Scarlet Kinney & The Standing Bear Center For Shamanic Studies

[debbieredbear]

http://www.thestandingbear.com/

All of the Center’s teachings are based upon an understanding of the Medicine Wheel as a living mandala for spiritual and personal growth.  At the Center, you’ll learn to imaginally enter and explore this incredible living mandala, and to seek guidance and teachings from the archetypal energies, such as Animal Spirits, Upper World Teachers, and Goddesses who reside there.

Some Benefits of Shamanic Practices
for Women

You can achieve self-mastery through disciplined practices

Your self-confidence and self-esteem may be enhanced

You can access and integrate Goddess archetypes

Your relationship with the Earth will grow and evolve

You can reclaim your ancient, Feminine, Earth wisdom

Your sense of “oneness??? with Earth and all women will deepen

[walking-soft]

 Will it ever cease?? Be sure to bring your wallet and or visa card. I'm sure besides the "workshop" fees there will be plenty to buy to help you on all these "journeys"!!!!

[Scarlet Kinney]

TO DEBBIE RED BEAR, WALKING SOFT, AND ANYBODY ELSE:

I am the founder and director of The Standing Bear Center for Shamanic Studies in Surry, Maine.

I just discovered that you have taken it upon yourselves to judge me as fraudulent, and to try to put me out of business by maligning me on this site. As far as I can discern, your "research" about me consists solely of reading the home page on my web site.

Here is my response:

First:

You have reproduced content from my web site's home page on your site. All material on my site is copyright protected. You do not have my permission to reproduce it in any way whatsoever. Get this material off your site immediately, as you are infringing on my copyright.

Second:

Who are you to judge me, or what I do?

You do not know me. You have never met me. You do not know what I have endured physically, emotionally, socially, OR financially as I have struggled as a white woman to honor a traumatic but genuine shamanic initiation experience that almost killed me and left me scarred for life.

Until you have presented yourself at my door and respectfully asked to hear my story; until you have listened to it respectfully; until you have sat in council with me, any opinion you may have of me is necessarily invalid as it is not based upon any realistic knowledge or experience regarding who I am, or why I do what I do. ?

I extend a very warm invitation to any and all of you to personally contact and/or visit me for this purpose instead of hiding behind this web site and sniping at me.

Third:

You are only broadcasting your ignorance of historical and cultural realities when you make remarks indicating that only Native American Indians have a right to practice or teach Native American Spirituality. Every culture in the history of humanity has produced shamans and healers, or medicine people, and many non tribal people still carry that knowlege in their genes.

I do not claim to be Native American. I do not advertise myself as Native American. I am not a medicine person in the Native American sense, and I do not promote myself as such.

I am a white woman who underwent a genuine shamanic initiation experience, and I am the keeper of certain teachings of the Bear Spirit Clan that it seems I carried in my genetic memory. The traumatic shock of my initiation somehow opened those memories. (I was horribly burned in a propane explosion and fire, and while out of body was asked by several members of the Bear Spirit Clan to return to the body and share these teachings with others.) I agreed, and am doing so.

My authority to teach doesn't come from you or anybody else. It comes directly from Standing Bear, Chief of the Bear Spirit Clan.

Finally:

You also publish your ignorance for all to see with all of your flap about how wrong it is for spiritual teachers to be paid for their time and efforts. Every priest, minister, psychologist, and yes, medicine person, including the Pope and the Dalai Lama, is financially supported in one way or another by those she/he serves, and this has also been true down through history.

Following my initiation, I was fortunate enough to have found a Mohawk shaman woman [editorial comment from admin: I'm sure the Mohawk Nation will be very surprised to learn that they are related to a "shaman woman"!] with whom I studied for three years. Had it not been for her, I would very likely have lost my mind because of the intensity of the shamanic visionary states into which I was thrust by the shock of my initiation. As there was nobody in my own culture who knew how to help me, I will be eternally grateful to her for having done so.

While I studied with her, I witnessed several Native Americans verbally and psychically assault her in a public setting, because she was teaching Native American ways to white women. At that time I didn't know how to defend her. I do now, and I most certainly would.
Yes, she charged for her teaching and guidance, and I was pleased to be able to pay her. I charge for my teaching and guidance as well. It's an ethical stance. Those who come to me for help know precisely what they will receive from me in return for what they have paid. This keeps the exchange clean and clear, and limits the potential for unbalanced or unrealistic expectations for all concerned.

