Restoring our Pre-colonial Kinship Worldview with Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows)

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Episode Description

How can the indigenous or pre-colonial worldview reshape our understanding of our world? How can it reconnect us as humans, as mammals once again? Is her power accessible to everyone? Should it be....?

In today's episode, we are joined by my dear friend and mentor, Wahinkpe Topa, or Four Arrows, navigating the intersections of indigenous wisdom, its non-binary worldview, and the transformative power of becoming fully human: a relation, a kin with nature and not her dominator. We kick off this conversation with a critical discussion on the film "Indian Horse," co-produced by Christine Habler and Clint Eastwood, spotlighting the nuances of indigenous portrayal in media and the importance of authenticity and sincerity when we embrace the indigenous worldview in our own lives. Through Four Arrows' perspective, we differentiate between place-based wisdom and overarching indigenous worldviews, drawing argumentative connections with Iain McGilchrist's theories on brain hemispheres and their cultural implications.

We then challenge the conventional academic frameworks held by our colonial institutes by introducing critical neurophilosophy, merging indigenous wisdom with contemporary neuroscience. This segment critiques McGilchrist’s exclusion through indigenous perspectives and examines the essence of oneness, implicit in the indigenous worldview. We discuss Four Arrow's book Restoring the Kinship Worldview, which illuminates the power of worldview and the indigenous worldview's 28 precepts: nature-based and human-centered worldviews.

Our conversation takes a deeper turn as we redefine hope and human connection amidst global crises. Drawing inspiration from Sitting Bull and indigenous spiritual practices, we explore concepts such as reincarnation, hypnosis, and the intrinsic value of interconnectedness. The episode culminates in a powerful discussion about moving from a fear-based or courageous culture to one of fearlessness, emphasizing the power to rebuild society through indigenous principles. We also reflect on Abraham Maslow's encounter with the Blackfoot people, challenging the Eurocentric biases that have shaped traditional views on self-actualization.

Wahinkpe Topa's Books:

1. Full list HERE. 

2. Restoring the Kinship Worldview

3. Sitting Bull's Words For a World in Crisis

4. Unlearning the Language of Conquest Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America

5. Critical Neurophilosophy & Indigenous Wisdom

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Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows), Image from Spirit of Humanity Forum.,

Conversation Chapters

0:35 - Indigenous Wisdom and Non-Binary Worldview

4:48 - Understanding Binary vs Non-Binary Worldviews

23:03 - Navigating Worldviews and Meta-crisis

33:15 - Redefining Hope and Human Connection

40:53 - Moving From Courage to Fearlessness

55:47 - Reevaluating Self-Actualization and Worldview

1:15:56 - Reviving Indigenous Ceremony and Hypnosis

1:20:43 - Reclaiming Indigenous Wisdom and Sovereignty

1:32:04 - Engage With Wildland Chronicles Community

Transcript

Wahinkpe Topa: 0:40

All right, let's jump into it, Brother.

D. Firth Griffith: 0:47

My friend four arrows, thank you for for being here. It's an honor and a blessing beyond, probably, what you will ever know thank you, I'm proud to be here I, uh, I first ran into you and your words in that. I believe it was published by Cal Berkeley that online. What is it the indigenization controversy? For whom, by whom? And then….

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:19

Out of UBC's critical….

D. Firth Griffith: 1:22

Yeah, A Critical Review....

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:22

You know, yeah, and you know the reason I wrote that was most of the things I write are a revenge to something or a challenge to something no one else is writing about, right. But that was when Christine Habler came to me as a producer of Indian Horse with the film that she co-produced with Clint Eastwood the film that she co-produced with Clint Eastwood. And when the author had died and she continued the movie, she got complaints from indigenous groups in British Columbia and even though she was, I mean, they did prayers before every scene that was, you know, about the boarding schools and hired all indigenous peoples. She really was doing it right. But this is the controversy that that article talked about, and I wrote the article because she had contacted me.

Wahinkpe Topa: 2:21

I'm heartbroken, I don't know what to do, and I said, well, let's see if we can get an article in your neck of the woods because she's in Vancouver and we'll see if we can deal with that. And so that was the motivation behind it. And so it's challenging. And I do make this distinction between place-based indigenous wisdom, which requires fluency in the language, in the ceremonies, and the multi-generational wisdom of the flora and fauna, and we've got to fight for that that sovereignty is so key for these local areas and it can be misappropriated, but the worldview that and I've been around the world with Kogi, mamos and Kukak chiefs and Uralamori Simaron people and as unique and different as their spiritual traditions are, the common themes just stand out and they stand out in contrast, in a non-binary way, with the colonial ones. I want to make that distinction and that worldview belongs to everyone and that's what we've got to bring back.

