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]

The Biggest Estate on Earth



The British colonization of Australia began in 1788.  Historian Bill Gammage, a white fella, spent ten years studying the writings of early observers, as well as paintings, drawings, and maps from the era.  The landscape in 1788 looked radically different from today.  Much of what is now dense forest or scrub used to be grasslands.  Early eyewitnesses frequently commented that large regions looked like parks.  In those days, all English parks were the private estates of the super-rich.  Oddly, the Aborigines who inhabited the park-like Australian countryside were penniless bare naked Stone Age heathens.  Their wealth was the land.

For unknown reasons, the British immigrants did not immediately discard their clothes, metal tools, livestock, and Bibles, fetch spears, and melt into the wilderness — freedom!  Instead, they attempted to transplant the British way of life onto a continent for which it was unsuitable.  In his book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Gammage focused on the first century of the colony (1788–1888), an era he refers to as “1788” in the text.  He refers to the Aborigines as “people,” and the aliens as “newcomers.”

In a nutshell, he describes the people as being brilliant at surviving in a brutally bipolar drought & deluge climate, and the newcomers as a hapless demolition team.  Gammage’s academic peers, stodgy old gits faithfully clinging to the glorious myths of Empire and white supremacy, did not leap to their feet cheering for his scandalous nonsense.  So, his book is jam-packed with images and lengthy quotations that support his heretical conclusions (1,522 footnotes!).  The endless parade of historic evidence may test the endurance of general readers, but Gammage had to do it in order to avoid being dismissed as a raving nutjob.

A core subject in the book is firestick farming — using fire to deliberately reconfigure ecosystems in order to better satisfy human desires.  Our species originally evolved as grassland hunters that loved dining on large herbivores.  In Australia, the people used a variety of fire strategies for transforming rainforest and scrub into lush grassland.  This greatly expanded habitat for delicious grass loving critters.

The people used both hot fires and cool fires to manage vegetation that was fire intolerant, fire tolerant, fire dependent, or fire promoting.  Different fires were used to promote specific herbs, tubers, bulbs, or grasses.  To prevent new grassland from reverting to woody vegetation, it needed to be burned every two to four years.  Eventually, after decades or centuries of repeated burnings, there would be no more dormant tree seeds that could germinate.  According to Gammage, “Most of Australia was burnt about every 1 to 5 years depending on local conditions and purposes, and on most days people probably burnt somewhere.”

Ideally, in selected locations, patches of dry grassland were burned as rains approached.  Several days after a shower, fresh green highly nutritious grass burst through the ashes, and the wildlife raced in to feast on it.  After a burn, the grass grew waist high, and often head high.  Some sites were deliberately designed to optimize ambush hunting for kangaroos or wallabies.  Without managers or fences, the wild game animals capably raised themselves, and eagerly moved to where the people provided fresh food.  By keeping most fires small, the people chose when and where game would be concentrated.  On outstanding years, when herds got too large, surplus animals were slaughtered, to avoid rocking the ecological boat.  Australia had few large predators that competed with the people, or ate the people.

Gammage saw that the people lived in affluence.  They had learned how to live through 100 year droughts and giant floods.  No region was too harsh for people to inhabit.  Their culture had taboos that set limits on reproduction and hunting.  Hunting was prohibited in breeding grounds for important animals.  Lots of food resources were left untouched most of the time.  Newcomers were astonished to observe the great abundance of wild herbivores, fish, birds, and edible plants.  Abundance was the norm.  “People accepted its price.  They must be mobile, constantly attendant, and have few fixed assets.”

In 1788, the people were also growing crops, including plums, coconuts, figs, berries, macadamia nuts, tubers, bulbs, roots, rhizomes, and shoots.  Yams were grown in paddocks that could cover many square miles.  The people planted grains, including wild millet and rice.  Early newcomers described millet meadows of a thousand acres (405 ha), as far as the eye could see.  The people’s method of farming did not require a permanent sedentary life.  They stored food, but they didn’t remain by their stores to guard them.  Even in harsh times, theft was uncommon.  The people were astonished to see how hard the newcomers worked to grow food.  Whites perceived hard work to be a virtue.

