Ethnoautobiography, Accountability, and Virtual Spaces

Leny Mendoza Strobel

My name is Elenita Fe Luna Mendoza Strobel. I am Kapampangan from the Philippines. My ancestors are settlers from Southeast Asia who displaced the indigenous Aetas. Other ancestors are probably related to the Spanish who colonized the Philippines for more than 300 years. Today, I am a settler on Pomo and Coast Miwok lands on Turtle Island. In the U.S., I am a woman of color who spent several decades teaching Ethnic Studies at a California state university. I am married to a white man from Montana who is also an earth scientist, a mystic, and is of German and Russian descent. His ancestors are from an ethnic tribe in Germany who were ousted and displaced to Russia for 200 years before coming to Turtle Island as settlers.

I have worked with Jurgen Kremer for the last five years teaching Ethnoautobiography (EA) to undergraduates. As a scholar whose work focuses on decolonization and indigenization for Filipinos in the diaspora, my scholarly work closely parallels and resonates with Jurgen’s framework on decolonizing whiteness and recovery of the indigenous mind through Ethnoautobiography.

Jurgen is also an adviser to our nonprofit organization, the Center for Babaylan Studies (CFBS), which focuses on Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and practices (IKSP). As a Center we do not have a physical location; most of our work is in virtual spaces and social media. There is much about virtual spaces that is unpredictable so to remain grounded in indigenous values and vision is often a challenging terrain. Ethnoautobiography is a good framework for doing this work as it names the elements that we could nurture in our daily practice so that we may recover our indigenous mind:

1. connection to ancestors;
2. belonging to community;
3. knowing History and healing its shadows;
4. paying attention to dreams and imaginal realms;
5. cultivating a mythic imagination;
6. developing storytelling skills;
7. respecting gender fluidity and sexual orientations;
8. nurturing a faith or spiritual practice; and
9. reconnection with Nature.

The tenet of Kapwa in Filipino indigenous psychology is at the core of our work. Kapwa means  “The Self is in the Other.” In Kapwa, there is no Other. This way of looking at the world is indigenous. It’s all Connected. All is Sacred. We are all Relatives. This is what indigenous peoples believe and call “Original Instructions.” Kapwa psychology also articulates this sense of being and doing and relating. CFBS and its all-volunteer core group has, for over a decade, managed to seed a movement of decolonizing and re-indigenizing Filipino communities in the diaspora.  We have been organizing conferences, symposia, and retreats since 2010; we publish books and journal articles; and we utilize social media to expand our work.

Adrienne Marie Brown’s Emergent Strategies¹ also describes new ways of being (for most modern/western folks), becoming, and working together that is inspired and influenced by the world view and beliefs of communities of color and other minoritized groups. Her work is inspired by African American science fiction writer, Octavia Butler. She writes that “above all else, Relationships matter.”

Doing a lot of our work in virtual spaces and social media also subjects us to criticisms and call outs (now called “cancel culture”). In the time of Covid-19 isolation, it seems that this cancel culture phenomenon has emerged alongside extreme political polarization in the U.S. For CfBS it has been a learning space. In this essay, I cite examples of call outs that I have observed and followed on social media in my attempt to understand the phenomena and to distill what appropriate responses can be taught to us by the lens of Ethnoautobiography.

Ethnoautobiography is a decolonial lens and a practice that has the potential of healing historical trauma; of building bridges across differences; of inspiring visionary futures grounded on indigenous perspectives.

Call Out Culture in Diasporic Filipino Communities.

I feel encouraged by the powerful voices of folks who come from minoritized spaces who now find it imperative to speak their truth and are finding venues to amplify their messages through video blogs, podcasts, Facebook (FB), Instagram, Twitter, and elsewhere. CfBS has a small archive of online videos about our projects; a Facebook closed group and a Facebook public event page; an old website² and a new website in development.³ In the early years of yahoo listserves, we maintained a discussion group about decolonization (pagbabalikloob listserve on Yahoogroups) and we began the exploration of indigenous/precolonial traditions of the Philippines in the babaylan listserve. Both listserves became containers and catalysts for the longing and the desire to find kindred spirits among Filipinos in the diaspora and in the homeland and articulate a counter-narrative to colonial discourse. These eventually led to the creation of our non-profit organization; we seeded a decolonizing movement that is now visible in diasporic communities with large Filipino populations across the U.S. and Canada.

