Thom, this is heartbreaking. Your words help us understand how lost we are and why.. The arrogance of every dominant group that only their ways are the true ways have destroyed so much. The British said that India had been brewing tea for a thousand years but until the British came did not know how to do it properly.
I am filing this for future reading again and again.
We all (7) grew up on our 300 acre family farm, doing chores, riding horses, going to a Catholic school, etc. in upstate NY which was founded by our great grandfather in 1860. He'd come from Ireland at 5 yrs, walked to Beekmantown from Quebec City, Ca. where the family dispersed. He stayed in the area working in the iron mines, later with a team of oxen. My mother's family was New England Puritan, included the first leader of the Mayflower colony, 3rd great grandfather worked with Franklin. Jefferson, etc. during the Revolution. Her uncle was our childhood hero as when plowing with horses, spent more time collecting native artifacts, telling us stories of what each one was used for while to us, he even looked like an Indian. We were read stories about native cultures as if they were the real sons of the earth. Our farm is totally organic, we vote totally in the FDR mode and think native cultures around the world are the only decent ones. We threw off the Catholic superstitions and Puritan insanities brought from Europe and try to make way in the many endeavors required of the 2lst century. We are like a huge number of people in this country who have come to these realizations. Keep hope alive.
--an Iroquois Amendment that would replace our broken 'Special Prosecutors' with a quorum of grannies (clan mothers) with Impeachment power.
--we are on the path, and need to feed it, of restoring our public lands to our native population. In places where that has been done diversity and ecosystem health has improved more than under customary management. Our native population has the meaning and the understanding; all they need for a healthy coherence is control.
Like in the book, The Giving Tree, the Prodigal Son story, and Siddhartha’s journey, this is the cycle of connection, forgetting and suffering, and back to connection. It is tragic, but the forgetting and destruction lead to having to reclaim and own who we, one of the living creatures, we with the most choice, of a Living, Intelligent creation, daily known to us as Life itself.
The early knowing and guidance lived in the heart and mind of original humanity, with direct listening within, dreams and visions, along with trial and error, guiding the way.
About the same time the destruction started, knowledge was surfacing in spiritual writings like Adwaita Vedanta, as to who we are and how to live together, albeit it not guiding us to return to building indigenous villages.
There is no owning this original knowing, for it lives in every heart and soul, without any needed DNA measure of what amount of original knowing lives in our blood. (However, we Do all know what the basic needs are of every human, plant and animal, and we all dependent on Mother Earth.)
And yes, gloriously, the remnants and even deeper practices are available for our remembering from the Native American culture and South American Native, and in the Netherlands, I have read.
I am a white woman reconnecting white children to nature, bringing in Natives to share their rememberings that yet live, as I myself have felt Native since childhood, and have had visions of my past as a Native living on the plains.
There is hope, and it is the connective truth and spark that lives in each of us, we indeed, beyond just religions’ message, the children of the Creator, heirs to the Knowledge within us. Now, as many have, including myself, may we reconstruct villages, and have the indigenous teach.
This is the best piece I have read from your pen, Thom, from among many great words. Such deep insight! And we who are Caucasian and conscious of what we have inflicted on indigenous people all over the world need this understanding in order to forgive ourselves (which does NOT mean to throw off accountability and avoid repairing the damage). In my own view, I believe that the human being in its natural condition has a very keen perception of the spirit as well as the physical characteristics of its environment. Just as there are hugely varied geological and environmental conditions in each part of the world, as well as a multitude of flora and fauns unique to each area, there is also a spiritual character that is unique to each place and the people who live in that area will manifest a culture, beliefs and traditions that reflect the spirit of the place in which they live. This emerges organically, in my sense of it, rather than through trial and error. Environments are always shifting and changing, and so some cultures may have moved on, as the Pueblos you mentioned, which doesn't necessarily mean the culture was unsuccessful; it simple adapted to the changing conditions. In this I'm not splitting hairs with you, just sharing what comes to me inspired by what you have said.
