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2001-04-14 You might want to read the previous entry first, as it is opens and pertains to this entry. During the conversation with my mom yesterday, we were talking about her masters thesis and "how do you analyze a living story without killing it by analyzing it in with a Western mode of thought..." Well, also included in that conversation was another puzzling question which I would like to pose to all of you out there, and have a variety of answers or ideas discussed. Please sign my guestbook if you have ideas! We were talking about how the Native American women's stories all centered around land, community and spirituality, and how the three are interconnected completely, and only through a Western analytical mode of thinking would the three be pulled apart. This lead to me mentioning to her my research with regards to my paper about Music in the African American church. I told her about how my research discussed how the Africans who were stolen and brought to America brought with them the interconnectivity between music, dance, transcendance and God, and how these things were not separated at all in their thinking. They were all a part of each other. And we were talking about how to understand the Native American women's stories, one must understand, holistically, the environment in which they were created. A big part of the environment is the white culture which brought over the slaves and which destroyed and pushed aside the Native culture. Peter Bratt discussed the Native American soul wound and the Latino soul wound. When we discussed this two years ago, My first response was, "If they had a soul wound, the people who pushed them into the soul wound had to have a soul wound as well! So, that would mean that there is an intrinsic soul wound within the White/European/American mind/aesthetic/society." And I think many of the people who read this think about this a lot: you know, the capitalistic society that we live in. I don't need to explain this. It's common knowledge, right? So, Mom said that the Native response to figuring out what the white soul wound is, would be to say that white people's soul wound comes from not being connected to the land. She went on to say that the Natives have been living on this continent for thousands and thousands of years. They are deeply tied to this continent and land -- and a big part of their soul wound is a result of losing that connection. But, because white people are recent implants into this continent, my ancestors only having lived here for 250 years, many other people's ancestors living here for only decades... This calls into question, "How can white people be connected to a land in which they are recent implants? Is it possible for white Americans to be connected to this land? If so, where? Will we know? Is our connection to the land intuitive? Will we know it when we find connection to the land? Do we have to be tied to it agriculturally and self-sustainably in order to be fully connected to the land? Will we only find spiritual balance by connecting ourselves to the land? Where is my land?"
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