Tamarack Song:
Proponent of the Native Lifeway.
Tamarack Song is the organizer of the Wilderness Guide Program at the Teaching Drum Outdoor School in Three Lakes, Wisconsin and the author of Native Lifeway: The Circle Way. He has also written columns for several outdoor magazines.
Originally printed in the Spring 2008 issue of Black Oak Presents, pg. 4-7.
Black Oak: Please explain to our readers a little bit about what they can expect to learn during your Wilderness Guide Program.
Tamarack: The focus of the program is actually more on unlearning than learning. Sure, essential skills such as fire making, shelter building, and hunting/foraging are covered in-depth, but the major emphasis is placed on changing the beliefs and patterned behaviors that keep us from knowing our intrinsic selves. We have tremendous intuitive abilities, along with a vast store of ancestral memories, both of which lie dormant because we have been conditioned to use our heads rather than our hearts.
When we relearn to approach life with our hearts, we come to realize that the core skills are relationship skills. The Web of Life is comprised of interwoven threads of relationship. When we recognize and come into balance with this essential awareness, we are naturally drawn to the skills of relationship: sensory attunement, truthspeaking, shadowing, and being as a question. These qualit-ative skills then provide the context for learning the quantitative (food-clothing-shelter) skills. They are learned much easier than if attempted before the qualitative skills.
Black Oak: How would you evaluate the succ-esses or failures of the Wilderness Guide Program thus far?
Tamarack: Because I don't know failure, I hope you don't mind me reinterpreting this question. A dropout, for example, would typically be viewed as a failure, and the Wilderness Guide Program has a 30 to 40 percent dropout rate. We help the "drop-outs" to see that tripping is only failure if viewed from dichotomous perspective (You are expected to walk; you tripped; you failed).
The way of Balance is to be grateful for tripping because it is a valued lesson in becoming a better walker. A number of "dropouts" have come back to the program another year and thrived, and we have three coming back this year.
I would like to see much more growth in the area of replicating the Wilderness Guide Program, or something similar to it. A rite of passage from existing to living―a reawakening of our Native selves―is needed by every single human who finds him/herself without a vision, without a clan, with-out the ability to spontaneously and passionately burst into whatever the moment gifts.
Black Oak: Your literature argues that humanity is living precariously far from its natural state. What did you mean by this and how is our current lifestyle dangerous?
Tamarack: Over the years I've had the opportunity to ask many, many people if they are truly content with their lives, and seldom does someone answer, "Yes." Our nature is nature, and the farther we are separated from our Earth Mother and Sky Father, the more anxious and depressed we become. We are designed to live in the now; how-ever, our isolation from the means and ends of our existence forces us to live for the future. When we cannot catch a fish or pick a piece of fruit when we are hungry, our only options are to produce or purchase them. Both choices are exploitative, as agriculture and the market economy are laying our planet to waste.
More and more people are saying, "Green is the answer"―green business, green politics, alter-native sources of energy, permaculture. Isn't all of this just a kinder, gentler form of the same old thing? We are still isolated―still reliant upon poli-tical and economic systems, still not dwelling in the moment.So here we are: great masses of people leading lives of quiet desperation. In exchange for the Beauty Way we have taken to waiting/preparing for retirement, heaven, the collapse, or some other panacea.
Black Oak: You have also written that there is no distinction between spiritual and secular life. Given that this distinction is a basic tenet of classical liberalism, would you say that you have broken with the Enlightenment project?
Tamarack: I'd say it's the other way around: civilized people have broken from the Web of Life. Dichotomous perspective―black and white, cold and hot, fresh and rotten―is a tool of the rational mind, used to aid in decision-making. It is hardly intended to be the premise upon which humans base their life philosophies; however, when heart and head are not on speaking terms, the head does the best it can with what it has.
Native people generally view the unknown and unseen―what we call the spiritual―as a facet of a crystal, which is so integral to the whole that it would lose definition and meaning if it was isolated from the crystal.
Black Oak: What is your position on the family unit and the division of labor based on sex?
Tamarack: The family unit is an artificial construct resulting from the breakdown of relation-ship. A Native group moving to a new region does not start a new community, but rather they join the already-existing community comprised of their furred, scaled, winged, and leafed sisters and brothers. When our approach to life is inclusive rather than exclusive, we do not end up as the only mother, father, or child in an isolated nuclear family. Instead, we have several lovers, parents, elders, children, and siblings in a trusting, caring circle of relationship called a clan. We evolved and lived for millions of years as clanspeople―it is imprinted in our DNA. Every effort to replace the clan has failed, and we are miserable living any way other than in clan, and yet we keep trying...
