Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Meet Tink Tinker, "Relationship in a Whole Other Key"


November 2017, Dr. Tink Tinker (wazhazhe, Osage Nation), Iliff’s Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions


Today's post dovetails fairly well in its basic elements to my last post, Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology, as I work through a series of presentations speaking to how process philosophy and theology better conforms with the organic and natural rhythms of creational relationships than do our own inherited and standardized Western philosophies and Christian theologies of the American and/or Anglo-European worldviews.

Though Native Americans present their beliefs and theology in a different fashion than I would from my own Westernized culture I can only hear it's linkages to my own cultural identity but dimly. However, when stripped down to their native faith foundations than I, from a Process Christian viewpoint, can find many, many loci to the Native American philosophical and religious elemental cores living in dynamic congruency with Process-Relational Christianity (and of course, with many other world religions as well by this same effort).

And so, today, just listen. Listen to another culture speaking to us from it's own non-Westernized heartbeat and identity. One speaking a foreign language we do not know nor understand. And hear the heart and wisdom of Dr. Tink Tinker speaking to his deep, deep past Native American past. And then, at the end of this post find one last conversation to the American Indian worldview which I have reposted here below. And when you do, think of the little native children when confronted by Westernized culture bent on destroying their beliefs and identities. Who wandered throughout their lives with questions and no answers amongst their tribal elders torn in two when European culture met their own and broke their native cultures to pieces.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
December 14, 2022
From Cobb & Friends -

Partners in Process,

Tomorrow, Dec 13. Tink Tinker: The Moth and the Alligator--Relationship in a Whole Other Key

A Cobb Institute board member suggested that we adopt the practice of "land acknowledgment" to name native tribes dispossessed of their land in our various regions. To assist our reflection, we turned to Tink Tinker, a citizen of the Osage Nation (wazhazhe), and Professor Emeritus at Iliff School of Theology. For nearly three decades he volunteered both administratively and as a traditional spiritual leader at Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver and has worked closely with the American Indian Movement of Colorado. His topic invites exploration of the clashing worldviews that euro-christians and America's native peoples bring to the conversation. To get acquainted with Tink Tinker see this lecture at Yale, this Critical Conversation about American Indian worldview, or this panel conversation at Phillips Seminary honoring the 50th Anniversary of Vine Deloria's God Is Red. In 2020 the Colonial Compromise was published, with responses to his 2008 book, American Indian Liberation Theology.

Before coming to the faculty at Iliff in 1985, Tinker had earned a B.A. at New Mexico Highlands University, an M.Div. at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, which named him its Alum of the Year in 2004. He had been teaching for several years in the Bay area before joining the Iliff faculty in 1985. Find at this speaker's bureau website further biographical information, a list of his books, and a 4-minute video excerpt of his message to the United Methodist 2012 General Conference.



Individual Salvation vs. Cosmic Balance:
An American Indian Perspective
April 30, 2018

Tink Tinker (Osage Nation) is Clifford Baldridge Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches courses in American Indian cultures, history, and religious traditions; cross-cultural and Third-World theologies; and justice and peace studies. Tinker is a frequent speaker on these topics both in the U.S. and internationally. His publications include “American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty” (2008); “Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation” (2004); and “Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide” (1993). He co-authored “A Native American Theology” (2001); and he is co-editor of “Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance” (2003), and Fortress Press’ “Peoples’ Bible” (2008). This lecture is made possible through the support of Gerald Facciani ‘13 M.A.R., the Native American Cultural Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Forum on Religion and Ecology, and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

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Dr. Tink Tinker Career Celebration
4/12/2018

The Tinker Program Endowment will provide funding to carry on the galvanizing work of Dr. Tinker in perpetuity. This three-pronged endowment serves to honor the past, affirm our present direction, and establish momentum into the future. Continuing Dr. Tinker’s teaching legacy is of paramount importance via this programmatic endowment. Education, both for the public and at Iliff, will include such courses as Indigenous Knowledges and Western Science and columbusday and State-Supported Hate Speech along with emerging topics related to Indigenous Peoples. Additional topics may include (but is not limited to) American Indian cultures, history, and religious traditions; cross-cultural and Third-World theologies; and justice and peace studies related to Native American & Indigenous concerns. A second initiative of this program is the furtherance of Dr. Tinker’s legacy as a mentor to students. The program will provide mentorship for Indigenous students by Indigenous scholars/leaders. A third element of the program is the continuance of Dr. Tinker’s research areas. This endowment will holistically support further research on Native American and Indigenous issues.




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Overview

This thought-provoking work describes the oppression suffered by American Indians since the arrival of European colonists, who brought a different worldview across the ocean and attempted to convert the native population to the religion they brought with them. The methodology, language, and understandings of the Christian beliefs of the colonists--and of the majority society since the colonial period--largely failed to Christianize the native population. Different conceptual frameworks and different understandings of terms made (and make) Christian doctrine unappealing and at times incomprehensible to American Indians.

In this book, "Tink" Tinker focuses in particular on differing understandings of Jesus Christ and of the land, and the centrality of both to the "theology of sovreignity" and the challenges communities of faith face, particularly indigenous comminites, in a postcolonial world.

George E. "Tink" Tinker, a member of the Osage Nation, is a professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, CO. An ordained Lutheran pastor, he is the author of several books and co-author of A Native American Theology (with Clara Sue Kidwell and Homer Noley.


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GoodReads

The Colonial Compromise:
The Threat of the Gospel to the Indigenous Worldview

by
Loring Abeyta (Contributor),
Edward P. Antonio (Contributor),
Natsu Taylor Saito (Contributor),
Ward Churchill (Contributor),
Roger K. Green (Contributor),
Mark D. Freeland (Contributor),
Barbara Alice Mann (Contributor),
Steven T. Newcomb (Contributor),
Tink Tinker (Contributor)

This book explores the different types of compromises Indian people were forced to make and must continue to do so in order to be included in the colonizer's religion and culture. The contributors in this collection are in conversation with the contributions made by Tink Tinker, an American Indian scholar who is known for his work on Native American liberation theology. The contributors engage with the following questions in this book: How much of one's identity must be sacrificed in order to belong in the world of the colonizer? How much of one's culture requires silencing? And more importantly, how can the colonized survive when constantly asked and forced to compromise? Specifically, what is uniquely Indian and gets completely lost in this interaction? Scholars of religious studies, American studies, American Indian studies, theology, sociology, and anthropology will find this book particularly useful.


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Critical Conversations – American Indian Worldview And The Twinned Cosmos Of Indigenous America (Barbara Alice Mann, Onondawaga, Bear Clan And Tink Tinker, Wazhazhe, Osage Nation, Eagle Clan) 
by Whitestone Publications

The following is the video and transcript of the fifth “Critical Conversation”, a monthly Zoom seminar with advance registration sponsored by Whitestone Publications and involving indigenous and international scholars. The seminar took place on December 8, 2020.

Recent protests in the United States have drawn attention to the persistence of colonial violence and racism. Well-intentioned but typically toothless efforts to remove statues and rename landmarks or make land acknowledgment claims have drawn wider rhetorical attention to American Indian issues. Yet centuries of intentional erasure and genocide of American Indian peoples has left public education and public discourse without language or memory to confront deeply entrenched and romanticized conqueror mentalities. Federal “recognition” and neoliberal identity politics perpetuate a long history of tactics to divide and conquer American Indians while eurochristians continue extractive impulses to adopt Indian “spiritual” practices into contextless oblivions of “self-exploration.” In this conversation, Barbara Alice Mann (Onondawaga, Bear clan) and Tink Tinker (wazhazhe, Osage Nation, Eagle clan) will critique politics of identity and euro-forming by addressing what Barbara Mann has termed the Twin Cosmos of Turtle Island and which Tink Tinker has addressed as deeply framed worldviews among American Indians.

Moderator: Roger Green, General Editor, The New Polis.

Presenters: Barbara Alice Mann (Onondawaga, Bear clan) is an Associate Professor in the Jesup Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA. She has published widely in the areas of Native American history, women’s studies, and literature. She lives and works in her traditional western Seneca homeland of Ohio, at the western tip of Lake Erie. Her books include Iroquoian Women: The Gantawisas (2000), Native Americans, Archaeologists, & the Mounds (2003), George Washington’s War on Native America (2005), The Land of the Three Miamis (2006), The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion (2009), Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America (2016), and President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain (2019).

Tink Tinker is wazhazhe, a citizen of the Osage Nation. For 33 years he was a professor of American Indian studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, where he still holds the title emeritus professor. During most of that time, Tinker also was the (non-stipendiary) director of Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver. Tinker has abandoned christianity as a colonialist and Genocidal imposition on Indian Peoples in favor of recapturing the traditional worldview of Native Peoples. Although Tinker was trained in eurochristian theology and bible, he has come to see the Native experience of the interrelationship of all life and our ideal of cosmic balance and harmony as totally incompatible with eurochristian colonialist imaginary of hierarchy, one that sees reality as a manichaean hierarchical struggle of good versus evil. He is the author of Missionary Conquest (Fortress Press, 1993), Spirit and Resistance (Fortress Press, 2004) American Indian Liberation (Orbis, 2008), and numerous scholarly articles, including contributions to The New Polis. Tinker’s “Redskin, Tanned Hide: A Book of Christian History Bound in the Flayed Skin of an American Indian” has importantly drawn attention to a book of christian history bound in the skin of a murdered Lenape man gifted to Iliff school of theology, where it was proudly displayed for about 80 years.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Roger Green: Hi everybody, my name is Roger Green, and I’m general editor of the New Polis. Thank you for attending today. This is our largest critical conversation so far, so we’re really pleased. I’m also especially pleased because Tink Tinker is my former professor and I chat with Tink all the time — regularly — about the issues that we’re going to be talking about today, Tink and Barbara and I are all contributors to a new collection on colonialism and the dangers of colonialism to American Indian world views, so that’s this forthcoming book edited by Miguel De La Torre.

Today, I’m just going to give a couple of some introductory remarks about who Barbara and Tink are, and then we’ll get going from there. So, our presenters in this order today will be Barbara Alice Mann who’s Onondawaga, Bear clan and also “Seneca”. She is an associate professor at the Jessup Scott Honors College at the University of…

Barbara Alice Mann I’m a full professor, thank you.

Roger Green: Oh! Full professor! Okay, I pulled it from your bio on here.

(Background noise) 

Carl Raschke: Everyone Please mute yourself now.

Roger Green: Barbara Mann’s a full professor at the Joseph Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo. She’s published widely in the areas of Native American History, Women’s Studies, and Literature. She lives and works in her traditional Western Seneca homeland of Ohio at the western tip of Lake Erie. Her books include, Iroquois and WomenNative Americans, Archaeologists and the MoundsGeorge Washington’s War on Native AmericaThe Land of Three Miami’sThe Tainted GiftSpirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath, and most recently, President by Massacre. She’s got a lot more books in there too, and articles as well. 

Tink Tinker is (wazhazhe / Osage nation) a citizen. For 33 years, he was a professor of American Indian Studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Colorado where he still holds the title of Emeritus professor. During most of that time, Tinker was the non-stipendary director of Four Winds American Indian Council here in Denver.

Tinker has abandoned Christianity as a colonialist and genocidal imposition on Indian peoples in favor of recapturing the traditional worldview of Native peoples. Although Tinker was trained in eurochristian theology and bible, he’s come to see the Native experience of the inter-relationship of all and our ideal of cosmic balance and harmony as totally incompatible with eurochristian colonialist imaginary or hierarchy one that sees reality as a Manichaean hierarchical struggle of good versus evil.

He’s the author of Missionary Conquest Spirit and ResistanceAmerican Indian Liberation, and numerous scholarly articles including contributions to the New Polis. Tinker’s important article, “Redskin, Tanned Hide — a book of Christian History bound in the flayed skin of an American Indian” has importantly drawn attention to a book of Christian History found in the skin of a murdered Lenape man, gifted to the Illiff School of Theology, where it was proudly displayed for about 80 years- from the late 1890s into the late 1960s- and there’s more. You can read that article for more on that.

So today, Barbara and Tink are going to talk about American Indian world view and they know a lot more about it because, as Tink said before we logged on today,  they both live it and deal with it in academia. So, there’s going to be some critique of identity politics and conceptions of American Indian worldview and I’m just not going to say any more about it because they can speak for themselves. Thank you all for being here, I’ll turn it over to Barbara.

Barbara Alice Mann: Hello everybody! Well, I got up this morning and I decided to go with the PowerPoint for you, I’ve got some screens that I think help illustrate the idea of how connected we are to land and and space. So those are two really important concepts- spatiality and land/water- are like a part of the hands of the cosmos, and it’s a lot easier to see it to talk about it. 

So, if I can find what I did with my PowerPoint here…

Okay, alright, is that shared? 

