Transcript: MARTIN PRECHTEL on Identity and Sacred Rites of Passage /22
Ayana Young Hello. My name is Ayana Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild where we explore radical ideas relating to Earth renewal.
Today, we're speaking with Martín Prechtel, who is a leading thinker, writer, and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. As a half-blood Native American with a Pueblo Indian upbringing, his life took him from New Mexico to the village of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. There, becoming a full village member of the Tzutujil Mayan population, he eventually served as a Principal in that body of village leaders responsible for instructing the young people and the meanings of their ancient stories through the rituals of adult rites of passage. Once again, residing in his native New Mexico, Martín teaches at his international school Bolad's Kitchen through story, music, ritual and writing. Martín helps people in many lands to retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the indigenous soul. For more information, visit floweringmountain.com.
Hello, Martín. Thank you so much for joining us. Hello. I'm so excited to have you on the show and hear about your incredible experiences and visions for the future.
Martín Prechtel Oh, you bet. I was just listening. All that I said, boy, I better live up to it.
Ayana Young Well, your book certainly did. All the books that I've read have made me think anew. So I'd like to begin by asking you to give us a little introduction to the Pueblo Nation and the Tzutujil Maya that you lived with. How can we begin to grasp how these people see the world and their purpose in it, their cosmology, if you will?
Martín Prechtel Well, first of all, I grew up in New Mexico, the Reservation, Pueblo Reservation. There's 19 pueblos in New Mexico and they are divided by different language groups. Anthropologists divide them like this and Native people divide themselves like that. Matter of fact, the [unknown] I grew up in, today is their biggest ceremonial day. I didn't go because of the interview, but it's enormously based on feeding spiritually the world that feeds us. And New Mexico in this area before it was called New Mexico and it was all Native, the main issue is always water. So all of the rituals — and non Indians always used to make fun of them, "Oh, they're doing the rain dance."
It's based on the idea that grief of being a human being ends up being tears dependent on whether or not there is water in your blood vein, in the tree leaves, in the ground, in the air, in the snow. For the winter, we really depend on the snow here. And so I grew up very lucky and also not knowing I was lucky. I'm not a Pueblo Indian. My mother was a Native person from her people, who are mostly Canadian Indians of various and sundry types — you know, Hurons and Anishinaabe, Hunting Cree and so forth. A lot of painful history, but I didn't really grow up with those cultures. But because my mother was, you know, mostly Native, she got a job teaching Indians when, you know, an Indian was an Indian. So she got a job teaching on one of the reservations, but they were old time. I hesitate to use the word conservative. That brings up right wing Republicans which they're not, but they're keeping their things alive — not in a kind of dried and stuffed revivalist way; but with them, it never died. And they're one of the most famous Pueblos for having done that. As a result, they don't like to be broadcast or be talked about or anything like that. There's still no photography. There's still no recording, no sketching — really old fashioned.
When I was a little, cute little kid there and everybody liked me and I grew up there and so I was lucky to speak. They have their own language called Tewa, and I grew up speaking that. And then the thing about these languages is that inside the languages themselves — they could put you in prison, they could cut off your arms, they could take away everything from you — but if you have the language, you can still speak and understand the world in a way that is indigenous.
So that was the main thing growing up, was that my mother was the first person in this territory of the Southwest to introduce English as being something that was the second language. It was always thought that English was a [unknown] language and everything else would be eventually eradicated, which Native people here didn't go for. Thank goodness. And so she was teaching it from another point of view. And I was her test group. She was asking me, "How come all these Indians say this and that? And how can they say it like this?" And I said, "Well, actually, you see, in this language, there's no he, she or it.” You don't have a “he.” You don't have an “it” You don't have a “she,” but you have a woman, female word – another word that belongs only to women. Only women speak it, but all the men understand it. You got words that belong and only men speaking — all the women understand it. And yet, you know, and all these different things. So then when you translate into English, you know, you get kind of pigeon talk which I still kind of speak to be honest. And proudly, I say in English because I never held English to be the sovereign language. I really held it to be a language which I've since worked as hard as I can to subvert into an indigenous tongue which is why I write the way I do.
But as far as Mayan people go, they're very far away. I mean, by my…I also calculated, I mean the closest to Tzutujil. Well, actually, I don't know where [unknown] in San Francisco, but that's probably about three and a half thousand miles or 3000 miles from here. But culturally, it's a mystery. Always has been a mystery to me, why there is so much corroboration of the way of thinking and being between Central Guatemalan Indians and a lot of Indian people, Native people, who are from Central Rio Grande region. Their speech is probably not related. I mean, I think people are related one style to another style, but it's like so remote.
But as far as the Mayan and the beautiful set of human position in the world, there's a lot of similarities and they also have similar history with what you might call the European interruption into their culture, which in this case was Spanish — not Spanish culture, as much as it was Spanish government. And the funny thing about the Spanish, as opposed to the English and the French and the Danes and Portuguese and all these other people that go around at that time around the Renaissance and afterwards, is that the Spaniards weren't interested in annihilating all the population. They were interested in actually having a huge population that pay tribute whereas these other groups wanted to get rid of or enslave the local populations. The Spaniards, for all their faults and for all the terror that they wreak havoc everywhere, actually kept a lot of good records and also made the native tongues the national language. Like in Guatemala in the 1600s, it was required for Spanish to be able to speak Kachiquel, which is one of the most populous languages being spoken even there today and this was a million and a half speakers, maybe 2 million because Tz'utujil were very small, like 60,000 people, Tz'utujil based dialect. And then everywhere you went, they were required to peruse. They wreaked havoc, as they say. But with the English, the things to get rid of all these guys didn't take the land, having the slaves, and then when they didn't work, you know, bringing Black slavery.
