"Toughness is in the spirit and soul, not in the muscles." -~ Alex Karras
(For those who don't know, Alex Karras was a professional football player who later became an actor.)
But - here's my story. As a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, I learned that strength of spirit meant much more that physical strength. On one particular fire dispatch, our ranger district in Northern California had already sent out all the standing fire crews, so they scratched together a crew from what they could find on the district, anybody who could pass the step-test and had a red card (fire-job qualifications card). The crew boss and a squad boss were from fire management but I was the other squad boss and, at the time, I was the assistant silviculturist working in timber management. Most of the crew were young and inexperienced, from the Young Adult Conservation Corps, with a professional archeologist too, a young woman.
We spent three weeks going from fire to fire, three total in Southern California - three weeks of 18-hour shifts, getting four hours sleep a night in paper sleeping bags on the ground, without a day off. When we were dispatched to a new fire, the fire command thought we were a fresh crew and sent us out on night-duty to locations that the day crews were being flown into by helicopter. We had to walk in, up 80% slopes (I had a clinometer with me), from Cow Canyon Saddle up Mt. Baldy, and then out again at the end of the shift.
I was carrying an 18-pound chainsaw on my shoulder and a butt-pack full of rations and every kind of snack I could grab in camp. I was wearing a cruiser vest with lots of pockets under my brush coat and all my pockets were stuffed with candy, cookies, cans of juice, etc. Altogether, it was a heavy load. When we got to our assigned area where we were to cut fireline, reinforce the existing line, and put out hotspots, I started handing out the goodies to the crew - they were beginning to be in pretty bad shape by then and just walking in was a huge effort - everyone was falling out. The young archeologist was doing the same thing that I was doing. We were doing what we could to buck up the spirits of the crew - even the crew boss and the other squad boss were starting to lose it. At the time, I was 6'1", maybe 160 pounds, the archeologist was maybe 5'4" - this was in contrast to a muscular young ex-high school football hero on the crew who had started out flexing and strutting in fire camp.
The next night, we were doing structure protection in Icehouse Canyon on Mt. Baldy, up on the roofs of the cabins trying to keep them from burning. Earlier, we had gotten a hot meal at the Ice House Lodge, a beautiful old building with county firemen laying all over the floor sleeping - in the middle of our meal we had to run outside and cut a line around the lodge to keep it from burning (it finally burned to the ground in another fire several years later).
Icehouse Canyon was aptly named - a narrow, steep canyon with a year-round stream of snow-melt run-off - it was cold! It was approaching Thanksgiving by this point so we were freezing but, despite that, we were in the middle of a fire-storm powered by Santa Ana winds with fire blowing everywhere. It was getting pretty miserable. And then the ante went up - the burning vegetation on the steep canyon-sides above us was no longer holding back boulders, allowing them to roll loose - they were bounding and crashing down the canyon-side in the dark, right on top of us, like cannonballs. We could hear them coming but we couldn't see them in the dark until they were already there. We were totally exposed on the rooftops with no way to protect ourselves. That's when the football player started crying.
By that time, it was all that the slight little archeologist and I could do to keep the crew together and functioning. She was mothering everybody, even though she was probably still only in her 20's, and, at 36, I was being Papa Bear. She really did impress me with the strength of her spirit.
It was a life lesson for me in one of those situations that absolutely tests the limits of your endurance, your physical condition, your emotional stamina, and your spirit - one of those "when the chips are down" situations. I was struggling too, but I kept myself going by helping keep the others going. In that situation, what mattered most was not about being male or female, or being big and muscular, or being experienced - what mattered most was the strength of spirit, from whomever it came. It was quite a lesson for me that I will always remember.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Of Microphones and Warmth
When the "Heart Song" CD was recorded between 1996 and 1998, technology was different than today - there was no Garageband or Amplitube software in iPhones or iPads. Gear was not designed around USB, recording was not as easy or democratic. So, back then - "Heart Song" was recorded and engineered by an ace in the recording industry with "golden ears": Kris Solem of 52nd Street Digital and Future Disc Systems in Los Angeles. Unbelievably, he was able to obtain the use of a Sheffield Labs tube microphone which had a tube preamp built into it, courtesy of Robert Hadley and Doug Sax of the Mastering Lab. Anyone who knows sound equipment, knows if you want warmth in a recording, you gotta use tubes instead of condenser microphones. But a Sheffield Labs microphone? I was told then that those mikes rented for three hundred dollars an hour, used by artists like Barbara Strreisand. Today, it's an extremely rare and sought after microphone. only about a dozen of these mics were made for the industry-changing Sheffield Labs direct-to-disk recordings. This is absolutely one of the finest mics in the world. Two songs, played on a bass flute, were not recorded with the Sheffield Labs microphone - the bass sound distorted too much. So a Neumann was brought in for the bass songs. The Neumann itself is a prized microphone, but not in league of the Sheffield Labs microphone, hand-built and rare. Why was the "Heart Song" CD so graced? Was there something in the music that called for it? Or was it simply the generosity of the will of the universe? Listen to the quality of the recording, mixing and mastering - it is undeniable. Is the quality of the playing equal to the quality of engineering? You have to decide that for yourself when you listen. Downloadeable tracks from the out-of-print "Heart Song" CD are available via PayPal at this link: http://www.facebook.com/WhitePathMusic/WhitePathMusic/app_96687436973. Dohiyi!
- by Bill Neal
- by Bill Neal
Saturday, August 4, 2012
The Making Of An Eagle Staff
Some years ago, when I first started to coordinate powwows, I was told that I needed an eagle staff for the gathering. I asked how that was to happen and was told simply to put out the word that it was needed. A couple of months later, at another gathering, a woman came to me to tell me she had heard I was making an eagle staff. I asked how she had heard that since I had said nothing to anyone - but she offered an eagle feather from a Cherokee elder who had passed over and came back the next day to gift me with it. I told a friend what happened and the friend offered to make the eagle staff for me - just provide the feathers. I called a friend who had gifted me with a feather from his son's headdress after his son was killed in a car accident - I asked permission to put the feather on the staff and he offered me seven more feathers.
That is how the eagle staff came to me that has now graced eight powwows, including the Eagle And Condor Intertribal Powwow, with its medicine. It now has twelve feathers but I have seven more to add to it, gifted to me by a young man at a youth conference for substance abuse prevention at which I had been asked to play. Having just been released from a residential treatment program, he came to me with the seven feathers and said to me that he had been praying about what to do with them - that it came to him that he was supposed to give them to me.
Now, I have two questions in my mind. The first - how is it that things sometimes happen this way and other times not? What is at work when that happens?
The second question, which is troubling to me, is: should I even be speaking of these things here? These are delicate matters and need to be discussed circumspectly and respectfully. There are many, many reasons not to speak of these things in this kind of forum - but now it is done and I do not withdraw it.
Please know that there is so much more to be learned than can ever be shared this way. Any who are really serious about learning these ways must seek it in person from those who know, over time, with the utmost patience, humility and respect for that which is being given.
Now, I have two questions in my mind. The first - how is it that things sometimes happen this way and other times not? What is at work when that happens?
The second question, which is troubling to me, is: should I even be speaking of these things here? These are delicate matters and need to be discussed circumspectly and respectfully. There are many, many reasons not to speak of these things in this kind of forum - but now it is done and I do not withdraw it.
Please know that there is so much more to be learned than can ever be shared this way. Any who are really serious about learning these ways must seek it in person from those who know, over time, with the utmost patience, humility and respect for that which is being given.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Blackfoot Physics and European Minds: David Peat
Abstract
Western science and "European consciousness" is contrasted with that of Indigenous and traditional peoples. The metaphysics of the Blackfoot of North America and this vision of an animate world is examined. It is argued that something similar existed in Europe of the early middle ages but that the secularization of space, time and matter
paved the way for the development of science. A new science may be possible which combines the current power of abstraction and analysis with an "impersonal subjectivity".
Introduction
European consciousness dominates the world. As we move towards the next millennium will this continue to be the case? In this article I explore a radically different world-view, that of the Blackfoot of North America, and ask if their approach to society and the natural world has anything of significance to teach us. Indeed, can the study of alternative ways of thinking give rise to a creative response within own consciousness?
The initial statement of this article requires amplification and qualification. By "European consciousness" I do not mean something confined to a specific geographical location but, rather, a way of thinking and behaving that, while it did happen to develop within Europe, now has an influence across much of the globe. Its seeds were already present in the middle ages and its flowering resulted in the secularizing of time and of space, the rise of science and the proliferation of technology. It transformed a society that had previously existed on trade and barter into the major force for expansion and progress that now dominates the world.
One of the most dramatic products of the Western mind has been its particular approach to science, a discipline that, along with its associated technology, is by no means as objective, neutral and value free as we once believed. Western science expresses an entire metaphysics about the way be relate to the world, society and ourselves. Western science has its triumph yet we are now aware of the hubris connected to its success. To take one example, our technology acts somewhat like a virus which, when it enters a society, transforms its entire structure. Export a sack of seed, a bag of fertilizer or a canister of pesticide to the Third World and one transforms an entire way of life that may have survived, largely unchanged, for hundreds or even thousands of years.
An Animate World
In recent years I have often heard the boast that, for the first time in human history, we all share the same story of creation and that today children all over the world are being taught the same facts about nature. Western science has become the yardstick of truth and, measured against it, the stories and traditions that have sustained ancient cultures are dismissed as myths, superstitions and old wives tales.
But, measured on the scale of the world's civilizations, this "European mind" is comparatively young and its science a mere infant. Go back a millennium and time was experienced as a cycle of renewal. The seasons, the rhythms of daily life and the church's calendar were all in harmony. Space was united with time and its interior was as rich as the yoke of an egg. Aristotle's natural philosophy taught that each body has its natural place; medieval society was a world in which each person was in his or her proper place. Our modern notions of the rights of the individual was far less important than the well being of society as a whole.
In such a world everything was alive; rocks, rivers and trees. Nature was constantly at work and it fell to human beings to act as her midwife. Metals grew in the womb of the earth and the sacred work of the miner and blacksmith brought this labour to completion. In many ways the reality of this world was far larger than the scientific reality we inhabit today.
For a variety of reasons European consciousness began to change. Time, the theologians had argued, belongs to God but now it became secularized though the practice of usury. Banking is about buying time and setting time aside. Inevitably a secularized time led to our modern obsession with growth and progress, prediction and control.
