Kent Nerburn

In light of what is happening in the current Democratic dust-up between Obama and Clinton, someone reminded me of a blog entry I wrote in September of 2006. I read it and my jaw dropped.

You could go back in my blog archives, but I think it deserves reprinting. Here it is. I believe it was entitled Looking for Leaders, Looking for Vision. I wish I could get it to Obama.

Blog Entry — Sept 27, 2006

Politics is heating up around here, as I’m sure it is in your neck of the woods, too. Invariably, the claim is made that “we want to run a clean campaign.” But fear sells in America, and a politician who wants to win in America is in the business of selling. So he or she almost inevitably ends up trying to peddle fear about what his or her opponent proposes to do.

Look for people who are visionary. I don’t mean those with good ideas - lots of people have good ideas. And I don’t mean only those with correctives - we all know that there are past mistakes that need to be corrected. I mean those who make you think about the world around you differently.

The key to great political leadership is to make the people see the world in a new way and to believe that this new vision can come to pass. Kennedy had it; Ronald Reagan had it.

I didn’t like Reagan’s vision - it seemed to me to lead to the kind of selfishness that envelops us today. But it was a vision, and it galvanized people. Kennedy’s, though based a great deal on personal charisma, brought the nation into a forward-looking mode that it dearly needed after the long, exhausting emotional recovery from WWII. Clinton had the charisma to do the same, but he squandered his moral capital and lacked a vision of greatness for the country, and, ultimately was taken down by his own stupidity and a cabal of ferrets who used every means at their command to shred him bloody. GW is beneath discussion. In fact, his abject failure and political divisiveness make the need for a national vision ever more crucial.

But it is not simply in national politics that vision is needed. Look to your local races. Who can inspire you to believe that there can be kindness, honesty, clarity, and compassion at the heart of your state or community? Who can take a visionary dream and make it seem like an attainable goal? Who seems to understand you and your needs, as well as those of the people less fortunate than you, and can still shape a vision of a future that will be better for your children?

Just promising to tune up the machine is never enough. No matter what your politics, there will always be opposition to any modifications of existing systems. What is needed is always a re envisioning of the world in which we live, both locally and on larger levels.

Who says to you, “We can be better,” and not just by putting in or removing programs and kicking the current bastards out? Who inspires you with the vision that would reshape the streets and community and world in which you live? Who calls to you with the strength of Sitting Bull’s admonition, “Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of lives we can create for our children?”

Look for those people. They are the real leaders. They are the ones who can take you to the places where your children can live a life of hopefulness and dreams.

Technorati : Clinton, Democrats, Obama, Politics, President

As long-time readers of this blog realize, northern Minnesota winters induce a cryogenic state. I have been using this period of prolonged darkness and below zero temperatures to do a lot of writing on two main projects as well as trying to assist those who are pushing forward on the film of Neither Wolf nor Dog. I’ll write more about those various projects as they congeal and take better shape.

But I don’t want you to think I’ve disappeared into the witness protection program, so I’ve decided to send out an interview that a friend brought to my attention recently. I don’t even remember the circumstances under which I gave it, or to whom.

But I like it.

I hope you do, too.

INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR KENT NERBURN

Can you briefly describe your writing philosophy?

My work has been a constant search, from various perspectives, for an authentic American spirituality, integrating our western Judeo-Christian tradition with the other traditions of the world, and especially the indigenous spirituality of the people who first inhabited this continent. Someone once called me a “guerrilla theologian,” and I think that is fairly accurate. I am deeply concerned with the human condition and our responsibility to the earth, the people on it, and the generations to come. I believe that we are, at heart, spiritual beings seeking spiritual meaning, and I try to honor this search wherever I discover it in the course of my daily life.

Your writing seems very poetic in style. Is this something you do consciously?

I take the music of language very seriously. Like a heartbeat, it exists right below consciousness, but it animates and infuses your language with life. As both a reader and a writer, I tend to sub-vocalize, thus making my pacing and thoughts more auditory than conceptual. I want the sentences to aspirate, and pulsate with cadence and internal music. A good sentence should sound good and feel good and roll comfortably off your tongue, not simply serve as a conveyor for ideas.

Who inspires you? Who are your favorite writers?