So I grew up in a place where Spanish was spoken as a second language, not English. And English was a third language because Guatemala, where I did live for so many years in the village of Santiago de Aititlan, the language of the people was not Spanish, but it was Tz'utujil Maya, and then almost everybody could speak three or four dialects of other Mayan, some of which are not mutually intelligible. And then the men because of the commerce issue — they were, uh, some of them and not all of them — they were the ones who dealt with the outside public world, outside their own zone. And they would speak some Spanish, but the Spanish they spoke was this most incredibly prettier 17th and 16th century Spanish which are very similar in many ways to the Spanish that is spoken in Northern New Mexico today. So it's always been the mystery to why these two places. You know, I didn't leave United States to go find Guatemala. I just ended up there, but I was always so mystified by way to have so much love of the same things together.
So as far as the cosmology, I'm not anthropologist, so even though there are people accuse me of it. And to talk about it from that objectified point of view, I think it's better to go on and it will appear as time goes on because the the thing is, we don't have gods or goddesses in the strict sense, like, you know, the pantheist idea of Europe and India and all that. But there's a force that is constant in there all the time and it's not like another world. It is this world, the other side of this same world. And so the maintenance of what it is we have here in this world, considering our world, is only a layer of a mini, layered world, and it's our responsibility to keep our end up of it for all of the things that we removed from it.
For the Mayans, it is based on feeding time as an entity, and they don't have a word for time so it's called the Walking of Dawns and the Walking of Sun. And with the Pueblo People, one of the major differences is that the Pueblo People do not have the abundance of the land. They don't have these jungles and they don't have so many trees. They have a definite winter here where everything dies back and it comes back alive, whereas in the tropics it's a different story. So among the Pueblo people, they are also constantly having to feed with beauty, to the rituals, their dances, all of the secret society rituals to heal, constantly healing the ground. They understand the human body is not being a reflection of the world, but being the actual world.
So in English, you have the verb 'to be.' German, you have a verb 'to be.' You know all of the romances, you have a verb 'to be.' And so your body cannot be the Earth and be the land at the same time without it being sort of like an Escher thing. But in these other languages, there's no problem with it whatsoever. I remember seeing an anthropologist, and I like to poke fun at them because I have so much fun, because most of them hate me, but... actually, the modern ones don't actually like me, but they all kind of cling to me.
Anyway, I was talking once in a sacred house in [unknown], and I remember this one guy talking to this other, you know, official, and he says, "Well, now what is this over here?" And the guy said, "Well, that's the Sun. That's Morning Star and that's the Mother of Life that Lives in the Moon Whose Body is the Ocean." And he says, "Oh, you mean like the sun in the sky?" He said, "No, no, not like the sun. This is the sun." And the other guy said, the anthropologist says, "No, the sun is in the sky." He says, "Yes, the sun is in the sky." "So what is this on this altar?" "That's the sun in the sky." And they said, "Well, how can you be in the sky in here?" And the guy said, "Yes."
Because if it has to be this or it's not that, either it is or...in other words, "To be or not to be," is not a question to Tz'utujil or in the language that I grew up in. That's a totally different mindset. And so this ends up being a giant philosophical problem for these other guys, where then two year olds in Tz'utujil understand that we don't need the metaphor in those cultures. In order to have this enormous rituality, we have rituals that have metaphors. Whereas in European languages, you gotta have metaphors to understand these big things. And I personally have a belief that this was not the case originally. I think that actually the Indo European language was an immensely, amazing language and immensely amazing people, but at some point in their history, something happened to cause them to become enormously afraid and give them doubt to their language. That's why I invented the schools. I had this [unknown] based on trying to figure out when that happened and how to stop being like that. Sorry, I get carried away.
Ayana Young No—
Martín Prechtel I always do. You're the one who tricked me into it. You know, I mean, you read my book. [laughter]
Ayana Young Well, it reminded me in your book when you were talking about plants as people and not as a metaphor and that idea really stunned me in a beautiful way.
Martín Prechtel [Laughter]
Ayana Young Yeah because planting the land is, or was, a sacred ritual all over the world with elaborate clothing and decoration and...
Martín Prechtel Yeah...
Ayana Young You know, the farm was a temple with sacred monuments. So perhaps you could describe for us this holy connection between plants and people and how the Maya and Pueblo honor that connection.
Martín Prechtel Well, what is not the holy connection between plants and people??? Because all flesh is plants. So basically, your whole body is made of plants, or somebody's body that you're eating was made of plants. I mean, plants are the most amazing thing. That's why I wrote the book on the [unknown] because with Mayan people, I mean, it's just no one talks about it outside the culture, but because to them, it's not like something to talk about. It's just a known fact. And like when, I mean, I even wrote about it there. I remember marching around. I used to be a flute player in the village. Every time the old man and old women had to move somewhere on foot to go do whatever, you know, errand they had to do — had to go with music. So it's always with the specific songs for specific rhythms of walking, going distance or going short distance; in the village, outside. Anyway, I was always there. So I was going along, going along, going along and these guys are really boiling hot men because they heard about a bunch of young guys that decided to be leftist gorillas and they're planting cardamom and they were just cutting down big old tons of hardwood trees which were never supposed to be touched because it was supposed to belong to the Holy Beings of the Mountains and the place that people weren't even supposed to go, except to make rituals. And they never lived there.
