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Native American Perspectivism; Part 2 with Johnney Valdez - Ep 117
586 Plays9 months ago
Dr. Alan brings Johnney Valdez back on to continue their discussion about Native American Perspectivism. Johnney talks about how native people think about the universe.
TranscriptsFor rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/117
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction to California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:20
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites. So for more info,
00:00:43
Speaker
about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation.
Introducing the Rock Art Podcast
00:01:08
Speaker
God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
Johnny Valdez: Native Perspectives
00:01:32
Speaker
Welcome to episode 117. We're having the second episode with Johnny Valdez from the Paiute and Pueblo Indians. And in turn, we're going to hear some interesting stories and some American Indian perspectivism, as I call it, to better understand the way in which native people think about the universe. It's very interesting and a wonderful opportunity.
00:02:05
Speaker
Hey out there in Rock Art Podcast Land, we have Johnny back. Here's Johnny. I love that. How are you doing, Johnny? I'm doing very well. Thank you, Doc. So quick introduction. I think you should introduce yourself and then pray over us before we begin, like we did last time.
00:02:27
Speaker
And I think maybe a sound bite about who I'm talking with. My name is Johnny Valdez. And you represent both the Ute and Pueblo people. And you're a highly placed prestigious, well-known dignitary for those groups that works in the cultural resources and sovereignty space. How's that?
00:02:49
Speaker
That's funny. It's true. I've done a lot of that, so great. My name is Johnny Valdez. I am a descendant of the Yut tribe and of the Pueblo tribes. And I have spent a lifetime working on helping tribes with improving their position in the world and helping people connect and get together. So we generally start off with a little quick blessing when we're doing something like this. So we'll start in a good way.
00:03:21
Speaker
Thank you for giving us this opportunity again to speak with people out there in archaeology podcast land and the rock art group. We think that everything that we do is important. And that's a wonderful thing. We want to bring people together, help them see from a different perspective
00:03:45
Speaker
But we should all take the time to see it from a different view. And hopefully I'll be able to bring that viewpoint and perspective to people who are listening. Grandfather in a good way. Bless all the people of the world. We all struggle. There's a lot of things going on right now and hopefully we can have the world calm itself down a little bit. So we may enjoy it. Grandfather in a very good way.
00:04:12
Speaker
We ask you to bless all the people that are listening and all their families and friends. Get them to take a different view of life. Hear it from someone else's view. Smile, be happy, be in a place where they can be loved by everyone that's around them. So thank you for that, grandfather. There are so many things that we should talk about and ask for, but we know that you'll take care of those things, grandfather. So in a good way, we'll continue on.
00:04:44
Speaker
Thank you, Johnny. That was important and spiritual and religious. And I want to thank the Lord and our Creator for giving me this opportunity. I'm honored and blessed to have a prestigious and deeply knowledgeable person such as yourself to come on the show and talk about an American Indian perspectivism on both rock art, the subject matter, the context,
00:05:12
Speaker
the deep meaning and the nature of that particular element. And I'll open it up to you and you can start at the beginning and work towards the end. How's that? Yeah, that sounds good.
Shamanism and Spiritual Beliefs
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a lot that we were talking about the last time, and if anyone wants to go back and listen to some of that, that's probably good. But it's viewpoint and perspective about shamanism, medicine men, medicine women, however you want to talk about those things. They're religious, they're
00:05:45
Speaker
their religion and their beliefs and sometimes they get tangled up and people don't recognize that. They think that shamanism is just nothing but supernatural nonsense or it's just spirituality that people are making up.
00:06:02
Speaker
That isn't how Native people, I think of most kinds around the world, think of it. They think of it as part of their belief system. It's part of a structure of understanding that is valuable and important. So as we look at a piece of rock art, there's an image there, there's a thought there.
