Seeking Spirit While Learning to Live with Blood on My Hands:

One White Settler-Colonizer’s Continuing Journey to Face History Without Excuse

James W. Perkinson

This paper will track a white male educator/artist’s journey into taking responsibility for living as a settler-colonist on the land of others and gradually opening up to the power of indigenous politics and wisdom. After more than thirty years of slow motion “initiation” into Black cultural struggle to survive the structural oppressions of inner-city Detroit, coupled with fifteen years partnering with a Filipina scholar—engaging her own version of the journey—I am gradually learning how to respond to my own positioning as a white settler colonist, continuing to inhabit stolen land.

My only possible contribution here is precisely a confession of such supremacy and outline of what it might mean for whites such as me to do our work in the face of a triple responsibility of accountability for the history of Native genocide and land theft, Black enslavement and labor coercion, and “Orientalist” invasion and plundering of the rest of the planet. My people cannot begin to collaborate in struggling to aid in dismantling a five-hundred year-old colonial legacy, and trying to return to such fragments of our own indigeneity (Indo-European and proto-Indo-European) as yet remain alive in our own ethnic backgrounds, except in a resolve to “own” our profound shaping in reprehensible forms of privilege. This “privilege” (which is simultaneously a moral and mental incapacity and ignorance) derives from this “unholy” triplet of stolen land, captive labor, and military adventurism now organized as neo-liberal globalization. Cooperation in the continuing regimes of taking land, forcing labor, and invading “others” are the murky and ignominious spiritual formation that I must probe, own, articulate, and seek to displace within my own reality, even as I seek to open to indigenous wisdoms and potencies—Black, Filipina, Native, and finally European (in the deep past).

The journey here is one that begins in non-innocence, but does not stay put in white guilt (though guilt is a necessary moment in facing into any form of involvement with injustice). The itinerary is rather a continuous lesson in humility and correction and tutoring by those my culture has “othered,” in committing to lifelong resistance to my own culture’s settler-colonial shadows and white supremacist ghosts—without any expectation of reconciliation or right “to be here”—and resolve to live otherwise. What might such look like concretely? This, the paper will explore, in a mode of ever-questioning ethno-autobiography born of continual “schooling” and challenge on the part of black, brown, yellow and red elders and critics (including the sharp confrontations articulated by the Lakota-organized #NODAPL water protection action at Standing Rock, North Dakota and the continuing efforts to repudiate The Doctrine of Christian Discovery) (see Newcomb, 2008). And it will do so with joyful gratitude.

Confession

I am a straight white male, living on other people’s land. Such is the baseline reality for any lighter-skinned denizen of this supposed experiment in democracy, wherever in the Western Hemisphere such a one may place a foot and sink a “foundation.” But in my particular case, I cannot be “here” where I write in Detroit, on the land of others and as the beneficiary of a violent history of colonization, and pretend that “here” is not also lying next to me on the bed at night, every night that my wife and I are home in the Car City over the last sixteen years of married life. Here was also “there” where she was born in an archipelago of 7,100 islands half a world away, in the “Oriental” East, “taken” by the U.S. as a colony in 1898. The reach of white colonial “taking” extends even to there.

I hurt my wife and myself very deeply a number of years ago. And the wound I caused left scar tissue and pain that can now be plucked like a harp, with a single sharp string of hot reverberation, by odd events or unrelated images. The precipitating event was worked through with the aid of numerous friends, and unrelenting commitment on both our parts, and gradually “metabolized” into the relationship. But it is not gone. When it comes up, my self-subscribed duty at this point in our relationship is not ever to convey—in words or mere gesture or tone—“that was years ago, babe, it is time to get over it already.” My deep responsibility is rather to carry that pain in the same golden bowl of delicacy within which I hold her, as if it is as holy and sacred as everything else in nature. Because it is.

My wife is the one who has taught me the most astounding thing I know—that the backside of even the most mundane of events or phenomenon, carries an aura of extraordinary mysteriousness and beauty. Until I married her, I never thought I could share the drab details of everyday life with someone for years on end, the co-habitation of the same physical space after all the costumes and cosmetics come off, and still be hit with these bright bubbles of raw joy spiking up my spine while watching her chicken-walk across the living room floor on her way to pee, or catching her flaring her nostril half-way up her face in feigned repugnance at some silly occurrence around us.

Life with her is a constant ambush by a Depth-Presence peeking suddenly through her piercing eye or in her gravely belly laugh or on her quivering lip as she weeps over the latest news of the murder of an indigenous Filipina leader—like I’m living with some ancient Spirit-Goddess who plays hide-and-seek with me only on her own terms and refuses to be captive to any of my expectations. In my experience of my wife, there is no line of demarcation between the ordinary and extraordinary. They are each other. She is both. And I nearly destroyed the extraordinariness!