The people made farm and wilderness one.  Also, their way of life intimately married spirituality and ecology.  Gammage provided a fascinating chapter on the spiritual life of the people.  While many different languages were spoken in wild Australia, all places shared the same cosmology, the Dreaming.  Reality was created by their original ancestors in the Dreamtime, and they established the Law, which required the people to care for all of their country.

“The Dreaming has two rules: obey the Law, and leave the world as you found it.”  Thus, fundamental change was outlawed.  Many other societies are possessed with a pathological desire for change, and see it as natural — progress.  Their god word is Growth.  “People prize knowledge as Europeans prize wealth.”

The native kangaroo grass was excellent (“caviar for grazers”).  It was a deep-rooted, drought tolerant perennial that held the soil in place, retained soil moisture, survived fire, and was highly nutritious.  It remained green after four months without rain, a great asset for wildlife in drought times.  The newcomers’ sheep grazed it down to bare clay, killing the grass.

Wetlands were drained to expand pasture.  Livestock compacted the soil, which dried out, and cracked.  Springs, ponds, and creeks evaporated, eliminating the critters that lived in them.  When rains returned, runoff was increased, leading to erosion, landslides, deep gullies, floods, silt chokes, and the spread of salts.  An observer in 1853 commented on the growing soil destruction: “Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with a tussocky grass like a land marsh.”

The unclever solution was to continue overgrazing, and plant exotic grasses from Europe and Africa.  These were shallow-rooted annuals that flourished in winter and spring, wheezed in summer, and died when burnt.  When “the land looks drought-stricken; it is cattle-stricken.”  Before long, the finest native grasses were greatly reduced, and in many places eradicated.

The newcomers wanted to live like rural Brits — permanent homes, built on fenced private property.  They freaked out when the people set fires to maintain the grassland.  Before long, districts began banning controlled burns.  This led to the return of saplings and brush.  So, in just 40 years, the site of a tidy dairy farm could be replaced by dense rainforest.

Without burning, insect numbers exploded.  In 48 hours, a pasture could be nuked by caterpillars or locusts.  Dense clouds of kangaroo flies drove newcomers crazy.  Leaf-eating insects defoliated entire forests.  Without burning, fuels built up, leading to new catastrophes, called bushfires.  Since 1788, there have been many catastrophic bushfires.  The Black Thursday fire hit on February 6, 1851.  It burned 12 million acres (5 million ha), killed a million sheep, thousands of cattle, and countless everything else.

Newcomers generously shared smallpox and other diseases with the people, who proceeded to die in great numbers.  Too late, the people realized that the newcomers intended to stay.  They resisted, but were badly outnumbered.  Newcomers “brought the mind and language of plunderers: profit, property, resource, improve, develop, change.  They had no use for people who wanted the world left as it was.”  They were champions at the dark juju of genocide.

Without people hunting them, the kangaroo population exploded, gobbling up the grass intended for sacred cows and sheep.  Bounties were paid for kangaroo scalps.  “In 1881, New South Wales paid a bounty on 581,753 roo scalps — 1600 a day — and in 1884 on 260,780 scalps in the Tamworth district alone, but roo plagues continued.”

Australia is an especially salty continent.  There are large lakes saltier than the ocean, and numerous saltwater rivers and creeks.  In many regions, topsoil sits on a layer of clay, which keeps water from penetrating into the salt below.  Since 1788, the salt problem has become far worse.  The bigger trees grow, the more water they drink, saltwater rises, killing the trees.  Also, forest clearing increases runoff, and faster moving water cuts deeper into subsurface salt — so do plows and other mutilations.  The salt predicament befuddles the experts, but all agree that salt is an effective cure for agriculture.

One question perplexes me: Was firestick farming genuinely sustainable for the long run?  It significantly altered the ecosystem of a land the size of 48 U.S. states, minus Hawaii and Alaska, and the alterations had to be regularly maintained, century after century.  Nobody is sure when the practice eventually became time-proven and widely adapted.  Obviously, Australia wasn’t interested in being continually forced to dress scantily, like a park.  At the first opportunity, she rushed to return to her preferred wardrobe, primarily forest and scrub.  Could the burning have continued indefinitely, without additional harm?  Should we consider firestick farming to be a form of domestication?