00:06:22
Speaker
that means something very specific to some people, but it's also, in a way, art. It's left up to interpretation. These people were putting it down and knew that it was going to be many years into the future that people were looking at this. But this shamanism that people talk about, the spirituality,
00:06:42
Speaker
There's so many pieces of it that are loss or misconstrued because there are so many different types of shaman. And I'll just give you some examples. There are medicine people who are strictly about medicine, some that are strictly about the scientific part about being a shaman. They can tell you the plants and the animals and their uses.
00:07:05
Speaker
Then there's shaman that are for the hunt that tell you the future of your hunt to the positivity of your hunt. You go to them and listen to them because they tell you stories about hunting. They tell you about what you should expect to see and the positivity that you need to have to be a good hunter and to lead a good hunt. But then you also have another group of shaman that are truly about spirituality.
00:07:30
Speaker
about the future, about the past, about vision quests, about sun dances and altered states, peyote and nettles and ants and eagle down feathers, using ayahuasca, all of those kinds of different things.
00:07:46
Speaker
So there's a large variety of shaman in different tribes, and some call them shaman, some call them medicine people, some call them something else, you know, doctors, other kinds of things. And there's a lot of experience that goes along with it. It's not something
00:08:06
Speaker
You can get in eight years from going to classes and schools. Your classes and schools are visiting with relatives and other families within your nation and families in other nations near you and learning from them, learning the process, learning the understanding of it all, the why and how, and sometimes it may take you a lifetime to learn it and know it.
00:08:30
Speaker
And in fact, your mentor probably doesn't know it all. And because no one really ever does, they're just doing their best in a good way, trying to learn as much as they can and pass it along to other people. The difficulty with all of that is that
00:08:48
Speaker
in true shamanism form or in medicine man form. Someone like myself, I wouldn't be considered one simply from the fact that I'm not a member of any of the tribes. But I certainly know the ins and outs of most of our religion and belief. I wasn't lucky enough to be a sun dancer. You have to dream that. It's a dream. It's a process that you have to go through and it's a very big honor to do it.
00:09:16
Speaker
But I have been very lucky to be a historian and learn about different dances, learn about the process and what all the plants and animals are, how to go on vision quests. I've been on them myself. I know what that's like, you know, walking across the sky. They say, you know, you go and walk 20 or 30 miles across the high mountains at 10 or 12, 13,000 feet.
00:09:40
Speaker
And by the end of the day with no water and no food, I'm going to tell you right now, you're in an altered state and you start seeing and feeling things. And it really does get to your emotion. It does get you right down to where you need to be to understand
00:09:57
Speaker
Here's something I did wrong. You start seeing it, feeling it. You recognize that in yourself. And then there's this desire and belief within you that you need to go make that right. You don't need to go talk to that friend. You need to go talk to that family member. And it's very powerful. At the same time,
00:10:16
Speaker
when you have a vision quest like that, there's a lot of positive things that you can do to improve your life and your friends and family, maybe your tribe's life by taking a different look at it. You've gone to a place where you can actually free your mind up a little bit and you're seeing clearly and thinking clearly
00:10:39
Speaker
And it seems illogical, like how can I be thinking clearly, I'm worn out, I'm on my 27th mile and I've been in a high country, my legs are burning, I can't breathe, I can't feel my body, it's just kind of going on autopilot, trying to get down to the bottom where I can get a drink. You start fighting all of those things, but what really becomes powerful is that
00:11:04
Speaker
belief system that you have, from hearing from other elders, from other people, from your contemporaries, you hear that this stuff is going to happen to you. And then when it does, you kind of know what you're looking at, you're starting to understand it. Very much like a few of the recent podcasts you talked about, you know, people see a very similar thing to something someone else saw. And it's because the spiritual belief that
00:11:34
Speaker
you're built into a system that allows you to have that altered state to look within yourself and to see the environment around you and recognize it. Now, I'm by no means an expert in all the different groups within the Utes, just in the Utes alone. There's 11 original bands, seven bands now they say, and three tribes.
