God is Red



God is Red fascinated me.  Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2006) was a Yankton Sioux activist.  His great-grandfather was a medicine man.  His grandfather was a chief who became a priest.  His father rose to an executive position in the Episcopal Church.  Deloria graduated from a seminary, but chose not to become a minister, because of his father’s frustrations.  He sought a path that could be of greater benefit to Native American people.

There are three editions of God is Red (1973, 1992, 2003), spanning a turbulent 30 year era — aim for the newest version.  The book provides important views omitted from the glorious saga of Western civilization.  Even the 1973 edition was well ahead of mainstream society in foreseeing ecological catastrophe, the destination of our runaway train.  We’re not a good path.  Why are we on it?  That’s the question that drives this book.  Deloria’s search for understanding is presented from a Native American perspective.

All civilized people are descendants of tribal ancestors.  Unique religions emerged in each tribal homeland, fine-tuned to its landscape, ecology, and climate.  Every homeland had sacred places where the community participated in special ceremonies.  All members of the tribe had deep roots in the homeland, and all shared the same worldview.  A tribal person “does not live in a tribe, the tribe lives in him.”

In modern society, neighborhoods are constantly-changing swarms of occupants having highly diverse incomes, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and political views.  People may live side by side for years, yet have nothing in common, and sometimes intense differences.  Many do not know the names or faces of most folks in their neighborhood.  This is not a coherent community sharing a profound sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of their ecosystem.

The Western conception of time is not about the eternal cycles of passing seasons; it is linear — a bloody one-way pilgrimage from the miracle of creation to the tumultuous end of the world, a constantly intensifying cyclone of population, progress, pollution, and bad craziness.  Humans are simultaneously the crown of creation, superior to all other life on the planet, yet each newborn inherently flawed, via the curse of original sin.

Jesus of Nazareth was a radical and intriguing Jewish thinker who lived in occupied Palestine.  He was not fond of the Roman storm troopers, materialism, or greed.  Just live simply and be nice.  At that time, in the Mediterranean basin, and in many surrounding regions, the tribal era was long gone.  It had mutated into a number of civilizations.  Common folks lived under the thumb of elites.  Life was harsh.  Regional bloodbaths were common.

For a while, the members of the Jesus movement were all Jews.  When Jesus died, his followers believed that he was the long anticipated Messiah, and that he “would return almost immediately with an angelic army to judge the world.”  So, they quit working.  Before long, they went bankrupt.  They had no doubt that he would return during their lifetime.  They were wrong.  He didn’t. 

A bit later, they opened the door to allowing gentiles into the Jesus movement.  From this point forward, it was no longer a community having a common ethnic identity.  This was the first step on the path to becoming a multinational religion, the one and only absolute truth for everyone, in every place, for all eternity.

Over time, the Jesus movement expanded into other regions.  In Rome, many joined the parade.  Growing numbers led to the birth of a religious institution — the Roman Catholic Church.  By and by, the Roman Empire was rotting away from decadence and delirium, softening it up for a spectacular blind date with vicious mobs of bloodthirsty barbarians.  The collapse of the Empire created a power vacuum that was taken over by the Church, which proceeded to expand its domain and accumulate enormous wealth and power.

True believers waited for the return of the Messiah for years, then decades, then centuries.  This was getting boring.  One day, a revelation from God arrived — the Messiah could not return until all nations had heard the story of Jesus.  So, believers shifted their preaching and teaching into high gear.  Like the Roman Empire, the Roman Church became devoted to perpetual growth and the accumulation of wealth.  Kings and Popes worked hand in hand to conquer, colonize, and convert distant lands.  The missionaries wanted to save heathen souls, and the states wanted to relieve the converts of their valuable resources, exploit their labor, and collect taxes.

And so, Christendom spread across Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia.  Colonists eventually arrived in America.  Epidemics of Old World diseases rapidly spread, killing maybe ninety percent of the Indians.  The buffalo robe fad exterminated 40 to 60 million bison.  Fur traders nearly eliminated the beavers.  Loggers mowed down vast virgin forests.  The cavalry slaughtered those Indians who resisted surrendering their freedom.

