Our Indigenous Ancestors

John Trudell: “[B]ecause we … come from where we come from, every one of us is the descendant of a tribe. Every person in this room is a descendant of a tribe at some point in our ancestral evolution. Common, collective, genetic memory that’s in there, you know, that’s encoded, like I say, in the DNA. And for every individual, encoded in our individual DNA, alright?, is the experience of our lineage from the very beginning. Whose whole perceptional reality was what I was just saying: all things have being, we’re made up of the Earth – all my relations, pray to spirits. See, and they didn’t pray to man or human form. The closest they came to it was they prayed to spirits that were called ancestors. Alright? And because they were praying to those ancestors for help and guidance, they understood that we were borrowing today from the past and the future. We’re borrowing it from both places…. they knew that to keep the balance was the purpose…. The reason for being was to keep the balance. So this was … what I will call a spiritual perception of reality. And so because of the spiritual perception of reality they understood that life was about responsibility. It wasn’t about the abstraction of freedom – it was about responsibility…. So the spiritual perception of reality was based upon that: we were the Children of the Earth, the Earth was our Mother. The Sun and the Sky – these were our fathers. Alright … and our reality worked for us.” What It Means To Be A Human Being (2001)