Gammage’s benediction:  “We have a continent to learn.  If we are to survive, let alone feel at home, we must begin to understand our country.  If we succeed, one day we might become Australian.”

Gammage, Bill, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011.

There are several Gammage videos on YouTube.

Kitchi-Gami



In the Ojibway language, Kitchi-Gami means Lake Superior.  Johann Georg Kohl (1808-1878) was a German travel writer, geographer, and ethnologist.  In 1855, he spent six months visiting trading posts and missions in Ojibway country near Kitchi-Gami, mostly at the Apostle Islands off the north coast of Wisconsin, and at the settlements at the base of Keweenaw Bay, in northern Michigan.

Kohl’s book, Kitchi-Gami, was published in 1860.  It presents a different perspective from John Tanner’s 1830 book, The Falcon.  Tanner was a white man, kidnapped as a boy, who spent 30 years among the Ojibway, had a hard life, and described his many struggles.  Kohl was a visitor from outer space who was fascinated by the Ojibway.  He interviewed many, learned a lot about their culture, and discussed numerous subjects not mentioned by Tanner.

Kohl was eager to record as much as possible about the Ojibway, because it looked like Native Americans were rapidly dying off, and would soon be gone.  At the same time, the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were working to preserve remnants of the traditional culture of Germany, because the rustic folks who still remembered bits of it were also dying off.

Both the Ojibway and wild Germans were cultures that inhabited vast ancient forests, sacred places of magic, mystery, hungry wolves, and mystical little people (fairies).  Kohl noted that the folktales of both had similar themes and lessons.  Ojibway birch bark wigwams were of comparable quality to the huts of poor peasants in Lithuania, Ireland, or Polish Jews.  Like Scandinavians, the Ojibway fished at night using torches.  Germany had witches or sorcerers who could cause others harm by curses, charms, or spells.  The Ojibway had Windigos, men or women possessed by evil spirits who were terribly common.

Kohl’s gift to us is a remembrance of the closing days of the wild frontier, when Ojibway country was relatively unmolested, except for its furbearing animals.  The St. Mary’s River was the eastern outlet for Kitchi-Gami.  Bears crossed it during seasonal migrations.  In 1811, the migration lasted all summer, and 6,000 bears were killed, as many as 100 per night.  Before Kohl arrived, the greedy fur mining industry in the region had peaked, sharply declined, and moved westward.

Near the St. Mary’s River was a settlement named Rivière au Désert, because it was a ghastly, hideous eyesore in the wilderness — scruffy patches of oats or barley planted amidst stumps.  “Nature is here, at the outset, a pleasing wild forest garden; but when civilized man breaks into it, his axe and his fire produce a desert of half-carbonized tree stumps and skeletons.”  French Canadians call these patches of cultivation “un désert.”

Kohl was fascinated by the spiritual life of the Ojibway.  In Germany, the black robes commonly taught that the world is a hellish nightmare of demons, wickedness, and abominations.  The Ojibway, on the other hand, loved their sacred land, and cared for it.  Their culture was not fixated on the soul’s path in the afterlife.  They had a vibrant spiritual connection to life in the here and now.

Unfortunately, the here and now was sharply different from the good old days.  Kohl chatted with an old woman whose name meant “dawn.”  He called her Aurora.  The blitzkrieg of civilization had pushed the Sioux out of their forest homeland, and westward onto the prairie.  Tribal warfare intensified.  People no longer felt safe.  Aurora had lost three brothers, and ten other close relatives.  She said that the Ojibway were far weaker since the Long-knives arrived.  They used to be healthier and stronger, able to go ten days without food and not complain.  Their traditional culture was withering.

He was amazed to learn about the Ojibway vision quests, which were part of their rites of passage into adulthood.  Nowhere in Europe did young boys or girls courageously “fast for days on behalf of a higher motive, retire to the most remote forests, defy all the claims of nature, and fix their minds so exclusively on celestial matters, that they fell into convulsions, and attained an increased power of perception, which they did not possess in ordinary life.”  Sometimes it took ten days of fasting to have important dreams.

