Indigenous Healing Quotes

Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.

To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.

Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.

As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.

There are some aches witch hazel can’t assuage. For those, we need each other.

They're all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I'm the last, the very last, and I'm sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot. I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash water across my bare skin. And dance. I'll dance a Ghost Dance. I'll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it's my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them? I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls. I'm growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor. We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.

Whether they are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave: the full realization of their innate gifts, and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius. In the psyches of such people there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them is blind to it.

Understand indigenous healing will also heal other nations and peoples. We've all been living on broken ugly systems built on genocide and slavery. Strengthening and empowering others, in whatever capacity, also helps the self.

Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but “naturalized.” This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country.

I am my own best medicine.

settlers cannot be considered immigrants because immigrants are expected to obey the laws of the land when they arrive, while settlers make their own new laws of the land.

keep this / with you / it is part / of your story / sometimes / to remember / a wound / is the way / of healing

Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our, connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.

Some may say it’s tiresome to dwell on the hurt- after all there’s a relentless (if artificial) drive to Stay Positive! in America, to focus only on solutions—yet an essential step in the process of decolonization is hearing the painful stories of the colonized and the exploited, respectfully and with an open heart.

As we seek this healing, let us do so with the knowledge that oneness is not sameness. It is the transcendence of our differences and the weaving of our diverse expressions into a tapestry that is harmonized and aligned with common purpose.

What does a good mother do when mothering time is done? As I stand in the water, my eyes brim and drop salt tears into the freshwater at my feet. Fortunately, my daughters are not clones of their mother, nor must I disintegrate to set them free, but I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?

Colonial, white supremacist organizational practices seem inevitable because they were so universally adopted over the next centuries, and they still govern the great majority of our institutions, but they were design choices. This means that other choices are available, even when they seem far-fetched. We know what spices and organizations look like, feel like, and function like when they are inspired by the colonizers’ principles of separation, competition and exploitation. How would they be different if they were based on principles like integration and interdependence, reciprocity and relationship?

If intergenerational trauma can alter DNA, why can’t intergenerational love?

So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.

Indigenous people were or are without strife or violence, but their fundamental worldview emphasizes connection, reciprocity, a circular dynamic.

What we can focus on with decolonization is stopping the cycles of abuse and healing ourselves from trauma.

Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. ... Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.

While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed.

if you look at Indigenous and traditional healing practices, they do a remarkable job of creating a total mind-body experience that influences multiple brain systems. Remember, trauma “memories” span multiple brain areas. So these traditional practices will have cognitive, relational-based, and sensory elements. You retell the story; create images of the battle, hunt, death; hold each other; massage; dance; sing.

The Waorani carry out a similar diet with their arrow poison, called curare or, in their language, oomae. This is another amazing product of the indigenous science, a most sophisticated technology that the Waorani extrapolated from an ancient myth.

The lesson is that thriving is not actually about the leader, it’s about the whole flock. Everyone has the potential to lead, and leadership is about listening and being attuned to everyone else. It’s about flexibility. It’s about humility. It’s about trust. It’s about having fun along the way. It is more about holding space for others’ brilliance than being the sole source of answers, more about flexible shape-shifting to meet the oncoming challenges than holding fast to a five-year strategic plan.

I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind.

The separation-based economy exploits natural resources and most of the planet’s inhabitants for the profit of a few. It considers the earth an object, separate from us, with its resources existing solely for human use, rather than understanding the earth as a living biosphere of which we are just one part.

Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation. Ritual is the pitch through which the personal and collective voices of our longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit. Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow. I call ritual an embodied process.

Spirit animal— An appropriated concept assigned to the sacred rituals of some Indigenous tribes by colonial forces. The tribes that do have a concept related to a “spirit animal” have specific traditions that go along with it, as the spirit serves a specific function in their belief system. Not to be used by anyone outside of such tribes. Try “animal friend” or “spirit guide.

Before my first visit to Waorani territory, I was introduced to don Casimiro Mamallacta, a traditional Kichwa healer and family man living in the outskirts of the jungle town of Archidona, by his daughter Mercedes, whom I met at the Jatun Sacha biological station. During the years that I was collaborating on the demarcation effort and in between the work sessions, I lived with don Casimiro's family.

