Excerpt from Kalpulli

Excerpt from Kalpulli: 'Dancing the Dream Awake"

...More than one keen observer of the human condition has said some version of the following: civilization itself is the problem. Over the last several thousand years, our evolution has fallen into a rut. Civilizations come and go, nations rise and fall, empires appear and disappear. Each rise and fall leaves things worse than they were before. This is not to say that there is no intended or unintended good in the process. But the environmental costs far outweigh the good.

To borrow a proverb from the French, "If you want to make an omelet, you must first break some eggs." Many readers will be offended by the premise that civilization is a problem. However, we do not advocate throwing the baby out with the bath water. We love Johann Sebastian Bach and William Shakespeare as much as anyone else does. It is not nihilism that drives us, but the need to change our frame of reference. The need to change what is absolute in the center of all of us, to paraphrase N. Scott Momaday.

Dr. John Kimmey has said that, "If you stop someone in the street and ask them to explain their civilization, you will get several different answers, depending on whom you stop." The goal of this project is that in five hundred years, everyone will know that the basis for our society lies in the original instructions given at the beginning of life by the Creator. To say that we are in the early stages of groping our way back to those original instructions would be an act of arrogance. We have a long walk to get to those beginnings. We must take the walk.

The alternative is not alternative. As the twentieth century moves inexorably toward the twenty-first, we are hearing from those who have neither vision, nor imagination, nor awareness. We are being told that our future is exclusively technological and competitive. This is unadulterated bunk, and it must and will be challenged by this project and innumerable other groups and individuals throughout the world.

Those who suffer from technopathy, terminal or otherwise, have never heard or have chosen to ignore the prophecies rooted in the tribal cultures of this planet. From the Hopis to the Tibetans, these prophecies have proven accurate. In one of his greatest poetic contributions, Dr. Peter Blue Cloud from the Six Nations Confederacy calls for a return to the "old, hard ways of Grandfather." Modernity itself is the greatest tyranny we have ever faced. Paraphrasing Robert Moore: We must stand and we will get beyond it.

The word iposti will be used increasingly and its usage will connote a deepening joy: post-modern, post-Graeco-Roman, post-Eurocentric, etc. What is worth keeping will of course be kept, but the rest must be carried to the curb. As William Butler Yeats reminds us, "Things fall apart, the center cannot remain." Black Elk states further, "Where you stand is the center." For most of the time that human beings have been on this planet, evolution has been our guide. Hunter-gatherer societies, for the most part, were able to stay in balance with the environment. Then we got ourselves into the civilization rut. In every sense of the term that counts, our evolution has been stuck. When subsistence gave way to the want of surplus, the environment suffered. When the environment suffered, everyone suffered. Subsistence does not mean barely scraping by. It is simply abundance without surplus, abundance without environmental degradation.

Conventional wisdom, the anti-wisdom that will kill all of us, tells us that once something is destroyed it is gone forever. but our relatives in Ghana remind us, "Ishey Olukwakolee Bashiyo. That which the Creator has made can never truly be destroyed."

Russell Means tells the story of a television crew that went to the Black Hills to make a documentary on the struggle of the Lakota people for the return of that sacred site. One of the reporters noticed that an elder was not speaking with the young peop0le in the community, much less teaching them old ways. His journalistic curiosity got the better of him, and he said, "Grandfather, I notice that you're not sharing any of your teachings with your young people. Why is that?" the elder responded, "These people are not worthy to learn what I have to teach them." The reporter then asked, "But Grandfather, with due respect, how ill the old ways continue if the elders do not share what they know?" the elder's answer was both revealing and comforting. He said, "When the day comes, when there is a worthy generation, the land will teach them what they need to know."

Consider the White Earth Land Recovery Project, the Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative, the Seventh Generation Fund, and the Tracking Project. These and other organizations are at work returning to those old, hard ways of Grandfather. In India, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, Tibet, and China, people are beginning to ask the right questions. Happily, they are also coming up with the right answers...