There was a fellow by the name of frank who I was sitting next to who has passed away since, who is representing a native tribe or Confederation of tribes in southern Canada in southern Ontario. Imagine, Frank, imagine if the best efforts of my people, you know, of the Europeans who came here and discovered this already occupied continent. Imagine if their best efforts had been successful. And they had wiped out your languages. And nobody spoke any native language. I mean, there's There's hundreds of them still spoken in North America? What if nobody spoke any of them? What if they had succeeded? The Catholics? You know, who authorized this whole thing back in the 1400s? And 1500s? What if they had succeeded in destroying ever every last semblance of your religion? What if nobody knew how to make a sweat lodge? What if nobody even knew what it was? What if nobody understood? You know, how to how to do a son ceremony? Or Abby, just what if all of that was gone? And, and he's starting to look a little distressed. And I said, you know, imagine if you had no connection to your ancient ancestors at all, if you had no way to understand, you know, to look at a wampum or any of the old ways of recording things. And you and you just had no idea what any of it meant? And and I said, Can you imagine, you know, what, how you would feel if that had happened, and he was like, that would be devastating. It would just be an overwhelming horror. And I was like, Yeah, and that's what happened to my people. You know, this, this is what happened to my people, three successive waves about 1000 years apart in Europe first, the Celts, then the Romans, then the Catholics, just scrubbed Europe of any semblance Europeans have any semblance of connection to their ancient past, we now refer to that as pre history as if it doesn't exist. We are a people who have been disconnected from our tribal roots.
The most important point is that culture is learned by trial and error over time. And when you look at the history of indigenous people around the world, what you find is that repeatedly, people make the mistake of wiping out their environment.
There was a society down in the area that we would call New Orleans right now. And they, they were settled, they were agriculturalists. They had they built pyramids. And they had come up with a system to make sure that even though there's a natural tendency in agricultural societies for hierarchies to emerge, that every person would be connected to everybody in society. So they had four classes or castes, the top one was called the sun gods. There were two middle ones, and I can't remember their names. And the bottom one was called the stinkards. And the stinkards did things like you know, clean the toilets. And the sun gods were like the administrators and ran the ran the country and then the people in the middle were like, you know, the merchants and the, and the physicians and stuff like that. But every you could only marry two casts away from the cast you were born into. So if you were born into cast, number one, you had to marry into cast number three or four. If you were born into cast, number two, you had to marry into cast four or one or like this, you know. And so every family had members of every caste in it, and everybody had relations in all castes. And the result of that was a society that did have hierarchy and yet existed in harmony.
You know, I wrote about this in '96, and Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight too that. That our society is I referred to it as a younger society and refer to Aboriginal people who have learned the lesson and gone through that cycle that the Maori were in the middle of, and the New Caledonian, said completed, as had most of the Native American tribes of North America as older cultures, and that our younger culture just doesn't know a lot of these things.
