I come to this place, as if in a boat drifting, between the unknown lands of both the future and of the past, adrift in the present with the knowledge, that the old ways are ever
so relevant to the present. The title ‘… back to that place with no name…’ is written like it was in the middle of a story ...
.... back to that place with no name ….
INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING
... because that’s where my story begins. It begins in the middle, from a disconnected past and the unknown future, searching from the inward journeys inspired from the insides of trees. I reach for the Indigenous teachings, tell my story in poems and prose, like the poetic way in which the tree grows and like our Ancestors have done from when time began. It is a contextual search through time, for that place of knowing self. The connection of past, present and future within the four realms of self: Within a blood context of finding my Indigenous root to family, it is rife with a past of unknowns. Within the Earth’s context it sees me finding my Spiritual connection within my work connected to Mother Earth’s work and is where I drift in the present. And through my various cultures, I connect my heart to meaning taking me into the future of unknown experiences, on this journey back to the beginning, I Return to know my blood, my roots, my voice from within connected to my heart, my spirit, my ancestors and our Mother, I Create. So with Poems and Trees I tell my story....
"...As salmon do
and redder as they go
from their beginnings, spawn.And as geese fly to their return
honking in a loud 'V'ictory
following the last wing
toward the tomorrow sun.They know their view of the future
keeps an eye on the last,
that the tide of today
is wrapped in the wake
of the past.The journey of backward
becomes the forward
armed with the child
and knowledge
of early times...."
"Pain acknowledges the bereft tone in which we were, are. Sounds become slivers into our alone, picking and needling us from our abandon awash in the away. We languish in its wind, for its current leaves us nowhere, and altogether everywhere, on particles of a conscious sleep." Excerpt from "Reflections of 1497" - 1997 Series "Spoken Trees"
In 1994, my Native Ancestry came to me, via an Uncle I didn’t know I had, the brother that changed my mother from ‘only child’ to the youngest, came from British Columbia, had been adopted at the age of two in Manitoba. He came carrying, that place with no name: My Great Grandmother’s meaningful names that had been replaced with palatable Christian names, punctuated with their Tribes as maiden names....,the day the order changed.
Ancestors ~ Family - 2004 series "Relations"
That would be like changing your last name to your local region, like East York or Clarkson, in a herding blanketed kind of way.. The ripple effect to this would be profound and is experienced for generations as many would be at a loss to the connection of past to present and understanding of where we come from and who we are made up of, that circle that hoop has been broken. Women also lost their respectful status; once respected as Seers and Sayers, the Life Givers, women/Mothers/Grandmothers along the same spheres as Mother Earth and
Grandmother Moon who controls the tides, were relegated to little more then servents /slaves/ breeders.
They were at once demonized, sexualized, silenced and their name placement lost from maternal to paternal. With names and culture taken away, the disconnect has taken place and when someone changes another’s identity, the sacred hoop of their life is broken, stories lost, descendents unable to connect with ancestors and family, a whole race’s value, diminishes with future generations, still lost, trying to find their way back to that place with no name.
My first lesson in Indigenous knowledge, was to look inward, learning about myself, a thirteen year and ongoing journey into the woods of oak, pine, spruce, fir, birch, cedar, and each one accumulating into a yearly series. Each series my own understanding of my life through the many teachings from Nature and Culture through this life force; Trees.
1997 series: Spoken Trees - The Day The Order Changed
“The Cree word mamatowisowin, for example describes the capability of tapping into the ‘life force’ as a means of procreation. This Cree concept describes a capacity to be or do anything, to be creative.” Willie Ermine
Mamatowisowin or Spirit Knowledge:
“Mamatowisowin defines the methodology used in a quest for vision, where the seeker/artist begins to explore his/her own existence subjectively. By placing ones self into a direct stream of consciousness, the seeker/ the knower / the artist will begin to unfold a greater, inherent understanding of self, by utilizing the methodologies of Mamatowisowin.” Willie Ermine
"You have accepted the knowledge out there like the air that you breath
Or like the water that wraps you wet in its slow motion wrestle
Or like the blue sky that is a universe black deeper and farther then you can imagine
And yet you continue to spin and breath and live around the sun
A place where even the stars that you can see are not really there
You have fallen into the knowledge of the Blue " Excerpt from Spiritual Knowledge, 2006 "Messages Between Blue and Red" series.
