(To N. Scott Momaday, in gratitude)
The first Europeans who entered the North American continent across the Atlantic Ocean were unprepared for most of what they encountered. Nothing was more astonishing than the fertility of the landscape and the abundance of creatures that inhabited it. Their written accounts contain wide-ranging descriptions of schools of fish so dense that one can imagine them walking on them, flocks of birds so large that they blot out the sun, and mammals of every size and description hunting and feeding beneath an almost seamless canopy of trees extending nowhere. The distance at which one cares to look.
Homo sapiens also flourished in this landscape. Some tribes settled in permanent villages, others preferred to hunt and forage in mobile groups. Whatever they choose to live, these populations have been able to do so for centuries without diminishing the abundance of other organisms or the supply of natural gifts—clean air, water, and healthy soil—on which life in all its forms depends.
The ancestors of these eastern tribes did not show the same restraint. Whether the peoples who first entered the continent itself – whether they traveled by boat or across a land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska in the late Paleolithic is a matter of ongoing debate – hunted to extinction the megafauna they encountered. Recent research suggests that climate change may have contributed, but the continent-by-continent timing of this mass extinction event suggests that human predators were crucial participants in it.
This is the mystery that Scott Momaday set out to solve in his book, “The First American to See His Own Land.”[i] He believed that doing so would involve determining how a group of people came to the idea that the land was sacred and therefore needed to be treated with a kind of reverent respect. How, in particular, did the reckless predator “come to understand that there is an intimate and vital connection between the Earth and itself, a connection that involves a complex web of rights and responsibilities” [?]”
This is certainly a difficult question, and one that no one currently with decision-making power in a society dependent on fossil fuels believes is worth contemplating. But it is difficult to imagine a more important question to be asked and then answered in a way that might recover the complex web that, according to Momaday, the indigenous hunters eventually came to understand. Perhaps his answer provides a useful starting point for us as we look to displace generally mindless predators in our world.
Momaday asserts that the idea of the Holy Land may have resulted from the recognition of beauty. In the ceremonial poems and songs he refers to, he always finds pleasure in the look and feel of the natural world recording minute details and vast interconnections. And in the artefacts made by these people—from spears and canoes to plates and dresses—he sees the same aesthetic principle at work. Moreover, this beauty is not the beauty of a painting hanging on a museum wall. It is rooted in relationships rather than things, in how things are arranged in a familiar environment rather than how they erupt within a heroic act of romantic imagination.
To illustrate this point, Momaday offers a description from the oral tradition of his Kiowa family. The narrator brings up a plot of tribal land, “south of the pecan grove,” where a woman is buried. We do not know her name or the exact location of her body. But we are told that she was buried “in a beautiful dress” – made of “soft buckskin” and “decorated with elk teeth and beads.” Momaday draws attention to what is stated in the story (the woman, the dress, a particular plain) and what is not (her individual identity, a dangerous sign) and concludes that this tale is, in essence, a “declaration of love.” For the Earth.” And in the vision it brings before our mind’s eye, all the different elements of the story become “one reality, one expression of beauty in nature.” The beauty of the dress lies not only in the materials and craftsmanship, but in the way it brings meaning to the sacred landscape. During this process beauty acquires ethical and spiritual dimensions, because it requires us to consider what is the “proper” use of the land thus conceived and what is not.
From the Native American point of view, the beautiful and the appropriate are “inseparable,” Momaday concludes. When we refer to the Earth as sacred, it is this unity that we honor. Without proper reverence for the beauty of nature, the sense of proper use of the land loses its connection with the customs and rituals of its inhabitants. A deep interest in what might be appropriate gives way to the earnest pursuit of what will lead to profit. Thus the unity of beauty and wise use is dissolved and suddenly no one can see the absurdity of celebrating the paintings of the Hudson River School while tolerating the pollution of the rivers so exquisitely depicted. The tragic unity—civilization and its discontents—is being reshaped under the sign of progress, a process that is fatalistic rather than voluntary. Indian dress hangs in the museum to admire the educated and knowledgeable; The Indian land is distorted by the mores that mark the civilized individual as a member of an “advanced” society. Soon everything becomes ugly – the land and the people who no longer feel a connection to it. Momaday chose the right time to look for greener pastures.
There are other paths that might lead us to the earthly aesthetic that Momaday characterizes in Kiowa culture, and other affiliations that might capture the integrity, and thus the wisdom, of a sedentary tribe. in Underland – A deep time journeyRobert MacFarlane tells a modern version of the pursuit of vision. It explores a series of places, both natural and man-made, where one can travel beneath the Earth's surface and look around. His journeys are arduous and, often, fraught with danger. He does it for the sheer pleasure of adventure and in the hope of finding and illustrating ideas available only to those willing to expose themselves to danger in inhospitable, lightly explored terrain. He is particularly interested in the liminal quality of these underground sites, that is, their placement between a world open to the sky and interior worlds below. By exploring the latter, he hopes to gain a new perspective on the former. From this perspective, he seeks to understand what those who migrate between worlds – whether tribal shamans or contemporary daredevils – might tell us about the ways of imagination.