Ghost Dancers Rise: At the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing, tribal leaders gathered in Washington, DC, for a ceremony in front of the Capitol. They could have dwelt on the catastrophes that were Columbus's legacy, but instead they closed the ceremony with these words: We stand young warriors In the circle At dawn all storm clouds disappear The future brings all hope and glory, Ghost dancers rise Five-hundred years.

What I want to show is that because of the very nature of the historical disciplines, historians cannot show whether or not miracles ever happened. Anyone who disagrees with me—who thinks historians can demonstrate that miracles happen—needs to be even-handed about it, across the board. In Jesus’ day there were lots of people who allegedly performed miracles. There were Jewish holy men such as Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the circle drawer. There were pagan holy men such as Apollonius of Tyana, a philosopher who could allegedly heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. He was allegedly supernaturally born and at the end of his life he allegedly ascended to heaven. Sound familiar? There were pagan demigods, such as Hercules, who could also bring back the dead. Anyone who is willing to believe in the miracles of Jesus needs to concede the possibility of other people performing miracles, in Jesus’ day and in all eras down to the present day and in other religions such as Islam and indigenous religions of Africa and Asia.

Medicine Woman is the soul of healing. The deep feminine that will heal you. And will in turn heal the world. She connects us to the wisdom of nature, the wisdom that has been tapped and held by indigenous cultures and the healers who came before. She who has walked this path for a hundred thousand years, before the gleam of steel and the coming of machines and oil. She is the feminine principle in healing that has been lost in our technocratic war on disease. Medicine Woman is our native, our inner ability to heal. She brings with her visions of healing of community – circles of support, healing through arts, connected communities, health giving foods.

A diet rich in readily available nutrients allows the bones to mineralize properly, particularly during gestation and early development, and gives the teeth immunity to decay throughout the stresses of life. Not surprisingly, he found that the native diets that conferred such good health on healthy, so-called primitive groups were rich in minerals, particularly calcium and phosphorus, necessary for healthy bones and teeth. What is surprising about the work of Weston Price is his discovery that these healthy diets always contained a good source of what he called "fat-soluble activators," nutrients like vitamin A and vitamin D, and another vitamin he discovered called Activator X or the Price Factor. These nutrients are found only in certain animal fats. Foods that provided these nutrients were considered sacred by the healthy groups he studied. These foods included liver and other organ meats from grazing animals; fish eggs; fish liver oils; fish and shellfish; and butter from cows eating rapidly growing green grass from well-mineralized pastures. Price concluded that without a rich supply of these fat-soluble nutrients, the body cannot properly use the minerals in food. These fat-soluble nutrients also nourish the glands and organs to give healthy indigenous peoples plenty of immunity during times of stress.

Technology was sent into Africa as an instrument of terror. Colonization could not have happened without it — followed by much destruction. I do not know why it feels to me that the Christianization of the Third World is fueled by guilt, but somehow the often violent zeal with which indigenous people were pulled away from their traditions, the lingering fear of sinning, going to hell, failing to pay dues, were all projections of a filthy Shadow. The colonizers called this a “pacification mission.” Then they came in to console those terrified by technology and converted them to Catholicism. My experience with Christianity in Africa is that its power does not come from Christ but from technology —

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.… Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above. So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them. There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back. Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track. The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.

The New Age is in fact many philosophies that embrace similar core beliefs. As a result, it can be hard to define. We certainly know what it is not. It is not a mainstream religion, whether of the East or the West. And it is not part of any single philosophical tradition. It has many manifestations such as astrology, Tarot Cards, psychic powers, the channelling of spirits, and the healing powers of crystals and sacred stones. Often, ancient and indigenous beliefs are incorporated into New Age philosophies, so that practitioners will reference European pagan traditions, goddess worship, and shamanism. The New Age can also include various forms of animism – in which animals communicate directly with humans and act as spirit guides. If this all sounds a little muddled, that’s because it is.

if you look at Indigenous and traditional healing practices, they do a remarkable job of creating a total mind-body experience that influences multiple brain systems. Remember, trauma “memories” span multiple brain areas. So these traditional practices will have cognitive, relational-based, and sensory elements. You retell the story; create images of the battle, hunt, death; hold each other; massage; dance; sing. You reconnect to loved ones—to community. You celebrate, eat, and share. Aboriginal healing practices are repetitive, rhythmic, relevant, relational, respectful, and rewarding—experiences known to be effective in altering neural systems involved in the stress response. The practices emerged because they worked. People felt better and functioned better, and the core elements of the healing process were reinforced and passed on. Cultures separated by time and space converged on the same principles for healing.