We white people absolutely have to take responsibility for the harm we have inflicted. As I read in a Facebook meme, "Your shitty childhood doesn't excuse your being a shitty human being." But I am so grateful for the appeal to compassion, and I am happy to say that, as one who has spent a lot of time trying to learn Native American traditions and who has a sweat lodge on my property, what I have found from the Native people I have been honored to spend time with is this:
Despite all that was done to them and the fact that they had to keep all the traditions and ways alive in secret, at risk of jail or death, most of the people I know have been more than willing to welcome the descendants of their oppressors into these ways. They have been patient with our lack of understanding and spare nothing to teach us as best we can understand. They show compassion and grace in embracing us. I have been with some who talk about us as "wannabes," and I can accept and understand that, but at least among the teachers I have been with, there is a sense of vision that what they have is truly a Light for the future of our Earth Mother and all of our relations on the planet, and they are dedicated to doing whatever is needed to help us understand and move into the way of harmony. For this, I am grateful beyond the power of words to express.
Some observations of the evolution of human culture are timeless. This is one for the ages, always inspiring, albeit a soul-wrenching reckoning of all we've lost along the way. We can't change the past, but an honest awareness serves as the clearest reflection of ourselves as a species beyond the myths.
Yet, mere knowledge of all the twists and turns that have brought the world to the brink of destruction has not veered us off course. Perhaps it's the spirit we've lost (some of us, too many of us), which imbues all things -- that unknowable force animating every living cell of all creation -- more than just the school-book knowledge of the outward path of evolution we're on that is so clearly wrong.
Today, the miracle of life seems cheap, just another throw-away commodity in the service of petty greed and ambition. One glance at your devices, and it's all easy to see in an instant: What serves as our dominant culture is a truly insane, tech-heavy explosion of end-game materialism without limits or guardrails -- a resource-draining, increasingly unequal Orwellian dystopia, pitting everyone against everyone else, threatening all life on Earth, an economic and political system designed to satisfy every destructive whim of human desire to the bitter end, totally divorced from the looming hard reality threatening ...well, everything!
Not fate as much as cause and effect. Karma, if you will. "Don't look up."
Of course, original indigenous cultures also suffered their weird belief systems and base desires. Who can blame them: Day and night, sun and moon, lightening and thunder, snow and cold, a full belly and refreshing breezes on a warm summer evening, beautiful parents and a healthy child -- what terrible and wonderful gods are these who have so much power over our lives? And certainly the tribes warred with each other endlessly over resources as time progressed ...being human.
But in the early times, most people had to respect the physical environment they depended upon and struggled to survive in. And to thrive in. The good life. If not harmony exactly, the more egalitarian societies seem to have at least found a workable balance between the needs and wants of an ever-growing population of diverse humans and the ever-changing demands of an even more diverse environment. Nature being a harsh mistress, there weren't many choices available when it came to living or dying back in the good old days.
And neither are there today. The one thing that seems missing most, though, is that *living* spirit of oneness with Mother Earth, the basis for many if not all of our ancestors' religions. The thing that keeps people together instead of tearing them apart. These days, it's still a thread to follow in one's mind if nowhere else. Maybe a living, changing feeling more than a mere thought.
I had the good fortune of being born and raised with the wild mountains of Western Montana as a playground and with orphaned Cuban and Native American kids mixed into the cast of characters who made up our inner gang -- in our young minds, pretty much like the patrons of Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, but a movie way after our time in Fantasyland. We had lots of outside time in the woods during all four turns of seasons, some good, some bad, some downright scary. (As my mother used to say, it's amazing we survived childhood). For several years, we were free to live-out a child's world of magic mostly unimpeded in the best of settings.
The whole experience is forever burned into memory at a fundamental level. And so are the remnants of those innocent feelings of being a wild and free child, a time that seemed timeless. Each Fall before the dark days of winter no matter where I'm at, I always give thanks in remembrance to one of my own greatest and earliest childhood mentors, who allowed kids to be kids (without too much admonishment) while teaching them an invaluable appreciation, with his many firsthand experiences, for other peoples and cultures from around the world, a wise elder whom I didn't realize as such until much later when my own adult life happened: https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2006/oct/01/rudolph-john-jack-holterman-jr-91-6/
The innocence and magic of nature is still here, all around us; we need to recapture that universal spirit it in our daily lives, especially in the concrete jungles.