But these guys were just sawing all this up and selling the lumber to the lumber companies. So the old people found out about it and they're gonna march up there and see if it was true because no one had actually seen it with their own eyes. And on their way up there, we saw somebody had planted a great, big old cornfield — big, beautiful [unknown] in the white corn. And all these guys that were so mad and had their machetes bristling and everybody was yelling. They all went to their knees and started kissing the field. And the field had been planted by their mortal enemies, you know, next door. And they gave up and went home because once they saw that field and once they saw the corn and they realized it was their own ancestors growing out there. All of the folly of, you know, human I want it this way and I want it that way disappeared from them because they recognized themselves; because as far as they are concerned, they are plants, they are corn, their own self.
So where I grew up...Back to that again, back to old municipal. Exactly the same thing. There are so many, you know...Like, even when we eat breakfast, like my little daughter today, she said something about she didn't want to eat the blue point. She wanted the red corn because we grow....I grew all my own plants here, all her food. And I said, "Oh, don't say that out loud." So, "What do you mean?" So, “You're gonna insult the Mother of the One and God will be sad and then Her heart will fly out of Her chest and next time we plant, it won't grow up."
So we went down to Her. I got my blue corn growing. I got purple corn growing. Some special blue that came from this old man. We got [unknown.] And we're going down there and they were all flagging, all falling over. She said, "I just insulted the One and look!" And then the red one, you know, was fine. So, you know, the people say, "Oh, well, that's folklore. That's cute." You see, if you live in a relationship with the ground and the world in such a way that that is your consciousness then you become more of a human being.
So as far as plants being genetically far from people, that's also nonsense too. All you have to do is become a scientist at chromosomal levels and look at the genes. It's really not as far as you'd like it to be, you know. So Plant is…Not only are we totally dependent on it, but the monocultures have gotten to the point that when you're depending on something, that means it's your slave or your dominion. Like, for instance, meaning like somebody works for me. Okay, that's the person that I'm paying so they're lower than me. That doesn't work like that in Native culture. Whatever is feeding you, and if you're dependent on, that is your parent. That's your ancestor. That's the one that you kneel in front of. That's not the one that says, "I own. This is mine. Man, look at what I got — all these fields." I said, “No, every time you see you have to kneel and you [unknown] because what if you're killed or what if you die at that very moment? Then that beautiful way that you are at that moment is what you become upon your death."
So the idea by living in a certain way in these cultures that we're talking about, that you asked me about — Mayan Tz'utujil and the Kiva culture of this area — is that your life and then subsequently when you pass away, it's supposed to feed life so much the present never dies. So the present gift of being alive in this particular time is called the Belly Button of Time and that is given life by the way you fall back to the Earth. It's like a seed. So people and plant, they're like left and right foot of the same organism, and therefore the way you live and the way you are...
I mean, I got attacked one time by a bunch of guys that wanted to kill me in Guatemala. It's in another book, but I thought I got hit. I actually caught a piece of shrapnel. What do they call it? Ricochet off a wall in my sternum. Made a hole in there and looked like I was shot through and I started bleeding and I thought I was killed because it's right over my heart. And so I said, "No, I'm not going to go panic. I'm not going to go terrified. Just going to sound like one of my old teachers, Chiviliu. I said, I'm going to be just like you said. I got to be exactly what I believe in and what I am as I go out. So I got this great second chance because I wasn't shot through, but I was dying ‘far as I was concerned. So I was going to stay in one piece with that same mentality of being this beautiful plant being going back in the ground to replant the presence with my past husk. And so, it didn't turn out. I wasn't shot through. The lead was just stuck in my bone there. We pulled it out with the pliers, and I was fine. I was terrified for the rest of my life. But. Now, nonetheless, it was a wonderful second chance for me to realize, Yeah, you got to be that beautiful thing when you go down, and all those cultures have that so that you live your life with that and you don't live it to get to a goal line. You live it. So that at this very moment, I kiss my corn. That's what I always want to be known for. You know because she's my mother and she's giving life to my whole family.
Ayana Young I loved the chapter you wrote about the young men running to run versus—
Martín Prechtel They're running right now, running at this very minute.
Ayana Young Wow! Yeah, running to run, not running to win, not running to get somewhere or, you know, to make money, but running for, you said, “the deliciousness of it.” And [Laughter] it was such an incredible word — the deliciousness of running and living for just the passion of life itself. It was—
Martín Prechtel Why not?
Ayana Young Yeah, why not? And if you know, for me, as someone who was born in modern America, I feel alienated from the major spiritual traditions. I know very little about the practices of my blood ancestors so I gravitate towards the messages of Earth-based peoples. Not to glue a veneer onto my tainted psyche, but because I reject the dominant culture and I recognize how deeply it's affecting the Earth. I mean, the Earth is changing under the weight of humanity. Habitat is disappearing. The most fertile lands are now paved under urban sprawl. The blood and the bones of the Earth are being ripped from her. So are there certain Indigenous teachings, maybe the more practical side of things that are being reimagined in light of this altered landscape?