And the pain now is part of the mystery, a haunt over our relationship that will be there to the end of life. The wound I caused is not sacred, but inexcusable. But the pain that remains is now part of the Mysteriousness between us and demands that I honor its life as profoundly as her own. It does not very often put in an appearance any more. But it hovers there as an uncompromising teacher. It teaches about colonial patriarchy and white supremacy and plain stupidity. But even more it teaches about the uncompromising demand of the universe to be ready at moment’s notice to be arrested by what is not me, and simply listen, and see, and accept, nakedly, without excuse or apology, my own history of failure to grasp reality. I do not know a deeper teacher than my own personal and cultural failings, embodied back towards me, in a voice that refuses not to be direct and explicit and angry. And beautiful, in spite of! Call it Filipina confrontation. In another quarter of my life, which I’ll talk about in a moment, call it black indignation. Increasingly in recent years, call it Native repudiation. Even call it a tree.

Because the awareness of a universe beyond what my own white colonial settler “self” had blinded me to—a universe full of unspeakable mystery and unimaginable beauty and uncompromising autonomy that will speak back unapologetically or even with frightful rebuke—first accosted me, when I was only about five years old, in the form of encounter with a couple of mammoth sycamores behind the house where I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio! I wrote about it recently this way. Bear with me, while I quote that writing at length.

Boyhood Intimation

My first real inkling of what it might mean to be alive outside the first womb came when I was but five years old. On a summer late afternoon in an open acre behind our house a towering sycamore suddenly breathed on me with its ever so subtle pungency of dry-heat scent. A looming solidity hovered in the cicada-keened shaft of light, cutting through its leaves and my skin with a vast Something, indefinable as taste, insoluble as hunger. I suddenly knew the strange touch of beauty and grief that haunts every moment of actually seeing into a thing, without explaining either it or oneself, of stumbling across an invisible line into an immensity of presence that simultaneously provokes immense melancholy because it cannot be possessed or kept from sliding into the eclipse of night, any more than my own being could be.

The moment was one of abrupt voluptuousness and galactic sadness all at once, a huge, wild beast of response that broke surface in my young body like an unsuspected whale from the depths, carrying me over into the body of the world around me as if there was no barrier between. Today in my adult voice, I would argue that such experience is simply what it means to be a child and suddenly “see” into the sheer magic of the natural world—a quality of experience every one of us is designed for, in some version or another, but which becomes increasingly remote or even impossible as machine culture gathers us into itself relentlessly.

Indeed, many adults I know today would say, “Oh come on, Jim, cut the New Age crap, it was just a tree, not a snort of cocaine!” But that is the entire point: there is no such thing as “just a tree.” That is “just a concept.” The real thing is . . . !? What is a tree? Do we really see it? Can you make one? In any case, it was a moment I would never recover from, however much it might be covered over as the years rolled on. Rather, it was something I would grope for—usually unknowingly when late afternoon sunlight takes on a particular cast.

In all the seasonal drifts to follow—lurched by my various choices into a living concatenation of such seeing and its losses—I remain irrecoverably aware, before and beyond words, that life is an unclose-able hole of grief and beauty into which one falls incessantly. Or else runs from and dies coldly.

But that suddenly sentient tree of my boyhood would also show its terroristic side—the terribleness of its wildness—only a year or so later, when during a thunderstorm, it would just as suddenly drop an arm on the head of a seven-year old friend of mine, running home from the rain straight into the path of the descending branch.

The falling limb caused a concussion and shattered any illusions of deference to things human that such a new-born lover as myself might be tempted to predicate of its majesty. The tree was, after all, committed merely to being a sycamore, surging up in infinite slow-motion in its own great photon-love, hosting the million-fold drama of life and death composting within and composing its own bark and branches and roots and shade, without favoring any. And I was merely a human being, suddenly awake to what was so much bigger than me, trying to walk forward in this little sliver of reality called my body, without a society or community around me to give orientation or meaning to that experience. I could hardly tell anyone, as the moment did not come contained in the thin coin of words and grammar. It came as an entire world, pouring in through my pores, without fanfare or business cards (Perkinson, 2015, pp. 25-26).

Thus I wrote a few years ago. But my own reflection now takes another lap around. The lack of a community that could have helped me interpret my experience was not accidental. It was genocidal. The remains of that genocide nestled in the soils of a hillside, not even twenty meters to the east of the sycamore. A patch of drainage ditches roughly the size of half a football field composed the slope of hill running down to the foot of the tree. Full of floral fossils from the ancient seas of the area, the ditches also occasionally disgorged spear-heads of no-longer-present Native folk of that place.

