Blood and Breath

This article comes out of my thinning patience with the plethora of western works on "Indian thought," which do little more than wrap Christianity in feathers and blankets, preparatory to announcing the discovery of some "universal principle." On the conservative end, missionary-mangled versions of Native traditions pluck one, small episode out of an interactive story cycle, wash its bones clean of any identifying features, and then reinterpret it as anything from a "Sun Myth" to evidence that, upon resurrecting, Jesus visited the Cherokees. On the New Age – or worse, "scientific" – end, stories are mixed and matched with breathtaking disregard for culture of origin, with the aim of supporting whatever agenda is at hand, be it a biblical flood; the fanciful Beringian "land bridge;" or the cultural uplift of us savages by ancient alien [check one]:

• UFOs

• Semites

• Africans

• Atlanteans

It is hard for traditional peoples to challenge any of this nonsense because Native Americans average only 3% of the American population and primarily live below the poverty line, with life expectancies of 47 for men and 50 for women. A major consequence of our complete dispossession by Europeans is our heavily limited access to church hierarchies, academia, and the popular press, the very factories busily pounding out these tall tales. Moreover, although few mainstream Americans know as much, it was against federal law for Natives to practice their traditional spiritualities until 1978. Yes, you read that correctly. It was not until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978 that we enjoyed any of America's vaunted freedom of religion. Even so, our religious rights are severely curtained any time anyone governmental decides we might be ghost-dancing too vigorously, again. (The Wounded Knee genocide of 1890 occurred because the people were practicing a non-US-approved religion.) Our woes did not end with the nineteenth century.

Between modern killing (90% of all U.S. uranium mining is conducted, very unsafely, on reservations), forced sterilization (42% of all living Native women have been sterilized by the government), government kid prisons (called "boarding schools"), out-adoption of Native infants, and missionary-run, government-backed cultural genocide – not to mention denial of federal recognition to those hiding out in the hills and the swamps from all of the above – it has taken everything we can do just to survive physically, let alone get into the more delicate matter of correcting stereotypes, lies, and misrepresentations of ourselves and our cultures. There are so many gaffes, so widely spread, that the tiny handful us in any position to start the correction are, frankly, daunted by the magnitude of the chore.

The task is heightened by the fact that, post-missionary and -governmental meddling in our cultures, a large number of modern Natives are left knowing very little about their own histories, cultures, and spiritualities. Instead of the old stories, they have had colonial versions forced down their throats, sometimes, by their own leaders. Sganyadaiyoh ("Handsome Lake") of my people, the Senecas, is a good example. In 1799, he fashioned his Gaiwiiyo ("Code"), which severely christianized Iroquoian culture. Today, the fact that he was completely opposed by the Clan Mothers, lineage chiefs, and holy people of his time is lost in the academic, and worse, reservation, rush to embrace his Code as "tradition," simply because he kept some of the old cultural props, like clans and seasonal festivals. Academia now fawns over his "visions," some of which he acknowledged having made up and others of which he claimed to have forgotten. (As the Clan Mothers asked at the time, what kind of dimwitted prophet forgets his own visions?) Despite these drawbacks, Sganyadaiyoh had the backing of the Quakers, who controlled Iroquoian reservations in his day, and access to Thomas Jefferson, so his Code prospered. Anthropologists wrote it down in English, a sure-fire method of mainstreaming it. Today, instead of being seen as the caving to colonialization that it was, his Gaiwiiyo is lionized in academia as Real Indian Wisdom.This sort of damage makes it especially hard for real traditonal thinking to gleam through the cultural ruins.

In addition, so used to its own ways is it, that western thought is ill-equipped to grasp Native thought, unprimed. Instead of priming itself, however, Eurosupremacy just assumes that whatever it already knows is pure and sufficient unto the day. This arrogance leads to what I call "Euro-forming the Data," or cramming it into pre-existing western schema, whether or not it fits, by lopping off meaning here and denaturing ideas there, until the result feels comfortable to Europeans. Euro-forming is easy to identify but hard to overcome. I have thought long and hard about the most fruitful entry point into real Native perspectives, not only spiritually but culturally, and concluded that our concepts must be grasped through a previous appreciation of our binary math.

As a lynchpin, binary thought is so far from western linearity, that it is next to impossible for Europeans to crawl into it without a conscious effort. Toward the goal of helping westerners appreciate something like a Native approach, I have published Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (3rd printing, 2006) and Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds (2003), especially chapters 3, "We Can Make a Waukauhoowaa," and 4, ""Kokomthena, Singing in the Flames." I will soon have a chapter coming out on our binary gift economics, which I realized only in the summer of 2006 was the basis of matriarchy, generally. Here, I will both review some of my already published material and abstract a bit of my forthcoming materials.

The first thing to understand is something so fundamental to western thought as to be invisible to westerners, i.e., the realization that base number of their culture is One, as evinced in such ideas as one god, one life, one way, one soul, one true love, etc. In the West, the only accommodation of Two is the Manichean dichotomy, under which, if there are two of anything, one must be an impostor, a rival, a debasement, an evil to be driven out in favor of the One Right Thing. In any TV movie about twins, we can be certain at the outset that one of them is ≈ EVIL ≈ itself, intent upon destroying The Good Twin. I call this One-Thinking.