00:12:00
Speaker
with the Pueblos, there's 24 different Pueblo tribes and a couple of different languages there. So to know in any great detail
00:12:13
Speaker
any one of those would take you a lifetime to do just one. And to know a general amount about a bunch of them takes a lifetime too. So I'm not here to speak on behalf of all Native people, but I am here to say as a Native person,
00:12:30
Speaker
I see that this perspective is lost, and it gets lost a lot of times with the scientific world, with archaeologists and geologists and others who are looking at it from a completely different perspective. Could you give us a bit of an insight on one of your personal journeys on your vision quest?
Vision Quest Insights
00:12:50
Speaker
I think that would be very special for us. If you're able, if it's not too intrusive, as to
00:12:58
Speaker
What you saw, what you felt, what sort of the takeaway was from that experience and how that related to who you are now and how you see the world. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'll give you a little insight into that. Well, going on a vision quest is
00:13:17
Speaker
is kind of a long and drawn out thing most times. Most times it takes you three or four days, no food, no water, you're in a Sundance, you're in a specialized vision quest. Years ago, obviously I didn't do this myself, but years ago they used to take young kids up into the very high country, drop them off in the mountains and make them walk home.
00:13:41
Speaker
We didn't do exactly that kind of thing, but my brother Chris and myself, we have a landscape irrigation contracting company and all this stuff, but we did a lot of forestry. I was a hotshot firefighter and did that around the country. And when I came home,
00:14:00
Speaker
we went out and we got government contracts and we got a contract to build trails and so we built all these trails and then we had also gotten another contract to fix the trails to do trail maintenance and so after a long summer it was kind of a long summer of doing this work we were kind of down to the last one and it was one that we kind of
00:14:26
Speaker
And we're just like, oh man, that's a long ways. It's 30 something odd miles. It's going to be tough. We can take an extra backpack. We can camp out out there or we can just fight it and work our butts off and get it all done in one day.
00:14:41
Speaker
And we knew that that was going to be a vision quest. We knew that looking at the trail maps and all of that stuff, we couldn't carry enough water. There was there was no way we would have to get water along the way where we could. And we knew a few of the sites we'd been there before were native from the area. So we went up to a place called Hope Creek and then walked up.
00:15:02
Speaker
to the top of South River Peak and came all the way back down to a place called Tiki Creek. And this is out in the San Juan National Forest. When we first started the trip, and this is what's so valuable, when we first start that trip,
00:15:18
Speaker
We get in there about three or four miles in a very lush place, a place you would never expect to see what we saw. Running down the trail right at us was one of the biggest, most beautiful Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep I'd ever seen in my life.
00:15:35
Speaker
And it was running right at us. And it slammed on the brakes. We were jogging. We were runners. We were in pretty good shape back in those days. And we slammed on the brakes. And we were about 20 feet away from each other, just staring at each other, not knowing what to do. Right in the middle of the trail. And finally, he just kind of ambled off. He didn't run. He wasn't scared or anything. He was just surprised. He was running down the trail for whatever reason. And he was like jogging, you know.
00:16:03
Speaker
And it was like, that's very strange to see a sheep jogging down the trail. But he stopped and kind of just walked off to the side and let us go on our way. Well, then we went up into these high peaks and you're talking about 13,000 feet. We've gone from about 9,000 to 13,000 and we're clearing trail. There's a few trees knocked over. We've got axes and little hand saws and we're clearing the trail off, making it wide enough for
00:16:27
Speaker
for horses and people to get onto the trails. And we're kicking rocks off the trail. We're fixing water bars, anything that's happened in this trail. Johnny, let's do a cliffhanger. We'll stop there. We'll pick it up on the next segment. Absolutely. See you in the flip-flop, gang. Welcome back, gang. We're in the second segment of Rock Art Podcast, Episode 117.
00:16:54
Speaker
with Johnny from the Pueblo and Ute tribe talking about his personal experiences on a vision quest. We were right at the apex, the heights of the precipice there and face-to-face with a bighorn sheep. You can continue now, Johnny. Yeah, so we hiked up to the top and saw the River Peak and started fixing our trails all day long.
