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.