Our work has not been without its critics. As Facebook (FB) became the choice for sharing news and images from our events, our critics started calling us out. One Filipino American scholar who considers him/themself a keeper of indigenous traditions from the Cordillera region in Northern Philippines posted on FB that we don’t have the right to wear indigenous attire because we are not indigenous; that as lowlanders from the Philippines we are merely appropriating indigenous cultures in the name of decolonizing our identities. (There are over 150 indigenous/linguistic communities in the Philippines today, mostly located in Mindanao).

Our response to this scholar was to invite them to our events and to have a dialog with their indigenous elders either privately or in an organized event. We issued a private and a public invitation as a gesture of our willingness to listen to their criticisms and to try to build a bridge between his community and ours. They did not respond.

More recently, a small group of young and emerging US-born Filipino American scholars who are reclaiming an indigenous identity based on inherited bloodline to indigenous communities in the homeland started using social media to excoriate the work of CfBS without explicitly mentioning our organization. Using Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, their posts were designed to draw boundaries of right and wrong ways to decolonize and thus, were promoting an “us vs. them” binary, i.e., that non-indigenous Filipinos who claim to be decolonizing and embracing Filipino indigenous practices are guilty of cultural appropriation. The posts were sometimes incendiary as in “Fuck, Kapwa!;” “your ancestors are dead, don’t call on them!;” “a bunch of neoliberal bullshit.” One scholar wrote an online essay that elaborated on the call-outs⁴ and a scholar-elder from CfBS finally wrote a response⁵ that was also an invitation for face-to-face dialogue or online conversation. There was no response to this invitation. For now the call-outs seem to have been muted.

Another Philippine-based scholar called out our organization and published her criticism in her book. She writes that we have appropriated the term “babaylan” as a mere symbol of decolonization and feminist empowerment without engaging living babaylans on the ground in the homeland. Such symbolic appropriation, she writes, contributes to the invisibility and silencing of the living babaylans. She publicly stated that perhaps we do not even have the right to use “babaylan” in the name of our organization. Although this scholar is someone who has been supported by CfBS and has been publicly affirmed as a culture-bearer for having spent two decades learning from babaylans, chanters, and oralists, her dismissal of CfBS’ work created a breach in relationship that has not completely healed for me personally. In correspondence with this scholar, I said that as indigenizing scholars we should be building bridges between the work that is being done in the diaspora (in all its perceived flaws) and the work she is doing in the homeland. In this case the call out, lacking in understanding the historical context of CfBS’ inception and the unwillingness on both sides to mend fences, resulted in an impasse that is awaiting resolution to this day. However, it should be mentioned that CfBS continues to collaborate with this scholar’s own nongovernmental organization in the Philippines in affirmation of her vision to give voice to living babaylans.

In these call outs, CfBS takes the position of humble learners in the face of complex and layered issues around decolonization and re-indigenization that claim to be grounded in Filipino indigenous spirituality (to the extent that can be articulated) and embodied practices. As settlers on Turtle Island and as diasporic peoples, we are challenging ourselves to continuously educate ourselves by asking questions that push us to the edge of new understanding, new strategies for more effective negotiation and transformation in this era of manic global capitalism, boundless consumption, and severe climate change crisis. How do we do “indigenous work” in these fractured settings? What does it mean to be rooted in Place as a diasporic people? How do we become allies to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and in our homeland? Clearly, the learning is a process. The fourth international Babaylan conference held in Toronto focused on these questions.

How can social media enable spaces for respectful dialogue instead of perpetuating the deeply flawed binary/dualistic ways of thinking and othering? The culture-at-large, more recently due to the covid crisis and the murder of George Floyd, may be shifting the discourse a bit to reflect a “third way” thinking or “borderland thinking” but these happen in less visible, liminal spaces. During Covid isolation, CfBS has been able to create spaces for conversations and community-building. Through its Decolonization School, it has been using the framework of Ethnoautobiography to support participants in their journey towards ancestral healing, grief work, and culture-bearing work. CfBS also started a podcast, Kultivating Kapwa; its first ten episodes were interviews with this author as the founding elder of the organization. Subsequent and ongoing podcasts draw from the community members/culture-bearers discussing a myriad of topics such as: indigenous healing practices in Covid times; academic work as spiritual work; decolonizing parenting; healing intergenerational conflict; Filipino martial arts, indigenous arts in the diaspora, and many more. In a way these offerings are also a response to the call outs. In creating these offerings we are engaging the criticisms and elucidating our positions to clarify what is being misconstrued or misperceived by the critiques.

In all of these offerings, CfBS protocols and guidelines focus on Kapwa as relationship building; as a practice framed by Ethnoautobiography, the focus is on the practice of radical presence and participatory presence—both undergirded by critical humility.

Call-out Culture on College Campuses:

Prior to the Covid pandemic and the closure of schools, there was much social media attention on call-out cultures on college campuses. One example of an attempt to address the call-out culture on college campuses is voiced by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.⁶ He mentions that the prevailing call-out culture on college campuses is part of a larger culture of “victimhood”, a coddling of the American mind. While Haidt provides many examples (from East Coast colleges and in some California colleges) of students calling out teachers and administrators for triggering emotional trauma stemming from racism, classism, homophobia, and colonial trauma, he rarely provides a historical context to his analysis. He doesn’t mention the crisis of modernity and the failure of Enlightenment values to prevent the moral panic that he says characterizes the call-out culture. Instead he seems to rely on the silent and assumed universality of a moral code of ethics within a neoliberal ideology. Haidt believes that students who are raised in over-protected homes are ill prepared for the realities of adulthood; that their oversensitivity to offense makes them even more risk-averse. On diverse college campuses, he believes that differences of all kinds should be a source of curiosity and there should be a presumption of innocence and guilelessness when mistakes are committed. This is how he valorizes diversity.

Haidt also refers to the “economy of prestige” that he believes fuels this culture of victimhood. On one of his short online videos⁷ he cites an example of a Philippine indigenous culture, the Ilonggots, as a sick culture. In referencing anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo’s work about Ilonggot headhunting, he uses headhunting as an analogy to the modern practice of “increasing prestige” as a prime motivator of human behavior. He says that headhunting is a practice of increasing one’s prestige. This interpretation of Ilonggot headhunting is very different from Renato Rosaldo’s (husband of Michelle Rosaldo) study of headhunting. When Rosaldo asked why Ilonggots headhunt, they answered: “Because we need a container for our grief.” This answer is so different from the “need to increase one’s prestige.” In Culture and Truth,⁸ Rosaldo’s seminal text on critical anthropology turns the lens of critique on the practice of ethnography itself – the need for self-reflexivity on the part of the ethnographer; the need to be explicit about the knapsack of theories one carries on his/her backpack as they enter “other” cultures. The call-out culture that I observe on social media is not an attempt to increase one’s prestige; it is a cry for help; a cry for recognition; a cry for affirmation. Usually it is Grief looking for a container.

Without mention of historical contexts and the power of decolonizing processes for white folks and people of color alike, Haidt’s valorizing of diversity rings hollow. Changes in U.S. demographics due to global migration and displacement in the manic phase of late global capitalism; responses of the Global South to corporate globalization through the critical lens of anti-imperialist and postcolonial movements; climate refugees created by global climate crisis – all of these phenomena are creating awareness of the failure of the modern narrative of neoliberalism to address past injustice and present trauma. The call outs, facilitated by technology to a large extent, is part of this rising global voice in response to the trauma of the civilizing process which, fueled by the Enlightenment era, justified white supremacy and white theology as rational grounds for the genocide of native lands and peoples and creating “Otherness” as a category of difference. The Enlightenment era’s social contract was created as an ideal contract that undergirded European cultures until the European colonial projects necessitated the racialization of the social contract. This is the context that Haidt doesn’t mention.