D. Firth Griffith: 3:48

Let's talk about that non-binariness. In the middle of writing a book and I found myself headlong into the 800-page or 1,000-page, whatever it is Master and His Emissary by Ian McIlchrist, and I've come to this unbelievable angst, like I want to write an entire book, like you're saying kind of out of this, like revenge for something that nobody's speaking about, obviously for a different reason, but just this idea of this two-sided brain, like in the book he's writing about. You know and I'm not a neuroscientist and I'll let you speak to those things You're obviously much more learned and you've felt that space for so many more years than I have. So for now I'm just going to accept that there is maybe two sides of the brain, although a lot of his experiences are in the separation I forget what it's called, but the four separation of the two sides of the brain and he claims that the people still live and act and can still function, which is weird to me. We can separate the relationship between ourselves and what is ourselves and we can still function. That just seems scientifically weird to me.

D. Firth Griffith: 4:48

Anyways, the point is he writes about what he calls primitive art, and how primitive art is the domination or the mastery of the left hemisphere of the brain, which is control and domination and lacking relationship and place-based visions. Right Now he's not going to say place-based wisdom but, like these understandings of the world around us don't, as he claims, sit in this left side and he says that's primitive art. And then he says the opposite of this is Greek art, which is balanced right, and here you see the rise of civilization. And so I want to set this as a foundation, because really, what I want to learn from you and sitting with you is so much. One of the dominant worldview today is binary. We have two sides of our brain. We have life that is what we have and then we have nature, which is something else non-intelligent, non-living. We have this separation. Ian McGilchrist even claims that we can't be one until we are separate, like our separateness defines our ability to then rejoin as one, which is also something strange.

Wahinkpe Topa: 5:58

So it sounds like you're critical of Ian McGilchrist's masterpiece, right.

D. Firth Griffith: 6:03

Critical is a light word for it, but I don't want to show my hand because I don't know what you think and I want to let you lead this.

Wahinkpe Topa: 6:10

You showed your hand, and so I want to assume that you haven't read my critiques of that book.

D. Firth Griffith: 6:16

No, no. How do I find?

Wahinkpe Topa: 6:17

this. I'll dig them up for you. Most of them are. I just wrote one of. I was, I'm an enemy, sort of, of the American Psychological Association history of, you know, sterilizing indigenous women and covering up, even in recent times, you know, the Abu Ghraib tortures and stuff like that. So I've you know I've refused to use APA. You know inraib tortures and stuff like that. So I've refused to use APA in a lot of books and stuff like that.

Wahinkpe Topa: 6:49

And then I get an invitation from one of the premier peer-reviewed journals of APA to write an article on decolonizing Western psychology. And the editor is an independent, amazing guy. And I said, well, wait a minute, I don't want to write this for a lot of reasons, but if I do write it I'm not going to pull any punches. And he said that's what Wade Pitgrim is his name. He said no, that's why I want you to pull punches. You got to say it like it is. And I said well, how's it going to get published? I don't want to spend all this time writing such a long article, peer-reviewed with citations, if it's not going to get published and it won't be if it's peer-reviewed to typical people. He says what if we use indigenous peer reviewers. I said you can do that. He said yeah, hey, long story short, I'll send it to you. Please, I'll send you a free copy. Don't pass it around. In it I must have had five pages of my critique of Ian at his work. He recommended we we can't spend too much time on it, so we cut it down to our couple. I think five paragraphs or something. But here's the deal. Look, bless his heart on, you know, the brain hemisphere, lateralization, it's. It's interesting. I think there's, you know, there's things. There's things to it that are true and important, maybe.

Wahinkpe Topa: 8:39

But Greg Cahetty and I wrote a book called Critical Neurophilosophy and Indigenous Wisdom be neuroscience and indigenous wisdom. Because everybody was gaga over neuroscience and if something. There was one study that was done. I can't remember who did it, some university where they had a page of kind of bullshit and would have people ask is this true or not? And 70% would say no, it's not true. Until they put an image of a brain with light up, things in it and stuff right To associate this neuroscience phenomenon. