Greetings, and welcome to Week 2 of Native American Religions and Ecology. Let's take up three themes in these remarks today: self-determination, sovereignty, and Indigenous knowledge. We're considering then self-determination and the voice of Native peoples, sovereignty and the inherent values of the people in relationship to the natural world, and Indigenous knowledge as knowing. These three concepts that provide the focus for these remarks, self-determination, sovereignty, and Indigenous knowledge, though contemporary expressions of Native communities voice for integrity and coherence, these ideas are also descriptive of much older traditional values. This becomes clearer as we explore ways in which Indigenous knowing makes us more aware of the spiritual experiences that ground Native American religions and ecologies. These central ideas then are not simply analytical concepts for understanding the diversity of Native American ecological thought. Rather, self-determination, sovereignty, and Indigenous knowledge are relational ideas. That is, they arise in the confluence of community, place, biodiversity, and cosmos. Native individuals, communities, and the cultures they transmit flow out of these traditional relationships with the local natural world and the larger universe of spiritual presences. These relationships with the larger natural world are not a management system created by humans to control nature. Rather, Indigenous voice, values, and knowing arise out of mutual relatedness with a dynamic living world. We can understand them as symbolic processes and entanglements that flow out of and help to create spiritually dynamic lifeways. "Lifeways" is a term that suggests the integration of relationships within Indigenous communities as an orienting idea rather than a definition. It serves to emphasize the interaction of individuals and community without raising either to dominance over the other. Lifeway then is not the collapse of the many forms of life experience, but a context in which a cause and effect and consequence are open-ended, dynamic, and relational. This is strikingly different from the reductive turn evident in much of modern Western thought that separates activities that we call economics, arts, religions, medicines, educations, or sciences. In this sense, we can recall an etymological reading of religion. This old etymological understanding of religare, religion as a binding back. Native American Religions and Ecology is a dialogue about the binding of individual lived experiences into a communal bundle or lifeway. What makes this dialogue most meaningful is that the lifeway bundle is inherently relational. The cultural richness of Native American traditions flows out of the many different ways in which these relational experiences were expressed in symbols. So that symbols and symbol making in this sense is not simply a representation of something, not a representation of something distant or other, rather the symbolic consciousness that we're speaking of in the Native American context makes present or acknowledges the presence of what it names. There are three components here of this symbolic consciousness that we should stress. Symbols as making present and symbols as giving rise to thought and symbols as evoking relationships. Let's consider two examples from Native American religious expression that manifest this inherent presencing and relating, namely drumming and storytelling. In Native American communities, the sound of the drum embodies and exemplifies relational life. Consider this drum by George Beaver. It's a Ghost Dance Drum from the Pawnee people. This particular healer images the Thunderbird with lightning coming out of the face and mouth of the Thunderbird and the swallows in flight in the sky. Again, this orienting in air, the feeling of this large orientation into a larger cosmos as well as the local, this drum made by this individual is unique in that we don't understand its particular symbolism. But the larger symbolic consciousness, obviously is presencing something. For George Beaver, this was also giving rise to thought and bringing him into relationship with these dynamics that he's pictured here. It's important to emphasize also the sound of the drum. The sound embodies and exemplifies relational life. It's very helpful to understand that this is differently articulated by the many Native peoples on the North American continent and yet there is a realization, there's a shared understanding that sound activates a symbolic awareness across the Native traditions. So while differentiated across the traditions, there's a shared understanding of this awareness that the drum itself is alive and it speaks through its sound. So by it's voice, the drum gives lived expression to the pulse of relational exchange between beings in existence, between local beings and cosmological beings. This relationality is not an absence to be achieved, but rather it brings into manifestation an integrative presence that pervades the lifeway. This relational consciousness gives rise to thought, it courses through art, it support subsistence practices, and it breathes voice into storytelling. Thus, we can say that this relational consciousness is the dynamic of Native American lifeways. It's the beating heart of Native American cultures. With self-determination then, when we consider local Indigenous communities gaining control of their own voice, they reassert the lifeway relationships embedded in Indigenous knowledge between people, places, land, biodiversity, ancestors, and spiritual presences. In this sense, self-determination is less of a political assertion by Native American leaders and more of an affirmation of the voice of the community in determining their own futures. Regaining control of Indigenous knowledge by local communities reasserts relationships of a particular people with places, lands, animals, plants, ancestors, and spiritual presences. Sovereignty calls out the deeper values in this voice of Indigenous peoples in reasserting relationships that have been muted, lost, or stolen. Sovereignty is typically associated with a political consciousness linked to treaty agreements and the re-examination of those broken agreements and the recognition of distinct Native peoples as nations within the United States and Canada. While these political actions are very significant and they're widespread among Native American elders and leaders, there is also a sense that nations applies not only to humans, but also to plants, insects, animals, clouds, atmosphere, and all of the distinct families of the living earth community. Thus, sovereignty for Native thinkers constantly challenges communities towards new ways of understanding their relationships with the surrounding world. We might call this the challenge of context and definition of sovereignty. That is, as soon as we try to impose a strict definition on sovereignty, for example, as the voice of Indigenous peoples to reassert relationships that have been muted, lost, or stolen, immediately, questions arise about which people and what place. Two examples then, the examples that we've already mentioned of the drum and storytelling help to clarify this relational knowing embedded in self-determination and sovereignty. When we consider the drums, such as in this drum group here, we have positioned the drum as a living presence in Native American religion. Its sound can be likened to a religious ecology. That is, its very nature is connected with others in a meaningful way. In this drum group, this circular symbol-making is evident in the