Absent this historical context and analysis reinforces the presumption of a moral universal that is based on liberal ideas of the social contract that were racialized. Furthermore, it calls identity politics into question as a form of discourse of victimhood without having to take on issues of justice, reparation, and healing. Perhaps as a social psychologist, it’s understandable that Haidt’s horizon focuses more on individual attitudes and behaviors that create a climate of lack of safety from traumatic triggers. But to call this a symptom of ‘victimhood’ is to render oppressive systems, ideologies, and institutions invisible and denial leads to historical shadow material that festers in the psyche and manifests in collective anger, fear, and mistrust.

Ethnoautobiography and Historical Shadow Material

Ethnoautobiography’s (EA) emphasis on historical shadow work is useful. I think what we are seeing in today’s call-out culture is a working out of the historical shadow of the United States. As millennials and younger generations become disillusioned by white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, individualism, and the failed promises of neoliberalism, they are challenging paradigms that they’ve inherited from earlier generations and they are adept at using social media to voice their critique. However, cancel culture/call-outs tend to polarize more than provide spaces for dialogue and search for common ground in spaces where historical contextualization is missing. To extend historical analysis beyond the timeline of modernity is necessary to find common ground. Sound bites and 144 bytes of tweets, and short attention spans do not lend themselves to this in-depth engagement that’s necessary.

EA asserts that we all have indigenous roots; at one time all of our ancestors lived on indigenous lands. In our classroom, we ask students to trace the journeys of their ancestors from their ancestral homelands in Europe before the formation of modern nation states to their settler journeys to Turtle Island. What their research often uncovers are those historical moments (Big Stories) that shaped the personal history of their ancestors. These stories of displacement show the impact of genocidal wars, famine, imperial and colonial projects, slavery and at the same time these stories are also embedded in the narratives of progress, modernity, and development. There are losses either way and when those losses are accounted for—language loss, historical amnesia, cultural losses, ecological consequences—there is a felt need to grieve. Grief is not just personal but also cultural, ancestral,and civilizational. Ethnoautobiography provides a process for dealing with the shadowy consequences of History by recommending reconnection to indigenous elements that were disregarded and devalued in the rise of modernity. As a decolonial practice it decenters the western gaze, decolonizes whiteness, and uncovers the indigenous roots of whiteness. Healing what Jurgen Kremer calls “normative dissociation” of the modern self, ethnoautobiography re-connects the disconnection of the modern self from ancestry, community, history. In the process, it reveals the shadow and the losses, the grief, and the trauma of disconnection.

I have found several virtual spaces where a movement among millennials is emerging in their attempt to work out the shadows of the culture and history they have inherited.

“How We Gather”⁹ is a movement led by millennials seeking to address questions of belonging and meaning. This project was started by two graduate students at the Harvard Divinity School as a “spiritual start-up” in an attempt to map the tracks of personal transformation, social justice, community, accountability, creativity, and purpose-finding/spirituality among this generation. Exploring the “How We Gather” website leads to the various reports on how this movement is attempting to challenge traditional religious institutions to meet the questions of disillusioned millennials about the role of religion in their life. The report also points to the spaces and places where millennials are finding communities of belonging – in their gyms, yoga studios, impactHUBs, meetups with purpose, pop-up dinners, book clubs, etc.

The designers of “How We Gather” have since created Sacred Design Lab to provide “divinity consultancy” to corporations because they find that corporate employees feel spiritually depleted and are looking for sacred rituals to address this need. The aim and larger goal “is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense.”¹⁰ Angie Thurston, is also providing “Inner Sourcing” to young folks (21-26 yr old) who are looking to “go inward” and connect to Source and then find an outer expression of service.

