A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom

 A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom by Huston Smith, Edited and prefaced by Phil Cousineau

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From Congress to the United Nations, Indigenous and native people are calling for peace, rights, reconciliation, restoration of land, water, “All Our Relations” and/or some kind of just recompense for these failures. Our pressure from migrants fleeing industrial farming corporations, their bulldoze-and-burn techniques, maquiladora slave-labor camps, dictators and funded wars could be pulled back if we listened to the moral balance of their stories, histories and the balanced relationships with the earth from which they came.

       With any luck and good wisdom, we can ALL learn from these truth-tellings to blend the edges of “fiction” with “history” and cleave to a center which is humane, spiritual, material and changing. This “gravitation” to a unified, healthful center is elucidated by longtime Berkeley resident Huston Smith’s A Seat at the Table: In Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom, edited and prefaced by Phil Cousineau. He quotes Gene Thin Elk (Lakota, 1994, p.119) “We have, at the very core of our being, more power than anything human kindness has ever made ever since the beginning of time…We can, in any given second, start that healing process and walk a healing road."      

       Vine Deloria Jr., author of God is Red: A Native View of Religion and The World We Used to Live in: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men said in 1979, “The fundamental factor that keeps Indians and non-Indians from communicating, is that they are speaking about two entirely different perceptions of the world.” (p. xviii) 

       Smith, in conversation with Anishinaabe activist and politician Winona LaDuke, responded to one of her questions about world religions by saying “the unique contribution of the Indigenous peoples is to focus on this point of mutual relatedness,” (p. 52) and she “vigorously described this way of conducting oneself in the world.”   

       She said the name for her nation was “the land of the people,” “But it also means the land to which the people belong…In all our stories, in our oral history, we say this is where the giant went to sleep, or this is where the great river was made. All those stories are contained in the land itself, and they are not contained elsewhere.” (ibid.) 

       “It’s not about looking back – it’s about being on your path – staying on the path the Creator gave you,” (p. xx) and to “live in accordance and respect to the Akin, the Earth that cares for us, which is our Mother. That is what we are taught in our community.” (p. 52)

       Cousineau says, “Along with the recovery of lost land and revenues comes the revitalizing of what many elders call the “Good Red Road,” the spiritual path that emphasizes the community and the great web of life.” (p. xviii)  

It is painful to see and own up to the bitter truths of the Gold Rush and settler California Genocide, discoveries of residential school children taken from their families to be abused and neglected, dying far from home; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) and girls; raped, abducted and "disappeared" even now by residents of the "man camps" of the resource extractors of West and Upper Midwest. 

       The lost children and wise adults who see the Earth sinking under her human burdens are turning to old ideas and stories of ecological and community balance and wisdom; the Elders who experience, repeat and remember them and the old “songs” celebrating "the great web of life."  

        The process of storytelling is the oldest of human oral traditions that encompass culture, ethics, religion, history, family and all parts of Natural History: geology, geography, botany, zoology and more. We circle around back to a worldview where dreams, songs and visions of interconnectedness are held in the highest esteem; a worldview where ALL is held in balance by each part working together harmoniously, even in the midst of change, BECAUSE of change. Because of creative and natural gifts of curiosity, learning and sharing “songs.”

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