Tribal folks were not amused.  They were confused, perplexed, and pissed.  A missionary would convert them to the one true faith, and a year later the next missionary would inform them that the first one was a demonic fire hose of lies and deceptions.  All the black robes read the same book, but none agreed on what it meant.  WTF?  Especially aggravating was the enormous gulf between the beautiful beliefs they taught, and the relentless brutality of the colonial society, and its frantic gang rape of their ecosystem.  Meanwhile, back in Europe, instead of brotherly love, Christian nations endlessly waged war on one another.

When the Church shifted into globalization mode, and the Reformation shattered it into numerous denominations, the sweet teachings of Jesus largely got thrown under the bus.  Many express deep concern for zygotes embedded in uterine walls, but display far less compassion for the infants that eventually squirt out of the womb.  When American economic interests are threatened, reverence for human life stops, and the Marines are sent to mow down the enemy of the month, as well as innocent bystanders.

Deloria maintained a sense of humor.  He had a lot of fun with his chapter on popular Christianity — the theme parks, Jesus freaks, pussy grabbing faith healers, shameless money-hustling televangelists, and mega-church prosperity cults.  “The evangelical and fundamentalist wing of Christianity dwells on the figure of Jesus, and on the theology of old time religion.  Yet their knowledge about Jesus, his times, and the early church is nearly nil.”  Sunday school taught me nothing about the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Thirty Years War.

Today we’re flying along on a joyride to Judgment Day, which is mere months or days away, maybe.  In polite conversation, it remains rude to contemplate our responsibility for leaving behind a somewhat habitable planet for the kiddies.  “It takes incredible willpower to pretend that history is the unfolding of a divine plan for humanity.  In less than two and a half centuries, American whites have virtually destroyed a whole continent.” 

Deloria concludes, “Who will find peace with the lands?  The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.  Who will listen to the trees, the animals and the birds, the voices of the places of the land?  As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors.  That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.”

Deloria, Vine, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 3d ed, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 2003.

YouTube offers a number of Deloria videos.

Lapps and Labyrinths



Once upon a time, all humans in Europe were nomadic hunter-gatherers.  Today, we know little about those prehistoric wild folks.  Over the centuries, farming, animal husbandry, ceramics, textiles, and other technologies from the Middle East slithered westward into Europe.  Eventually, almost all of the wild folks were either absorbed into the turbulent new culture or eliminated by it.

In Europe, the far north was one of the last regions to be colonized.  Around 15,000 years ago, it was buried under a sheet of ice that was a kilometer thick.  Then, the climate warmed up, and by 8,000 years ago, the northern interior of Sweden was no longer hidden under an ancient glacier.

Humans began moving into some parts of Scandinavia about 10,000 years ago, along with the reindeer, moose, wolves, bears, seals, and other pioneers.  The descendants of these early humans are known as Saami or Lapps (“Lapps” is insulting to some).  For thousands of years, they were largely disconnected from European civilization.  Some forest dwelling Saami remained hunter-gatherers until the end of the nineteenth century.

There are now maybe 70,000 Saami.  They call their ancient homeland Sápmi.  Four modern nations claim sections of it: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  In the past, Saami groups spoke nine different languages.  These belong to the Uralic family of languages, which emerged west of the Ural Mountains of Russia.  Uralic languages include Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and Samoyed.  The Saami in western Sápmi look Scandinavian; in eastern Sápmi they look more like Inuit.  Their language includes 400 words for describing reindeer.

In the 1980s, archaeologist Noel Broadbent was engaged in routine research on Iron Age seal hunting in Sweden and Finland, along the northern coastlines of the Gulf of Bothnia.  One day, in the Västerbotten region of eastern Sweden, he discovered evidence of a ritual bear burial, which made no sense whatsoever, because it spit in the face of sacred myths — and myths often trump reality.

Bear burials could only be Saami business.  The myths said that Swedes were the original settlers of Sweden, and the scruffy Saami were exotic aliens that wandered in from elsewhere a few hundred years ago.  The myths said that Saami were reindeer herders who lived in the interior, and Swedes were the ones who settled the coast and began seal hunting settlements.  On, the coast, Broadbent had stumbled across an inconvenient truth, and a significant one.  The bear burial forced a sharp turn in his research.  He rolled up his sleeves and became a myth buster.