“Living at the intersection of spirituality, social justice, identity, history” is how the off-shoot of a “How We Gather” retreat describes itself below:

Coming out of the “How We Gather” retreats, Marsha Foster Boyd (co-principal curator and facilitator), Marcia Lee (co-principal curator and facilitator), and Jennifer Bailey were invited by the “How We Gather” team to curate retreats for people of color involved in spiritual leadership and social action to create a more just and compassionate world. We have a vision of a process that allows us to strengthen the ties of spirituality and social justice in our lives and community by deepening in relationship with the Creator, self, and others. We recognize that our society has rotten roots of capitalism, racism, militarism and other oppressive systems, that our ancestors have survived and thrived in during violent times before us, and now is our time to come together to create the world that we know is possible. From our experiences, history, and dreaming was born the idea of How We Deepen.¹¹

Citing the above as one of many examples of technology-mediated spaces for creating communities of belonging, accountability, purpose, and meaning points to an emerging movement that seeks to address the deep shadows of imperial history and white supremacy. In this sense, trauma – not just individual but also cultural, history and civilizational trauma – is not so much about a “culture of victimhood” but a culture in search of a moral and ethical compass that reconnects us to all the indigenous elements we have been disconnected from.

I attended a “How We Deepen” retreat at the invitation of Marsha Foster Boyd and the retreat focused on story-telling, processing historical shadow material, reconnecting with ancestors, building community, deepening spiritual journeys. These are the same elements that Ethnoautobiography identifies; elements that the “normative dissociation” of the modern self can access to heal historical trauma. Through the re-centering of these indigenous-informed elements and processes, a common ground becomes palpable and possible across all kinds of differences. However, the common ground becomes visible only because of the willingness of all involved to be vulnerable to the work of Grief that comes with shadow work.

When the inner work manifests in the outer work, Vikki Reynolds,¹² a scholar/feminist/activist in Canada calls for “collective accountability….because Invasion, Occupation, Genocide, and Assimilation have created the Structures of Oppression that must be changed.” Change, says Reynolds, is usually initiated from the margins and then moves into the mainstream. She exhorts cisgendered and white allies to always ask themselves whether their “call outs” and “call ins,” in the end, result in doing justice. Her emphasis on “justice-doing” is contrasted with the “anti-oppressive” stance of many so-called allies of “others.” Justice-doing shifts the binary of “anti-oppressive” to a collective accountability and thus performing a more transformative politics of identity.

Ethno-accounting is critical to ethnoautobiography. How do we allow previously silenced and marginalized voices to speak their truth when it is difficult to hear? How does whiteness function in ways that make it difficult to listen? Ethnoautobiography asks us to practice critical humility. How would this look like? How do we bear witness to pain that is not simply personal…but cultural, historical, civilizational? How do we listen to pain that implicates us? How do we lean in and have tough conversations? These are questions that loosen up the boundaries of identity politics that tend to fix identities into sealed boxes of categories.

At a recent online course, We Will Dance With Mountains,¹³ created by Bayo Akomolafe and team-taught by Jurgen and myself, Isoke Femi and Eve Annecke, participants grappled with the process of decolonizing white identities (most of the participants were white). One of the lessons learned in doing this course online has to do with the limits of technology/virtual spaces for this kind of work. The processing of shadow material, building of online communities, listening to profound trauma and pain, lack of time and space to create a container for Grief—this important work is constrained by the medium. Nevertheless, connections that were made sparked ongoing conversations outside and beyond the course itself resulting in collaborative projects, friendships, and sustained dialogues. Bayo’s admonition to “get lost and slow down” to allow us to find other tables to sit on, ask new questions outside of the parameters of what’s been handed down, to make different choices—reminds us that this work doesn’t guarantee Certainty and fixed results. The modern era promised Certainty in many areas of life via mythic stories that were tied to ideas about the “ideal life”, “happiness”, “improvement”, “success”—all of which have dark underbellies that have subverted such projects.