A community is a place of self-definition. Any group of people meeting with the intention of connecting to the power within is a community. People who regroup under a different banner to take care of themselves are attracted to indigenous culture. In these new formations, people seek to explore what has frustrated, betrayed and constituted a deep wound in their hearts. What they are trying to do is restore their inner power, which has been tarnished. Because they are trying to fight the servitude in which corporate power holds them prisoner, they are redefining themselves. They are moving themselves away from the magnetic visibility of externalized power. But to regroup against the Machine is to get out of control. However, one must not only be aware of this moving away, one must also be prepared to go all the way. To leave behind society and culture, one has to be prepared to do battle in order to be who you want to be. Without a community you cannot be yourself. The community is where we draw the strength needed to effect changes inside of us.

I had a lot of resentment against my brothers for what they did to me. I carried this anger around with me, and it was actually making me sick. There is a saying in AA that if you have resentments it keeps you away from the joy of sobriety, and this was true. I was carrying a load on my shoulders. One day we talked about the abuse in counselling, and my counsellor asked me if it was happening today. I said, “No.” She suggested living for today and leaving yesterday in the past. I did not know what she meant until I got thinking about it. If I dwelled on the past it would rob me of today. That made a lot of sense. I was stuck in the past. To get past it, I had to accept that yes I was a victim of sexual abuse and yes, I was a victim of residential school, but that was in the past. This is very hard to do because the result of these events changed my views on everything I do today. I have to learn how to keep myself in the present, instead of the past. It is a continuous battle within me. It is like I have dual personalities, and one wants to overtake the other. One still wants to be Karen the victim, who wants the attention and pity. The other, Karen the Survivor, wants to be independent and strong and wants to help others.

I mightn't be a shaman in the indigenous sense, but as a world-bridger between Western culture and the indigenous world, I knew I was playing a shamanistic role. Language was my medicine and with it I would do my best to record my awakening and help heal with my words... The journey isn't over yet.

Among the Secoya, clear guidelines regulate preparation of the medicine. They are adamant about this preparation method and insist that the guidelines be followed. I've already discussed some fundamentals of harvesting the plants. When respected, all the elements and subtle factors combine to make a potent and efficacious medicine, necessary for a positive and healing ceremony.

Shamanism explores an area that contemporary Western science knows little about- the mind.

Red lentil soup, although quite seductive in scent, is as simple to make as its name suggests. Marjan preferred to boil her lentils before frying the chopped onions, garlic, and spices with some good, strong olive oil. Covering the ready broth, lentils, and onions, she would then allow the luscious soup to simmer for half an hour or so, as the spices embedded themselves into the compliant onion skins. In the recipe book filed away in her head, Marjan always made sure to place a particular emphasis on the soup's spices. Cumin added the aroma of afternoon lovemaking to the mixture, but it was another spice that had the greatest tantric effect on the innocent soup drinker: 'siah daneh'- love in the midst- or nigella seed. This modest little pod, when crushed open by mortar and pestle, or when steamed in dishes such as this lentil soup, excites a spicy energy that hibernates in the human spleen. Unleashed, it burns forever with the unbound desire of an unrequited lover. So powerful is nigella in its heat that the spice should not be taken by pregnant women, for fear of early labor. Indigenous to the Middle and Near Easts of the girls' past lives, nigella is rarely used in Western recipes, its ability to soothe heartburn and abolish fatigue quite overlooked.

My children tell stories of the ancient world, the old world. They search for Little People on the tundra, little beings not taller than a human hand. They tell stories of strong men who stayed underwater for days. The strong men cupped their hands against the ocean floor, breathing with pockets of air made by their cupped hands. My children try to forget death by telling these old stories. They’ve carried dead bodies to the graveyard with their own youthful hands.

The healers drained our old blood in the arms or back of the knee. They tattooed ancient symbols on our bodies, especially children. Tattoos protect our spirits.

