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Influences

Another thing I don't think is understood is that Native Americans grow up in the dominant culture as well as the native one and influences come from all directions. I love punk rock and post-punk. I really enjoy fanzines and when I was in high school William Blake was a great inspiration to me because I felt that he was tuned in to a higher kind of spirituality. And he was tuned into his landscape. The engravings of Blake that were so captivating to me when I was a teenager were engravings that showed the light coming out of the pages.

Another thing about him was that he was a very independent thinker, he seemed to have a great deal of spirituality that he put into his work. I could feel this as I was growing older and searching for something that I could relate to - something that was beyond the cut and dried, the Catholic Church that I was raised in. I was looking for other sources of inspiration.

At the moment what I'm interested in is Buddhism, because the ways of knowledge are so similar to Native American systems of knowledge and it's the logical progression in terms of my work. So, my influences have gone all the way from William Blake and the Sex Pistols to a Cree Medicine Man who taught me so much about Native American traditions. Even though I'm not a Plains person, biologically, I learned an awful lot about Plains traditions and about Cree traditions from this man who treated me as a daughter for many, many years until he 'made his long sleep' as he would say.

Other influences in my life have been intellectuals like Gerald Visner who is a Chippewa intellectual, here at U.C. Berkeley. Wilma Mankiller has also been influential for me, because of the great work that she's done politically, for Cherokees and for women as the Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. As Wilma once said, her election to the office of Principle Chief was a great step forward and a great step backwards, because traditionally in the old days prior to the establishment of the United States, Cherokee women were leaders. Nancy Ward, for example, was the traditional leader, 'The Beloved Woman' of The Cherokees prior to the period when they were removed from the eastern portion of their nation and forced to go into the Indian Territory. Even today we still have the Beloved Women who represent the strongest leadership, the greatest voice of authority for Eastern Band Cherokees.

The Great Spirit

There is the same sense of an all-powerful being at the heart of Native American spirituality as well as Christian spirituality, but at the same time its much more participatory, from the Native American point of view in that if you take care of the animals and you take care of the plants, if you take care of the trees and you take care of the water, then the Great Spirit will take care of all of you. In my understanding of Christianity, God is omnipotent and will do what God wants to do because he is this all powerful being who occasionally is wrathful.

It also seems to be a hierarchy of power, with God up here at the top, then the clergy, then ordinary people, then animals. So it's a very dominating kind of spirituality, a very paternal kind of spirituality. Certainly what was dished out to Native Americans until very recently. We may have reached a new millennium, but we're still very much in the 20th century and in certain ways still locked in the values of the 19th century, when it comes to Christianity, I think.

Further Reading
The Transformation of Cherokee Apalachia 1755-1808 by Dr Sara Parker
Published by UC Berkeley 1991
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© dprogram 1996>2008

Originally broadcast on UK television's Channel 4, dprogram is an award winning, mind expanding trip featuring rare and exclusive interviews with leading edge personalities from areas like cyber culture, consciousness research, parapsychology, music and art.

Volume 1 includes:
• Dan Mapes CEO of San Francisco's leading edge virtual reality design company SynergyLabs on the metaphysics of VR.
• Jah Wobble Musician and founder member of Public Image Limited on Cockney mystics, creativity and the inspiration of William Blake.
• Dr Sara Parker UC Berkeley scholar on the New Age 'colonisation' of Native American spirituality.
• Bishop Joey Head of the First Church of the Last Laugh - the worlds fastest growing snack relgion!
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• Willis Harman Former president of The Institute of Noetic Sciences on their 'conventional research into unconventional areas'.
• Dr Edgar Mitchell Founder of The Institute of Noetic Sciences and Apollo 14 astronaut on parapsychology experiments in space.
• Nick Pope of the British Ministry of Defence on why he had to change his mind about the UFO phenomenom.
• Peter Russell Author, on the global brain, spirituality on the net and our part in the evolution of the planet.
• Ann & Alexander Shulgin Pioneer researchers into psychedelics and the mind, on the politics of ecstacy.
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