A North American Indigenous Narrative-based Inquiry of Culture and Land

This research uses a narrative cultural inquiry study to address the need to save the land our Mother Earth (Aki) and the relationship with Indigenous Spirituality through the topics/themes of Spirit Houses, Sa'be (Sasquatch) and Sacred landscape features such as Spiritual Sites, Ceremony and Pictographs within the geography of Turtle Island, North America in Northern Ontario, Canada. The rationale of this study was to address the larger inaadiziwin (philosophy) of Indigenous character and way of life with nature or “All My Relations” for the author.

Earthing Theology

The encounter of Aboriginal Australians with European settlers led to appalling injustices, in which Christian churches were in part complicit. At the root of these injustices was the failure to comprehend the Aborigines’ relationship to the land. In their mythic vision, known as The Dreaming, land is suffused with religious meaning and therefore sacred. It took two hundred years for this to be acknowledged in British-Australian law (Mabo judgement, 1992). This abrogated the doctrine of terra nullius (the land belongs to no-one) and recognized native title to land, based on continuous occupation and ritual use. But land disputes continue, and at a deeper level, there is little appreciation of the Indigenous spirituality of the land and the significance it could have for reconciliation with First Nations and the ecological crisis. Aboriginal theologies can help Christians to appreciate the riches of this spirituality and work towards justice.

Indigenous spirituality surrounding Serianthes trees in Micronesia: Traditional practice, conservation, and resistance

Spiritual connections to the natural world are fundamental to Micronesian worldviews. Structured interviews gathered ethnoecological information about Serianthes. The kosmos-corpus-praxis conceptual framework analyzed spirituality surrounding this leguminous tree and its connection with Indigenous cosmology, traditional knowledge, and practices. We can summarize the results as follows: (a) interspecies relationships expressed through rituals and oral history guide ethnobotanical practices in Belau (Palau) and Wa’ab (Yap); (b) the tree is critically endangered on Guåhan (Guam) and Luta (Rota). In Luta, the tree is celebrated as a flagship species for endangered plant recovery, while the last Guåhan tree has become a rallying point for spiritual resistance when its habitat became threatened by military plans to construct a firing range; (c) spirituality is a fundamental value for island communities; and (d) traditional knowledge holders and scholars strive to work together toward a co-production of knowledge, using spirituality as a fundamental principle toward respectful and sustainable biocultural conservation.

Ethnobiology of Northeastern Turtle Island Food & Medicine: Summary of an NSIS Lecture

Food, medicine, and material culture are related topics. Securing access requires a respect for the natural laws of the environment. With examples from the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (in Ontario), Mi’kmaq First Nation, and global indigenous nations, we observe that indigenous peoples are natural leaders for achieving an ecological balance with our oral stories that document our traditional observations for millennia. Indigenous spirituality and ecological ways of knowing provide solutions for dealing with climate change, local food, medicine, and material security. With ethnobiology, we awaken native linguistic knowledge, traditions in medicine and foods, and discover designs that were laid dormant by colonization. Native languages and verbal traditions carefully describe a holistic role that applies to the land, while acknowledging all our relationships with water, plants, medicines, fish, flyers and crawlers, emphasizing their importance to all.

Vision questing in the New Forest: Indigenous spirituality in the public sphere and the cultural values underlying the Idle No More movement

This article considers issues related to Indigenous spirituality in the public sphere. More specifically it examines ways Indigenous people have actively engaged in the electronic public sphere to communicate spiritual teachings and to fulfill kinship responsibilities by utilizing their spiritual gifts to benefit their human and non-human relatives, including the environment, through social action. The author takes the Idle No More movement (INM) as an example of a grass-roots social justice movement that effectively used Facebook as a public platform to create awareness and to mobilize social action. However the spiritual foundation of such social action is often lost in the message. And all social action, including the INM movement, has to be understood in spiritual terms. In this article, the author examines the representations of Indigenous spirituality expressed in the electronic public sphere with a focus on the cultural values underlying the Idle No More Movement.

Synergism between Catholicism and Indigenous Spirituality within the Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Program of Takiwasi, a Therapeutic Community in the Peruvian High-Amazon

The association between spirituality and medicine is unfolding as a research theme that may have increasing practical implications in healthcare systems. Both spiritual and scientific dimensions are present within the treatment protocol for addiction applied at the Takiwasi Center, a pioneer therapeutic community that combines western approaches, including psychotherapy, biomedicine, and Catholic practices, with traditional Amazonian medicine. Through a series of open-ended and semi-structured interviews conducted on nine workers of the center during fieldwork research and comparison with the information obtained from literature review, the present article aims at testing the existence of an effective synergy between Catholic religiosity and indigenous-mestizo spirituality within the therapeutic process performed at the Takiwasi Center and puts in evidence some stimulating and problematic issues that arise from this synergy.

„Szaman nigdy nie umiera”. Sztuka naskalna jako wyraz tożsamości w twórczości Jane Ash Poitras

This article discusses the phenomenon of reusing of ancient rock art iconography in modern art on the example of the artworks of Canadian Cree visual artist Jane Ash Poitras. To understand the role the rock art plays in the collages of J.A. Poitras, the first part of the paper is focused on the Indigenous perspective, which provides the clue to reading complexity of history and contemporary art of the First Nations in Canada. Then the painting Shaman never die V is thoroughly analyzed. It is showed that rock art motifs used in this artwork had been very carefully selected and the meanings they evoke significantly go in pair with wider ideas related to traumatic history of Indigenous Canadians as well as ideas related to persistence of Indigenous spirituality symbolized by the image of shaman.

The Jeju April 3 Peace Park

The Jeju April 3 Peace Park was built in 2008 to commemorate the South Korean state’s atrocities toward civilians on Jeju Island before and during the Korean War. Situated in the distinctive local context of remembering, the park reveals its unique ability to manifest long-suppressed trauma through the meanings of both indigenous spirituality and materiality. A national commemorative event has activated the park even further to become a liberating theater of mourning for suppressed mourners. While it inevitably embraces the conventional aesthetics and rituals of the official commemoration, the park simultaneously facilitates the empathic recollection of the tragic event at the uncanny moments of symbolic work that have been mediated through such uncustomary media as mourners’ bodies, improvised props, and local dialects.

How is the Medicine Wheel considered in therapeutic practice?

This paper is a review of research in 2010 and then updated in 2019 which reflects the considerations given to the Medicine Wheel during an Indigenous person’s healing process. While at City University of Seattle in Edmonton, Alberta doing my Master’s in Psychology Counselling I was curious as a Gwich’in woman as to how Indigenous values, beliefs, and spirituality were and are being considered in therapeutic practice. The limited and now growing academic research over the past ten years speaks to integrating traditional Indigenous spirituality, such as the medicine wheel teachings into one’s healing journey. However it does not address any applications with respect to methodologies or practices — the medicine wheel is simply a concept. Through reconciliation many Canadians are learning how Indigenous people in Canada were denied their cultural practices and it is my intent to find a way for Indigenous people to introduce their own values and healing into what is defined as traditional therapeutic practices. My research I hope will open more doors to understanding how Indigenous people heal and grow over a lifetime and how that process continually shapes the person on their healing journey.