Martín Prechtel First of all, an indigenous…From my point of view, when I use the word ‘indigenous,’ I'm not talking about Mayans. I'm not talking about Pueblos. I'm not talking about any specific tribal peoples. I'm talking about from the point of view of the indigenous soul which is not tribal specific. So it's a soul that I believe all human beings are capable of remembering given a good cultural surrounding. But instead, as you say that, it does not exist. That's sort of like an organ that is not really very well developed inside all human souls. Therefore it's vestigial in most cases. And so it's like growing up eating McDonald's hamburger your whole life and then once trying to develop tastebuds, how much have been damaged and how much can be done? Well, I'm one of these hopeful idiots who keeps thinking, you know, it can be revived. And not only revived it, but some things can show up that have never shown them before. So when I talk about indigenous I don't, I never...I'm not talking about something that was that can be paved over, it can be imprisoned, it can be killed. I'm talking about the thing that can't be killed, can't be imprisoned, that can't be pulled in because that's still the arrogance of Western society thinking it's all powerful, thinking that it has, you know, because the Earth is bending under the weight of humanity. Well, there are humans, for one thing, people that should be trying to be human. Second off, the Earth is enormously powerful and humans keep thinking they're in charge of everything is very comical to anything of the indigenous soul intact.
The thing that people who are worried about it are so tied up with, I think, is the fact that they do want it their way. In other words, they want to be able to have an indigenous soul and still, at the same time, have all the comforts of the conqueror's society you see in places. And well, I don't think that's actually possible. So what you're thinking of trying to adapt something that's indigenous to and that's still also what you're saying is corroborating the idea that people have progressed and they have changed. I don't believe in evolution and this change, that things are going to an apex or that this particular time in life is what we were always trying to get toward. I think evolution is only change. And that what is indigenous is in constant change and constantly learning how to be new, which is why I wrote the book called The Unlikely Peace at Chuchamaquic. I myself, you know, was terrified of all the GMOs and all this and all that, and then I saw these seeds [unknown] all by themselves without my permission, you know, come through and all of a sudden, there they are again. After, you know, if you have to read the book, there's quite a long story.
But so, as far as you know, saying I don't want to co-opt and I don't want to litter the world by putting on a veneer and, yet, I want my cake and eat it too. It's not possible to have these two things. So I think what I'm saying is, is that the grief level of finally recognizing the fact that humans are not here to succeed. Humans, if they are really, really, truly humans, appear to be an indigenous part of the bigger thing than themselves, and without them in charge. Then, of course, then you get all of the evangelical Christians that, "The God is in charge," and that is definitely not what I'm saying, and then it's not just nature. Because nature — the designation of ‘nature’ as nature is also not just Western but civilization's idea that you have nature and non nature. An indigenous view is that there is no such thing as non nature. That is only people trying to fortress themselves up so much with so many walls and so many ideas and so much armors to say, "I am not that." And therefore they live in this eternal, crumbling grief world that is always constantly in sight. So basically, the world that you have now that is seen as you say, "Alienated as a bystander" is in flight away from being at home as an indigenous person.
Well, so how can I be an indigenous person if I'm not tribal? How can I be an indigenous person if I don't know what that looks like? Well, first of all, that thing "I" — the "I" that doesn't know is a good thing it doesn't know because if it did, it would co-opt it. So the point is to be able to go into a grief level where the grief itself becomes pain. So the understanding and feeling so deeply the loss, not the loss of not getting what you want, but the loss of what you love the most comes down to love. Because if the taste buds of the tongue, the wiring in the ear, if the corona and the retina are not seeing fully what is out there, the only reason is because of the language that's being used. But as far as I'm concerned, the first and foremost place that has to be approached, could be approached, might be approaching, definitely possible to approach — which is one of the big things — is with the language. And most people say, "I'm not understanding that." So of course not, because you know people aren't doing it right.
But you have to.....Like, for instance, if you just try to speak for one year without using the word 'it.' In other words, a baby colt wouldn't be an it. A baby child wouldn't be an it. A cup on your new cupboard wouldn't be an it and your car wouldn't be an it. You know, you say, "So what would it be?" Normally, you would get the Tarzanic thing, you say, "My car, he's a good guy. My car, she's a good [unknown.]" I already say that. Develop a third word that doesn't— or fourth word — that doesn't mean that so that you're no longer addressing the world as inanimate.
And then the other thing is, instead of talking about the sun when the sky talks 'to' the sun in this sky. And then it's all, then you're going to be locked up, yeah. In Western culture, you would be. For instance, in Tz'utujil it's always — and like where I grew up, they will say — you know, like when the sun comes up in the morning, everyone kneels — man, woman, child, or they go out and give a gift because they know the sun is dying every day and it has to be said. The only reason it goes is for all the carbon unit that each human being takes out of the earth, it has to give something back to this constant motion in the sky. Western people say that's a belief. We know that it's fine.
So as soon as you're speaking, you don't use the word "sun," instead "Father." You say…You don't say, "Hey, there goes the sun." You don't speak as an objectified…Like it's something there — a ball of fire or something like that. You say, "Oh, Father, it's good to see your face. Good to feel your breath again." You know, "I, your child, your daughter, your fruit, your sprout, the one that hangs on your tree is a little baby bird trying to peck yourself out of the egg of night." You know, all those kind of things people say, and then goes…And then at night time, when the sun isn't there, you can use the word "sun," but when you see the moon, you see Grandmother. We see water, call it My Mother. You don't even use the word "water" in front of the water. And when you see a person in the street, you don't say, "Hey, March, how you doing?" [Laughter] "Hey, sister." "Oh, hey Auntie," or "Hey—," you know whatever relationship you might have. If you don't know the relation, according to age you figure it out which you respect and vice versa with them to you.