In the twelfth century Aquinas denied that the artifex (miner, blacksmith, sculptor, etc.) is the assistant to nature for, he claimed, while the form of matter may be altered, its essence is untouched. The crafts and arts of humankind had been reduced to the superficial transformation of mere appearance.
In 1438 another influence was added to the developing European mind. With Byzantium under threat from the expansion of the Ottoman empire its Emperor, John Paleologus, along with seven hundred advisors, traveled to Florence in an attempt to gain Pope Eugenius IV's military support. In exchange he offered a resolution of the theological differences between the two churches. The result was that for a time Florence was filled with neo-Platonism and its influence, at the height of the Renaissance, cannot be underestimated.
In the thirteenth century William of Auvergne could write "When you consider the order and magnificence of the universe... you will find it like a most beautiful canticle.. and the wonders and varieties of its creatures to be a symphony of joy and harmony to the very essence. ... The goodness of a substance, and its beauty are the same thing". Likewise Abbot Sugar supervised the rebuilding of the abbey church of St. Denis in order to make the divine manifest within bronze, stone, stained glass, precious metals and jewels.1 Now, in the Renaissance, artists were directing their gaze away from the natural world into one of ideal forms.
Within this melting pot of ideas matter and spirit became fragmented one from the other and a participatory reality was transformed into scientific objectivity. For me the exemplar of this change of consciousness is linear perspective which developed in the earlier part of the Renaissance. Siena is referred to by Italians and a feminine city. Within the paintings of its school time and space are united. The various events of a saint's life are presented in total, like a superimposed comic strip; and while depth in space is certainly indicated it is still possible to see an object from a multiplicity of viewpoints. But, as the Renaissance developed in the more masculine city of Florence, time was abstracted from space and painting was left with the single viewpoint, a frozen world seen though a window. With the device of perspective one longer enters into to painting but views it with an objective eye. Mirroring the metaphysics of the period, nature has been projected away from us and the world is experienced as something external.
The mathematical basis of perspective is called Projective Geometry. This term says it all. One no longer engages directly with an object in its natural, essential form, as something that can be explored and touched, instead it becomes a surface that must be distorted to fit the global logic of mathematical perspective. The rich individualistic inscape of the natural world had given way to a uniform perspectival grid of logic and reason.
How well perspective parallels a science in which nature obeys laws that are, in some metaphysical sense, external to matter's essence. As Bacon argued, these laws are to be discovered by placing nature on the rack, another sort of grid, and tormenting her to reveal her secrets. Descartes and Newton can not be held responsible for our modern world, the seeds of its consciousness were sown long before.
It is only as we reach our own modern age that the perspectival vision of science has been shaken by, for example, quantum theory. Yet artists are always the antennae of society and the foreshocks could be felt when Cezanne restored touch to painting and, in the process, activated time and multiplicity of viewpoint. Never interested in projection Cezanne entered directly into nature, and nature entered into him. "The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me." he wrote, "I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting....I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness." 2
The Modern Mind
The European mind, along with its material and conceptual products, exerts a powerful seductive force on all of us. It would be extremely difficult to live without the products of such a consciousness, nor would most of us we wish to - at least not in an entirely radical fashion. Many have already written of the shadow side to this power; intensive farming, high technology medicine, rapid communications and so on. My own interest in somewhat different. It is to ask if an earlier richness together with a sense of harmony and a balance can be restored to the European mind. It is to ask if an ethical and moral dimension can be added to our science and technology and if supposed objectivity can be tempered through participation.
Is our world destined towards increasing uniformity or can we accommodate alternative view points and metaphysics, each enriching the other? The arts have always been eager for such enrichment, Debussy drew upon Balanese music, Picasso on African masks, and a director like Peter Brooke has explored the world's theatrical traditions. When used in a creative and respectful way these are not acts of cultural appropriation but of cultural renewal. Is something similar possible within our science?
At this point is could be objected that, unlike the arts, science is objective and, from a cultural point of view, value-free. It is for this reason, it is said, that Indigenous and marginalized cultures cannot really co-exist beside industrialized nations and are doomed to extinction. I don't believe this is true. Traditional cultures have enormous power and may, in the end, act to transform or renew our own technological society.
An Alternative Vision
My test case is that of the Blackfoot people, a nation who once occupied an area of the North American plains east of the Rocky Mountains but now today live in reserves in Montana, U.S. and reservations in Alberta, Canada. By tradition they were hunters of buffalo; traveling with their tepis in the summer and wintering along river banks. Their language is a member of the great Algonquin family which runs from the Cheyenne in the central US plains though the Blackfoot and up into northern Canada with Ojibwaj and Cree finally into the Naskapi of Labrador.
My encounter, as a representative of Western science, with the Blackfoot was neither systematic nor anthropological3. It was more an ongoing friendship and a series of discussions about our respective world-views. In turn this led to a number of circles in which Western scientists sat with Blackfoot and other Native American Elders.
The Blackfoot have weathered the extermination of the buffalo and the appropriation of their lands. Anyone past middle age would have experienced the residential schools in which children's heads were shaved, clothing burned, and a prohibition placed upon speaking their mother tongue or praying according to their tradition - physical and sexual abuse was also far from uncommon. Today the Blackfoot have exchanged their horses for cars and pickup trucks. They live in houses instead of tepis and job hunting has replaced the buffalo jump and buffalo wallow. Surrounded by the pressures of North American society they are faced with drug and alcohol problems yet what struck me most during my visits is the way that the old is able to coexist with the new so that, for many Blackfoot, their traditional vision and metaphysics survives untarnished. Clearly the Blackfoot have the extraordinary ability to coexist within two worlds. Yet they taught me that we all possess a similar capacity and buried deep within the European mind lies something that may be able to temper the momentum of our present path. We are all indigenous people, in the sense that each of us is the carrier of a sacred relationship to the natural world and has access to a wider vision of a reality long denied.
Blackfoot Reality
What is the nature of Blackfoot reality? Certainly it is far wider than our own, yet firmly based within the natural world of vibrant, living things. Once our European world saw nature in a similar way, a vision still present in poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins who perceived the immanence and inscape of the world. Nevertheless our consciousness has narrowed to the extent that matter is separated from spirit and we seek our reality in an imagined elsewhere of abstractions, Platonic realms, mathematical elegance, and physical laws.
The Blackfoot know of no such fragmentation. Not only do they speak with rocks and trees, they are also able to converse with that which remains invisible to us, a world of what could be variously called spirits, or powers, or simply energies. But these forces are not the occupants of a mystical or abstract domain, they remain an essential aspect of the natural, material world. It is not so much that the Blackfoot live in an extended reality but that our own Western vision had become excessively myopic.
This wider reality embraces flux, movement, change and transformation. The creator of the land, Napi (the Old Man), is also its trickster, one who is constantly changing form, traversing boundaries and upsetting preconceptions. For example, what the West takes as the aberration of multiple personality becomes the acceptance that an individual is not a fixed thing but fluid, a being whose multiplicity is reflected in the way a person's name keeps transforming during their life.
How is one to maintain orientation in a universe in which everything is caught up in the river of transformation. How can anything be preserved from change? The answer lies in participation within the flux by means of acts of renewal. Renewal requires an act of sacrifice and it is these sacrifices, these actions of participation, performed each morning when the sun rises, each year at the Sun Dance, which help to maintain the great circle of renewal. Thanks to these acts of renewal time, within the flux, turns on its axis. Seasons follow seasons. Circling time is always the same, yet always different, always renewed.
Acts of renewal reflect the compacts formed in ancient times; negotiated relationships between the ancestors and the energies, or spirits, or keepers of the land. No one believes that a pipe ceremony actually causes the sun to rise. Rather, by renewing their relationships to the dynamics of nature the Blackfoot maintain a harmonious role within the cosmos. Within a balanced cosmos the sun will rise and the seasons follow in their proper harmony.
Personal sacrifice, responsibility, ceremonies and acts of renewal therefore have nothing to do with the world of mechanical causality but are more to do with a relationship to a living cosmos. Although it does not come from the Blackfoot, the story of the rainmaker well illustrates this point:- A rainmaker was called to a region experiencing drought. He arrived and immediately went into the hut provided for him only to emerge several days later as it began to rain. When he was asked how he had made the rain he replied that he had not caused the rain to fall. Rather, when he arrived in the village he discovered everything to be in disharmony. He therefore retired to his hut in order to bring himself back into balance. Once balance had been restored then nature returned to harmony and the rain fell as it naturally should.
Carl Jung chose to term this synchronicity, his "acausal connecting principle".4 It was present earlier in the West in the form of Alchemy in which external material workings and internal transformations mirror each other. This constant movement towards balance and harmony within the flux is the essence of the Blackfoot world.
The Map in the Head
An expression of the Blackfoot's relationship to a reality of rocks, trees, animals and energies is expressed within what many Native Americans call "a map in the head". This map is a way of knowing where one is in relationship to the land, its history, society and all the living beings of nature. For the Blackfoot this map begins with Napi's body, which is traced out in the landscape in the form of rivers, buttes, hills and valleys. It is also the track left by Napi as he walked across his land. The Map in the Head is songs sung and the stories told around the fire at night. It is the relationship of the Blackfoot people to their world.
The map in the head is a form of knowledge, but knowledge, for the Blackfoot, is no mere collection of facts but something that one grows towards. Knowledge, like a song, is a living being; a being with which one can come into relationship. Coming to knowing is an active dialogue with nature; with the rocks, plants and animals. As one Blackfoot put it, "the plants and animals are our microscopes and laboratories."
Knowledge is relationship and relationship brings with it responsibilities and obligations. Thus it has been put to me that when Western science performs its experiments it is actually conversing with nature and, in this process, telling nature about ourselves. Are we willing to take responsibility for what we say? Each action in the laboratory must be balanced by its reaction somewhere else in the world. When we create order in one place we give birth to disorder in another.
Such a point of view should not be entirely alien to our European minds. It was a European, Goethe, who suggested an alternative to the Newtonian method which he saw as a way of gaining knowledge by placing nature in highly artificial situations. By contrast, Goethe sought "an instant worth a thousand, bearing all within itself." 5 His method involved, for example, coming into relationship with plants and contemplating their inner nature. In this fashion Goethe sought to understand the inner nature and meaning of plants.6
While Newtonian science studies particular instances in the hope of generalizing into a law of nature - unity within multiplicity - Goethe studied the multiplicity that arises out of unity. Goethe's notion of the archetype of all plants resonates with Indigenous concept of the Guardians or Keepers of plants and animals. By carrying a piece of bone a Blackfoot comes into direct contact with the Guardian or Keeper of the buffalo.