Hello Thom. Thank you for this history and understanding. I want to share a poem I wrote several years ago, along with several others, mourning the terrible damages our people have caused to the First Peoples' path of life on Turtle Island.
LIVING IN THE DAYS OF CAIN
We are living in the hard days of Cain.
Careless, we answer his question with, “No.”
Our needs are buried under want and pain
Taught us by the soulless dragons that blow
Winds of death, which destroy all we love.
We forget truth, or refuse to look
At those trapped in the reservations of
Poverty and violence that we took
For granted. With generations we’ve shared
The fates of those we conquered and displaced,
The discerning indigenous who dared
To teach us civilization and grace
But failed. Now we understand their despair
At freedom’s loss, our children’s table bare.
Eliz Barger At least, the teachings so far continue to be ingnored by so many, but there is hope. Thank you, Thom, for continuing to work for truth and life and forgiveness. I will never give up.
Thom; as I was reading this I had a feeling you had posted it before. I remember being so captivated by your writing and it's romp through human history. The story of The Lost People brought back memories of a book I had read entitled; "AZTEC" by Gary Jennings. That book covered the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico the killing of Moctezuma and the destruction of the Aztec nation. The story is based around an old Aztec warrior who is also an official of the nation. He reveals the history and culture of his people to a Catholic Bishop who had accompanied Cortez on his journey. The Lost People reminded me of that old Aztec in the way his story described the ancient culture and history of the Aztec Nation. He describes the brutality and destruction brought about by the Spanish and the Catholic church. That was my feeling the first time I read The Lost people. This time I am more inclined to be reminded of a book entitled; "The Immortality Key." by Brian C. Muraresku. A book about the Ancient Greeks, Ancient Mysteries, and the spiritual capitol Eleusis. A book you recommended. Once again ;thanks for all you do. Whoops!! The first time I read your story was on October 26, 2021. I have it in my Thom Hartman file.
Thom, this is heartbreaking. Your words help us understand how lost we are and why.. The arrogance of every dominant group that only their ways are the true ways have destroyed so much. The British said that India had been brewing tea for a thousand years but until the British came did not know how to do it properly.
I am filing this for future reading again and again.
We all (7) grew up on our 300 acre family farm, doing chores, riding horses, going to a Catholic school, etc. in upstate NY which was founded by our great grandfather in 1860. He'd come from Ireland at 5 yrs, walked to Beekmantown from Quebec City, Ca. where the family dispersed. He stayed in the area working in the iron mines, later with a team of oxen. My mother's family was New England Puritan, included the first leader of the Mayflower colony, 3rd great grandfather worked with Franklin. Jefferson, etc. during the Revolution. Her uncle was our childhood hero as when plowing with horses, spent more time collecting native artifacts, telling us stories of what each one was used for while to us, he even looked like an Indian. We were read stories about native cultures as if they were the real sons of the earth. Our farm is totally organic, we vote totally in the FDR mode and think native cultures around the world are the only decent ones. We threw off the Catholic superstitions and Puritan insanities brought from Europe and try to make way in the many endeavors required of the 2lst century. We are like a huge number of people in this country who have come to these realizations. Keep hope alive.
Things we can do to show we learned:
--an Iroquois Amendment that would replace our broken 'Special Prosecutors' with a quorum of grannies (clan mothers) with Impeachment power.
--we are on the path, and need to feed it, of restoring our public lands to our native population. In places where that has been done diversity and ecosystem health has improved more than under customary management. Our native population has the meaning and the understanding; all they need for a healthy coherence is control.
So very grateful your life was saved!!
Like in the book, The Giving Tree, the Prodigal Son story, and Siddhartha’s journey, this is the cycle of connection, forgetting and suffering, and back to connection. It is tragic, but the forgetting and destruction lead to having to reclaim and own who we, one of the living creatures, we with the most choice, of a Living, Intelligent creation, daily known to us as Life itself.
The early knowing and guidance lived in the heart and mind of original humanity, with direct listening within, dreams and visions, along with trial and error, guiding the way.
About the same time the destruction started, knowledge was surfacing in spiritual writings like Adwaita Vedanta, as to who we are and how to live together, albeit it not guiding us to return to building indigenous villages.
