Tag Archives: ancestors

Dreamwork, Indigenous Mind

Dreaming with the Ancestors (PDF)

Dreaming with the Ancestors

by Teresa MacColl, MA

International Association for the Study of Dreams

Psiber-Dreaming Conference

September 5, 2008

Dreaming with the Ancestors

by Teresa MacColl, MA

In Irish myth, the Salmon is the oldest and wisest of all the animals, and it was said that any person who ate the Salmon of Wisdom would gain the gift of prophecy… they would be able to see their future. By seeking and working with the Salmon of Wisdom, we can gain an understanding that is rooted deep in the collective awareness of all humanity. By remembering the dreams and stories of our ancestors, we can remember our ancestor’s future, and reclaim a more balanced, holistic, and ecologically sustainable world.

My name is Teresa Rae MacColl, and my tribes are Celtic from Ireland and Scotland, Teutonic, and Anglo-Saxon. I am a graduate of Dr. Apela Colorado’s Indigenous Mind (IM) Master’s Program at Naropa University, where I chose to research my Celtic Indigenous roots or rather my roots chose me that’s how the ancestors work.

When I first met Apela, she called me “Fish Girl” , and she said to me “I’ve waited years for a Fish Person to come along!” I had been working with white sturgeon in the fisheries department at UC Davis at the time, designing fish ladders for the sturgeon. Apela is from Wisconsin and her tribe, the Oneida, have a deep reverential connection to the sturgeon. So Apela too is a “Fish Person”.

After working in the sciences most of my adult life, where one is trained to not talk about or have feelings or emotions connected to the animals they work with, I had finally found a teacher and mentor who I knew loved and cared about fish and ecology in a very deep spiritual, ancestral, and traditional way, and I knew I was on the right path. So began my training as an indigenous scientist.

Indigenous science is a holistic discipline that considers nature to be alive and intelligent. Unlike western science, the data collected from indigenous science are not used to control the forces of nature. Instead, the data shows ways and means of accommodating nature.

Students conduct research using the critical distinctions that indigenous scientists rely upon (please see list below). This research offers a unique opportunity for students to encounter their ancestors and their whole self with the support of mind, body and spirit.

The indigenous scientist is an integral part of the research process and there is a defined process for insuring this integrity.

All of nature is considered to be intelligent and alive, thus and active research partner.

The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance

Compared to western time/space notions, indigenous science collapses time and space with the result that our fields of inquiry and participation extend into and overlap with past and present.

Indigenous science is concerned with relationships, we try to understand and complete our relationships with all living things.

Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the senses including the spiritual and psychic.

The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place. This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive. In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science.

When we reach the moment/place of balance we do not believe that we have transcended — we say that we are normal! Always we remain embodied in the natural world.

Humor is a critical ingredient of all truth seeking, even in the most powerful rituals. This is true because humor balances gravity.1

Indigenous Mind is a masters program where students study and research their own indigenous tribal ancestors earth-based spiritual traditions within a Western Academic framework.

1Colorado

Students individually and collectively go through a deep decolonization and ancestral remembrance process. This is especially important for those of us who are of European ancestry, who are more removed and disconnected from our indigenous roots, or even having awareness that we have indigenous ancestors. Students spend time with traditional native elders and learn what it means to remember who they are in an indigenous tradition, and make an ancestral journey to the land of their ancestors. The quest is to access earth-based spirituality, remember the traditional ways of ones own genealogical ancestors without appropriating from other cultures, healing both wounded masculine and feminine, maintaining balance, and promoting inter-tribal healing and understanding.

In 1855 Chief Seattle warned the white settlers of America that “when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men”, it would signal “the end of living and the beginning of survival.” Those American settlers had forgotten their own native tradition in favor of a religion that taught man he must “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish in the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen.I.26). This view of the natural environment denied there is any spirit in nature.