Healing
Plants have the power to heal. For the Blackfoot the nature of their action cannot be reduced simply to chemical substances or molecules. Healing involves a relationship to the entire plant and this includes its power, energy, spirit, or in Goethe's terms, its archetype.
One can perhaps understand this by analogy to sacred sculpture of, for example, India. Within a ceremony these objects act as windows into the world of the sacred yet are at the same time no more than stone, clay and pigment. Their action is that of a diagram, or map, of the pattern of the sacred. One comes into relationship with the numinous though the catalytic action of the icon. In a similar way the plant and its associated chemicals open into a larger world of energies and healing powers.
There is a related metaphor in Western science. A molecule is not so much an object but a dynamical pattern. At the quantum level it is a pattern of energies which extend into the ground state of the entire cosmos. Absorbed into the body this dynamic energy pattern provokes a range of transformations of the body's biochemical activities. Of course, the analogy can only go so long as Western science continues to fragment matter from ethical values, consciousness and spirit.
It goes without saying that the relationship to the plant world extends into ecological practice, and here I am drawing not upon the Blackfoot but my conversations with the Mohawk. When one hunts for a medicine plant, or for that matter for an animal, one does not pick the first or second one comes upon but always the third. A prayer is first offered that the plant will sacrifice itself and after it has been picked an offering is made to the earth. Returning home the plant is treated in a respectful manner for one is not only dealing with the particular but the universal, the Guardian of the plant, the archetype. In the action of healing with the plant energy may be exchanged but within such a metaphysics whatever is taken must, in some way, be paid back.
Language
The Blackfoot I have met speak of their traditional ways as a science.7Of particular significance is the way this science is enfolded within their language. The language contains the map of the land, the relationships to the energies and spirits of all living thing - the rocks, the trees, the plants, birds, fish and animals. The flux in which they live is perfectly expressed in what could be termed their "process language". European languages have a heavy reliance upon nouns and lend themselves so well to a type of thinking that deals in categories and Aristotelian logic.8 Our physical reality is that of objects in interaction with one another - nouns linked by verbs. This thinking also extends into the abstract and psychological spheres when the world of our experiences, relationships and feelings becomes a collection of objects of thought to be manipulated, generalized, abstracted and acted upon. How eagerly do we build categories and concepts, how literally do we take our "language games", how easily do we become trapped in empty philosophical argument.
While other problems may certainly arise this sort of trap is not present within a language where the verb takes centre stage. Within Blackfoot all is movement, process and transformation. Nouns as objects emerge in a secondary way though the modification of verbs. To them the English language is a straight-jacket which forces their minds into a world of objects, categories and restrictive logic.
Take, as an example, healing. To the Western mind this is a transitive business in which the doctor (noun) acts upon the patient (another noun) to bring about a some change of state. For the Blackfoot healing is a process. This process is itself the primary reality, rather than that of patient and doctor. Healing often involves singing. In this case in speaking about healing the process of the singing is the focus of the linguistic act. Rather than singing being performed by someone, the pure act of singing is taking place - singing is singing itself. It is out of this singing that healing unfolds to reveal the previously sick person.
Again an analogy from contemporary science may help. According to classical physics nature consists of objects in interaction with one another. Observation is an objective business that reveals the world for what it is. Quantum theory, by contrast, stresses that observation is participation and within any act of observation the observer and observed are united in a holistic and unanalyzable way. Observation is a process within which it is no longer possible to speak of the independent existence, or properties of, the observer and observed.
As Neils Bohr pointed out the paradoxes and difficulties of quantum theory arise out of our need to employ ordinary language in our discourse. But this language, be it English or Danish, historically developed in a particular way and within a world of classical objects. We are suspended in this language so that we do not know which way is up and which is down. By contrast, the Blackfoot live in a world that is much closer to that quantum domain, a world of flux, transformation and essential relationship far from that of absolute categories, fixed objects and rigid Aristotelian dualities. Their language perfectly reflects this world.
Harmony and Balance
Knowledge is not partitioned in a holistic world and Blackfoot science is not confined simply to the material. It embraces society and good government. Its norm is balance and harmony. Society is not an artifact built by individuals with rights and freedoms, rather it is a process of renewal, a coherent whole out of which emerge persons with responsibilities and obligations. An individual exists in respect to his or her relationships with society and nature.
Take as an example, Blackfoot justice. What we would term a crime is, to many indigenous people, a disruption of the harmonious working of their society. Rather than approaching this disorder in terms of adversarial trial, proof, guilt and punishment, a circle of elders meet with the aggrieve party and perpetrator. Discussion within this circle is not so much designed to establish the factuality of what has occurred but rather it seeks a way of restoring balance. Thus the perpetrator may asked to suggest some action that would satisfy all parties. Finally, when everyone is again in a balanced relationship the decision is made public.
Indigenous Science
The Blackfoot speak of a science which includes a metaphysics of the reality in which they live, a set of relationships to the natural world, a deep understanding of their immediate environment, and a technology appropriate to their lifestyle. Such a science is common to many other indigenous peoples of the Americas and, indeed, to traditional peoples world-wide.
As the notion of "a Map in the Head" suggests, such a science is not, like our own, of an exclusive objective and global nature but is specific to a people and a place. Perhaps an analogy with cooking may help. The world's great cuisines are each associated with a particular country and region. After having lived in Italy for more than a year I am discovering that there is no such thing as "Italian" cooking but rather a way of cooking that is specific to the meats, fish, vegetables and fruits of a particular region. Even the Tuscan cooking of my particular province is subdivided. Great cooking involves a deep understanding and empathy to the nature of the materials available. It is at the same time a science and a high art that is not easily exportable.
This metaphor applies to the indigenous sciences of North America. The Haida, living on the British Columbia seaboard developed masterpieces of marine engineering: coastal and ocean going canoes, carved out of giant cedar trees. The particular shape and mass of these vessels enables the Haida to move at high speed across the ocean and to sustain long voyages without exhaustion. Another of their sciences, which is shared with other Pacific peoples such as the Maori and Hawaiians is a ways of navigating over long distances using patterns of stars, and observing the pattern of waves and the direction of the wind.
The Algonkin of the Eastern Woodlands are hunters and gathers who must venture for many days from their homes. Their technology enables them to construct a birchbark canoe, using only a curved knife and the materials of the forest, in less than a day. The vessel is strong enough to support a heavy load as it travels though white water rapids, yet light enough to be portaged from river to river.
South of the Algonkin the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois confederation are farmers. They employ a biological symbioses by planting the Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash) together; corn supplying a mechanical support and beans fixing nitrogen to supply nutrients in the earth. Yet eventually land can be farmed out and wild plants over picked. So, in traditional times, the Mohawk would, after two or three generations, abandon their villages and rebuild some distance away, allowing the forest to return to its pristine state. The complexity of their civilization and their negotiations with the energies of the earth is reflected in a language which employs a large number of names referring to relationship.
In so many cases a traditional people, before disruption by European civilization, possessed considerable knowledge of their territory and adapted technologies appropriate to the environment and way of life. For this reasons such people may appear conservative and slow to adapt. But one should remember a maxim employed by some of the indigenous people of North America. In taking a decision one does not so much consider its immediate impacts but the consequences it will have upon the seventh generation to come after. In this respect we should recall a, possibly apocryphal, story that has been related to be by a number of architects. It was found that, after many centuries, the great oak beams in an Oxford college needed replacing. Consultants considered substituting other materials until someone discovered in the college records that at the time of the founding of the college a stand of oaks had been donated with an eye of future replacement. According the story these oaks were now well matured and could be used to renovate the roof.
Conclusions
It is not the intention of this essay to argue that we should abandon the Western world-view and become Blackfoot over night. Rather it is to suggest that it would be useful for us to examine our metaphysics in the light of that of another society. In this way we may come to realize that much of what we take to be inevitable and self-evident is, to a great extent, a social conditioned perception which contains a variety of unexamined assumptions.
There is a great deal to be proud of in our science and technology yet our modern world exhibits much that we now desire to change. Radical change requires a shift in perception and a transformation of consciousness. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from Blackfoot physics as an alternative way of viewing the world.
But could "Blackfoot physics" be applied in Europe, for example? The essential issue is that, unlike in the west, there are no Blackfoot physicists, nor for that matter are their any Blackfoot artists. Rather each person is a generalist, who has come to know the wisdom of the group. This is not to say that there are not people with special healing abilities, or Keepers of Sacred Bundles, or Elders who know many of the Lodge tales, but rather that the traditional ways of the Blackfoot are available to all their people.
Blackfoot science has not fragmented as a particular system of knowledge from the other areas of life. It would be difficult, and probably impossible, to abstract something called Blackfoot Physics from the entire culture and then import in packaged form into a Western laboratory.
It is certainly true that Western science is already extracting certain knowledge from the Indigenous peoples of the world. Most of this involves information about the pharmaceutical powers of rare plants, fungi and the like. Indeed, one of the arguments for delaying the destruction of the world's rain forests and other threatened ecologies is their potential for exploitation for wonder drugs and miracle cures. But, again, this is being done in a fragmentary way. Science removes the plant from its environment and analyses it to discover active ingredients. Once they have been synthesized there is no need to preserve that particular ecology or to attempt to understand the world-view in which that plant was respected and used.
As long as Indigenous science is only employed in this fragmented way it will make little impact on the Western mind. A genuine dialogue can only develop if Western science is willing to extend its horizons and, for example, temper its abstract objectivity with what could perhaps be called an impersonal subjectivity:. Impersonal since it does not rely upon the accidents of personal biography and prejudice, yet subjective because it speaks to our deep relationship to the world, and our objective intuitions about nature.
That subjectivity is antithetical to science because it is believed to involve the distortions of highly personal biographical material is the legacy of Europe's romantic movement. In an earlier age the subject, the artist or musician for example, sought to eliminate the purely personal in their work and become the servant or conduit of what lay beyond. Indeed, personal expression was considered to be in bad taste, a falling from the ideal.
