SUNDAY’S
SERVICE (“Native First Peoples”) July 18, 2010
by Pete Lenz
Opening Prayer
Remember us after we are gone.
Don’t forget us.
Conjure up our faces and our
words.
Our image will be as a tear
in
the hearts of those
who
want to remember us.
“Popul Vuh” mid 1500s
Doug’s solos
In this part of Maine, what we call the Western Foothills,
or ingloriously the Oxford Hills, the various sub-tribes and bands of Indians
included the Passaconaways, here in the Oxford
Hills area; the Pigwackets (a bit to the west
at today’s Fryeburg) and the Annasagunticook,
or Amoscoggins, (a bit to the East of
us here with their matrix at today’s Auburn)... and the Rockameekos
(a bit north east at today’s Canton, Jay, and Rumford. Due
north, at today’s
I’ve written 11
documentary books on Native Americans – (Indians) 6 or 7 of which have dealt
with the Mawooshen (or Maine &
Southern Maritime Provinces area). Obviously I can’t “cover” everything
I’d like in these few minutes.
The sub tribes and native
bands that didn’t have villages and encampments here in the Oxford Hills area
nonetheless traveled through the area constantly, on trails and
waterways. An Indian trail is still extant and quite apparent at the base
of Paris Hill; it follows the Little Androscoggin, heading down to the sea for
summer camping and fishing, stopping here for crop growing, and, to the north country for homebases &
winter living and hunting.
I have
traveled authentic Indian trails in the Waterfords as
well where an elderly friend of mine there found an Indian tool while swimming
in Bear Pond. I have traipsed about where the Pike’s hill Indian
cornfields were and their historic corn-grinding mill existed...now doubted by
pseudo experts because in was formed as a glacial pothole..
And Walmart-
in its excavation for the superstore on rt. 26, Oxford, discovered a massive
village site 11,00 years old full of artifacts. They paid some money to
the state, called in the state archaeologist, and went ahead and built right
over it just the same...giving new meaning to Bert and I great quip: ‘Dont’cha move---a Goddamn inch!!!!’
I’ve learned that what
ended up being a tremendously tragic history, for both the first, original
peoples (and us), because of the world we have destroyed and lost) and the
outcome. It did not need to be so!
Indeed the first years of White
--Indian encounter were often both pleasant and advantageous for both
groups. Tremendous praise and appreciation was heaped on these First
People, their life-ways, and culture, and humanity and it was fully depicted
and documented. [Even by some who were at
the ready to kill, enslave and exploit them.] From one of these who wished for the best for the First Peoples
we’ll chose our first reading:
1st reading
- Marc Lescarbot
priest/scholar/traveler (1606 voyage) with Samuel de Champlain:
- They found Indian navigational pilots; he expressed profound appreciation of native
lifestyle and culture and, his words, “celebrates diversity”
(reading from the Lescarbot’s words with the
Champlain voyage to the
“Almighty God, in the creation of this world hath
so much delighted Himself in DIVERSITY!
But the wonder that far exceedeth
all others is . . . that in man, more variety is found than in other things
created. As for man’s face, two shall not be found who in every respect
resemble one another . . . But in manners and customs of life, the difference
is especially marvelous.
It’s wrong to call them barbarous, for one thing they love their children more that
we Europeans love ours.
We must celebrate this diversity and
always exhibit acceptance and tolerance.
“It is important for native people to
survive and multiply”:
They believe the Creator made
women first.
Their sexuality is based on
pleasing women!; they practice a probationary marriage
period, “the functions of Venus (ie. their love and sex lives) lack of jealousy and
possessiveness;
The word “Savage” is abusive and
unmerited for they are anything but that!;
“The earth never deceives us, if
we cherish her in good earnest. As a promise made by God they shall
possess the land as a certain heritage that cannot perish.”
“These tribes are exceeding
happy without European excesses and corruptions;
“They believe there is something in
nature which governs this world of ours.”
They share goods and possessions
in common and give-to, and help, one another, according to need.
“We can learn much from these peoples
for wealthy Europeans of conspicuous consumption are
blood-suckers of the poor!”