[And everybody said “yes”.] 

Great! That’s good. Well, if I can get through it now… Oh, I don’t know how to get through it. Let me stop sharing because somehow or another it’s not advancing. I don’t know why not. Do you know why, Carl? Where’s Carl?

Carl Raschke: Right here. it’s probably not advancing because, well I mean, it should advance. I’m not sure why it didn’t. 

Barbara Mann: I’m not sure either, because it was kind of important. 

Carl Raschke: One thing you might want to do is put each slide up and just then then take it down and put it back up for the next one, if you can do that.

Barbara Mann: I’m not sure how to do that.

Sarah Pessin: Barbara, are you sure, when you take your cursor and hover it around on the bottom, are you sure you don’t see any arrows? Sometimes you need to just like, hover the arrow around on the slide so that you can see where the advancing arrows are.

Barbara Mann: I am hovering. I do not see it.

Sarah Pessin: What about if you click on your computer the arrow that’s on the very bottom of the..

Barbara Mann: Oh yeah! 

Sarah Pessin: Okay, good.

Barbara Mann: Okay. All right, well, the first thing I wanted to talk about was Ohio, because I know that westerners like to regard us as fly over country (as well as easterners), but that’s not what Ohio is. Oh shoot, now it’s really advancing when I don’t want it to. I’ve got pictures all over the right of my screen of participants, is there some way to move the PowerPoint? Can you all see all of Ohio, or not? 

Carl Raschke: Yeah, we can see it.

Barbara Mann: Okay, because I can’t just now. I’m going to see if I can pull it up here, because I can’t see it, because picture…

Roger Green: If you just click on our pictures, you can move the whole bar of people wherever you want on the screen, so it’s out of your way.

Barbara Mann: Oh, I didn’t mean to do that. How do I click “Hide thumbnail”? Okay. Well, first of all, I wanted to explain what “the Woodlands” are, because most people who aren’t Indigenous and aren’t eastern, don’t know “Woodlands” refers to the Great Forest. The entire area that’s in green there, was forest, which the Europeans industriously took down, step by step, as they pushed west. Forests, of course, were very, very important to the ecology of the situation.

If you look at Ohio, what I’ve got here, is the 18th century layout of where people were. And people are still in those places, even though we don’t have the reservations that were promised to everybody in Ohio, in the Greenville Treaty of 1795, which, by the way, was not accepted by the majority of the Indigenous people. It was kind of put forward because Anthony Wayne was threatening to murder everybody if people didn’t sign.

All right, so you see up in the north, around the lake, you’ve got a lot of Seneca, some Onondawaga and Seneca people there. Ohio was the original eastern homeland of the Iroquois. A lot of people don’t know that. There’s Susquehanna there, you see? Up there near, [inaudible], Ohio. They met in the 18th century and we essentially gave them that land because they were no longer safe in the middle Atlantic area because of a group calling themselves the “Paxton Boys,” that were out on a murder spree trying to kill everybody.

So, they came running to Ohio and Susquehanna did ask for sanctuary, and we gave it. You’ll see the Lenape there in the middle of the state. The Seneca and Lenape came east together. We were traveling together as two very large groups with each other out there on the grass ocean prairie, and came east together, because there was safety in numbers.

When we came to Ohio, we took the northern half, and the Lenape took the southern half, especially the southeast. Later on, the Miami kind of encroached a bit on Ohio, but actually, Indiana was the site of uh The Great Miami Confederacy. Fort Wayne, Indiana is actually Kickianga, which was the capital of the Indiana Miyami (that’s how it’s actually pronounced — Miyami) Confederacy.

Cherokee and Shawnee were down at the bottom. Cherokee along the Ohio, the Shawnee, western Ohio, and they were like the border patrol for everybody. We did have a few Tuscarora.

Now, the land actually means something to us. The outline of the lakes means something to us. Lake Erie iridi is a Iroquois-Seneca word, a Western Seneca word, and it means “panther.” So, the Erie, who are Western Seneca, are the panther people. This is because Lake Erie is envisioned as a panther crouching to pounce on Lake Ontario. And you can see the Maumee river on the top northwest corner, that’s right where I live.

Maumee river, her tail, it’s twitching. She’s really eager to get pouncing, so that I think, is kind of an important visual of what is going on. When we look at a map, it’s not the same thing, I don’t think, as what Europeans see when they look at the map.

Ohio was the land of the Three Miamis, that was the Maumee. I don’t have a map of mommy in the top Northwestern area, and the big and little Miami’s (Miyamis), coming up from the Ohio river into Ohio. Ohio is a very watery state. It has a lot of swamps and water, so one of the reasons the mounds were created here was a living space that would be dry when the rivers flooded. So, Ohio was very much a part of a long, long, Indian tradition. 

Let me see if I can get share screen here. Let’s see if I can share it. All right, let me show you this screen here? Okay, can everybody see the big map now? Is it sharing? (yes) 

Okay, this is the map that Cyrus Thomas did in 1894 and I want you to notice where all the red clusters are. That was where the Great Mound Cultural Centers were. They went all the way from Lakota land, West down the  lakes, all the way through to Upstate New York, and all the way down into Florida. And there’s an actual reason that they are going in that particular areas, following the rivers.

You can see that Ohio was right in the thick of it. Ohio is probably the most important central area for the old Mound cultures, that, by the way, are about five thousand years old. They’ve found remains of food — gourd foods — you know, various kinds of gourd vegetables, that were clearly partially eaten. And you kind of don’t do that- leave your [food] remains, unless you’re actually living there, raising it, needing those things. So, this shows that one of them was dated to more than 5000 years old. So, whereas archaeologists like to say “Oh Mound Cultures were recent, about 2000 years,” no, they’re more than 2 000 years. They go back about 5000 years.

You can see the interplay of the lakes here on this: Lake Erie which is the cat about to jump on Lake Ontario, which is farthest to the east. You can see that the Indiana area was heavily mounded as well, and that it was following down the rivers. By and large, all the mounds followed the rivers because having water to the east of the mound was very important for ceremonial space.

Now, the archaeologists like to say, “Oh, Ohio Valley Mounds and Mississippi Valley Mounds” and separate them out. We don’t separate them out. We see them as one thing, starting up there in Pennsylvania. This is where the Mississippi starts in Pennsylvania going in the Allegheny River, going down the Ohio River which connects to the, what’s called, “lower Mississippi” all the way down. That was the Mississippi river for us and it was actually the “Great Horned Serpent.”

Okay, so you know, I was talking about animal effigies. (Stop sharing for a moment).  Okay, so the landscape is meaningful to the people, and I know that’s true for Tink too. It’s not just the land that you’re standing on, it’s the space above you as well. And that space above us is actually outer space. When we see the sky, we see outer space out there where the stars are, not necessarily blue atmosphere, because that belongs to the earth, that’s still part of her.

So, spatiality is an entirely different concept from what it is for Europeans, who see it as entirely connected to a plot of land. And in this world and that one, grabbing and saying they own that land — that’s not how it works at all. Land and water is connected to women through the water for various obvious reasons of amniotic fluid.

Air is heavily connected with men, because the speech making was something that was given to man, the sound vibration was given to the men. There’s an old story that women could pull new life out of their bodies and men couldn’t, and that was kind of disturbing to the men, because they could pull things out of their bodies, but it wasn’t life.

And so, the men were feeling kind of depressed about this, and women got together and said, “oh what can we do to give a man a heartbeat below their heartbeat below their heartbeat?” Because that’s what pregnancy is, a heartbeat below your own. And so, the women came up with a drum. And that was given to the men, so that they would be able to create a heartbeat below their own, same as the women could.

And so, that made the noise — drumming made the noise — and it’s always a heartbeat rhythm of some sort, and so the men acquired their own little boy and a lot of them call it “little boy” that the drum belongs to them. And if you put water in a drum, and then you beat it, that sound will carry for miles. So obviously, vibration in the air belongs to the men. That spatiality part of it belongs to the men.

So we see this as the two interactive halves. There’s no fight there’s no Manichaean dichotomy. One’s not trying to destroy the other. The whole point is, how do you cooperate with one another to make a better reality? So, space and land and water are very differently viewed where I come from the way Europeans view it as a resource. Tink, do you want to jump in?

Tink Tinker: Sure. Thank you. Very, very useful, Barbara. I want to say that what Barbara is pointing to, is something that I call a radical difference in world view between American Indians on the one hand, and Euro-Christians on the other, using the cipher ‘eurochristians’ as a more sociological, precise reference than the old, almost useless, color-coded “white people.”

I’ve got a lot of students who come into my classes who, because Illif is a more liberal kind of school, who come in with these new age sensitivities and want to immediately claim, “my world view is just like yours.” And I want to say to them, “uh, no…sorry, but it’s not.” Because world view is something you’re born into, not something you choose, like becoming a Presbyterian or a Catholic or a Lutheran or a Episcopalian or other denominational choices one can make in the United States or even in Europe.

But world view is like a language that you speak. It’s deeply, deeply, inbred in the consciousness. More than that, as cognitive linguists would tell us, it’s also deeply physical. And for Indian people our worldview relates to the physical experience of being in the land, in a particular place. That’s what Barbara was pointing to, in terms of “mound culture,” in terms of Ohio Valley, and the larger Eastern Woodlands region, and the mounds that were there.

I want to suggest, to take it a step further, that there are there are a number of ways of getting at this worldview difference. One is that you know the eurochristian world is entirely temporal in its thinking. That’s the ordinary — spatiality is subordinate in eurochristian world.

Our thinking tends to be spatial first of all, and the temporal is subordinate. We see the world around us as in terms of place, and not in terms of time. So, we’re rooted in particular places. Our ceremonies are spatial. They are particular configurations of space that, in fact, eurochristians may have had 1900 years ago, 1800 years ago, when churches were built with the altars to the east.

Nowadays, of course, high churches like Episcopal churches, can sometimes refer to the altar as “liturgical east,” even though it’s actually north by northwest. Because they build the churches depending upon the urban configuration of the property that they’re building on, not in terms of any real physical spatiality or directions of the earth itself. That’s one example.

More recently, I’ve argued that a fundamental basic difference between the two, it can be determined linguistically between the languages of American Indians and eurochristians. eurochristians live in what cognitive linguists call, an ‘up /down image schema’. The cognitive metaphors build upon, again George Lakoff would say, the physicality of ‘being upright’, of standing up.

The problem is, he [Lakoff] imposes that nilly-willie on everybody, when it doesn’t work for Native Americans, for American Indians, because our basic imagery isn’t ‘up /down’ but what I call ‘collateral egalitarian’. It’s horizontal instead of vertical. Because for us, it’s that physical relationship, not just to the land, but to all living persons on the land. And by living persons, I mean to always include the non-human persons — the mountains here in Colorado, the trees the rivers, the lakes, the buffalos, and the squirrels, of course the eagles, and the sparrows.

All those people are part of this collateral egalitarian world that we share, so that the eurochristian up/ down image schema immediately develops a notion of anthropocentrism, where human beings are in charge. That doesn’t work in an Indian environment. Humans are not in charge, we’re just like everyone else — along for the ride and have our responsibilities back to the rest of the people who share the land with us.

Our responsibility is to the buffalo, who then in turn, fed us as Osages. Our responsibility is to the mountains, who in turn connect us — connect the land people with the sky people. The land people with the sky people, because the mountain is the go-between, between earth and sky.

When I present this to theologians, they think they got me between a rock and a hard place because they immediately say, “yeah, but Tink, your people had chiefs — certainly you did have an up-down image schema.” See, it works that way in the white world. You have a president, a congress, states, and eventually, you have all the people- the voters, right? So, it’s an up /down image schema-a hierarchy. A CEO, middle management, and the labor class. The bishop, the ministers, and the lay people.

That up / down image schema is there, whether we’re talking about politics, business, or religion. “And you Indian people had chiefs” [they say], and I tell them, “yeah, we were better than that. These people you call chiefs, we had two of them in every village. And they took turns every other day being in charge. It was like having Donald Trump on Mondays, and Hillary Clinton on Tuesdays.” That, of course, causes a ripple of laughter that you can’t get in a zoom meeting. But then they suddenly realize there must be something else going on in this person that we Osage just call gaihega, other than what the English word ‘chief’ seems to indicate.

How the role of the gaihega, or the two gaihegas, is to reflect back the consensus of the people. And the minute they stop reflecting back the consensus of the people, they out of a job. They’re no longer useful to the people. So, we don’t have that up /down hierarchy that results in an autocracy, that can even challenge the validity of an election, right?