Such art sought to express the numinous, the divine archetype, pure form, call it what you will, in a direct a way as possible by eliminating the idiosyncratically personal. It was a marriage of objectivity and subjectivity, the inner and outer response to archetypes and materials. I am suggesting that something similar may be possible within Western science. The power of its objectivity should be retained while, at the same time, opening the door to an impersonal subjectivity - a more direct connection to the material world, one that is felt, experienced and becomes the object of a trained intuition.
Within the framework of such a science it may be possible to open a dialogue to other traditions and ways of thinking. Such a science could be simultaneously global, in that it seeks universal laws of nature, and local, in that it responds to particular ecologies and social needs and, at the same time, choosing alternative metaphors for its expression.
The philosopher Wittgenstein pointed out that when philosophy believes it is speaking of great truths it is really involved in a variety of language games. This is equally true of science for, no matter how abstract the mathematics, its interpretation and meaning must always be expressed in everyday language. And such language carries with it a great deal of biological and cultural baggage. Language, in which all science must be expressed, is far from being value free.
It could be said that our current way of thinking, our "European minds", has not yet caught up with the deeper meaning of the scientific discoveries of this century. Quantum theory stresses the wholeness of nature and the inadequacy for what could be termed "the Cartesian Order". That is, an order based upon notions of continuous space and time. One of the most significant movements within contemporary science is the search for this new order. In a sense it is a desire to reanimate time, a way of bringing back a truly dynamical time into the heart of physics. But to do this implies an entirely new metaphysics and a change in the way we think about the world.
Such a change is also inherent in the discoveries of chaos theory and non-linear systems. A science seeking certainty, control, predictability and closure has ended up subverting itself. The world, we have learned is far more complex than our attempts to describe it. It contains regions of infinite sensitivity and absolute unpredictability.
As I have argued in this essay, one of the great changes in the European mind was the secularization of time and the projection of nature into some world external to the essence of a human being. It seems to me that within our modern world are the seeds of something entirely different. They are the seeds of a consciousness that, in some ways, may resonate with that of the Blackfoot. It is a consciousness that seeks a deeper and more compassionate relationship with the natural world. One which may replace prediction and control by something more intelligent, more subtle and more and holistic gentle in its action. Above all what is require is a creative response to the modern age. Such a change of consciousness requires an enormous energy, for we are being called upon to dismantle old perceptions and prejudices and leave ourselves open for the operation of the creative.
References
U. Eco, "Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages", Yale U.P., 1986
Joyce Medina, "Cezanne and Modernism: The poetics of painting" SUNY, Albany 1995
F. David Peat, "Blackfoot Physics" 4th Estate, London, 1995.
F. David Peat, "Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind", Bantam Books, NY, 1987
Henri Borthoft "The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way towards a Science of Wholeness". Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY 1996
The biologist Brian Goodwin, in a private discussion, told me about a current revival in the Goethean approach. He is working with what could be called objective intuition, an way of inner knowing that, he believes, should coexist with conventional biology, each enriching the other.
In this respect I am reminded to a story from Ancient China. In a time of great political unrest the country's leaders sought the advice of the Confucius. What action should they take to restore harmony. The sage replied that they should first purify the Chinese language and restore it to its original pristine state. In our own times we have become aware of the extent to which the English language has become corrupted in the mouths of some politicians and the military. The language we use is irreducibly linked to our perception of the world.
Alan Ford and F. David Peat, "The Role of Language In Science", Foundations of Physics 8, 1233, (1988)
Western science and "European consciousness" is contrasted with that of Indigenous and traditional peoples. The metaphysics of the Blackfoot of North America and this vision of an animate world is examined. It is argued that something similar existed in Europe of the early middle ages but that the secularization of space, time and matter
paved the way for the development of science. A new science may be possible which combines the current power of abstraction and analysis with an "impersonal subjectivity".
Introduction
European consciousness dominates the world. As we move towards the next millennium will this continue to be the case? In this article I explore a radically different world-view, that of the Blackfoot of North America, and ask if their approach to society and the natural world has anything of significance to teach us. Indeed, can the study of alternative ways of thinking give rise to a creative response within own consciousness?
The initial statement of this article requires amplification and qualification. By "European consciousness" I do not mean something confined to a specific geographical location but, rather, a way of thinking and behaving that, while it did happen to develop within Europe, now has an influence across much of the globe. Its seeds were already present in the middle ages and its flowering resulted in the secularizing of time and of space, the rise of science and the proliferation of technology. It transformed a society that had previously existed on trade and barter into the major force for expansion and progress that now dominates the world.
One of the most dramatic products of the Western mind has been its particular approach to science, a discipline that, along with its associated technology, is by no means as objective, neutral and value free as we once believed. Western science expresses an entire metaphysics about the way be relate to the world, society and ourselves. Western science has its triumph yet we are now aware of the hubris connected to its success. To take one example, our technology acts somewhat like a virus which, when it enters a society, transforms its entire structure. Export a sack of seed, a bag of fertilizer or a canister of pesticide to the Third World and one transforms an entire way of life that may have survived, largely unchanged, for hundreds or even thousands of years.
An Animate World
In recent years I have often heard the boast that, for the first time in human history, we all share the same story of creation and that today children all over the world are being taught the same facts about nature. Western science has become the yardstick of truth and, measured against it, the stories and traditions that have sustained ancient cultures are dismissed as myths, superstitions and old wives tales.
But, measured on the scale of the world's civilizations, this "European mind" is comparatively young and its science a mere infant. Go back a millennium and time was experienced as a cycle of renewal. The seasons, the rhythms of daily life and the church's calendar were all in harmony. Space was united with time and its interior was as rich as the yoke of an egg. Aristotle's natural philosophy taught that each body has its natural place; medieval society was a world in which each person was in his or her proper place. Our modern notions of the rights of the individual was far less important than the well being of society as a whole.
In such a world everything was alive; rocks, rivers and trees. Nature was constantly at work and it fell to human beings to act as her midwife. Metals grew in the womb of the earth and the sacred work of the miner and blacksmith brought this labour to completion. In many ways the reality of this world was far larger than the scientific reality we inhabit today.
For a variety of reasons European consciousness began to change. Time, the theologians had argued, belongs to God but now it became secularized though the practice of usury. Banking is about buying time and setting time aside. Inevitably a secularized time led to our modern obsession with growth and progress, prediction and control.
In the twelfth century Aquinas denied that the artifex (miner, blacksmith, sculptor, etc.) is the assistant to nature for, he claimed, while the form of matter may be altered, its essence is untouched. The crafts and arts of humankind had been reduced to the superficial transformation of mere appearance.
In 1438 another influence was added to the developing European mind. With Byzantium under threat from the expansion of the Ottoman empire its Emperor, John Paleologus, along with seven hundred advisors, traveled to Florence in an attempt to gain Pope Eugenius IV's military support. In exchange he offered a resolution of the theological differences between the two churches. The result was that for a time Florence was filled with neo-Platonism and its influence, at the height of the Renaissance, cannot be underestimated.
In the thirteenth century William of Auvergne could write "When you consider the order and magnificence of the universe... you will find it like a most beautiful canticle.. and the wonders and varieties of its creatures to be a symphony of joy and harmony to the very essence. ... The goodness of a substance, and its beauty are the same thing". Likewise Abbot Sugar supervised the rebuilding of the abbey church of St. Denis in order to make the divine manifest within bronze, stone, stained glass, precious metals and jewels.1 Now, in the Renaissance, artists were directing their gaze away from the natural world into one of ideal forms.
Within this melting pot of ideas matter and spirit became fragmented one from the other and a participatory reality was transformed into scientific objectivity. For me the exemplar of this change of consciousness is linear perspective which developed in the earlier part of the Renaissance. Siena is referred to by Italians and a feminine city. Within the paintings of its school time and space are united. The various events of a saint's life are presented in total, like a superimposed comic strip; and while depth in space is certainly indicated it is still possible to see an object from a multiplicity of viewpoints. But, as the Renaissance developed in the more masculine city of Florence, time was abstracted from space and painting was left with the single viewpoint, a frozen world seen though a window. With the device of perspective one longer enters into to painting but views it with an objective eye. Mirroring the metaphysics of the period, nature has been projected away from us and the world is experienced as something external.
The mathematical basis of perspective is called Projective Geometry. This term says it all. One no longer engages directly with an object in its natural, essential form, as something that can be explored and touched, instead it becomes a surface that must be distorted to fit the global logic of mathematical perspective. The rich individualistic inscape of the natural world had given way to a uniform perspectival grid of logic and reason.
How well perspective parallels a science in which nature obeys laws that are, in some metaphysical sense, external to matter's essence. As Bacon argued, these laws are to be discovered by placing nature on the rack, another sort of grid, and tormenting her to reveal her secrets. Descartes and Newton can not be held responsible for our modern world, the seeds of its consciousness were sown long before.
It is only as we reach our own modern age that the perspectival vision of science has been shaken by, for example, quantum theory. Yet artists are always the antennae of society and the foreshocks could be felt when Cezanne restored touch to painting and, in the process, activated time and multiplicity of viewpoint. Never interested in projection Cezanne entered directly into nature, and nature entered into him. "The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me." he wrote, "I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting....I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness." 2
The Modern Mind
The European mind, along with its material and conceptual products, exerts a powerful seductive force on all of us. It would be extremely difficult to live without the products of such a consciousness, nor would most of us we wish to - at least not in an entirely radical fashion. Many have already written of the shadow side to this power; intensive farming, high technology medicine, rapid communications and so on. My own interest in somewhat different. It is to ask if an earlier richness together with a sense of harmony and a balance can be restored to the European mind. It is to ask if an ethical and moral dimension can be added to our science and technology and if supposed objectivity can be tempered through participation.
Is our world destined towards increasing uniformity or can we accommodate alternative view points and metaphysics, each enriching the other? The arts have always been eager for such enrichment, Debussy drew upon Balanese music, Picasso on African masks, and a director like Peter Brooke has explored the world's theatrical traditions. When used in a creative and respectful way these are not acts of cultural appropriation but of cultural renewal. Is something similar possible within our science?
At this point is could be objected that, unlike the arts, science is objective and, from a cultural point of view, value-free. It is for this reason, it is said, that Indigenous and marginalized cultures cannot really co-exist beside industrialized nations and are doomed to extinction. I don't believe this is true. Traditional cultures have enormous power and may, in the end, act to transform or renew our own technological society.