So the point is with language, when you get a modern language — what we're calling modern language, it's not that modern — but when it is already subverting the indigenous idea and creates instant depression because everything you're surrounded by is no longer related to you. So if you can just take one word and change that and then you can get going and try to speak without the verb ‘to be.’ Now, I personally like the verb ‘to be,’ but I don't like think that it's the only way to speak. You know, like if you say in Kewan, where I grew up, or in Tz'utujil, you say, "This is a cat," — you can't say that, but you can't say either. Like, there's no absolute nos or yeses. Like, if someone says, "Would you like a cup of tea?" You can't say, "No." You can't say, "Yes." You have to say....You have to describe what you mean. And you have negative and positive forward-moving phraseologies. But if you say what I'm saying, what I'm saying to you right now to modern people, they will say, "Oh, well, that isn't going to do anything," but let them try it and see how their life goes because, you know, it changes everything. How you view the world is how you speak with and to and amongst one another because the main problem with modern people is the only thing that counts as people — and they don't care that much about them so their interrelations between people are extremely sparse because they see them only as humans as opposed to animals and plants and celestial beings and stars and trees. And you could act like that, as you say, and it wouldn't happen. But if you start to actually try to speak in your language...In other words, it's one thing to learn another language because usually when you learn another language, you just translate into your own language. You're not really, actually speaking that language. But if you try to subvert English into an indigenous language, you might find something really different happening.
So that's what I work with. A lot of people thought in the beginnings...I mean, mind you, "So yeah, but we need it this afternoon before the Earth collapses." Well, you're not going to get it. It's got to be slow. It's got to be gradual because if it's fast, it's the gringos at work again going too fast, gonna end the world. So it's going to be slow and beautiful.
And there's lots of other places. I mean, another thing is food. I mean, it's one of the....There's two places. It's music and food and I mean music has been subverted so it's food, but there is amazing customs and things of food that have leaked way back from our ancestry. Now I'm not a big worshiper of ancestors, so I want people to know their ancestry. I want them to know their history. I want them to know where they're from, but not so they can get an identity, but so they can get a real identity that's different than their ancestry. But they can't do that as long as they're running away from their ancestry and that's that's the conundrum. So as long as you're running away from your ancestry, you're going to constantly be what you came from. It's that old cowboy thing. The world is round. You get going fast enough you end up sniffing your own butt, you know, because you gone so fast.
Ayana Young [Laughter]
Martín Prechtel I'm sorry, a little graphic, but I grew up with that stuff. Um, with the food and music, you see, there are places there to go past all the nonsense of the head and go straight to the heart and straight to the body in the stomach. So with food and then music, of course, organic music, I mean…There so much plugged in music and….But when you play music…I know how to make the instruments. Again, you can't just grab an instrument and play an instrument. You got to make the instrument so you know everything about it. The thing is, if you dig and if you try and if you move and willing to go slowly in your brain instead of wanting the answer and just sit in the lawn chair, I hope the world goes your way, amazing things can happen. Now they're not going to get in the front page of any of the imperial rags, but they're going to be there, I'll tell you what.
Ayana Young You've criticized the New Age movement's appropriation and hollowing out of shamanic traditions. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Martín Prechtel The great desire for wanting something that's not the same as these people have been raised with has to be given its due. I mean, I don't think people's desire for something deeper and mutual is bad, you know. And so, a lot of the New Age, we're just kind of lumping it together. It's kind of a broad subject, just a New Age. But....And so it's basically people are going to go and change the names of what they already know, and then do the same thing over again. In other words, if their parents were not raised as [unknown], were maybe raised as Christians, but didn't raise their children as Christians. Or maybe their grandparents were Orthodox Jews, but their grandchildren were not raised as Jews, still, it's all implied inside the cultural way of going about things. And so as soon as you try to become a Buddhist or a South African shaman, then um, you generally go about it in the way in which all spirituality has been treated since you were young. Even though you're not recognized, you just basically change the words and not get the same.
So even in that sense, you know, and it's not such a variable, terrible bad thing, but when you start making up a ritual in order to accomplish something, then you're still manipulating phenomena — which is basically the 10 minute technology. So shamanism, where I come from is not a career. It's something that you get touched with and get called to do. And everybody goes sticking and [unknown] but then you have to because the Holies say yes. Basically trying to give a place for the people when they messing up, so that there's somebody who can advocate their case with the Holies, so that they can make it heal again. That will only occur in proper situation. As far as I'm concerned, in a culture that has an intact relationship with nature or with the wild. Anyway, if you already have a people who are entirely, totally disconnected with their ancestral and with the ground, and, as you put it, with nature, and then they're trying to be shaman...I mean, I don't know how many of these New Age shamans, you know it's coming to me wanting to teach them this. And I said, "Oh, no, no, learn how to be a person first and then we'll go from there.” They don't know how to raise cow. They don't know how to do this with chicken. They don't know how to tie knots. They don't know how to ford the river. They don't know how to get through the trees up here. They don't know well enough not to let go of it.
The shamanism is based on the natural things, way they are and all the myriad beauties of all the plants and animals. I always put things like, "How many feathers does the songbird have on his tail?" And they'll look at me like, "What's that to do with these?" “You gotta know. There's ten.” “Okay, how many does the raptor have?... It's twelve, and the big one says thirteen. "And, “Which one is the one you use for this?" And they say, "Well, that's just something learned." I said, "No, you gotta know this stuff before you're shaman. Little, tiny kids know these things."