“This energy manifests itself in all existence because all life is connected, and all of life is primarily connected with and accessed through the life force.” p104 Willie Ermine
“For the Cree, the phenomenon of mamatowan refers not just to the self but to the being in connection with happenings. It also recognizes that other life forms manifest the creative force in the context of the knower. It is an experience in context, a subjective experience that, for the knower, becomes knowledge in itself. The experience is knowledge.” Willie Ermine
The backward way of my knowing, becomes my
forward truth. I flow with life and let life come to me. Through prayer and intuitiveness, a very Spiritual association happens between my life, and learning the truth from it connecting to the growth of Mother Earth. What I do in my work is actually documented, actually has a Cree name, was and is a traditional Indigenous way of creating. I created the work from some instinctual place inside trusting in the life force in another life form. And while the actual work, is unique in its processes, it is traditional in the ways of Indigenous seeing and knowing from the inside out. By using life and it’s form and the inside of myself in prayer and my subconscious, I create prayer of life itself, for example, this detail of a knot, in "Red Roads Protection", 2006 series "Messages Between Blue and Red" became a prayerful message and it has a Cree name: mamatowan, which means Creator Within connecting to happenings. It speaks to the artist’s subconscious need to go “within” in order to create and that other life forms can manifest the creative force in the context of the artist or the knower. Some who have written about it are Willie Ermine and Douglas Cardinal and Judy Iseke-Barnes. It was a Natural part of my indigenous blood and the Spiritual teachings of my Grandmother, that inspired me to create in this way, not knowing the Cree term "mamatowisowin" or "mamatowan" until just recently, my backward way of knowing becomes my forward truth, I paint from the inside of the trees to find the inside of me, and know more of my self from this subconscious way of inwardness trust and belief. In a time when Indigenous cultures are fighting to stay alive and healthy, it seemed trusting the life force of our Mother Earth and myself was a need indigenous to me and a lot of what has been lost in the old ways, I find relevant in what I do in this work.
"Sacred Way" was the very first of 12 series I began in 1996 through 2007's "Shapeshifting New Skins", the process of learning about myself through the wood grains. As I painted these wood pieces, I was understanding that I contained all the knowledge as a truth within. One of my first pieces I did was called ‘Seek the Self’. This piece spoke to knowing oneself: The painting of a woman who stands in the centre inside the sky and inside the watery grains of pine wood, solid in her own truth taught me to ‘seek the self and be
the wearing’. She was me learning in a “Sacred Way”, that to find that strength within, you must know your whole self including the uncomfortable places, and that someone else’s enforced belief systems was not the cloth I would wear. And still, I was missing the connection I needed to get back to that place with no name.
From the 1997 "Spoken Trees" series Spirits Ingrained in Me
, was a self portrait I did on Oak and describes how my Grandmother taught me from inside my heart. She was the spiritual entity who raised me while my mother and father worked. She taught me to see everything as spirit, that all life even the creeping and crawling deserved life and must never be squished from an outside fear. The truth of their life must come from strength within. She taught this without ever disclosing my ancestry. After marrying my grandfather, who was mixed blood, they ran away from Manitoba, from all who would judge this interracial marriage, and sent for her daughter, my mother, after settling in Toronto. Teaching blood from the inside out is tragic, because it leaves an instinctual hunger for what is felt and understood at the most deepest of levels but has no name. For even though she was not Native herself, she carried this knowledge from her husband into my heart, hiding our Indigenous blood and her first born.
"...Presence became her one day after the days of hiding. Moving on she became the relevant silence. Unwrapping her family who grew her, who hid themselves but grew her distance. She became; the coming and the going, the hidden and the revealed, the place and the destination, the future and the past, the cleaved and the released, the closed and the open, the answer in the promise. Her cry? No Need to Hide. The circle is complete. The blue has opened. Our coming IS our going. Our place is our destination. For our future is covered in our past, and what was hidden now is revealed. What was given, is now being received. For what was confused as complex has fused to one...." Excerpt from 1999 series of the same name: No Need To HIde
In "Lesson's of a Mother" , 1999 "No Need To Hide" series, Mother Earth teaches this truth because we are connected to her, dependant on her and she is always reliable in her cycles and the culture we graft to her. The language, culture, taught by Elders, and the land it’s connected to, is tantamount to this Indigenous Knowledge. That there were many ways to see Mother Earth and her teachings, and each truth was valid for each knower. These truths were subjective and each truth added into the whole, the common denominator or the connector to all was Mother Earth.
This Inside way of seeing, required the respect of one and/or many to listen to each other’s stories and accumulate inner knowledge, like compound interest would be multiplied, type of knowledge. These systems comprised a community of peoples adding into the language, adding into the stories. Each person respecting the inner spaces of each other for ‘there were many paths to the high place’ and there just wasn’t one way of knowing or seeing. And the Native People’s knew that tapping into the Universal Stream of knowledge was a circle that contiguously gave back into the whole and so stories were passed on, but our names were not. They are lost forever.
But after 500 years of enforced indoctrinated objectified knowledge, forcing outside ways onto a race of people, the clash of ways of knowing:
Aboriginal -Subjective Truth and European -Objective Belief System where one looked within and created more, the other from without and blanketed all with one knowledge, a lot of knowledge systems were lost. One respected individuality, the other feared it and it was the latter type of thinking which forced names, clothes, hair, language into one mold, onto a race of people onto all people. The Indigenous ways were incorporeal or inside knowledge systems subjective to the knower while the European ways were objective, where information is from the outside and gathered from books and studies, immovable belief structures based on scripted doctrine that must apply and be blanketed upon all.