Donatello, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nelson Mandela, Black Elk, Lao Tzu, good elementary school teachers, caring nursing home workers, and anyone who spends time with people who can offer them no benefit.
I love Graham Greene, Jim Harrison, Annie Dillard, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

You quote the Sioux writer Ohiyesa in Small Graces: The Quiet Gifts of Everyday Life. Do you have a favorite quote or thought of his?

I constantly hark back in my own life to his comment about spirituality: “Whenever, in the course of our day, we might come upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful or sublime - the black thundercloud with the rainbow’s glowing arch above the mountain; a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge; a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of sunset - we pause for an instant in an attitude of worship.” This, it seems to me, is the key to a humble appreciation of the gift of life we have been given and a proper way of honoring the Great Mystery we have come to call God.

What makes you hopeful about the future?

I am hopeful for human beings because I believe that, at heart, we all seek the same thing - a chance to love and be loved, to raise good children, and to live in peace with our neighbors and families. That we so consistently fail to do so is troubling. And I admit to being deeply upset by the selfishness that is abroad in our own land - believing that we must look out first and foremost for ourselves - and the tendency, both here and abroad, to use religious belief to justify cruelty toward others.

When you write, do you ever feel that something greater than yourself is providing the words or ideas?

Alas, no. I wish I did. But I do believe that we are all God’s hands here on earth, and that in and through my writing I must endeavor to do God’s work, however one chooses to define or give a shape to God.

You write about experiences you’ve had that suggest you’ve studied with various spiritual traditions. What’s been particularly helpful or pivotal in your path?

I love the Beatitudes from the Christian tradition, the use of natural forces as analogy in the Taoist tradition, and the spiritual commitment to the power of the earth in the Native American traditions. I believe we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, that the ways of force and acquiescence shown in nature must govern an integrated and balanced life, and that each person must, indeed, find his or her own spiritual path and live each day with an attitude of prayerful awareness.

Do you recommend spending time in nature?

Let me quote Ohiyesa again. “All who have lived much out of doors, whether Indian or otherwise, know that there is a magnetic and powerful force that accumulates in solitude but is quickly dissipated by life in a crowd.” We should all seek the healing and clarifying power of nature so that our spiritual focus and power is not allowed to dissipate.

You talk about the importance of ritual in Small Graces. Are there any rituals or practices you’d recommend to someone seeking a more spiritually focused life?

Prayer - not as petition, but as reflection and contemplation. Mentoring. Service with no thought of recognition. I know these are not specific. But each person must find his or her specific expression of these general principles. Helping a child or an elder or someone in need will do more for one’s spiritual focus than closing any deal or building any building or achieving any position of fame or celebrity.

Do you believe that “coincidences” may be more than that?

I believe in the subtle power of intention - again, like the Taoist belief in the slow, inexorable power of water - and I believe that the miracle of life cannot be accidental. As to whether there is a force that guides our every move and shapes outcomes for some greater or smaller purpose, I don’t occupy myself with that thought. All I know is that I must be God’s hands on earth, and I must express thanks for the goodness that befalls me. Whether my actions are guided or determined is not something I contemplate.

Do you believe in miracles?

Interventionist miracles? I’m not sure. The general miracles of two people creating a child, the impenetrability of death, the endlessly renewing human experience of love? Yes. I guess I believe that God embedded the miraculous in the ordinary, and it is our task to discover it and celebrate it.

Do you ever imagine some sort of ideal world somewhere in the future? What’s it like?

I am less a visionary than a caretaker. I have seen too much sadness and injustice to have any faith in an ideal world. I admire those who do, and I believe they are the ones who should lead us. But I am more concerned with the alleviation of human suffering and the fostering of human kindness than I am with overall visions.

Do you plan to write more books like The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life?

I see The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life as a part of a trilogy that includes my two other books, Simple Truths: Clear and Gentle Guidance on the Big Issues in Life, and Small Graces.

Hidden Beauty is an expansion and elaboration of the core idea in Small Graces, that we may not all live holy lives, but we all live lives that are alive with holy moments. Whereas Small Graces followed a single day, Hidden Beauty ranges farther afield, casting its glance on such events as standing before one of Donatello’s sculptures in a cathedral in Florence, Italy; watching a legless man in a wheelchair fly a kite in the sunset over Gallup, New Mexico; and attending a native funeral on an Indian reservation deep in the woods of northern Minnesota.

Simple Truths addresses the fundamental issues of being human, like love, work, parenthood, tragedy and suffering, loneliness and solitude, old age, and death. It was really a book inspired by my desire to express, in the clearest and most heartfelt way of which I was capable, those things that I think it is important for my children to know about life.

I guess a better way to say it would be that Simple Truths sets out to speak of a life well-lived, while Small Graces and Hidden Beauty show us the ordinary, everyday events that serve as epiphanies of such a life. Small Graces is more a celebration of the moments close to home, while Hidden Beauty casts its vision at the larger world around us.

Whether I will write more books like this depends on whether or not I feel I have something new and meaningful to say. I always want my small books to move gently over deep waters. Should I find myself traveling over such waters in the future, and feel that I have the words and insights to give expression to their depths, I will happily write more books like Simple Truths, Small Graces, and Hidden Beauty.

You have a lot of wonderful quotes at the beginning of each chapter of Small Graces. Is there one that’s particularly special to you?

I believe in them all. But I would think that the essence of my philosophy about life is in the quote, “We are not all called to be great. But we are all called to reach out our hands to our brothers and sisters, and to care for the earth in the time we are given.”

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Seek the unseen in life. Celebrate the ordinary. Serve the weak rather than currying the favor of the powerful. Find a way to direct your life towards God. And live for the seventh generation rather than for yourself. Most of all, follow the invitation of the Lakota chief, Sitting Bull, “Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of life we can create for our children.” To live in such a way would be a worthy legacy and an honorable gift of thanks for having had the privilege of sharing in this miraculous experience we call “life.”

A few weeks ago I received a wonderful selection of student responses to Neither Wolf nor Dog from Bill Davis, a teacher of philosophy and East Asian Studies at Blue Valley North High School in Stillwell, Oklahoma. The very fact that they have those courses speaks to the quality of education available to the students, and their papers on Neither Wolf nor Dog confirmed that quality.

I can’t always carve out writing time to offer a worthy response to the emails and contacts I get. But the efforts of these students merited something more than a short note of thanks and appreciation. I thought I’d share my response to them with the rest of you. Perhaps it will be of some value to those of you who teach Neither Wolf nor Dog in your classes.

It’s a long read, so get your cup of coffee.

Here goes:
Read the rest of this entry »

Most of you know Neither Wolf nor Dog, my “literary child” that has drawn the most attention of any of my books over the years. Few of you know To Walk the Red Road, the collection of Red Lake tribal members’ memories that set in motion the events that resulted in the writing of Neither Wolf nor Dog.

This is because To Walk the Red Road was done as a reservation project and was published only locally, and in very small numbers. But its effect was huge. The photos it contained and the way it gave voice to the tribal elders caught Dan’s attention and resulted in him inspiring me to write Neither Wolf nor Dog.

I’ve always felt that to really understand Neither Wolf nor Dog it is important to see the photos and hear the authentic, heartfelt voices of To Walk the Red Road. But up until now that opportunity has never been available.

Now, for a short moment, that opportunity is here, and I’m excited to be able to offer it to you for this holiday season. The Red Lake School Board has authorized me to do a limited reprint of To Walk the Red Road, and these are now available. My sisters at wolfnordog.com have packaged an autographed copy of To Walk the Red Road with an autographed copy of Neither Wolf nor Dog and are offering them at a special holiday price of $34.95. They have told me that they will do free gift wrapping and work out special gift boxes if you so desire. You need only to go to their website, wolfnordog.com, to place an order or to find out more.

I know that a lot of you have asked about To Walk the Red Road over they years, since it figures so prominently in the story of Neither Wolf nor Dog. It has always been a frustration to me that I could not help you find copies. Now I can, at least for as long as the few hundred we have printed last. I think the book by itself is a wonderful accomplishment, because it gives you a glimpse, through photos and memories, into one of the few closed reservations in the country and a place that has been in the news for all the wrong reasons for the last several years. If you want to see what it was like to grow up on a reservation, and to hear the stories as the elders told them to the children, To Walk the Red Road offers you the rare opportunity to do so.

I hope this posting gets to those of you who have asked over the years, as well as to those of you who would find this pairing of books to be something valuable to own or give. I don’t keep track of the numbers of remaining books, so I can’t guarantee how long this pairing will be available. But, for now, we have them.

Click here to go to wolfnordog.com to order your own copies.