On an idyllic summer day, we walked through the meadows and hillsides, sitting in circles, laughing and filling sacks of cottongrass, salmonberries, crowberries, cranberries, mountain alder, northern golden rod, and rose hip roots. We collected cloudberry tea and Labrador tea, and wild celery. The Elders walked together, laughing, talking of the old days when they would travel to the Messenger Feasts, across the channel to Siberia, or south to trade in Qikiqtaġruk. We’d mix a dessert of fresh berries and lard, whipping and whipping the lard until fluffy.

Most white people enter therapy in order to gain better control of their lives, or as one healer put it, “to stickhandle through life.” Indigenous healing is instead about connecting with the spirit world in a meaningful way and achieving harmony. Whereas

It was only one kiss. It wasn’t a deep kiss, a French kiss, the kind of kiss that redefines a teen life. It was pepperoni, snowflakes, spit, and rodeo dust. Crazy, like dancing and soaring and walking to a new home. Sweeter because it didn’t taste like good-bye.

Some sources say that Imbolc means “in the belly of the Mother.” In either case of its meaning, this celebration is in direct relation to, and an extension of, the Winter Solstice – when the Birth of all is celebrated. Imbolc may be a dwelling upon the “originating power,” and that it is in us: a celebration of each being’s particular participation in this power that permeates the Universe, and is present in the condition of every moment. This Seasonal Moment focuses on the Urge to Be, the One/Energy deeply resolute about Being. She is in that way – and Self-centred. In the ancient Celtic tradition Great Goddess Bri wilful gid has been identified with the role of tending the Flame of Being, and with the Flame itself. Brigid has been described as: “… Great Moon Mother, patroness (sic … why not “matron”) of poetry and of all ‘making’ and of the arts of healing.” Brigid’s name means “the Great or Sublime One,” from the root brig, “power, strength, vigor, force, efficiency, substance, essence, and meaning.” She is poet, physician/healer, smith-artisan: qualities that resonate with the virgin-mother-crone but are not chronologically or biologically bound – thus are clearly ever present Creative Dynamic. Brigid’s priestesses in Kildare tended a flame, which was extinguished by Papal edict in 1100 C.E., and was re-lit in 1998 C.E.. In the Christian era, these Early Spring/Imbolc celebrations of the Virgin quality, the New Young One - became “Candlemas,” a time for purifying the “polluted” mother – forty days after Solstice birthing. Many nuns took their vows of celibacy at this time, invoking the asexual virgin bride. This is in contrast to its original meaning, and a great example of what happened to this Earth-based tradition in the period of colonization of indigenous peoples.

... it is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it. Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecological systems that sustain them. We restore the land, the land restores us.

The essence of our being, what we actually are as human beings, is sound. We are sound. We’re part of the uni-verse. The one great sound. Each of us individually are a tone. A tone that we give our body, to the tone that we give our voice. - Dr. Lee Brown, Co-author of “The Sacred Tree

The third Preface for Easter tells us that Jesus is ‘still our priest, our advocate who always pleads our cause. Christ is the victim who dies no more, the Lamb once slain who lives forever.’ The original Latin is more paradoxical: Jesus is ‘agnus qui vivit semper occisus’; the lamb who lives forever slain.’ If the risen Lord did not still have his wounds, then he would not have much to do with us now. The resurrection might promise us some future healing and eternal life, but it would leave us now alone in our present hurting. But because of Easter Day we already share in the victory. He still shares our wounds and we share his victory of death. We too are now wounded and healed. When Brian Pierce OP first went to Peruvian Andes, he was surprised by the ubiquitous images of the crucified Christ, covered with blood. It seemed as if the faith of these indigenous people stopped prior to the resurrection and they were left only with images of defeat. But he learned that he was wrong. These crosses are signs of how the risen Christ is now sharing their crucifixion. We can have courage and risk getting hurt. Charles Peguy, the French writer, told the story of a man who died and went to heaven. When he met the recording angel he was asked, ‘Show me your wounds.’ And he replied, ‘Wounds? I have not got any.’ And the angel said, ‘Did you never think that anything was worth fighting for?