There is no owning this original knowing, for it lives in every heart and soul, without any needed DNA measure of what amount of original knowing lives in our blood. (However, we Do all know what the basic needs are of every human, plant and animal, and we all dependent on Mother Earth.)
And yes, gloriously, the remnants and even deeper practices are available for our remembering from the Native American culture and South American Native, and in the Netherlands, I have read.
I am a white woman reconnecting white children to nature, bringing in Natives to share their rememberings that yet live, as I myself have felt Native since childhood, and have had visions of my past as a Native living on the plains.
There is hope, and it is the connective truth and spark that lives in each of us, we indeed, beyond just religions’ message, the children of the Creator, heirs to the Knowledge within us. Now, as many have, including myself, may we reconstruct villages, and have the indigenous teach.
Thank you, Tom.
This is the best piece I have read from your pen, Thom, from among many great words. Such deep insight! And we who are Caucasian and conscious of what we have inflicted on indigenous people all over the world need this understanding in order to forgive ourselves (which does NOT mean to throw off accountability and avoid repairing the damage). In my own view, I believe that the human being in its natural condition has a very keen perception of the spirit as well as the physical characteristics of its environment. Just as there are hugely varied geological and environmental conditions in each part of the world, as well as a multitude of flora and fauns unique to each area, there is also a spiritual character that is unique to each place and the people who live in that area will manifest a culture, beliefs and traditions that reflect the spirit of the place in which they live. This emerges organically, in my sense of it, rather than through trial and error. Environments are always shifting and changing, and so some cultures may have moved on, as the Pueblos you mentioned, which doesn't necessarily mean the culture was unsuccessful; it simple adapted to the changing conditions. In this I'm not splitting hairs with you, just sharing what comes to me inspired by what you have said.
We white people absolutely have to take responsibility for the harm we have inflicted. As I read in a Facebook meme, "Your shitty childhood doesn't excuse your being a shitty human being." But I am so grateful for the appeal to compassion, and I am happy to say that, as one who has spent a lot of time trying to learn Native American traditions and who has a sweat lodge on my property, what I have found from the Native people I have been honored to spend time with is this:
Despite all that was done to them and the fact that they had to keep all the traditions and ways alive in secret, at risk of jail or death, most of the people I know have been more than willing to welcome the descendants of their oppressors into these ways. They have been patient with our lack of understanding and spare nothing to teach us as best we can understand. They show compassion and grace in embracing us. I have been with some who talk about us as "wannabes," and I can accept and understand that, but at least among the teachers I have been with, there is a sense of vision that what they have is truly a Light for the future of our Earth Mother and all of our relations on the planet, and they are dedicated to doing whatever is needed to help us understand and move into the way of harmony. For this, I am grateful beyond the power of words to express.
Some observations of the evolution of human culture are timeless. This is one for the ages, always inspiring, albeit a soul-wrenching reckoning of all we've lost along the way. We can't change the past, but an honest awareness serves as the clearest reflection of ourselves as a species beyond the myths.
Yet, mere knowledge of all the twists and turns that have brought the world to the brink of destruction has not veered us off course. Perhaps it's the spirit we've lost (some of us, too many of us), which imbues all things -- that unknowable force animating every living cell of all creation -- more than just the school-book knowledge of the outward path of evolution we're on that is so clearly wrong.
Today, the miracle of life seems cheap, just another throw-away commodity in the service of petty greed and ambition. One glance at your devices, and it's all easy to see in an instant: What serves as our dominant culture is a truly insane, tech-heavy explosion of end-game materialism without limits or guardrails -- a resource-draining, increasingly unequal Orwellian dystopia, pitting everyone against everyone else, threatening all life on Earth, an economic and political system designed to satisfy every destructive whim of human desire to the bitter end, totally divorced from the looming hard reality threatening ...well, everything!
Not fate as much as cause and effect. Karma, if you will. "Don't look up."
Of course, original indigenous cultures also suffered their weird belief systems and base desires. Who can blame them: Day and night, sun and moon, lightening and thunder, snow and cold, a full belly and refreshing breezes on a warm summer evening, beautiful parents and a healthy child -- what terrible and wonderful gods are these who have so much power over our lives? And certainly the tribes warred with each other endlessly over resources as time progressed ...being human.
