taught to do the same. Always amazing.
This is also recognized by Pope Francis Encyclical Letter on the environmental crisis called Laudato Si’. Here is a quote from the Indigenous Wisdom article I wrote for John Cobb and Ignacio Castuea’s book “For Our Common Home: Process-Relational Responses to Laudato Si’:
“… his [Pope Francis’) most passionate and poetic comments are when he is referring to the writings of his namesake, Francis of Assisi, who speaks of the natural world in kinship terms and “would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’(11),” such as “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” “Brother Wind,” and “Sister Water.” This appears to be how the Pope is suggesting we fundamentally conceive of our relationship with God and the world.”I couldn’t agree more David! In posting the slides I included an extra one by Mary Graham that talks more of the land connections. I had a Nakota student once who wanted to know if there where any other classes anywhere in the world she could take that talked more about The Land is the Law because it resonated so much with her and her family’s experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t know of any.