Indigenous healing is instead about connecting with the spirit world in a meaningful way and achieving harmony. Whereas traditional psychotherapy is based on a man-against-nature paradigm, Indigenous healing focuses on man harmonizing with nature.

that different layers of insight can happen simultaneously. As the body becomes sharply aware of the state of its tissues, muscles, joints, bones, and fluids, and calcified energy begins to melt, we begin to perceive the connections between the visceral layers and the more complex psychological dimensions of our consciousness.

Gregg Braden, in his book The Divine Matrix, cites some fascinating research that supports the notion that DNA is what connects us all at a very fundamental level. Although the studies described were done with human DNA, it’s easy to extrapolate from them to assume that the DNA of all life—forms would behave similarly. The idea that we’re all connected in some intangible web of life is something we’ve heard over many, many centuries from mystics and indigenous peoples, and now the experiments that Braden cites give scientific credibility to what, up until this century, was a spiritual/metaphysical idea.

Result-oriented, low-tech, low-cost, shamanic medicine, uses natural elements, spirit, and the healing power of a caring community, as practiced by indigenous societies for millennia.

Duran argues for the need for healing institutions to retain culturally competent staff and that the adherence to strictly Western models of treatment maintains the colonization process. Hodge, Limb, and Cross claim that the Western therapeutic project is inconsistent with many Indigenous cultures and often serves as a form of Western colonization.

It is widely recognized that Indigenous peoples are often not well served by Western treatment styles and those seeking help are often confronted with more alienation and traumatization. Sones et al. point out that data regarding the mental health and wellness of Indigenous peoples is lacking "partly because of the challenges in the identification of indigenous clients, mistrust of mainstream health, frequent absence of culturally competent care, and lack of access to indigenous healing options and care. Furthermore, culturally influenced Indigenous behaviour is often misinterpreted by Western-oriented clinicians as evidence of psychopathy.

Although this chapter has focused on its personal dimensions, trauma exists in the collective sphere, too, affecting entire nations and peoples at different moments in history. To this day it is visited upon some groups with disproportionate force, as on Canada’s Indigenous people. Their multigenerational deprivation and persecution at the hands of colonialism and especially the hundred-year agony of their children, abducted from their families and reared in church-run residential schools where physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were rampant, has left them with tragic legacies of addiction, mental and physical illness, suicide, and the ongoing transmission of trauma to new generations. The traumatic legacy of slavery and racism in the United States is another salient example. I will have more to say about this painful subject in Part IV.

and more resourceful than the people they dominated, and they used their powers of dominance to set up a system in which they were in power, with privileges and advantages that were denied to those whose lands they took over. They did this by destroying religious, spiritual, and other cultural practices of indigenous people and instituting White religious, spiritual, and cultural practices in their place (Zinn 2005).

people of diverse religions, spiritual expressions and indigenous traditions throughout the world, hereby establish the United Religions Initiative to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.

This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

The roots of jazz and blues extend back through slavery to the collective rhythmic patterns of indigenous tribes in West Africa, where cannabis had thrived for centuries. Thrown upon bonfires, marijuana leaves and flowers augmented nocturnal healing rituals with drum circles, dancing, and singing that invoked the spirit of the ancestors and thanked them for imparting knowledge of this botanical wonder. It was only natch that Satch, the musical savant and dagga devotee, felt right at home as soon as he set foot on West African soil. “After all,” he explained, “my ancestors came from here, and I still have African blood in me.

Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers and the memory of snow. When I close my eyes and wait for my heartbeat to match the drum, I envision people recognizing, for perhaps the first time, the dazzling gifts of the world, seeing them with new eyes, just as they teeter on the cusp of undoing. Maybe just in time. Or maybe too late. Spread on the grass, green over brown, they will honor at last the giveaway from Mother Earth. Blankets of moss, robes of feathers, baskets of corn, and vials of healing herbs. Silver salmon, agate beaches, sand dunes. Thunderheads and snowdrifts, cords of wood and herds of elk. Tulips. Potatoes. Luna moths and snow geese. And berries. More than anything, I want to hear a great song of thanks rise on the wind. I think that song might save us. And then, as the drum begins, we will dance,

Air travel has made it possible to travel vast distances in no time at all. We fly so we can get to places more quickly, and waste less time. Yet, we often don't honour the passage of that time or respect the other costs of that rapid transition from one environment to the next. I didn't allow time to "unpack" the tension and stress my body must have carried as a result of the travel, not to mention the terrible stress it put on the environment. I realized so much of my life was driven by a "make it happen" attitude; that belief that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. And yet, my father constantly reminds me, "You can do anything you want. But you can't do everything." There is a cost. It takes energy. Be that fossil fuels, calories or our soul-connection. In some indigenous cultures there is a belief that you need to allow time for your soul to catch up with your physical body after long journeys, so it's important to rest when you arrive and travel more slowly during the journey itself, taking time to pause, wait, rest.

