So what is it with me and songs? All week I have the line “Guess I’ll go out to Alberta” from Four Strong Winds, in my head. In 2007 I visited Canada for the first time, making a 3 week journey from Toronto via Alberta to Vancouver. On the plane from Ireland I was reading a book called The 8th Chakra (subtitled What it is and How it can Transform your Life - for those not happy with new age thinking you can probably stop reading now!). So what is it? According to the author, Jude Currivan, it is the energetic portal to our higher awareness, our guidance and our soul purpose (I told you to stop reading!). From an 8th chakra perspective the Cosmos is perceived as unified, all one, holographic. Humans embody both a higher and lower self. What happens, energetically, anywhere happens everywhere. As we become energetically in Harmony with ourselves, so too does the Cosmos. We can co-create Heaven on Mother Earth. And it is time for us all now to experience that, to become soular (sic) heroes and become unified, rather than remain in the polarity of light and dark. Everyone of us walks a unique path to a destination ultimately shared by all.
We attain Harmony by attuning our attention with our intention and making our awareness coherent and energetically resonant with it. Thus our beliefs and perceptions shape our well being and our lives. If we have no awareness of such processes we create a reality that becomes a reflection of our own inner chaos. To be aligned with higher consciousness in the Cosmos we need to accept what is in our lives and take responsibility for it as the outcome of choices ultimately made by a higher self trying to wake us up. Thus we achieve real consciousness rather than egoic unconsciousness. And as we heal ourselves we heal the whole.
A simple exercise she gives is to create 3 columns. In the first write down any attributes of the physical world. In the 3rd write its opposite. In the middle find a word that resolves these opposites. This is the point of balance. I found that if you apply this exercise to your intention ie what you want to bring into your life, then you come up with very interesting points of balance which come from a higher self level. Some require giving, some receiving. Some are active (yang/masculine - head - energies), some are passive (yin/feminine – heart - energies). Having access to both allows the energies of life to pass harmoniously through us. As Einstein pointed out we cannot solve a problem from the same place that created it. We have to move to a higher vantage point. As change is the norm, we are constantly confronted with situations that challenge us to take the higher vantage point. This is usually seen as surrender. But it is not a surrender, it is a re-membering of who we really are. In Buddhist traditions this approach becomes a resolution of Karma ie we re-incarnate many times as we work towards resolving our issues. An article on her website sees Karma as both what we are born with and how we manage our lives, noting that Karma literally means action in Sanskrit.
Ancient prophecies, and the elders of the primary peoples such as Native Americans, say that this is a time of transformation. For the last 2 millennia western culture has become dominated by the head energies and has denigrated the heart energies. We need to bring these into balance, see the earth as a fellow cosmic traveller infused with the energies of the heart. As we become aligned with that we access the universal heart, according to Currivan.
While in Alberta I visited a place called Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump. It was an interpretative centre so we learnt how buffalo jumps are found all over North America. The Native Americans (now called First Peoples in Canada) occupied the continent for 6000 years before Europeans discovered it. They had no guns or horses and so developed strategies for dealing with their environment. Each year the buffalo migrated across the great plains and prairies. Scattered here and there are some small rises in the land. The buffalo had poor eyesight and so the native peoples tricked some of the herd to pass over these. The result was that their heads got smashed in and the people had food for the winter. The event itself was a communal one with tribes coming together to share in the hunt and at the same time meet socially, arrange marriages, trade, pow-wow etc.
I was allowed a short time to walk around the site. I had never been on the prairies and was astonished at how vast they are. 360 degrees of almost flat land with scrubby tough clumps of grass. It was the first snow of the winter that day, with a bitter wind. As I stood surveying what was in front of me I was overwhelmed by the feeling that something terrible had happened in this place.
In the museums I was very moved by the First Peoples sections. The beadwork of the costumes particularly caught my eye. I felt as though I was looking at something very familiar to me. I used to be involved in costume making for theatre earlier in my life and had carried these skills over into craft work, forum theatre (a form of community theatre) and art therapy later. Forum theatre is a method whereby plays about relevant issues are performed in front of an audience who are then asked to get involved in the solutions. In Victoria Museum there is an interactive display of native masks etc. One figure has many masks, performs small theatrical plays which emphasise human folly and asks the audience to get involved and see if they recognise themselves. Forum Theatre!
When travelling to Vancouver, via the Rocky Mountaineer train, I found my interest was wholly in the native peoples and little in the pioneering history of those who had conquered the west. Having read “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee” many years ago, I reckoned I had a good idea of the history of these peoples. But as I read a contemporary book about the history of the Blackfoot, and other peoples who had lived in and around Alberta, I realised I still had a very limited view.
One surprise was that the Europeans traded for almost 2 centuries before things turned really bad. They brought in arms, horses and beads(!) and within 50 years the natives had completely mastered them all. They in turn supplied the Europeans with various goods but over time ran down their stocks as the new technology overworked the environment and became out of harmony with it. As the white populations grew and pushed westward the natives continually adapted. Buffalo jumps were no longer needed nor the skills involved. Extensive buffalo shooting parties were organised for white wealthy businessmen who had no use for either the meat or hides. Christianity brought a ban on Totem pole construction and potlatches (pot lucks). A major weakness for the natives was that they lacked a certain gene which would have given them a resistance to whiskey. As trading intensified, dealings between the natives and the whites were carried on in trading posts which always involved whiskey. Alcoholism and all the attendant problems of prostitution and disease swept like a plague through the native populations. They were easily cheated under these conditions. Other new diseases such as smallpox added to the devastation.
