We are living the consequences of having rejected the living connection between the human and other-than-human. This is paralleled by the split between mind (psyche) and body. The power of dreams and visions – of the inner life in general, which is our connection to all of creation – is seemingly lost on a world that has forgotten. Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell made well the point that in the industrialized, modernized world beyond the experience of traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, one must work out one’s own “salvation.” For many people, the religious tendencies in the “West” of the last two or three thousand years no longer explain life as it is lived. For many others, the Greek concept of epistemé – knowledge, science, understanding, has been abandoned completely for the concept of doxa – common belief, received opinion, dogma. As a result, those us for whom these religions – as they are proselytized – are not working, must work out our own psycho-spiritual understanding, or personal mythology, of this veil of tears for themselves. Others simply believe what their peer group believes, locking themselves into the dogmatic tendencies of that group.
The background for this and the following observations is the realization that the human race is committing suicide and that it probably can’t stop even if it wanted to. Observing the public sphere in the early twenty-first century, one must seriously consider the declensionist school of evolutionary theory. It is possible that we humans hit our peak some ten thousand years ago, right before we started building cities and taking the trip down Civilization Road, which of course has nothing to do with what is generally meant by the term “civilized.” By the time the European Civilization Entourage hit North America, the path to self-destruction was laid out, although few realized it at the time and the ones who suspected were ignored. This “settler-colonial” branch of Leviathan, as it has played out, turns out to be the same disease as in the Old Countries that just keeps getting worse.
Toward arriving at my own in-flux religious tendencies, I have put some effort into learning how people lived on the earth for so long without mucking it up; i.e., hunter-gatherer culture. Part of this process has been to grasp the true nature of the term “indigenous.” While we bandy words about like “sustainability” and “ecology,” actually being one with the great Mother Earth has long since gone by the boards in the grand settler-colonial project on Civilization Road. Working out my own acceptable worldview involves trying to regain a sense of indigeneity, at the very least, and hopefully some sort of lifestyle that begins to approach an indigenous habitation of the planet. The Civilization Entourage arrived plundering, raping, and enslaving as well as spreading their ubiquitous diseases to the Americans, who had little resistance to them in their biological make-up. Until then, the diffuse hunter-gatherers and part-time agriculturalists of North America were doing pretty well, all things considered -- not unlike indigenous people everywhere. Anthropologists and historians have had to abandon the old “Whig History” dogma that indigenous people lived on the verge of starvation and spent all their waking hours in a constant search for food. In reality, they lived in a time-rich world of plenty and were living in a kind of luxury. Settler-colonial offspring who have chosen epistemé over doxa have acknowledged this. Rituals existed that kept people renewed and aligned with the forces of nature, the process that is today left up to individuals to work out on their own.
My own complicated story has not emerged from a state of repose. It was birthed through untold trials and tribulations; from a struggle that included twenty or so years of hard-scrabble working class survival with few psychological tools for coping. It emerges from having lived out-of-doors for three years (intentionally), where I came to know a bit about what it means to live close to our Mother and learned what it means to be “time-rich.” It emerges from a lack of coping skills shored up by self-medication habits that eventually and fortuitously landed me in addiction and recovery. It emerges from beginning college at age thirty-two, pursuing and obtain a Ph.D. (history), and over twenty-five years in the workforce as a college professor. In the course of these events, I learned that there are an infinite number of ways to tell the story of one’s life, or of someone else’s life, or of both, and they can all be true. This story emerges from a place of realization that the only way forward is to know that not knowing is knowing.
When I was a non-traditional undergrad living in the Missouri Ozarks, I and a couple of friends embarked on the indigenous practice of “crying for a vision” – spending several days on a mountaintop fasting and asking the Universal Mind for guidance. As a history (and music) major, I was on a path that Clio (and Euterpe) seemed to lay before me, but I was unsure as well as curious. There’s a reason the Greeks held the Muses to be instrumental in life events great and small, and Clio and Euterpe, the Muses of History and Music, respectively, had been in my life for some time. It’s been over a quarter-century now since that Vision Quest. Three of us embarked together to separately sit on a mountaintop in a spirit of Seeking the Way Forward. It was raining when we went up on an evening in May, 1994. Each of us had our own reasons for going and up the mountain we went in the rain.