Broadbent reported his Saami findings in Lapps and Labyrinths.  It does an excellent job of documenting his archaeological research in Västerbotten — lots of charts, graphs, tables, illustrations, maps, and detailed technical information.  It’s not written for general readers, it’s not a pleasure to read, but it is readable, and it delivers many fascinating insights on these wild folks of prehistoric Europe.

The Saami were fortunate to inhabit a region that was far from ideal for farming, or herding cattle, sheep, and goats.  Six month winters are not easy for tropical primates.  Unfortunately, Germanic peoples, who farmed and herded, were being driven by population pressure to expand northward — folks who are now called Swedes and Norwegians.

What followed was similar to the later conflicts that arose between European settlers and Native Americans — their language, music, and spirituality was banned.  Kids were sent away to boarding schools.  Much of their land was privatized by settlers.  This put the squeeze on traditional hunting, so many shifted to reindeer herding.  The Saami were forced to perform hard labor in silver mines and construction projects.  The formerly wild and free became taxpayers, required to give the king furs, skins, feathers, fish, and so on — this put additional stress on wildlife.

The Saami were nomadic.  In the warm months, reindeer grazed in the mountains; in winter, they moved to the forest and dined on lichen.  At the coast, the Saami hunted seals on the late winter ice.  In the autumn, when the skins, blubber, and meat were at peak quality, they returned to catch seals in nets.  Three months were devoted to seal hunting.  Along the shore, Broadbent’s research uncovered thousands of bones from seals, reindeer, hares, ducks, moose, and bears.  Ninety-eight percent of the bones were from seals.

On the coast, they caught salmon, whitefish, cod, herring, and shellfish.  In rivers and lakes they caught salmon, perch, whitefish, pike, burbot, trout, and char.  When the catch diminished, they simply moved to another lake.  When game got scarce, they packed up their lavvo (teepee) and moved on.  In summer, they feasted on raspberries, bilberries, blueberries, crowberries and bearberries.

The Swedes were sedentary, betting their lives that luck and cleverness would allow them to survive in one permanent location in the wilderness.  It was a harsh life.  Farming was small scale, and very risky, in a land where late spring frosts, and early autumn frosts could nuke their crops overnight — and often did.  Too much rain could rot their crop.

The wild Saami didn’t soil their britches when a wolf killed a reindeer, because they didn’t own the reindeer, and wolves needed to eat.  What could possibly be more normal, natural, and healthy?  Duh!  Saami wisdom understood that everything was spiritually alive: humans, animals, trees, winds, streams, blizzards, northern lights, and so on.  Their entire reality was magnificently sacred.  They were always careful to remain quiet and respectful, because shouting and loud disturbances profaned the holiness of their home.

Saami people had great respect for bears, highly intelligent magical beings who slept all winter without eating, and then returned to life when warm breezes blew.  Every spring a bear was killed and eaten in a holy ceremony, and then its bones were lovingly buried.  It was a celebration of rebirth, renewal, and profound admiration for the bear people.

Swedish settlers depended primarily on their cattle, goats, and sheep.  These provided milk, meat, hides, wool, and fertilizer.  For six months animals could graze outdoors, and for six months it snowed and snowed.  In places, it could get up to 3 meters (10 ft.) deep.  Animals were jammed together in shelters, eating stored hay.  In warm months, pastures sometimes got baked by droughts, eliminating the forage.  Sometimes rain preceded haymaking, damp hay rotted in the barns, and animals sickened and died.  In remote settlements, dry hay could not be hauled in from elsewhere.  Sometimes epidemics of animal diseases wiped out the herds in a region.

Sometimes predators dropped by to have lunch with the herd, which always resulted in settlers violently soiling their britches, jumping up and down, and shouting impolite comments.  Settlers were law abiding royal subjects, and they were obligated to regularly make generous contributions to the friendly bailiffs who collected taxes for the king.  The animals were private property, living wealth, and status symbols.  The more you owned, the better.

The primitive devil-worshipping Saami hung out with the reindeer people, herbivores who were perfectly adapted to the chilly climate of Sápmi, needed no barns, ate lichen all winter, and took care of themselves.  The Saami did not suffer from tax collectors and tithe collectors.  They were free.  They inhabited their Sápmi homeland for thousands of years without causing permanent injuries to the ecosystem.

