Another Look at Appropriation
Jun. 26th, 2007 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kokopelleThis excerpt is from sharing person's post on a neopagan community:
The large part of the controversy can be tracked to an underlying theme of the Native American belief systems. From “The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian” by Joseph Epes Brown:
The wrinkle comes in when the statement is made that traditions are not to be discussed. IMO discussion does not mean the same thing as teaching. An analogy would be that my partaking of a dish at a restaurant is a discussion. The cook can refuse to share the recipe, and hence deny a teaching. If the cook did not want his meal 'discussed' than he should not have a public place that people can come and eat at. A tradition that is truly secret will not share anything of itself with the outside world. More open traditions will share enough for a discussion while holding secret the core teachings.
The Native American people have shared enough for a good discussion. It is too late to close the barn door if all Native American folklore and history is now considered a teaching. The plate is on the table. I don't think the intention of the statements was that all non-Native Americans must now forget about and ignore the Native Americans' rich heritage. Instead we are being asked to please respect the sacredness of the teachings and honor that they are the lifeblood of a people.
At the symposium Navaho and Apache elders presented their views of what happened and how they want the experience to be taught. One issue that came out was that they did not want anything about their religion to be taught. To them their religion is exclusive to their people and should not be taught or even discussed with people who are not of the tribe.I've been interested in appropriation and these thoughts kick-started my own comments...
The large part of the controversy can be tracked to an underlying theme of the Native American belief systems. From “The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian” by Joseph Epes Brown:
Religion is not separate from the other aspects of the American Indian culture. Another way to say this is that the spiritual life of the American Indian is interwoven throughout their life.The irony here is that Joseph Epes Brown was not Native American, but he wrote a book that is a cornerstone of understanding the breadth of Native American beliefs. Is this really ironic? Perhaps not. I read the comments of the elders and the thing that stood out is that they do not want anything about their religion to be taught. Teaching implies an intention to then do what was taught. To start an analogy, let's say I must be taught to cook in a particular style to make specific dishes. Teaching is necessary. Only by instruction can the full message and truest intent of a tradition be passed on. It is this full message that the Native Americans wish to protect.
The wrinkle comes in when the statement is made that traditions are not to be discussed. IMO discussion does not mean the same thing as teaching. An analogy would be that my partaking of a dish at a restaurant is a discussion. The cook can refuse to share the recipe, and hence deny a teaching. If the cook did not want his meal 'discussed' than he should not have a public place that people can come and eat at. A tradition that is truly secret will not share anything of itself with the outside world. More open traditions will share enough for a discussion while holding secret the core teachings.
The Native American people have shared enough for a good discussion. It is too late to close the barn door if all Native American folklore and history is now considered a teaching. The plate is on the table. I don't think the intention of the statements was that all non-Native Americans must now forget about and ignore the Native Americans' rich heritage. Instead we are being asked to please respect the sacredness of the teachings and honor that they are the lifeblood of a people.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-28 05:06 am (UTC)Traditions can only be "taught" in a state of fractured individual and group mind.
There are states of being that can only be achieved, they simply cannot be learned. Often times that achievement is not ever attainable to individuals not born and raised within the context of an experience. It's not possible to explain or even teach the concept of that distinction to a mind that doesn't already have the understanding.
It's a really difficult concept to even talk about from with this culture where even science with it's Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, still presumes that it's possible as an outsider to understand.
Usually the closest analogy I can think of is celebate clergy who teach about sex and the dynamics of a sexual union. Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I'm not a fan of Robert Frost generally but I rather like: "We dance around the circle and suppose, while the secret sits in the center and knows."
For those who can taste spirit and breathe essence, outsider involvement and practice dilutes and confuses the experience. For some who taste spirit and breathe essence, that dilution is part of the process and the unfolding. For others, it's stealing the soul of a people or a practice.