Native traditions assume a base number of Two. There cannot be One unless there have first been Two. The easiest way to explain this is through our (Iroquoian) concepts of The Direction of the Sky and The Split Sky. The Direction of the Sky is the East-West axis, the trail that Brother Sun runs daily. He cannot know where West is, unless he first knows where East is. Similarly, East is meaningless, unless West also exists. Only after we know the Two, may we know the One. It is through their cooperation that the single path, The Direction of the Sky, can be descried.

Oops. Now, there is an imbalance: One stands without a sacred Twin, but not to worry. The trail of Brother Sun is crossed by the path of Grandmother Moon, who normally runs The Direction of the Sky, but who, once every generation (18.61 years), favors us by running another trail, that of The Split Sky, showing us how to restore the balance through the North-South axis. Again, we cannot know North unless we also know South, and South is meaningless without North. Together, collaboratively, they create The Split Sky, another, single path. Now, we have a cross, which looks something like a plus sign, a unit of Two constructed by Four. This is what I call Two-by-Four Thinking, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. The Two-by-Four of the Cardinal Directions, shows the traditonal, tilted concept of the Twinned Direction of the Sky (E↔W) and Split Sky (N↔S). Figure created by Barbara Mann. White (E↔S) wampum and purple (N↔W) wampum are referenced by the background colors.

In Figure 1, the directions are shown as cocked, not "true" (E↔W) or (N↔S). This has to do with solstices and equinoxes, important time-keeping devices in agricultural cultures. For our purposes here, it is important to see the interaction of the two sets of sacred twins. Typically, N↔W-the Blue Lynx of the north (referencing calving icebergs and glaciers) and the Humpbacked Runner of the Western Rim, Flint-are connected with wrinkled things like death and danger, whereas S↔E-the Sweet Woman of the South (referencing corn) and the Sapling, the Strawberry Man-are associated with smooth things like life and safety. E↔W is construed as male, and N↔S is construed as female. Obviously, they criss-cross in the N↔W and S↔E pairings.

The primary halves are shorthanded in the woodlands cultures as Blood and Breath. West of the Mississippi River, they are more likely to be referenced as Water and Air, respectively. In addition, they are conceptualized as Sky and Earth. These binaries are cosmically observed, with everything that exists tending to belong to one or the other, as shown in Table 1. The Halved Cosmos. Male and Female do show up as interactive halves, but it is important to see that this is as part of a larger concept. M/F is not the concept, itself.

Traditionally, people were very careful to know what fit into which category. This included, of course, the two spirits indwelling everyone – not just gays and lesbians, as fractured traditions popular in New Age circles maintain. A person born with just one spirit was feared as most probably criminally insane. (That Europeans claimed to have just one spirit explained a lot for us.)

Table 1. The Halved Cosmos gives an example of how the complementary binaries work. Table created by Barbara Mann.

The Sky/Breath spirit, gotten from the father, lived in the brain and dealt with ethical and intellectual issues, whereas the Earth/Blood spirit, gotten from the mother, lived, depending on the culture, in the marrow of the bones or in the gut. It dealt with moral and passionate issues. Part of spiritual health lay in knowing which spirit was speaking and why. Of course, a life's task was to coordinate the different agendas of each. At death, the two spirits went their separate ways. They did not necessarily reincarnate together. Ghosts are dangerous specifically because they represent just one of these spirits, bereft of the tempering presence of the other.

Of course, widespread across the continent were stylized motifs referring to these concepts. Recently, western scholars have broken down to admit that Native Americans wrote, with two completely independent and mature writing systems in South America predating Cuneiform. There has been a lag in recognizing writing in North America, however, because western scholars do not comprehend that wampum was a character-writing system and that our mounds were an earth-writing system. Nevertheless, our bedrock binaries are articulated in both. Wampum used white and "blue" (actually, dark blue-purple) beads made from quahog shells to create four possibilities for every character, depending on whether the character (or background, depending on one's vantage point) was white or blue and which half of the double-wampum speech it fit into.

The binary shorthand in mound-writing worked a little differently. There are numerous ways of referencing the cosmic twins, but one of the most popular in the Ohio Valley mound cultures was through the use of the square ■ of Earth and the circle ● of Sky. Figure 2, Square-and-Circle Motifs in Mound Writing, shows the cosmic connection between Breath/Circle/Sky and Blood/Square/Earth. An interesting alternative to the very common Circle-Square appears in the lower left center, where Earth is entirely encircled by Sky. Figure 3. The Cross Mound, shows an even more interesting twist, with the circle of Sky encompassed by the square, here as a plus-sign, of earth. Needless to say, this "cross" gave the early missionaries quite a start, exciting some fairly wild speculation about the Jesus's disciples hiking around in North America. (This last is a perfect example of Euro-forming the data.)