A good day. A good week. I’ve spent these last warm days of autumn on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota with John Willis, a photographer and professor at Marlboro College in Vermont, and his wife, Pauline. John and I are collaborating on a book of his photographs. My charge — and it is as wonderful a charge as a writer can get — is to use my words to create a parallel text to John’s photographs. I am not to provide commentary or to write cut lines. This is a book of two artists responding to the same environment and experience through their respective art forms. I am both honored and excited to be able to share pages with John.

John has been going to the Rez for well over a decade. He and I first met through a program he runs there in the summer. It is called “Exposures,” and it attracted me with its authenticity and integrity. In Exposures, he takes young people from Vermont, the Bronx, the Navajo reservation, and other disparate cultural settings and brings them together with young people from Pine Ridge. They all work together on photography projects that document the people, places, and life on Pine Ridge.

So many projects, well intentioned and necessary as they are, focus on providing assistance and service. John tries to build upon strength. If he gives, which he does regularly, it is quietly and personally. In that way he echoes what I so appreciate about NANAI, the program from the Netherlands about which I just wrote. There is so much need on the Rez and so much sadness and poverty, that it is hard not to focus exclusively on need and deficiency. When you find people who acknowledge the need and deficiency, but try to build upon strength, you have found rare people, indeed.

I am excited to work with John on this book of his photographs, because we both see something far deeper and far more important than the sadness and poverty. We see the power of the people, the culture, and the land.

I invite all of you to view a few of John’s photographs at http://www.jwillis.net.

I’m going to make a strange comment, and I ask you to hear me out before you slam the computer shut in astonishment:

When I think back on the journey to the Netherlands and Iceland, I keep being haunted by the thought that the Netherlands is perhaps the greatest possible cultural manifestation of Christian values regarding the land, while Iceland is a perfect embodiment of pagan values regarding the land.

Now, stay with me.

The Christian charge regarding the earth is to subdue it and make it fruitful. More than anyplace I’ve ever been, the Netherlands has been successful in subduing the earth and bending her to its purposes. That they have done so gently and respectfully, and in the service of human good, is much to their credit. They have claimed land from the sea, they have run watercourses throughout their country, they have bred flowers and foods that increase human health and the experience of human beauty. They have, to the extent that it is possible, been gentle stewards of the land in the best manner of the Biblical injunction.

Iceland, on the other hand, has harnessed some of the power of the land in terms of such technologies as geothermal energy, but mostly they have adapted to its commands and demands, making an honest genuflection to its power and dominance. They make small roads, they live on what the land will bear in its natural cultivation rather than creating artificial environments to grow plants and animals that do not naturally thrive there, they leave great stones in their roadways if those stones have a historical precedent as having spiritual power. To travel across their country is to sense the presence of nature, not the presence of culture.

What strikes me as I consider these two worlds through which I passed is how viable each seems as a human adaptation to the land. We are, by our nature, culture builders. We do not live as feral beings and we do not live in a world of adaptation devoid of the exercise of imagination. That the Dutch have looked upon their environment and tried to master it, and the Icelanders have looked upon theirs and tried to fit into it, does not change the fact that each has, in its own way, tried to exercise a worthy stewardship over the piece of earth it calls its own.

The peril we face today does not come from such differing philosophies of how to serve as stewards of the earth, but from the failure to exercise control over how we act upon those philosophies. If the preservation and sustenance of the earth is not a core value in a culture’s philosophy; if the long term good of the earth is trumped by the belief in the short term good of the individual, then the land on which those people live will inevitably come to grief.

This is not a political position, it is a simple fact. Each person pursuing his or her self interest does not necessarily add up to the best interest of the land. It takes an active decision to believe that acting in the earth’s interest is actually in your own self interest. For a long time this seemed like a philosophical canard and little more. But, as the condition of the earth is shown to be ever more fragile and the threats to it ever more borderless and international, what was a philosophical canard is fast becoming a practical grounds for personal and governmental action.

In the last analysis, it does not matter how we look at the earth — as Christians, pagans, Muslims, Hindus,Taoists or Confucians or atheists or Jews — so long as we look at it as the place that must sustain our children. If we put aside our philosophical and political differences, if we recognize that the earth on which we walk must remain healthy enough to hold the footsteps of our children, we can truly weave the tapestry of cultures that the dreamers among us envision.