In Germany, Christian preachers taught their flocks to give away their wealth, and live a life of unconditional love.  Native Americans were perplexed to observe that the teachings of the black robes often had no association with their behaviors.  The aliens seemed to be possessed with a frantic desire to seize and hoard as much wealth as possible.  They were arrogant, domineering, and impressively dishonest — the opposite of loving.

The Ojibway actually practiced what the Christians preached.  “As a universal rule, next to the liar, no one is so despised by the Indians as the narrow-hearted egotist and greedy miser.”  Voyageurs and traders regularly travelled through Indian country with valuable goods and full purses.  There were no police or soldiers in the wilderness, but it was very rare for a trader to be attacked for the sole purpose of robbery.  But the two big fur trading companies “often plundered each other’s posts, and employed the Indians for that purpose.”

Kohl was impressed by the charity of the Ojibway.  “There are no rich men among them.”  An Indian will not hesitate to share his last meal with a hungry stranger.  The principle is “that a man must first share with others and then think of himself.”  He was also impressed by their egalitarian society.  No man, not even a cripple, considered another Indian to be his superior.

Kohl was not a hunter-gatherer in Germany, and he was not raised in an egalitarian society.  He did not understand that hunting abilities varied greatly.  In The Art of Tracking, Louis Liebenberg noted that among the San hunters aged 15 to 38, “70 percent of all the kudu kills were made by only 17 percent of the hunters, while almost half the hunters made no kudu kills at all.”

The “communist” Ojibway annoyed him with their absolute commitment to generosity.  The poor hunter “is forced to give all his spoil away, industry is never rewarded, and the hard-working man toils for the lazy.  A man often has to support others, without complaining.  So, all are fed, and none ever get prosperous.”  The heathens were more Christian than the Christians.

Liebenberg wrote a lot about persistence hunting — running after game until they collapsed from exhaustion (a practice that led to our ancestors becoming bipedal).  Kohl noted that the Ojibway also did this.  Horses were not ideal for hunting in a forest.  Running down elk was easiest in the deep snows of winter, when the hunter travelled on snowshoes.  Sometimes bears were chased down.

One day, when Kohl was in the Apostle Islands, “A warlike maiden suddenly appeared, who boasted of having taken a Sioux scalp, and she was led in triumph from lodge to lodge.  I was told that a supernatural female had appeared to this girl, who was now nineteen, during the period of her great fasts and dreams of life, who prophesied to her that she would become the greatest runner of her tribe, and thus gain the mightiest warrior for husband.”

Women were healers, prophets, and enchanters.  “It may be easily supposed that these squaws, owing to their performing all the work of joiners, carpenters, and masons, have corned and blistered hands. In fact, their hands are much harder to the touch than those of the men; and, indeed, their entire muscular system is far more developed, and they are proportionately stronger in the arm, for the men do not do much to bring out the muscle.”

Raised in rigidly strict Germany, Kohl was amazed by how loving Ojibway parents were.  “Indians have an ape-like affection for their children.  Even fathers are very kind to their sons, and never treat them with severity.”  Europeans often exposed (abandoned) unwanted children, but the Ojibway never did.  But when the elderly could no longer keep up with the band, they were left behind.

In Kitchi-Gami country, there were numerous locations named Lac du Flambeau (Torch Lake).  In summer, when vast clouds of mosquitoes made life miserable, the deer waded into lakes and ponds, just keeping their heads above water.  Hunters in canoes quietly moved toward them from downwind, with birch bark torches burning.  The deer calmly stared at the light, and were easily killed.

So, dearest reader, there’s a sampler.  Kohl also described their wigwams, canoes, diet, food preservation, sugar making, fishing, clothing, revenge killing, warfare, spells and magic, medicine, vision quests, dreams, ceremonies, stories, reverence for copper, symbolic drawings on birch bark paper, and on and on.

Kohl, Johann Georg, Kitchi-Gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway, 1860, Reprint, Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 1985.