[yes,
these are his actual words from 1606!]
HERE
CLAIR’S DIGGERS: The natives gave according to ability,
received according to need!. Did they inspire others
the world over– early bible- communist Christians, the Diggers??????, Marx ???
CLAIR SONG she will
introduce it
2nd prayer[s], Zuni
May your way be fulfilled.
May
you be blessed with life
Where
the life-giving way
Of
your Sun Father shines
May
your way be reached.
We need to help people go back to a
Collective
broken place and
Begin
to heal themselves. Wilma Mankiller
More examples of contact, praise, (but occasional
Euro-white depredation)
- Giovanni Verrazanno (1524)
praises Eastern Seaboard Indians as “noble” – “ancient Greek-like” “educated,
robed, wise, worldly” - his men joyfully give natives gifts but then to
show some off back in Europe, capture a few to take back, including a dragged
and screaming young pregnant woman.
- 1534--1540 Jacques Cartier’s men deathly ill along
the St. Lawrence Riverway. Cured of scurvy with
pine bark extract & grape seed extract; They were
amazed and marveled at state of high civilization.
- David Ingram & companion) 1568-9 kept alive and
fed by Original Peoples all across the eastern half of the current U. S. in
returned, they performed surgery on a few natives & saved their
lives.
- Bartholomew Gosnold (in 1602) encountered skilled Abenaki
sailors – “huge cries and shouts of joy unto us – exceeding courteous, gentle
of disposition-
we
became very great friends.”
- Samuel de Champlain (1603) description cross
cultural diversity appreciation; “red men and white men have commonality,
common origin – “everyone prayed in his heart as he thought good” – “here began
that lasting friendship” – gave spit stickers to
joyous Indians, pasting them to their foreheads; “engaged in eco-gardening and
companion planting” – “the woman decides and chooses in courtship and marriage”
– they come first –[but] four natives kidnapped to be taken to France!
- Captain Weymouth & navigator/chronicler, James Rossier (1605) exploratory voyage up the
-
Sir George Popham
& Raleigh Gilbert, start the first English colony (mostly convicts) “They embraced us and we them”; “we would in no way
offend them”, “the goodness of the land and peoples can hardly be expressed,”
“Natives attempted to insure non-violence of Englishmen”;
Later reports of
deteriorating relations, cruel jokes and aggressions perpetrated by the English
colonists such as planting a dynamite charge amongst the Indians during a
tug-of-war contest with the English.
-
Capt. John Smith (1614) exploring the
NE coast, including
One of his captains, - Capt. Hunt, in a separate
ship - broke away from the others, captured 69 island
Indians at
- Christopher Levett (1623
Casco Bay set up on Hog (Peakes Island) visited and
stayed as honored guest with the Acocisco’s (Casco’s)
and sachem Skittergusset, and welcomed many of them
to come and stay at his home on Peakes, which they
did. Huge praise for natives and their ways and
integrity.
- Pilgrim women help dying native smallpox victims in
1638. Many thus recover.
- MANY OTHERS we don’t have time for: Wood,
Thomas Morton (Maypole Man), Roger Williams; Daniel Gookin;
Fr. Cretian LeClercq; John Josselyn, New Eng. Rarities, Fr. Sebastian Rale; Fr. Pierre Biard .........
Beliefs – Philosophical -
Spiritual – that we have
learned
all Indigenous peoples, believed that “The Earth was
alive, usually taking the form of a mother. They also believed - and many
Europeans before 1600 believed also – the planet to be a living organism full
of life giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, therefore,
strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the Mother,”
…including mining.
The universe was seen as a communion
of subjects, not a collection of objects.
The Universe is a single sacred community and
there’s no way the human can be fulfilled apart from the natural world.
The planet is primary, the human is
derivative…in other words for example the first purpose of medicine is not to
serve the human but instead it must be to take care of the health of the
planet, because if the planet is not healthy, humans can’t be healthy.
Indian Chickasaw poet & essayist
Linda Hogan says that the “Native belief system was and is at its base respect
for the land and reverence for life and that’s the basic thing people
need to have in common. That’s where it all begins to heal.”
