Returning to the American Journey

"For the spiritual past has no objective reality; it yields only what we are able to look for in it. And what people find in literature corresponds precisely with what they find in life. "
-- Van Wyck Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past"

I set up this blog a year ago, intending to make my first substantial post on Columbus Day 2008. I chose that day not to celebrate nor castigate Columbus, but to mark the beginning of the current epoch in the history of the American continents. The forces unleashed by that contact have shaped our world, and us, profoundly.

I found I didn't know quite what I wanted to say or what tone to strike, and rather than move on to other topics, I let this blog space sit idle. The Columbus Day date has arrived again, and I've decided to post and plan to begin posting here regularly, approximately once a week.

First, a bit of introduction: I'd like to say a bit about who I am and the perspective I'll be writing from. I am an Appalachian American and hold a PhD in American cultural studies, focusing on American literature prior to 1865. I have a particular interest in the religious cultures of the lands comprising the United States. My approach here will not be primarily academic, however.

I sometimes define myself as a "recovered intellectual". This is partly in jest and partly in earnest. I am no longer involved in teaching or scholarship and have little desire to work within conventional university structures or the intellectual communities they give rise to and sustain. Though I value research, critical thinking, and the documentation and preservation of cultural artifacts, I found many things about those communities to be artificial and stifling. I am still in a process of self-directed intellectual development, but my passionate interests and beliefs about what is real have placed me beyond the pale of conventional academic discourse. (Through such notions as postmodernism and Deconstruction, which in me met soils prepared by Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism, I have also chosen to move beyond the pale of traditional Western ideas of what is real and what constitutes reason or knowledge).

I am a contemporary Pagan. There are many adjectives that could indicate something about what that means to me: earth-based, Hermetic, magic(k)al, monist-polytheist, mystical, immanent-transcendent synthesis...If you want to know more specifically about my religious notions, I have blogged about my foundational ideas and some experiences at Manifold Oneness.

My next post and a few early ones will address Native American issues, concerns and cultures. One of the reasons it has taken me a year to make the first entry is that it is difficult to know where to begin (despite having taught much of my source material academically) and hard to write about the intercultural issues and dreadful historical realities that attend First Contact between Europe and Native America.

I want to be clear that I do not presume to speak for Native American peoples. I do think that my ancestry includes Native Americans (my first European ancestors in North America arrived in the 17th century and most of them have lived in Appalachia), but this does not mean that I am Native, that I have or should have tribal affiliation, or that I can speak in place of any Native American. Because it could be confusing at first, I also want to be clear that my religious practices do not include any culturally-specific Native American practices. Because I define myself as "Pagan" and "earth-based religionist," I want to be clear up front that in these early posts about First Contact between Europeans and Natives, I do not intend to suggest that my modern earth-based perspective should be conflated with the pre-Columbus Native perspective.

I am a contemporary Pagan Appalachian-American commenting on American cultural history. Everything that has happened to shape that history is a part of my cultural legacy. As a Pagan, I approach it as an open-ended process of exploration--one aimed at helping to understand American cultural history anew, to find elements of the past that have contributed to who we are today and that can offer cautions and inspirations for the future. My tone here, I intend, will be informal but informed.

I am especially interested in using this space to explore the past from a Pagan religious vantage. I endorse ecological, egalitarian and communitarian/collectivist values, and I believe that those values spring from and are best nurtured within a living, evolving spiritual life. The physical, natural world is a spiritual reality.

New Worlds, Ancient Earth

.
For All

... I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil

..........of Turtle Island

and to the beings who thereon dwell

.......... one ecosystem

.......... in diversity

.......... under the sun

With joyful interpenetration for all.

............. -- Gary Snyder, Turtle Island

Before any human foot set upon it, there was the land -- two continents between the poles and parting two great oceans. Here geography, biology, culture and history conspired to create an ever-renewing material and ideational realm that came to be called "America".

As land, people, idea, and identity "America" has been diverse and ever-shifting. The United States lays especial claim to the words "America" and "American," and though both North and South America are inhabited by "Americans," the United States is the universally understood default referent for "American" cultural identity. Its political and popular cultures name themselves--and are universally called by others--"American".

But American cultural identity is a relatively new thing, something that came together conceptually only in the generation after the American Revolution, about 200 years ago. As a concept unifying previously diverse lands and peoples, its roots are in the so-called "New World" -- a prior unified concept or "meme" in the European mind--that began when Spain made contact with Caribbean and Central American cultures in the 1490s. "American" identity may now be localized and most vocalized in the United States, but it begins in an encounter with the whole New World, the vastness of both continents that Europeans first conceived of as a great unity--one new world, and all its inhabitants one "Indian" people. American identity begins with the unknown, with an immense and desirable Mystery that was feared capable of absorbing and transforming all ethnicities who enter it. It has proven to possess that power.

Native America was not a great unity, however, any more than 15th century Eurasia was a great unity--not in terms of politics, language, religion, technology nor trade. In truth, there are even yet many Americas inhabiting the same space. It has always been so.

But before all this, there was the constant witness, the land. Everything that has happened in all the Americas has happened on the land, been sustained by the land, left its mark on the land. The land has made "America" possible, and the land receives our dead. The land has driven history and delimits all future possibilities. And someday the land will triumph over culture and biology and reabsorb the people and erase all signs of history and even the word "America." First and last witness, the Earth shall abide. America is temporary and phenomenological. America depends on the living Earth, which gives individual and cultural life. And so the Earth is sacred, alpha and omega, and is the Creator and Lover of all that we know.

As border and as idea, "America" is a temenos, a sort of temple precinct or sacred enclosure--a real but imaginary space laid over an imaginary but real landscape. America is a physical and mental space willfully inhabited by human beings, a place where culture happens, a locus of self and societal cultivation. The land has been an alchemical cauldron and its cultural history a fire out of which post-Native, post-European, post-African "America" continues to emerge.

But before these meaningful projections-made-real, there was the land.



An Outline of American Geography: Regional Landscapes of the United States
Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Landscape Photography
Geography of MesoAmerica
Glacial Landscape Patterns
A History of Wildlife in North America
Extinctions in Near Time
Origins of Name "America"
Folk etymology and "Amaruca"
History and Varations on the Pledge of Allegiance