NOTE: Early editions of this book refer to the Ojibway as Ojibbeway.  These people are also known as the Chippewa and Anishinabe, in a variety of spellings.

Northern Antiquities



Paul Henri Mallet (1730-1807) was a Swiss historian who had a fondness for the Teutonic (Germanic and Scandinavian) tribes of northern Europe.  Their strength, ferocity, and devotion to total liberty eventually enabled them to reduce the Roman Empire into a bloody blotch of road kill.  Mallet had no fondness whatsoever for the corpulent, decadent, oppressive Romans <spit!> and their legions of slaves.  The Teutonic tribes enjoyed a life of magnificent freedom.  Listen:

“They were free because they inhabited an uncultivated country, rude forests and mountains; and liberty is the sole treasure of an indigent people; …and he who possesses little defends it easily.  They were free because they were ignorant of those pleasures, often so dearly bought, which render the protection of a powerful master necessary.  They were free because hunters and shepherds, who wander about in woods through inclination or necessity, are not so easily oppressed as the timorous inhabitants of enclosed towns… and because a wandering people, if deprived of their liberty in one place, easily find it in another, as well as their sustenance.  Lastly, they were free because, knowing not the use of money, there could not be employed against them that instrument of slavery and corruption, which enables the ambitious to collect and distribute at will the signs of riches.”

The second great achievement of the Teutonic tribes, according to Mallet, was eventually abandoning their demonic indigenous spirituality and converting to the one, and only, non-demonic religion, that was dedicated to the worship of a volatile Middle Eastern sky deity.  In Northern Antiquities, Mallet tried to sum up what was known about these tribes prior to conversion.  It provided a window between the early Roman observers, Julius Caesar (51 B.C.) and Caius Cornelius Tacitus (A.D. 98), and the later Christian historians, like Adam of Bremen (1076), Saxo Grammaticus (born about 1150), and Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241).  He also cited a number of less famous sources, now obscure, which help make his book unique, but not flawless.

Twenty centuries ago, Tacitus described the wholesome, old fashioned animism of the German tribes.  “They conceive it unworthy of the grandeur of celestial beings to confine their deities within walls, or to represent them under a human similitude: woods and groves are their temples; and they affix names of divinity to that secret power, which they behold with the eye of adoration alone.”  In the pagan era, northern Europe was still largely covered with a vast primordial forest.  If you wanted to travel, you used a boat.

Unlike modern multinational religions, in Teutonic spirituality, female deities played prominent roles, and the living natural world was sacred.  Odin’s companions were ravens and wolves.  Mallet wrote, “The earth, the water, the fire, the air, the sun, moon, and stars had each their respective divinity.  The trees, forests, rivers, mountains, rocks, winds, thunder and tempests had the same; and merited on that score a religious worship, which, at first, could not be directed to the visible object, but to the intelligence with which it was animated.”

A thousand years later, near the end of the pagan era, their deities had become humanized — wise, crazy, loving, gullible, brutal, lusty, fickle, and so on.  The pantheon of deities was patriarchal, headed by Odin, the All Father.  By now, the Indo-European influences were unmistakable.  Indo-Europeans were a culture from eastern lands that spread across the west, leaving a pattern of closely related patriarchal pantheons.  They spread from Greece (Zeus), to Rome (Jupiter), Germany (Wotan), and Scandinavia (Odin).  Half of humankind today speaks Indo-European languages, including almost all modern European languages.

Tuesday is Tyr’s day, honoring the war god.  Wednesday is Odin’s day (Wotan’s day), dedicated to the shaman, poet, magician, singer, and chief war god.  His wife Frigga was Mother Earth; the Saxons called her Ostara (Easter).  Thursday is Thor’s day, for the red haired, skull crushing thunder god.  Friday is the day of Freyja, the goddess of love.  The winter solstice was the shortest day of the year, Mother Night.  This was the time of the Jul feast (Yule), a celebration of Frey, the sun, with hope that the coming year would be bountiful.  Today Yule time has become a surreal marketing holiday.