Most people of European ancestry believe their culture is rooted in Christianity, and are unaware of the tens of thousands of years of pre-Christian heritage and spirituality preceding the last two millennia of Christian experience. Christianity is relatively recent, and before it was the pre-dominant religion in Western Europe, most people practiced a spirituality that wasn’t expressed in sacred texts, but which arose out of the experience of being sensitive to the land and sky — to the changing seasons, to the power of the hills and rivers, to the mystery of the stars, and the movements of the sun and moon.2

To the ancient Celts, the realms of the Otherworld were in full view all the time, which included the ancestors, the deities, and the sidhe or faeries. In the Scottish Highlands, you find the “two sights” or an da shealladh in Gaelic, also known as the “second sight”, which denotes the capacity to see both the normal waking world (ordinary reality) and the world of spirit and energy that is intertwined and connected to this one. We find the two sights among certain individuals, who are the dream-seers and the vision-seers.3

When St. Patrick came to Ireland in AD 432, he spent nearly 30 years traveling throughout the countryside bringing Christianity to the local people and establishing churches and monastic foundations upon many Druidic sacred sites. He was not the first one to bring Christianity to Ireland, but he was the one to abolish the pagan rites of the Druids at Tara. Supposedly, first he got rid of the snakes, and then he got rid of the dragons. There were no snakes in Ireland. The Celts used the serpent imagery as a symbol of the universal life energy, a positive symbol of the goddess. So this legend of St. Patrick ridding the land of snakes and dragons was about the conversion of the pagan priests and the killing of the goddess, the feminine. St. Patrick also banned different forms of divination as “giving offerings to the demons”, which included the dream-seers and the vision seers.4

2 Carr-Gomm, 4-11.

3 MacEowen, 253

4 Concannon, 150-151.

“Your dreams are your doorways” —

Auntie Poepoe, Hawaiian elder

Much of our post-modern world does not have elders or intact cultures to link the modern and dissociative way of studying our dreams, with the ancient integrated ways of our ancestors. So in the IM program, we are attempting to reclaim what our indigenous ancestors did, and that is to use our dreams as guides, and to connect with our ancestors, and dream tribally.

Students learn how to understand and interpret dream messages from the ancestors and the spiritual world, and are taught by elders how dreams work on multiple levels to impart messages and understandings for today, and simultaneously reconstitute tribal ways. Tools for understanding dreams as guides in the waking world, particularly in their propensity for cross-cultural understanding and healing, are also provided. Dreams are one way the ancestors “speak” to us.

Our ancestors used to dream together as a tribal group, and they would share their collective dreams with the community. As we re-create a tribal dream community, we are able to gather up and perceive patterns and large writ ancestral communications that may come only to a group, and may be too much for a single person, or perhaps the dream is unifying people towards something that involves a group. We can perceive a collective Gestalt.5 In our IM tribal dream community, we collect and record our dreams together in a “dream database”, where we can look at our dreams collectively and track different patterns and themes in relation to the phases and signs of the moon. Working with dreams using indigenous protocol has enabled us to bring back the sacred art of tribal dreaming

5. A structure, configuration, or a pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gestalt).

“It’s time to make your dreams come true.”

-Mr. Hale Makua, Hawaiian elder

IM Dream Data:

Those of us that are the “Dreamers” started dreaming with and for each other or what I like to call “dream weaving”, and the collective dreams give a more informed story of what the dream messages were communicating to us. Ancestral information would come through the dreams of others as well our own individual dreams. Working with the community, one let’s go of their attachment to the dreams, because sometimes we are being “dreamed through”. The other message that comes through is that Mother Earth needs healing, and through our collective dream research we find that our ancestors used this dream information such as this to help maintain balance and harmony.

Below are some examples of storytelling through the dreams, and “dream weaving” with other students, connected to the ancestors and the land of the ancestors. The first dream I had is an example of one of many dreams I had that was connected to someone else, their ancestors, and the land of their ancestors. I was being “dreamed through”, and “seeing” ancestral information for someone else (this is how my Celtic ancestors dreamed, they had dreams of prophecy or the “second sight”) but also there was a message and work for me in the dream. What we are also finding is that we are becoming a global tribal dram community, and that ultimately the dreams and the “work” transcends space and time. For me personally, I know the dreams I have are connected to healing Mother Earth, which is not separate from healing and finding balance in the masculine and feminine within ourselves.

Elders, Indigenous Mind, Indigenous Science

18 June 1999 Letter- In Appreciation of Dr. Colorado (PDF)

APELA COLORADO

272-2 PUALAI ST.