Or so I was told—for search as I might, I never managed to find one of those relicts of the past that would have certified my white boy choice to side with my lighter-skinned ancestors, when we played Cowboys and Indians on those very slopes, as indeed the “superior” choice. After all, “we” were here and “they” were no longer. Of course, I wanted to be one of the “cowboys”!

But now I know the truth to be the inverse. My people were superior only in the technologies of weaponry. As exemplars of a fierce and place-savvy form of indigenous dwelling, the Shawnee and Iroquois and Miami, or even the earlier Mound-builders of the Ohio River Valley, knew way more than my folk about tree-talk centered on walking forward with all the other communities of kin—finned and furred, leaf-growing and berry-producing—into a future of shared sustenance and continuity. Most of my people only knew—and only know—about killing and plundering. And continue that project up to today.

Slow-Motion Initiation

In some small measure, in part “schooled” by those two tree-experiences, I grew up never quite able fully to internalize white settler violence. Not that I didn’t try—at one point even hitting my best friend in the eye in my home neighborhood for coming onto our front lawn one day without asking permission. I had seen other kids hit each other, and wondered what it felt like.

I ended up being beaten in turn, later that same day, by my friend’s own “homies”—neighborhood Catholic kids he attended parochial school with who did not like the presence of the lone Protestant family (my own) in that neighborhood and would not tolerate one of their own being hit by an “outsider.”

Around the same time, I would make the mistake of bringing a black public school buddy home to play on the neighborhood basketball court one afternoon. And once again, learn of white violence at the raw end of a fist, policing what I had failed to recognize as neighborhood “white space.”

There is not time to go into all the intricate details of my struggle in that setting growing up. Enough said that more than four years of regular bullying left me internally frightened, but externally very competitive in sports, as my only way of “proving” some kind of competence at “being a white male.” The part of me “awakened” by the tree-encounters remained incommunicable at some level, a kind of fierce love of gentle forms of magnificence that entirely baffled and scared me, which I kept hidden as best I could, and which left me intensely lonely and somewhat of a misfit in the white male colonial project of continuous conquest and competitive “take over” and “winning.” A beneficiary thereof—to be sure! But also, at some level—a wounded “discard” or “refugee,” psychically and spiritually!

There is also obviously not space to go into all the relevant details of my life trajectory. Suffice it to say that it has entailed continuous journey into deep encounter with cultures and people different from me. Conversion to a Pentecostal form of Christianity plunged me into a student prayer group during undergraduate years that led to deep friendship with two young black women from the inner city of Cincinnati. That particular experience of an exploratory mode of spirituality, while tutored in many ways by young black energy, led immediately after graduation to a move to inner city Detroit which became, and has remained, “home” for me ever since.

I am now a white male middle class heterosexual by background and conditioning who has lived the majority of his life in the inner city. Without question my most profound spiritual formation and emotional education has been “ghetto” street life over the course of four decades. There, low-income neighbors checked, challenged, embraced, rebuffed, and taught me, in what has amounted to an on-going rite of initiation into another way of being a body, under protocols of rhythm and percussion, signifying and rhyme-spitting, dozens-playing and “jiving,” that broke down the codes of bourgeois morality and presuppositions of supremacy I had internalized growing up, and opened a way to experiment with being “something else.”

Black anger and black humor as deep pedagogy! The process continues today. As a result, most of my academic work has entailed theorizing in both religious studies and communication studies discourses about white supremacy and white racism, and confronting my own Euro-heritage people about such, animated by that personal trek across the boundaries separating black from white.

This part of my history also meant living in a form of intensive Christian Community for the better part of two decades, in that lower income black neighborhood, pooling income and assets on a poverty level budget on a per-capita basis with black and white participants in that communalized structure, helping elaborate programs like a school and daycare center, food pantry and clothing exchange shop, and ultimately collaborating with neighbors on “take overs” of their own apartment buildings in a cooperative legal structure where they became the owner-managers of the buildings and the property (though ultimately, of course, the land still remains Native).

In the process, I found myself gradually disabused of some of my white supremacist arrogance of presuming to help other people, and gradually began to be able to see the amazing survival skills and creativity of folk who could elaborate minimal physical resources into social relations of immense vitality and insight, and make the desperation of poverty yield astonishing beauty in spite of itself.

I fell in love with black culture and learned to live on a razor’s edge of participation in rhythmic modes of being that I was allowed to learn, but could never claim as my own. Spoken word poetry became as integral to my way of being as my own breathing.

But so did inner city activism, led by older African American women and younger hip-hop heads, pushing back on the neo-liberal forces of Wall Street and Koch Brothers manipulation of policy, gentrifying Detroit, privatizing its assets, foreclosing its poor black and brown residents out of their homes, and seizing control of its waters. Indeed, in going to the 2016 Coast Salish/Filipino-American conference, I had to get permission of the court, as I was technically out on bail from an action of civil disobedience carried out with others in resisting water shutoffs in the city (finally dismissed after three years in the court system for failure to provide a speedy trial).