00:17:23
Speaker
We got to a beautiful meadow out as we started down the hill, our last chance to get a little bit of water. But both of us really, we wanted to finish the day and get it done.
00:17:34
Speaker
We knew the challenge it was going to be. So we just pressed on. Instead of going out of our way a mile or so to get water, we just continued down the hill. And when we did, boy, it started getting rougher. There was a lot more in the way. There was a lot more clearing that needed to be done. So it was really physical. It didn't have much in the way of anything up there if we wanted to get something to eat anyway. So we just kept working our way through.
00:18:02
Speaker
As we started to get down in the evening, we'd started well before light. But in the evening, as the sun was starting to set, your body just started consuming itself. You can feel that you're starting to eat into your own fat. You're getting a little bit delirious. You're trying to stay right on the trail. You're trying to get the job done at the same time, trying to concentrate.
00:18:33
Speaker
And then your body and your mind take over. And there's this strength and this understanding that you have that you keep pressing forward, you keep moving forward.
00:18:46
Speaker
there's kind of a thumping with every step that you take. It's like the beating of a drum and you stay in a very, very rhythmic state. I know we stopped and talked to each other and said, man, it feels like there's drums beating. He's like, yeah, I know every time I step.
00:19:04
Speaker
Like, yeah. And then you just, he'd step once and then I'd step. And pretty soon we were in sync stepping and the drums were beating. And as we were getting down to the bottom of the hill, I was starting to see all of these animals flashing by me, watching a bear walk past, hearing his name and youth, hearing my dad say it over and over again. And then an elk passing by and then deer off to the side, all of these things happening.
00:19:34
Speaker
And then as we were getting all the way to the end, I was so tired and just, I don't think I can make it. I've got to get to my knees. I've got to stop.
00:19:44
Speaker
And there's that bighorn sheep coming right to us, slamming on the brakes in front of us. It was the exact scene from the morning. It was the exact scene, but it was somehow mystical, like dust was flying all around. I mean, it was sparkling and beautiful. And it said so much about what I needed to do with my life.
00:20:09
Speaker
try and do things in a good way and start, you know, not being so full of myself and trying to figure out the importance of others' views and others' thoughts that there are these signs, these spirits, these things that you can see that are so much more valuable and more important than your very narrow-minded life
00:20:35
Speaker
And we kind of stumbled our way the last mile or so. And we got down to a creek near the bottom and slammed our faces into the water. And we both sat there and kind of told the stories that we each had about what we were seeing and what we were feeling and what we were thinking. And it was just a powerful thing to have done that, to have walked across the sky.
00:21:03
Speaker
as our ancestors had done, was just so beautiful to think of the moments that they had probably done those hundreds, if not thousands of times in their life. We had just done it that once, and I've subsequently done it a few more times, but that was just so powerful to think of how strong
00:21:25
Speaker
all of these people that came before us were, and I mean, I'm talking back to the prehistoric times and, you know, in the archaic periods, all of these areas.
00:21:36
Speaker
these people just had an importance and a value to everything that was done. And that we have that within us too. We have that shamanistic ability to reach that altered state, to get that vision quest, to have that future, that past run by us in the forms of animals and thoughts.
00:22:00
Speaker
and it was just so beautiful and powerful. It is one of the greatest things, I think, that has ever happened to me. That's rather a mystical and remarkable story, Johnny, and I have to process that and think about it, but it's fabulous that you shared that with our audience because
00:22:19
Speaker
I think it gave them a glimpse, a glimmer of the motivation and the sense and the function and the purpose of such vision quest experiences. Based on your experience working with and knowing the cultures of Native people in your area, how does that relate back to any of the rock paintings or rock drawings
00:22:47
Speaker
that you're aware of, what do the native peoples think or feel or sense or know about those pictures?
Interpreting Rock Art Symbols
00:22:59
Speaker
Are those too intrusive a question or is that okay to be asking?