Yes, much of what you're trying to do is worthy and needed. There is indeed a lot of hoo haw, not to mention severe abuse of every kind, going on out there.

But nobody is served well by malicious attempts to defame or financially ruin another person. It hurts the intended victim, but of equal importance is that it hurts the perpetrator.
At this point, and until you have proven otherwise to me, I must consider you and your site to be perpetrators of your own brand of abuse, which places you on a level with those you accuse.

I can help you heal from this imbalance, but I suppose you wouldn't trust a white woman to do so.

Yes, you're darn right. I am TICKED! I have had a bellyful of this kind of nonsense.

[PLH]

Ok let me see if I understand this correctly. Please correct any misunderstanding I may have. You are white, not NDN. You refer to a Medicine Wheel, that is a white concept?
Sorry I have to re-word rather than steal a quote from you here: You are the keeper of certain teachings of the Bear Spirit Clan that it "seems" you carried in your genetic memory? How do you "seem" to carry anything in your genetic memory?

Perhaps you could concentrate on your own imbalance.

[Le Weaponnier]

QUOTE:
"Every culture in the history of humanity has produced shamans and healers, or medicine people, and many non tribal people still carry that knowlege in their genes. "

"I am a white woman who underwent a genuine shamanic initiation experience, and I am the keeper of certain teachings of the Bear Spirit Clan that it seems I carried in my genetic memory. "



Oh, this one's just so easy.

Arguments against Genetic Memory:
1.  Loss of innocence. Children would be born with previous memories of past personalities.

2.  If genetic memory was a valid concept, each new experience would require a modification of every single genetic structure in everyone of a person's cells. Even if this was somehow feasible, the number of changes would lead to genetic mutations on a huge level.

3.  There has been no method documented for encoding such memories into genetic structure.

4.  Genes do not change from birth to death, with the exception of mutations as in cancers etc. Else, DNA testing would be invalidated.

On Wilkipedia:
"Racial memory is at present regarded by most scientists as new-age pseudoscience."


"Genetic memory is a device used in science fiction but it is not scientifically proven to occur in human beings."


I like that phrase "new-age psuedoscience".

[raven]

Scarlet,
If I may, without sounding like I am personally attacking you.
The point here is, making money on teachings. Did the elder charge you money what she taught you?
I will not take away what happened to you . Yes it was a terrible experience you went through, however I myself know first hand the physical and emotional pain of being burned. I did not have any animal spirits come to me when it happened.  Did it change me? You bet.
WalkingSoft knows me on a personal level. What I did with my experience is not start a web site as yours. Instead I did volunteer work at the burn units up in Chicago. Went in to talk to people that were going through the same kind of pain.
I grew up with Native grandparents, their teachings did help me through my difficult times. If anything, it taught me compassion.
My husband has sundanced for many years, I have seen more people come through my door than most therapist. Yet never has a dollar ever been made from his sweats or the endless hours of listening to people's problems.
Maybe what you went through was to help people, but it is the way that you are going about it that is not right.  You are thinking with a white mind. I am not saying that in a racist way, what I am saying is go back to square one, stand back and see what you are doing. If you need to make a living don't use native teachings as your tool to do so.
Now that I have shared more personal info than what I cared to, I will get back to my cup of coffee. And if you would like to discuss your personal experience with me, I will be more than happy to listen, and not ask for a dime.

[raven]

Also, the elder that charged you for her teachings, well that was your first mistake right there. And perhaps she was attacked not because she was teaching a white woman, maybe because she was charging money. That is pretty offensive in my world.

[educatedindian]

I'm glad to see the large number of hits on this thread. Apparently her followers or employees are following this with intense interest. Or perhaps it's disillusioned former followers who are following this so closely?

More on our deluded exploiter and fraud Ms. Scarlet Kinney, who apparently is such a super-spirchul type she monitors the web to shut down critics and tosses out legal threats within a few hours of any criticism posted.