In our ancestors’ time, everyone understood that they had the power within them to do good things, to be a good person, and to live a good life. Dominant culture has led many of us to stray from this self-empowerment. You are not weak or broken. You are strong, and you can heal. Know your own power.

The spiritual path—is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it. —Marianne Williamson

we begin to prepare our conscious mind through the simple act of becoming aware of our actual state,

What thoughts, ideas, anxieties, fears, or concerns are occupying our thinking and feeling body? What personal material, memories, or emotions are we conscious of right now? What are we feeling on a raw emotional level? What are the habits, tendencies, or patterns that keep us at a distance from our raw experience?

Most white people enter therapy in order to gain better control of their lives, or as one healer put it, “to stickhandle through life.” Indigenous healing is instead about connecting with the spirit world in a meaningful way and achieving harmony. Whereas traditional psychotherapy is based on a man-against-nature paradigm, Indigenous healing focuses on man harmonizing with nature.

Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them.

I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?

A guide is someone who walks ahead and knows the territory, aware of the potential perils of the terrain.

I see the unconscious as an ongoing matrix of gestation where things need to develop before they are born into our conscious mind. There is much that we do not know about ourselves and that is okay. What is ready to appear will do so at just the right time.

Nisargadatta said so eloquently, “When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. And between those two my life moves.

The disadvantage of this is the tendency to become overly analytical of our inner states and lose contact with our actual raw emotion, our somatic experience, and our spiritual resources.

Part of the guide’s job is to bring the faith by remembering his or her own certainty in the healing potential of the work. Through communicating this sense of faith verbally and energetically, they hold the light that the client might not yet be able to see.

it is the creative transmission of love, sourced in wisdom, that has the power to heal.

given the level of trauma caused by the colonizer virus and wealth consolidation, can funders actually support transformational change?

horrifying word, “livestock”).

Am I taking this action against a perpetrator of harm to perpetrate more harm against them? Or will it truly help me (and/or others) not just to feel better momentarily but to carry less harm and hurt into the world? And what can I learn from my ancestors and other Indigenous people about healing without reinforcing carceral systems?

It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed.

many Indigenous cultures view a person’s mental illness not as a problem specific to them but rather as a sign that something is amiss within the larger community. Hence mental health is situational—reflective of the history, economics, politics, environmental conditions, and a host of other factors that affect a community. It struck me as odd that the rise of NPD was not viewed as a reflection of the painful structure of our society.

Indigenous and Eastern cultures, on the other hand, have fully understood and honored the connections among the mind, body, and soul/spirit2—the sense of something higher than ourselves3—for thousands of years. They have long used ritual and ceremony to tap into the Self in order to connect with ancestors for guidance and clarity, and operated with an inner “knowing” that a whole person is made up of interconnected parts.

helping me fill my pail with earthworms that were severed by her shovel. I thought I could nurse them back to health in the worm hospital I constructed beneath the irises. She encouraged me in this, always saying, “There is no hurt that can’t be healed by love.

Begin by calling in your council of spirit guides. Grandfather, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now. Grandmother, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now. Ancestors, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now. Creator, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now. 2. State your prayer in simple terms. I am facing [INSERT TROUBLING ISSUE], and I don't know what to do. I bring this issue to you for your guidance. Please bless this prayer with clarity, protection, and favor for the highest and best good for all. 3. Pray for Mother Earth. And please bless our Mother Earth with healing and protection and ease the suffering of all her children. 4. Close with gratitude and remembrance. I am grateful--Mitákuye Oyás'in [(Me-talk-oo-yay Oy-yaw-sin) an indigenous lakota phrase that has a combined meaning of “we are all related” and “all is connected.”]

