After “the environmental crisis” came to popular attention in the 1960s, American Indians were portrayed as having a legacy of traditional environmental ethics. We wanted to know if this were true. But how to gain access to ideas of which there is no written record? Answer: analyze stories, which have a life of their own, handed down from one generation to the next going all the way back to a time before European contact, colonization, and cultural, as well as murderous, genocide. And the stories do reveal indigenous North American environmental ethics (plural). That’s what American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study demonstrates.
I wrote
American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study
This book was my first portal into the North American Plains-Indian worldview.
It is a powerful narrative of a profoundly spiritual visionary that “has become a North American bible of all tribes,” writes Vine Deloria in his Introduction to the 1979 Bison Books edition.
“So important has this book become that one cannot today attend a meeting on Indian religion and hear a series of Indian speakers without recalling the exact parts of the book that lie behind contemporary efforts to inspire and clarify those beliefs that are ‘truly Indian.’”
It has also become the genre exemplar of American Indian spiritual narratives—autobiography as the armature on which to sculpt a spiritual worldview. Black Elk fought against George Armstrong Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn alongside his cousin the great Crazy Horse, and he was a leader of the Ghost Dance which ended tragically in the massacre of Wounded Knee.
"If any great religious classic has emerged in this century or on this continent, it must certainly be judged in the company of "Black Elk Speaks"...The most important aspect of the book, however, is not its effect on the non-Indian populace who wished to learn something of the beliefs of the Plains Indians but upon the contemporary generation of young Indians who have been aggressively searching for roots of their own in the structure of universal reality. To them the book has become a North American bible of all tribes." - Vine Deloria, Jr. "The experience of Black Elk...comes to…
Living two generations after Black Elk, Lame Deer begins his life story with a vivid description of his own vision quest—a rite of passage for Lakota youth.
After purification in the sweat lodge, alone on a hill in the darkness, he learned that his wish to become a medicine man was to be granted. While Black Elk’s story is solemn and tragic, Lame Deer’s is spiced with humor and humanity. He gets drunk and goes to jail. He climbs to the top of Mount Rushmore and sits on Teddy Roosevelt’s head.
But he explains, in all seriousness, the symbolism of the sacred pipe, the meaning of the Sun Dance, and the secrets of the shaman.
Storyteller, rebel, medicine man, Lame Deer was born almost a century ago on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. A full-blooded Sioux, he was many things in the white man's world - rodeo clown, painter, prisoner. But, above all, he was a holy man of the Lakota tribe. The story he tells is one of harsh youth and reckless manhood, shotgun marriage and divorce, history and folklore as rich today as ever - and of his fierce struggle to keep pride alive, though living as a stranger in his own ancestral land.
His life story in Black Elk Speaks ends when Black Elk was only twenty-seven years old. He would live another sixty years. The Sixth Grandfather completes his biography.
Black Elk successfully made his way into the utterly new White man’s world, performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Europe and converting to Catholicism and becoming a deacon. Toward the end of his life, Black Elk renounced Catholicism and with a providential encounter with the poet John G. Neihardt, he found the person in whom he could entrust his great vision, which he had never truly forsaken.
He spoke in Lakota, his son Ben translated, and Neihardt’s daughters Enid and Hilda transcribed his narrative in shorthand. The Neihardt daughters’ typescripts are published here in full and clearly show that the poet’s contribution was only to distill the essence of Black Elk’s tale in vivid and concise prose, not to intrude any of his own preconceptions.
In Black Elk Speaks and When the Tree Flowered, John C. Neihardt recorded the teachings of the Oglala holy man Black Elk, who had, in a vision, seen himself as the "sixth grandfather," the spiritual representative of the earth and of mankind. Raymond J. DeMallie makes available for the first time the transcripts from Neihardt's interviews with Black Elk in 1931 and 1944, which formed the basis for the two books. His introduction offers new insights into the life of Black Elk.
The spiritual worldview so beautifully rendered in Black Elk Speaks reflects the landscape of the North American Great Plains.
The Four Winds emanate from the cardinal points of the compass, and above is Father Sky and below is Mother Earth all united in one Great Spirit. The spiritual worldview of the Ojibwa reflects the landscape of the woodlands surrounding the Great Lakes. It’s an animate, shape-shifting world of the Trickster/Culture Hero Nanabushu and Wendigo, the cannibal spirit of the hard and lean winter months.
In this magical-realist novel, Louise Erdrich, a writer of Ojibwa ancestry, weaves together the star-crossed lives of her fictional characters with the fluid human and animal (and animal-human) characters of the traditional Ojibwa worldview. Erdrich thus breathes new life into the Old World of the North Woods and brings that Old World to bear on the New.
Past and present combine in a contemporary tale of love and betrayal from Louise Erdrich, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012
'Everything is all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble.'
Rozin and Richard, living in Minneapolis with their two young daughters, seem a long way from the traditions of their Native American ancestors. But when one of their acquaintances kidnaps a strange and silent young woman from a Native American camp and brings her back to live with him as his wife, the connections they all…
Before there was money, people bartered one kind of stuff they had in abundance for another kind that they needed (or wanted). That may be true, but little appreciated in our market-oriented Western worldview, there was once an even older gift economy.
The Gift, among other related topics, explores the gift economy, which characterized the lifeways of many American Indian peoples. Hyde provides the key to understanding many of the stories in our book.
Hunters are portrayed as “visiting” the lodges of beavers, moose, and bear. They come bearing gifts that only humans can create through artifice or cultivation: knives and tobacco, for example—things much prized by the animal recipients.
In turn—but not necessarily in return—the animals give the humans their flesh and fur. The bones are their somatic souls, which should not be broken, but returned to the element from which they came—earth or water—to be reclothed in flesh and fur.
The heart of our book consists of 13 stories collected by William Jones, the first American Indian anthropologist, among the Ojibwa (or Anishinaabeg) in the wilds of Canada, northwest of Lake Superior. Jones was killed on an anthropological mission to the Philippines before he could polish his literal translations, thus providing an unfiltered window into the indigenous Ojibwa worldview. The stories are preceded by an Introductory essay and followed by an interpretive essay. They reveal a worldview in which humans live in a multispecies society involving interspecies marriages that facilitate reciprocal gift-giving between the people and the animals on which they depend for their sustenance. Our book contributes to a larger Western cultural movement toward a more expansive worldview and inclusive moral community.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
