Page 38 - ECOlogic Book

Pellitier, is “. . . the place where one is allowed to just be, wherein the
greatest freedom lies.”

For spiritual reinhabitation, we can turn to no better teacher that the Native
American spirit ways. Says Steven Davison, “These are traditions which are
potent from the practice of untold generations, which are born of the land
and return their peoples to it. Here,” says Davison, “the spiritual connection
is real: the spirit powers actually respond to these ancient forms of
34
communication.”

“But there’s a problem if we try to adopt Indian ways,” says Davison, “not
only is it nearly impossible t adopt another culture, regardless of its power;
it is usually inappropriate to do it as well, regardless of the culture’s value.
Reinhabitation requires a culture-wide transformation; and on this scale,
cultural appropriation is usually called colonization. If reinhabitory
communities are to be large enough to be significant as experiments in
culture of place, it seems they will have to discover who they can be without
denying who they already are.” Even Western culture is rooted in land-
based spiritual culture, if you go back far enough. Davison goes on, “This
does not deny indigenous spirit-ways as sources of guidance and inspiration.
It is only that the work must be done by us and cannot be done for us.”

Gary Snyder says that to know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are
part of a part (the Matrieska doll) and that the whole is made of parts each
35
of which is whole. “You start with the part you are whole in,” says Snyder.

A Crow Elder has said, “. . . if people stay somewhere long enough – even
white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the
spirits coming up from the land. “The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost,
they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to
influence them.”

There are old and wise spirits flowing in these waters that surround us, and
in this land called the Great Lakes Bioregion. Are you listening?

34 Davison, Steven, “Divining the Soul in Place”, in Spring, 1984 Raise the Stakes

35 Snyder, Gary, “Bioregional perspectives, in Home: a Bioregional Reader, Van Andrus, Christopher Plant,
Judith Plant & Eleanore Wright, eds., (New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1990).

38