“For Engels, Western attitudes and ideas were such that knowledge was being used for dominance and in effect produced a state of ‘false consciousness’. The implication of this ‘false consciousness’ is that the Western world is guided by invalid criteria in its synthesis of total human knowledge. In short, the Western world has capitulated to a dogmatic fixation on power and control at the expense of authentic insights into the nature and origin of knowledge as truth.” Willie Ermine
"Stories change and cycle round again. They grow harder and harsher to retell
Journeys so far they wounded more than knees, Buffalos hunted to starve a nation, rot needlessly into extinction
Battles won and battles lost, Residential schools that cycled the great cost of future families
The painful journey of feet became the telling on the tongue, That a religion can teach precisely what it is not
That will be repeated again and again to the generations that with naught, Sickness wore death around the necksof reserves in beads of assimilation. Trades bartered lives for spotted blankets and bottles
All on the same spirit lands, with the two leggeds and the four, The standing ones and the stone, the water, the swimming, the creeping And the Crawling, all bearing witness to the silent history, Kept silent in schools, in the recessed caverns, in the name of righteousness...." Excerpt from Re-Awakening The Stories from 2005 "Seeing In A Sacred Manner" series.
The life of a tree in grains, carries a language of its own, a tongue of knowledge, carried in memory of growing in droughts and rain, summers of sprouting, years of shade. Its language, could be rolled around in the palm of your hand, planted in the earth and in your lifetime you could lay under its shade, perhaps hundred times your height. Branches spread into the Spirit places and roots are grounded, to hold on when life blows too hard and, it's knowing, how similar the Standing Ones are to the Human ones, with outer bark and ego protecting the core, a language of sacredness as whole and connected is in each one of us. The balance of Spirit seems to be missing or misused on this very physical continent.
" ...Reaching up from the down below and calling out for the Blue Road, are the prayers from within, that the outside shell has to die just a little so the spirit can be more in balance with the mind, the emotions and the passions. When the mind directs the emotions with the truth found in the spirit, the body responds to needs not wants, is part of the whole, not controlling the whole..." Excerpt from "Spirit Needs Sacrifice" from 2004 "Earth Prayers" Series.
The latest series 2006; "Messages Between Blue and Red" is the quest for more Spirituality into our Culture and being cognizant of the other side.
"Shapeshifting New Skins" was the hardest journey to date, finished in 2007, it speaks to Shapeshifting within so we can help the Physical Earth.
"... But the twelfth Moon of December is the one that pulls me,
She’s this Little Spirit Moon that has my right leg, teaching me in a good way
To see and to have good health in body and mind and share it with my alls
She teaches me to have the purest of intentions by walking it tall
She pulls me Westward to grow into that good Red Road and not fall
And Like all the Moons she’s ever turned, surrounding me by her every curve
In Spirit and Bear, Sugar and Sucker, Flower and Strawberry,
Raspberry and Thimbleberry, Corn and Falling Leaves,
Freezing and Little Spirit and the Big Spirit of The Blue Moon,
She’s my Grandmother, She’s all around me, She always has been, In all the seasons in this secret place of Kanaway hitowin in every year without fear.""Grandmother Pulls Me" 2007 series "Shapeshifting New Skins"
Excerpts:
Because a lot has been lost of the Indigenous Cultures, and that Aboriginal Epistemology is not understood in schools and education facilities, I refer to Indigenous Educators to give a framework around this ‘unique’ work.
Cree Elder and Scholar: Willie Ermine at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College
From the Book: First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds Excerpts by Willie Ermine - Cree Elder and Scholar, Edited By Marie Ann Battiste, Jean Barman, UBC Press Vancouver
Judy Iseke-Barnes : Journal of Intercultural Studies
Metis Associate Professor: Dr. Judy Iseke-Barnes at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
Dennis Dutton’s “The Art Instinct – Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution” Bloomsbury Press New York . Berlin. London
Castellano (2000, p.29) provides an excerpt of the Royal commission on Indigenous Peoples Report (1999, pp. 622-623) which describes the experiential nature of knowledge.C ASTELLANO , M.B. (2000) Updating Indigenous traditions of knowledge, in: G.J.S. D EI , B.L.H ALL & D.G. R OSENBERG (Eds) Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts: multiple readingsof our world, pp. 21–36 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press)
“ Aboriginal people were on a valid search for subjective inner knowledge in order to arrive at insights into existence. What Aboriginals found in the exploration of the self became the basis of continued personal development and of Aboriginal epistemology....
“Aboriginal people have the responsibility and the birthright to take and develop an epistemology congruent with holism and the beneficial transformation of total human knowledge. The way to this affirmation is through our own Aboriginal sources.”
Willie Ermine