An Alternative Vision
My test case is that of the Blackfoot people, a nation who once occupied an area of the North American plains east of the Rocky Mountains but now today live in reserves in Montana, U.S. and reservations in Alberta, Canada. By tradition they were hunters of buffalo; traveling with their tepis in the summer and wintering along river banks. Their language is a member of the great Algonquin family which runs from the Cheyenne in the central US plains though the Blackfoot and up into northern Canada with Ojibwaj and Cree finally into the Naskapi of Labrador.
My encounter, as a representative of Western science, with the Blackfoot was neither systematic nor anthropological3. It was more an ongoing friendship and a series of discussions about our respective world-views. In turn this led to a number of circles in which Western scientists sat with Blackfoot and other Native American Elders.
The Blackfoot have weathered the extermination of the buffalo and the appropriation of their lands. Anyone past middle age would have experienced the residential schools in which children's heads were shaved, clothing burned, and a prohibition placed upon speaking their mother tongue or praying according to their tradition - physical and sexual abuse was also far from uncommon. Today the Blackfoot have exchanged their horses for cars and pickup trucks. They live in houses instead of tepis and job hunting has replaced the buffalo jump and buffalo wallow. Surrounded by the pressures of North American society they are faced with drug and alcohol problems yet what struck me most during my visits is the way that the old is able to coexist with the new so that, for many Blackfoot, their traditional vision and metaphysics survives untarnished. Clearly the Blackfoot have the extraordinary ability to coexist within two worlds. Yet they taught me that we all possess a similar capacity and buried deep within the European mind lies something that may be able to temper the momentum of our present path. We are all indigenous people, in the sense that each of us is the carrier of a sacred relationship to the natural world and has access to a wider vision of a reality long denied.
Blackfoot Reality
What is the nature of Blackfoot reality? Certainly it is far wider than our own, yet firmly based within the natural world of vibrant, living things. Once our European world saw nature in a similar way, a vision still present in poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins who perceived the immanence and inscape of the world. Nevertheless our consciousness has narrowed to the extent that matter is separated from spirit and we seek our reality in an imagined elsewhere of abstractions, Platonic realms, mathematical elegance, and physical laws.
The Blackfoot know of no such fragmentation. Not only do they speak with rocks and trees, they are also able to converse with that which remains invisible to us, a world of what could be variously called spirits, or powers, or simply energies. But these forces are not the occupants of a mystical or abstract domain, they remain an essential aspect of the natural, material world. It is not so much that the Blackfoot live in an extended reality but that our own Western vision had become excessively myopic.
This wider reality embraces flux, movement, change and transformation. The creator of the land, Napi (the Old Man), is also its trickster, one who is constantly changing form, traversing boundaries and upsetting preconceptions. For example, what the West takes as the aberration of multiple personality becomes the acceptance that an individual is not a fixed thing but fluid, a being whose multiplicity is reflected in the way a person's name keeps transforming during their life.
How is one to maintain orientation in a universe in which everything is caught up in the river of transformation. How can anything be preserved from change? The answer lies in participation within the flux by means of acts of renewal. Renewal requires an act of sacrifice and it is these sacrifices, these actions of participation, performed each morning when the sun rises, each year at the Sun Dance, which help to maintain the great circle of renewal. Thanks to these acts of renewal time, within the flux, turns on its axis. Seasons follow seasons. Circling time is always the same, yet always different, always renewed.
Acts of renewal reflect the compacts formed in ancient times; negotiated relationships between the ancestors and the energies, or spirits, or keepers of the land. No one believes that a pipe ceremony actually causes the sun to rise. Rather, by renewing their relationships to the dynamics of nature the Blackfoot maintain a harmonious role within the cosmos. Within a balanced cosmos the sun will rise and the seasons follow in their proper harmony.
Personal sacrifice, responsibility, ceremonies and acts of renewal therefore have nothing to do with the world of mechanical causality but are more to do with a relationship to a living cosmos. Although it does not come from the Blackfoot, the story of the rainmaker well illustrates this point:- A rainmaker was called to a region experiencing drought. He arrived and immediately went into the hut provided for him only to emerge several days later as it began to rain. When he was asked how he had made the rain he replied that he had not caused the rain to fall. Rather, when he arrived in the village he discovered everything to be in disharmony. He therefore retired to his hut in order to bring himself back into balance. Once balance had been restored then nature returned to harmony and the rain fell as it naturally should.
Carl Jung chose to term this synchronicity, his "acausal connecting principle".4 It was present earlier in the West in the form of Alchemy in which external material workings and internal transformations mirror each other. This constant movement towards balance and harmony within the flux is the essence of the Blackfoot world.
The Map in the Head
An expression of the Blackfoot's relationship to a reality of rocks, trees, animals and energies is expressed within what many Native Americans call "a map in the head". This map is a way of knowing where one is in relationship to the land, its history, society and all the living beings of nature. For the Blackfoot this map begins with Napi's body, which is traced out in the landscape in the form of rivers, buttes, hills and valleys. It is also the track left by Napi as he walked across his land. The Map in the Head is songs sung and the stories told around the fire at night. It is the relationship of the Blackfoot people to their world.
The map in the head is a form of knowledge, but knowledge, for the Blackfoot, is no mere collection of facts but something that one grows towards. Knowledge, like a song, is a living being; a being with which one can come into relationship. Coming to knowing is an active dialogue with nature; with the rocks, plants and animals. As one Blackfoot put it, "the plants and animals are our microscopes and laboratories."
Knowledge is relationship and relationship brings with it responsibilities and obligations. Thus it has been put to me that when Western science performs its experiments it is actually conversing with nature and, in this process, telling nature about ourselves. Are we willing to take responsibility for what we say? Each action in the laboratory must be balanced by its reaction somewhere else in the world. When we create order in one place we give birth to disorder in another.
Such a point of view should not be entirely alien to our European minds. It was a European, Goethe, who suggested an alternative to the Newtonian method which he saw as a way of gaining knowledge by placing nature in highly artificial situations. By contrast, Goethe sought "an instant worth a thousand, bearing all within itself." 5 His method involved, for example, coming into relationship with plants and contemplating their inner nature. In this fashion Goethe sought to understand the inner nature and meaning of plants.6
While Newtonian science studies particular instances in the hope of generalizing into a law of nature - unity within multiplicity - Goethe studied the multiplicity that arises out of unity. Goethe's notion of the archetype of all plants resonates with Indigenous concept of the Guardians or Keepers of plants and animals. By carrying a piece of bone a Blackfoot comes into direct contact with the Guardian or Keeper of the buffalo.
Healing
Plants have the power to heal. For the Blackfoot the nature of their action cannot be reduced simply to chemical substances or molecules. Healing involves a relationship to the entire plant and this includes its power, energy, spirit, or in Goethe's terms, its archetype.
One can perhaps understand this by analogy to sacred sculpture of, for example, India. Within a ceremony these objects act as windows into the world of the sacred yet are at the same time no more than stone, clay and pigment. Their action is that of a diagram, or map, of the pattern of the sacred. One comes into relationship with the numinous though the catalytic action of the icon. In a similar way the plant and its associated chemicals open into a larger world of energies and healing powers.
There is a related metaphor in Western science. A molecule is not so much an object but a dynamical pattern. At the quantum level it is a pattern of energies which extend into the ground state of the entire cosmos. Absorbed into the body this dynamic energy pattern provokes a range of transformations of the body's biochemical activities. Of course, the analogy can only go so long as Western science continues to fragment matter from ethical values, consciousness and spirit.
It goes without saying that the relationship to the plant world extends into ecological practice, and here I am drawing not upon the Blackfoot but my conversations with the Mohawk. When one hunts for a medicine plant, or for that matter for an animal, one does not pick the first or second one comes upon but always the third. A prayer is first offered that the plant will sacrifice itself and after it has been picked an offering is made to the earth. Returning home the plant is treated in a respectful manner for one is not only dealing with the particular but the universal, the Guardian of the plant, the archetype. In the action of healing with the plant energy may be exchanged but within such a metaphysics whatever is taken must, in some way, be paid back.
Language
The Blackfoot I have met speak of their traditional ways as a science.7Of particular significance is the way this science is enfolded within their language. The language contains the map of the land, the relationships to the energies and spirits of all living thing - the rocks, the trees, the plants, birds, fish and animals. The flux in which they live is perfectly expressed in what could be termed their "process language". European languages have a heavy reliance upon nouns and lend themselves so well to a type of thinking that deals in categories and Aristotelian logic.8 Our physical reality is that of objects in interaction with one another - nouns linked by verbs. This thinking also extends into the abstract and psychological spheres when the world of our experiences, relationships and feelings becomes a collection of objects of thought to be manipulated, generalized, abstracted and acted upon. How eagerly do we build categories and concepts, how literally do we take our "language games", how easily do we become trapped in empty philosophical argument.
While other problems may certainly arise this sort of trap is not present within a language where the verb takes centre stage. Within Blackfoot all is movement, process and transformation. Nouns as objects emerge in a secondary way though the modification of verbs. To them the English language is a straight-jacket which forces their minds into a world of objects, categories and restrictive logic.
Take, as an example, healing. To the Western mind this is a transitive business in which the doctor (noun) acts upon the patient (another noun) to bring about a some change of state. For the Blackfoot healing is a process. This process is itself the primary reality, rather than that of patient and doctor. Healing often involves singing. In this case in speaking about healing the process of the singing is the focus of the linguistic act. Rather than singing being performed by someone, the pure act of singing is taking place - singing is singing itself. It is out of this singing that healing unfolds to reveal the previously sick person.
Again an analogy from contemporary science may help. According to classical physics nature consists of objects in interaction with one another. Observation is an objective business that reveals the world for what it is. Quantum theory, by contrast, stresses that observation is participation and within any act of observation the observer and observed are united in a holistic and unanalyzable way. Observation is a process within which it is no longer possible to speak of the independent existence, or properties of, the observer and observed.
As Neils Bohr pointed out the paradoxes and difficulties of quantum theory arise out of our need to employ ordinary language in our discourse. But this language, be it English or Danish, historically developed in a particular way and within a world of classical objects. We are suspended in this language so that we do not know which way is up and which is down. By contrast, the Blackfoot live in a world that is much closer to that quantum domain, a world of flux, transformation and essential relationship far from that of absolute categories, fixed objects and rigid Aristotelian dualities. Their language perfectly reflects this world.