There’s a whole lot more to this. I can talk about other things going on in our languages that just don’t cross those worldview boundaries. Early on, two decades ago, Barbara in Iroquoian and Women pointed to the fact that Indian languages don’t have any word for ‘evil’. We don’t experience evil, until the Christians bring it with them. That’s when we begin to experience evil in the world, is through the missionaries, the Christians, and their armies, of course..and the genocide that they bring with them…and the notion of the Canaanite, the invasion of the land of Canaan, that they bring with them, from the Old Testament, that allows them to kill us willy-nilly in order to take our land.

We have no word for ‘sin’. The worst thing you can say in Osage about anything is, “Biibizhi.”  I say it all the time to my dog, my daughter’s dog, when I walk the dog, when she goes into a neighbor’s little front garden area, “biz hi, shunge bizhi…bad dog, bad.” So, I stubbed my toe, “bizhi”– “That’s bad.” My father died, “bizhi,” that’s bad. Or “bizhi on,” That’s really bad. That’s too bad.

That’s the closest we can come to your word ‘evil’ in our languages, and that’s critically important because it begins to spell out the distinct worldview difference that we, and this is what I said to Barbara before we got on air, which she and I live  both in our day-to-day world and our academic lives.

We live that reality, of there not being any evil. In the eurochristian world of course it’s deeply embedded in the worldview. Not — and I don’t mean eurochristian in a religious sense, I mean it sociologically. The cosmic struggle between good and evil is deeply embedded in U.S. foreign policy. That’s clear, right? There’s always an evil that the U.S. foreign policy is focused against. It’s never us because the U.S. government and the U.S. people are kind of like Christ, sinless in the rest of the world.

It’s the Communists that are evil. And before them, the National Socialists were, the Nazis in Germany. And after the fall of communism in 1990, suddenly it’s Radical Islam. And suddenly, you know, the old cyphers that elevated Euro-Christians to the apex of human worth didn’t work anymore because ‘radical monotheism’, ‘ethical monotheism’ it was called, suddenly came up against a brick wall, because the new evil in the world is radical Islam, which is after all, monotheist.

And as Barbara assures us already, 20 years ago, the number ‘one’ is dysfunctional. So this is the last word I’ll leave you with — for us, the big distinction between world views is that you all are focused on the number ‘one’, whereas for us, the key number is always ‘two’. What I’ve always called ‘reciprocal dualism’ and Barbara calls the ‘twinship principle’. So that we have to have both sky and earth, male and female, light and dark. And the fruition of the earth depends upon the balance and harmony of that pair of sky and earth, light and dark, male and female, always in all of its different manifestations.

So that there’s never this cosmic collision between good and evil, struggling for the life of the planet or the life of human beings. But rather, we struggle in communities, to maintain the harmony and balance of life around us. That’s our responsibility, back to all of those relatives that live on the land with us, those non-human people, who are doing their part to preserve harmony and balance as well. That’s 20 minutes worth of a 10-week seminar, and we never finish in 10 weeks in a university setting, covering all those bases.  Kakunah

Barbara Mann:  No, we sure don’t.  Yeah, it’s quite true, and I think that if you understand land the way that we see it, you’ll see that the whole point, the whole responsibility of people, and that includes everything, is to maintain the balance, to keep the twinship always in the right balance. And  there’s a tension there, so we’ve got to make sure that it’s coming together, whereas eurochristians are just describing constantly trying to explode it and break it apart.

So, I’ve got some more screens that I think are a little more meaningful. (come on, all right, hopefully I’m in the right one here, yeah okay). What I want to do was talk about the way that we have a government, and that’s quite right that you’ve got the dual chiefs, and in fact, it’s not just one set of twin chiefs, you’ve also got the women, who have their own chief system.  So you got the we personal [inaudible] kind of clan and national-national means this spatial clan needs the blood so you got blood and breath going on there. So, men have their two, and women have their two, and the whole point is that grandmothers and grandfathers [are] exchanging information to make sure we’re on the same page. 

One of the things that are going on, are the mountain structures here.  There are a lot of effigies and they’re pretty important for understanding the way that things are seen. You’ve got symbolic designs and you’ve got effigies and they, the whole purpose of those is to connect space and land that’s the whole purpose of everything.

So, you see effigies animals and i put uh this beautiful eagle mound effigy on the cover of “Blood and Breath” book. The eagle himself is made of stone which is absolutely earth-based, it’s about as “Earth” as you get. But he’s inside a circle, and that’s always a circle of sky, because he flies. He flies. He connects. One of the reasons eagles are so important, is because they can walk around on the ground, or they can walk into the sky. And you and I can’t do that, or at least I can’t.

Actually, we could. What we had in the woodlands was balloon flight. Only certain of the more powerful of the “shaman” / medicine people could take flight. And there’s even a Shawnee tradition that describes how to make it airballoon and somebody taking off. And you end up holding the corners of the edges of this balloon part with your hands, so it was pretty dangerous. He could look down, you could see designs like this, because this eagle is enormous. He’s an enormous line effigy.

We also have the symbolic designs of the square and circle complex. This was part of that complex, and there’s a little road there, that would have led to the square nested circles and nested the half circles. And I want to show you some of the designs, earliest designs. I’m pretty sure the traditions also here were the earliest designs, were the effigies. And this eagle, because he’s in a circle, would actually have been one of the later effigies.

And he’s a ‘he’, because he’s connected to sky. And you can see people on the causeway here. We always had these very wide streets, holding things together — causeways they were, and we would pile up the sides of them pretty high. In this area they would be like 10, 15 feet high. Why? Because, if you’re going to ceremony, you got grandma, kids, and the kids are running all over the place, and it kept the little kids from getting lost. And everybody’s getting lost, you couldn’t miss where they were going — kind of like the modern interstate system.

So, this guy is in Putnam County, Georgia. He’s not an early [inaudible] in the early period we also have a lot of blood designs. He was an air design, space design, there’s a blood design. This is the canals. These are Hokum Canals. In Arizona, women always built canals and mounds. The women piled the dirt. The men might have come up with some of the designs, but the women piled the dirt because the women are connected with dirt and water.  

So, somebody noticed that this was already available with river. Okay. And then you’ve all these little lines coming off these, are all the canals that the women built. This is more than just a series of canals coming off the river. This is actually a complement to the Cygnus constellation in the sky. And if you turn them into both the same direction, somebody here highlighted the star patterns, but you can see Cygnus.

And you can see, as somebody did back in the Hokum area, that this looks important — like the earth herself. Mother earth provided the replica of the sky. And the women helped her out, because she got tired before she finished. So, the women helped her make the wings, and the wings are all the canals. This is about as close as you can get to water and breath connecting.

And part of the job of humans to keep things going on is to make these connections. See, on the right, you’ve got blood in the breath…and on the left, you’ve got breath in the blood.

Let me see what’s going on here. I also got the great horned serpent. He is really important in the east, well, I think he’s pretty important throughout the Americas. This is the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio. It was saved in 1900. They were going to plow it under. At one point, all of the effigies had their twins connected.

The Great Horned Serpent is earth. He’s about as ‘earth’ as you can get. Men are better off not messing with them. But man, you can see that he’s about to take a little trip. Have you ever seen a snake running out of his coils? This is what he’s doing. He’s running out of his coils. He’s embarking on a journey, right?

Archaeologists like to say that this thing off the edge here, “oh it’s an egg! He has an egg and a wife and a swamp.” No, no, no, no, no. That is medicine bundle, for heaven’s sakes! Everything, every person, and that includes the mountains of rocks, as we discussed, has a medicine bundle.

Women actually carry a permanent medicine bundle in their wombs, right? You’ve got your medicine bundle going on, and if you’re a snake, that’s a little bit of a trouble, because where do you carry your medicine? How do you carry it? Well, if you’re the Great Horned Serpent, you extrude your horns when you’re going to travel, and you sling your medicine bundle between the horns. And he’s got his own smoothing stone right in the middle.

That is a crystal, usually a stone that women use in ceremonials. So, you can see that he’s running out of his coils, and he’s about to take a trip. By the way, I mentioned the nested semicircles. Here’s a couple. We’ll look at those a little bit later.

Those are also sky and earth, the smaller one underneath, is the earth. This comes, the schematic, and all the schematics come from the Squire and Davis, Mounds of the Ancient Mississippi Valley. I think Mounds of the Mississippi Valley came out in 1858. The survey of all the mounds they could find, and the schematics, are some of the only information we have left, because so many of these mounds were utterly destroyed.

In 1905, I believe it was, there were still 12,000 mounds and mound complexes in Ohio. By 1950, that was down to 5,000. So, that’s how quickly Americans just destroyed the mounds.

Okay. Now, Great Horn Serpent is connected to a sky. You can see his solstice alignment, and you can see his lunar alignments. People have worked these out. This isn’t a matter of speculation. Depending on where you stand during ceremony, you can see winter solstice equinox, summer solstice sunset, and that’s sunrise. Very important times of the year, and not the least because if you’re a farming culture, you kind of got to know when to start planting.

Here, you’ve got the most important sight line is right through the middle of his medicine bundle, and right through his smoothing stone, which would have been right in the middle. Okay, and you can also see all of different moon rises going on. Moon rises were really important. In fact, the people that built most of the animal refugees in Ohio, their name was actually “the moonlight people” because they spent most of their time looking at night sky to construct this thing.

All right, I told you that we do not see the Mississippi River the same way the Europeans do. In fact, we see it starting at the Allegheny river, which is right up here in what’s now Pennsylvania. You can see him running here, see it running, and then it connects with the Ohio River, because the Europeans gave them all these names, separated them out, and that connects with what’s called the “Lower Mississippi.”

Except, we see it as all the same. And look at it, you can see it on the map here — the Indigenous Mississippi starting way up here in Pennsylvania, going all the way through here, and all the way down to the delta. Right? That’s the Great Horned Serpent, you know. Saw him running out of his coils in Ohio- this is the trip he’s making.

He’s coming down, all the way down to the sea. So, he’s traveling south, and his horns are the Mississippi delta, and that so-called ‘egg’, this medicine bundle, winds up being the Caribbean Sea. We know what the landscape looks like. Here is an actual area of Mississippi here, and here, and here you see this little shallow area.

Okay, look at what’s going on here. In Ohio, you’ve got his horns, and you’ve got this shallow area indicated — that’s the opening of this medicine bundle- where the ‘egg’ is emerging. That’s what they’re calling it, but it’s emerging and so you could throw the stones into the water, that was really important. Okay. Are the troops getting restless? We can stop sharing for the day if the troops are feeling restless. All right, do you see the how…

Cleo Kearns: The troops are riveted, not restless!

Roger Green: And folks, now I think at this point, anybody who wants to can start kind of putting questions into the chat. And I want to draw attention to a couple of other native folks who — in chats — who gave some of the worst things that you can say in Cheyenne or in Lakota, so I’ll just draw your attention there. And I’ll just take questions as like, kind of first come, first serve. And I’ll turn them over to people, and then maybe we can cut some of the talking over of people. But Tink, maybe — Barbara just talked for a while — did you want to expand on any of that stuff, Tink?

Tink Tinker: Yeah, I’ll say a little more, but I am looking forward to getting people involved in the conversation too, and hearing especially from other natives who happen to be participants in this. I suggested the first time I spoke, that were special people, and Barbara in both of her talks, has underscored that dramatically with her maps of, you know, mounds and the mound culture.

And it’s interesting that for us, relationship to the land is really key. Harmony and balance with the land is key. Marking the land is key. I hear this part, you know, a lot of this stuff has been erased by the eurochristian invasion.

The mounds were dismantled, so the invaders used rocks from the mound to build fences, and build houses, and simply, you know, took them apart, so that they could level the ground out and use it for planting. Or, they were destroyed in order to do minerals extraction, but in this part of the country, here in the west, we still have the most dramatic representation of that as the medicine wheel up in Wyoming.

But even though the attempt has been made to erase that part of our living, our relationship to the earth, it still exists in the deep structure of our minds and our behavioral patterns so that when we create ceremonies, when we go out to a make ceremony, we have particular ways that we do that. In 1978, I started going into San Quentin Prison, in Bryn County here, one of the roughest California State Penitentiaries, to visit with Indian inmates.

And already, there, natives were beginning to argue about what direction the sweat lodge should face. It’s so serious in many federal prisons, that they’ve allowed inmates to build two separate fireplaces with one lodge — a fireplace to the east for an east sweat lodge, and a fireplace to the west, for a west sweat lodge.

But the important thing is, that the design of the lodge is circular, with openings either to the east or to the west, and with the fireplace to that direction, so that the line of the sun is exactly, you know, the line that you draw from the fire pit to the stone pit inside the lodge. You know, it’s an east-west line.

Same thing happens in dances. Dances like the Sundance, or the Green Corn Dance. This you know, the Sundance, typically in the plains, the opening to the dance harbors from the east, and the dancers come in that east door, just as the sun is rising above the horizon in the morning.