LAHAINA, MAUI, HI

96761

18 JUNE 1999

Greetings return to you, Doctor Colorado, in the love and in the light of the ancestors, The Source of Life.

We of the ancestral tribal mind, dream our dreams and they are full of gentleness of the mind, the warmth of the heart and the humility of the soaring spirit; “Let peace prevail, enfold it with the red cloak”. If darkness comes persuade it to follow the way of peace. The ancestral bowl of light.

In appreciation and support of women of vision, like yourself, Doctor Colorado, there is a connection to the Universe where Kane retrieved from Lehua, the bowls of light and two red stones. Like the ancestors, you are connected to the Universe by your own visions as part of an inseparable aspect of creation- the merging of the ancestral tribal mind.

This sense, the intuitive avenue through the heart, opens the mind to the appropriate translation that it may enter the theoretical aspect of living and effectively integrate those feelings of the heart into usable theory of that ancestral tribal mind.

Since time on Mother Earth is so limited and time within the bosom of the Universe is so extensive, there is room for you to develop your own level of cosmic vision and give birth to it through the appropriate channels of physical reality.

The level of the material human mind is limited and grows slowly, but the level of the spiritual tribal heart is eternal, and as it becomes filled with aloha it changes the very nature of the material man into the vision he holds most dear: that of himself as an alive and integrated extension of the Universe- The Ancestral Grand Plan.

Doctor Colorado, you have distinguished yourself by a consistent superior performance of the ancestral mind on the beach of Quida, Benin, West Africa, January of this year, 1999. Proof of the quality of your instruction can be seen by the fact of students’ dissertation, one that I witnessed, in Dakar, Senegal, West Africa, this last March, 1999. You have clearly demonstrated that you are eminently qualified as a Kumu- an Elder, a teacher, and a foundation built and established with the ancestral strength of compassion. I appreciate, respect, and support your good work and recommend its essence to those of interest.

May the spirit of the land and all its relations, with the ancestral tribal mind of the Oneida, create a sanctuary fully imbued with aloha. With the permission of the ancestors I leave you, Doctor Colorado, in the love and in the light of the ancestors, The Source of Life; rejoicing in the power and the peace braided with the cords of patience, revealing the tapestry of aloha.

Respectfully,

Hale Makua

Hono Ele Makua

Ancestors, Indigenous Mind, Indigenous Science

Remembering Who We Are: Recovering Indigenous Mind (PDF)

Traditional Greeting

It’s good to be here. My name is Apela Colorado; I will open this talk in a traditional Native way with a chant — a prayer. Foster Ampong, a Ka ko’o, or helper, is going to do that for us.

(Hawaiian chant, “E ho ‘i Mai,” a request to enter and to merge with the sacred wisdom.)

Can you feel that good, strong feeling in the room? It seems like Foster’s been doing this all his life, right? In reality, Foster just came back to his culture in January. I’m acknowledging this because the most powerful thing I can share with you is the belief in ourselves as native people and the proof that anything is possible when we’re in our indigenous minds. We can remember our power. We have an hour and a half to spend together and when I’m done with my presentation, I will ask Choctaw Elder, Pokni, Mary Jones, who has worked with me, taught me,and helped me for so many years, to listen, to reflect, and to close off our session prayerfully. We’ll also have a question-and-answer time at the conclusion.

I was excited to hear about Coumba Lamba; in fact, I’ve waited for more than 20 years for this day to happen. In the 1970s, I was doing my doctoral research on native alcoholism. I believed, and was trying to prove, that the answer to healing Native American addiction, which is the leading cause of death, was the return of true culture and spirituality. At the time it was a very radical claim to make. But I faced a difficult personal reality, one that ultimately brought me to this gathering. I wanted to find out why almost everybody in my family that I loved was either actively alcoholic or had died of addiction, and I didn’t want it to happen to me or to my children. So I started researching everything I could get my hands on. I read every study I could find, not easy in the pre-internet age, and besides I was living in a remote Native community without library or bookstore. After reading more than 250 scientific studies of Native alcoholism, I found out there were 247 differing opinions on what caused Native addiction. It seemed more like personal opinions than rigorous research. My sense of this was heightened by the fact that all of the research was conducted by non-Natives. None of the millions of dollars for the studies ever went to Native people, and certainly, none of it went to treatment for our suffering. The context of cultural control and domination evident in the research process drove home the point that addiction among American Indians had to do with being an invaded, oppressed people. Before contact we didn’t have addiction, after contact we did have addiction. Not hard to figure out, but none of the studies addressed it.

When I began my doctoral dissertation research, experts were telling us, “It’s your biology. You

lack the proper genes to metabolize alcohol – you are weaker, that’s why you become addicted.”

The subtext being that drinking alcohol is normal (at the time the Harvard University had

received a multi-million dollar grant, the largest ever to look at the genetic causes of alcoholism.

The donor was Seagram’s whiskey company.) I wanted to find evidence to support the view that

Native addictions resulted from invasion and expropriation – loss of culture, spirituality and life.

I succeeded, but what happened to me in the search, and how it happened, opened up the mystery

of the ”Great Knowledge.”1

REMEMBER, THE PROCESS OF INDIGENOUS SCIENCE BEGINS

I grew up in Wisconsin, and the one cultural person left in my family was my grandfather, who

chose me from his grandchildren and taught me Native values and ways. I wasn’t aware that was

what he was doing. I just knew that I loved him and wanted to be with him. Out of all of his

grandchildren, somehow, I was the only one that was born with a cultural leaning, with that kind

of calling and role in life. He saw it.

My grandfather died when I was just a young teenager, but before he died he relapsed and went

back to drinking. So, I actually lost him much earlier in a terrible way. The one person, in our

huge extended family, I could connect with emotionally was taken from me by alcohol. And then

I was alone. But because of that, I became totally committed to doing something about addiction.

But my grandfather was cultural and knew he should pass on what he knew of the Great

Knowledge. Just before he died, he made my grandma drive him three hours through a

dangerous snowstorm – to come talk with me. I was about twelve years old and really angry with

him for drinking. I did not want to be with him and he knew it. He sat in the easy chair, looked

hard at me (this made me madder) and leaned forward on his cane, and began to speak. What he

said scared the wits out of me. He described my life, naming things he could not possibly know,

and then laid out my future. He wanted my attention and he got it! Then he said, “Remember the

Pipe, Remember the Pipe, Remember the Pipe,” the Pipe being a central way to American Indian

Great Knowledge.

I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I had never seen an Indian pipe in my life. Until

1978, it was illegal in North America for Indians to practice our spiritual ways. It was made

illegal through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Administrative Codes and Practices. You could get

penalized, be imprisoned, or have food rations withheld for practicing indigenous ceremonies.

The ceremonies went underground and missionaries made certain that we grew to fear our own

ways. They justified this to stop the “reckless giving away of things.” A Blackfoot woman once

said, “the worse thing the white man ever did was to kill the buffalo and put us on welfare. They

only give us enough to live and we can’t share with each other.”

As I matured, I felt such loneliness. I kept looking for my reality, for the unconditional love that

underpins Native culture and that I felt with my grandfather. I recalled that he had wanted me to

go to university. So I did. Even though I was not conscious of it, I kept pursuing advanced

education trying to find him and to realize that love in my life. At age 27, I was accepted into and

entered a doctoral program at an Eastern Ivy League school. The wealth and privilege of the

place was beyond any experience I had had. I wondered why I had been accepted and learned

that the personal statement to my application is what did the trick.

1 Private conversations with Credo Mutwa, Great Sanusi of the Zulu, he refers to the ancient

indigenous wisdom as the Great Knowledge.

I had been afraid to apply, thinking I was not smart enough or good enough. The fear was so

great that I procrastinated until the night before the deadline when I picked up a pen (I didn’t

even type it) and wrote about my grandfather and I, and how he wanted me to go to university.

This was a completely unexpected thing and paradoxical. I was sitting in a busy airport, using

my lap as my desk, but was in a liminal state—a light, energetic, feeling came over me. I felt

alive again, and I had a hunch that I would be accepted. I was.