Later Life Decolonization

But also late in the day—a couple of years after my 50^th birthday—I married a Filipina and, again as I wrote in the 2015 text quoted above, —

found myself confronted all over again with need of under-going yet another regime of border-crossing. This time it was into a culture structured in what one Filipino ethno-musicologist called a curvilinear tonality of communicating—both strangely like and yet confoundingly different from the percussive sensibility I had slowly internalized in inner city Detroit. And yet again I have had to embrace a recurrent experience of awkward failure and apologetic chagrin as I seek to submit to a new protocol of embodiment in service of expanding my capacity for radical joy and the sweet tang of intimacy.

And in that context of intimacy, yet a third demand for journey has emerged with a vengeance. And that is an inverse climb back down the phylogenetic tree—in relationship to all of those plant and animal and fungi ancestors whose prowess and potencies have recombined in sexual and metabolic processes over multiple millions of years to produce “me.” More specifically such a trek requires entertaining the nurture and pedagogy of non-human genealogy, mediated through indigenous cultures who know how to “live in place” and call the entire project of settler colonialism and expansionist civilization into question.

In encounter with indigenous cultures here and in the Philippines, and through wide-ranging reading in a newly emerging literature going by the name of anarcho-primitivism—asking deep questions about the impossible viability of civilization as we have thus far known it—I become more and more aware that “human emergence” over the vast reaches of our time on the planet has typically entailed profound apprenticeship to a given plant or animal “relative” in relationship to an intact local ecology.

That relationship effectively became our earliest (and continuing) sensorium, in which “identity” was learned dialectically through symbiotic communication and reciprocal eating (commensality). And given that evolutionary history, I must now confess that I am so far in my own life’s unfolding, a “not yet human” human being.

Rather, I face in the mirror each morning, an immature configuration of cells, fizzed up in a thousand commercialized discourses to hanker after books and french fries, high-end coffee and hot showers. I have attained middle age without yet having been “initiated” into the living matter, which is our living mater, and cracked open to the vital insurrection of wild-spirited animation that is simply the way things are in nature. And I stumble now towards old age with inconsolable longing and inchoate aching for that early boyhood level of awakening that first caught sight of the stunning magnificence and intolerable beauty of life and loss in this world (Perkinson, 2015, pp. 24-25).

In my Detroit context, that third journey has meant numerous things. I teach in an inner city Christian seminary. For more than two decades now, I use my status there to teach about the history of colonial violence that Christianity has embodied for all but a couple hundred years of its life on the planet. White supremacy is merely the offspring of an even older and more vicious Christian supremacy.

I work to re-read the biblical tradition back into its beginnings as a pastoral-nomad movement of peoples exiting imperial enslavement to return to the land through their herd animals in the semi-arid corridors of the Mid-East. It is a tradition that was continuously imperialized over three thousand years and ultimately made into the most damaging religious discourse the earth has seen. But it began wild and feral and anti-imperial. And in its inception it was merely one form of indigenous codification, relevant and true only to its very limited and particular ecological context.

In its later claim to universal application, it becomes increasingly reprehensible and nearly insufferable. Such I teach and believe. Needless to say, my Christian students—white and black—end up both scandalized and fascinated. But so far, I have not been fired.

This third journey has also meant working to collaborate with Native efforts to challenge the entire edifice of settler colonial rule over the bend of Detroit river called in Ojibwe wawiiatonong (“where it goes around”) and by Wendet/Huron numma sepee (“the place of the sturgeon”; or oppenago, “where the waters meet”) (Cornell, 2003, p. 9; Givens-McGowan, 2003, pp. 27-29; Stonefish, 2016).

It has meant participating in a tri-cultural initiative in 2015, gathering leftist Christian activists, hip-hop entrepreneurs, and indigenous dwellers in the area around political commitments to resist water privatization—in part schooled by Great Lakes “water walkers” such as Ojibwe activist Mona Stonefish—a struggle over the basin whence flows 20% of the earth’s fresh surface water, which is our own local version of the “protect the water” campaign” staged at Standing Rock and erupting wherever indigenous lands and rights are being trampled by fossil fuel interests and governmental blindness.

This third venture has likewise meant sitting at the feet of half-white, half-Native teacher Martín Prechtel twenty days per year in northern New Mexico—Tzutujil Mayan-embraced and -trained for more than a decade—who now pushes especially on those of us who are Euro-heritage to grasp the depths of our complicity in the entire slave-syndrome of civilization launched across the planet from Mesopotamia and Central Asia more than 5,000 years ago, and work to recover what fragments of indigeneity we can unearth in our own heritage, to live on behalf of a future beyond ourselves, in such a way that we might actually be worth being descended from (Prechtel, 2001, 2012).