Robert Wolf's story is absolutely amazing, Robert was a psychologist. And he was hired by the government of either Malaysia or Indonesia, I forget which, I think it was Malaysia, to figure out why this one tribe of people have the Senoi apostrophe S Oh, I, or maybe that it's five letters. But anyway, the Senoi people why they were lazy, the government couldn't figure this out, they were these rubber plantations that were spreading across the, you know, the country. And, you know, indigenous people were leaving their land and coming to work on the rubber plantations and, you know, making money and building houses and getting drunk and all this kind of stuff. And the Senoi had nothing, they would have nothing to do with. And they moved, every they lived in the jungle, and they moved every every week or two, you know, from place to place, they would live someplace for a couple of weeks, they would eat all the food around them. And then they would move, you know, 40 miles away and live there for a couple of weeks and eat all the food around and then, and by the time they came back to the place where they had started, it was like 20 years later, and it had regenerated and so it was a completely ecologically balanced system. But you never knew where they were. And Robert was supposed to go interview them for the government. And so he goes, there was this road that just like, like these roads in Nevada, you know, that just go straight through for 400 miles. And there's like one little road going off kind of thing. You know, there's just mile, hundreds of miles of jungles on the right. And on the left was whatever I think, you know, whatever it was, and there was this little country store and on this road, and behind the country store was a little trail that went into the jungle back about a mile or so. And then at the end of the trail, there was a stump and that was it. And then you were in the jungle, and you had no idea. You know, there's the trail to the country store. And so Robert, found that the country star was the place to enter the jungle to find the Senoi. And so he visited the store. And the guy says, well, there's the path. And so he walks this path. And when he gets to the end, there's the guy sitting on the stump, one of the Senoi people, and Roberts was like, Oh, what a wonderful coincidence. And the guy's like, Yeah, cool. And so they had a conversation, and Robert left and wrote up some notes. And then he came back about four or five days later, and he takes another walk back along that path, and there's a different guy sitting on a stump. And Robert has a long conversation with him and comes back. And the third time he goes back, and there's a third guy, a different guy sitting on the stump. And Robert has now come to the conclusion that this is like their lookout station, right? This is where they hold off the barbarians. And this guy invites him to come visit the camp. And so Robert follows him for like a half a day through the jungle, you know, a path that he can't even figure out and gets to this little camp that we're the Senoi we're living, and spends about a week with them, you know, and what he discovers is that, first of all, when they sleep, they all sleep together, everybody has to touch somebody, you know, your foot is on this person's stomach or that you know, whatever. And they believe that the dream world is the real world. And that this world is the dream world. And number one, and number two, they dream things and act when they wake up in the morning or what they the whole morning is spent everybody discussing their dreams. And it comes out in conversation over the course of a few days. Robert is like, how come nobody's gone to go sit on the stump? And they're like, Oh, we only do that when we dream that somebody is coming to visit. And Robert was like, what? And they were like, Oh yeah, three times we dreamed that you were going to come and visit. So three times we had to send somebody to me.
There's a lot out there that we don't understand that we don't know. And there's a lot to learn from indigenous wisdom. And I think it's just a flaming screaming tragedy that we have abandoned. So much of it and that that we haven't abandoned. We either cartoonize, you know, into the cartoon Indian essentially. Or we denigrate.
Jeff eventually told me his story. And his story was that he was a halfbreed. He was he was his mother was half Aboriginal and half white and his father was white. And this was, Jeff is, I mean, this was literally 80 years ago, you know, maybe 90 years ago, Jeff was born in a time when it was illegal to be a half breed in Australia. And they they when the police found out that there had been these children who are the products of miscegenation, I guess is the word. They will abduct them and take them to these giant orphanages, or they would sell them. And this is what happened to Jeff. He was he was three years old. And he was he wandered outside his mother's home in this little Aboriginal village. And a policeman on horseback was going by, and he saw Jeff and said that kids the wrong color and grabbed him and took him and sold him to a local, they call them stations there, it's a ranch, it was this huge ranch. And, and he, he became mute. He still stutters, but he, he is the guy who owned the ranch, forbade him to speak, and, you know, beat him and whipped him and, and put him to work. I mean, he was slave labor. And so when Jeff was my recollection is 10 years old, I, you know, it probably says In the article, it's been, it's been probably a decade since I've seen Jeff. But when he was young man, he was, you know, not not yet. Maybe, maybe 1012 13, something like that. He was in the, in the dining hall. And the guy who owned the ranch was there. And one of the one of the ranch hands was trying to provoke Jeff to speak, knowing that he wasn't supposed to speak, you know, in the presence of the guy who was the owner. And he was poking him and stuff and teasing him. And Jeff got really upset and was kind of starting to say something and started stuttering and it just all fell apart for Him. And so what happened was the just turn off this phone. And so what happened was Jeff picked up a stone and threw it as hard as he could in the sky hit him right in the middle of forehead and, and then ran. And Jeff had been stashing pieces of tack and gone. And, you know, he had been preparing for this escape. And he fled into the bush. And he lived in the bush for a couple of years, and hooked up with an old Aboriginal Trapper who taught him how to trap and taught him how to survive in the bush and taught him all the old Aboriginal ways and where the Quinten places were, and what the, you know, the sacred places and ceremonies. And Jeff became basically an Aboriginal elder. And which led him eventually to, you know, get this ranch and, and, and start taking care of these kids. So that's just backstory. So I'm sitting here with Jeff, you know, after I've gotten to know him fairly well, and, and I'm like, you know, don't you hate these, you know, that guy who bought you? And he's like, No, he was raised in that society, he was probably treated the same way. And I'm like, well, don't you hate the society that, you know, that separated your mother from you, and, and, you know, put in these racial barriers. And he's like, now that he says, The people here, the white people here were prisoners, they were brought from Australia, from England to Australia, they were, they were themselves, the oppressed, and the oppressed frequently become the oppressors. And, you know, it was a real lesson for me, I'd never met anybody who had such a deep understanding and so much compassion for the people who had, you know, just totally screwed up his life.
