Filed under: First Nations, Indigenous wisdom, culture, health, life, love, residential school syndrome, self-help | Tags: Aboriginal community development, Aboriginal health, Compliments and Emotional Health, finding love, First Nations self-esteem, giving compliments in the Native Community, holistic health, Indigenous health, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Peoples, life coaching, love, Native American self-esteem, relationships, residential school syndrome, self-love
Giving Compliments in the Native Community
Native people cannot give compliments. And this is a clear indication of our People’s lack of self-esteem because we can only give of what we have in abundance.
The healthiest people are those who give the most compliments. They champion those around them to achieve and demand more from life.
If you’re a Native person, here’s an exercise for you: count how many times in a given day you give a compliment and how many times you receive one.
For holistically healthy people, the compliment count (i.e. the number of compliments you give and receive) measures over 100 in any given day. Any count under 50 indicates poor emotional health.
Even if you’re by yourself in the desert, you can always give thanks for the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the animals you meet, and so on.
That is the way our People have always lived. It is precisely this attitude of gratitude that enabled our Ancestors to maintain the sacred balance of reciprocity that permeated everything they did.
The real traditional people out there (and they’re out there) are those who make everyone around them feel better. They’re the ones you want to be around.
I’d love it if the love in our hearts matched the beauty in our traditional regalia.
As generous as Native People are with their time and money, we so desperately need to match that generosity with making each other feel great about ourselves.
If we don’t start doing this, no one else will. We cannot rely on anyone else to come in and save us from gossiping ourselves to death.
We have the love medicine inside our hearts. We always have.
When we smile, we make the world a healthier place.
When we share our love, we make our Ancestors smile.
Filed under: Environment, First Nations, culture, health, religion, self-help, women | Tags: A New Earth, Beyond Recycling, feminine power, Gender and the Environment, Global crisis, Green Revolution, Indigenous wisdom, Religion and the Environment, Sexism and the Environment, Spirituality and the Environment, Women and the Environment
An Indigenous Perspective on the Green Revolution
Two things are necessary for us to change our connection to the Earth and save us from ourselves. And they both come from an Indigenous worldview.
It’s not enough to recycle, buy organic local produce, or vote for the Green Party. Those things, among other best practices, don’t address the fundamental attitudes that got us where we are today, which is in the midst of our Planet’s sixth mass extinction.
Until women hold the balance of power, we will continue to destroy our Planet.
Yeah, I said it.
The greatest champions of Mother Earth have been Indigenous Peoples. Anything espoused by the Green Revolutionaries today has its roots in Indigenous wisdom.
Virtually all Indigenous Peoples were matriarchal. It is no coincidence that the Earth’s greatest protectors were led by strong women. Respectful attitudes towards women go hand in hand with being respectful of the Planet.
Conversely, when we look at the societies responsible for destroying our Mother Earth, we notice they are dominated by men and have been for centuries. This is also no coincidence.
Western European attitudes towards women have been anything but respectful and caring. It’s blatant sexism, and it’s been like this for centuries. The whole purpose of the Inquisition and its ‘witch’ burnings was to eradicate female power. Before Christianity’s introduction into European culture, the early Europeans had the same caring attitude towards the Planet.
However, with the advent of Christianity came the subjugation of women and the Planet’s ‘resources’. This is clearly stated in the Bible and it is one pronouncement that Christians centuries over have had a very easy time obeying. The cheating, lying, stealing and killing are habits that have been a little harder to curb.
It is a given that Islamic-Judeo-Christian (yes, all three can trace their roots to Abraham) societies are among the most disrespectful of women. You can see this in the power structures of those Churches, Temples, and Synagogues. In art, the ratio of female to male nudes in the Louvre, the Tate, and all the other repositories of ‘civilized culture’ speaks to this imbalance of power.
You can see this in the laws of these nations, where the number of laws that govern property rights greatly outnumber the laws that protect women. In many countries, the courts turn a blind eye to husbands beating their wives.
How you treat women, so you treat the Earth.
In Indigenous societies, it is the women who have that direct connection to the Planet. The women were (and still are in many communities) largely responsible for the picking of medicines. Women were the decision-makers and caregivers, while men were the warriors and hunters.
Only when the Europeans landed on Turtle Island did they demand to deal with the men. It is only a recent phenomenon that you see men as chiefs. This has more to do with the continued colonization that my People still face, than with any tradition.
Venture into any Indigenous community today and you’ll see something that’s missing from the ‘green revolution’. It’s the spirit of true humility and gratitude. Traditional people give tobacco as a sacred gift to the Creator before anything is ever taken from the land. It is this concept of reciprocity that’s missing from the ‘green revolution’.
With so much to give to the World, it makes me sad to see many of our People embrace the trappings of colonization and Christianity. It’s as depressing and ridiculous as seeing a Kodiak bear competing in a televised hot dog eating contest (you can find that clip, like everything else, on YouTube).