But in the early times, most people had to respect the physical environment they depended upon and struggled to survive in. And to thrive in. The good life. If not harmony exactly, the more egalitarian societies seem to have at least found a workable balance between the needs and wants of an ever-growing population of diverse humans and the ever-changing demands of an even more diverse environment. Nature being a harsh mistress, there weren't many choices available when it came to living or dying back in the good old days.
And neither are there today. The one thing that seems missing most, though, is that *living* spirit of oneness with Mother Earth, the basis for many if not all of our ancestors' religions. The thing that keeps people together instead of tearing them apart. These days, it's still a thread to follow in one's mind if nowhere else. Maybe a living, changing feeling more than a mere thought.
I had the good fortune of being born and raised with the wild mountains of Western Montana as a playground and with orphaned Cuban and Native American kids mixed into the cast of characters who made up our inner gang -- in our young minds, pretty much like the patrons of Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, but a movie way after our time in Fantasyland. We had lots of outside time in the woods during all four turns of seasons, some good, some bad, some downright scary. (As my mother used to say, it's amazing we survived childhood). For several years, we were free to live-out a child's world of magic mostly unimpeded in the best of settings.
The whole experience is forever burned into memory at a fundamental level. And so are the remnants of those innocent feelings of being a wild and free child, a time that seemed timeless. Each Fall before the dark days of winter no matter where I'm at, I always give thanks in remembrance to one of my own greatest and earliest childhood mentors, who allowed kids to be kids (without too much admonishment) while teaching them an invaluable appreciation, with his many firsthand experiences, for other peoples and cultures from around the world, a wise elder whom I didn't realize as such until much later when my own adult life happened: https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2006/oct/01/rudolph-john-jack-holterman-jr-91-6/
The innocence and magic of nature is still here, all around us; we need to recapture that universal spirit it in our daily lives, especially in the concrete jungles.
Really impactful and a great recognition of how lost we are. Thanks Thom! I will pass this on to my children and grandchildren.
A very interesting discussion on the influence of geography on world politics:
“Are we really prisoners of geography?”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/10/are-we-really-prisoners-of-geography-maps-geopolitics
Hello Thom. Thank you for this history and understanding. I want to share a poem I wrote several years ago, along with several others, mourning the terrible damages our people have caused to the First Peoples' path of life on Turtle Island.
LIVING IN THE DAYS OF CAIN
We are living in the hard days of Cain.
Careless, we answer his question with, “No.”
Our needs are buried under want and pain
Taught us by the soulless dragons that blow
Winds of death, which destroy all we love.
We forget truth, or refuse to look
At those trapped in the reservations of
Poverty and violence that we took
For granted. With generations we’ve shared
The fates of those we conquered and displaced,
The discerning indigenous who dared
To teach us civilization and grace
But failed. Now we understand their despair
At freedom’s loss, our children’s table bare.
Eliz Barger At least, the teachings so far continue to be ingnored by so many, but there is hope. Thank you, Thom, for continuing to work for truth and life and forgiveness. I will never give up.
too many people…
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Thom; as I was reading this I had a feeling you had posted it before. I remember being so captivated by your writing and it's romp through human history. The story of The Lost People brought back memories of a book I had read entitled; "AZTEC" by Gary Jennings. That book covered the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico the killing of Moctezuma and the destruction of the Aztec nation. The story is based around an old Aztec warrior who is also an official of the nation. He reveals the history and culture of his people to a Catholic Bishop who had accompanied Cortez on his journey. The Lost People reminded me of that old Aztec in the way his story described the ancient culture and history of the Aztec Nation. He describes the brutality and destruction brought about by the Spanish and the Catholic church. That was my feeling the first time I read The Lost people. This time I am more inclined to be reminded of a book entitled; "The Immortality Key." by Brian C. Muraresku. A book about the Ancient Greeks, Ancient Mysteries, and the spiritual capitol Eleusis. A book you recommended. Once again ;thanks for all you do. Whoops!! The first time I read your story was on October 26, 2021. I have it in my Thom Hartman file.
Sometimes I joke, don't make me mad, I'm still pissed off at the Albigensian Crusade.....
A heft of white-guilt lifted , increased feelings of compassion for folks not like me, a real game changer Thom😳🙏
❤️