Seeking Schooling in the Shards

And thus a kind of fourth prong of this latter turn. Prechtel’s influence camped out on what was already stirring in me in the way of what Martin Shaw might call “bone memory” (Shaw, 2016). The beauty I encountered in African American, Filipino, and Native American sagacity and savvy did not just astonish and attract; it ultimately unearthed yearning and counselled “return”—a concerted “about-face” to begin working my way upstream in my own family waters, following scents and intuitions only partly coherent, on quest for what was indigenous and worthy in my own ancestry, pre-capitalist closing of the commons in late medieval Europe, pre-Faustian bargain (later on) with white hardness and brutality.

The Prechtelian input mentioned above in particular has pushed towards a Sherlock Holmes operation of rummaging through the folklore and mythology and faery history “preserved” (but not necessarily understood very well) by Euro-versions of empire, frequently placed under glass as “dead objects” for musing and secret or explicit confirmation of supposedly modern superiority.

But those “remains” contain more than mere nostalgia. They open portals of imagination towards what yet ghosts the DNA and haunts the longing. A mixed-blood white–Chippewa student of mine of late, recently offered poignant reflection on Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan’s Woman Who Watches Over the World divinings (Hogan, 2001, pp. 196-200). Perhaps we dominant-culture white folk now inhabit an entire culture beset by “phantom pain.” She is prescient.

We writhe in vague tremors and bone-throbs without either language or discrete memory, running restless and terrified over entire continents, “spooked” by echoes of ancestral doings never faced or requited, hungry for the spice and demand of wild winds and peat fires, for horse-counsel and bear-dream and river-healing and insect-wisdom and willow-metabolism of trauma into wheat-holding baskets of comfort. Phantom pain. “Hallowing” all the cutoff tentacles of relation with boar and sycamore and mountain cedar and lightning, grandfather-calm and grandmother-courage and rock-stability, glinting underneath lichen-damp robe-of-mist from time past. We, too, used to nestle in the niche of the Earth that nurtured us. And the memory is still out there, in nook of land and crook of tree and loch of water—even though for us in the West, an ocean away.

Thus far for me (in my still nascent explorations), it has been especially the Táin tale of Celtic fame and the Nart riff on Caucasus height (Colarusso, 2002) that have summoned (Nordic and Scandinavian materials still wait to be savored). What in Irish ken is now regaled as joke and excess yet recalls the herder penchant for raid and rough justice—recalled in smoke-haloed cast of Samhain story-telling fires and recounts of Cailleach-joust with Brigit as fall harvest gave way to winter blast of snow and frost careening into Imbolc’s slow-growing light, hinting milk-flows and spring. In full title known as the Táin Bó Cuailnge, the myth of the “The Cattle Raid of Cooley” features the teen-aged water-ford champion of Ulster, Cú Chulainn, defending borders against rival cattle-herding clans from Connacht.

Undergoing initiation in the process, he rebuffs aggression first in ogham script and standing stone omen, then in poetic wrangling and eloquence—before devolving into single-handed duel—seeking to halt wider war in conflict-resolution conventions understood as divinatory rites disclosing outcomes (and thus settling battles) beforehand by mobilizing wild signs and word-designs (Tarzia, 2016, pp. 5, 17-18, 54-57).

But the tale is also typical of indigenous quip in “storying” the scene from the root-world of seeds and minerals to the star-realm of constellations overhead, where heroes-in-conflict are not merely themselves as humans, but simultaneously embody the snows and rains of weather, the stalks of growing oats before the scythe, the seasons in cloud-combat or repose of sun and bird-song, animal flight before storms or in full-on-fury of sparring for mates.

And this is the lesson that touches the longing—a fierceness of dwelling honestly in place, catching beauty in the mirror of myth, counselling respect and gift in the never-ending dance of life and death, eating and exchange, where no one species is privileged as supreme and the “king” may bear leaf and berry or hoof and antler as well as gem-crusted scabbard and ring.

The Nart Saga collection (Colarusso, 2002) similarly stacks up enigmatic-character and landscape-feature in mythico-historical narration haunting the crags with mountain-sized monster and moon-slivered sign of favor, when the genes collide and the heroes struggle. Here too, deep ancestry shimmers faint and suggestive, where the human line runs back into fire-stealing Nasran giants and moon-gilded Setenaya heroines and a clan-champion like Sasruquo who may also comport as iron-implement forged from hard stone (Colarusso, 2002, pp. 96, 98, 104, 252, 256, 329, 356-359 ).

