Conscious Choice: Remembering Who We Are

July 2006

Remembering Who We Are

Apela Colorado and the Indigenous Mind

By Suzanne Saucy

“The white man is clever, but he is not wise.”
—Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe

On a sunny day in mid-February, I wound my way through rain-drenched back roads to meet with Apela Colorado at her beautiful adobe home hidden in the woods of Orinda. Colorado—whose tangled ancestral roots lie among the Oneida and Cherokee nations, French tribals and Celts from Wales and Ireland—teaches at Oakland’s Naropa Institute and the Presidio’s Wisdom University. Her work is helping students reconnect to what she calls the Indigenous Mind.

Our meeting began with a prayer ceremony. Colorado lit a braid of sweet grass, woven in three strands to represent body, mind and spirit. Because sweet grass springs back when stepped on, it has come to symbolize the flexibility that we enjoy when body, mind and spirit are aligned and acting in harmony. Waving the curling smoke to the Four Directions, she asked the Great Spirit to bless our meeting. Then we prayed together for the healing needed to allow Creation to continue through the generations.

Colorado explained that her strong attraction to indigenous elders and healing is partly due to her close relationship with her grandfather, a bond that survived despite the dysfunctional effects of alcoholism. On the impoverished Midwest reservation of her childhood, despair permeated her marginalized community: Elders unable to speak or write English were shoved aside. Healthcare services were not widely available. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ use of a “blood allotment system” to identify Native claims was divisive and fostered conflict. And because the Oneida had refused to sign surrender treaties with Washington, the tribe was denied government benefits. As a young girl of mixed blood, little Apela didn’t want to be identified as “an Indian.”

Later, in the 1960s when she became involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM), she didn’t want to be considered “white.” But recognizing that being half-white meant she could enjoy certain privileges not available to full-blood Native American brothers and sisters, she became determined to find ways to promote indigenous values in mainstream culture.

Joining the Two Minds

Colorado left the reservation to attend the University of Wisconsin. After graduating, she started working at an AIM chapter where an alcohol treatment program helped heal the emotional damage caused by early exposure to alcoholism and family violence.

While still a student, Colorado was tapped to serve on the board of directors of the Association of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, where she worked with Lucy Covington, an elder activist of the Kohel Tribe in Washington State. Colorado was present for the signing of the American Indian Freedom of Religion Law and the Indian Child Welfare Law.

During the ‘60s, AIM began rebuilding tribal integrity by bringing back traditional ceremonies. Colorado was heartened to see people of European ancestry seeking connection with Earth-based traditions that respected women, children and nature. Yet she was also saddened to see some of these people taking and not giving back. It seemed like the same old song—white outsiders seizing an indigenous resource and exploiting it.

Colorado remembers the wise words of a Sioux elder. He said, “The power is not lost; you are. Hope stems from knowing that the power can be reclaimed. The problems of our country can be solved when the white man remembers who he is; then we can sit together as peoples and work out our differences.”

The elder’s words signaled an epiphany in Colorado’s life, as she suddenly understood the power that comes from “remembering who we are.” Looking back, Colorado reflects that, “There are turning points in our lives that we don’t heed. When we do remember to notice, we receive such a gift. We receive so much information in a linear way. Then there come a few words that can shift the shape of our destiny in a moment and give direction and guidance in staying connected to spirit and purpose in our lives.”

An earlier turning point had occurred when she was working in a native Aleutian community in Alaska as a young woman. Colorado had cut her own firewood and learned to gut fish, and had an indelible experience of “what it was like for the mind and nature to be one.”

In 1989, Colorado drew on these experiences and invited a group of 13 friends—indigenous and western women from around the world—to a meeting in Mexico City to discuss ways to link earth-based knowledge with western science, with a focus on the environment and continuity of our species. The result was the nonprofit Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN). WISN has sent emissaries around the world, visiting tribal communities and accumulating a priceless library of native science. Indigenous science aided the survival of pre-industrial, nature-based communities, and these ancient skills—healing with plants, navigating by stars, plant cultivation and animal husbandry—will serve us well when the oil wells run dry.

Honoring the Indigenous Mind

In the early ’90s, Colorado established a pioneering academic program at San Francisco’s California Institute of Integral Studies. The Traditional Knowledge Program was to be a sanctuary for surviving practitioners of indigenous mind. Faced with the dilemma of how to help Europeans, Black Americans and Jews find paths back to their tribal minds, she prayed to her French Canadian ancestors for a solution. Soon after that, her mother returned from a family reunion and presented her with the history of her French ancestry dating back to the 1200s, giving Colorado the inspiration to create a new program.

Colorado developed what may be the first Master of Arts degree in Indigenous Mind. While most religions propose that salvation lies in attaining an enlightened state, many indigenous traditions believe essential wisdom is embodied in the “normal” state—connectedness to nature, to others and to one’s ancestral roots. Wisdom University teaches that this primordial consciousness can be rediscovered if we are willing to move beyond the “individualistic self” and recover “a type of thinking and inquiry that supports a sustainable way of life and promotes a sense of interdependence.”

Colorado works with groups of mostly female students who research their genealogies back to tribal roots, learning about ancestors who were either colonized by outsiders or were colonizers themselves. The program offers students an opportunity to “decolonize your mind” by remembering, forgiving and releasing pain associated with the ancestors. Students spend time with native elders and learn what it means to remember who they are in an indigenous tradition. Their quest is to reclaim the divine feminine and access earth-based spirituality.

Steven Donovan, president of Esalen Institute from 1983 to 1993, credits Colorado with showing Western academics that “there are incredible spiritual and psychological technologies that we’re totally oblivious to.” Colorado, he says, “has pretty much created this field.”

According to Wisdom University President Jim Garrison, when you work your way back to the beginnings and reconnect with Indigenous Mind, you discover that, “What was there at the beginning is so far in advance of where we are now.” The ancestors understood “the one essential fact that’s necessary for human survival—that the world, humanity and the plant and animal kingdom are all one.”

Because Western civilization has become disconnected from nature and its tribal roots, “It’s like waking up in some kind of nightmare, trying to bring these two parts of ourselves together,” Colorado explains. But she is convinced that “the next doorway to our survival as a species is going to be whether or not we remember what we left behind on the trail—linking this lucid way of living with our fast-paced, aggressive, creative Western way of knowing.

Apela Colorado left me with a poignant question: “If I asked you to prepare a set of facts that was going to be crucial to your children 10,000 years from now, how would you do it?” The old people thought about that.

Suzanne Saucy is a Berkeley-based freelance writer. For more information about Apela Colorado, visit Traditionalknowledge.org and Wisn.org.

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