By the time of the Bible a personal monotheistic
Deity creates a world outside himself, in opposition of a prior attitude toward
the divine as expressed directly in the natural world. And it comes from
the Greeks. This “Anthropocentrism”, this alienation from the natural
world, comes from biblical, Christian, Western humanist sources, with the
deepest roots of the pathology being the ethos of “man having dominion over
nature and subduing it- along with most of its peoples.
With the “Scientific Revolution” and the unlocking
of some of Nature’s mysteries, nature became to be seen as a machine, devoid of
mystery or divinity, it’s component parts could be
dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes
appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. The highly
influential Sir Francis Bacon put it this way in 1623:
[nature
is to] be put in constraint, molded, and made new by art and the hand of man.”
Some other basic principles coming from Native
American-Tribal-First peoples: peoples who were largely killed, decimated,
dispossessed. This I call the WORLD WE HAVE LOST! yet
ALL WE MIGHT HAVE GAINED ie. had the Europeans,
and then “Americans” appreciated, respected, indeed celebrated them and their
moral, environmental ethos, learned from them and followed their lead, we could
and would have gained immensely!
Yes, it’s been largely LOST, to rapacious
destruction, selfish greed, attitudinal non-valuing, non
loving, and non caring,
But it wasn’t All lost! Much has remained-survived and has and
can guide and inspire us more and more today.
Native ethos says, “The more we
divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to die, in
ways such as to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, and the
more we become estranged from the grace in the world, from the essence of life,
from the realization that all life is sacred, full of awe and wonder.
And this arrogant
defiance of nature, connection to the natural community, will kill
us—emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
Earth weep
From John Hollow Horn (1932)
Some
day the Earth will weep,
She
will beg for her life,
She
will cry with tears of blood
You
will make a choice,
If
you will help her
Or
let her die, and
When
She dies,
You
too will die.
As early as the 1500s, a Maya prophet wrote
Alas, we were saddened because they came.
They came to make our flowers wither
So that only their flower might life.”
From a Pima Indian song come the
words:
Weep
my unfortunate people!
All this you will see take place
Weep
my unfortunate people!
For the waters will overwhelm the land.
Powhattan said (1609)
Not
a man of two generations is alive now
But myself.
I
know the difference between peace and war
better than anyone
Why
should you take by force that which from us
You can have from love?
What
can you get by war?
Ojibway Prayer for healing
Grandfather
Look
at our brokenness
We
know that in all creation
Only
the human family
Has
strayed from the
We
know that we are the ones
Who
are divided
And
we are the ones
Who
must come back together
To
walk in the
Teach
us love, compassion and honor.
That
we may heal the earth
And
heal each other.
Part of what we’ve
basically lost, lost for the bulk of Americans, has not been lost to everyone,
not to such prominent Native leaders, oracles and traditionalists like Ohiyesa, John Mohawk, Chief Oren Lyons, Winnona
La Duke who ran for vice president in the 2004 election-----Wayne Newell
(Passamaquoddy elder), Paula Gunn Allen ----and non native students of long ago
like Henri Rousseau, Henry D. Thoreau and Ralph W. Emerson, John Muir, John Storer etc., and today’s Carolyn Merchant, Wendell Berry,
Matthew Fox, Starhawk, Frederick Turner, Terry
Tempest Williams, Bill Mckibbin, Thomas Berry, and
many more.
Think of the likes of
these folks and those like them, “fellow travelers” .....at
the helm of moral and political leadership in the
It seems to
me that the best we can do now is decry the criminal desecration, the
attacks on the environment, the planet and most of its peoples, and then resist
them …. build movements to incorporate this new
ethos, be ready to stand up, speak out, engage in resistance, even “direct
action,”
These good Indian &
non-Indian folks, with the native-based INSPIRATION GUIDES they have for us
today, are helping us build a growing new country and world and are our, and
our children’s, hope for the present and the future.
Ps. And hey! Since I [may] have your
attention here... we
need to take a stand: - declare and speak out against the current wars, in