So if you're gonna have urban shamanism, as they like to call it, then it's gonna be a shamanism of the modern culture in order to heal modern people in order to keep them in the trenches with the insanity that's wrecking the Earth in the first place, but I have no relationship whatsoever to that kind of shamanism. And the New Age thing is based basically on feeling powerful. And I really, you know, like I never used the word ‘power’ in relationship to any kind of healing. Shamanism is an anomaly inside the cultures that are intact. In other words, shamanism is not what those cultures are made of. Those cultures are made of people who are together and got it together. When they messed up, then they got to have an anomalous human being in there to help them to patch it up the farther and farther they drift. It can't be taught. It's just something that the natural world [unknown.]
It's like two warring tribes. You know, let's say, for instance, you have two tribes that are ancestrally related to one another. You know, some familiar you know, and they're warring and they're at each other's throat. And let's say both sides speak to this One Being that they're willing to speak to the other, and that's basically what shaman is. But if you don't have the antagonist to know what that is, then it's very difficult to just stand up when they say, "Hey, I'm a shaman. I'm going to wave these feathers and you're going to be better." That's not to say that there aren't some people in all cultures, no matter where it's found, who have capacity. That's not what I'm talking about because there are people who can heal and there are people who can talk with Holy and there are people who do all kinds of things with the faith that they have, and that's great. So I'm not criticizing that. I just...
When I do get a little sarcastic about all of the rituals that get made up and done, but a lot of damage is actually done. I used to go to men's conferences, crazy guys like Robert Bly and Michael Meade and people like this to hire me, actually, at times by writing, go-to teacher. They hire me in order to keep these guys from setting themselves on fire, blowing themselves up. You won't believe some of the crazy stuff they were doing because they come from a...They've gotten rid of their religion and their spirituality which has some sort of idea of tradition, but was not really nothing anymore for them, apparently. And they…All these guys coming out of war from Vietnam or whatever and then they were making up rituals that basically came from group therapy and trying to make them look as if they were actually spiritual things with natural peoples.
I have to say this, which is what’s always very unpopular when I say. Gringos hate me once I say it, but... I say it as gently as possible. Any ritual that is done spiritually in a real tribe is never done for the people. It's never done for the people so that after the ritual is over, they say, "Wow, I feel a lot better." The whole idea is for the Holy to feel better because the Holy has been mined and taking some cut and holes dug in here by — and the indigenous people think they're doing that too. They don't think they're outside that, you know? They don't say, "Oh, we're not Western, we're great. We're pure. We're clean. We don't do any of that." No, they feel they're the guiltiest of all so they spend all the time making risk to make the Holy well, but trying to heal the Earth, trying to heal the soul of the Spirit. So they're not trying to heal the people, but the people are healed as a result because they're the ones that are the benefactors of all of this great Earth that is experienced and giving us our food and our lives.
So when you have all of these ritual things that are supposed to make you have an experience or feel something, it's just, you know, very amateurish, that the people haven't been feeling these things by natural world. Others, when they get up and eat their breakfast, they don't feel that exhilaration of just being alive like you're doing — you're a little kid in the world. There's a tree and there's all these plants and people smelling the air and Oh my God, what's that cricket doing? Maybe they don't have that and so they're trying to find a spiritual way to jettison out of the muck in which they were born and raised in, which they are still in collusion with by being this way. So I'm always saying, "You know, best to learn how to become a people. Learn how to become a culture." And then, as shamans are necessary, they will appear, and they will be legitimate within the cultures they appear. Martin Prechtel will not be the one to say what those books look like, but I will say, I think there's enough of spiritual DNA in a human being of any place to regenerate it, given the condition.
Ayana Young And for so many people who are in the daily grind in urban life, who maybe don't have the space to grow food, don't have even the thought process to slow down and listen to that cricket...
Martín Prechtel Well an apple tree doesn't worry about who eats his apple. Apples just keeps making apples. And it's not about getting to the place to where you can have that wonderfulness of being able to be with the trick and all that. It's not about not having the space. It's about making the space. And if I don't have this or I don't know it, make it happen. You know, like yourself, don't wait for it to happen.
And another thing is that human success is still what you're talking about, you're still talking about, "Oh, wow, great, me as a person, I'm going to finally get this." No, that's still the conqueror talking. That's still imperialism. That's still need for procuring something that ‘I’ want and ‘I’ need, and the one that ‘I’ want is writhing in pain. The ‘I’ that needs it is the one that's writhing in pain. The reason it's writhing in pain is because of the fact that ‘I’ one that wants it, and I'm not talking about the ego. I'm talking about this being that wants to possess instead of become the thing itself. And becoming...How do you become it? You know, we talk about initiation, or that you can't just put a person through a program and they become this.
On the other hand, as I said, if you have faith that there is really a memorial process in the spiritual DNA of the human being — which I am just giving the name of indigenous soul — and if you allow that thing to live, then it may enforce something beautiful for the future. The thing is a capacity with grief. When you don't have the capacity with the grief as a modern person, then you cannot praise. And so one of the greatest things is to be able to praise. And so what am I going to praise? “I don't see anything worth praising”. Yeah, that's the problem — what you're seeing, not with what there is to pray. There is always something we're praising in this Earth and there's always something beautiful to hear. It's just we're not hearing. Of course, you say, "Wow, the world is so like this. The World is so like that." Yeah, that's the challenge. See it, hear it. I don't mean to say, see the good in anything. I mean, you know, some guy is raping a woman. There's nothing good about it. Okay, I'm not talking about that. But I'm saying, see what there is to see. See what there is beautiful. And you say otherwise, it's just laziness in the culture [unknown] to be lazy because it's not coming my way, it's the culture's problem. It's not coming my way. Let me have litigation so I can get paid for suffering. No. Make beauty.