drums symbolism but also as the community of players reaches out to the community of listeners. So we have the amplification of groups extending out into the nation of existent beings. Self-determination is the shared voice of these interacting, intersecting communities and sovereignty arises as the values that pervade these interactions and they give vitality to this act. These then are the voice, values, and knowing also found in oral storytelling. We have this charming image here of a father transmitting the stories to his son and imaging them on a buffalo hide. The relational sound that we saw in the drum is amplified by the act of storytelling. The breath of one's body becomes the drumming, and the transmission of this interaction with the listener. It's according to many Native American traditions, then, that stories have their own life, and so the father imparting the telling is imparting a life to his son also. The storyteller gives expression through her voice, his body, their gestures, to that story being. So also, the listening audience participates in that creation of relational knowing. This is this symbolic act of giving rise to thought in the next generation. The point here is that self-determination and sovereignty arise in all of the uncertainty and ambiguity of the story. It reminds us how stories are embedded in the dynamic relationships of life. Stories and percussive sound serve to bind relationships, not simply as experiences, but as ways of knowing. In this relationship then of Indigenous knowledge and traditional environmental knowledge, we speak of binding relationships into a unity. And there's an interesting paradox here. The paradox of verbal forms like binding, that suggest the world is in movement, the telling of the story, the drumming, and yet we also have noun forms like knowledge, and we have the fact of the drum itself, an object. These suggest that the world has form, and can be fixed. If the sound of the drum and storytelling are exemplary forces in Native American Religions and Ecology, then their movement accords with the verbal mode, which is characteristic of Native languages in North America. That is, verbal forms predominate. One example is the word "mnihaha", in the Nakota language. It translates, most clearly, as "laughter is happening to me," mnihaha. The world of impinging forces such as laughter comes to a person. Definition and contexts then move in relationship to one another. This bond between the unity of knowledge and the process of knowing creates the possibility of lifeway. Two Native scholars expressed it this way: "Perhaps, the closest one can get to describing unity in Indigenous knowledge is that knowledge is the expression of the vibrant relationships between people, their ecosystems, and other living beings and spirits that share their lands. All aspects of knowledge are interrelated and cannot be separated from the traditional territories of the people concerned. To the Indigenous ways of knowing, the self exists within a world that is subject to flux. The purpose of these ways of knowing is to reunify the world, or at least to reconcile the world to itself. Indigenous knowledge is the way of living within the context of flux, paradox, and tension, respecting the pull of dualism, and reconciling opposing forces. Developing these ways of knowing leads to freedom of consciousness, and to solidarity with the natural world." This is a profound insight into their own traditions by these Native scholars, and making connection to the ways of living, the lifeway of the people. These close connections of land and Indigenous knowing, help us understand what is intended by the phrase "Native American Religions and the Ecology." The binding of vibrant relationships of a people to their land activates personal freedom and solidarity with the larger life community. Another expression of this way of knowing has been described as Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK. So TEK, Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The relationships that constitute traditional ecological knowledge are the subject of intense debate among scholars, especially as TEK relates to Indigenous knowledge. Are they the same or are they different, Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge? For our purposes, let's consider four interrelated levels of Indigenous knowledge. First, the local and empirical knowledge of animals, plants, soils, and landscapes. Let's consider this traditional ecological knowledge. And it's obviously a observational or empirical knowing. And it's located within the sphere of the local. So it has the sense of my relationship to the place in which I've been born, in which I travel, so first level. And second level, the connecting of this analysis of changes in forests, movement of animals, and seasonal variations. So we're expanding the first level into the seasonal, the larger forests. These two, we can say, constitute a management system. This management system, then, is, as we said earlier, is not to control the natural world, but rather to enter into this connectedness. The third level of Indigenous knowledge in which we're situating traditional ecological knowledge: social institutions, rules, norms, values, and social relationships that affirm this knowledge as inherent to the life and survival of the people. Let's take as an example of this third level, the buffalo hunt in traditional times. Namely, when the buffalo were spotted, it was among many planes people, the duty of a particular group of warriors and individuals to really monitor the people so that no one charged the buffalo too early. These are institutions, rules and norms that embed a knowledge and transmit this knowledge that are related to the subsistence of the people. Fourth then, and let's call it the largest level, a worldview level of meaning that the shapes perception and gives rise to the sense of spiritual presences guiding individuals and communities. This is obviously the cosmological level. And it's important that we realize that the cosmological level is obviously folded back into the first level also, that we have a sense of the interrelatedness of these levels of Indigenous knowledge. If we consider these four levels, then, we realize that they're intimately related. And they're related in the ever-expanding human awareness of the larger world of the cosmos. The fourth level, this larger sense of the cosmological relatedness is, as we suggested, folded back into daily activities. We have to emphasize that the buffalo hunting example that I used earlier is traditional. But these four levels are still found among many fishing-oriented Native peoples, plant gathering so that there are institutional rules and traditional environmental knowledge which is still being transmitted today. We sense then that traditional ecological knowledge is not something different from Indigenous knowledge, but it serves as a portal into these four overlapping spheres of knowledge. So also, we can consider self-determination and sovereignty. They stand in relationship with Indigenous knowledge, not simply as contemporary statements of Native American political resurgence, they do that of course, but in our overview, what we're suggesting is that self-determination is the voice of the people. And that sovereignty is the assertion of deep values of community coherence. And that all of them flow from and in relationship to ways of knowing which we've characterized in these four levels. These then are the pulsating rhythms that emanate from the drum of the lifeway of the people.
