Indigenous Wisdom – Alissa Fleet

Ruby Gibson on Reconciliation with Mother Earth

August 23, 2023 No Comments

Ruby Gibson on Reconciliation with Mother Earth

Alissa Fleet
August 23, 2023

For over 30 years Dr Ruby Gibson and her Freedom Lodge organization have been working in Native American communities on the recovery from historical trauma. Following the method she developed “Somatic Archaeology” you begin with listening and bringing awareness to the great library of information and story each person is walking around with. As she says, recovering from trauma is not very hard when you have the right tools; trauma is just like a speed bump that is part of life.

What intrigued me is that her conversation with Thomas Hubl, when asked where she wanted to take the work next , she said that she dreamed of doing healing sessions with the Earth herself, similarly to how you would with a person.

To paraphrase:

“It is like there is a fragility right now to nature, because humans have been careless in our relationship with her. So go to the places of hurt and listen to her. Offer your love and awareness, as a kind of repair. Go to the places that have been mined and drilled and bear witness to those scars in the earth. Go to the burial grounds, the places where there were battles, the places where there has been a lot of pain and wounding, and offer prayers and blessings so that we can come back into relationship with the earth.”

Going on pilgrimage to the places of historical harms, to bring awareness and witnessing, is a practice I have been part of from the peace walks with the NE Peace Pagoda, and am curious to keep learning from. My understanding from systemic work is that for human beings to “find their place” again in relationship to the earth, we have to realize how young and new we are as a species, compared to the ancientness of the Earth. And that when we know our place, we see that is is absurd for us to attempt to “heal” the planet. What we can reconcile though is the relationship between humans and the earth, which is something different. This is where ritual and ceremony come in.

Falling out of the sky and surviving 40 days in the Colombian Amazon

July 24, 2023 No Comments

Falling out of the sky and surviving 40 days in the Colombian Amazon

Alissa Fleet
July 24, 2023

You may have heard the story of the four children who survived a plane crash in the Amazonian jungle in Columbia and were found after 40 days.

When the story first filtered through the news it was hailed as a triumph of the Columbian armed forces and the indigenous people working together. If you read more closely you can hear it as a story about the differences between an indigenous and western way of solving an almost impossible problem.

There were seven people onboard the plane and when it had engine failure and went down in the jungle. The adults — the children’s mother and two pilots were found perished in the wreckage and there were signs that the four children from the indigenous Huitoto tribe, aged 13, nine, five, and one, had survived. But they were in such a deep part of the jungle it was nearly impossible for search crews to find them. The Columbian government deployed more than 100 soldiers but it was so dense and the conditions so difficult that many of them dropped out of the search.

Meanwhile the eldest girl was taking care of her two younger sisters and younger brother. At 13 years old she had already been given the knowledge of how to live in the jungle. She had taken the baby and built a hammock in the trees for her where she was safe and happy. They knew which fruits could be eaten and they were eating cassava flour saved from the plane.

After many days of searching one of the indigenous elders did a ceremony to dialogue with the spirit of the jungle about their predicament. They were in such a deep place where “no human was ever meant to go,” that the elder offered to the jungle his own life in exchange for the children. After a deal was made, he gave the Indigenous guard on the search team specific instructions on what to do when the children would be found the very next day, as they were.

In his account of the search, Columbian activist Manual Rozental emphasizes that it was not technology or the armed forces that found them, but the indigenous knowledge and in particular women’s knowledge.