Beginning in A.D. 829, a mob of radicalized black robed terrorists began to stomp in from down under, and build churches on holy sites.  The Saami were perfectly happy with their own spiritual beliefs, so converting the small population took 300 years.  They learned to act like faithful believers, whilst privately preserving their ancient culture.

A bit later, the Saami were shocked to discover that they had mistakenly converted to a fake religion, according to the new Lutheran black robes, who hated both Catholics and the Saami.  In the 1600s, the Lutherans and the state began a brutal crusade of compulsory conversion.  Resisters were beaten, some were killed, especially shamans.  Sacred drums were confiscated, smashed, and burned.

Swedes were encouraged to move into the “vacant” wilderness and settle.  Population grew.  Women lost status.  Saami were driven away from the coast and other prime locations.  By and by, Sápmi country was savagely molested by money hungry road builders, miners, loggers, trappers, sealers, and fishers.

Oh, before I go, here’s an interesting fact.  By 8,000 years ago, the glaciers had melted away, raising the sea level.  At the same time, because there was no longer immense weight on the land, the land rose in elevation (called isostatic uplift).  “Stone Age sites in northern Sweden are found on old beaches that have been uplifted 120 m or more (393 feet).”  The Bronze Age coastline is now 20.5 km (12.7 miles) inland from today’s coastline.  Land uplift has greatly altered the waterways, lakes, and fjords over time.  Many old water networks and harbors dried up.

Finally, what are labyrinths?  Broadbent discovered some of these along the coast.  They were spiraling stone constructions made up of single lines of stones forming walkways toward a center point.  More than 300 have been found in Sweden.  Labyrinths were built by Christian settlers, mostly in the sixteenth century.  They were symbols of protection, indicating that the land was no longer corrupted by dangerous heathen devil worshippers.  Labyrinths are found in many regions of Europe.  Ironically, they were originally invented by pagans.

Broadbent, Noel, Lapps and Labyrinths: Saami Prehistory, Colonization, and Cultural Resilience, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Washington, D.C., 2010.

A print version of Lapps and Labyrinths can be purchased from Amazon.  A free PDF version of the entire book can be downloaded free [HERE].

The Sami is an easy to read, colorfully illustrated, 86-page PDF produced by the Sami Parliament in Sweden.  It contains info on the modern Sami, their history, traditional spirituality, and struggles as an oppressed minority.

Other peepholes into Sápmi:

The Sámi People: Pastoralism vs. Agriculture

Sámi Traditional Worldview

Early Sámi History

Sámi Learning and Education

The Significance of the Bear Ritual

Shamanic Roles and Practices

A gorgeous 4-minute video of Saami, reindeer, and their land is [HERE]

A History of the Swedish People



Vilhelm Moberg was born in 1898, in a remote village where remnants of the peasant way of life persisted.  He wrote A History of the Swedish People, which spanned two volumes: (1) before the Renaissance, and (2) after.  Moberg’s writing has been translated into 20 languages, and Swedes have bought six million copies of his books.  Most histories focus on the big shots, the decision makers, the conquerors, the villains.  His work focuses on the nameless people that historians disregard: the common folks, the salt of the Earth.  I like that.

In this spirit, chapter one is a discussion of slavery, which existed for several thousand years.  Bondsmen (slaves) have been invisible in Swedish history, because textbooks are obligated to focus on the patriotic glories, and step around the embarrassing dreck.  Bondsmen could be bought, sold, given way, or killed.  Throughout his life, Moberg was devoted to the notion of freedom.  He estimated that in the eleventh century, twenty percent of the population was bondsmen.  The rest of the book is devoted to the commoners who were freeborn, the rugged peasantry who worked hard to survive in the forests of Sweden, and were the majority of the population.

In most other European nations, peasants were not free.  They suffered for centuries under the heavy fist of feudalism.  They inhabited lands crisscrossed with roads, which enabled the nobility to snatch the fruits of their toil and keep them under control.  The main exceptions were Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, where the peasants escaped serfdom.  The Swiss, surrounded by powerful enemies, were protected by the Alps.  The Norse and Swedes were protected by their vast rugged forests.  As long as the forests survived and remained roadless, the people were much safer.