Figure 2. Square-and-Circle Motifs in Mound Writing

Figure 2. Square-and-Circle Motifs in Mound Writing shows how paired earth-writing was deployed. Notice the smaller motif including the Square of Earth within the Circle of Sky. SOURCE: Ephraim George Squier and E. H. Davis, Ancient Mounuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys ans Explorations. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 2 vols. (1848, reprint; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), 1: 66, facing.

Figure 3. The Cross Mound

Figure 3. The Cross Mound, shows another variation of the Earth-Sky motif, with Sky interestingly inside the four corners of the Earth. SOURCE: Ephraim George Squier and E. H. Davis, Ancient Mounuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 2 vols. (1848, reprint; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), 1: 98, facing.

Figure 4. Dome and Concentric Mound Motifs

Figure 4. Dome and Concentric Mound Motifs, are based on Grandmother Turtle, who carries Turtle Island (North America) on her back. Figure created by Barbara Mann.

Another popular motif included concentric circles and/or semi-circles. Figure 4. Dome and Concentric Mound Motifs, which uses the concept of the Great Turtle Island, or North America. Seen in profile, the lower arch represents the turtle's back, or Earth, whereas the upper arch represents the Sky above. The concentric motif is an overhead view of the same concept, with the larger Sky around the whole shell of the swimming turtle. In addition to the minor representations of this motif in Figure 2, there are some really stunning representations of it in other Ohio Valley mounds, as shown in Figures 5 and 6, below.

Figure 5. Semi-circle and Circle Motifs in the Mounds

Figure 5. Semi-circle and Circle Motifs in the Mounds, shows both the profile of Earth and Sky as well as the overhead view of the same binaries. SOURCE: Ephraim George Squier and E. H. Davis, Ancient Mounuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 2 vols. (1848, reprint; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), 1: 61, facing.

Figure 5. Semi-circle and Circle Motifs in the Mounds, shows both the semi-circular and the concentric motifs. Figure 6. Concentric Motif in Mound-Writing shows the overhead perspective, only. It features the interesting Lenape concept of onion-like layers of dimensional reality, peeling inward to the central core of earth.

Figure 6. Concentric Motif in Mound-Writing

Figure 6. Concentric Motif in Mound-Writing shows the top-down view of the Sky-Earth binary, as complicated in Lenape thought. SOURCE: Ephraim George Squier and E. H. Davis, Ancient Mounuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 2 vols. (1848, reprint; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), 1: 76, facing.

Woodlands social, political, and spiritual life certainly reflected our binary thought, but it is also obvious in our gift economies, which carefully maintained the interaction of Blood and Breath through field and forest, respectively. The Two-by-Four here was Female/Male crosswise from Farming (Female)/Hunting (Male). These root pairs included other associations: Blood-Water-Seed/Female/Field ↔ Breath-Air-Arrow/Male/Forest.

The math of the gift economy was more complicated than this, including three, a concept important to binary math. In woodlands cultures, three is construed as a number of warning, admonition, or special care. For instance, founded in the twelfth century, the Iroquois Constitution featured three pillars in its preamble (i.e., as things to be vigilant about in maintaining our democracy). Those pillars are, of course, twinned:

1. Ne Gashasdenza

• The sacred will of the people (Breath)

• The sacred power of the people (Blood)

2. Ne Gaiwiiyo

• Ethical Behavior (Breath)

• Moral Behavior (Blood)

3. Ne Skennon

• Peace (Breath)

• Well-being (Blood)

Binary economics are gift economies, interweaving the gifts circulating from the Blood half to the Breath half, and back again. The Two-by-Four function here is through the interaction of the Mother (Female/Clan) and Father (Male/Nation) sides of the culture, with all their respective associations of field and forest, as shown in Table 2. Binary Gift Economy, below.

Table 2. Binary Gift Economy shows the Two-by-Four interchange on the economic level. Table created by Barbara Mann.

Table 2. displays the Two-by-Four interaction between Sky and Earth to sustain life. Although the Clan identity springs from the Mother side, it nevertheless applies equally to the male Wolf clan half. Similarly, although the National identity adheres to the Father side, it includes the younger nations, which are Female. Youth and Age involve none of the western baggage, but simply indicate that life existed in Sky (which refers to outer space, not the earth's blue atmosphere), before life was initiated on planet Earth.

Hopefully, this whirlwind trip through Native binaries helps to clarify some of the more important paradigms of truly traditional thought. It should be instantly obvious that there is no room for Manichean polar opposite, for a solitary God-figure, for singleton souls, or "higher consciousness." Spirituality is not a competition but a collaborative, and no Single Unifying Theory is desirable or likely.

* * *

Those interested in further reading might look up these works by Barbara Alice Mann:

Daughters of Mother Earth (Praeger, 2006), currently out in paperback as Make a Beautiful Way (University of Nebraska Press. 2007).

Land of the Three Miamis: Northwest Ohio's Native American Traditions (University of Toledo, 2006).

George Washington's War on Native America (Praeger, 2005).

Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds (Lang, 2003).

Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (Greenwood, 2001).

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (Lang Publishers, 2000, 2004, 2006).

"Euro-forming the Data" in Debating Democracy (Clear Light Publishers, 1998).

© Barbara Alice Mann, 2007.