In Denmark, every nine years, a ceremony was held in January.  “The Danes flock together in crowds, and offer to their gods ninety-nine men, as many horses, dogs, and cocks, with the certain hope of appeasing the gods by these victims.”  A similar ceremony was held in Uppsala, Sweden.  After the sacrificial humans and animals were killed, and their blood drained, their bodies were hung from trees in a nearby sacred grove dedicated to Odin.

From the perspective of ecological sustainability, the humanization of deities activates flashing red warning lights – it is not a characteristic of sustainable cultures.  Human supremacy is a standard symptom of self-destructive societies (see Jensen and Livingston).  Notions of superiority were also inspired by the domestication of plants and animals, which radically reconfigured ecosystems solely for the benefit of humans (see Scott and Diamond).  Finally, the northern tribes waged war with iron weapons and, as every school child knows, metal-making consumes nonrenewable resources, a habit that often leads to addiction and overdose.

In what is now France, the Gauls were farmers living in permanent villages and towns.  They were heavily dependent on domesticated plants.  To the east, across the Rhine, were the Germanic tribes, who were primarily hunters and nomadic herders, raising domesticated cattle and sheep in a wilderness of forests and wetlands.  When threats approached, they packed up and moved.  Their livestock was self-propelled, and capable of feeding themselves.  The Gauls were helpless sitting ducks who could not move their stuff away from danger.  Their granaries were not mobile, and their towns were quite flammable.

Throughout the centuries nomads have enjoyed being parasites on hard working farmers.  The Berber proverb is: “Raiding is our agriculture.”  Tacitus said this about the Germans: “They will much easier be persuaded to attack and reap wounds from an enemy, than to till the ground and wait the produce.  They consider it as an indication of effeminacy and want of courage to gain by the sweat of the brow, what they may acquire at the price of their blood.”

Mallet added the master key to understanding all human history — “The weak had no right to what they could not defend.”  Today, liberals piss and moan about the horrors of capitalism, but capitalists are merely recycling the ancient tactics of nomadic herders, like the Mongols and Huns.  Consumers are their weak and vulnerable prey.

Thus, the Teutonic tribes were warriors, and war was their source of honor, riches, and safety.  It was essential that warriors die a violent death, with their arms in their hands, ideally laughing with their final breath.  Folks who died of disease or old age were sent to a low class afterlife in Niflheim.  Courageous fighters were sent to the premier afterlife in Valhalla, where they would spend eternity in bloody battle.  Every day, they would delight in cutting each other to pieces, and then magically recover, mount their horses, and ride back to the hall of Odin for a night of feasting and oblivion drinking.  Yippee!

Dying in bed was totally shameful.  Iceland and Sweden had ancestral cliffs (ättestup), where the sick and aged plunged to a violent death, to end their lives honorably.  Those too weak to jump were sent to Valhalla by a caring friend smashing their skull with an ancestral club (ätteklubbor).  Stafva Hall in Sweden had annual festivals, with singing and dancing, after which the wobbly geezers, beyond their expiration dates, leaped into the lake far below.

In the Teutonic tribes, women were considered to be equals and companions.  Society could not survive without their hard work.  Germans admitted them to their councils, and consulted with them on the business of the state.  In the north, it was common to meet women who delivered oracular information, cured the worst maladies, assumed whatever shape they wished, raised storms, chained the winds, travelled through the air, and performed every function of the fairy art.  There were ten prophetesses for each prophet.

The book concludes with a happy ending.  Once the freedom loving Teutonic people had finished rubbishing Rome, liberty was restored to Europe, and the victors leaped on the escalator to modernity.  As Mallet was writing in 1750, life was grand.  People and their belongings were now safe and secure.  Fields were filled with laborers.  Numerous cities flourished in peace and prosperity.  Paganism went extinct, and everyone flocked to the new religion, in which believers were promised an eternity in paradise as long as they did not kill, or lie, or steal, or fornicate, or judge others, or hate their enemies, or think blasphemous thoughts, or accumulate wealth.

Mallet, Paul Henri, Northern Antiquities, 1770, Reprint, AMS Press, New York, 1968.

Other sources:

Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, 1076, Reprint, Columbia University Press, New York, 1959.