But if we don’t; if, when making our decisions, we refuse to look into the eyes of the children and grandchildren all around the world, that tapestry will be torn and destroyed before it is ever woven.

Then the winds that blow will be ill winds indeed, and none of us will need a weatherman to know which way those winds blow.

I have just received several emails from readers saying that their experience in coming into the United States was far different and far more friendly and accommodating than the one that passengers on my plane encountered. They suggest that maybe our entry was an aberration or specific to that particular airport.

I truly hope so. I want to believe that the excitement that travelers from other countries feel as they enter into the United States is supported and reinforced by the welcome they receive as they step off the plane. This is a wonderful country, and it should welcome and embrace travelers. As Emma Lazarus’ famous poem says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

Most travelers entering our country are neither poor nor huddled masses, but they are assuredly all tired. We need to meet them as we would meet them if they arrived at the door of our homes, excited about a visit.

Here is the embarrassment:

I get off the plane in Amsterdam and see a sign asking me to choose door A or B depending on whether or not I have anything to declare. I do not, so I choose the “nothing to declare” door. I walk right out into the street where I am part of everyone else and no longer sequestered behind an imaginary boundary that separates the fliers from the non-fliers. I can just get in a car and drive away.

Entering Iceland, the same thing.

Now, welcome to America:

We get off the plane and are herded into a holding area. These are Americans, Germans, Icelanders, and a smattering of other folks. Blessedly, most speak English, so the lack of signage in any language other than English is not a great problem. But the young men shouting orders to us in rapid-fire English are. They seem to see themselves as police officers or para-military, so they hector and badger and shout out in humorless, flat tones, telling us to get in line, have our passports ready, and not to use our cell phones or take photographs. If your English isn’t good enough for you to understand their particular patois, you are shouted at even more aggressively, as if you might be thinking of making a direct contact with Osama Bin Laden or planning to beam cell phone photos back to some angry mullah who is mapping the interiors of all American airports. And God help you if you don’t understand at all and cross one of the lines or walk into some area in violation of the shouted orders.

Now, keep in mind that these are tired travelers who are, or were, excited to get to America, the land of freedom and opportunity. Their English is imperfect, they don’t know where their baggage is, they don’t know if or where the people who are there to meet them are, they don’t know what is happening, and they don’t know how long they’ll be held in containment. All they know is that they are being yelled at and told to stand in line and not do anything that might hint of documentation or communication. Some of them are eighty years old.

The lines, of which there are four, funnel into three booth areas, where a humorless young man or women asks some questions, scrutinizes passports, makes everyone not American — little kids and eighty year olds included — ink their fingers and give two fingerprints, then remove any glasses and stand still for photographing. Children are crying; businessmen are grumbling; the elderly are in wheel chairs or standing at their walkers. But you’d better not move — it might be a terrorist rush or an attempt to send a satellite signal to the caves of Tora Bora.

The line moves glacially. Each person takes anywhere from one to five minutes. There are three lines and probably three hundred folks. Do the math. Then imagine you’re a young mother with a two year old and an infant, or an eighty year old in a walker.

Oh, and lest you think you can crab and complain, right past the booths is a wall covered with one way glass. Should you make a ruckus or show exasperation, I am sure that other humorless folks are duly noting it and photographing you or sending signals to the booths to flag your passport or mark an “x” by your name.

In general, you have found yourself in a world where there is a subterranean current of anger that has been formalized into procedure, where you feel watched and mistrusted, and where you feel that the government is not your friend, and you are not theirs. You are, in effect, guilty until proven innocent.

I wanted to shout out to the people who only minutes before had been laughing and talking excitedly about visiting the Mall of America or going to see their relatives in Iowa that this is not America, that we are not like this.

But I couldn’t. It would have been a subversive act.

And all I could think of as I watched the excited faces of the little children lose their smiles and fill with worry and concern, is that if this is what takes place for a group of mostly Icelanders arriving at a B level airport in a Scandinavian/German city in the middle of America, what is it like for a Middle Easterner or southeast Asian arriving in Detroit or New York or Chicago O’Hare?

It was a sad and sobering experience, and not one that made me proud to be an American.

Sorry, Woody. This land is no longer “made for you and me,” it’s made up of “us” and “them.” And everyone entering America is “them” until proven otherwise.

Travel is always good for one’s perspective. You see the world, and your own life, anew. My recent travels to the Netherlands (and Iceland) did just that.

