@ gary_nb_misc

High Prairie

**One **

Let's sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can't see a highway or a fence. Let's have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs. Let's have the grass for a mattress, experiencing its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals.1

Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya wakan--the holy air-- which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan-- spirit, life, breath, renewal--it means all that. Woniya--we sit together, don't touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.1

There it went again. Kind of halfway between a gobble and a drumming. Or perhaps both sounds. I was just coming ou of a restful, deep sleep. A dim, orange light filtered throug the tent's rain-fly.

Gobble-gobble-drum-gobble, drum. The strange sound mingled for a moment with my dreams, then became reality. I sat up in my sleeping bag. Cold morning air hit my face.

Gobble, drum-gobble, drum. The sounds were everywhere now. "What in the world is going on?", I thought. Things were getting quite wild. This drumming, gobbling sound filled the air on all sides around me, with the sounds growing louder and more numerous. I was in the tent, wrapped in my sleeping bag, unable to move much, and not able to see the

---2

strange goings-on outside. It was all kind of crazy and wonderful, and I felt very curious and left out. What was going on?

I quietly unzipped my down bag, and slipped out. Likewise, I opened the tent door, then with a sudden and quick jerk on the rain fly zipper, I opened the tent to the outside world, and plunged out onto my belly, glancing all around in an effort to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that had, in such an unusual way, brought me to wakefulness.

Tens of flapping wings beat the air, and the sky around me filled with sharp-tailed grouse. The birds took off to the east--flapping their wings, gliding: flapping, gliding. Then all was still and quiet again, save for the occassional moo of a cow in some far pasture, and I was alone on the high prárie, in the chill of morning, with the golden light of dawn growing around me as the sun edged up toward the eastern horizon.

I was laughing with delight. In the city you get woken up by an alarm clock--by a warning, that says you'd better get up, or be late for work, or school, or whatever you're in danger of being late for. Here in the country its different. You're woken up by the wonders of the new day. "How dare they wake me up like that", I joked out loud. "On the other hand", I thought, "I was sleeping right in the middle of their dancing ground." I was awake and happy, stretched half-way out of the tent door with my stomach lying on the short, dry

---3

grass of the southeast Montana prairie.

The honey was thick. I spread it over peanut butter and bread with my hunting knife, then sat back and enjoyed breakfast while watching the sunlight begin to rake the hilltops. This was Antelope Valley--or so I had named it, after the small herd of seven or eight antelope that frequented the area. I was down in the bottom of this broad, shallow valley now, but if you walked up to the top of any of the surrounding hills, you could see the vastness of the high prarie. The land rolled away from you towards the horizon. Bare, slate-covered hilltops, lush, green grass and clover in the draws. Dandelions and chokecherry bushes backlighted by the low-lying morning sun. Gravelly hillsides in the distance, streaked with brown, red, and sometimes black.

And therin lies a problem. Those black streaks. The pratie, it seems, overlies huge beds of coal. Coal that is needed by society. Coal that must be mined to feed our technology. Dirty, black rock that is blasted and gouged out of the earth by some of the largest, most powerful machinery ever built by mankind.

I thought about this as I chewed on dry apricots. The line between sunlight and shadow, still to my west, moved rapidly now, towards where I sat. I looked forward to the sun.

The original natives of this land, the plains indians, would never have understood and condoned what the white man was doing to the prarie. To them, digging up the earth--

---4

taking a blade to the earth--was "like taking a knife to my mother's breast". I sat there in the grass, my hunger satisfied and the soft sunlight just beginning to hit my face, and I knew that I agreed with the indians.

---5 (page missing)

---6

Two The Broken Hoop

I shouldered my day pack and took off to the northeast, up a draw. Three antelope appeared on the crest of the hill to my left. When they saw me they froze, alert and ready to dash off at the slightest hint of danger. I froze too, so as not to scare them away. These mammals were at home here on the prairie. Mile upon mile of vast, open space--perfect habitat for a species which depends on early warning and tremendous speed to escape from predators. I had often, during my hiking trips on the prairie, tried to sneak up on antelope, and see how close I could come to them. It was difficult, to say the least. "Hunting antelope with bow and arrow must have been an art", I thought. The sun grew warmer. I pulled off my wool sweater and walked to the top of the hill.