New Spaces

I started writing this essay before the pandemic and at that time I was following some websites about transformation festivals that were growing in popularity. The pandemic has temporarily closed down these festivals but the sub-cultures they create are worth commenting on. Some parts of the “Call out culture” are also questioning the old ways of resistance, activism and protest; they are turning to more creative approaches and the creation of alternative spaces.

And speaking of alternative spaces, I notice the ubiquity of “transformation festivals.”¹⁴ I haven’t attended any of them. I am merely noticing that the younger generations who attend these festivals who are mostly white, upper and middle class, are searching for connection and community, for roots, for their own tribe. I have been following the discourse online about whether these festivals are just another form of escapism for a summer weekend-—to imbibe entheogens, to be transported to a different reality that feels magical, and away from the modern urban environments most of these folks probably are from. At issue is cultural appropriation as a lot of attendees don feathers, henna tattoos, and other cultural regalia that are deemed not their own.

The festival curators claim that these are the spaces for creating an ancient future culture through visionary art, electronic music, models of ecological living, dance, tribal rituals, sacred altars, creation of temples, raw food purveyors, ceremony. The festivals are located in the desert or wild spaces where a sense of mythos is invoked, a “communing with the earth” theme is centrally focused.

As an outsider looking in through the lens of ethnoautobiography, I am wondering how festival goers reconnect with their ancestors…how they process the shadow material as one looks at the history of whiteness and supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. Does this subculture, outside of its festival venues, feed into justice-doing and social justice movements?

Erin Sharpe, a scholar who has studied these festivals, writes that “although festivals are deemed as vehicles for social change, on-the-ground reality is more about the social reproduction of dominant power relations rather than emancipation.” One critique is that festivals poorly represent the interests and values of the community they purport to represent.¹⁵

Although these events aim and often claim to be “of the people and by the people” and a celebration of community values, numerous examples exist in which the expressed interests and values represented only a segment of the community, which most often were those of the socially and politically dominant groups.

Transformation festivals are also a testing ground for “leisure as resistance” approach to political activism. Within this emerging approach, the experiential and expressive qualities of leisure have become increasingly relevant. I observe the growing tendency for political events to incorporate music, dance, play, puppetry, and other creative elements. Social protests these days seem to have much more in common with arts fairs and theatre festivals than with the more traditional models of march, rally, and civil disobedience. For activists, this more festive and creative style of activism has emerged as a sustainable model for political participation in that it is imaginative, envisionary, and fun to do. In other words, instead of griping about what they’re against, activists use their protests to demonstrate what they’re for.

Sobey Wing,¹⁶ a Filipino American culture bearer in Vancouver, BC, has participated in festivals before they were called “transformation festival” by Jeet Kei Leung, one of the early festival organizers. Sobey says: “There was “a lot of cultural appropriation I was participating in and creating out of a notion of multiculturalism before I realized what I was doing.” He felt that his identity was being whitened. As someone who was part of the anarchist punk scene and rave culture, Sobey was aware that the intention of these subcultures was to reduce harm and to focus on community health, and to do anti-racism work. These cultures were eventually called “transformation festivals” by Jeet Kei Leung with the intention of describing the potential of these festivals to model a new way of living that is sustainable, about human connection and expression and giving hope to a disillusioned generation. However, with the growing popularity of these festivals, there was more and more emphasis on the marketing and entrepreneurial side.

Looking as an outsider through the lens of ethnoautobiography, I wanted to know if these transformation festivals were providing a venue for decolonizing whiteness, for becoming aware of indigenous issues, and for reconnecting with ancestors. According to Sobey, there is a very small fringe group at these festivals that is interested in these issues; he says that for the most part, the theme of “We are all One and We should not be Divided” is the more dominant theme at the festivals. There are, however, festivals that are beginning to offer educational workshops on decolonization, cultural appropriation, such as the Koksilah Festival¹⁷ in its second year in British Columbia and with indigenous-led programming. Sobey mentioned that some festivals invite indigenous elders to speak and describes these festivals as “liberal and pan-indigenous in scope with very little decolonizing.”¹⁸