In several European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root.  Romans built many roads for the expansion and management of their empire.  Later, those same roads made it easier for scruffy outsiders to rubbish their empire and loot their booty.  In Roman times, the wild German tribes were also fiercely warlike, but their goal was not conquest and expansion.  Their goal was to keep outsiders out, homeland security.  Caesar noted, “It is the greatest pride of the Germanic tribes to surround themselves with broad desolate frontier regions.”  Frontier forests were buffer zones that were kept untilled and uninhabited.

In the dense roadless forests of Sweden, invaders soon became perfectly lost.  It was terrifying.  Behind any bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The forest people knew every rock, hill, and cranny in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When attack was unwise, they vanished and waited patiently for fresh opportunities.

Over the centuries, Swedes adapted well to forest life.  In addition to fishing, foraging, and hunting, they farmed on a small scale.  Livestock was their primary resource, providing them with meat, milk, butter, cheese, hides, and wool.  The forest was common land owned by no one.  A Swedish proverb declares, “The forest grows as well for the poor as for the rich.”  It was the poor man’s garden.  Forest dwellers often lived in isolation, with few neighbors to rely on.

Moberg devoted an entire chapter to his love for the forest wonderland in which he grew up.  In his strict rural Lutheran village, good and bad were sharply defined.  Where others could see him, little Vilhelm had to behave properly, to avoid criticism.  In the forest, he was free.  He could hide where no one would see him, and behave any way he liked.  He was happier as a child in the forest than in any other place in his life.

In pagan times there were festivals in which stallions, bulls, billy-goats, cocks, and humans were sacrificed to the gods.  One observer recorded details about the annual ceremony at Uppsala.  Next to the temple was a sacred grove, where the corpses of up to 200 sacrificed men and beasts hung from the trees.  The sacrificial humans included criminals, infirm old men, foreigners, bondsmen, and prisoners.

The Vikings were possessed with an insatiable hunger for the valuables belonging to others.  They enjoyed cruising along coasts and rivers and raiding Christian towns and villages — peaceful settlements with which they had no disputes.  Vikings were extraordinarily cruel and inhuman, and they fought with pure fury.  Vikings ravaged Europe from 800 to 1050.

Sweden’s conversion to Christianity was slow and bloody.  The Asa people (pagans) were open minded, and they worshipped many gods and goddesses.  Deities that brought good harvests, weather, and health were honored, and bummer gods were tossed on the compost pile.  When foreign missionaries suggested worshipping a new one, they were willing to give him a try.  The pagans were open minded, but the missionaries were not.  Naturally, the Swedes were not delighted to be told that all their ancient beliefs were wrong and evil.  Commonly, after the missionaries had moved on to convert others, the newly baptized folks returned to the faith of their ancestors.

It took 300 years to convert the small population of Swedes.  In 1122, Småland was last region to be converted.  The chronicle reads: “King Sigurd set his course for a trading city called Kalmar, which he laid waste, and thereafter ravaged Småland, exacting from the Smålanders a tribute of fifteen hundred beasts; and the Smålanders accepted Christianity.”  This slaughter was called the Kalmar Raid.  Sigurd returned to Norway laden with loot.  In some regions, Swedes continued to secretly practice pagan rituals into the seventeenth century.

Later, Christian Swedes decided to teach the Finns about the Prince of Peace.  King Erik offered the Finns peace on condition they let themselves be baptized and adopt the Christian faith, but they turned down his offer.  So the Finns were massacred.  “After the struggle was over the king walked about the battlefield among the masses of the fallen heathen and was so deeply moved by the sight of their corpses that he wept.”

Moberg had deep appreciation for the 5,000-year era of Swedish peasants, which was approaching extinction by 1900, displaced by the hideous rise of industrialism and urbanization.  Ancient farms and villages were being abandoned, returning to forest.  Growing numbers of weird and spooky human-like beings, known as Consumers, were wandering into peasant country from Stockholm, and other insane asylums.