The Netherlands is small, resolved, and involved in the grand experiment of controlling and mastering the environment.

There are new cities, recently constructed on reclaimed sea land, that attempt to create an optimum living environment for relatively high-density human population — new downtowns that are, essentially, outdoor malls, but with the aesthetic awareness that uses textures and angles and colors to break up the geometric, hard edged monotony of contemporary urban life; small touches like sidewalk trash receptacles that drop their contents to a central waste location for collection and periodically “flush” themselves; planned communities of modern row houses set among large expanses of forest and green space.

There are massive engineering projects, like the movable sea wall that closes off the Rotterdam harbor with two great gates that are meant to keep out a devastating storm surge, and there are the smaller, everyday realities like a culture of bicyclists who take their road behavior as seriously as we freeway drivers in the States take ours (I know; I got chastised by a woman for taking a casual left turn that caused a chain-reaction stoppage of other bicyclists who were traveling swiftly and intently behind me).

In short, it is a society with an overall vision of what constitutes the civic good, and a tolerance for individual behavior so long as it does not contradict that civic good. But there are severe penalties for violation of expected civic norms, like improper carrying of passengers in the cargo area of a van, or scofflaw attempts to ride public transportation without paying.

It is a real contrast to our contemporary American experience, where the legislation of morality is paramount, but civic freedom is considered sacrosanct. We can drive around talking on cell phones, weaving in and out of traffic, in cars that have are never inspected on tires that can be in any condition; we can recycle if we want to, pretty much build where and how we want to, throw up franchises and strip malls with no regard for traffic patterns or the aesthetic effect on the environment. About the only place where the civic good is seen as more important than individual freedom is in our newfound commitment to stopping smoking in public places. Otherwise, personal rights dominate over public responsibility in almost every situation. Attempts to change things in this regard bring forth frantic cries of “Nazi Germany” and “Social engineering,” while the real movement toward Nazi Germany is taking place in the usurpation of our freedom to live unobserved and unscrutinized by phantom elements of our ominously secretive current governmental regime.

It saddens me to see the direction my country is going, and it enlightens me to see what is taking place in the countries of others. The Netherlands has its problems, but at least governmental intrusion into people’s politics and bedrooms is not among them.

I am, as always, proud to be an American, but it is because our country is so large, so full of potential and optimism, and so rawboned and welcoming of new ideas and new ways to see the world. If we would continue to be the great country we are, we should continue to celebrate these virtues and look more at how other people live their lives and how they have confronted the challenges and opportunities that their particular environment provides them.

That would allow us to stay great — not photographing and fingerprinting every tired foreigner who comes through our airports on their way to see the country that they have been told is “the land of the free.” But that is a story for the next post. Stay tuned.

I’m back from the trip to the settled, resolved civility of the Netherlands and Belgium and my two day stopover in the surreal, almost lunar otherness of Iceland. Like any trip, it is hard to know where to begin. I could write about the astonishing juxtaposition of realities; I could write about each of the countries themselves; I could write about the people I met and the experiences I had.

What I think I’d like to do is write a bit about NANAI and the people associated with it. NANAI is the group that invited me to attend and speak.

NANAI is the acronym for the Netherlands Association for North American Indians. It is a small private foundation started by an amazing woman named Maria van Kints and ably carried on by her son, Leo van Kints. Maria is now 94, and the gathering I attended was, to some extent in her honor, though its actual purpose was to serve as the 35th anniversary and annual meeting of the foundation members.

To a non-Native American who must tread carefully in Native reality in order to have any credibility at all, the NANAI gathering was, at first glance, almost impossible to understand. There were Dutch folks wearing beads and feathers (though they were in the minority), there were displays of substantial and legitimate artifacts and decorative finery such as parfleche bags and beaded moccasins, there was a table and shelves of books for sale that would have been the envy of almost any bookstore dedicated exclusively to the Native American subjects, there was a tipi, there were Peruvian and Mapuchean singers and dancers in traditional costumes, there were boards of jewelry for sale — well, you get the idea. And it was all being held at a stately two-story manor in a beautiful, verdant park in a leafy suburb of Amsterdam. To add to the strangeness of the event, at least to American eyes, in an adjacent area of the park was a scamster who called himself Carl Big Bear selling sweat lodge experiences to willing Dutch participants for, I believe, 50 Euros (about $70) a person. Blessedly, NANAI had no association with him. Nonetheless, to an outsider walking into the whole scene, the Admiral Stockton question quickly rose up: “Who am I and what am I doing here?”