Spatiality is incredibly important, whereas for eurochristians, it’s always temporality, right? Mass starts at 9 am, 10 am, 11 a.m, and noon, and they last 48 minutes each so we can get people out the door and the new crowd in. If you’re a Protestant, the liturgy’s 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Any longer than that, and you might be out of a job pretty soon, because people have learned, habitually, that they can’t sit any longer than that.

And so, you know a lot of eurochristians would come drop in at Four Winds [American Indian Council in Denver, Colorado] when we were having ceremony downtown, where I was doing ceremony for 25 years, and after an hour they get real fidgety. And after two hours, they would get up and excuse themselves and say, “I’m sorry, but we have reservations at the Pancake House.”

[Laughter]

Our ceremony would last as long as people spoke, because see, it didn’t depend upon me. I was just there to coordinate traffic. It depended on how much was on people’s minds, because we went around the room, in a circle to let everyone have their say.

We would invite in the Wanagi, those relatives from the Wanagi world. In Barbara’s book she calls them spirits, and a lot of Indian people these days use the English word ‘spirits’. I have some problem with that because, my understanding of the Indian world is that we’re radical materialists and these spirits have bodies and I’ve actually seen these bodies.

(Barbara Mann: Yeah, they do, they do, yeah.)

Tink Tinker: Wow! So I call them Wanagi. I use the Osage word which has a different set of meanings than the Lakota word Winagi. It’s a more holistic meaning in Osage. We’d call them in and then we would wada. And the missionaries picked that word and said, “oh yeah, that’s your word for prayer.” Why do we have to have a word for what you do?

‘Prayer’ is an up/ down image schema. We’re “praying” to that male sky god that you all think is “the one,” and of course they also want to know, “Oh, Tink, what’s your Osage word for ‘god’’? Because languages are just different codes for a human universal…NOT!

So, I wrote the article years ago now, “Why I Don’t Believe in a Creator,” because, as Barbara says, the number ‘one’ is untenable. It doesn’t work. Everything becomes that up /down image schema.

If you have the number ‘two’, then you have up and down working to create balance and harmony in all of life. So we don’t. We quit using the word ‘pray’ at Four Winds eventually, and I use the Osage word, ‘wada’ which simply means ‘talk’. We talk to our relatives from the Wanagi world, who after all, were on that same collateral egalitarian horizontal axis as we are — they’re not above us, they’re not below us — even though they might be sky Wanagi or earth Wanagi — spirits of blood or spirits of breath, like  Barbara’s book, but we’re all on the same plane.

The Wanagi just have access to different energies and different skills than we do, hence they bring things into our world that we can’t access, except through them. On the other hand, as Albert White Hat used to insist, they need our help too. They need human help, because they can’t come into our world to help us, unless we invite them in — either in a good way or a bad way. So that we’re working together to create harmony and balance.

Ideally, in our ceremonies we go around the room, everyone would get a chance to without talk to the Wanagi, and that meant we could go a long time, depending on how much was on people’s minds.

You know, after 9/11 when those buildings came down in New York, the people of Four Winds spent three and a half hours wada in ceremony talking, and we weren’t done and ready to eat until everyone had finished saying everything that was on their mind. As my colleague here in Denver,  Glenn Morris is fond of saying, “in the Indian world, there are no bosses, no up/ down image schema, no hierarchy, no one can tell anyone what they need to do. We can only encourage one another, make requests of one another.”

Even when I wanted a ceremony, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, and went to a sicangu, medicine man, his name was Eagle Elk, Joe Eagle Elk, and I said to him, “Joe, do I need to offer you a pipe?” And his response was telling, I mean, in terms of world view, in terms of collateral egalitarian. He said, “no, you don’t need to bring me a pipe.”

In English, he said this, “you could go find a red willow stick about that long, as big around as your pinky, and you could cut it, and you could strip the bark off of it, and you could paint it red, and you could tie a red tobacco tie on the end of it, and you could bring that to me, and tell me what you want in ceremony.” There were no imperatives, like “go do this.” He wasn’t telling me what to do, but I knew that his Wanagi weren’t going to come into his ceremony and help me, unless I followed that protocol.

Interesting stuff. Very interesting stuff. I’ll hold up there and see if we get some input from other people.

Roger Green: Yeah, and I’ll just invite, because Sheldon and Gracie you’ve both made comments in the chat box, I just wanted to give you a chance to join into the conversation.

Tink Tinker: Ekon!

Gracie RedShirt Tyon: Hello! Good morning! It’s a good day today, and I want to say thank you so much for having this time, and I’m really grateful to be a part of this discussion this morning! Thank you, Barbara, and thank you, Tink, and thanks for everyone being here today. And I wanted to just say that, I want to acknowledge the traditional homelands of the tribal nations that we reside on in this area of Colorado.

Tink Tinker: Hawe!

Give them, give thanks to those relatives and to our ancestors for allowing us to be here and for taking care of this land.

I just made a few comments in the chat, and I just wanted to say, talk about, I appreciate this topic, about the differences of world views, because we’re constantly faced with this. As a Lakota woman, and every day, always faced with contradictions, or contrast, or even conflicts of world views, and so I think a lot of my interest lies in — how do we navigate that, and how do we help our young people and students to navigate that as well as people that are our allies? How do we bring them to the understanding of our worldview, and not just the understanding, but the recognition and the respect?

One of the things that struck me about Barbara, about your Powerpoint, I love it. I love the images that you provided about the cosmology, because all of our beliefs for the most part, you know, this world mirrors the spirit world. So, everything that we have here is a mirror of the spirit world and I think that just displayed so much of my belief system also.

And you know, the Black Hills and the sacred and the holy place of the Black Hills — we call that the heart of everything that is — not just in the physical, but in the spiritual in the cosmology, so I really appreciate what you brought today, and I’m so grateful to be here, and to learn that, and to be a part of this conversation. Pilamaya!

Tink Tinker: Kasi x’si, Gracie! Good to hear your voice. Good to have you with us, and thank you for remembering that you and I and Roger and others are sitting on Cheyenne and Arapahoe lands. Lands that Lakotas and Osages also traversed regularly in this city of what two or three million of invasive peoples. 

Barbara Mann: Oh, I have some more pictures, since people seem to like them. I didn’t want to bore anybody, but since people like it,  I can make up some more things to show you. Let’s see, where did that..? Oh, right. Okay. Let’s look down here.

We have a place in Ohio it was when the relatives Wyandot now…the Olentangy Caverns. They’re right down there, near the Columbus, which was named for Columbus as you say, and you’re quite right — a lot of the mounds were built with stones and not just rocks. We would mine river-shaped square, very heavy stones and there was a magnificent mound in what’s now Columbus, Ohio, and it was built entirely of stone.

The settlers were, it was a pyramid actually, and the settlers were so upset about it in the 19th century, that they took down the entire mound, the stone mound pyramid, because their stories said that we were too savage to build anything like that, let alone have a plan that included squares and circles. So, then they used all those already cut and beautifully shaped stones to build the first capital of the state of Ohio, as we called it.

And Ohio, by the way, is a Seneca word, it means “a beautiful river.” So, they built their capital out of those stones that they took from the mound they destroyed, and then that capitol burned to the ground, because the spirit people who were in those rocks did not like that use, I think.

In any case, Olentangy Caverns is near Delaware, which is right near Columbus. Delaware was a very old Cherokee area, but the one that used this cave, Olentangy Caverns, and I want you to take a look at what it looks like here, there there’s like a 60-foot drop. It’s a very strong drop, and people used to go down a rope, very important in traditions in this area because you have the two spirits — and I know that New Agers have taken that and made it something it’s not, but everybody has a spirit of blood they got through their mother, and the spirit of the breath they got from their father.

The spirit of blood comes from underground and goes back underground. So, there’s that brought back to underground, and babies that haven’t been born yet, are depicted as little smiling faces looking up from underneath the ground, waiting for a woman to walk over so they can jump in her feet, and then slide up to her womb. So, the little babies would be down in this kind of an area. There were ceremonies that were held here.

I want you to take a good look at how this is, and of course they would call this the crystal room, and the tower room. We had a couple different names, and the chamber, this was all, you know, names they slapped on it. But I want you to take a look at reproduction, female reproduction. And I want you to take a good look at where the ovaries are. I want you to take a good look at the cervical canal. I want you to take a good look at the uterine cavity and all that.

Now, I want you to look at the cave again all right, mother earth as womb. That’s where all the babies are waiting to come back up. This is where your blood spirit goes when the body disintegrates. And I want you to look at the fundus. I want you to look at the ovaries. I want you to look at the cervical area, how coming in right once you look at all of this.

We knew exactly what this was. You can go down into those caves, of course, they both have steps down, now.  But some Wyandots do run at his tourist area. Archaeologists found the remains of a little baby maybe a couple months old, his poor little bones in a crevice there, it was in one, I forget which of these two branches it was. It was in one or the other.

And it was not a burial that somebody did in a hurry, blah, blah, blah. That was a woman inviting her poor baby to come back to her, to be reborn, to come back under her feet, and under her womb, so that she could bear that child again.

All right, there are a lot of symbols of cosmic balance. These are primarily Cherokee. Cherokee build roundhouses and square houses for our summer, but the sky is the circle of breath and the square is the blood of earth. Those are the representations. There will be a causeway connecting these two.

Also, I have the nested circles and semi-circles. This is a view from top/down here on the left this is the back of turtle rising, turtle mother earth rising from the ocean. On the outside in the the middle part here is the atmosphere but the outside is the circle of sky around the earth.

Here we’re looking in profile. This is the back of turtle rising from the water, and this is the sky overarching, she carries this land on her back.

All right, you see these motifs everywhere. Here are the circles. You can see the circles, and we always had what the archaeologists call them out…it was watered around it’s very important to have water typically to the east of any ceremonial mountain complex because that was spirit protection. Spirits of breath had to cross water to leave, to get on the milky way trail. Spirits of blood could not cross that water to get back into the ceremonial space so you will see rivers and you will see causeways.

This is Lenape. They perceive of reality as like an onion layer. You keep peeling, there are layers of consciousness reality spirit, and then when you get to the very center, right here, you’ve got earth. So it’s like peeling away the layers of reality. It’s a very interesting one. This one’s down there in Kentucky.

This, you’ve got all kinds of things going on here. You’ve got the circle square complex and there’s always a causeway and these are very large acreages. Here, you’ve got the circle of sky surrounding the square, and here you have a really interesting development. You’ve got water connecting directly with sky water and sky. That’s very interesting. Here you’ve got the assembly circle the turtle rising and the sky around him.

Okay. Here this is a very huge important mound ceremonial complex that is now Newark, Ohio. All of this was destroyed. Everything was destroyed the only thing that remains is a circle, an octagon. It’s an octagon because the Cherokee had eight clans so instead of a square they had the eight clans. One of the the clans died when the mound builders were overthrown, so they now have seven clans, but at that time it was eight.

These are not distorted because they couldn’t draw an octagon right. These are distorted because, depending where you stand on the observation mound (whoops), depending on where you stand you can sight different events through each of these little mound openings. This is where people would enter ceremonial space. Each of these little mound mounds here marked a period of the sky, by the night sky, for you’re first spotting what was going on.

This is a very important piece of water because again it protects ceremonial space. Here, you’ve got the circle mound. This is still here. They call this the eagle mound. It’s not an eagle. It’s the foot of the thunderbird. Okay, the claw of an eagle is what we call him, thunderbird is kind of archaeologists use.

His foot, the ceremony that was conducted there was so powerful that ‘claw of an eagle’ or thunderbird came down, and he just touched the ground, because he’s sky. It’s hard for him to touch the ground. He touched it with one foot, and it was so powerful that when he rose back up his mouth moves up in his wake.

Okay, here’s the causeway leading to the connected square. All that was destroyed when the euros put their railroad through. These burial mounds, they just totally destroyed it, and what they did — according to records — is they took all the burials and all the bones and they just threw them into the mouded area to support their railroad this railroad which is no longer there was built out of the bones of the people.

Some of these uh little circle mounds are still there they’ve actually found burials in this area, but this circle octagon, one of the oldest most important heritage sites in the world, it’s on the world register…is a member’s only golf course that we’ve been trying to get off there forever, but it won’t go anywhere.

They refuse to move it.

Mother, mom, I call it the mother mouth. It’s mother earth. Look at mother earth going in her arms circle and square. That is absolutely beautiful. These are water motifs that you’re seeing there. So mother earth, turtle mother earth, she’s holding the circle and the square that’s really powerful stuff. 

All right, just the last one. This came from an art show down there in Newark that we held, and these are all things that were made by people from this area. My granddaughter had one of these. My daughter was given that by a Shawnee woman. It’s wearing…because a child’s umbilical cord after it’s born because the umbilicus is very important for connecting you to here.

