Author Topic: Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)  (Read 9665 times)

Offline nahualqo

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Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)
« on: January 19, 2007, 01:37:04 am »
I have been reading this board and I see a lot of condemnation without any substantive support of real Native American belief systems. If people that run and post on this board do not support their own Traditional Spirituality by faith, attending cerimonies, supporting traditionalist endeavors then your authority to count others as frauds is diminished. If you are Native American and Christian then are you dissing others as pagan because you are Christian or because you are a Traditionalist and support our unique spiritual identity?

Supporting our identities and spiritual beliefs is more than outing wannabees, much, much more. It is being pipe holders, bundle keepers, Kiva holders hosting sweat lodges and sacred drummers and songkeepers. Being snug in your SUV in your college educated throne does not make you immune from being a fraud if you denounce the nuagers while ignoring your own peoples spiritual needs.

The reason why so many people are drawn to our tradiional beliefs is because we hold a greater authority of not having perverted ourselves stealing continents and forcible conversions. Our original reality holds something of value because we were honest and original and true to ourselves.

What we need are pipe keepers, timekeepers, story tellers and cerimony leaders and a return to what we have always held sacred. In doing this, returning too ourselves we may provide something of value to the nation that wakes up their hearts and recognizes the sacred in our traditional sacred ways. It is time, they have not understood us and even destroyed us with contempt and hubris for almost 500 years. If you don't know your own beliefs, find out. I know for a long time, keepers of our sacred knowledge were held at arms length by many of their own peoples. We need most of all to know ourselves and know our own sacred ways and pass them on and make them live. How many of you allow your children too much television, too many computer games and no traditional knowledge?

Being Native American is about being ourselves. Our biggest problems are not now what white people are taking away, our problems now are us not supporting and respecting our own selves, our own traditions and renewing them. If you don't renew our own beliefs you can't get their meanings back in our lives by outing wannabees, we get them by living within them, please listen in our hearts, to know what makes us all truly happy.

My grandmother lived at a time where all Blackfoot children were forced to leave home and attend missionary boarding school where they were cruely punished for speaking their language or attending to their own spiritual needs or beliefs. I gave my daughter a traditional name in our own toungue years ago and I raised her the best way I knew how in our traditional wisdom.

Now that we have the computer age and unlimited telecommunications opportunities. Put up boards that teach your language, share the principles of your teachings, histories and myths among your people. In the next decades there should be no Native American tribe or people that doesn't have a web based center so that their people may contact each other from all over the country and around the world.

If you want to out wannabees do so, but not at the expense of doing something positively that enriches our peoples with your talents, that saves our identities and beliefs by living example.


Offline Ric_Richardson

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Re: Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2007, 06:31:24 am »
Tansi;

You forgot to mention that there are still people who continue to work with Traditional Medicines (Muskiki), which were and are a very important component of our Culture.

Since much of the specific teachings about many of our ways, including Ceremonies and Medicines are only shared with chosen people, I do not expect that these will end up on websites, although this is a fear among some of us.

The knowledge of plants, which can be used in the treatment of Cancer and many other health issues is still around.

Ric

Offline nahualqo

  • Posts: 57
Re: Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)
« Reply #2 on: January 19, 2007, 07:29:27 am »
Oki Ric,

Thank you, that is a very good point. We are fortunate to have a tribal web site. I had the wonderful fortune of meeting someone of our tradition on the web site that traveled over much of the same ground I did and we were raised just a few miles apart. I am having a wonderful introduction to some areas of our spirituality that I was never opened to before in our private emails. I was raised in a different tradition than my tribal tradition from lack of opportunity when I went back home to the Rez to try and find someone with whom I could learn. I found another Native American tradition that became open to me. In my correspondence I am finding the similarities and learning and touching base with my own tradition is rejuvenating to my life. I feel that there will be some time in my life where I will devote a number of years to our tradition. I will have to go back home to be a part of cerimonies but I would not even have that opportunity without having visited our tribal web site.

Specific things like healing, cerimonies, societies like we have in our tribal tradition need to be earned and experienced and participated in person. But the connectivity possiblities are wonderful. I had traveled many miles to go back home on unsuccessful attempts to gain experience that now is available after having made the right contact on my tribal website. I just think that the many areas of communal living that can be shared such as stories and language is something that I dreamed of and need.



Tansi;

You forgot to mention that there are still people who continue to work with Traditional Medicines (Muskiki), which were and are a very important component of our Culture.

Since much of the specific teachings about many of our ways, including Ceremonies and Medicines are only shared with chosen people, I do not expect that these will end up on websites, although this is a fear among some of us.

The knowledge of plants, which can be used in the treatment of Cancer and many other health issues is still around.

Ric
« Last Edit: January 19, 2007, 07:35:02 am by nahualqo »

Offline Ganieda

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Re: Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)
« Reply #3 on: January 22, 2007, 12:03:24 am »
I liked what you have to say here....I am not Native, however I can see the wisdom in your words. 
Quote
If people that run and post on this board do not support their own Traditional Spirituality by faith, attending cerimonies, supporting traditionalist endeavors then your authority to count others as frauds is diminished.
Quote
Being snug in your SUV in your college educated throne does not make you immune from being a fraud if you denounce the nuagers while ignoring your own peoples spiritual needs.
Well said. 
Quote
If you don't renew our own beliefs you can't get their meanings back in our lives by outing wannabees, we get them by living within them, please listen in our hearts, to know what makes us all truly happy.
Quote
I gave my daughter a traditional name in our own toungue years ago and I raised her the best way I knew how in our traditional wisdom.
I applaud you for this.  It has been said that every time an elder dies we lose a library.  How very sad that is. 
*May the Sun warm your Heart, The Moon light your Path and Sacred Mother Earth embrace and protect you always.*

Offline educatedindian

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Re: Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)
« Reply #4 on: January 22, 2007, 06:14:20 pm »
"If people that run and post on this board do not support their own Traditional Spirituality by faith, attending cerimonies, supporting traditionalist endeavors then your authority to count others as frauds is diminished."