Rural peasants were the last full-blooded individualists; each one was personally unique, warts and all.  They were highly attuned to the ecosystem that had been their ancestors’ home for centuries, and they had little contact with outsiders, or their peculiar ideas.  The Consumers were rootless tumbleweeds who dressed alike, smelled alike, thought alike, and lived alike — the standardized outputs of a mass culture.

Peasants spent a lot of time with each other, gathered around the hearth fire.  Folks did handiwork — spinning, weaving, carving, and so on.  Elders shared stories and memories.  The daily lives of peasants were spent in intimate contact with the magic, mystery, and beauty of wild nature, which is essential for wellbeing.  Consumers would suffer panic attacks if forced to live in a medieval cottage — no lights, TV, radio, internet, books, running water, toilet.  Here’s Moberg’s punch line: “Instead of the things they lacked, medieval people had others, which we have lost.”  They enjoyed good old fashioned community.

The book goes on to discuss many other topics.  It interested me because my mother’s family has Norwegian roots.  The Norse and Swedes are closely related.  I’ve been reluctant to review this book, because it’s not about ecological sustainability.  But it does discuss subjects that are both interesting, and rarely mentioned.  So, I turned to a number of other sources to look for the missing eco-info.

Like the wild Irish, British, and Germanic tribes, Scandinavians shifted from hunting, fishing, and foraging, moving toward small scale pastoralism and farming in forest clearings.  This encouraged conflicts with wild critters, who were thrilled to feast on the delicious offerings of rye, oats, calves, poultry, sheep, and so on.  Nature became an enemy.  The peasant lads fetched their war paint.

By 1870, wild boars, aurochs (wild cattle), and beavers were extinct in Sweden, and red deer and moose were getting close.  By the mid-1900s, the wolf population was zero.  Later, some beavers (from Canada), boars, and wolves were reintroduced, or wandered in from elsewhere.  To this day, the eternal peasant’s war on wolves continues in Sweden, Norway, and Finland — three of the most “eco-progressive” societies in Christendom.

Oddest of all, in Moberg’s celebration of the common folk of Sweden, he made no mention of the Sami people, the wild hunter-gatherers who have been harshly abused and exploited by the civilized racist settlers for several centuries.  New research is discovering that the Sami people inhabited large portions of Scandinavia long before the Nordic (Germanic) pastoralists arrived.  Sami lived as far south as Hadeland in Norway, not far from Oslo, one of my ancestral homelands.

Genetic data has linked the modern Sami to the first humans who wandered into Scandinavia more than 10,000 years ago.  They have been in Sweden much longer than the Swedes.  The Sami homeland is known as Sápmi, and it spans large areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  Sami have another name, Lapp, which some do not like.

Moberg, Vilhelm, A History of the Swedish People, Pantheon Books, New York, 1973.

To learn more about Sami and reindeer, four nice essays are [HERE]

Lapps and Labyrinths, an excellent 2010 book on the Sami, by archaeologist Noel Broadbent, can be purchased from Amazon ($$$), or downloaded free [HERE]

 

Don’t Sleep

One day, listening to the jungle drums on the info-stream, I heard that a study had concluded that the happiest people in the world were the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) tribe of the Amazon (true).  I heard that some guy then went to visit them, to discover the source of their bliss (false).  I heard that his name was Daniel L. Everett, and the book was Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (true).  My library had the book, and reading it was a rewarding experience (true).

Everett spent much of 30 years among the Pirahã (1977-2006), arriving long before the happiness study was published.  His three children were raised among them, on the banks of the Maici River.  The jungle was full of dangerous things.  All night long, some natives stayed awake chatting.  They rarely slept more than two hours at a time.  Sleepers became a playground for dozens of three-inch cockroaches (annoyances), and were often joined by eight-inch roach-eating tarantulas (beloved allies).

Acquiring food required the natives to “work” 15 to 20 hours each week.  They hunted, fished, foraged, and grew some manioc.  About 70 percent of their diet was fish.  They lived beside a major river that had not yet been emptied by commercial fishermen.  Villagers who visited cities were shocked to observe how much food the civilized folks consumed — three big meals a day!

The Pirahã were remarkably and genuinely happy.  They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything.  Violence was rare, and so were angry outbursts.  They were amazingly tolerant and patient.  They were less pleasant to be around when traders brought them rum, and every man, woman, and child became blind drunk.