Harmony and Balance
Knowledge is not partitioned in a holistic world and Blackfoot science is not confined simply to the material. It embraces society and good government. Its norm is balance and harmony. Society is not an artifact built by individuals with rights and freedoms, rather it is a process of renewal, a coherent whole out of which emerge persons with responsibilities and obligations. An individual exists in respect to his or her relationships with society and nature.
Take as an example, Blackfoot justice. What we would term a crime is, to many indigenous people, a disruption of the harmonious working of their society. Rather than approaching this disorder in terms of adversarial trial, proof, guilt and punishment, a circle of elders meet with the aggrieve party and perpetrator. Discussion within this circle is not so much designed to establish the factuality of what has occurred but rather it seeks a way of restoring balance. Thus the perpetrator may asked to suggest some action that would satisfy all parties. Finally, when everyone is again in a balanced relationship the decision is made public.
Indigenous Science
The Blackfoot speak of a science which includes a metaphysics of the reality in which they live, a set of relationships to the natural world, a deep understanding of their immediate environment, and a technology appropriate to their lifestyle. Such a science is common to many other indigenous peoples of the Americas and, indeed, to traditional peoples world-wide.
As the notion of "a Map in the Head" suggests, such a science is not, like our own, of an exclusive objective and global nature but is specific to a people and a place. Perhaps an analogy with cooking may help. The world's great cuisines are each associated with a particular country and region. After having lived in Italy for more than a year I am discovering that there is no such thing as "Italian" cooking but rather a way of cooking that is specific to the meats, fish, vegetables and fruits of a particular region. Even the Tuscan cooking of my particular province is subdivided. Great cooking involves a deep understanding and empathy to the nature of the materials available. It is at the same time a science and a high art that is not easily exportable.
This metaphor applies to the indigenous sciences of North America. The Haida, living on the British Columbia seaboard developed masterpieces of marine engineering: coastal and ocean going canoes, carved out of giant cedar trees. The particular shape and mass of these vessels enables the Haida to move at high speed across the ocean and to sustain long voyages without exhaustion. Another of their sciences, which is shared with other Pacific peoples such as the Maori and Hawaiians is a ways of navigating over long distances using patterns of stars, and observing the pattern of waves and the direction of the wind.
The Algonkin of the Eastern Woodlands are hunters and gathers who must venture for many days from their homes. Their technology enables them to construct a birchbark canoe, using only a curved knife and the materials of the forest, in less than a day. The vessel is strong enough to support a heavy load as it travels though white water rapids, yet light enough to be portaged from river to river.
South of the Algonkin the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois confederation are farmers. They employ a biological symbioses by planting the Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash) together; corn supplying a mechanical support and beans fixing nitrogen to supply nutrients in the earth. Yet eventually land can be farmed out and wild plants over picked. So, in traditional times, the Mohawk would, after two or three generations, abandon their villages and rebuild some distance away, allowing the forest to return to its pristine state. The complexity of their civilization and their negotiations with the energies of the earth is reflected in a language which employs a large number of names referring to relationship.
In so many cases a traditional people, before disruption by European civilization, possessed considerable knowledge of their territory and adapted technologies appropriate to the environment and way of life. For this reasons such people may appear conservative and slow to adapt. But one should remember a maxim employed by some of the indigenous people of North America. In taking a decision one does not so much consider its immediate impacts but the consequences it will have upon the seventh generation to come after. In this respect we should recall a, possibly apocryphal, story that has been related to be by a number of architects. It was found that, after many centuries, the great oak beams in an Oxford college needed replacing. Consultants considered substituting other materials until someone discovered in the college records that at the time of the founding of the college a stand of oaks had been donated with an eye of future replacement. According the story these oaks were now well matured and could be used to renovate the roof.
Conclusions
It is not the intention of this essay to argue that we should abandon the Western world-view and become Blackfoot over night. Rather it is to suggest that it would be useful for us to examine our metaphysics in the light of that of another society. In this way we may come to realize that much of what we take to be inevitable and self-evident is, to a great extent, a social conditioned perception which contains a variety of unexamined assumptions.
There is a great deal to be proud of in our science and technology yet our modern world exhibits much that we now desire to change. Radical change requires a shift in perception and a transformation of consciousness. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from Blackfoot physics as an alternative way of viewing the world.
But could "Blackfoot physics" be applied in Europe, for example? The essential issue is that, unlike in the west, there are no Blackfoot physicists, nor for that matter are their any Blackfoot artists. Rather each person is a generalist, who has come to know the wisdom of the group. This is not to say that there are not people with special healing abilities, or Keepers of Sacred Bundles, or Elders who know many of the Lodge tales, but rather that the traditional ways of the Blackfoot are available to all their people.
Blackfoot science has not fragmented as a particular system of knowledge from the other areas of life. It would be difficult, and probably impossible, to abstract something called Blackfoot Physics from the entire culture and then import in packaged form into a Western laboratory.
It is certainly true that Western science is already extracting certain knowledge from the Indigenous peoples of the world. Most of this involves information about the pharmaceutical powers of rare plants, fungi and the like. Indeed, one of the arguments for delaying the destruction of the world's rain forests and other threatened ecologies is their potential for exploitation for wonder drugs and miracle cures. But, again, this is being done in a fragmentary way. Science removes the plant from its environment and analyses it to discover active ingredients. Once they have been synthesized there is no need to preserve that particular ecology or to attempt to understand the world-view in which that plant was respected and used.
As long as Indigenous science is only employed in this fragmented way it will make little impact on the Western mind. A genuine dialogue can only develop if Western science is willing to extend its horizons and, for example, temper its abstract objectivity with what could perhaps be called an impersonal subjectivity:. Impersonal since it does not rely upon the accidents of personal biography and prejudice, yet subjective because it speaks to our deep relationship to the world, and our objective intuitions about nature.
That subjectivity is antithetical to science because it is believed to involve the distortions of highly personal biographical material is the legacy of Europe's romantic movement. In an earlier age the subject, the artist or musician for example, sought to eliminate the purely personal in their work and become the servant or conduit of what lay beyond. Indeed, personal expression was considered to be in bad taste, a falling from the ideal.
Such art sought to express the numinous, the divine archetype, pure form, call it what you will, in a direct a way as possible by eliminating the idiosyncratically personal. It was a marriage of objectivity and subjectivity, the inner and outer response to archetypes and materials. I am suggesting that something similar may be possible within Western science. The power of its objectivity should be retained while, at the same time, opening the door to an impersonal subjectivity - a more direct connection to the material world, one that is felt, experienced and becomes the object of a trained intuition.
Within the framework of such a science it may be possible to open a dialogue to other traditions and ways of thinking. Such a science could be simultaneously global, in that it seeks universal laws of nature, and local, in that it responds to particular ecologies and social needs and, at the same time, choosing alternative metaphors for its expression.
The philosopher Wittgenstein pointed out that when philosophy believes it is speaking of great truths it is really involved in a variety of language games. This is equally true of science for, no matter how abstract the mathematics, its interpretation and meaning must always be expressed in everyday language. And such language carries with it a great deal of biological and cultural baggage. Language, in which all science must be expressed, is far from being value free.
It could be said that our current way of thinking, our "European minds", has not yet caught up with the deeper meaning of the scientific discoveries of this century. Quantum theory stresses the wholeness of nature and the inadequacy for what could be termed "the Cartesian Order". That is, an order based upon notions of continuous space and time. One of the most significant movements within contemporary science is the search for this new order. In a sense it is a desire to reanimate time, a way of bringing back a truly dynamical time into the heart of physics. But to do this implies an entirely new metaphysics and a change in the way we think about the world.
Such a change is also inherent in the discoveries of chaos theory and non-linear systems. A science seeking certainty, control, predictability and closure has ended up subverting itself. The world, we have learned is far more complex than our attempts to describe it. It contains regions of infinite sensitivity and absolute unpredictability.
As I have argued in this essay, one of the great changes in the European mind was the secularization of time and the projection of nature into some world external to the essence of a human being. It seems to me that within our modern world are the seeds of something entirely different. They are the seeds of a consciousness that, in some ways, may resonate with that of the Blackfoot. It is a consciousness that seeks a deeper and more compassionate relationship with the natural world. One which may replace prediction and control by something more intelligent, more subtle and more and holistic gentle in its action. Above all what is require is a creative response to the modern age. Such a change of consciousness requires an enormous energy, for we are being called upon to dismantle old perceptions and prejudices and leave ourselves open for the operation of the creative.
References
U. Eco, "Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages", Yale U.P., 1986
Joyce Medina, "Cezanne and Modernism: The poetics of painting" SUNY, Albany 1995
F. David Peat, "Blackfoot Physics" 4th Estate, London, 1995.
F. David Peat, "Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind", Bantam Books, NY, 1987
Henri Borthoft "The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way towards a Science of Wholeness". Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY 1996
The biologist Brian Goodwin, in a private discussion, told me about a current revival in the Goethean approach. He is working with what could be called objective intuition, an way of inner knowing that, he believes, should coexist with conventional biology, each enriching the other.
In this respect I am reminded to a story from Ancient China. In a time of great political unrest the country's leaders sought the advice of the Confucius. What action should they take to restore harmony. The sage replied that they should first purify the Chinese language and restore it to its original pristine state. In our own times we have become aware of the extent to which the English language has become corrupted in the mouths of some politicians and the military. The language we use is irreducibly linked to our perception of the world.
Alan Ford and F. David Peat, "The Role of Language In Science", Foundations of Physics 8, 1233, (1988)
Monday, July 30, 2012
A Cree Legend - "Warriors of the Rainbow"
- There would come a time when the Earth would be ravaged of it's resources, the sea blackened, the streams poisoned, the deer dropping dead in their tracks.— with Atarangi Muru and 40 others.
Just before it was too late, the Indian would regain his spirit and te...ach the white man reverence for the Earth, banding together with him to become Warriors of the Rainbow.
There was an old lady, from the Cree tribe, named "Eyes of Fire", who prophesied that one day, because of the white mans' or Yo-ne-gis' greed, there would come a time, when the fish would die in the streams, the birds would fall from the air, the waters would be blackened, and the trees would no longer be, mankind as we would know it would all but cease to exist.
There would come a time when the "keepers of the legend, stories, culture rituals, and myths, and all the Ancient Tribal Customs" would be needed to restore us to health. They would be mankind's' key to survival, they were the "Warriors of the Rainbow". There would come a day of awakening when all the peoples of all the tribes would form a New World of Justice, Peace, Freedom and recognition of the Great Spirit.