The Narts also were cattle-consorts, living beyond the bounds of nation-state enslavements in virtue of their herder-savvy and shepherd-symbiotics. But in these non-Indo-European expressions—shared across the mountain peoples and divided in collated form into four loose collections (Circassian, Abaza, Abkhaz, and Ubykh)—we find Caucasus hints of broader shared memory with tales such as Aphrodite and Anchises, the Gorgons and the Amazonas, Prometheus and Cyclopes in Greek dress and finesse; or Indra slaying monster Vrtra on mountain top, releasing watercourses conferring life in Indian compass; Odin upside down in his Yggdrasil “World-Tree” in Nordic regions north and west; and the Arthurian round of celebration across the Channel (p. 7).

Ancient Silk Road concourse was arguably a remarkable Eurasian precursor of our current conceit of “globalization”—stirring a wide swath of peoples and musics, foods and spirits, story memories and ancestral idiosyncrasies into a cook pot of spicy and nutrient flavors. All of this old practice and narration hovers over my ruminations on life at the epicenter of industrialization, now crucible of finance capital blight and neoliberal austerity gone savage.

Most immediate on the addenda for my growing spiritual grasp of Detroit as “place” is searching out indigenous smarts in containing the dangerous arts of iron-smelting and blacksmithing in an entire range of taboos and rites, engendering recognition of, and respect for, the underworld spirits thus disinterred and unleashed. Not just African traditional wisdom would comprehend this modern upheaval of the planet as an Iron-God event (Cosentino, 2002, pp. 298, 303-304 ), but much of my own more immediate ancestry as well. High time to get up to speed on the spiritual warnings tendered all along the ancient way leading up to today’s hyper-industrial cataclysm.

Tasting Salt in the Text

As already noted, a big part of the task for me in grappling with indigenous rebuff and black challenge here, “where the river goes around,” is not only learning about older Indo-European practices of living closer to the land (as indeed those of precursor cultures). It also has meant learning to “read” Christianity back into its Jesus-Movement roots as anchored in a recursive anti-imperial search for a more just and sustainable lifeway (Perkinson, 2013).

Indeed, this 1st century Palestinian peasant resistance initiative, led by a hinterland shaman/prophet from Galilee, sought vital animation from its renegade indigenous ancestry. “Israel” in its prehistory took its legendary succor from the stories of Abram and Sarah as nomad refugees from urban Haran, following their herd animals south to Levantine hill country.

More recently in the old time line, Moses had exited the courts of Pharaoh and spent 40 years under tutelage to a Kenite clan of herder blacksmiths in the Sinai outback, before finally having the “wilderness chops” necessary to hear a bush speak and lead an ex-slave horde through another 40 years of “wildlands schooling” in the sands, taught by herd animals and the land itself how to live independent of Egyptian hegemony and enslavement. “Isra-El” then emerges under Joshua as a “covenanted amalgam” composed of this desert-trained herder-troop coming up from the arid southern outback and fugitive Canaanite peasants fleeing Mediterranean seacoast cities to the interior hills, where newly-introduced iron technologies allowed cultivation in rocky terrain (Gottwald, xxiii).

These varied constituencies “federate” into a herder-peasant hybrid, mixing Canaanite traditions of storm god Baal, his sister Anat, and mountain-dwelling El with the Sinai-sirocco-deity, “YHWH,” brought in by the Hebrew ex-slaves.

The result is an embattled experiment in recovering a more equitable and ecosavvy lifeway—until Israel herself opts for monarchy and a kind of settler colonial domination a few centuries further on, absorbing polytheistic creativity into the State-controlled monotheism while eclipsing Canaanite names and genealogy. But for a brief interlude, the imperfect attempt was instructive. A re-tribalizing “cimarron” people, going “feral” from empire and memorializing, in their Sabbath traditions, the role of re-learning how to “live on the land” in Sinai, anchored in the experience of collecting aphid defecation (known as “manna” and subsequently baked up into honey-cakes) pooling under tamarisk trees, celebrated as “divine provision!”

This is the model re-called by John the Baptist and Jesus the prophet, ultimately organizing a “liberated zone” for the marginal in the Galilean hill country, re-instituting gift-economy practices of sharing goods in common, and initiating “healing clinics” outside official Temple and synagogue venues by way of shamanic trance and ancestral visitation. John roams the wilds east of the Jordan as mystic of the mesas, camel-clad, leather-girded, eating wild honey (perhaps also a reference to “manna”), ferreting out the ancient Voices (like Rachel’s; Mt 2:17-18) still “carried” by the land, and mediating ancestral Presence (Mk 1:4-8; Mt 3:1-12).

Jesus will be initiated in the River, addressed by a Thunder Voice (perhaps even inundated by a rain-storm), tutored by a 3,000 mile-traveling dove, schooled by stone confrontations in the ancestral haunts on rugged terrain outside the boundaries of the nation/state proper (as had Elijah and other prophets before him) (Mk 1:9-14; Mt 4:1-11; Jh 12: 20-30).

