"ON PERCEIVING A NEW WAY"

 “ON PERCEIVING IN A NEW WAY”

After our daughter Susan graduated from Macalester College in 2005, she signed up for Americorps.  She worked for two years in Albuquerque in an arts center, some of whose clients were adults with learning challenges.  She and other colleagues developed arts pieces with these young adults, especially using theater and drama.  Caroline and I went to visit her on several occasions, learning more about the Southwest, which neither of us knew much about.  We would usually stay with a west Tennessee cousin of Caroline’s dad – Bill and Joanne Claybrooke were great hosts to us in those days. Bill had been in the area since he went to work as a photographer for the atomic work at Los Alamos, and he knew all the back roads and places to visit.

  On one of our excursions, Bill took us to the Acoma Pueblo, which was astonishing.  It is a group of Native Americans who live on a mesa high in the New Mexico landscape, and on this Indigenous Peoples Day, I am thinking of them and of our visit to their home.  Acoma Sky City is located on a mesa that is 350 feet high, and it is one of several Acoma towns.  There are about 5,000 people left in the Acoma clan, and they are descendants of the Anaasazi people.  The town that we visited is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America.  Written records date back to 1150 CE, but their oral tradition takes it back to the BCE/CE era divide.  

     While the Acoma people  do limit contact with those classified as “white,” they also recognize the need for cash flow in the community, so they allow tourists to pay for tours and to purchase their incredible art works.  At that time in 2006, there was only one road up to the town, and it was often blocked to public traffic, except for the tour vans.  Like all indigenous people in this country,  their lives have felt the deep sting of invasion by those of us classified as “white.”  They also limit contact with “white” people because they understand the deeply infectious disease of consumerism, which has captured white culture.  This was one of the first insights that I would gain from our visit with them – the resistance to “white” people is not based so much on the arbitrary system of “race.”  It is based on their empirical observation that people in white culture (and those influenced by it) were held captive to the idea of consumption, that the meaning of life is found in using something completely up in order to gain its benefit.

    This observation was tied to the Acoma idea (and the idea of many indigenous people) that beings on the earth, and indeed existence itself, were sacred and to be honored, even when they were used as food and shelter.  They had prayers to use when eating plants and animals, prayers to use when utilizing other parts of earthly beings.  They recognized the fundamental connection between them and all existence, and nowhere was this more clear than in their connection to water.  Their area averaged 7 inches of rainfall per year (Atlanta’s annual average is about 49 inches). To them, water was obviously precious, and they prayed for rain every day. The idea of wasting water, of using water for other than a fundamental human purpose, was not conceivable.  

    They also saw their ancestors in much of the existence of the world that surrounded them – in plants and animals, in rocks and in the few trees nearby, even in the sand and hard dirt.  It was not a question of “to be or not to be,” it was a question of seeing a fundamental connection, a fundamental community of all of life, even all of existence.  I was impressed by this observation and by its power.  In my context of a metro area full of trees (though less so every day, with all the continual development), I’ve thought of their insight in this way:  which perception is more helpful to humanity – to see a tree as the dwelling place of the ancestors, or to see a tree as lumber, as a house to be built.  

    I was also intrigued by a less philosophical tenet that they shared with us.  Maybe it was my Calvinist leanings, but my ears perked up when they discussed the distribution of power in the tribe.  The men held the political power, and as I heard this, I thought “What else is new?  The same old same old.” But, they added, the women own the property rather than the men, with property being passed down in a matrilineal system.  As one of our female guides put it: “When the men make a bad political decision, guess where they won’t be sleeping that night?”  It was an insightful decision on the separation of powers, to keep one another accountable and to emphasize the power of community.

    On this Indigenous Peoples Day, I give thanks for these Acoma and similar approaches to life.  I am well aware of how much we of European descent have vandalized their lives.  Yet, I am also grateful for the gifts that they offer us.  In our days of shrinking resources and the dissolution of community, these insights from people who have existed continuously for at least 1000 years give me hope.  They offer us a different way of perceiving ourselves and perceiving others, a different way of living our lives, a way that emphasizes connection and community, rather than dissolution and individualism.  To use Jesus’ approach about his storytelling and indeed about his life, let us have ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to receive.