His face started morphing into different people, shapeshifting into wise, old, Indigenous men, as though he’d lived hundreds of lives and I was seeing him as he was in each one of them. I met many different people coming through to help with healing – shamans from centuries before – and I studied creases across their faces, wrinkle lines worn like badges of wisdom, markings of lives lived.

Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but thing, of healing, of the coagulation of myself.

Yet ultimately, by connecting to the flow of life and love from your parents, grandparents, and lineage, with its gifts and challenges, you start to hear the beat of the drum that echoes in your heart. I see people transformed as they work with their family energy fields. They see their family stories in a new light, and they see their unique purpose because they are releasing victimhood. As they shift, they expand their healing to help others. They start clinics and training programs in distant places, establish community gardens for healing in their towns, create workshops to help people tap into their inner genius, teach mindfulness, translate ancient Buddhist texts—the list is amazing, endless, and creative. A history of pillaging leads to caring for the earth; a history of atrocity toward another race leads to working with Indigenous people. There is something unconscious to this process. When you don’t see yourself as a victim, you start to recover your self-worth, and you begin the journey to peace and harmony.

We can't meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without "re-story-ation".

In the cosmology of the Dagara peoples, matter and Spirit are fused. These two phenomena are complementary, each a reflection of the other. In the Dagara story of creation, the physical world that we can touch and feel and see came into being in parallel with a brighter, more dynamic and expansive energetic world that we call the Other World, or the Spirit World, or the unseen world. These two aspects of the universe do not exist as a polarity, for each is a manifestation of the other, and each is dependent on the other, with a stream of interaction going both ways to maintain balance and stability. The indigenous belief of the Dagara is that we are primarily Spirit. In order to exist as material beings, we have to take a form, and there is the sense among my people that to be in matter is not the most familiar or suitable form for us. To fit ourselves into the narrow part of the universe that allows energy to exist as matter takes some getting used to, and we only bother with it at all because it serves the useful and unavaoidable purpose of expanding the spirit in us.

World History 101 - The Actual History History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything. Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language. Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s. Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil. The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain. Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is. That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors. No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you? Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.

Healing the planet is ultimately about creating infrastructures of caretaking that will replace infrastructures of capitalism. Capitalism is contrary to life. Caretaking promotes life.

It is well known that Sōtō Zen for laypersons since at least the fourteenth century has been quite different than Sōtō training designed for monks or nuns in terms of incorporating popular practices such as divination, pilgrimage, posthumous ordination, and the veneration of indigenous deities in pursuit of healing and the gaining of worldly benefits. Thus, a great number of the approximately 15,000 Sōtō institutions (this number, confirmed in recent surveys, includes a small number of monastic training centers and a very large number of local temples) are designated prayer temples.

People are often missing from the nostalgic view of nature, an omission detectable in the pandemic-era observation that “nature is healing.” Obviously, there is a difference between a healthy ecosystem and one stressed by people and pollution. But beyond that, a Westerner’s attempt to arrive at the idea of how things are “supposed to be” is usually fraught, because it doesn’t take into account who is doing the supposing. Indigenous groups are sometimes said to be more attentive to an ecology’s changes and temporal cues: flowerings, weather patterns, and migrations. Yet it’s too easy to read this as passive adaptation, a total lack of footprint, rather than active construction and collaboration with the nonhuman world.

If we all lived in a reciprocal way, the flow of abundance would begin to cut through the systems and structures that keep us down. Gratitude is the gateway for abundance. Practice mindfulness, share, give back, and walk with grace. If we all walked in this Indigenous way, our Earth would heal.

Here on the waste beds there are expanses without a living thing, but there are also teachers of healing and their names are Birch and Alder, Aster and Plantain, Cattail, Moss, and Switchgrass ... Nitrogen-fixing legumes in abundance, and clovers of all kinds, have also come to do their work ... Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way.

As a Black, Indigenous, and Person of color struggling with CPTSD in the form of racial and historical trauma, you carry cultural legacy burdens that have shaped your thinking, your sense of self, and probably your worldview. And while burdens can also be personal--such as physical trauma in childhood that leads someone to subconsciously seek out abusive partners in adulthood--the burdens I'm talking about are large-scale, permeating throughout this nation's society to directly disadvantage and hurt you and other marginalized groups.