In the morning, we arrived at the ridgetop and walked around for awhile trying to decide how to split up and how to deal with what might be wet three days. We finally decided to spend our time in the dry rain shadow of the sixty-foot tall rimrock, about a quarter mile apart from each other. I was on the south end of the east face overlooking the Buffalo River valley, with my friends to my left (north). We agreed that in the morning, one of us would build a rockpile sculpture roughly halfway between himself and the other guy. Then, in the evening the other guy would alter the sculpture in some way to make it clear that all was well. For me, extremely powerful dreams and visions were a precursor to this Vision Quest rather than the result of it. Those events were in the past at this point (more on this later). For three days I implored the Universe to tell me if following Clio and Euterpe was the right course. Not hearing “No,” and not knowing what else to do, I have continued on this path. I became radicalized in a political sense and, upon reflection, Clio’s influence can be seen in at least three parts. I came to realize that some of us are in the revolutionary business of remembering the horrific crimes committed against humanity and the Earth by humans with Power. That’s one part. Another part is we are remembering the dreams of those who dared to dream what freedom from these crimes might be like and how we might get there. That’s another part. The most important part is that we are engaged in GETTING THERE.
So, I wrote a book on Herman Husband, a middling yeoman farmer and activist in the eighteenth century, raised in the system, benefitting from the system – I should say Empire – and yet, because of a conscience that manifested throughout his life in a Christian-based mythology, he is very much interested in “getting there,” i.e., he dreamt of what freedom and I daresay “bliss” would mean in his world of Christian metaphors. His dream is part of what we are engaged in understanding.
We must do this while inhabiting a world of Christian Americanisms, keeping the senses tuned for the diamonds in this veil of tears while looking for them within. This project engages a personal effort to provide an indigenous perspective. I am not Native American, but I am an earthling descended from the indigenous people of northwest Europe. Native American scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. noted that we have reached a point where indigeneity is more a matter of attitude than of bloodlines, it’s just that Native Americans and other non-settler-colonial peoples are more likely to still be in touch with a worldview that was fairly universal thousands of years ago – that Mother Earth is the final arbiter and our task is to nurture and attune ourselves to an inner guidance system rooted in the Mother. This inner guidance can be thought of as the ground from which individual life forms emerge. We are the eyes and ears of the Mother, but we have evolved these brains who have developed a hubris telling us that The Brain, not the Earth, is the Master. This is how we’ve gotten into this mess – we must re-access the inner guidance on a massive scale and put down the tools of hubris: Power and its monster, War. This is the worldview this book embraces.
As far as Herman Husband is concerned, he lived from 1724 to 1795. The historical literature on this period is fraught with reflections of one American mythology or another largely written by careerist historians who are otherwise able scholars but who must (as they were trained to do) inhabit their career track. In other words, don’t rock the boat in ways that call into question the U.S. power structure or the basic assumptions of capitalism, although there is a remnant of “radical” history in the “canon” to which a handful of brave souls contribute. The history discipline’s orthodoxy runs counter to an honest search for the truth, thus purging the life from what could be a very engaging endeavour. This is a major block in the search for truth. Nothing new about this – pandering to power has always watered down “professional” discourse. This is an institutionalized cowardice that we can ill-afford in these dark days.
Clio knows that if history doesn’t engage the soul of storytelling, i.e., convey some deep message that reveals truth, it’s dead. The problem with writing a biography is that a human life doesn’t fit into a book. Humans tell stories, but accurately describing a life that has an infinite number of perspectives, all of them subjective, all of them true, cannot be done. Approaching these stories with the realization that whatever objectivity there might be, it is rooted in subjectivity. This is an aspect of indigeneity that I was pleased to discover. Indeed, the subjectivity of any intellectual process permeates this work. Twentieth-century Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl has done us the favour of explicating the nature of phenomenology, the acknowledgement of this subjectivity and its attachment to the lifeworld as opposed to the positivists’ strictly mental world, which, phenomenologists correctly argue, isn’t real. This is what Husserl called “the crisis of the sciences,” and it turns out that Husserl’s phenomenology strongly resembles an indigenous worldview, or what some Native American scholars call Native Science.
What’s missing from historical orthodoxy is a connection to the world as it is lived. It is institutionalized, so anyone on a career track may not notice much less point it out. The crisis Husserl pointed out he sums up with this question: Can reason and that-which-is be separated, where reason, as knowing, determines what is? The human has been isolated from the other-than-human in “modern” and “postmodern” consciousness as the mind has been isolated from the body. “Objectivity,” like “positivism,” is a useful fiction but should not be confused with the lifeworld; the subjective reality we all experience in our own way. At the heart of our own subjectivity is a paradox – always a sign that reality is nearby: objectivity is supposed to bring us above subjectivity and toward reality. But by separating interpretation and analysis from the lifeworld, i.e., the subjectivity we all share, what might be real is left in the dust. The stories, art, songs, dances, and other art forms that unite the human with the other-than-human represent the vitality that is like the air we must breathe and water we must drink. To tap into this creative inner universe is to tap into the creative centre from whence all creation comes. That’s what has been left behind by positivism and the careerist approach to history. I don’t know if this book would be considered a “monograph” or not and I don’t care. I’m telling a story. * * *
