There is a great deal of lip-service given to the Native American cultures by the “new age” movement, but little else. Millions of dream catchers hang on walls, and probably an equal number of kachinas on shelves. Little has been done to address the wrongs done to these people, and I believe in these actions, we have hurt our chances to survive.

Who would you pick to teach you to survive with little water and how to grow crops in the conditions projected for much of the world in the not so distant future. My choice would be the Hopi. But instead of a dialogue of heart and mind we continue to pursue policies that seemingly insure their destruction.

Take water, central to the Hopi culture, a majority of there ceremonies are centered around it. They have survived, even thrived (before the white man came) in one of the harshest climates on the planet. You would think that their experiences might have some interest for us, but instead we (Peabody Coal) steals 1.3 billion gallons of water a year from their aquifer per year to transport coal cheaply in order to keep your electric can opener working.

It is a logical question to ask how something so important to the Hopi could, in the time of lawyers and law, negotiated away the life blood of their culture? Well, do you think it might have been the fact that the lawyers provided (pushed on) by the federal government to negotiate for the Hopi, were also on the payroll of Peabody Coal. That little tidbit wasn’t revealed until after the deal, and the company with the support of the courts will not address a new deal or the fact that the coal can be transported without water.

The ancestral wells of the Hopi are drying up, it is projected that they and the aquifer that this culture has depended on for 4000 years will be gone in the year 2011. There seems to me to be a pattern here, the concept of “justice for all” only applies if you don’t have something we want.

According to Hopi prophecy, at the end of the fourth world, the older white brother, Pahana, will return in a true exchange of hearts, as well as knowledge. From a totally unpatronizing perspective, we have got alot to learn from the Hopi and other traditional cultures.

A personal observation, that the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a “ hatred of materiality”, a goal oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature. The spirituality of tribal people is rooted in a deep and unsentimental connection to the Earth, expressed through a careful attentiveness and reverence for particular plants, geographic locations or features, and local differences. This “disconnect” of modern civilization can be traced to the rise of religion, particularly the great monotheistic ones. In my mind we are paying the price for the desire to leave our plight, rather than seeking a harmony with.

If we are graduating from nation-states to a noosperic state, we may find ourselves exploring the kind of nonhierarchical social organization - a “synarchy” based on trust and telepathy - that the Hopi and other aboriginal groups have used for millennia. If a global civilization can organize from our current chaos, it will be founded on cooperation rather than winner take all competition, sufficiency rather than surfeit, communal solidarity rather than individual elitism, reasserting the sacred nature of all earthly life. Those who desire such a world will work to create it.

As the Hopi also say;
"We are the ones we have been waiting for."