She's apparently a mix-and-match shame-on type,  with some devotion to a Greek goddess of memory. If there's any defense for the exploitation she does, it's likely in that traumatic event which she uses in a very crass way as a license to exploit.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:oumvhWhkvfAJ:www.mythicartist.org/artists/work/sk_mnemosyne.htm+%22scarlet+kinney&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
"My cousin Gen is dead now. She has been dead these many years. She died at 45, along with her mother, my Auntie Eleanor, in a fire in the Cambridge house they shared, on the first anniversary of the fire in my home in coastal Downeast Maine, which, in spite of being horribly burned, I survived.
I had two sisters and Gen had three, but throughout the years of our youth, before our lives and our loves led us down very different paths, we shared a bond of understanding about the world in which we lived together for eight weeks every summer that we both agreed made us much more than sisters in flesh; it made us sisters in spirit....
Daily during our weeks of freedom from the routine constraints of school and catechism, Gen and I headed for the deep woods....It was then that we entered into a parallel world that existed either below or above the one we had left behind....
This experience led me to conduct shamanic research at The Standing Bear Center for Shamanic Studies, which I founded in 1994, on the possible relationship between ancient, pre-patriarchal Goddess archetypes and the contemporary shamanic Goddess archetypes I work with and teach at the Center. The results of that research have been fascinating, and will be included in a shamanic teaching book, which is in process."

She reminds me of the the young kid who called himself a "shaman" and founded his own "tribe" who spammed this board for weeks. While their desire for some kind of meaning is understandable. the way they go about is as wrong as can be.

Understand this, Scarlet. All your bluster and self righteous ignorance does not make what you do any less wrong.

Your ingorance extends not just to the most basic knowledge of Native and tribal cultures. It also includes a lack of knowledge of copyright laws and the Fair Use Act.

Not to mention basic English. "Judge" is a not a bad word. It means using your brain to think.

[educatedindian]

More on Ms. Kinney. A photo of her on an ad for her faux-feminist shame-on teachings. "Cute" necklace.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:vN8tdOa6fs4J:waldo.villagesoup.com/community/story.cfm%3FstoryID%3D67090+%22scarlet+kinney&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3

A bio
http://www.mythicjourneys.org/guests_kinneys.php
"Scarlet Kinney of the Standing Bear Center for Shamanic Studies, is an artist, writer and mythologist. She earned her BA in studio art at Goddard College, Plainfield, VT, and her MA in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis on Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA. Scarlet studied the women's shamanic ways of the Iroquois Nation with a Mohawk shaman woman for three years, and founded The Standing Bear Center for Shamanic Studies in 1994. The Center offers shamanic workshops, individual shamanic counseling, and an apprentice training program leading to certification as a Shamanic Counselor"

Anyone else think that her alleged Mohawk shamaness was actually Penny McKelvey, the Scot who calls herself "Oshinnah Fastwolf"?

Most of the sites out there on her are about her painting, though most of them are down now. I'd say, like our earlier "shaman" leading his own would be "tribe", she could be as scarred as he was, and she could be both victim and victimizer, as he was.

[lynxwoman]

O.K., this is reverse racism. My teachers taught me that everybody is on an equal shamanic plane; it's about respect; it's about ethics; and it's about honoring a heritage, a way of being, and a way of seeing. Native cultures are dying all over the United States; preservation, my friends.

If a bald eagle showed up at your door and his head was painted black, would you say he was not a bald eagle?

Educated Indian, I think you should contact Scarlet for counsel. My great grand-mother was a Cherokee medicine woman; true shamanic initiation is just that: you don't question it, nor can you predict where it may land. And how dare you talk to a female elder that way!

"Truth first is ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as being self-evident." Shopenhauer

To really obtain a humane outlook and true balance I think you need to pay Scarlet double for your session.

I hope you see the error of your ways and I really hope that you someday obtain Center.

[Barnaby_McEwan]

O.K., this is reverse racism....it's about respect; it's about ethics; and it's about honoring a heritage, a way of being, and a way of seeing.

If I was Indian, I wouldn't feel honoured by white people peddling cheesy 'noble savage' stereotypes in order to give their lives meaning. And I'd be enraged if when I protest, someone with a silly fake name accuses me of racism.

Native cultures are dying all over the United States; preservation, my friends.

Newagers and 'shamans' are helping to destroy native cultures, using their white privilege to displace them with salable counterfeits. Your preaching to native people about their own cultures is a perfect example of the despicable arrogance of newagers.

I hope you see the error of your ways and I really hope that you someday obtain Center.

Damn, where's Mibby when we need him?