In trace and even in obvious (albeit cryptic) representations, the stories are deeply rooted in shamanic and indigenous orientations (even if taken over by state-sponsored agendas and imperial conventions almost from the first moment pen was put to papyri).

Spirit Counsel Inside the Maw of Global Capital

But what to do with such “witnesses from the way back” in a diasporic situation of profound rupture, deeply structured in settler colonial hubris and land theft, routinized in white supremacist arrogance and blindness, now subjected to ever more draconian surveillance and behavior modification in thrall to Googlized stupefaction and Facebook inanity?

Indeed! Recent conversations with Filipino-American colleagues, navigating remarkable “recovery journeys” seeking to integrate shamanic “family lineages” into contemporary circumstances, turns up a conundrum of particular precariousness for those of us white and wanting to be responsible. Except for those few remaining relatively intact indigenous communities, living in watersheds not yet entirely shattered and remade in the corporate image and interests (such as coltan mines or Palm Oil plantations), all the rest of us wake up each day inside the gullet of neoliberal globalization, in the process of being eaten by a boardroom intention.

Like it or not, aware or not, we are already part of a violent, on-going, relentless and ruthless rearrangement of every vital element on the planet, in service of a class of privatizing profiteers who already are busy securing their chosen shelters from the climate apocalypse fast descending upon us. Recovering indigenous sensibility in the mix is an enterprise of negotiating with long neglected energies, no longer “hallowed” with intact modalities of expression.

While it is far beyond my own wisdom to do more here than “intuit on fraught terrain,” it would seem that the spirit-world is trammeled with “hungry desire,” frustrated neglect, and human “receptacles”—both individual and collective—unprepared for either the vehemence of the anger or the depth of the hurt unleashed when the ancestors are invited or the spirits summoned. When shamanic practice (in varied forms for which the word “shaman” itself is a contested and not always entirely apt term appropriated from Central Asia) first began to navigate this-world/Other-World communication in specialized form, presumably the cultural settings were relatively congruent with their eco-environments. The pain and grief wrestled into redress and transformation by the shamans and their communities would have had their source in local failure and offense.

Today however, the grievance is imbedded in globalizing social structures that are dissimulated by so much cognitive “murk” (popular cliché, familial ignorance, educational triviality, political lies, corporatized brain-washing, etc.) as to be all but imperceptible for most people. Those structures themselves carry out 500-year old (or older) convictions of national, religious, racial, gender, class, etc. “supremacies” so ingrained in broadly shared “affective economies” as to make intervention and persuasion otherwise seem nearly hopeless.

Within such a conundrum of layered pain and hidden cause, how listen to spirit whisperings and ancestral visitations? In the big picture, such large-scale entanglements and woundings are relatively new. Indigenous cultures indeed figured “monsters” into their repertoire of warnings and struggle. But how imagine healing when the monsters are no longer “out there” where they can be sighted and identified, but rather, the very definition of context and even “home”: we are now “inside” their bellies, before we even exit the womb.

The global economy has already swallowed most of us! How gain perspective on what is far along in the process of metabolizing you? Does the Spirit-World itself have language for this phenomenon? Or are we all—spirits included—having to innovate afresh, in the midst of a confusing morass of fractal impressions, shards of older meanings, ruptured chains of association, uncomprehending assumptions?

The Ashanti have a proverb: “The Devil will eat you, but not all of you!” Where is the “not all” part today and how could we even know? If we do not keep asking after what yet remains outside the maw, not yet digested, I fear we will end up developing rites of healing, trance-quests for meaning, imaginal journeys of re-connection all within the digestive tract of what “already has us.”

We will only feed the monster. “Animal familiar for sale, only $25! Just click on the link!” Most particularly, I find the capacity of global capital to direct spiritual proclivity towards the benefit of those already wealthy and resourced to be almost limitless. I do not have easy answers for how to counter such.

But in Detroit, as a resourced white male, it has meant trying to stay accountable—continuously and on their own turf, in face-to-face relationships—with people of color, who are themselves living on the edge of poverty, innovating collectively in small scale pushback on the corporatized juggernaut flattening the city, elaborating deep indignation into amazing resilience and celebration “in spite of.” In the midst of the “manufactured emergency” that is Motown today—we can boast no great success. But there is this: a community of vision and laughter and weeping, flaunting color, parading style, not yet entirely consumed!

Towards the Land

So this is a rough outline of my white man confession. It is mostly just that—confession of responsibility and failure. As a settler colonialist benefitting—no matter my personal intention—from the on-going plunder, I am not yet asking forgiveness. That request can come only after reparation. And that has yet to happen. My confession is not “of” the truth, but only “toward” the truth. The truth lies in the land. Until the land is returned, I understand everything else to be merely provisional (Tuck and Yang, 2012, pp. 26-38 ).