What would it have been like to have been an indian before the white man came? And what would it have been like to have been conquered by the wasichus, and seen your beloved land taken away from you, then despoiled and abused by an uncontrolled technology? The indians had technologies, you know. Arrows, bone awls, fire--these are all technologies, even if they are 'primitive'. And fire alone is enough of a technology to wreak tremendous destruction on an environment.

---7

Nuclear bombs only do the job much quicker. Yes, the indians, like us, had technology, and it was advancing, although surely at a relatively slow pace. Unlike us, however, they lived in harmony with the Earth. The rational and irrational within indian society were in balance, and as a result, the people had a peace of mind. What would it have been like to have lived as an indian? Perhaps some of Black Elk's accounts

relate this best:

Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together likę relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. 2

That was another happy summer, for the big trouble had not come yet. We cut plenty of tepee poles up along the creeks that came down the east side of the Black Hills, and there was all we wanted to eat, for the Hills were like a big food pack for our people. Iron Bull, a little boy my age, and I had great fun fishing. We always made an offering of bait to the fish, saying: "You who are down in the water with wings of red, I offer this to you: so come hither." Then when we caught the first fish, we would put it on a forked stick and kiss it. If we did not do this, we were sure the others would know and stay away. If we caught a little fish, we would kiss it and throw it back, so that it would not go and frighten the bigger fish. I don't know whether all this helped or not, but we always got plenty of fish, and our parents were proud of us. We tried to catch as many as we could so that people would think much of us. 3

The sun, the Light of the world, I hear Him coming. I see His face as He comes. He makes the beings on earth happy. And they rejoice. O Wakan-Tanka, I offer to You this world of Light.4

But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu, and it is dirty with lies and greed.5

---8

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,--you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. 6

A light and pleasantly cool west wind fortold of a fine, spring day. I sat on top of the hill, overlooking Antelope Valley and the prairie beyond. I hadn't known the name for it then, but I was looking at the World's Rim. I remember sitting there in the sunshine thinking that it should be so easy to live as one with all that surrounded me.

But it isn't. Its hard to live in this society, and to achieve a 'peace of mind', to be as one with the universe. We (western society) have destroyed an entire culture. And my god, what have we replaced it with??

I was back in the stockroom loading huge boxes of 4-ply toilet tissue onto a trolley when the call came. "Employee four to TA, four to TA". That was me--number four. I heaved a last box onto the cart, and started off for the toiletries section.

The store was getting crowded now. Sundays at K-Mart were

---9

like that. I passed by the plastic dishpans and turned left. Through the windows at the front of the store, I could see that it was snowing. "What do the mountains look like now?", I thought. The mountains, rugged and snow-capped, lay only a few miles to the north. But from inside the store, one could only see the parking lot.

She seemed upset. "Foamy menthol is advertised as on sale", she explained, "but there's none left on the shelft"

"A catastrophe", I thought, sarcastically.

"Oh I'm very sorry", I replied, as sincerely as possible. "And I'm sure we don't have any in back, either. Would you like a rain check?"

"Oh, well--no". She was kind of grumbling. I like the menthol so much. You get in a hot shower, and then rub it all over your body, and you just tingle all over. It feels so good".

I didn't know quite what to say, so I just nodded and went back to work stocking the shelves with toilet paper. Business was still picking up. The air was heavy with the smell of paper, popcorn, people, and a thousand other oders from a thousand different products. Kids screamed and piloted plastic spaceships down the isles of the toy section. Two teenage boys stood gaping at a Farrah Fawcet poster.

And outside, the snow--and beyond that, the mountains...

---Three The Yin and the Yang

A red-tailed hawk soared on a rising thermal. It was early still, but already getting hot. This was a land of extremes. On the high prairie, it could be sunny and warm one minute, snowing and bitter cold the next. Yet I loved it there, out in the open, empty space all around me. It was alot like the desert--vast, seemingly endless distances. A landscape where your conscienceness has room to expand out and fill the spaces, where you have freedom to think and feel and grow. It is a landscape that you become a part of.

