CULTURAL APPROPRIATION?

I recently wrote a slightly polemical piece titled 'Reinventing the Wheel' for the current issue of Indie Shaman Magazine (see pic below) launching my book The Medicine Wheel. Here it is :)

A book by a European on the Native American Medicine Wheel? Is that not cultural appropriation: an act of theft from a colonised people, by a member of the dominant culture? It would probably depend on which Native American you asked. I have been in Sweatlodges run by Native Americans which, rightly, you wouldn’t dream of trying replicate yourself. And one by a woman from a Lakota reservation who wanted us all to head out and lead lodges ourselves. She even suggested that it was a male thing to be hidebound and exclusive about tradition. She claimed to have brought a spirit for the lodge over from America in her handbag. What shone through was her compassion and generosity of spirit.

There is no final answer to this question. There are good points on both sides. It is certainly appropriation, or worse, to claim to represent a tradition of which you are not part. On the other hand, people have always borrowed and re-invented. Our creativity in this respect is fundamental to who we are, and it is not something you can put a stop to without truncating human nature.

I found myself in a limbo for some years on this matter. I could see the depth that comes from an old tradition, that has woven in layers of symbolism and meaning over the centuries, or even millennia. I knew I could never be part of those traditions. So where did that leave me, a member of probably the first society in history not to have extant traditions?

 

It left me free, I ultimately concluded. Free in a way that many indigenous people are probably not, with their commitment to doing things in the ways they have always been done.

In the Buddhist tradition, one of the fetters to insight is reliance on teachings and ceremonies as ends in themselves. It is a natural human tendency to mistake words for realities. It is much harder work to hold them lightly and see what it is they are pointing to. It requires courage, too, for there will always be people who see thoughtfulness about tradition as a betrayal, as showing a lack of respect.

Teachings such as the Medicine Wheel, and ceremonies such as the Sweatlodge, can be helpful to us in our non-traditional societies. That is all that matters. Jim Tree, a Cherokee who wrote The Way of the Sacred Pipe, says (p15): “If it’s real, it works; if it works, it’s real.”

So, grasping the freedom I had claimed for myself, I wrote a book on the Medicine Wheel. I made it clear from the outset that I was in no way claiming to represent any Native American tradition.

There is no single Medicine Wheel. There are dozens of them, each with their own traditional teachings. I used the one that just happened to have come my way. I learnt about it from a non-traditional teacher. But most of what I have to say comes from my own reflections. I made my own connections with the Directions and Elements of the Wheel, coming from my personal experience.

This is what we need to do with any teaching in order to fully understand it. Having reflected on and practised it on its own terms – and that may take some years – we can increasingly make our own connections and contributions. For the spirit to unfold deeply, we need to find our own unique bearings in relation to the teachings and ceremonies, and be willing to re-invent: advisedly, for it is a right that needs to be earned.

This is where religion ends and what you might call spirituality begins. Religion is for the majority, and always will be. It serves a purpose, providing authority (that is often what ‘elders’ and ‘lineage’ really mean), and a fairly simple set of beliefs and practices that come to be seen as sacred.

Our modern shamanic world functions for the most part as religion. I think it is best to accept that as inevitable and probably necessary, rather than railing against it, while at the same time not neglecting to keep up our prodding of its sacred cows. Like the way people act differently when an indigenous person enters the room, as though the Pope has walked in. No disrespect intended, but humour is probably the best approach.

The Medicine Wheel provides a way of understanding ourselves and the universe, using the four Directions, and the four Elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air. This is straightaway empowering, because it is within our immediate experience. We have been taught to believe that an understanding of the universe is in the hands of scientists, using equations that most of us do not have a hope of grasping. It is not that the scientists are wrong, but there is more than one way of seeing and comprehending anything. Sun, Soil, Rain and Wind: what could be more immediate than that?

In my book, I place most emphasis on the four Elements, because we have a similar understanding of them in the western esoteric tradition, which goes back a long way. They are something we understand already, whether or not we are conscious of that. They align well too with Carl Jung’s personality traits of Intuition, Feeling, Sensation and Thinking: Fire, Water, Earth and Air, respectively. The Elements are used in a similar way in astrology, the stories from the sky spirits.

For us moderns, the individual tends to be seen as autonomous, and our path is towards wholeness. For an indigenous person, the individual is seen as relational, and there is no path, rather an ongoing requirement to live in balance with the world. The Medicine Wheel shows us how to live in balance, though it can also be used within our paradigm of wholeness.

Our modern world is linear. We are always going somewhere, we have plans and things to achieve, which we formulate with reason. The world of the Medicine Wheel is very different. It is the spirit that speaks to us and guides us, there is nowhere to go, for it is how we live that matters. There is serious effort to be made, but it is more to do with integrity in the moment, than in trying to re-shape the world.

With its emphasis on the Elements, the Medicine Wheel reminds us that we are part of the natural world, for we are nothing but those elements – elements that are alive and inspirited. It is a corrective to the Great Forgetting: the 3000 year period, from the ancient Greeks onwards, in which we in the West have gradually come to feel ourselves as separate to the natural world.

There are many ways in which the Wheel can be used: psychologically, philosophically, ceremonially, divinatorily. I will conclude with a brief description of how the Four Elements relate to personal psychological experience. Each Direction has many correspondences, the Elements being just one of them, for between them they describe the whole of life. This includes the journey from birth (East) round to old age (North).

East/Fire – Initiation

Life is continually renewing and unfolding. If we block that process, we may get ill. At what points in your life did a new element enter your consciousness, that eventually changed everything? What were the natures of those elements? Were they also times of difficulty and crisis?

South/Water – The Close-to Place

This is where we pay attention to ourselves, to our hearts, to what we are feeling in the moment. This can in some ways be the hardest, yet most transformative place on the Wheel. The dis-identified attention itself is enough. Living at the coal-face of who we are. The inspirational energies of the East provide the vision for the transformation.

West/Earth – Incarnation

We are here to bring spirit into matter, to embody. Life needs to be fully engaged with, to be lived. The worldly is the spiritual, they are not separate. This is the place where we dream, and where we engage in Ceremony, whose purpose is to remind us, in our busy everyday lives, of the primacy of the spirit.

North/Air – Two-Eyed Seeing

Two-Eyed seeing is a modern Native American concept that refers to the ability, in the first instance, to appreciate the value of both traditional and modern forms of healing, without one criticising the other. This quality of disinterest – which doesn’t mean lack of engagement – is the essential quality of the North/Air. It is what our minds are really for. Though a simple idea, most people find it very difficult: we generally only know how to believe what we want to believe. That is why the North is also the place of the Elder.

Directions provide orientation when we are lost. If your life isn’t working, check-in that the Directions are in balance. In the modern world, we have a psychotherapeutic paradigm that attributes dysfunctions to childhood conditions. An indigenous perspective is that the spirit of eg anxiety has come to visit us, it is not part of us, but we need to get to know it and form a relationship. And use the Medicine Wheel to ask in what way this spirit is an expression of imbalance, and what Directions/Elements need to be cultivated? Maybe more trust in life, a quality of the South, is needed. In this way our sufferings bring us to a deeper point of balance, both within ourselves and in relation to the world.