This, I love this obsidian, red obsidian knife with the deer handle and one of them carved. Here’s another one. I think this one is beautiful. In any case, I will stop sharing [my PowerPoint] now.

Okay, so those are some more indications of how earth connects to humans, connects to land, connects to animals. You have the eagle, the claw-land of the eagle, which is the Georgia monument, as well.

But the spatiality and the way it’s used is ceremonial space. There’s not an inch of Turtle Island [which] is north america, you know, the turtle’s coming north and then you’ve got mexico in the central americas, the tail, and then south america is a fish zooming up to attach to this turtle who is carrying us about.

So, that’s the way that we envision this sort of thing going on and the stars are connected to earth. When I was a kid, we’d go out at night and kind of mimic ceremony.  We were just kids. Whatever constellations were up there, we take sticks and we commemorate whatever that was.

And you can find under the mounds a pattern of stars, you can find under the mounds (and archaeologists have hung these) and they’re all swooped. They don’t know what it means, but there are sticks that were under those mounds. I think they were part of stabilizing the amount of the dirt, but they mimic the patterns of the stars when that mound was built.

And the men would have done that because they would have done, they were by and large astronomers, because that’s a man job. That’s a breath thing, so they would have probably placed those sticks. That was again wood that come from man part.

And all the standing men that were cut down are matters of great grief because when a young man dies his breath spirit, if he’s going to stay and guard the people, goes into the trees goes into the trees. And when they say “the false face, oh the Iroquois have false faces”… those are not false faces. They’re not masks. That is the face of the spirit that’s in that tree, is the face of that man, a young man who volunteered to guard the people, so cutting down all those trees broke everybody’s heart.

Roger Green: As we’re waiting comments here, Barbara, I’m reminded that you — in our in our conversations about this talk — you expressed that I share that you’re Bear clan and that Tink is Eagle clan, and that’s important. So, I wondered if either, or both of you, could speak to that, and if anybody has questions or comments please share them in the chat.

Barbara Mann: Yeah, the clans also show the two halves, and it’s a nice combination of breath and blood going on there. The bear is very important critter of course. He’s very heavy medicine, and so being a bear and a panther is a nice balance all by itself.  Tink? 

Tink Tinker: For us both Bear and Panther are earth clans…

Barbara Mann: Well, Panther would be sky because he hunts in the forest and jumps. And you know, getting off…

Tink Tinker: Both Bear and Panther clans, and we have 24 clans, so Bear and Panther are the two clans that are invested with the spiritual responsibility for protecting the people.

Barbara Mann: Ah as Bears are protecting too…

Tink Tinker: Eagle is also an earth clan,

Barbara Mann: mmmhmmm

Tink Tinker: And it connects sky and earth. 

Barbara Mann: Yeah, it would.

Tink Tinker: And interestingly enough, Buffalo is the sky clan.  Now, we in my household, we connect sky and earth because we are both Eagle and Buffalo. As Barbara knows, and Roger, and a lot of others of you, Jill, and Dan and Beth…eight years ago, we adopted a close relative, my brother’s granddaughter, who is buffalo clan — toka uthsethe — buffalo bull clan.

So we have both in our household. And when we took her in, even though by adoption she’s now Eagle, she was named in a ceremony into the buffalo clan. Her name is Toopé — ‘they will gaze upon her’ — by her grandpa, back from the Osage reservation in ceremony.  And, in our world, in our land, in our villages, traditionally, — it is destroyed of course by the missionaries and by colonization — the earth people lived on the south side of the road, the sky people lived on the north side of the road, with the road representing the path of the sun, east to west.

And the two chiefs, one was sky and one was earth.  They lived in the center of the village in large lodges across the road from each other.  Large lodges, because they might have to host any guests who come into the village, and they’re responsible for gifting the guests who come into the village feeding them and giving them a place to lay their head at night so the important role being a gaihega — strange word, “chief,” because chief immediately brings this image of up-down image schema to bear.

But because my daughter was born into Buffalo clan toka the buffalo bull toka uthsethe, I had to teach her when she was fifty months old, four years old just barely, “you’re left sided. You put your left shoe on first. You tie your left shoe first. So don’t pay attention to your dad.  I’m Eagle clan born, so I’m right-sided, and I put my right shoe on first, my right arm through a jacket first.”  This isn’t right-handed and left-handed, it’s right-sided and left-sided, and it’s a social device to help us remember who we are every moment of every day.

And that’s critically important, to remember whether I’m sky or earth, and to walk the earth that way and walk in balance with the others in my community who are on the other side of the road. And having a Sky clan daughter helps me enormously [to] live that in an urban environment where all the other pressures of urbanality would be inclined to erase that distinction and allow me to forget who I am. But that lives deep. It’s ingrained in us way back. And now it’s ingrained in her and she’s now in sixth grade middle school, her first year in middle school, and she’s attending a school in Denver — remote by the way it’s all distance learning because of Covid — but a school called the American Indian Academy of Denver and I don’t know if Gracie is still with us but my daughter is learning Lakota, not Osage, because they have a Lakota teacher in this school, and she’s pretty good at it.  

Gracie RedShirt Tyon: That’s good to hear. I’m still here, Tink, thank you. That’s great, because you…you and I both know that our languages are very similar. Same, yeah, same language group, and I’m happy for her, that she’s able to learn that.

Tink Tinker: Yeah, a lot of words the same and her her grandpa is bilingual Osage and Lakota both. He was adopted up at Rosebud forty years ago.

Roger Green: There’s a question from Sheldon Spotted Elk. Sheldon, do you want to ask it yourself? or I can read it out for you, but I’ll just invite you to ask it yourself first.

Sheldon Spotted Elk: Certainly, certainly I could ask. Hopping on. Thank you so much. Great information. I, the question I had is about some of the concrete applications of this. And so, I grew up in, I’m Northern Cheyenne from Linger, Montana originally. Living here in Denver now, but I just was curious about any of this work being able to translate, world views, and I know primary sources especially in the legal arena being in ceremony, elders, song dance, using that to translate to build institutions — of course tribes are sovereign governments now — and that’s, I think a different worldview that kind of adds on to on top of what we’re talking about is the cosmological worldview, but have you seen very much work as far as translating that and making institutions and law more approximate to culture? is the direct question. Now hopefully that makes sense, so I’ll wait for your answer. Thank you.

Tink Tinker: Thank you, Sheldon. I’m going to say a few words, Barbara, if I can. Um it’s really complex.

We live in a late colonial period, and you kind of named the complexity by my by naming “tribal governments.” You’ve got to remember the tribal governments are not our old traditional community governing structures. Tribal governments were created by the colonizer, by the U.S. government particularly, in that 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. I never use the word ‘tribal’ unless I’m talking about a colonialist tribal government.

I much prefer what the Osage Nation calls itself today, is Osage Nation. They slip up and start using the word tribal because they’re you know we passed a new Constitution a decade ago. The last article of the new Constitution said “this constitution will take effect as soon as it is approved by a majority of the Osage plebiscite and is approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

What?! Approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs? The U.S. government?

I raised the objection and was told, “Tink, please argue the point after we get the constitution because we really need to get this constitution.” We ain’t sovereign. We’re something called “quasi sovereign,” or as John Marshall said in an 1830 Supreme Court decision, a “domestic dependent nation”… whatever in the world that is! He made it up. He made it up out of whole cloth. It didn’t exist until that moment, and now we’re the living reality of it because we think tribal governments are sovereign and tribal governments are no more sovereign than the city of Denver or Arapahoe County or the the town of Elizabeth, Colorado.

It all comes under that hierarchy, right? That up-down image schema. Here’s the U.S., there’s Colorado and its sovereignty, there’s the county and its sovereignty, the city and its sovereignty, and Indian reservations are down here at that level of sovereignty, which means we ain’t very sovereign. We get to make choices about stuff that the U.S. government concedes to us to make, period. I don’t concede that point yet. I’ve been fighting it for the 76 years that I’ve been on this earth, and I hope that my grandkids will be fighting it long after I’m gone.

What we need is to begin to reclaim — and by the way the new Osage Constitution, instead of two gallega, we now have one principal chief, a principal chief an assistant principal chief, a national congress a national supreme court judiciary. That pretty much looks like the U.S. government to me. It’s unicameral, not bicameral, but we have modeled our government after the colonizer. There are other words, but we’re in public, so I won’t use uh, you know, stuff like, uh like cow manure — that’s really what it is — and we think we’ve got something because we’ve got self-governance.

We don’t have the freedom to determine our own people’s future. The United Nations has ensured we don’t have that self-determination factor when they approve that document on Indigenous Peoples. We really are — internationally, globally, Indigenous Peoples are — have an inferior sovereignty to that of this artificial, plastic entity called a nation-state that claims territorial prerogatives over their native territories over our native territories. So I guess I have another agenda, Sheldon, namely when I’m arguing the difference in worldview I’m beginning to lay out what I think might be helpful even to our colonizer-relatives in terms of their need to correct the radical imbalance that they’ve caused in the world through 528 years of colonization, and through the 500 years (or 1500 years before that) of violence on the european continent, and throughout the middle east, the so-called crusades to reclaim what they think is is their territory, but it’s no part of europe, but jerusalem. from Muslim occupation.

By then of course it was a Muslim homeland. It wasn’t eurochristian, even though they were still Christians and still Jews in that part of the world. It was simply conquest on the part of christian kings in europe.

We’re still involved in that. We’re still involved in treating the earth as if it were just there for human convenience, for us to use and abuse and to use up. So extraction industries happen even on our reservations where we’re supposedly sovereign, and Osages even allow it because we’ve learned to deal in this abstraction called “money,” “currency,” rather than feeling the relationship directly to the land so there’s a pipeline now that cuts all the way across the Osage reservation and unlike our relatives up north, Osages were glad to have it come through because the allotment holders of the land got a kick back from the oil companies where whenever the pipeline crossed their land.

I want us to begin talking about coaching our colonizer eurochristian, Christian relatives in a different way of feeling the world of experiencing a different sense of physicality, where we can begin to rein-in on what we see as this economically necessary need to rip up the earth to extract coal, iron, oil, natural gas, whatever your the mineral of need is at the moment — and it gets worse with the invention of high-tech technologies where we need uh you know precious metals to build all the electronic technology for a laptop or a cell phone. We can we can coach them on a better way to live in harmony and balance with the world around us.

Barbara Mann: Tink. Thank you for bringing that up. I wasn’t going to get too much into it, but you know, Ohio has no reservations. You read the Greenville treaty, we were promised them. But you know what happened? all the die-hards came to Ohio, and we put up a resistance that they really had to think twice about. It took them another let’s see…from 1783 until it was about after 1800, it was like 1817 before they got the last area of Ohio, which was our reservation.

They took it all. They took it all, and they were so mad at us for putting up that fight that nobody got any land whatsoever. Some of us were enrolled and, you know they kind of played with that in the 1950s because, “well you’re not on a reservation, you’re not”… Okay, what’s going on here?

I would like to put in a good word by the way for the great law, of the Iroquois, which you may know, because the U.S. government was actually patterned after the government we created, except they left a few things out. Everything was bicameral. The men had younger and elder brothers in their councils who had to talk come to consensus. Women had the elder and younger clans and their councils had reached consensus, and then the floor had to reach yet another consensus.

The women alone controlled the agenda, and so there was that little bit of hierarchy. Men could send it forward, but if we didn’t want to talk about it, nothing more. Nothing more. Okay, by the way, if you get out to outer space, the men have the stage, because space is a breath. But women have total control of their own affairs, and women alone controlled the land.

In 1848, the U.S. government passed laws abolishing, abolishing the [Iroquoian] League, and that was in retribution for preventing them from going past our areas for 250 years. They imposed their own form of government in 1848, which totally disempowered the women. We hadn’t been the strongest advocates, saying, “you can’t have land.” [In] 1868 they made it even stronger. Women in West Virginia didn’t even get the vote back until like 1968, ’67 or ’68.

It’s not necessarily the Iroquois form of government that they bastardized that’s the problem. The problem is the monetization, because we have a gift economy. It’s not the exchange economy, which is based on rating. It’s a gift economy, which is based on taking care of the world. We’re not just giving to other human beings. It’s, if you take down a tree you by-god plant a tree. If you’re on it … you’re very very careful [with] land and you use it for more than 20 years before you move along your circuit.

So there are very strict rules of land usage and, by the way, pipelines are not part of it. You were very careful about digging in earth because that was somebody’s house, right? You were very careful about taking down a tree because there was a man in there. There was a man in that tree. So the rules that we had are completely ignored by all the so-called tribal governments of a few reservations, and a lot of them, a lot of those governments, get pretty high-handed, and a lot of people consider them complete neo-colonial expressions.