The vision I wish to emphasize occurs while MacFarlane is exploring sea caves on the west coast of Norway. These underground sites can only be reached by two routes – a long and dangerous trek over ice, snow and rock-covered slopes or by boat through one of the world's most powerful vortex systems (which Edgar Allen Poe featured in his book Descent into the Vortex). “). They contain some of the few cave paintings ever found above sixty degrees north latitude. Members of a tribe of Bronze Age hunter-gatherers and fishermen braved the dangers of reaching these caves to paint a series of stick figures – mainly humans, with some Human-animal hybrids – on the walls with a red iron oxide tint, the figures seem to be dancing.
Having barely survived his journey along the overland route, MacFarlane wonders what might have compelled these people to paint their red dancers on these very walls. Perhaps, he argues, caves were chosen not just for shelter and preservation, but precisely because, from the artists' point of view, they were surrounded by a larger context that included both the powerful whirlpools, the wild coastline beyond, and the spiritual depths from which the burning desire emanated. To paint radiates. The caves are part of a network linking the external and internal landscapes, and the dancers are a dramatic representation of the powers that one can tap into by acknowledging, through art and ritual, one's place in that network. This observation leads him to a conclusion that echoes Momaday's moral from The Tale of Indian Dress:
Any encounter – modern or ancient – with these painted characters will be just as well Necessarily it is formed not only by confrontation with the red forms themselves On the cave wall, but also through the details and moods of the landscape beyond Dark point – due to falling sunlight or snow, sea mood, The gliding presence of an eagle or the flowing presence of an otter – and by experience Getting to the caves of the dancing characters first.
So we are faced once again with the convergence of tribal modes of meaning-making with these modern types concerned with the power of place and directed to ignore the boundaries inscribed in our thinking by Western modes of rationality. It is a happy convergence and full of promise for anyone looking for a way out of the manifold chaos created by modernity. Whether we see beauty or seek truth, a holistic approach refocuses our attention on the larger landscapes—social and ecological—in which the arts and sciences are shaped. It fits an isolable object into a network of connections such that it may reveal features that would not appear when hung on a wall, viewed through a microscope, or stripped of abstract statistical probability. Thanks to the onset of multiple crises, we are finally beginning, albeit very slowly, to realize that these characteristics may be the most important to take into account.
Certainly, for Momaday, Indian dress is beautiful in itself. MacFarlane finds himself as captivated by the red dancers as he is surrounded by the cave wall alone. Reductionist science has added significantly to human knowledge and well-being. But unless clothes, dancers, and molecules are reconnected to their moorings in social arrangements and the natural world, they cannot speak to the crises generated by the unbridled pursuit of human well-being. Both beauty and truth are stunted when cut off from their roots in relationships of affection and reverence. Art oscillates between avant-garde provocation and entertainment, and experimental methods breed senseless destruction.
MacFarlane traveled in the company of other explorers who were drawn for their own reasons to the underground sites he visited. They were a diverse group – counterculture rebels, wayward youth, well-rooted locals united by curiosity, and usually proud non-conformity. These are voluntary affiliations, but Macfarlane gives them characteristics common to tribes, such as the Momadai, born of kinship ties and shared history. As he said in an afterword written to praise his fellow underground travelers, these people were just that
…Mappers of networks of interrelations are, in fact, trying to connect them Thinking in unfamiliar scopes of time and space, and not looking for scattered objects Gems of personal epiphany but rather to expand the possible means by which People may move and think together across the landscape, responsibly Knowledge of the Deep Past, the Deep Future and the Inhuman Earth.
The difference, of course, is that MacFarlane and his tribe come as visitors to their favorite places. Home is the place they return to when their travels are over. Like almost all of us in the developed world, they are “scattered” (Martin Shaw’s term), thinking and moving “across” the landscape without settling long enough to become citizens of any part of it. Their experiences give them access to knowledge that Macfarlane is entitled to call “responsible,” but that is still a far cry from the “complex web of rights and responsibilities” honored by indigenous tribes in lands they had learned to describe as sacred.
If the deeply rooted sense of beauty derived from Kiowa cultural expressions is to play a role in shaping our response to social and environmental collapse, it will need a region that can sustain it. If truth is to find a foundation in its proper sphere, the scattered elements will need to dig out and occupy a veritable patch of ground—a ground base which we know, learn to love, and through this knowledge and love determine what constitutes the proper use of it. Without the kind of reverence that Momadai celebrates, we are unlikely to find the wisdom or strength to make our way to any kind of safety.
To get an idea of how we obtained such a land base, please visit the occupation website thehearth.org
[i] First published in 1976 AD National Geographic; Reprinted in American landa volume of nature writings edited by Bill McKibben for the Library of America.
Teaser source: The red sandstone cliffs of Wyoming's Black Hills, former Kiowa territory that remains sacred to them in modern times. CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=424544