Hi Nick. You said much the same to me in an email. I think your points are very important, and agree with them. But some of what you imply sounds to me close to an NDN version of evangelism, or could be misunderstood as that.

For some of us, our faith is very private, and this may be because our traditions tell us to keep it private or that public displays are immodest. Others may simply be private people, or uncomfortable talking about their beliefs.

Others may also be from traditions where community practice is more important than private belief, where it's not important if everyone believes in or even takes part in a ceremony as long as some continue to keep doing it. I'm not the right person to do the blessing of the mescal pits, but I take comfort in knowing they are done every day as the sun falls.

The values, the ethics, the worldview that we have is important to tell outsiders of and hopefully influence them. This site and our efforts are part of that, but certainly not all of it or even most. We say with our efforts that what the community and elders say are real is important to distinguish from what is false. Often what the exploiters do directly disrupts traditions. We saw that with Tonya Billington, who was led away from actual Cherokee tradition in favor of Nuage ideas.

Offline nahualqo

  • Posts: 57
Re: Hello, I am a member of Siksika (Blackfeet, Browning, Montana)
« Reply #5 on: January 30, 2007, 06:32:16 am »
I agree with you, what is nuage cannot give us, cannot feed us, cannot touch us. All of our great Spiritual leaders believed with their whole being in who we are, believed that the Creator made us precisely to be who we are. Our greatest spiritual leaders faced and fought the terrible drama and world ending conflicts. Our being was rendered asunder by the juggernaught of the dominant colonial culture. Our spiritual leaders were imprisoned just because they can tell us who we are, remind us not to forget ourselves. Yes they are reminiscent of Evangelists but we are not religious, we do not practice religions, the Dewey Decimal System does not include our beliefs in libraries under religion but of history, past tense. The entire juggernaught of colonial reality is bent upon ending our knowledge of and being ourselves. We end the illusion of the colonial juggernaught by being ourselves. This makes me bold to to speak on that connection.

Our way is not confined in a book, a belief or a system but of an entire oneness with our entire being connected to our ancestors reaching back into the deep recesses of our DNA, our antiquity extending deep into the awareness of first man, early man, man that first awoke from the dream.

When they brought us the Bible, we recognized in the Bible our own currency of belief. We live exactly with those powerful spiritual forces that Moses, Joseph, Jesus lived. We are not bound to colonial reality to submit by killing ourselves, killing our belief in order to bottle it or put it in a book so that it can be marketed. Western scholars want to empty us as informants and distill us into pages in a book.

We are the entire history of ourselves, our Bible is in the wind and speaks to us and when we return to ourselves, we become clean with ourselves, our soul returns and sits in the seat of our heart just by remembering that which connects us to our ancestors, our people. We know who we are and if we don't there are people and places that remember and by joining with them we too can remember and clean our soul from the confusion on the unclean stage of our co-opted minds and hearts. To be free is to be ourselves as our Maker knows us.

We have been instructed by generations in the dominant culture to ignore our own hearts, to see mishapen images of our own selves, to distrust the ancient calling to the seat of our souls where we hold hands with all our relations that came before us that are joined in us, for us, by us. We are different than Christians and other religions, we don't come clean by getting religion, we come clean by being ourselves, being who the Maker intended us to be and that is a secret we each know connected by soul, connected by flesh down through the Great Mystery of Creation to father and child, mother and child, grandfather and child, grandmother and child. The souls of our ancestors are not confused by mixed blood so why should we accept confusion?

Tatanka Yotanka, Tecumseh, Deganawida were examples of the clarion call, they are Native People that accepted the unmistakable image, our true self image not made in our mind, not made in the mind of man  but made in the Mind of the Creator that beheld us, envisioned us and made us in that beauty that only the Creator can. We are bestowed with that vision. The Creator's vision as we were beheld, this  is our religion. We are still beheld as fiercely as the first time we were Created and given form by the Creator. When you know that the Creator beholds us as we were, as we are, then will we come home to be ourselves. Our elders who have long beheld the Creators vision of ourselves have remained by paying terrible prices. We must honor them and thereby honor ourselves. The dead speak in the wind and touch all faces.

QO



"If people that run and post on this board do not support their own Traditional Spirituality by faith, attending cerimonies, supporting traditionalist endeavors then your authority to count others as frauds is diminished."

Hi Nick. You said much the same to me in an email. I think your points are very important, and agree with them. But some of what you imply sounds to me close to an NDN version of evangelism, or could be misunderstood as that.

For some of us, our faith is very private, and this may be because our traditions tell us to keep it private or that public displays are immodest. Others may simply be private people, or uncomfortable talking about their beliefs.

Others may also be from traditions where community practice is more important than private belief, where it's not important if everyone believes in or even takes part in a ceremony as long as some continue to keep doing it. I'm not the right person to do the blessing of the mescal pits, but I take comfort in knowing they are done every day as the sun falls.

The values, the ethics, the worldview that we have is important to tell outsiders of and hopefully influence them. This site and our efforts are part of that, but certainly not all of it or even most. We say with our efforts that what the community and elders say are real is important to distinguish from what is false. Often what the exploiters do directly disrupts traditions. We saw that with Tonya Billington, who was led away from actual Cherokee tradition in favor of Nuage ideas.


« Last Edit: February 21, 2007, 12:26:01 am by nahualqo »