The "Warriors of the Rainbow" would spread these messages and teach all peoples of the Earth or "Elohi". They would teach them how to live the "Way of the Great Spirit".
They would tell them of how the world today has turned away from the Great Spirit and that is why our Earth is "Sick".
The "Warriors of the Rainbow" would show the peoples that this "Ancient Being" (the Great Spirit), is full of love and understanding, and teach them how to make the Earth (Elohi) beautiful again. These Warriors would give the people principles or rules to follow to make their path right with the world. These principles would be those of the Ancient Tribes. The Warriors of the Rainbow would teach the people of the ancient practices of Unity, Love and Understanding.
They would teach of Harmony among people in all four comers of the Earth.
Like the Ancient Tribes, they would teach the peoples how to pray to the Great Spirit with love that flows like the beautiful mountain stream, and flows along the path to the ocean of life. Once again, they would be able to feel joy in solitude and in councils. They would be free of petty jealousies and love all mankind as their brothers, regardless of color, race or religion. They would feel happiness enter their hearts, and become as one with the entire human race.
Their hearts would be pure and radiate warmth, understanding and respect for all mankind, Nature, and the Great Spirit. They would once again fill their minds, hearts, souls, and deeds with the purest of thoughts. They would seek the beauty of the Master of Life - the Great Spirit! They would find strength and beauty in prayer and the solitudes of life.
Their children would once again be able to run free and enjoy the treasures of Nature and Mother Earth. Free from the fears of toxins and destruction, wrought by the Yo-ne-gi and his practices of greed. The rivers would again run clear, the forests be abundant and beautiful, the animals and birds would be replenished. The powers of the plants and animals would again be respected and conservation of all that is beautiful would become a way of life.
The poor, sick and needy would be cared for by their brothers and sisters of the Earth. These practices would again become a part of their daily lives.
The leaders of the people would be chosen in the old way - not by their political party, or who could speak the loudest, boast the most, or by name calling or mud slinging, but by those whose actions spoke the loudest. Those who demonstrated their love, wisdom, and courage and those who showed that they could and did work for the good of all, would be chosen as the leaders or Chiefs.
They would be chosen by their "quality" and not the amount of money they had obtained. Like the thoughtful and devoted "Ancient Chiefs", they would understand the people with love, and see that their young were educated with the love and wisdom of their surroundings. They would show them that miracles can be accomplished to heal this world of its ills, and restore it to health and beauty.
The tasks of these "Warriors of the Rainbow" are many and great. There will be terrifying mountains of ignorance to conquer and they shall find prejudice and hatred. They must be dedicated, unwavering in their strength, and strong of heart. They will find willing hearts and minds that will follow them on this road of returning "Mother Earth" to beauty and plenty - once more.
The day will come, it is not far away. The day that we shall see how we owe our very existence to the people of all tribes that have maintained their culture and heritage. Those that have kept the rituals, stories, legends, and myths alive. It will be with this knowledge, the knowledge that they have preserved, that we shall once again return to "harmony" with Nature, Mother Earth, and mankind. It will be with this knowledge that we shall find our "Key to our Survival".
This is the story of the "Warriors of the Rainbow"See More
Sunday, July 29, 2012
"Heart Song" CD by Elk Whistle Bill Neal Reviewed with Year 2000 Biography
by Bill Neal
[Ed. note: This was written in the year 2000 - a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.Some information such as the email address given in the article are no longer valid. - BN 7/29/2012]
White Path Music offers "Heart Song" by Elk Whistle. With solo Native American
flute music and sounds of the natural world to which the instrument is so
closely akin (birds, wind, crickets, wolf calls), "Heart Song" is a powerful CD
with strong reviews: "Heart Song" by Bill Neal (Elk Whistle) is an excellent
example of traditionally-rooted Native American flute music performed by an
artist of exceptional technical ability, inspired by the power of
spirit."
"Heart Song" was released nationally in June 1998, with cover
art by acclaimed Oklahoma Cherokee artist Dorothy Sullivan and liner notes by
teacher and guide Billie Nave Masters, Oklahoma Cherokee and Sac & Fox.
Elk Whistle (Mah-na-che-a-shun), also known as Bill Neal, is a performer
on the Native American flute, a recording artist, storyteller, teacher, and the
director of the Elk Whistle Ensemble. Neal, whose native ancestry is Cherokee,
plays the plains-style cedar flutes of the Lakota, Kiowa, and Comanche Nations
and the river cane flutes of the Choctaw and the Cherokee. He was honored in a
naming ceremony when the Tongva tribe (called "Gabrieleno" by the Spanish), the
original people of the Greater Los Angeles area, gave him the name
"Mah-na-che-a-shun". In the Tongva language, "Mah-na-che-a-shun" means "He Sings
With His Heart". He was also honored to sing for a number of years with the Red
Spirit Singers, a northern traditional powwow drum group which was based in
Southern California before moving back to Oklahoma.
Elk Whistle first heard his songs in the forest and mountains listening to the songs of the birds,
the whispers of the wind in the trees and across the land, and the voices of the
many-legged. The traditional songs of the drum gave him the phrasing and
vocalizations of his flute songs. He has no formal music training, he plays only
the songs he hears from within. He has been spoken of as the 'Keeper of Songs'.
He considers the music a gift given him by Creator, the Great Mystery, to
strengthen his connection and those of his listeners with Mother Earth/Father
Sky and the Universal Circle of Life.
For 22 years Bill Neal did professional environmental work, including 10 years with the U.S. Forest
Service, teaching forestry and natural resource management at Mt. San Antonio
College, and consulting in alternative energy and urban forestry, waste
management, and composting and recycling. He has worked with a variety of youth
programs. He co-led survival therapy expeditions for a program based in Northern
California that took incarcerated youth into the wilderness for 30-day treks. He
has been a field naturalist for an outdoor science education program for the
Orange County Unified School District in Southern California. He has fulfilled
leadership, supervisory and teaching roles for the California Conservation
Corps, the Young Adult Conservation Corps, and the CETA Youth Program.
All of this work came out of his realization as a young man of the
interconnectedness of all life and his conviction that the two-leggeds must
change their relationship to the natural world to which they belong.
Today Elk Whistle/Bill Neal performs about 300 times per year offering
concerts and educational programs to major performing arts venues. As a solo
performer and as director of the Elk Whistle Ensemble, he has been featured at
major theaters such as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the John Anson Ford
Amphitheater in Los Angeles, the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa
Mesa, the Martha Knoeble Dance Theater at California State University at Long
Beach, and KCET Public Television in Los Angeles. Elk Whistle has been a
featured performer in successive years at music festivals such as the Millpond
Traditional Music Festival in Bishop, California, and the Idyllwild Native
American Cowboy Jubilee in Idyllwild.
Elk Whistle has returned year after year to perform at museums such as the Autry Museum of Western Heritage
and the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Man in San Diego, at
county fairs such as the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa and the National
Orange Show in San Bernardino, and at festivals such as the Swallows Festival at
the San Juan Capistrano Mission.
Since 1997 the Elk Whistle programs have been offered to schoolchildren through the "From the Center" program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Since 1998 the Elk Whistle family program
has been offered to parents and their children at the Los Angeles County Public
Libraries.
The Elk Whistle Ensemble is listed by the Public Corporation for the Arts as one of the 100 cultural organizations in the City of Long Beach in their "Arts 100" program and in September 2000, Elk Whistle began performing
in a Laguna Playhouse production of "The Sign of the Beaver" from the book of
the same name by Elizabeth George Speare that has toured to many of the schools
in Southern California.
Elk Whistle has been a special guest performer at innumerable Native American gatherings such as the Sherman Indian High School Powwow in Riverside, California, the UCLA Powwow, and the Southern California
Indian Center Powwow in Costa Mesa, the largest Native American gathering in
California. He is particularly pleased to participate in the gatherings of the
California Indian people who are still custodians of their ancestral land.
He performs in correctional facilities where he shares the medicine of
the flute with his incarcerated Native American brothers. He is frequently
called upon to participate in weddings and other important private family
ceremonies. He offers his time and his talent to support environmental, social
and economic justice and programs that combat racism, violence, and elder and
substance abuse.
Since 1994, Bill Neal has been featured on a number of American Indian television programs in the Southern California area as well as on the "California's Gold" program with host Huell Houser, shown on all the
public television stations and in all the schools in California. He has
performed in a national satellite television broadcast to benefit the American
Red Cross Earthquake Relief Fund after the Northridge, California, earthquake in
1994. He provided original compositions for the soundtracks of exhibits on
Native American basketry and weaving for the Museum of Man in San Diego in 1995.
The Elk Whistle music is currently broadcast on a variety of radio stations such
as 90.7 KPFK-FM public radio in Los Angeles and WMPG in Portland, Maine, radio
stations in Portugal and Russia, and the World Music Radio Society that
broadcasts on the internet.
Most recently, Elk Whistle was very pleased with the opportunity and the honor to have participated in the 1999 World
Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles with the Dalai Lama. He has been
featured in the documentary film produced from this event which has aired
repeatedly on Los Angeles PBS television. He was included in a two-CD
compilation of music from the festival. (Both the documentary video and the
two-CD set are available to the public. Sales benefit the Tibetan refugees who
cannot go home to their sacred mountains. Contact Bill Neal at
elkwhistle@whitepathmusic.com to order.)
The first recording by Elk Whistle, titled "Songs from Turtle Island", was made live under the oak trees
using the power of the Sun. It is one of the very first solar-powered recordings
available anywhere. His third recording, "Beyond Time" has been completed in
collaboration with Elk Thunder (a student of Rolling Thunder who was a
well-known and well-respected native doctor).
Others have said: "A few months ago I was fortunate enough to catch Bill "Elk Whistle" Neal at a
performance.......Bill was utterly amazing, both as a person with a full heart
and a story to tell, and as a Native American flutist. One characteristic of his
playing technique is the most incredible breath control. His bending and shaping
of notes and vibrato are truly beautiful."
"I usually go to the Orange County Fair most every year, but this was the first year that I heard
you.......I greatly enjoyed your performance. Even on stage, you come across as
a person of high character, with a deep respect for your origin and ancestry.
Since then, I have heard the voice of "Grandfather Stone" talking many
times......."