[Mo]

maybe you THINKING native cultures are dying is wishful thinking. then you can exploit us all the more without all this nasty TRUTH and being exposed for who and what you really are...frauds.  set up a catholic church or temple and sell mass or barmitsvahs and see how honored catholics or jews will be about what you do. with all the things we need permission for i'll be damned if i will ask permission from you to be offended by your actions. you are exploiters plain and simple and no matter how you try to justify what you are doing it does not change that fact.  and yes i am offended by your assertion that native cultures are dying out. we are fighting to keep our culture from people like you who would turn it into a product to be sold. hands off! nice touch tho....was your grandmother a princess too?

[raven]

Lynxwoman,  Correct me if I am wrong, "your teachers, taught you everyone is equal on a shamanic plane?"  In other words, my spirituality is the same as ex: people that murder and rape?
So what you are saying here is that I am wasting my time trying to do good for the people and that if I chose the road of doing bad that would be balance of shamanic plane?
Do you honestly believe that?  Just because your gg-grandmother may have had some "insight" does not make a shaman, nor you.
And so with what you say is that you are taking classes to be a shaman? What is wrong with this picture? If you say that it is within all of us, then why do you need to be taught that? Isn't already within you? You shouldn't need someone else to teach you that.
And just so you know MY Culture is very much alive, thank you. Every morning I wake up it is still here, hasn't gone anywhere. So I don't know who is teaching that to you, but either the teacher is wrong or the student is.
Well if your g-g grandmother was Cherokee that would make you ummm help me with my math 1/32? I hope you don't prick your finger and bleed your Cherokee blood out.  Now that would be a dying culture in itself.
Now if you want to get into a debate over shamanism let me know. I can go down that road without the sarcasm.

[educatedindian]

"this is reverse racism."

Sorry "lynx", but no one Native would buy that claim for a second, esp not from someone like you who shows herself to be quite racist in her post in so many ways.

1) You have a phony "Indian name", one that's pretty ridiculous. Are there even lynxes in North America?
2) You hauled out the mythical "Cheroke great grandmother" claim. Most whites claiming that are actually trying to hide a Black ancestor in the family tree.
Obviously you know extremely little about your alleged ancestry. Cherokees don't have "shamans".
Actual Cherokees would not say "I had a Cherokee grandmother, great grandmother" etc. (For one thing, great grandparents are generally also called grandparents.)
They would say "I AM Cherokee." So for you, your alleged ancestry is just an excuse for your white racism.
3) The "reverse racism" ploy is itself most widely used by white racists trying to make excuses for their racism. There is no such thing, there is only plain old racism.
4) Your claim that WE are supposedly "dying out" is one of the oldest claims of white racists.
(Notice that YOU do not include yourself among the "we" of Native people.)
Natives are in no danger of dying out anywhere, (except perhaps Brazil) and have not been for over 90 years. There are 60 million Native people worldwide, GROWING in numbers.
Native cultures are not in any danger of dying out, and the clearest sign of that is the way we are fighting back against exploiters like YOURSELF and Scarlet.

"My teachers taught me that everybody is on an equal shamanic plane"

ROFL!
What the heck is that? I doubt you know yourself.

"it's about respect; it's about ethics; and it's about honoring a heritage"

Right, and you and Scarlet show no sign whatsoever of doing those things yourself. So it's laughable you try to lecture us about it.

"If a bald eagle showed up at your door and his head was painted black, would you say he was not a bald eagle?"

I'd wonder what idiot twinkie had tortured the poor creature just to make a point, actually.
 
"I think you should contact Scarlet for counsel."

ROFL!
Why the heck would I do that? She seems like a very foolish elderly white woman who is so confused by the trauma she went through she does not realize the harm she is doing with her lies and exploitation.

"true shamanic initiation is just that: you don't question it"

Nothing about her is "true". It's about as real as a three dollar bill. By her own admission, she made everything up herself.

"how dare you talk to a female elder that way!"

She's no elder. She is just old...and confused.

And the way that I talked to her was, in fact, sympathetic to what she's gone through.

"I think you need to pay Scarlet double for your session."

Ah, your true agenda is revealed. Like Scarlet herself admitted, it's all about money for her. She's scared she will lose her meal ticket.

"I really hope that you someday obtain Center."

ROFL!
I really should thank you for being so entertaining.

And I hope someday you obtain our Nuage to Plain English Dictionary.

[frederica]

First, we never had shamans. Second, the culture is not dying, but it is being corrupted by Nuagers incorportating AI  beliefs into Nuage practices. Stories and philosophy are being rewritten to fit Nuage beliefs. Then, it is presented to the general public as Pan-Indianism.  This act in itself does more harm than good. frederica