Getting in the door was one thing. Surviving was another. I didn’t know much about being

American Indian. There were no other Indians and few people of color. My identity and values

were challenged in every way. I did not fit and became more and more angry. This was a Jewish

university filled with brilliantly educated people, who were also intellectually competitive. In

class discussions, I never said a thing. I kept waiting for my chance, but was in a culture that

operated by different ways. People argued, asserted, cut each other off, and never, ever, left a

space open for someone like me to speak.

So, I started to fight. When the professor lectured, up went my hand, the only way to get the

 

Ancestors, Indigenous Mind

Kihawahine (PDF)

Kihawahine

Apela Colorado

The Kihawahine is the oldest Aumakua or spiritual helper in Polynesia. She is the life energy of fresh water. Her movement is symbolized, in tattoo and Kapa designs as a wave line punctuated with a period or dot in each dip of the wave.

Polynesian designs are symbolic rather than representational. They reveal the function or physics of the spiritual energy that the design evokes. The Kihawahine depicts the power of the knowledge of the integration of dualism (conception). She brings the spiritual and earthly realms together through the heart. In Christian tradition, her power is the Hieros Gamos or Mystical Union.

Her Kinolau or animal form is the lizard or Mo’o. Every island has a Mo’o, but only Maui has the Kihawahine. In Moku’ula, a 13 acred pond site situated at the base of the West Maui Mountains, a 36 foot black lizard appeared periodically with the cycles of the Moon. She became manifest through rituals and was last seen in the late 1800s. Thousands witnessed her appearance, including missionaries, sailors, and other Europeans who doubted her existence.

This Mo’o or Lizard took on the name of Kihawahine, or fresh water spirit, because the royal family of monarchical Hawai’i dedicated the spirit of a deceased princess to this Mo’o. From then on, the Lizard and the Princess were one, which is why the image of Ki’i has the form of a beautiful young woman. Moreover, only women can conceive.

Metaphorically, the Kihawahine in the pond is representative of the fetus in the womb, which is another reason that Polynesians revere her. Each vertebrae of the long lizard spine represents a generation. The tail is the ancient ancestors.

The Hawai’ian language also illustrates the significance of the Mo’o. a chat of one’s genealogy is a “mo’olelo”. A favored grandchild is the “Mo’opuna.”

The spiritual and cosmological power that this Ki’i, or image, represents is awesome and fierce. She holds the power of generations or of generating. The great warrior, King Kamehameha, could not conquer the Hawai’ian Islands until he obtained (improperly) the power of the Kihawahine. Using the Kiha, he took the image of her and placed it on his altar with his war God and married a woman from the Lizard Clan. Through this misuse of the sacred feminine, he succeeded in dominating the islands and overpowering the original earth and feminine spirituality. After becoming King over the islands, he went to the most powerful priests of the islands, those from Molokai. He asked them to lift the effects of what he had done with the Kiha. They refused and prophesized that because of his violation his line would die out which it did. the devastation generated by Kamahameha’s actions have had long term effects including the neglect and repression of the ways of the Kiha.

Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the pond site of the Kiha was held in such high regard that common people were not allowed on the small island at the west side of the pond. Dropping any kind of rubbish in the area was such a serious offense that one might pay with one’s life. After the European and American colonization of the islands, the last Kamehameha retreated from the capitol at Honolulu to the small island in the pond to renew. But as prophesized, it was the end of the dynasty. Yielding to political pressures, he returned to the city of Honolulu. The pond and Kiha were forgotten. About a hundred years ago, the sugar cane plantations covered the island and pond wiping out all traces of her. Lahaina, once referred to as the Venice of Hawai’i, became semi arid.

Today, facing global catastrophe, people are seeking ways to connect with and heal the deep wounds of patriarchy and geocide. Here on Maui we are remembering the beautiful, wonderful Kihawahine. We are working to restore the pond. At Pakala, our home and a Goddess Conference Ceremonial Site, Apela’s husband, Keola Sequeira, Kahuna Kalai Ki’i, or master wood carver and spiritual practitioner, has recreated the image of the Kihawahine, which has been held in the Berlin Museum since the late 1800s, for local ceremonial purposes. The Maui Goddess Conference is an historic event, the first of its kind to shed light upon and to rekindle the reverence for the Goddess Kihawahine.