Despite my first inclination to turn and run, several facts and elements caused me to look more closely. The selection of books for sale was impeccable. New Agers do not read Vine Deloria and Father Paul Prucha. The people in attendance (who numbered in the hundreds) had, for the most part, an air of education and erudition about them. Franci Taylor, a Northern Cheyenne/Choctaw scholar and practitioner of traditional ways was involved, as were several traditional folks from Pine Ridge, and Dan Agent, one of the founders of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) and a prime force behind the movement to provide free and open press in Indian country. Clearly, this was not a simple gathering that could be easily categorized and understood.

As the day went along, I began to understand. In the Netherlands, the interest in Native subjects does not carry the same ideological freight that it does here in America. Of course there are the New Agers, and New Agers are New Agers wherever you go: they will believe they have a Cherokee grandmother and, thus, an Indian heart, or they will think they have channeled an Indian spirit or will, quite innocently, say they feel an affinity to Native spirituality and create a syncretized belief system that then trails off into crystals and talismen. Some of them will claim they want an Indian baby, a desire which many Indian men will be happy to oblige, and others will simply want to be around Indians. At their worst they will give sweat lodges and charge money; at their best they will be wide-eyed spiritual seekers who truly believe that there is a common spirituality at the heart of all belief systems, and simply feel an affinity for Native cultural practices and beliefs.

However, as you move out from there, you run into intelligent people who wish to know more about a part of American history that has been distorted and poorly told; who are committed to the growing movement to hear and value indigenous voices; who wish to provide assistance and service to native groups that can use financial or political support. These folks are the heart of NANAI.

NANAI itself has evolved from its origins as a relatively political organization that associated with and felt solidarity with the AIM folks, to an organization that now is dedicated to education and correcting stereotypes. The myth of the noble Indian is strong in Europe, in no small part because of a man named Karl May who wrote a series of books that most northern European school children read in which Indians were a pure, untainted race involved in all sorts of rousing dime novel adventures. NANAI wants to correct this, and to establish that the Native peoples of America live ordinary lives with the joys and sorrows of all of us, and live neither in tipis nor on the casino dole — both of which are beliefs that remain current in much of Europe, as well as in certain places on our side of the pond.

They also give grants directly to groups and individuals in the Native communities in America — no strings attached, no controls over the performance of the group or individual other than the honor felt by the recipient to spend the money well and for the purpose for which it was given.

Thus, NANAI is a rather unusual organization.

I got to be close to the people that run it and to some of their friends. We’re all of roughly the same generation, and there is the same cultural grit under all of our fingernails. Paths diverge as we get older, but the folks who were part of the sixties and seventies, who saw the ascent of AIM, who watched the siege of Alcatraz and the second siege of Wounded Knee, all share a common base of cultural understanding, and we all can meet each other at some common place if we spend a little time seeking it out.

This is what happened in the Netherlands and Belgium. I recall fondly, and will always embrace, a simple day riding around the hidden parts of Rotterdam in a funky old yellow van owned by Nico, a Dutch man who goes into schools as a story teller and has taken it upon himself to be a chronicler of his community, accompanied by Leo, who runs NANAI; Franci, the Choctaw/Northern Cheyenne who is studying for her Ph.D. at the University of Leiden; Darlene, the Lakota woman from Pine Ridge; and Bud, her partner, another Pine Ridger who always has a knowing smile but keeps his counsel except to make an occasional salient observation. If you could invent a less likely group of folks, I would be happy to be part of it.

My hope is to be able to continue working with NANAI on projects on both sides of the pond. They bring groups over here periodically and introduce them to real reservation life, and they work hard to bring the truth of contemporary Native reality to the schoolchildren and general public of their home country.

I hope soon to be able to share more about their work with you, so those of you who might wish to join their organization as a statement of solidarity from this side of the ocean are able to do so.

But, for now, I must close this post. I just needed to pop my head out of the hole to let you know that I still exist. Sometimes the act of not writing is a response to having nothing to say; sometimes it is a response to having too much going on and no time or way to say it. This hiatus has been a result of the latter. I hope now to be able to crank out a few posts in the near future, so we can stay in touch in our strange cyberspace way.