And so making beauty....The curious thing about beauty, I found in honor courses, really, they take a slim view of what I say is that— that beauty comes only from a capacity with grief. Beauty does not come from anything but grief. Grief is not about being sad or sorrowful. Grief, it's about having the deepest emotion of missing what it is you love. And so the thing that you love the most you're missing, then you can praise by weeping and by feeling, and the actual ability to grieve then becomes the actual praise itself.
The incapacity to grieve what we have lost as human beings by praising the beauty of it in itself is one of the biggest problems, but you become a human being. You can become a human being in the process of destroying one another, but you yourself are never bound to receive. In other words, it's probably not popular to tell somebody you have to give to the youth which you never got. I'm not talking about money and I'm not talking about opportunity. I'm talking about recognizing watching them like Hawk and then that one little time a 16 year old actually sees the gorgeousness of the sunset on the sea and begins to weep, not for the angst of being teenager, not for the sadness, but for the beauty of what they saw. And there's somebody a little bit older there, it's just…You know what you're seeing is really, really worthy. And then begin to weep with them— not in a superior, condescending way, but side by side. Then people start to flower and then they start to see and then they start to make room for the things that need to be made room for. And that's the only place there's ever revolutions going to happen that can stay because it's not made for people. People are not here to succeed at getting their way. As long as people have been getting their way, they're always in the big old mess. They're always in the big old mess. And they say, "Well, should I just be fatalist and give up?" No, especially not that. It's not a state “to be or not to be” problem again, no. Be beautiful. Be something that God would like to eat for breakfast and then the world is replenished and then you are renewed, but don't do it for that, do it to make the world beautiful.
All these people, I know, I've got a lot of students coming in this...I got 400 students, Jesus, I can't believe. And some I don't know. Most of them I don't know. When the first days, they come in…They come in with these faces. You know, you could...you could cut a shark in half of these faces. They're so angry about the way the world is. I said, "You know, World is not getting better by your ugliness.” You know, “If I had you over for dinner, the food will get up and run away." You know, for five seconds on Earth have beauty and then there will at least have been five seconds for the Earth isn't like what you ain't. You know, try it, you might like it.
The environment is not concerned whether or not the redwoods go extinct or whether this sea rises or whether this plant goes dead. You've done that a million times before. It's the people they don't want — the people who want to make all the money and are killing the Earth and raping all the environment and this and the other thing. You can't have this big city and be in collusion and then have environmental concerns being approached by all kinds of programs and not have that be part of the same syndrome — the flip side of the coin that's making the problem. That does not mean you shouldn't protest. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try for environmental things, but you should understand that it's not an indigenous motive. For it to be different than that, you're going to have to be the thing itself that you want to have. You can't just, you know, go out and lobby and say, "I paid my five cents now I'm going to go home and be in collusion with the bullshit I'm against."
So I'm thinking that in the original idea of your program which is that people are always trying to quote, "Find an answer," "Find a bumper sticker," "Find a way to go." The point is is that if you're only feeding humans, the Holy is fleeing and the Holy is the core of what you're calling the environment, or something [unknown] but people call the environment. And as far as I'm concerned, I haven't found that to be making much of a difference. I don't think it's a bad thing to try and keep going, but there's just the same mentality as running a war are in the boardrooms of all these people, quote, unquote, trying to have a win-win-win situation with this situation as it is, and still fight for environmental concerns, which basically makes it so people have a choreographed nature. They can go take a walk being while they still live in their monetized urban area. And that has nothing to do with, as far as I'm concerned, with loving the wild, and has nothing to do with being an indigenous person. And a lot of indigenous people have given up being indigenous and they're still called indigenous, so we don't confuse those two terms. There's just two different things.
But when it comes down to...well, it doesn't come down. When we come up to as an individual, very few people are courageous enough to do anything they say, but it's not going to kill anybody to give it a shot for a little while or once a week or 15 minutes a day or something, you know, to change their language or the way they dress or what they eat. Things will change a little bit that way.
But the natural world has to be asked and it has to be addressed. In other words, ask the cranes, the migrating cranes, then you'll be shaman, you see. Ask the Earth itself. The people that say, "Well, we'll do something for the environment because we are in charge of the Earth. No matter what, humans are in charge. Humans are in charge. Humans are in charge." Humans are not in charge. The more they're in charge, the more the Earth bucks. Everybody says, "Oh, the Earth is falling apart." No, the Earth is having a flu and having a big flu. Man, it's time to get rid of this bug, it's bugging. And it's bigger than they are. It's this whole idea, the humans are bigger than the Earth. Yeah, but look what's happening. If you look what's happening, you're getting ready to sink into it and die. That's what's happening to it. And the Earth will continue on and the Universe will too.