Awards
As Director of the Elk Whistle Ensemble, Bill Neal was nominated March, 1996, by the Greater Los
Angeles Dance Resource Center for the Lester Horton Dance Award for "Outstanding
Achievement in Staging Traditional Dance" for a performance at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater.
Memberships
American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
International Native American Flute Association
South Coast Storytellers Guild
California Presenters
[Ed. note: This was written in the year 2000 - a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.Some information such as the email address given in the article, memberships, etc., are no longer valid. - BN 7/29/2012]
flute music and sounds of the natural world to which the instrument is so
closely akin (birds, wind, crickets, wolf calls), "Heart Song" is a powerful CD
with strong reviews: "Heart Song" by Bill Neal (Elk Whistle) is an excellent
example of traditionally-rooted Native American flute music performed by an
artist of exceptional technical ability, inspired by the power of
spirit."
"Heart Song" was released nationally in June 1998, with cover
art by acclaimed Oklahoma Cherokee artist Dorothy Sullivan and liner notes by
teacher and guide Billie Nave Masters, Oklahoma Cherokee and Sac & Fox.
Elk Whistle (Mah-na-che-a-shun), also known as Bill Neal, is a performer
on the Native American flute, a recording artist, storyteller, teacher, and the
director of the Elk Whistle Ensemble. Neal, whose native ancestry is Cherokee,
plays the plains-style cedar flutes of the Lakota, Kiowa, and Comanche Nations
and the river cane flutes of the Choctaw and the Cherokee. He was honored in a
naming ceremony when the Tongva tribe (called "Gabrieleno" by the Spanish), the
original people of the Greater Los Angeles area, gave him the name
"Mah-na-che-a-shun". In the Tongva language, "Mah-na-che-a-shun" means "He Sings
With His Heart". He was also honored to sing for a number of years with the Red
Spirit Singers, a northern traditional powwow drum group which was based in
Southern California before moving back to Oklahoma.
Elk Whistle first heard his songs in the forest and mountains listening to the songs of the birds,
the whispers of the wind in the trees and across the land, and the voices of the
many-legged. The traditional songs of the drum gave him the phrasing and
vocalizations of his flute songs. He has no formal music training, he plays only
the songs he hears from within. He has been spoken of as the 'Keeper of Songs'.
He considers the music a gift given him by Creator, the Great Mystery, to
strengthen his connection and those of his listeners with Mother Earth/Father
Sky and the Universal Circle of Life.
For 22 years Bill Neal did professional environmental work, including 10 years with the U.S. Forest
Service, teaching forestry and natural resource management at Mt. San Antonio
College, and consulting in alternative energy and urban forestry, waste
management, and composting and recycling. He has worked with a variety of youth
programs. He co-led survival therapy expeditions for a program based in Northern
California that took incarcerated youth into the wilderness for 30-day treks. He
has been a field naturalist for an outdoor science education program for the
Orange County Unified School District in Southern California. He has fulfilled
leadership, supervisory and teaching roles for the California Conservation
Corps, the Young Adult Conservation Corps, and the CETA Youth Program.
All of this work came out of his realization as a young man of the
interconnectedness of all life and his conviction that the two-leggeds must
change their relationship to the natural world to which they belong.
Today Elk Whistle/Bill Neal performs about 300 times per year offering
concerts and educational programs to major performing arts venues. As a solo
performer and as director of the Elk Whistle Ensemble, he has been featured at
major theaters such as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the John Anson Ford
Amphitheater in Los Angeles, the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa
Mesa, the Martha Knoeble Dance Theater at California State University at Long
Beach, and KCET Public Television in Los Angeles. Elk Whistle has been a
featured performer in successive years at music festivals such as the Millpond
Traditional Music Festival in Bishop, California, and the Idyllwild Native
American Cowboy Jubilee in Idyllwild.
Elk Whistle has returned year after year to perform at museums such as the Autry Museum of Western Heritage
and the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Man in San Diego, at
county fairs such as the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa and the National
Orange Show in San Bernardino, and at festivals such as the Swallows Festival at
the San Juan Capistrano Mission.
Since 1997 the Elk Whistle programs have been offered to schoolchildren through the "From the Center" program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Since 1998 the Elk Whistle family program
has been offered to parents and their children at the Los Angeles County Public
Libraries.
The Elk Whistle Ensemble is listed by the Public Corporation for the Arts as one of the 100 cultural organizations in the City of Long Beach in their "Arts 100" program and in September 2000, Elk Whistle began performing
in a Laguna Playhouse production of "The Sign of the Beaver" from the book of
the same name by Elizabeth George Speare that has toured to many of the schools
in Southern California.
Elk Whistle has been a special guest performer at innumerable Native American gatherings such as the Sherman Indian High School Powwow in Riverside, California, the UCLA Powwow, and the Southern California
Indian Center Powwow in Costa Mesa, the largest Native American gathering in
California. He is particularly pleased to participate in the gatherings of the
California Indian people who are still custodians of their ancestral land.
He performs in correctional facilities where he shares the medicine of
the flute with his incarcerated Native American brothers. He is frequently
called upon to participate in weddings and other important private family
ceremonies. He offers his time and his talent to support environmental, social
and economic justice and programs that combat racism, violence, and elder and
substance abuse.
Since 1994, Bill Neal has been featured on a number of American Indian television programs in the Southern California area as well as on the "California's Gold" program with host Huell Houser, shown on all the
public television stations and in all the schools in California. He has
performed in a national satellite television broadcast to benefit the American
Red Cross Earthquake Relief Fund after the Northridge, California, earthquake in
1994. He provided original compositions for the soundtracks of exhibits on
Native American basketry and weaving for the Museum of Man in San Diego in 1995.
The Elk Whistle music is currently broadcast on a variety of radio stations such
as 90.7 KPFK-FM public radio in Los Angeles and WMPG in Portland, Maine, radio
stations in Portugal and Russia, and the World Music Radio Society that
broadcasts on the internet.
Most recently, Elk Whistle was very pleased with the opportunity and the honor to have participated in the 1999 World
Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles with the Dalai Lama. He has been
featured in the documentary film produced from this event which has aired
repeatedly on Los Angeles PBS television. He was included in a two-CD
compilation of music from the festival. (Both the documentary video and the
two-CD set are available to the public. Sales benefit the Tibetan refugees who
cannot go home to their sacred mountains. Contact Bill Neal at
elkwhistle@whitepathmusic.com to order.)
The first recording by Elk Whistle, titled "Songs from Turtle Island", was made live under the oak trees
using the power of the Sun. It is one of the very first solar-powered recordings
available anywhere. His third recording, "Beyond Time" has been completed in
collaboration with Elk Thunder (a student of Rolling Thunder who was a
well-known and well-respected native doctor).
Others have said: "A few months ago I was fortunate enough to catch Bill "Elk Whistle" Neal at a
performance.......Bill was utterly amazing, both as a person with a full heart
and a story to tell, and as a Native American flutist. One characteristic of his
playing technique is the most incredible breath control. His bending and shaping
of notes and vibrato are truly beautiful."
"I usually go to the Orange County Fair most every year, but this was the first year that I heard
you.......I greatly enjoyed your performance. Even on stage, you come across as
a person of high character, with a deep respect for your origin and ancestry.
Since then, I have heard the voice of "Grandfather Stone" talking many
times......."
Awards
As Director of the Elk Whistle Ensemble, Bill Neal was nominated March, 1996, by the Greater Los
Angeles Dance Resource Center for the Lester Horton Dance Award for "Outstanding
Achievement in Staging Traditional Dance" for a performance at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater.
Memberships
American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
International Native American Flute Association
South Coast Storytellers Guild
California Presenters
[Ed. note: This was written in the year 2000 - a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.Some information such as the email address given in the article, memberships, etc., are no longer valid. - BN 7/29/2012]
Saturday, May 19, 2012
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Well, the waters got higher and higher. Finally everything was flooded except the hill next to the place where the sacred red pipestone quarry lies today. The people climbed up there to save themselves, but it was no use. The water swept over that hill. Waves tumbled the rocks and pinnacles, smashing them down on the people. Everyone was killed, and all the blood jelled, making one big pool.
The blood turned to pipestone and created the pipestone quarry, the grave of those ancient ones. That's why the pipe, made of that red rock, is so sacred to us. Its red bowl is the flesh and blood of our ancestors, its stem is the backbone of those people long dead, the smoke rising from it is their breath. I tell you, that pipe, that *chanunpa*, comes alive when used in a ceremony; you can feel power flowing from it.
Unktehi, the big water monster, was also turned to stone. Maybe Tunkshila, the Grandfather Spirit, punished her for making the flood. Her bones are in the Badlands now. Her back forms a long high ridge, and you can see her vertebrae sticking out in a great row of red and yellow rocks. I have seen them. It scared me when I was on that ridge, for I felt Unktehi. She was moving beneath me, wanting to topple me.
Well, when all the people were killed so many generations ago, one girl survived, a beautiful girl. It happened this way: When the water swept over the hill where they tried to seek refuge, a big spotted eagle, Wanblee Galeshka, swept down and let her grab hold of his feet. With her hanging on, he flew to the top of a tall tree which stood on the highest stone pinnacle in the Black Hills. That was the eagle's home. It became the only spot not covered with water.
If the people had gotten up there, they would have survived, but it was a needle-like rock as smooth and steep as the skyscrapers you got now in the big cities. My grandfather told me that maybe the rock was not in the Black Hills; maybe it was the Devil's Tower, as white men call it , that place in Wyoming.
Both places are sacred. Wanblee kept that beautiful girl with him and made her his wife. There was a closer connection then between people and animals, so he could do it. The eagle's wife became pregnant and bore him twins, a boy and a girl. She was happy, and said:
"Now we will have people again. *Washtay*, it is good."
The children were born right there, on top of that cliff. When the waters finally subsided, Wanblee helped the children and their mother down from his rock and put them on the earth, telling them: Be a nation, become a great Nation – the Lakota Oyate."
The boy and girl grew up. He was the only man on earth, she the only woman of child-bearing age. They married; they had children. A nation was born.
So we are descended from the eagle. We are an eagle nation. That is good, something to be proud of, because the eagle is the wisest of birds. He is the Great Spirit's messenger; he is a great warrior. That is why we always wore the eagle plume, and still wear it. We are a great nation.
It is I, Lame Deer, who said this.
http://www.youtube.com/