Paula Gunn Allen talks about the feeling of wholeness that permeates Native American thought.

...At base, every story, every song, every ceremony, tells the Indian that he is part of a living whole, and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole of being.7

Allen also speaks of the "dualistic division that the white man imposes on the rational--irrational aspects of the universe:

...Native American thought makes no such dualistic division, nor does it draw a hard-and-fast line between what is material and what is spiritual, for the two are seen to be two expressions of the same reality--as though life has twin manifestations that are mutually interchangeable and, in many instances, virtually identical aspects of a reality that is, essentially, more spirit than matter, or that more correctly, manifests its very spiritness in a tangible

---11

way. The closest analogy in western thought is the Einsteinian understanding of matter as a special state or condition of energy. Yet even this concept falls short of the Native American understanding, for Einsteinian energy is essentially stupid, while energy in the Indian view is intelligence manifesting yet another way.8

This indian philosophy is indeed a beautiful one; "...energy in the Indian view is intelligence manifesting yet another way". The idea of wholeness of the universe, of the inter- relatedness of everything permeates all of indian thought. This feeling of wholeness of the universe is something that touched me, during my wanderings out on the Montana prairie. It is a peace of mind, that the indians achieved through

song, dance, ceremony, and living close to the earth.

Allen made one statement, however, that was a bit short- sighted, "... Einsteinian energy is essentially stupid...". I don't believe Einstein thought of his energy as stupid. Dr. Einstein had a sense of the mystical in life, and he speaks about it in the following passager

The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.9

Indeed, modern physics is tending more and more towards theories that are complementary to philosophies like that of eastern mysticism and american indian. Energy is no longer being viewed as "stupid". Fritjof Capra speaks of this in his

---12

book, "The Tao of Physics".

...I see science and mysticiom as two complement- ary manifestations of the human mind, of its rational and intuitive faculties. The modern physicist ex- periences the world through an extreme specialization of the rational mind, the mystic through an extreme specialization of the intuitive mind. The two approaches are entirely different and involve far more than a certain view of the physical world. However, they are complementary, as we have learned to say in physics. Neither is comprehended in the other, nor can either of them be reduced to the other, but both of them are necessary, supplementing one another for a fuller understanding of the world. To paraphrase an old Chinese saying, mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches, scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science: but man needs both. Mystical experience is necessary to understand the deepest nature of things, and science is essential for modern life. What we need, therefore, is not a synthesis but a dynamic interplay between mystical intuition and scientific analysis.10

Capra believes, as I so, that our society "...is too yang --too rational, male, and aggressive". Our culture today lacks the balance between the yin and the yang. We are failing to see the wholeness of the universe. Our culture does view energy as something stupid, even though our science is beginning to tell us otherwise. We fail to see that the universe is moving, breathing, and alive--and that we are a part of it.

I believe that the world view implied by modern physics is inconsistent with our present society, which does not reflect the harmonious interrelatedness we observe in nature. To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed a cultural revolution in the true sense of the word. The survival of our whole civilization may depend on whether we can bring about such a change. It will depend, ultimately, on our ability to adopt some of the vin attitudes of Eastern mysticism; to experience the wholeness of nature and the art of living with it in harmony. 11

---13

Four Ghosts

So what about the american indian? How does he fit into all of this? Well, perhaps he can help show us the way--perhaps we can learn something from the indians. Even though its probably too late for the resurgence of indian societies like those of the past, perhaps we can all (i.e. all modern societies), through an attempt at understanding the indian and his lifestyle, learn about the intrinsic interplay of the yin and the yang in our universe, and as Capra says, "experience the wholeness of nature and the art of living with it in harmony".

Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" is the story of one culture (Earth's) moving in and displacing another (the Martian's)--a story which bears a high degree of resemblance with white man--indian history. In the following exerpts from this book, Tomás Gomez, a relative newcomer to the already established colonies on Mars, meets a Martian:

Now he looked at the Martian against the sky.

"The stars!" he said. "The stars!" said the Martain, looking, in turn,

at Tomás. The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh on the Martain, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphor- escent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian's stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like

jewelry. "I can see through you!" said Tomas.