00:23:03
Speaker
No, no, I think that's fine. I mean, you know, I'm not giving a specific tribe's perspective or a specific person's perspective. So I'm trying to take everything that you're saying and give you a general idea of
00:23:18
Speaker
of the process of thinking. And some of it, yes, is involved with one tribe or another. I'll give you an example that's really clear with rock art. You see those little spirals that are always there, right? That go clockwise or counterclockwise. And those spirals mean something very valuable. But to certain tribes, they're a viewpoint and a perspective problem. And I'll tell you why.
00:23:46
Speaker
You go up to one if you're a you person and you go to a round dance, for example.
00:23:54
Speaker
We only walk around that circle in a positive direction, right? So we're working, we're standing holding hands and we're working to the left. We're always going clockwise, right? And you'll get elders who really will get upset if somebody wants to do an interior circle and go the opposite direction. Because other tribes do their round dances the opposite direction.
00:24:21
Speaker
So in the rock art, if you see one that's going counter-clockwise, there's usually to some of our people, there's this vision that maybe there's something wrong there. There's something that we need to be aware of or be afraid of or our beliefs have concern on something going counter-clockwise, right?
00:24:47
Speaker
But other people, other people see that so much differently. I know that I do because I have to live in multiple cultures. One of the most powerful thing for Udo Aztecan people is the underworld. So if an elder tells you, well, you know, you've got to go positive, you've got to go this way and that way and do whatever. Actually, if you're underneath that picture and you're looking at it from below,
00:25:13
Speaker
those people are going counterclockwise. They're not going clockwise. And that's a problem for our belief system, right? And so it's not a negative thing. It's just like, oh, the underworld is seeing that going the opposite way. The sky world is seeing that going in a clockwise way. If you're in it, you're going in a clockwise way. And people are like, well, you know, yeah, you can see things from just two perspectives. Well,
00:25:43
Speaker
I'll give you another example and relates to the rock art because you see this happening. You see like an animal jumping or moving and the motion appears to be positive or going forward, whatever's happening. Well, if you roll a log down a hill, it rolls forward. It rolls forward like that animal is going forward. It's not going backwards. It's not backing up. It's going forward because when you push it down the hill, it can only go down the hill.
00:26:11
Speaker
And when you're standing over it, it's going in a clockwise motion. If you're down below it, it's coming at you in a clockwise motion. If you're standing to the right, it's going in a clockwise motion. But all you have to do is take two steps to the left, and you'll see that thing going counterclockwise down the hill.
00:26:30
Speaker
Right, right. And that is something that when I'm explaining this in other countries and in our country to different Native people, they finally kind of get it sometimes. That's like, you know, that's what my grandpa was trying to explain to me. I didn't get it, you know, and it wasn't because they didn't really understand what he was saying in the metaphor or the conversation or whatever. But they're like, ah,
00:26:53
Speaker
This is why native people see it may be different than other people. My wife is from Maine, Wendy. She's one of the greatest people you'd ever meet in your life. She's white. She was living in a good way from the time I met her.
00:27:08
Speaker
for all of her life. She helps people in and out of cancer. She does all kinds of wonderful things. She helps them with life coaching and life teaching. It's kind of energy work that she does. And what's amazing is she is constantly looking at it for multiple views, in and out of these different views.
00:27:28
Speaker
And that's really incredible because when you're able to get into somebody else's thought process, you don't have to agree with them. You just have to be able to see it from their perspective. And I think so many people who have animosity in tribal groups are upset because people who come, you know, European type,
00:27:51
Speaker
that have come here and dominated this continent, they feel like, well, I just need to see it from my perspective. Why can't you just see it from the way I see it? And that's fine. But if you're going to have a shared experience in the world, you're going to look at things deeper, shamanistically, or as a medicine person or anything, you have to be able to see it from multiple viewpoints, from multiple perspectives, and recognize that
00:28:18
Speaker
Maybe we're not always right. Maybe it's that we need to take a deeper look at what is provided because there's probably a reason that people are doing what they do. There's some people that are just, you know, not nice or they're bad or whatever you want to say. But in general, people are trying to move forward positively. They're trying to go forward. They're trying to do something from what they've learned and move into a better way.