It appears that the culture of transformation festivals is another emerging manifestation of a culture of resistance, a search for community, an attempt to simulate sacred ceremonies that bring about a feeling of “Oneness” and “Unity.” But how does a week-long event translate into justice-doing (as Vicky Reynolds recommends)? How does a week-end event imprint itself on people’s psyches with short attention spans? How do entheogens and altered states of consciousness usher in the difficult work of digging deeper, of doing archeological work of the psyche to be able to root out the psychic and epistemic violence of the civilizing process? Do festival goers have intact communities to return to where their transformative experience is received and then becomes fuel to build beloved communities?

Spiritual Commodities

My inbox is also full of free offers of seminars, workshops, online sessions, webinars about health and wellbeing and spirituality. I see the branding and marketing of wellness offerings. One friend owns the trademark to “The Conscious Reality Creation Method: The Six Figure Entrepreneur Guide to Accelerated Freedom.”¹⁹ Another friend is a “holistic and prosperity practitioner.” Another is a “creativity and life coach.”

What sounds like newly discovered healing modalities are really re-packaged ancient wisdom teachings mostly from indigenous and non-western mystical and philosophical traditions. So when someone is offering “energy workshops” I think of the ancient Taoist healing arts. When I see ads for EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) I am reminded of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s identification of acupressure points, meridians, and source points that balance the energy in the body. I have often wondered why and how so-called teachers of spirituality are able to patent and trademark healing modalities and spiritual teachings whose roots are from ancient indigenous cultures. Why not acknowledge the root source of the tradition and be explicit and transparent about the re-packaging that they are doing for a more contemporary audience?

Since EA’s ancestral work is part of the process of facing responsibility and accountability, wouldn’t lineage be just as important in spiritual traditions? Technology allows access to all sorts of portals to spiritual practices, thus commodification also becomes constitutive of the practice. A mile wide and an inch deep is the ocean of spiritual commodities. What happens when the goddess movement claims access to goddesses in all cultures as their own? What happens when yoga becomes a mere exercise regimen without its philosophical foundations? What happens when people dabble in brief treks to an Amazon rainforest to imbibe ayahuasca? What happens when we go away for a weekend retreat at Esalen or Multiversity to be with a guru or a qi gong master?

These events also provide the template for call outs of cultural appropriation, white privilege, white domination, and white saviorism.

Stephen Jenkinson,²⁰ writing about eldership, mentions the ubiquity of weekend workshops for all things ‘spiritual’ for the baby boomer generation which in turn feeds the economy of spiritual commodities. I often wonder about what “accountability” means in this arena. Indigenous paradigms emphasize the importance of responsibility and accountability to the Source, to the elders and holders of traditions. Capitalism encourages the commodification of spirituality where lineage is often not mentioned nor is deemed important. Being able to trademark a healing modality is an individual enterprise. I know that some of the healers in my network operate entirely in the gift economy; others accept donations but will not set fixed prices for their services; and others insist that it is only by naming their price that their healing gifts are valued in a capitalist economy.

Stephen Dinan of The Shift Network²¹ is one of the leading organizers and conveners of these spiritual events. His latest book, Sacred America, Sacred World invokes principles of Oneness and that it is America’s vision to lead the planet. America’s higher destiny is to use “inner technology of shifting consciousness through entrepreneurship.” This is a reference to the vision of the country’s founding fathers and what he outlines as the six cycles of the U.S. development and the 7^th cycle as the spiritual cycle. In this quote, he cites the biggest shadow of the U.S. that the country has failed to acknowledge.