---14

back. "And I through youl" said the Martian, stepping Tomás felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. I am real, he thought. The Martian touched his own nose and lips. "I have flesh," he said, half aloud. "I am alive." Tomás stared at the stranger. real, then you must be dead." "And if I am "No, you!" "A ghost!" "A phantom!" They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds.12

"There are the rockets." Tomás walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. "See?"

"No."

"Damn it, there they are! Those long silver things."

"No."

Now Tomás laughed. "You're blind!"

"I see very well. You are the one who does not see."

"But you see the new town, don't you?'

"I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low

tide."

"Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty centuries."

"Ah, now, now, that is enough." "It's true, I tell you,

"No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.

"You are so certain. How can you prove who is form the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?"

"Two thousand and one!"

"What does that mean to me?"

Tomas considered and shrugged. "Nothing."

"It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?"

"But the ruins prove it! They prove that I am the Future, I am alive, you are dead!"

"Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than

---15

anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it.

Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?" "Yes. You're afraid?"14"

Tomás put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation. Their hands did not touch; they melted through

each other.

"Will we meet again?"

"Who knows? Perhaps some other night." "I'd like to go with you to that festival."

"And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened."

"Good-by," said Tomas.

"Good night."

The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.

"Good lord, what a dream that was," sighed Tomás, his hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party.

How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian, rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats, the women with golden eyes, and the songs. The night was dark. The moons had gone down.

Starlight twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound, no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the rest of the cool dark night. 15

Perhaps our two cultures--the white man's and the indian's-- are like these two 'ghosts in the night'--each different, each moving a different direction in time, and each leaving the encounter with a feeling of the essence of the other. Whereas the indians can now only look back at the past, the white man must look toward the future. We can only hope that our cultural encouter with the american indian will someday be looked on as a learning experience for us---an experience where part of the essence of the indian way of life has rubbed off on us.

Indeed, the american indian, as he truely existed, now

---16

stands in the past. I believe, that if we are to survive in a meaningful and wholesome way, than we must carry a part of the indian into the future with us. Perhaps the most encouraging thought of all is, that we probably can't avoid carrying the indian philosophies into the future with us, at least in part. After all, we have literature on and by indians, and some people are reading it. We have remnants of indian tribes scattered throughout this country, and some people are learning something of the old ways from them. He will always be with us. The indian is now in our history. Indeed, as Seattle once put it,

"The White Man will never be alone."

...And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.16

The hawk I had been watching earlier drifted slowly with the wind towards the eastern horizon, then disappeared behind a far ridge. A wispy patch of cirrus clouds stood out glaring and bright-white in an otherwise electric-blue sky. Down the hill and to the left of me, an albino porcupine was digging for something around an area of deadfall and

---17

ponderosa pine trees. It was springtime on the prairie, and the whole world there was alive, growing, and at peace. It was a reminder of what our future could be.

---

!https://image.nostr.build/cc34ebf2d12c6c4a8cd057014c2cae9ca72e9ceed0cd019a2cbbc2c27fc61804.jpg]()

Footnotes

1 Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes. Pocket Books, New York, 1972. P.108.

2 Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt. Pocket Books, New York, 1932. P. 8.

3 Ibid., p. 54.

4 The Sacred Pipe, edited by Joseph Epes Brown. Penguin Books, New York, 1971. P. 83.

Neihardt, p. 8. 5

6 Ibid., p. 230.

7 The Sacred Hoop, by Paula Gunn Allen. P. 117.

8 Ibid., p. 116.

9 The Universe and Dr. Einstein, by Lincoln Barnett. William Sloane Associates, Inc., New York, 1949.

10 The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra. Shambhala Publicatior Inc., Boulder, Colorado, 1975. P. 306.

11 Ibid., p. 307.

12-15 The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Doubleday and Co., Inc., New York, 1946. Exerpts from "October 2002: Night Meeting".

16 The Portable North American Indian Reader, edited by Frederick W. Turner III. Penguin Books, New York, 1974. Exerpt from a speech by Seattle, a Dwamish chief. P. 253.