And I do agree with you, Tink, that can’t be the vehicle that we’re using. There was an African-American, woman scholar named Audre Lorde who wrote a wonderful article I recommend to everybody. She was talking about slavery, but she said the master’s tools will never dismantle a master’s house. That’s a really important concept and so by going into law and using western law, we’re not dismantling the house. We’re adding to the master’s house, the invader’s house. And I’ve always taken that essay to heart. I think she wrote it in the seventies, but it’s still very pertinent. You’ve got to be careful about the tools you’re using because you can only build what those tools will build, and I really would think we need to use tools to know that the old way.

Roger Green: There are a number of questions in the in the chat, so I’ll just kind of direct everybody’s attention there, but in the next order there’s one from Adam Loch, there’s one from Carl Rashcke, there’s one from Andy Yost, and one from William Elkins. So, maybe we’ll just kind of go in that order. Adam, do you want to jump in and say it? I don’t like to just speak for other people.

Adam Loch: I don’t mind if you read it.

Roger Green: Okay, Adam says, “what role do ceremonies associated with particular places, like some of some of the effigies, Dr Mann shared with us, have in promoting a political order? How does the autonomy of participating individuals generate political order according to reciprocal dualisms slash the twinship model or twinship principle?”

Barbara Mann: I’m not sure i understood the question, did you, Tink? Can you try it again, Adam?

Tink Tinker: Read the last part of it about the twinship principle again, Roger.

Roger Green: “How does the autonomy of participating individuals generate political order according to the reciprocal dualism or the twinship principle?”

Barbara Mann: Well, everybody has total freedom, and Tink was mentioning that with the dual chief system. Everybody has total total freedom, but you also have total responsibility,

Tink Tinker: Absolutely, yes.

Barbara Mann: So it’s not just about “I don’t want to wear a mask, I don’t have to wear a mask.” It’s about waiting for that grandma over there who could get very very sick. Your first thought has to be your obligation to the people and to everything around you. Your first obligation is not to yourself. So that’s how your autonomy works. You have autonomy, but you also have a responsibility that goes along with it. Is that clear at all?

Tink Tinker: When South Dakota AIM [American Indian Movement] decided they’d go back to the Black Hills again for sundance…for a number of years, they occupied a camp in the Black Hills camp, Yellow Thunder, but in the early 2000s they decided to go back deeper into the hills, into Wind Cave National Park, and so, out of, as a courtesy, Russell Means went to the park superintendent of Wind Cave to announce that they were going to do this and what the dates were. The superintendent said, “Well we can’t allow you to do that,” and Russell said, “We didn’t ask permission. We’re telling you when we’re doing it.”

And after a much longer conversation, the superintendent said, “Well, okay” and announced that his rangers would be keeping an eye on this massive encampment that was invading the black hills. And Russell said, “No, we know how to leave the land the way we found it, and it will be left the way we found it. Your rangers are welcome to come into our camp. Please tell them to lock their weapons in the car because they will not be allowed in our camp.” And he had to re-emphasize that because the superintendent wasn’t sure that he could send his rangers into an aim encampment without weapons.

But they continue to have that dance. It’s now led by a number of, a couple of at least, three of Russell’s sons. I guess that’s real sovereignty. They didn’t go to Pine Ridge government and say, “help us do this.” They circumvented all those institutions. Nor did he do it as an individual. He did it as part of a communal home. And of course, over the years sundances have proliferated on those northern reservations.

One year…was a good ten years ago, I was up at Pine Ridge and they told me they had counted 32 sundances on that reservation alone, which is to say a lot of families began hosting their own sundances because the large sundances tended to become a little too out of hand, a little too much not enough room to actually wada with the wanagi who came in to that sundance altar.

So, the AIM sundance was just one of those. I was there two years, two summers ago, I was there — last summer of course it got cancelled [due to Covid 19], but I was there two summers ago and it was a wonderful thing to be up there. All the Black Hills, in the middle of the tall grass, and to be camping up there with people. So I don’t know if that answers Adam’s question or not, but you know place still matters. yeah that one cave is the place of emergence for Lakota peoples.

Roger Green: Carl asked me to pass on his question, but Andy Yost has a question. Andy, do you want to speak it yourself?

Tink Tinker: Hi Andy, how are you?

Andy Yost: Yeah, Hi Dr Tinker, Dr Green, I’m happy to just ask it, if that’s okay with you, I don’t want to break protocol…I’m getting the go ahead. Okay, great. And Dr Mann, I just want to say personally, it’s a privilege to get a chance to speak to you directly. I was also a student of Dr Tinker’s and read closely your work and continue to do so in the work that I currently do as a lawyer for the federal government’s capacity building center for courts.

One of the things that I do with my colleague, Sheldon Spotted Elk, and this is an old lawyer trick — he didn’t actually tell you he’s also a lawyer —

Tink Tinker: Somebody’s got to be a lawyer, I guess.

Andy Yost: That’s right, I know, we’re usually embarrassed to say it, which is why…but I wanted to just, you know, put him on blast there for a minute. He and I work together in a number of capacities. One of them is, we work with a number of tribes on what’s called the tribal court improvement program, and I realize, by the way, that we…based on what we’ve learned today..that’s already, there’s already a thousand and one problems with even that set of words. So let me just recognize that on its face, and I’m hoping that for a little bit of charity so I can at least get a cogent question out, and you can address it.

Part of our work, a large part of our work, is helping or at least trying to help tribes develop for them themselves court — I’m going to use the term — ‘court systems’, but systems to, that can address and manage child abuse and neglect. Instances of child abuse and neglect. So the sort of shorthand way, the eurochristian way, let’s say, of saying that is helping them work on their court systems that handle child abuse neglect cases. So that’s just by way of of context.

So my question actually is more of a worldview question for both of you. My question is essentially, what is justice on the indigenous worldview? and if justice, the word justice, isn’t the…is an inappropriate term to use, your language Dr Tinker, coach me up a little bit. What are the right terms, and how might I as a lawyer thrown into the world… eurochristian world view, working with indigenous tribes, how might I be useful in the work that I’m doing as I try to bring whatever justice is or help inaugurate a more just relationship between our work on the fed and the tribal side?

Tink Tinker: I want my friend, Brett Shelton, involved in a conversation about this. Brett’s Ogalala and spent a number of years engaged in exactly that kind of legal practice on Pine Ridge, until he burned out, I think.

You’ve signaled a host of problems that we deal with in this light colonial period. Colonialism has not left Indian people unaffected. Genocide has not left us whole. It affects us psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, physically, all those ways. And one of the coping mechanisms introduced to us by the christians is alcohol, and now drugs, introduced to us by the eurochristians. Sociologically, but they were all Christians, so we may as well name it what it is.

Alcohol was a tool of colonization. It was a way of attacking self-dependency of Indian peoples and it worked way too well and today way too many of our people have succumbed to this disease of alcoholism i spent 30 years beginning with going into San Quentin prison going into facilities federal and state to visit Indian inmates almost all of whom were incarcerated because of things they did when they were inebriated, or later on on drugs, but usually inebriated. That’s the drug of choice, it seems like, [for] Indian People.

That’s what you’re dealing with in family systems too, Andy, unfortunately. It’s a postcolonial reality that we have yet to get a handle on as Indian People. Not that we haven’t tried. We have plenty of institutions on every reservation in every urban community struggling to get a handle on that.

I spent the last thirty years pouring water in a sweat lodge ceremony … í’n ungli (sitting with the stones), where about half the people who came out to this ceremony with me were former inmates. And all of them struggling with issues of alcohol abuse had sobered up and were trying struggling to stay sober. A friend of mine wrote a paper forty years ago saying spousal abuse is not an Indian tradition. Just the opposite. It’s only colonization genocide and alcoholism that introduces family abuse into Indian communities, and it starts with with men abusing women, trying to live the christian ideal of the hegemony of men of the patriarchy. And you see, it never quite worked in our Indian communities because women never forgot they were in charge. Never forgot that they were the decision makers and not the man.

Even if men were the spokespeople, the people sent out just to talk to government officials. There’s a story about people in Manhattan trying to talk to the Lenape and wondering why the Lenape showed up with with women in their contingent to negotiate a treaty. And and the Lenape, looking at the Dutch, saying, “where are your women? don’t you have any women?” Two different world views. Two different ways of experiencing the world.

And the Dutch asked the Lenapes, “What are you? a nation of women?” You know, putting them down, putting them in their place. And the Lenape, to their credit, looked at one another finally answered, and said, “Yeah, I guess so, nothing more powerful than that!” So that, when missionaries begin to introduce this notion that men are the head of the household, that’s really hard on the men. They don’t know how to act. And once alcohol is introduced, they tend to act the way the europeans act towards Indians, with some violence, and that’s so deeply rooted that it’s still going on to this day.

How do we change that? It’s our internal question that we are struggling with. It’s not that we’re not struggling with it, we really are, but it’s very very difficult when the reservation — and even urban Indian communities — are so rooted in desperate poverty there are reservations where the unemployment rate is regularly in excess of 75, 80, 85, up to 92 percent. That’s terrible!

And that makes for this desperate need to find other ways to cope. And alcohol and drugs is one of the ways to alter the reality of, you know, men have no way to support their families anymore. We can’t go out and hunt anymore, and we don’t have jobs, and the only money available it seems like is AFDC Aid to Families with Dependent Children. So that it really changes the structural realities in our communities, the social constructions. Long answer to a shorter question. Barbara, you have something to say about that?

Barbara Mann: I was just thinking about a story grandma told me about women taking care of a problem of an abusive man. Their sister, he was bad to her and the children, so at 2:00am when he was passed out drunk they sowed him into a blanket, dragged him far out in the woods and beat him with baseball bats in the blanket they sewed him in. Then, after they got tired of doing that, they went home. Never came back, and then they supported their sister and the children.

I was thinking about my uncle while you were talking. About, you know, boarding school did that to people…

Tink Tinker: Yes, that’s part of the equation absolutely

Barbara Mann: You know, boarding school did it to my uncle, but you know, I remember he would, he would get quite drunk. When he wasn’t drunk, he was a great man — I mean great in the old sense of the Indians — being great, standing up for people who couldn’t stand up for themselves, facing down bullies, and you know, euro-bullies and all that. But there would be times he’d tell me when he would be so drunk he would hold on to the grass so he wouldn’t fall off the ground.

And I know it was true, I know it was. He never did get the better of that but he was always a good, old-fashioned man…he took his responsibilities, and he never took it out on the family. He never took it out on anybody but himself. So there is that, and I think it’s because there were still traditional elements.

For example, the… for the Iroquois anyway, the primary male figure for the children, sister’s children, is not her husband but her brother. So we spent a great deal of time with my mother’s brother and his children. I think that had a lot to do with keeping him as straight as he was, because you just do that one old traditional thing and it’s like an anchor, you know, it’s…this is something you can hold on to and hope for.

So, I think going back to the old ways is probably one of the best ways. I was talking a friend [inaudible], who was another woman from the pacific northwest who told me, “you know, we just started using the old food.” And I grew up with the old food, we… I never even had cheese till like 22 or anything like it. We just used the old food — corn, beans, and squash — and because we couldn’t get, you know, deer meat and that sort of think or like, turkey.

But it’s old traditional food, I think, that is extremely helpful in keeping your head right. So, do the old things. If you just do the old things, I think that would go a long way helping people. And not demonizing the person who was acting out. I think it’s really important not to do that. People are going to act out, especially after they’ve been through what Indian People went through. Instead of that, you’re all, “Shame on you, you’re bad person! You must be punished!”… But instead of that, going out and doing a traditional thing. You know, just something like that is, I think, of a great deal more help you know than the law they’ve got now.

Tink Tinker: Let let me say something more about two things — one just in response to to what Barbara’s saying. The Indian inmates, incarcerated Indians I used to visit, were necessarily sober cause they were prison, right? Some of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, because they’re sober.

Come back to Andy’s other question that we didn’t get to yet. This word ‘justice’. One problem is that eurochristian languages trade in such weighty abstractions. Now, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and company, cognitive linguists, can assure us that all language is metaphoric and I can say too — and by the way, some of my best friends, Sheldon, are lawyers — you’ve heard that one before, huh? And smiling, because, we’ve been friends a long time.

Such weighty abstractions like ‘justice’, like ‘sin’, like ‘evil,’ We didn’t have a word for that in Osage. We only had an understanding of harmony and balance. That’s what it’s all about. Every individual, every family, every lodge, every clan, every village, ultimately the whole world, has to be in harmony and balance. That’s the goal, not justice.

Did we have ways of encouraging people to have certain kinds of behavior? Yeah, in an Osage village, each of the gaihega, two of them, right? Each of them would pick five ákida so that there were ten total who would live then around the lodges of the gaihega, and their job was to ensure that the people of the village followed protocol. Yes, a great deal of freedom, as Barbara said.