And I mean, protest bad things. You know, the pipeline going through, protesting it. The roads, going here, protesting it. Poisoning the river. Akkk. Protest all of it. But don't confuse that with a spiritual approach, okay? And it doesn't mean that it's separate from that, but as you have the spiritual thing, you have there wherewithal to do the other. But any changes that happen are still for people, it's not for the Holy. And the people that went here, "What do you mean holy? There's no Holy. You mean Jesus?" "No, not Jesus." "You mean Yahweh?" "No, I don't mean Yahweh." It means something you don't know doesn't matter. You don't have to know. It's inside everything. So next life, bust it loose and live. You reflect, and then we die. Yeah, then we leave something so it keeps going. Different version of time. Indigenous past never leaves. That's the other thing.
Like past tense, you don't have a past tense or a future tense in most of these indigenous languages that are finite. Like when somebody dies, they never leave. They're just always here. Like there's a tribe and what is it....Two weeks from now, this [unknown]. They're all going to go back where they came from. You know, the whole entire tribe goes — 6000 people go. They disappear into this lake where they originate from and they come up the same day that they originated, but just, you know, 20,000 years ago. And then gringo say, "Well, you can't really do that." That's when they made it, yeah. They come back home and they start their lives up. And as far as they're concerned, every year, it's the first year of existence. So, you know, it's different time understanding.
Ayana Young Is time another language barrier?
Martín Prechtel Well, time is language. That's exactly what it is. And the problem is, in Western languages, you have to develop astrophysics to even talk about it. But you know, if you're talking about the things that they're talking about in astrophysics, you can say those in Mayan when you're five years old. It's not...It's not that abstractly difficult to understand because it's not mathematical. It becomes something totally amazing. So it's very important people say, "Well, then all I have to do is learn another language." Well, that would be good as long as you actually learn it, but you can't actually learn. It's the grooves of your mind are already cut with the language that you grew up with. It's only certain extraordinary people can make that jump. So that's why I'd say it's better to subvert the language you already have with these ideas. But you know, you start cutting new grooves.
When you have a verb 'to be' you have — they used to call it in the old days — other than rhetoric with linear time. And what you have in a lot of indigenous languages, you have what it would be called a spherical time. You have like….And when you're riding in your mother's belly as a seed head, you're surrounded by the amnios. And that in Mayan thinking, amnios — the word for the amniotic fluid — is time. In other words, you're floating in that time. And what is that time made of? Well, it's salty, you know, it's full of minerals and they call it stars. They call that stars. And the stars, they're Alltime combined. In other words, things that used to happen or did happen are there. Things that are going to happen are there. Things that are happening are. There things that are never going to happen are there. Things that we wanted to happen in the old days are there and never happened. So they're all floating in this gigantic soup of the ocean of time. And so, as a small child inside your mother's belly, you're living in this mixed time altogether instead of it being a linear beginning to end time, you see?
Then you're born into this world with the air breathing from the water and then you get sequential time. You see, you know when things happen after one after the other, one after the other, after the other, after the other. But they are totally fed by this great big uh, what they call Ocean of Time. And so this is like everyone called it amniotality, but you know, that's just the way that people speak and think. It's not like you know something you got to go to school to learn. It's like everybody knows it. So it's inherent in the language.
A modern language, I think, for some reason, drifted away from some ancient understanding of time because they stopped being nomad. At some point, when they were ancient nomads, they had a totally different thing of time because they are always constantly moving. And when they moved, they didn't like move away from where they were. They move in cycles back to where they were. And so I think an ancient European languages actually did have a pretty good grasp of time, but once everybody becomes settled, it's just like the geologists pulling me on top. It's like the rug at the front of your house where the dog keeps running out. You know, keeps wrinking up up, wrinkling up, wrinkling up. Pretty soon you just have this gigantic mass blocking the door. And instead, if you spread this gigantic, beautiful rug out, you see all of the permutations of time and life lived all in one place at the same time, not one before the other.
And so when it comes down to hope, if you have that kind of understanding of time, then all of this very depressive, you know, "Look at what we're doing to the Earth" and things - which is very true. I'm not putting it down. I'm not saying that, but that's why it's happening because people are always trying to find answers. Everybody whose making a war thinks they're right. You know, no one's making a war because they think they're wrong. They're only making a war because they think they're right. They're only doing this and doing that because they're right. They're good guys and the bad guys and the Left and they all think they're right. Instead of seeing what is there and the Big Time and the Big Mind and then trying to be one of those little pieces of the stitching in that gorgeous rug of time, so that you do your part enough to make it a big care. So you say, "I don't have time." Make time. What are you doing with that time at the coffee shop being depressed? Forget it. Go out and do it.
Ayana Young It is really easy to get depressed.
Martín Prechtel Yeah, it's a sport.
Ayana Young Oh it is.. And I-
Martín Prechtel You paid for it.
Ayana Young Yeah. That's very true. It's very—
Martín Prechtel You can get depressed as much as you want when you're dead, so don't waste your time being depressed now because once you're there, you can be depressed all the time, if you want. I've seen everything I had shot down before me. I lost 19 friends in 45 seconds. I've been shot in the chest myself. Lost my whole culture twice over. And people say, "How come you're still happy?" I said, "Man, I'm not letting the enemy take me down not smiling because otherwise they win," Invite the fascist to dinner. Don't eat alone.
Ayana Young Thank you so much, Martín.
Martín Prechtel If you're sad more than two days in a row, you ate something bad or you're thinking something weird.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to Unlearn and Rewild. I'm Ayana Young. You heard the guitar music of Robbie Basho — "Two Tracks," "Blue Corn Serenade" and "Kowaka D'amour." Our theme song is "Like a River" by Kate Wolf and our producer is March Young.