00:28:48
Speaker
live in a good way. I don't say great way, right? Because great implies that somebody's better than somebody else. A good way is somebody who's taking everyone's perspective, elders, ancestors, people that will come in the future, they're looking at it from a bunch of different perspectives. And that's really powerful. I think it's the way that the best people seem to live. And
00:29:15
Speaker
I'm just glad that I have a family and a wife and a couple of sons and a daughter who are in that way. They have always looked at things in a good way. I hope that I've helped with it, but I think that they have learned it from their family and their friends. I mean, we have such a wonderful, beautiful family on both sides of my family and, of course, my wife's as well.
00:29:38
Speaker
that really try to recognize the value of others. And it's not just in religion or beliefs, it's in that spirituality of living a good life. Thanks, Johnny. I think that's a good place to stop for a moment for segment two. Seeing the flip-flop gang talking about and reflecting on Native American perspective,
00:30:05
Speaker
on rock art and on the theology, the religious metaphors and belief systems of Native Americans from a Native American viewpoint. Johnny, give us a glimpse of that, if you would. Sure thing.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's a misconception, I think, with everyone that we all understand it, that we all know, right? So the scientists know, the natives know who knows who's right. It isn't about being right. I think what's very interesting is that
00:30:38
Speaker
There's so many things that need to be discussed about how the rock art that we see in the world, no matter where you are in the world, when it's picked into the rock like that and you see it, there's so much power layered into it. There's this understanding that I think is universal. Everyone can see that
00:31:06
Speaker
The world has this view of itself. It just happens. It's happening all around us. As Native people, you can see on the rock art that we have taken so much painstaking time to
00:31:24
Speaker
draw sheep and quail and eagles and elk and deer and antelope and they're all on the rock art and they're in it. But those animals are a regenerating process. They're immortal in this way that
00:31:46
Speaker
that they're immortalized by the artist putting them there. They're venerated, they're saying this is sacred, this is something valuable, this is what we care so much about. And to give you an example of how that works is with all of the Native tribes that I've ever met, there's at least one if not many dances that they do
00:32:09
Speaker
that honor these animals. And, you know, for our tribe here, the Southern Utes, and one of our bands in particular, we have a bear dance, and that bear dance is a very sacred dance in the way that it's always done. It's something anyone can be invited to, but we have a brotherhood with the bear. There's all these stories that we have about bears. The bear stories are incredible.
00:32:38
Speaker
We, our particular band, don't hunt bears. And the reason that we don't is because we see them as our brothers, our sisters, our mothers, our fathers. And we integrate our life around those bears. We'll take one if we had to, if we were required to do it, if we were attacking or something had happened to one. But otherwise, we try to live in harmony with the bear.
00:33:03
Speaker
And there's that spirituality and that harmony. And it's all part of a circle of life, that operation that is so intentional that, you know, these animals, if one is harvested ever or one passes away, it is regenerated into the world. It goes back into the ground and
00:33:25
Speaker
and creates the flowers or the grass that feeds another animal or the byproducts eaten by spiders or other animals to regenerate the world. And that cosmology of understanding happens everywhere. I know that the Pueblos, they come up and have a deer dance.
00:33:49
Speaker
They come to the Utes to get there. They ask for special permits to come here because they don't have as many there. They come here and get them, and there's an honoring ceremony. They come and ask the council for the right to come and hunt, and they do, and they take these little horns back with them, and they use them in their ceremonies, and they honor them.
00:34:13
Speaker
And they give out the food to anyone who comes to visit during those very special dances. And they are part of what helps regenerate those animals. By honoring them, they are regenerated. They are brought back to life. They become immortal. They are part of the cycle of life.