Anderson, Rasmus Björn, Norse Mythology: Or the Religion of Our Forefathers..., 1875, Reprint, S. C. Griggs and Company, Chicago, 1884.

Caesar, Julius, The Gallic Wars, London MacMillan, London, 1908.  DOWNLOAD

Grammaticus, Saxo, The First Nine Books of Danish History, 1514, Reprint, David Nutt, London, 1894.  DOWNLOAD

Grimm, Jakob, Teutonic Mythology, 4 vols, 1883, Reprint, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1976.  This book provides the most information on Teutonic myth and folklore, but it is difficult to read.  All four volumes can be read at Google Books.

Metzner, Ralph, The Well of Remembrance, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1994. 

Tacitus, Caius Cornelius, edited by Hadas, Moses, Complete Works of Tacitus, The Modern Library, New York, 1942.  This volume includes Germania.  DOWNLOAD

Germania



Everyone everywhere has tribal ancestors.  Folks with European roots know little about their kin who lived in the countless centuries of wild freedom.  Tacitus gives us a glimpse at their world, as it was over 1,900 years ago.  He was a Roman historian, born in A.D. 56, and died in 117.  He wrote Germania in 98.  It provided a brief overview of several dozen Germanic tribes of the era, as viewed from a civilized perspective.  For example, the Batavi, Chatti, Usipii, Tencteri, Chauci, Fosi, Cimbri, Anglii, and Varini.  (MAP)

In the days of Tacitus, Germania was a vast wild frontier of forest and marsh, “a land rude in its surface, rigorous in its climate, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator, except a native.”  The mighty Rhine River separated the German motherland from the tribes of Belgica (Belgium) and the Celtic tribes of Gaul (France).  Since there were no bridges in those days, the treacherous fast-flowing river provided an effective security barrier.

The Rhine protected Germania from the evil Empire.  Moving armies across the wild river was a serious challenge, and the barbarians on the other side were notoriously ferocious.  The German side was heavily forested.  The Roman war machine excelled at fighting in open country, and avoided engagements near forest, where they lost their tactical superiority.  So, the badass Germans remained proud, wild, and free, whilst the tribes of Gaul and Belgica, who surrendered to Empire (to avoid annihilation), were obligated to pay tributes and taxes, and provide numerous young conscripts to fight in the Roman legion.

Throughout Germania, the people had the appearance of a pure unmixed race.  They had reddish hair, blue eyes, large strong bodies, and were not weakened by cold or hunger.  They raised herds and flocks, and grew a little grain.  Their diet majored in meat, cheese, fruit, and beer.  Warriors took great delight in fighting, hunting, feasting, and oblivion drinking.  Dreary laborious toil was the domain of women, old men, and slaves.

Germanic spirituality majored in reverence for nature.  They worshipped in the living temple of the great outdoors — not inside walls.  Their deities inhabited sacred groves that were the tribe’s place of origin.  Folks would gather in the grove and offer sacrifices, which were sometimes human.  A number of tribes had festivals honoring Ertha (Big Mama Earth), a deity always present in their lives.

Notably, they were still animists — they did not imagine their deities to have human form.  Centuries later, as Indo-European influences intensified, a pantheon (family) of humanlike deities evolved in German metaphysics.  In this new culture of human supremacy, a powerful male god ruled over a colorful mob of lesser gods, goddesses, and tricksters.  This tradition spread from Greece (Zeus), to Rome (Jupiter), Germany (Wotan), and Scandinavia (Odin).

Germania was not a realm of love and peace.  “They actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”  Raids and conflicts were common, and tribes depended on their warriors for survival.  In their rites of initiation, the transition of a boy into a man was marked by giving him a shield and spear.  From then on, the man was not allowed to cut his hair or beard until the day he killed his first foe.

Year after year, tribes invested much time and effort in killing folks from other tribes.  Romans were delighted by the fact that Germans worked so hard to kill other Germans.  They had to fight to survive.  The Cherusci were seen as foolish and cowardly, because of their deep love of peace — they were exterminated.  It was common for conquered tribes to go extinct; survivors were sold into slavery.

