Tiokasin Ghosthorse

September 21, 2016
· New York ·

When you read, you find out more than the average bear, and sometimes books drop some knowledge. But you must be conscious enough not to educate the wisdom out of yourself, stay humble with what you know, and don't pretend to know more than you do.

I found this excerpt after remembering reading it about 20 years ago, going through some hard-to-find real books, non-digital and with real paper pages.

John Collier (1933-1945), U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, wrote this statement in his book about a crucial difference between his people and the Native people of Turtle Island. The book was "Indians of the Americas, The Long Hope."

"They had what the world has lost. They have it now. What the world has lost, the world must have again, lest it die. Not many years are left to have or have not to recapture the lost ingredient.
This is not merely a passing reference to World War III or the atom bomb—although the reference includes these ways of death, too. These deaths will mean the end if they come — racial death, self-inflicted because we have lost the way, and the power to live is dead.

What, in our human world, is this power to live? It is the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality, joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion for the earth and its web of life.

This invisible reverence and passion is what the American Indians almost universally had, and representative groups of them have it still.

They had and have this power for living, which our modern world has lost—as world-view and self-view, as tradition and institution, as practical philosophy dominating their society, and as an art supreme among all the arts.

If our modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted within the twentieth century, which is the prospect now.
… The deep cause of our world's agony is that we have lost the passion and reverence for human personality and for the web of life and the earth, which the American Indians have tended as central, sacred fire since before the Stone Age. Our long hope is to renew that sacred fire in us all."