00:34:32
Speaker
they are a part of the medicine wheel. They are part of the seven generations that we look back to and that we look forward to as well. So it's really
00:34:46
Speaker
an interesting kinship that is made between the natives and the spirit world, that there are these, this underworld that might take us for a time that we have to understand, but then we're brought to the general world of living in this circular, positive way, and then
00:35:07
Speaker
we're taken up into the spirit world as our spirit goes away and is regenerated and brought back into the world again by the powerful thoughts and the love and honor that's been provided by all of these people who put that honor into their rock art, into their honoring of the animals and how powerful those animals really are in our understanding of life that they are life giving
00:35:37
Speaker
and that they are so important to us. Yeah. Johnny, that was very inspirational and interesting. I think in closing, I would ask you to perhaps indicate what the key takeaway is from our time together.
Incorporating Native Viewpoints
00:35:54
Speaker
We've done two podcasts now and tried to at least introduce
00:36:00
Speaker
the Native American perspective on, I'd say, a thing called cosmology or worldview, and also how that might relate to the way in which they see the world and how they sort of interact with the environment. What is the one compelling communication that you'd like to introduce or persuade or
00:36:25
Speaker
communicate effectively to our audience? Well, thanks, Alan. I think that's a really great segue into something that we do need to talk about, and that is just simply that, you know, Native people, for so long, and all the people that I've really ever met, really have a standoffish kind of view of a lot of these kinds of discussions. You know, normally they would sit around, any of my relatives or friends would
00:36:52
Speaker
sit around at a campfire and tell you this and it doesn't matter what color your skin is. They would go into detail and they'd probably have better and funnier and crazier stories than I do and that's good because they're all wonderful people.
00:37:06
Speaker
And Native people are very wonderful that way, but they don't come on very many podcasts or don't say much unless it's very pointed or very direct to a certain point. They don't want to talk about their cosmology or any of that in general because, and I think the reason is because most times when they've had something to say, people have used it against them negatively.
00:37:32
Speaker
And you can't blame them for feeling that way about some of it. But I think what is important is that people such as myself and others who had to live in kind of both worlds, reach out and talk in general about these things. You know, I'm not trying to be any kind of professional expert. I simply
00:37:56
Speaker
do have some expertise and would like to pass that along where I can to explain the differences in philosophies and differences in perspectives that people have. The vision of life can be very difficult if you can't see each other, come to a place where you can really
00:38:20
Speaker
talk directly to each other and that sometimes is a serious problem. I know anytime that I'm trying to work with a tribe on a deal or a treaty or something that they're working on,
00:38:33
Speaker
I always try and tell them, you know, you need to come to the table to have some of this conversation because if you're not at the table, you're for lunch because they come and they try to pick things away from you. They want to take your perspective. They want to take your views and try to mold them into whatever they think is valuable or important.
00:38:57
Speaker
And the more that the tribal leaders come forward and speak of their history and their spirit and their story, the better it is for everyone. And there's a lot of good tribal leaders doing that these days, and they're much appreciated. They're not hiding.
00:39:15
Speaker
You just kind of have to reach out to them. You have to reach out there and ask them for their perspective and approach them in a good way, and let them know why you're doing it, why you want to know about their medicine processes, their vision quests. Ask them positively, and if they can, they will.
00:39:35
Speaker
They're really wonderful and they have very funny stories. They're great characters. The laughter and the love and the spirit that Native people have is just unmatched. It really is. Thank you, Johnny. I really appreciate those reflections and I would echo that.
00:39:53
Speaker
to my colleagues, just one short sound bite and we'll close. It seems to me in this chapter of my life what I've noticed is a need, a high priority to embrace the Native American viewpoint in anything that I do, be it the study of rock art, the conduct of archaeological studies, and even when it comes to festivals and art,
00:40:20
Speaker
There seems to be a disconnect unless we embrace and involve the Native viewpoint and the key Natives as participants and key stakeholders
00:40:32
Speaker
in these conversations. And what I get from Johnny is that's becoming much more necessary and critically important, and that they wish to come to the table in an open, honest, and goodwill fashion to share their vision, their perspective, and do the best that we can to negotiate successful relationships.
00:41:00
Speaker
And with that, I think we'll close. See you again in the flip-flop, gang, and thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening to The Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:41:45
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.