This excerpt from Jack Douglas Forbes' book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2008, pp. 181-183; revised edition) published by Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, PhD in their book Restoring Kinship Worldview (North Atlantic Books 2022, pp. 127-129). American anthropologist, historian, political activist, poet, and educator Jack D. Forbes (1934-2011)—who had Native Powhatan, Delaware, and Lenape ancestry, as well as Swiss and Celtic roots—played a pivotal role in reforming and shaping Native American studies and education for more than half a century. After earning degrees in philosophy, history, and anthropology, he became actively involved in the Native American movement in the early 1960s, which advocated for Native American sovereignty and resisted assimilation into the dominant culture. He dedicated his life to developing and sustaining educational models based on Native historical and conceptual perspectives that would truly serve Native American and Chicano students. In 1969, he helped establish the Native American Studies program at the University of California, Davis, and in 1971, he was one of the founders of Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University (DQ University), the first Native American college in California. His major works include Columbus and Other Cannibals; The American Discovery of Europe; Apache, Navajo, and Spaniard and the book Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, which is considered his magnum opus. Forbes also wrote poetry in which he addresses the social and cultural status of indigenous people, particularly in his home state of California. Translation: Jiří Zemánek.
The reality of our absolute, complete, and total dependence on the Earth is used by indigenous teachers as part of self-knowledge. It is empirically evident that we are not only children who have been suckling at the breast of our Mother Earth all our lives, but that we are also intertwined with, and part of, what Europeans have chosen to call the environment. In reality, there is no “environment” for us.
I can lose my hands and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live. I can lose my hair, eyebrows, nose, hands and many other things and still live. But if I lose my air, I will die. If I lose my sun, I will die. If I lose my earth, I will die. If I lose my water, I will die. If I lose my plants and animals, I will die. All these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than my so-called body. So what is my real body?
We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings, as European mythology teaches us. Such notions arise from deductive logic derived from incorrect assumptions. We are rooted just like trees. But our roots extend from our nose and our mouth, like an umbilical cord, forever connecting us to the rest of the world. Our roots also grow from our skin and our other body cavities.
We do not do anything alone. We do not see alone. We do not hear alone. We do not breathe, eat, drink, defecate, urinate, or fart alone. We do not think, eat, invent, or reproduce alone. We do not die alone.
What the tree exhales, I inhale. What I exhale, the trees inhale. Together we form a circle. When I breathe, I breathe the breath of billions of long-gone trees and plants. When the trees and plants breathe, they breathe the breath of billions of long-gone people, animals, and other beings. As Lame Deer said: “Man is many things. Whatever makes up the air, the earth, the herbs, the stones, is also part of our bodies. …”
Who was my mother? The egg? Who was my father, the little creature called a sperm? But where did this egg and this sperm come from? They grew inside a woman and inside a man, but they had their own life paths, different from those of a man and a woman. Their bodies, that flesh, my ancestors, grew inside them and what was it? It was the earth, it was the sky, it was the sun, it was the plants and animals. We are so lucky to have so many wonderful mothers and fathers!
I live in the universe. I am a point of consciousness, a circle of consciousness in the middle of a series of circles. One circle is what we call the body. That is the universe itself, full of millions of tiny living things living their own separate but interdependent lives. Most of the time they live, fight, love, divide, and die independently of my consciousness. If any of them are disturbed or if they are injured, they can tell me so that I can help them; I can give them food, scratch them, or remove their remains.
The next circle is made up of all the other things on which I am completely dependent – Gishux, the sun, air, water and so on. The next circle is made up of all the things that fill my consciousness – the things I see, feel, hear and so on. The next circle is the source of my dreams, my consciousness, my knowledge, my gifts or abilities, my thoughts and “intuition”.
However, all of these “circles” are not actually separate – they are interdependent, intersecting and overlapping, and influencing each other.
And this interdependence flows into the circle of love, into that mystery, into that bond that holds everything together. Scientists may call it attraction, affinity, magnetism, gravity, or affection, symbiosis, kinship, community, family, compassion, or whatever else. But that circle, that mysterious circle that makes life possible, exists.