The people lived in a world that was spiritually alive, and they often saw and spoke with spirits that Everett was unable to perceive.  Sometimes spirits took the form of jaguars or trees.  Sometimes they spoke through a person in a trance.  Sometimes they provided the people with guidance or warnings.  Sometimes they killed people.  Many folks wore necklaces to protect themselves from evil spirits.

The natives spoke to their children like equals; “baby talk” was unknown.  Parents were not paranoid protectionists — kids were free to burn themselves in the fire, or cut themselves with sharp knives, in the pursuit of higher learning.  There was no spanking, and children were never given orders — nor were adults.  Pirahã teens were not confused, insecure, and depressed.  They naturally conformed to the ways of the community.  They were blessed to live in a stable sustainable society. 

The Pirahã language had no numbers, or words to express quantities.  They had no use for the knowledge of the whites, because their way of life worked just fine without it.  After months of daily classes, none could count to ten, or calculate the sum of one plus one.  Consequently, traders delighted in exploiting them, by underpaying them for jungle products. 

Indigenous folks who lived with the Brazilians and their money economy were known as caboclos.  Life in the culture of materialism infected them with madness.  When prospectors found a section of streambed rich with gold, other caboclos did not hesitate to murder them and swipe the treasure.  All that mattered was winning, by any means necessary.

They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem.  But the Pirahã had a time-proven way of life that worked very well — wild, free, and happy.  They always had everything they needed, and life was more or less grand, hence the smiles and laughter.  Might this have been humankind’s “normal” state in the good old days?

The caboclos were more sullen in nature.  The demands of the money world were highly corrosive to their traditional culture, to the vitality of their ecosystem, and to their mental health.  They were less secure, and had real reasons to worry about tomorrow, because their survival depended on an ever-changing external system that was beyond their control. 

Everett was originally enlisted by the Summer Institute of Language to translate the New Testament into Pirahã.  He was not supposed to preach or baptize.  The SIL had great faith that the sacred words of the scriptures alone were all that was needed to illuminate the wicked souls of the heathens and inspire them to convert to the one true faith.

So, Everett spent much time at his desk, listening to recordings, thinking, taking notes.  He was a linguist, not an anthropologist, and he was on a mission from God.  “I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus…, to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell.” 

Everett’s heroic efforts were vexed by the fact that no other language on Earth bore the slightest resemblance to Pirahã.  Learning it was devilishly difficult.  The villagers only spoke their native tongue, so no translators were available to assist him.  After years of struggle, he finally succeeded, and translated the Gospel of Mark.  He read it to natives, and none saw the light.  It had no effect.  Only one item in the scriptures captured their complete attention: the decapitation of St. John.

Pirahã culture was focused entirely on the present.  Their way of life was the same as it was 1,000 years ago, and would remain the same for the next 1,000 years.  So, there was no reason for history, and fear of the future was silly.  They lived in the here and now, and believed what they could see.  An event was only real if a living person in the community had been an eyewitness to it.  Thus, Everett’s stories about an ancient miracle worker named Jesus were purely meaningless. 

One day, Everett gathered the folks together and delivered a testimonial.  He had once been a hairy hippy, lost and confused, poisoning himself with drugs and booze.  Then, his stepmother committed suicide, he saw the light, accepted Jesus, and his life became better.  When the story was finished, the Pirahã all burst out laughing.  “She killed herself?  Ha ha ha.  How stupid.  Pirahãs don’t kill themselves.” 

His perplexing objective was “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  Missionaries had been trying to convert the Pirahã for nearly 300 years, without saving a single soul.  The villagers insisted that they had no desire to live like Americans, and they begged him to stop talking about Jesus.

By the late ‘80s, after ten years of failed efforts, Everett realized that he had become a closet atheist.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”  

He remained in the closet for 20 years, in constant fear of being discovered.  Finally, he confessed, and his family broke apart.  Today he’s a professor in the US.  He helped to create an official reservation for the Pirahã, so that they will forever be safe from greedy materialists (true?).

Everett, Daniel, L., Don’t Sleep – There are Snakes, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008.