Once the land is returned—and it is not a question, it will be, if not by political will (which is pretty unlikely, given the last 500 years), then by climate change itself, clearing out the whole project of modern anthropocentric supremacy by natural catastrophe. Once the land is returned—to itself and to those who know how to let it be itself and belong to it rather than “own” it—then my status will be an open question, not to be answered by me.

I understand the answer could well be, “No, you do not belong here or have permission to remain here. You need to work toward returning to your own ancestral places—England, Ireland, Holland, and Germany, or even behind that, Central Asia.” Impossible as those prospects might be, I understand them to be part of the open question that the history of settler colonialism raises.

So I am doing what I can to learn about those traces of my genetic line, and all the cultural mythologies that preserve some of the older cultural memory of those places and peoples, when they were themselves living more indigenously, not yet engulfed in this thing called civilizational supremacy and white colonial take-over, still belonging to the Eurasian land masses and watersheds and to their herd animals and plant forbearers who taught them how to live.

There are not living communities I can turn to (except perhaps the Sami). But there are cultural memory-shards and hidden practices and musical fragments and stories.

And so I am turning and will turn to such—knowing I will die, still living as a thief, repentant, scratching towards something less violent, committed to embracing correction, astonished at the immense beauty that flickers into view in my wife and her culture, in black creativity, in Native resilience, in my own deep ancestry, in nature’s own wild brilliance—grateful to participate in any way I can if invited as a guest, otherwise, learning culturally, from what I see, how to be more than simply “another white man” (while knowing that I do not escape complicity in being such), and pushing continually to clarify politically how I might be of some use in trying to put my body and mind in the way of the on-going machinery of conquest. Such a commitment in no way makes up for the history. But it is what I know to do.

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Endnotes

¹This paper began as a talk originally scheduled for a fall, 2016 gathering, on an island north of Vancouver, BC, of Coast Salish Native peoples and Filipino-Americans from both the U.S. and Canada to explore common experiences and differential struggles. I initially proposed the talk only at the strong urging of my Filipino wife (one of the conference organizers). And even then, I offered, up front, my own conviction that one more white male talking-head was probably not what the conference needed, but was overruled. Events unfolding in the conference, however, squeezed out the talk. So it is here re-tooled as part of my response to the recent Indigenous Wisdom & Shamanism: “Within, Between, & Beyond Worlds” conference held at Sonoma State University in early October, 2018. The basic confession remains salient across a now globalized theater of encounter between “the West and the Rest” (Hall, 1992).

²Sonoran Desert goatwalker and Sanctuary Movement founder Jim Corbett advocates a month-long Sabbatical sojourn, sleeping out on the land in vision-quest-like “opening” to wildlands “teaching,” during which the hard seed-shell of modern individualism may crack open before the primordial Presence that refuses every name and animates every “thing” (Corbett, 2003, pp. 213, 248-250, 287-288).

³Which is not to say it cannot be adopted and adapted to other contexts—it certainly has been (and the same set of issues applies to other “missionary,” text-based, so-called “world religions”). But to the degree its written features are taken up in other ecologies, other watersheds, in ways that override local indigenous knowledge of those contexts, and the spiritualities elaborated to codify those places and live symbiotically and sustainably there over generations, then I think it becomes a damaging and false imposition.

⁴Riffing on the title of a remarkable personal account of political struggle and spiritual succor over more than four decades on the part of an activist Methodist pastor friend (Wylie-Kellermann, 2017).

⁵Arab-speaking Bedouin in the Sinai today collect the puddles as a desert food they call “man’—likely an Arab cognate of the Hebrew manna (Eisenberg, 15-16).

⁶When Jesus heals the constant question is a typically “shamanic” one: by what powers does he do so—which ancestors or helper spirits? (Mark 6:14-15; 8: 27-28). When queried about his “authorization” to exorcise spirits, he can even be “read” as invoking an “animal familiar”—in his case, the migratory dove said to embody the spirit, that takes over from John the Baptist in his “vision quest-like” wildlands initiation. And when seeking counsel for his final confrontation of the Powers that be in the Palestinian capital (his Martin Luther King-like ”March on Jerusalem” and “Occupy Action” in the Temple that will end in his arrest and execution), like any good pastoral nomad he goes to the mountain headwaters to solicit ancestors for counsel (here, Mt. Hermon, source of the Jordan, where he is “visited” by Moses and Elijah in a storm of thunder and lightning) (Mk 9:2-9).

⁷For instance, the Potawatomi and Ojibwe stories of Windigos told in the Great Lakes basin area, or even the biblical traces of Leviathan, itself a carryover from the Canaanite beast, Litan or Lotan (Kimmerer, 2013, pp. 304-306; Johnston, 1995,, pp. 235-237 ; Job 42:1-34; Hermann, 1999, p. 133).

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