Land was not owned by individuals or their families. It was held communally. Territories were associated with particular tribes, these being the places over which they may have roamed and hunted, though many tribes were actually settled farmers. As the pressure grew, one by one, the native peoples were forced to accept treaties with the Government of Canada. Almost the first article of every treaty sought protection from alcohol. They usually also negotiated the right to hunt the buffalo at specific times but were otherwise confined to “reserved”, usually very poor quality, lands. They received monies annually, paid to the chiefs, on behalf of the community. (These treaties are still in force today. A native can either be living on a reservation and receiving a share of the treaty monies or a Canadian living by other means, but not both).
In Alberta the biggest tribe was the Blackfoot. They held out longer than any of the other tribes but eventually had to sign a treaty, though it allowed for buffalo hunting annually. It is reckoned that when the Europeans first made contact with North America there were up to 60,000,000 buffalo. But in the year following the treaty, when the Blackfoot went hunting down into Montana, there were no buffalo left. The tribespeople returned on foot to Canada over the winter months and starved to death in their thousands along the way. They believed that the catastrophe was caused because they had offended the great spirit by signing the treaty. On the return journey they would have passed through Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump.
A further catastrophe for the Blackfoot and other tribes was the discovery of gold in the northwest. Treaties that had been agreed were then more or less abandoned. The final and complete decline of the native peoples occurred over a matter of just 10 short years.
My trip ended in Vancouver. Because the main bridge was closed due to difficulty, our bus had to make a detour into a less salubrious part of the city. Here it was dominated by drug addicts (mostly white) who are currently devastated by crystal meths – an even more destructive drug than heroin. It takes only weeks to wreak havoc with the body. Overall I was surprised how, right across Canada, there was such strong evidence of homelessness and poverty. Apparently this is the outcome of a conservative government who decided a few years ago to remove thousands from the welfare system. In this journey of thousands of miles across that country, while at the same time reading about and experiencing its history, it seemed as though things had come full circle from the alcoholic days of natives to the drug culture of contemporary addicts. Those who are sacrificed to “progress”?
I could not help but feel that the problems between the native peoples and the whites were in reality an environmental disaster of a kind. While the natives had adapted over a period of 2 centuries, the actual collapse in the end was very quick. Having mastered their environment for more than 6000 years, they were completely swept aside in just 10 years. Is there a lesson here to be learned about global warming and rampant consumerism?
For the native peoples of North America humans are not seen as separate from the land or animals but as part of a continuum. The role of the grandparents is to educate the young – the parents being too busy providing a living to be able to undertake this. That education includes the belief that a Great Spirit (mother/father god) exists and each individual has to make their own contact with it through their Higher Self/Soul. This is achieved through vision quests undertaken in youth. Having spent some time in the wilderness and survived, the individual is gifted by spirit with symbols or animals that are personal to them. These are usually carved/painted on a rock face (petroglyphs). Whenever they meet someone who is similar to them they do not see them as soul mates, just someone who is on the same path. The subsequent use of the symbols involves personal healing when necessary.
Spirit contacts the individual via the elements, the plants and trees, the animals, the truth of heart feeling, the human body, visions, dreams or ideas related to the symbol. Making contact with spirit involves facing the four directions, discerning what visually manifests, offering gifts and accepting whatever advice is given in return. Given that planet earth itself is so significant, central to their beliefs is a respect for harmony between humans and the earth, surely a fitting contribution to the debate on global warming.
Yet they have not gone completely away and in recent years their culture, their shamanic ways, their beliefs about the universe, have all found their way into a Western culture (just like the Tibetans) exhausted with excess. On another note some projects exist in the contemporary world which seek to treat addiction using Native American methods. Addiction is seen as loss of soul and thus disconnection from community. Treatment consists of re-finding the symbol of the soul and thereby re-connecting community.
This was a relatively peaceful trip for me. There was a large group but little conflict with others. I allowed space to my travelling companions and they to me. Nor did I worry about where I would land on the bus – I got the best seat on the best day without any effort on my own part! I reflected a lot on what passes for tourism nowadays – thousands of people descending on attractions but hardly able to have any real sense of the place. Ignorant of the impact on each other or the environment. Endless buffets of food cooked hours earlier (yet described as sumptuous and lavish etc!). Vast mountains of disposable cutlery, cups, plates – all carried away in black polythene bags. I could not help but feel we were like those white buffalo hunters – descending on the place and stripping it of all that was worthwhile and to no good purpose. I was both observing and studying several things throughout
- The holographic universe
- The Mennonites, who focus only on the 5 most important things in their life and ignore everything else (see other blog article)
- The native peoples
- The environment
- The contemporary drug addicts
- A creeping feeling of a past life with a growing sense that all life is interconnected in some way and moves in circular patterns. The suffering of some in the past somehow or other offers a comment on today’s follies while opening opportunities for healing in the present. Yet, according to the holographic theory, if you focus only on what is difficult you get more of that. So if we focus on the destruction and tragedy of the native peoples experience we contribute to it getting worse. If we focus on the positive outcome – what they can contribute now to the saving of the planet – we get more of that. Environmentally if we focus only on what is difficult we will get more of it. If we focus on what is positive, doing the bit we can do, we get more of that.
Many years ago at a workshop we were asked to visualise Dublin 30 years hence. Though it was actually totally impossible at the time, I was surprised when my spontaneous visualisation saw the River Liffey with pleasure boats on it and a centre free of traffic. Nearly 20 years later a lot of that has actually come into being!
If this article irritates you please don’t throw your rotten tomatoes at me. Turn them into compost and use them for nurturing the environment!
© Eilish Kelly March 2008