In our isolated, relationship-starved society, gender-based division of labor makes little sense. If we define equality as being equally capable of pushing buttons, managing systems, giving babies bottles, and dropping children off at daycare, the abilities of female and male are virtually indistinguishable.
However, in virtually every Native society, females and males involve themselves in what we would see as gender-specific activities. When someone questions me as to why, I ask the person to compare his hand with the hand of someone from the opposite sex. Usually a wave of awareness comes over the person's face, and no more needs be said.
One beauty of the Native Way is that gender differences span a continuum rather than being black-white. Males with rich female energy will involve themselves in "female activities," and vice versa. The same continuum exists regarding sexual orientation.
Black Oak: Both you and Derrick Jensen have rejected veganism and vegetarianism as a viable alternative. How would you explain your position on hunting and meat eating to a vegan?
Tamarack: What do you mean―some of mine and Derrick's best friends are vegans and vegetar-ians! But seriously, in an isolated urban environ-ment, these approaches to diet make good sense―at least as good a sense as any other progressive "ism." Again―this time with food sources―we are react-ing to the suffering caused by the severing of relationship, but rather than address the core imbalance, we come up with rational solutions that amount to little more than Band-Aids.
When a visitor asks for my opinion on vegetarianism, I will often invite her out to the meadow to ask her opinion on where I might be able to grow my beans and broccoli if I were to become a vegetarian. After she delineates an area, we look to see who lives there. Along with berries, herbs, and wildflowers, we find toads, snakes, mice, butterflies, and perhaps a rabbit. We see deer tracks, and maybe we'll come across some fox scat.
What's going to happen to all of these relat-ions if this becomes a garden?" I ask.
"I suppose they'll just go and live somewhere else," she is likely to say. I explain that these animals have established homes just like we do, and when they are forced to move, they find themselves exposed and vulnerable and in conflict with the animals whose territories they invade. Most of the outcasts die painful deaths, and the land they were driven from is now off limits to their kin.
"What would this patch look like if instead I was to live on the plants and animals already here, just like butterfly, rabbit, or fox?" I ask.
"Things would stay pretty much as they are," would be her reply.
As is the way with rational approaches to things, many side issues could be addressed. And yet they all boil down to the same core issue: we have fallen out of relationship with our Mother and we are trying our damnedest to do everything we can short of just facing our fear and returning to the lifeway we know works.
Black Oak: One of your works is entitled Speech is Sacred: The Way of Truthspeaking. Why do you feel that speech is sacred?
Tamarack: Everything exists for a reason. We evolved speech so that we might share the voice of our hearts. This is our essential truth, as it comes from our seat of wisdom and awareness. However, when the mind usurps our power of speech and uses it to forward its this/that agenda, what we say is no longer our truth. It is no longer in balance with the Web of Life―it is no longer sacred.
When we hear the voices of any of our relations in the natural realm, we can trust that they are speaking their truths, because that is all they know to do. This was once also our way―our only way―and when we return to it, our speech will once again be sacred.
Black Oak: What would you say to someone who is sympathetic to your way of life, but feels too tied down to the modern world to take action?
Tamarack: Fox was young and full of spirit―he wanted to go out and discover the world. And one day he did. After climbing hill upon hill, swimming across river after river, and trudging through endless swamps, he grew tired and hungry.
On the shore of a lake he came upon a den in a great old willow. "This looks like the home of Raccoon," said Fox. "Raccoons always have a pot of thick crayfish stew on the fire!"
Sure enough, Raccoon graciously welcomed Fox, gave him a good half bowl of delicious-smelling stew, and wished him a good journey.
Fox could barely contain his disappointment. As soon as he got out of sight of Raccoon's den, he said with a scowl, "This bowl is half empty!" He threw it down and ran off.
A short time later, Badger came up the trail and saw the bowl. "What a gift―a half-full bowl of sweet stew," he exclaimed. "I am weary from my long journey and I have nothing to eat. This will give me strength to continue, and finding it inspires me to see what lies over the next hill."
Interview conducted
by Michael Kleen.
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