Before you can solve a problem, you have to identify it, you have to own it, you have to, you have to recognize it, you have to know where it came from. You have to understand its Genesis. And I think until we understand the cultural crisis, that this unending consumption way of life, this wetiko of life, has brought us that we can't, we can't solve it, I had a conversation, I relate this in my book, Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, with Professor Jack Forbes, who was the professor of Native American studies at UC Davis, back in the day, he's passed away now. But he wrote a book called Columbus and other Cannibals that blew my mind. And so I went out and met him at UC Davis. And, and, and he was, you know, so very, very clear about this, that, that until Western society understands what not just what they have done to Native people, but what they have lost as a consequence of doing this, the wisdom that they have lost the the, the 1000s of years, millennia of learnings that they have lost. There, it won't be possible to fix things he described. He gave me this word wetiko. He said wetiko is, I believe, was Lakota word. And Aiza literally translates to cannibal. It's one who eats another person's life, their flesh, but their life. Mm hmm And And he said, When Native Americans were, you know, first encountered Europeans, When Europeans first came here, at least, you know, maybe the second time that they came to North America, you know, Jamestown kind of melted into the forest, apparently, they said, Okay, let's go live with the Indians. But after that, when they came with the guns and the horses and things, he said, basically, you know, my, my ancestors were presented with a couple of choices. They could they could run, which many of them did. They could integrate, you know, which wasn't even an option in many cases. Or they could, or they could fight. But if they fought, because the Europeans were engaging in genocidal warfare, which was largely unknown among native tribes in North America, because you have to live with the people next door. And you're, you know, and you don't want to take their land because their ghosts are on their land, and your ghosts are on your land. And so, you know, we, they would have wars, Indian Wars, where they would do something called counting coup, which is where you draw one drop of blood, and that person's out of the game. They invented lacrosse, there's a painting in the in the Capitol building, or maybe it's in the White House, this giant painting, of like 1000s of Indians engaged in, you know, in this huge area in upstate New York, having this lacrosse game, you know, and is something that the painter actually witnessed in this in the 16 or 1700s. And this is how they would solve tribal disputes, was by playing lacrosse. So anyhow, you know, Jack Forbes was like, you know, those were our choices. And if we fought we became you, we became wetiko. And, you know, which was, in some ways, maybe even the worst option. And so he was like, you know, you guys, you white people, you have to solve your wetiko problem, you have to resolve your, cannibalistic cultural insanity. And until you do, that life's gonna be tough.
The integration of ancient wisdom with modern life is something that we really need to have happen and we need to do it in a way that isn't just another new age cliche. Or another new, you know, cafeteria religion. I'll take a little of this and a little of that, you know, but instead is is a deep dive into what humans have learned through painful experience. In some cases, you know, society ending experiences over the over the millennia. We have a lot of work to do guys