The Batavi avoided gangster raids by inhabiting an island in the Rhine.  The Suiones felt so safe and secure that they didn’t carry arms all the time — they had a pleasant life by the sea, centuries before the era of seaborne Viking terrorists.  Some tribes enjoyed safety by inhabiting remote locations in vast primeval forests.

The Hercynian forest once spanned east from the Rhine, across modern Germany, to the Carpathians, and all the way to Dacia (present-day Romania).  A quick traveler could cross the forest north to south in nine days, but it was very long, from east to west.  In 51 B.C., Julius Caesar noted, “There is no man in the Germany we know who can say that he has reached the edge of that forest, though he may have gone forward sixty days’ journey, or who has learnt in what place it begins.”  Pliny also mentioned it:  “The vast trees of the Hercynian forest, untouched for ages, and as old as the world, by their almost immortal destiny exceed common wonders.”

Every ecosystem has a limit to how many humans it can support.  In the time of Tacitus, the carrying capacity was quite low, because large-scale forest mining and soil mining were not yet possible.  Iron axes were still rare luxuries, and the moldboard plow would not come into common use for another thousand years.  Forest soils were too heavy for digging sticks.

Aurochs (wild cattle) inhabited a range spanning from England to China.  Bulls were up to 6 feet (180 cm) tall at the shoulder, much larger than modern cattle.  They were very strong, terribly aggressive, and loved to disembowel passing humans, wolves, and other annoyances.  Hence, the Germans preferred to enslave passive, dim-witted domestic cattle and sheep, which could be confined close to home.  By milking the livestock, they could extract four times more calories from their enslaved animals, compared to simply eating them.  Cheese could be stored for later use.

Nobody owned aurochs, or confined them to pastures, but somebody did own the horses and livestock.  These animals were an important form of wealth, and stealing them from neighbors was an exciting way to get rich quick, or die trying.  Hence, raiding was a popular pastime.  Naturally, it was a good way to make enemies, and ignite long-term feuds.  By majoring in herding, and building no permanent settlements, tribes could pack up and move when life got too hot.

In a world of tribal warfare, there was strength in numbers.  Family planning increased vulnerability.  “To limit the increase of children, or put to death any of the later progeny is accounted infamous.”  Thus, limited carrying capacity, plus population pressure, plus the crazy-making juju of hoarding wealth hurled Germania into a bloody cesspool, similar to the far larger one we’re soaking in today.

Our cousins the chimps do not enslave domesticated animals to inflate carrying capacity.  They respond to the tensions of crowding with kicks, punches, and bites — sometimes killing competitors.  Germans did increase carrying capacity, did not limit births, made enemies with raiding, nurtured feuds, and resolved tensions with spears, javelins, and long knives — intending to kill competitors.  This was not the only possible strategy, in theory, but it has been common around the world.  Crowded critters get crabby.

Tacitus described one tribe of good old-fashioned hunter-gatherers, the only example of fully wild and free Europeans I have found.  The Fenni (Finnish) enjoyed a life of magnificent simplicity in the great white north.  Their culture was so complete and well balanced that they had no need to wish for anything.  Listen:

“The Fenni live in a state of amazing savageness and squalid poverty.  They are destitute of arms, horses, and settled abodes: their food is herbs; their clothing, skins; their bed, the ground.  Their only dependence is on their arrows, which, for want of iron, are headed with bone; and the chase is the support of the women as well as the men; the former accompany the latter in the pursuit, and claim a share of the prey.  Nor do they provide any other shelter for their infants from wild beasts and storms, than a covering of branches twisted together.  This is the resort of youth; this is the receptacle of old age.  Yet even this way of life is in their estimation happier than groaning over the plough; toiling in the erection of houses; subjecting their own fortunes and those of others to the agitations of alternate hope and fear.  Secure against men, secure against the gods, they have attained the most difficult point, not to need even a wish.”

Tacitus, Caius Cornelius, edited by Hadas, Moses, Complete Works of Tacitus, The Modern Library, New York, 1942.  Germania is a short work, and free downloads are available on the web in PDF and text.  Amazon has a free Kindle version.