There are many interrelated shadow issues that America is often reluctant to face but I think at the root is an unwillingness to see ourselves as the aggressor and victimizer. Ultimately, this stems from never being able to face the Native American genocide and African enslavement that formed the twin sins of our early history. If we undertake a much deeper healing of these wounds, which will require humble contrition and an inventory of our shadow side, it becomes easier to see the ways that we are still perpetuating injustice and oppression in the world.²²

In the above quote, Dinan’s final word is about the need to do “personal” spiritual work. He believes that both ends of the political spectrum have much to teach each other about “forming a perfect union” but how this gets to be addressed at the systemic, structural level is where most analysis fails. What alarms me about this book is the way the U.S. is again being assigned the role of world leadership, this time, on all spiritual matters.²³ Many Native American scholars affirm that until the U.S. acknowledges the genocide of Native Americans as the constitutive element at the inception of its founding as a nation, there will never be peace and justice, nor One-ness. Although a movement of “land back and land acknowledgement” is becoming more visible, how would the notion of “American spiritual superiority” play itself out? Spiritual bypassing is not allowed.

Indeed, decolonization and re-indigenization via ethnoautobiography provides a way through the historical shadow material. This shadow material surfaces our personal and collective grief…but as a culture we do not have communal grief rituals; we are a culture that is afraid of Death…and so must hide and deny it.

Ethnoautobiography recommends that we make room for ritual-making, for storytelling, for remembering and honoring ancestors and the original instructions. EA encourages work with dreams and mythic stories, with the imaginal realms; talks about responsibility and accounting, humility and compassion; about the importance of learning how to dwell in a Place.

In other words, to embody indigenous wisdom is to heal our disconnection and isolation…our loneliness…guilt and shame. Ethnoautobiography provides a map and a process for this work.

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Jean Vengua is a California-born-and-raised writer, poet, and visual artist who grew up on its beaches and sunny avenues.

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Endnotes

¹ Adrienne Marie Brown, Emergent Strategies

² www.babaylan.net

³ www.centerforbabaylanstudies.org

⁴ https://www.one-down.com/articles/how-indigenous-filipinos-are-erased-from-fahm

⁵ https://www.one-down.com/articles/on-filipinos-and-the-question-of-the-indigenous

⁶ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/. Retrieved 2/9/19

⁷ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5dIS8NmK1U. Retrieved 2/9/19

⁸ Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. (Boston, M: Beacon Press.

⁹ https://www.howwegather.org/home. Retrieved 2/15/19; now called Sacred Design Lab: https://sacred.design/insights. Retrieved 2/22/21/

¹⁰ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/business/remote-work-spiritual-consultants.html?fbclid=IwAR2KgwyWCr0HYq0p78b0exJre1ZBw-t0eExzuQ7T236arBjdIzi44byfS1Q Retrieved 3/4/21

¹¹ https://www.faithmattersnetwork.org/how-we-deepen

¹² https://dulwichcentre.com.au/resisting-calling-out-culture-leaning-in-with-respect-and-dignity-by-vikki-reynolds/. Retrieved 2/15/19

¹³ We Will Dance With Mountains, http://bayoakomolafe.net/we-will-dance-with-mountains/ 

¹⁴ https://festivalfire.com/

¹⁵ http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/schaffner/teaching/spring2017/NGL584/readings/Sharpe.Festivals.pdf

¹⁶ Personal interview with Sobey Wing, Sept 29, 2018

¹⁷ http://koksilahfestival.com/

¹⁸ Here’s an example of where festival culture and tribal protocols clash. This essay was co-written by Sobey Wing although he is not acknowledged in the byline. http://realitysandwich.com/148033/symbiosis_eclipse_festival_neotribal_dance_culture_meets_tribal_fbclid=IwAR06arGJ9XmAggTmYrEy5XNXd7FlzwUwefFAa2ywPd7Sn0v1iyinUi4DoiU

¹⁹ https://teramaxwell.com/the-conscious-reality-creation-method-thank-you/

²⁰ Jenkinson, Stephen. (2019) Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

²¹ https://theshiftnetwork.com/

²² https://www.sacredamerica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/04/QA-Dinan.pdf

²³See also the Netflix series, The Family, which documents the work of The Fellowship Foundation as it “spreads the gospel of Jesus” at the highest levels of political power. Political leaders are deemed to be chosen of God.