The two things that will nurture the Planet are: women holding power and a spirit of gratitude. It worked for Indigenous Peoples for millenia. In a nutshell, that’s what separates an Indigenous perspective from a Western European one.
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“No Man’s Land” is what they call native housing in Vancouver. The reason for this is the almost total lack of fathers taking care of their children.
From a visiting alien’s perspective, it seems like someone is conducting a wide-scale social scientific experiment on the Native population in Canada to determine what happens when nations of children are raised without their fathers.
Preliminary findings of this grand experiment indicate low self-esteem across the board, a predisposition to a host of self-defeating behaviors, high incarceration rates, and widespread violence.
Single mothers, grandmothers, or aunties are forced to raise their children on their own without the support of the children’s father. Make no mistake about it: most of these women deserve superhero status.
This is such a huge problem in the Native community, yet no one talks about it. This is having a huge effect on the holistic health of our People.
Our children need a father’s love and concern to compliment the love they receive from their mothers. Without it, a child isn’t complete. And without it, a child can grow up resenting and even hating all men.
Where are the fathers?
The crux of it is no one ever taught them to be men.
The coming of age ceremonies have largely vanished as a direct result of colonization and the long-lasting effects of residential school syndrome. Some of these ceremonies included the throwing away of all the child’s toys to both symbolize and actualize the child’s transformation into an adult.
Simply put, G.I. Joe and candy morph into guns and alcohol. They’re too busy acting like boys, shrugging off any responsibility or accountability. Detention turns into prison time for many Native men.
If you’ve read my last blog, then you’ve caught a glimpse into the Native community’s unwillingness to embrace adulthood.
The sad fact is that most Native men do not want to get married and raise children.
It’s surely not a problem of not enjoying the company of women or being physically capable of having children. Native birthrates are among the highest in the world. The problem occurs after the child is born.
Even some of our leaders are busy acting inappropriately when it comes to having extramarital affairs and fathering children with a number of women.
Now before you start to think that I’m putting all the blame on Native men, that’s missing the point. What happens in the Native community happens in others communities as well.
As a sidebar, we still haven’t seen a movie about the life of Martin Luther King, despite all of his political accomplishments and inspiring leadership. Even though he said all the right things in public, his private life did not always live up to his upright reputation. In this respect, he shares even more in common with JFK.
It’s too simplistic to blame just the men for the problem of single-parent families. The women must share in the responsibility for this wide-ranging phenomenon. When you point the blame at one party, it has the effect of polarizing the community even more.
Instead of focusing on entrenched positions of “He doesn’t have anything to do with raising his children” to “She is constantly being manipulative”, we have to shift to the common interests of how we can come together to raise our children.
To end on an upswing, my father was and still is an excellent role model for all Native fathers. He is still married to my mom after 44 years. Along with my mother, he accepted and embraced the responsibility of raising both my brother and myself. Together, they overcame the long-term effects of their time spent at the Pelican Falls residential school–the place where they first met as children.
There are others just like my dad all over Turtle Island. The problem is there are just far too few of them. This must change.
Life isn’t a rap video. Perhaps if more Native men suffered from early onset male-pattern baldness, they would act their age much sooner. Flowing hair aside, no one should aspire to be the old guy at the club. It’s more sad than laughable for many reasons.
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Adulthood Deminished in the Native Community
What’s wrong with considering yourself to be an adult? If you’re a First Nations person in Canada, then there seems to be a growing fear of this label.
Adulthood in the Native community has been deteriorating for years. Not only has the age for youth been extended several times since the 1960s, the age of Elders seems to be shrinking too.
Put the two together, and although we’re living longer lives, adulthood is shrinking.
I’m a 32 year old youth. Maybe that’s why I still watch too many Seinfeld and Columbo re-runs and drink A&W Cream Soda whenever I’m in the US.
As inane as this sounds, the First Nations community in Canada considers all under 35 years of age to be youth. This is a problem for various reasons.
Firstly, whenever there’s a delay of entrance into adulthood, those effected face responsibility and accountability issues. That is, they are given a big excuse not to grow up and be a man or a woman.
When people are encouraged by the society in which they live to remain stunted, this, in turn, affects their behavior. They continue to do the things they did as a child.
Part of the reason for this is Aboriginal Business Canada wants a healthier return on the loans they’re giving out to youth. It turns out that teenagers and people in their early twenties are not deemed healthy loan risks. By extending the age of youth to 35, they hope to get a better return on their investment.
When only 3% of the First Nations population in Canada practise their traditional beliefs, the turning of age ceremonies that used to signify entrance into adulthood have largely gone the way of unpasterized milk.
When a Nation of People cease to practise their own ceremonies, frustration and turmoil ensue. The Afro-Americans are still dealing with the effects of slavery. No one else mentions it, but the fact they’re still largely practising beliefs that were forced on them by their ancestors’ former ‘masters’ should be viewed as a possible cause of the problems they continue to face.
At the age I am now, Jesus Christ was just starting his ministry. If he was around today, I guess he would be eligible for a youth loan to further his cause.