You can’t tell anyone what to do, but you can interrupt somebody who is being disruptive in the community and talk to them about it. And ultimately, the gaihega can’t do this, the ákida cannot do this, but the council of old wounds — the nóhonzhinga — they can sit down, talk through somebody’s behavior, and ask them to leave, and find somewhere else to leave. That’s pretty awful, because no other village will take that person in, so that person is on their own, if they survive for a period of a long time, until they can come back and make amends.

So it didn’t happen very often! There weren’t murders in Indian communities because, you know, the consequences were awful. And under colonialism, when there was a murder, usually it was more like an execution.

So, when Spotted Elk…not Spotted Elk — I’m looking at Sheldon’s picture — when Spotted Tail at Rosebud was murdered by uh…Crow Dog! Thank you, I can read lips… was murdered by Crow Dog, Crow Dog knew what he was doing. He knew it was an execution, and he knew he had to pay the price. And he knew what the consequences were, and when the U.S. government became involved, Crow Dog walked across the territory of the Dakotas to get to Sioux Falls on the appointed time for his incarceration and execution because he knew that was the consequence.

It was only a court case, a different justice system, Andy, that rescued him from that fate, but he was prepared, because he was acting for the people over against a former hero who had become too compliant with u.s. government people in the Dakota territory. And you see that very, very often, very often, in stories about — your colonialist stories — about Indians and the american justice system.

We deal in concretes and every day, in real world much more than the abstractions that are commonplace, every day, all the time in the eurochristian world. And one reason for that is that our languages tend to be verb based whereas your christian languages — English particularly, German exceptionally — are noun-based. Nouns are so important in German, they capitalize all of them! To their credit, there’s a pronoun they don’t capitalize — the first person singular — that English does.

But our languages are verb-based, at least the languages I know. I don’t know about Seneca and Iroquois languages, Barbara, but I’m assuming they’re verb-based.

Barbara Mann: Yeah.

Tink Tinker: The nouns build off the verbs, not the other way around. When you start with a noun, you start with an abstraction. When you start with a verb, you start with visible action that’s unfolding, that’s happening. So, we don’t have “gods.” ‘God’s’ an abstraction, whether it’s “God, male sky God” of the Christians or lowercase ‘g’ god, it’s still an abstraction. What is it?

I wrote a paper for a sister journal that Carl edits on ‘religion’, explaining that Indians don’t have religion. Religion’s another abstraction. What is it?

Barbara Mann:…a controlling mechanism…

Tink inker: Andy was in a class with me, and so was Adam, where we argued whether religion is a real category or not. It was that joint doctoral committee, joint doctoral program seminar — theory what was it “theory, theories and methods in religious studies.” Barbara, I didn’t mean to cut you off…

Barbara Mann: I didn’t mean to cut you off. You were talking.

Tink Tinker: kakunah!

Roger Green: So, I want to be aware of of time, even though it’s a eurochristian concept. There was maybe one…there’s one more question here, maybe we could end there. It’s from William Elkins, and William, are you still here? Do you want to speak it yourself, or I can read it for you? [waits]

He says, well, he was asking about a song, so let me just read his question here, it says, “To our Native American spokespersons in general, and all in general, are you familiar with ‘the Eagle’s song, the last resort’” and then he says, “if folks aren’t familiar with the song, I think it will be appreciated. It complements Dr Tinker’s representation of colonial christianity, just read this is my comment.” Do either of you know the song?

Tink Tinker: I know a lot of songs. They’re mostly in Osage or in Lakota. I don’t know that one by the Eagles, no. My kids probably know it.

Barbara Mann: I don’t know it either.

Roger Green: So, that feels like a good time to to wrap things up. I wanted to point to a couple more talks we’re hoping for. We’ll do a talk on the this concept of ‘sovereignty’ again in early February but we don’t have a date. And it’s it sounds like we have Walter Mignolo, who will be a critical conversationalist in January. And we’re building towards a conference in April that The New Polis is going to put on on the concept of decolonization, and particularly around the Doctrine of christian Discovery or the Doctrine of christian Domination — as Steven Newcomb (Shawnee / Lenape) puts it.

So, we’re always wanting more people to write and contribute to The New Polis and also to sort of build towards that event. And particularly along with that kind of abstract concept of the Doctrine of Discovery, particularly the issue of land-back, the tangible land-back issue, rather than statues…go ahead Tink…

Tink Tinker: Gracie just signaled that we should be careful with the word ‘sovereignty’ — that’s another eurochristian abstraction that we don’t have in any Indian language, but you’re also in trying to track down Glenn Morris to get him to do one of these conversations on on the word ‘sovereignty’ and Native People. Thank you, Gracie!

Roger Green: Yeah, and I wasn’t…I wasn’t naming Glenn, but now that you’ve named him, Glenn, your name is out there Glenn! [laughs]

And one more thing. So, there is a a new a new book called The Colonial Compromise that Tink and Barbara and Miguel de la Torre — a lot of people from the community — have recently put out, so you can check that out. It’s kind of expensive, so you might look for it through databases if you have access. So, with that I’ll just thank everybody for being here, and I thank especially Barbara Mann and Tink Tinker for being here. And, any parting words for from either of you?

Barbara Mann: No, just that nouns are very convenient if you’re planning on lying to people.

Tink Tinker: I would encourage people who are interested in the sketchings that Barbara showed us to look at her book Indians Archaeologists and the Mounds. It’s a wonderful text. She’s holding up a copy of it now for you to see the cover of.

Barbara Mann: Yeah, I did that way back in 2003.

Tink Tinker: Yeah, and I recommend everything she’s written, but one of my all-time favorites is Iroquoian Women, and I use those books in the classroom a great deal. Always good to see you, Barbara, and to be able to work together, and thank Roger and Carl for putting this together and I’ll say, kashínkaton wada!

Carl Raschke: Thank you very much this is incredible thank you

Roger Green: I hope everybody has a great day

Barbara Mann: Bye bye, Tink…Roger, Carl.


Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology


Carl Jung

“Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns...The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite.” ― Alex M. Vikoulov, Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality

Poet and Author Tennessee Williams

"Life is the perpetual destruction of innocence. If we are witness to this, and if we step forward and heal the wounds of this destruction, we become human; we might even become saintly. If we share what we've seen and learned, we may create art. To do nothing is to be utterly evil."-Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom


"The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process Metaphysician


Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology

by R.E. Slater


I was asked this weekend at our annual college Christmas party by fellow Christians to support their version of a "biblical" eschatology and how that "biblical truth" might be the more meaningful for living out our Christian faith as [liberal progressivism] overtakes the traditional church in an Age of Conservative Evangelicalism.

Mentally, my silent response was, "Yeah for American liberal progressivism seeking legal and civil equalities and recognitions to 'the unwanted other's' civil rights!" As versus the main church's active denial of those same rights by my Christian friends whose persuasion was the same one I've listened to all my life in their evangelical church traditions justifying their beliefs based upon their obsequious literal readings of the bible. (I will speak more to how to read the bible a bit later in this post.)

And secondly, my enjoining muted response in which I offered no further answers except continued silent response to their statements and thus preventing a predictably imminent and virtual crucifixion by my Christian friends. To speak would simply excite them to dig in and not listen. There was no purpose in attempting any truth speaking to religiously attuned ears seeking justifying responses to their own. I simply made a wise crack to relieve the tension in the room and left.

However, what I wanted to say would have been more along the lines of what I will observe immediately below. I would've stated that the only human Armageddon to come in my Christian friend's expected eschatological schemes (sic, from select passages in Daniel, the OT Prophets, and the NT such as the book of Revelation) would be by their own hands. Not God's. Nor the devil's. That end time judgments have usually come by the hands of the church itself historically. But of course, they would've decried my assessment against their own beliefs based upon a lifetime of personal and congregations readings, discussions, educational classes, and the pulpit. There was no winning this debate.

I Was but Now Am

Years ago I had entertained the very thoughts my friend's held that night based on old-timey fundamentalist teleologies and later, new-line evangelical teleologies (sic, the eschatological doctrine of design and purpose by God for creation). I too would've denounced my present self and shown by chapter-and-verse from Genesis to Revelation how to construct a biblical eschatology based upon a Reformed Covenantal reading of the bible. In fact, my graduate capstone paper for M.Div. certification centered on biblical exegetical studies proposing eleven major themes of the bible... several of which dealt expressly with teleology though I could easily make the case that all those same bible themes did so in themselves. Now realize that I was centering on major themes of the bible back in the 1980s; today, I could easily add a few more based upon current church discussions.

In that capstone project I merged those eleven themes with one another and discussed in brief what was meant by such subject matter as salvific discontinuity and continuity between the Testaments; God's Promises through the covenantal eras; the maturation of the major OT/NT Covenants across time; the various typologies of the Christ to come (sic, Messianic Christology); the movement of Salvific History through time, and etc. All this effort was done in order to complete a fuller picture of the coming future of God's inbreak into end-time human history describing God's divine sovereignty as God moved with humanity from the Fall of Adam to the Resurrection of Christ to the Salvation of both World & Cosmos. This then was the picture of redemptive eschatology I was taught would come to fruition via the "I-Thou cooperative" between God and man.

Now I still believe in these elements but am now expanding them beyond their traditional Christian basis when I speak to the more centralizing ideas of God's love and immanence (intimate nearness) with creation while lessening, or removing all together, the traditional church's theologoumenas as they are reflected by it's doctrines and creeds. When doing this, I am purposely placing my former education and theologies into a "progressive form" of evangelicalism and/or church traditions.

But when taking this step, I am also attempting to remove from my vocabulary and cultural mindset my own Western Philosophical thoughts when replacing them (as I can) with Whitehead's Processual thought structures. Which means all the Greek Platonic (sic, Hellenaic) philosophic structures describing God and man in the NT bible - or the more organic Semitic philosophies of the OT, are lifted out and replaced by Processual philosophy. Which in itself is it's own organic philosophy attuned to more similar mindsets from the ancient past. That is, Whitehead was echoed by Hegel who was echoed by earlier Semitic and Greek philosophers against Westernization's philosopher's such as Plato, Aristotle, and the rest who won out.

Thus, Whiteheadian process thought is the latest encapsulation of the past which is winning-over my own yearning to re-express my Christian beliefs in fuller, more congruent tones, to today's arising ecological civilizations and perhaps be recapture in other indigenous cultures and religions. Over the years I have gone into some depth to express all this... here, is my shorthand for observed momentous change which I see occurring across all of life's many disciplines and socio-political and economic landscapes as they each become more attuned to God's creative processual design in nature and the stars.

As an example of difference think in terms of the Greek pantheon's many Gods led by Zeus in their uncaring, unloving, greatness and power. Their distance from the world and their easy judgment upon mankind. This I have abandoned and refuse to conjoin Israel's and Christianity's God with such worthless Greek gods. When I read the bible now I am re-expressing the Christian God in terms of love, care, grace, mercy, and nearness, while also recognizing that the bible's authors in the ancient past did not separate their thoughts of God from their socio-cultural contexts as we have learned to do since the Enlightenment eras of the more recent past. And though their worship was tweaked to behave more in line with love than judgment and cruelty, still it was not fully enough when viewing Israel's doctrinal embodiments by the Pharisees and Scribes of Jesus' day. Thus Jesus ministry of indiscriminant love to the unwanted, unsightly, invisible, and oppressed. As well as Jesus' harshest words and actions against who were designated as priests of Israel's God. Even so today the church struggles with separating it's ideas of God from who God really is even as the bible narrators did in the past. Our pride and legalisms, wont for separateness, exclusion and holy "apartness," has brought a profound reading of the bible into today's civilizations. But again, I have discussed this at length over the years.

Hence, to contextually read the bible, one must read it in its cultural conjectures and teachings just as you would earlier ancient literature and beliefs. Some is fraught with goodness. Some not. Some is muddled in complexities by their own presumptions. And some more easier to grasp. And there's the rub. The ideas of the ancient past no longer translate "biblically" to the today's postmodern (er, metamodern?) world. Yes, the age-old metaphysical questions are the same of "sin and evil, God and man, purpose and reason for living." But the ways we approach such subjects must not be constricted by out-of-date Platonic, Scholastic, Enlightened, Victorian, nor Newtonian thinking any longer. With the age of (processual) quantum physics and (processual) evolution has come Whitehead and his predecessor, Hegel's, ideas of processual movement in a world which is never static, nor mechanical, nor without its own kind of processual (rather than reductionistic) teleology. In fact, we live in a processual creation/cosmos and don't even recognize it. We might call them "circles or cycles of life" (aka Disney's Lion King) but in Whiteheadian thought we may go far deeper than such simplistic statements.

What is a Process Teleology?

To Whitehead as a cosmological metaphysician who also happened to be a Victorian Christian, he observed a cosmology (or universe, or creation, or world) which was organic in its construction. He thought of it much like we do our own bodies and self-reflections moving through a world of experiences. We were not automatons any more than the world of quantum physics was, though scientists ascribed Newtonian philosophies to it. Yet, they did not work.

Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism spoke to a deeply complex, organically relational world of every changing causes and effects, where a positive evolution could evolve against all negative mutating circumstances. In these, like the biblical prophets and writers of old we would agree. When a God of love has essentially and purposely created creation from God's Self we would expect a struggle between good and evil - especially when it was created with agency, or INDETERMINANT free will, buried deep within the DNA of divine LOVE. Not by fiat did agency spawn. No, but by Love.

In time, Whitehead's ideas took shape and the generations after him recast his Philosophy of Organism as a Philosophy of Process, or, Process Philosophy properly stated. And as a progressive evangelical leaving evangelical teachings will keeping the bible ideas of "Covenant" and "Teleology" in my brain, heart, and faith, it became necessary to abandon not God but the old-line teachings of my faith. It held - and still does to some extent when not participating in White Christian Nationalism and Supremacy - a lot of good in it from many different directions. But of late, it's gotten tangled up with itself and has forgotten there is only one God and not the gods of politics appearing to my mind as the Evil Ones in Revelation.

None the less, these were things I thought but really couldn't speak to my present audience of Christian friends. They simply would not understand. As evidence of this I spoke to one of those friends who showed an interest for a time but then began to mentally wander off even as those close to our discussion moved away and spoke amongst themselves on other things they were more interested in. It is what it is, as they say in the state of New York. And you can't unmake that which is already decided and made. The best I can do is write down my thoughts and share with those who, like myself, must find another way.

From Faith to Faith, said the Apostle Paul

Which brings me to this observation: As a process Christian all the old line systematic theologies I was taught to believe - by both (i) exegetical interpretation of the Scriptures in the original languages plus (ii) eisigetical expositions from those studies - can no longer comport with the church's 2000 year hoary tradition of Westernized Christianity.

In its place, I am updating my faith through a more rigorous process of processual expansionism removing core Analytic Philosophical Westernized elements by replacing them with newer, more relationally organic elements pertaining both to my faith and civic life as a citizen of a liberal democracy eschewing any-and-all forms of authoritarian doctrinnaires and racisms as shown by the conservative church with its willful involvements in white neo-facist supremacy politics.

(Which is curious, as at one time I wrote here on an Age of Authoritarianism as versus an Age of Cooperative Participation of global communities with one another. To build ecological societies the latter must win out in displays of liberally adapted geographic global democracies against tyrannical and despotic governments of one or many. However, my shorthand at present is just to state Metamodernistic which implies these socio-economic elements and more.)

And so, when I now exegetically study the collected interpretations of God-and-life-and-faith in their orally derived and ancient/past commentaries, narratives, and interpretaive storylines of God in Scripture, I now read of them as plain admissions to theistic faiths in transition just like our own faiths are in transition today. Each historical era - whether in bible times or after - are attempts to describe a divinely loving God in their era-specific ageisms of culturally folkloric ideations of God-and-life-and-faith. Especially of a God who in many ways is "wholly-unlike us" but also a God who is "wholly alike us" in many, many other ways.

So when I speak of God I lean into the process version of God's nearness, participation, and fellowship with us, the world, and nature as versus the Platonic-Greek Hellenaic traditions of transcendency, wrathful holiness, and divine powers which Western theology has chosen to follow with its evidentiary histories of oppression, racism, and crusading inquisitions.

A God of Love is not a God of Wrath. The wrath we think we see is the consequences of our choosing not to love one another or the world about us. When ascribing to God Wrath, and Judgment, and Hell we are but describing ourselves and placing these qualities upon God. Which is why, I feel, the biblical authors had a hard time telling who the real God was and versus who they thought God was. 

These same discussions go on today in faith commentaries, books, and postings. And since divine revelation is open and not closed (sic, only found in the bible) I feel its a valid position to take that when a misapprehension of God is taken then I may call it out even when collected into the Scriptures. The biblical narratives are simply yesterday's newspapers of faithful believers gone wrong in their faith beliefs.

Reading the Bible As It Was and Can Become

Firstly, I don't read from a revelationally closed Bible but from an inspirationally open Bible by which I mean God is always in communication with us today as God was back then in "biblical" times. Whether by God's Spirit or however we wish to ascribe it along Western theological formulas and syllogistic equations.

Next, I would prefer to think of God's communication in terms of communing with us much as a parent would with a child... or a friend to a friend. To speak to one another in imagined divine fiats is one thing, but to commune with one another in divine love is another. A communion which vouchsafes God's lifelong fellowship and deeply earthy relational communion with us, and the universe, in continually intimate terms. Not in terms of a God ensconced upon a heavenly throne coming-and-going according to God's good whim much like the Greek gods had in the ancient Greek imagination.

Too, I've been leaning deeply into the process theological paradigms which teach God's nearness to us at all times in our lives. God does not - nay, will not - leave us as my earlier faith taught when teaching of a loving God beheld in idolatrous admixtures of a judging-and-condemning God. Without necessarily denying the ancient Greek idea of God's far-ness from us vis-a-vis the church's Hellenistic teachings of transcendence, a pan-en-theistic (not pan-theistic nor classical theistic) process faith better describes a God who created creation as One with God's Self. Think of this as a four-point "trinity" but in this case "creation" is the salient fourth point on the fellowship circle of Father-Son-and-Spirit. This then would describe a God who has no intentions of abandoning us because God is the kind of God who has been, and always will be, deeply, intimately, in processual relationship with us and God's beloved creation.

And to the outmoded eschatological idea of leaving this earth for a better, non-earthly life in heaven while the world burns itself up by its own hands in Armageddon-like ecology gone bad. This Christian theology as found in the NT book of Revelation seems quite un-God-like to a process Christian metaphysician. To such churchly beliefs of a distant God's impugning judgments upon a wicked, wasted earth, I would say this....

"If the events in Revelation's narratives do come about they will be wrought by our own hands - not by God's loving hands whose love forewarned us of sin and evil when we do not love one another. Nor does God pile-on when sin and evil measures our "endtime" existence.
Rather, one might say such calamities come from a polluted earth which we have corrupted to the point of its cosmic devastation. A devastation which bears consequences to our neglecting care of the earth.
So rather than ascribing to the Christian faith a judging Nether-God raging down His wrath and Hell upon us, I simply read in Revelation of unloving man's complete failures across societies, nature, and even the heavens itself. Which of course is a very processual theology which describes consequences to sin and evil and to which classic church doctrines would say anathema to in their closed, interpretive readings of God and Scripture and churchly dominionism."

A Heavenly Communion Which Doesn't Stay in Heaven

Further, when thinking of a "biblical" eschatology of predicted things to come first know God cannot control outcomes in a world God designed as generatively good in value and structure. Divine love does not control... it but persuades listening, obedient hearts against the misuse of its own agency.

And secondly, life is a procession of processual events both good and bad. "What we sow we will reap." A Loving God can never sow evil nor respond to evil in unloving, non-restorative ways of redeeming reunion.

And thirdly, we must learn to expand our minds and hearts away from the church's traditionalized teachings. It's biblical eschatology is divinely unbiblical as I have shown. But it also creates a closed cosmos whose future state becomes trapped within its own static statism.

However, if we substitute the word teleology for eschatology we then have a fully, more correct picture of a processually "uncontrolled" divine future working to rebalance its inherently redemptive structure away from deathly structures to divinely implanted transformative and generatively good structures. Structures I would better describe as organically inbuilt evidencing a teleology of atoning relationships between creation itself and its panenthiestically immanent Godhead. We might call such survivability as evolution, but a processually-based and divinely enable evolution speaks to continuing creative and generatively good evolving relationships seeking merger within its many cosmological forms.

Conclusion - We Are Whom We Are Becoming

Our conclusion? A process-based Christianity is more than progressive in its assessment of the world. It is a wholly-other construction away from perverse and unhelpful teachings of the traditional church (think gay re-education; or refugees being shipped to unready communities).

In essence, we are trading in a Fire-and-Brimstone God for a God of Love. And to the sins and evils in this life we do not blame God for them but ourselves for not humbling ourselves before one another and seeking goodness and kindness, listening and learning. God is a God of grace, mercy and forgiveness. Creation's very own teleology is one of generative goodness and valuative operation. Albeit, on its own terms, much like we ourselves likewise blessed with agency, but inherent in nature, in us, even the universe, is the Imago Dei of God.

And lastly, it is in creation's very nature - even us, ourselves - to redeem and recreate all things towards redemption. Christ did this very same in God's atoning emancipation. It is how creation's designed to work by active insemination from one redemptive effect to another. Process describes this creation process as "A process of Being which is Becoming." That is, we are, and we may move forwards towards what we may fully become as we can in this life and its circumstances. Like God Who once said to Israel "I AM who I AM"... so too we may also say, "We Are whom We are Becoming to Be."

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
December 12, 2022
partially updated January 23, 2023





Thursday, December 8, 2022

A Process Perspective of the Human Anatomy at the Nano Level



click to enlarge


​A Process Perspective of the Human Anatomy

by R.E. Slater

Years ago I watched YouTube's animation videos of our human body at the nano-scale. I was fascinated as I tried to imagine "the reality of the reality" I was seeing. It was absolutely surreal !

These vids came to mind this week when watching the movie "Strange World"... an illustration of the small and how it works together with itself and the world of the large. Without ruining the storyline let me just say I grew up in the generational worlds of my grandfather and my father who addressed life in their own ways even as I now have been adopting a newer view of life. A view which I hope I can pass down to Generations X, Gen Y (my kid's ages), and now Z (ages 14 and younger). A view which holistically focuses on the environment beyond our own.

Strange World
by Walt Disney Animation Studios


It is to the "Strange Worlds" beyond our own which I'd like to speak to here today... along with help from my online friend Jay McDaniel whose helpful process article you'll find at the end of this post. In it you'll find a far fuller discussion to what I will mention briefly here:

First, I've been replacing my Western Analytic Philosophy with A.N. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, as he named it in the early 1900s... now known as Process Philosophy (which is all the rage throughout science, theology, and eco-civilization discussions whether they know it or not). One of Whitehead's students was Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. (now, age 98, and very active in the process communities he has been spawning). Dr. Cobb took Whitehead's ideas and applied them to the bible and to his mainline Christian Methodist faith (built upon the Arminian (Reformed) tradition of human agency). What resulted was his philosophic application of process thinking into Methodism which we might describe as Christian Process Theology. Even so, I having been doing the same to my own evangelical faith structures by breaking down its Westernized Platonic teachingss in attempting a reasonable approximation of Whitehead's non-Platonic and very rich relational organic "Philosophy of Organism" into what I have been describing as Process Christianity over these many years.

A couple things to know:

1 - Process Philosophy is an Integral philosophy which means, all other philosophies, disciplines, and -isms, are but parts of the overall makeup of the universe we live in. A process universe once might describe as a process "reality" whatever that may mean. For Whitehead, it meant a book title, "Process and Reality" which is a must read. In the topical indexes to the right you'll find many resources to help you along (sic, "Index - Process...").

2Process Philosophy speaks to the cosmos as metaphysically alive; that it operates more as an organism than as a machine. This moves us from Plato, Medieval concerns, Newtonian Enlightenment, etc into the quantum age of all things. Things which operate processually like evolution, the human body, societies, economics... even God!

3 - Since we don't live in a binary, machine-like cosmology we may confidently state that we want to have an organic processual philosophy and theology (sic, religion of some kind; here, I prefer any process-based religion such as Process Christianity).

4 - Since everything is related to everything else we may thus describe the cosmology we live in as relational and may use terms such as panexperiential, panrelational, and panpsychic to describe this living organism we know as nature and the universe.

5 - Lastly, for those Christians asking this question, my own background comes out a deeply fundamental Baptist tradition which eventually heaved up into evangelicalism. This latter has recently split since the 1980s into conservative vs. progressive evangelical readings and understandings of the bible.

As process theology in naturally liberal and progressive I have simply uplifted my Christian faith (aka, Reformed) by removing bad theologies and replacing them with better, more expansive theology.

Love is the Center. A Loving God is its heart. Jesus is still the atoning, resurrected Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is still enlightening our beggarly hearts :) ... but rather than building on Platonic/Hellenaic/Western-American evangelicalism I've removed it as a foundation and am building upon Process Philosophy and Theology. When doing this it removes a lot of problems theologians have created for themselves over the millennia.

That's it, watch the vids. Enjoy the processual wonders of the human body. Learn to think organically, relationally, and interconnectively. Read Jay's article on the bottom to learn more. And follow through across the many articles you may find here. It's not meant to be hard but it may be helpful.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
December 8, 2022

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Human Cell, DNA, and Other Animations


DNA animation (2002-2014)
by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno
wehi.tv