And that's the reason that real magik is always secret -- those who know don't need to be told and those who need to be told will never know. And the oddest thing is that often those who go chasing "information" had the true knowing all along.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 05:50 pm (UTC)Echolocation
Date: 2007-06-30 07:09 pm (UTC)Humans need lots of shelter and protection. We're naked apes in a prickly wild changeable world. The thing we're best at doing is using our minds imagination and communication and organization skills in place of the fur and fangs and claws and wings we don't have.
So the question for us as people is often . . . hmmmm . . . how shall I orient myself in relation to this Is-ness. (godorion took a couple of years to introduce me to the experience of the great Is . . . and I was working REALLY HARD to understand.)
The traditions of a people or group are a way to organize and pass on a way to access the authenticity of the great mysteries with a reasonable likelyhood of individuals surviviing the contact more or less intact. Hence the common human patterns for ritual and ordeal experiences. It gets people in, gets them contact, and gets them out under cultural supervision.
If someone else comes from another tradition or context and accesses the ritual portal without the preparation or cultural context, it change the portal forever. This isn't the end of the world, because consciousness portals and ritual, like humans and culture, are forever evolving.
Some traditions (like the one I'm from) have that built in to the portal context. There's an aspect of access in my training that ritually deals with the overly able, the overly abitious, and those greedy for unearned reward -- the overly entitled. When the Cup is passed, each time there's an implied question: Is it poison or is it medicine? The answer every initiate knows is that poison or medicine depends on who you are and HOW you are in that moment of time. Whoever deterimes whether or not you drink accepts responsibility for the consequences. Not long into the initiation process, the individual has to take responsibility for that question on their own. Failure and consequences are part of the fabric of the experience. Some people never ever drink from the Cup again. It's an unkind wildness, built into the fabric of that culture.
In other traditions, access is controlled and monitored by guardians of one sort on another. The guardians monitor and train as a way to ensure greatest access to the greatest portion of the culture. It's rather like exquisitely decorating your own personal Christmas tree for your family, and then having anyone who feels like it kick open the door or break a window and come open your presents, and then sue you when their kid shoots something with the bb gun you had wrapped under the tree for your son who's finishing up his Hunter Safety Course.
People in our culture resonate with the traditions of other cultures because they are universal building blocks. Most people in our culture are starving for spiritual experience. It's in the fabric of our being. To access and express the ritual and traditions that are already ours requires that we turn and face the pain of our own personal and ancestral history. It's an initiation. We would much rather steal someone else's, maintaining that it has no validity as whatever the inter-cultural version of "intellectual property" breaks down to be. We are self-indulgent, self-entitled plagarists in the mythology of mind . . . and then confused and dismayed to discover that our souls are still starving.
Re: Echolocation
Date: 2007-06-30 07:35 pm (UTC)more like
Date: 2007-06-30 07:11 pm (UTC)Somebody somewhere has to make decisions about resources, access, and inclusion.
What would happen to a network if all of a sudden it was overrun with souped up versions of the old commodore 64?
What would happen to some poor little non profit network that some series of geniuses kludged together by adapting and adjusting over the whole history of personal computing, writing code specifically for that application and with tightly managed shared resources but always in the generations back so that it's all discarded hardware . . .and all of a sudden someone plugged into the network with a sophisicated cutting edge notebook computer, overran all the resources, and modified the code on the fly to better suit their access between the network's resources and the internet.
Re: more like
Date: 2007-06-30 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 01:16 pm (UTC)Words and concepts have a lot of power. Mystery schools do take graduated steps because not everyone is ready or able to go to the end game.
Going back to my original question, what does really matter? I don't believe that the egoic dogmatic secrets of a secretive group matter. I instead believe that peoples' health and wholeness matter. I also believe that a teaching group must strive for integrity and compassion in their charter and methods. I support the mystery schools with all their human frailties if a paced method of discovering Divinity is needed to both create a workable charter and maintain a person's holistic wholeness.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-28 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-29 09:19 pm (UTC)