EMPOWERING OURSELVES TO ABORIGINAL KNOWLEDGE

EMPOWERING OURSELVES TO ABORIGINAL KNOWLEDGE

Messagepar admin » Ven 29 Nov 2013 02:36

There comes a time when as cultural workers we have to make very important decisions regarding what we do and how we can better understand the essence and the spiritual forces that are behind the task of cultural promotion and cultural retention. It is right there amongst us, at our service with respect and order. It is the intangible forces of our cultural heritage that our special Elders constantly refer to and talk about.

Keeping an open mind, we must ask ourselves if it is not the time to question ourselves about how we are presently dealing with these intangible spiritual forces and if we are, to a certain extent talking about them, but not ready to fully recognise them. Is it because we are forgetting the order of things? How ironic.

The Cultural movement is very busy writing papers and interpreting things from past experience or from what is constantly put in front of us, but are we forgetting something?

How many of us are asking our special Elders to take the lead and to guide us with their spiritual knowledge from above, to advise us, to guide us and to help us to better understand what we are doing, even before we lift our pencil? How many of us put these Elders in front of a "fait accomplis" kind of hoping for their approval?

Is it not the time to change our approach and to listen to what we are as told by these special Elders? Are we taking the time to seriously understand the forces behind some of our very special ceremonies? Are we really listening? Are we really asking these special Elders to hold very special ceremonies to help us?

Interestingly, we put great trust in a man-made system called the "Canadian justice system" and we go to these courts of justice to meet man-made Judges, putting ourselves at the mercy of political power, to ask for justice, balance, equilibrium and sometimes to bring order into things.

We refer to this man-made political system in the hope that things will go better or turn in our favour. But unfortunately those systems are influenced by man-made values and do not necessarily reflect the Creator's natural laws.

How many of us know about the Creator's justice system, given to us by the Creator, our highest court system based on the Creator laws, through the process of a very special ceremony called the shake tent? This justice system is the highest tribunal known on this planet and this court system is based on four basic principles: honesty, respect, sharing and caring.

Only the truth is given through this justice system and it can also be used to guide us in all of our activities.

We are fortunate to have very special Elders empowered by the Creator to perform this most sacred ceremony and many others such as the sun dance, the blanket ceremony, the false mask. When is the last time as cultural workers that we took the time to participate in one of those special ceremony ?

How many of us truly believe in the Creator's direct empowerment of very special Elders waiting for us to ask them to help us?

Why do we always wait until the last minute to ask for help, having as a result to start all over again when we could ask them right from the beginning?

Through our cultural and spiritual evolution, some of our people have been given by the Creator very important spiritual tools to work with. Are we asking our knowledgable Elders about them? Are we asking them to help us to clarifiy the true meaning of what we are doing ?

For example, the wampum belts and other sacred objects are still submitted to political interpretation. They rest in vaults or in museums--suspected of containing spiritual values. They are given possessive meaning --they are ours or theirs-- and when we debate to whom they must belong and where they should go we lose precious time to empower ourselves with their true knowledge.

These sacred objects do not only contain spiritual directives. They are subordinate to the controlling artistic dimension of cerebral designs, our spiritual writing, our only writing. Are we prepared to learn or do we want to learn? That is, maybe, the true question that we must ask ourselves. Again, if the wampum belt is like a key that opens a box, within that box lie other keys such as language and culture. But a key is not simply a spoken language or their objects such as the dictionary or lexicons. Words of any language or any culture mean more than the mere vocabulary or sounds would have us believe.

To deal with the literal-lexicography, or cultural prose, or poetic moral dimensions of culture and spoken language or that which is written in books in other foreign orthography in isolation of the spiritual dimensions of our reading and writing (through our spiritual cerebral designs known by some of our Elders) is to forget and deny that the individual keys of our knowledge can be legitimately obtained only by empowering the master key of our languages and our cultures--the wampum belts and other sacred objects.

We should never forget that the master key respects our language and our culture, simply by recognizing that culture and language are the spiritual connections to who we are in relation to the Creator, the order of things, the land, and the universe.

Therefore we must ask ourselves and we must ask our special Elders if the voice of the land is in our languages and in our cultures or if it is in the spirit of our languages and our cultures? Are our languages and our cultures only retained when the people make the spiritual connection of the languages and the cultures? Is it only through the spiritual connection that a language or a culture is revived and only because the people make the connection ? How does this apply to our line of work as cultural workers? Shall we not ask ourselves this question if we do not want to miss the boat or swirl in huge circles of interpretation or translation into foreign languages with foreign syllabics?

Because of these special Elders and because of sacred objects, our culture is not lost in time because our knowledge of time does not make us look at time in a linear way. With this knowledge, our special Elders know that the past, the present and the future is the same--that it moves in a circular motion. All our knowledge is stored in a time-space continuum that acts as a universal bank and can be retrieved with the knowledge of our spiritual sciences in a very special ceremony performed by these special Elders.

By not including these special Elders at the forefront of our activities, our cultures and our languages will only survive through a linear retention process, under the "historic" influence that insists things of the past are no longer living things. They will be left to archival research which will only be subject to interpretation because we have lost their spiritual meaning.

This is why we have lost so much meaning and why we have so few of these Elders left because they could not retain our spiritual knowledge in museums or in written material. Our people must not fear the special Elders because of what was written about them or because of what the churches have said about them or because of the influences of linear materialistic philosophy that still rules in our communities and our cultural and educational institutions. We must learn to trust them, to trust the cultural and spiritual knowledge of those special Elders.

Those special Elders, also our healers, our scientists, are more of an "endandered" species than we think. We can no longer forget they exist. Maybe our people don't know who they are or how to recognize them, or maybe they don't know how to ask them for help, to ask the question and to get the answer. Maybe we rely too much on or are too busy doing interpretations.

This is why it is important to empower ourselves by really listening to our special Elders. They are the master key to the retention of our cultures and our languages for the benefit of our survival as people, to guide us and to help us find ourselves as cultural workers, as Cultural Centres and of course as a National Association dedicated to the promotion and retention of our cultural heritage.

We hope this will help every one of us to understand the dimension and the importance of very special Elders and why they must be at the forefront of our activities. We must trust them and we must ask them to join us. To ask, all we need do is to offer them tobacco. At the very least, it will open the first door of communication. All the rest and the follow up to our activities will rest in their knowledge and their connection with the Creator.

When the students are ready, the teachers will appear. It is time that we seriously prepare. The time is now.


Claude Aubin
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info@claudeaubinmetis.com
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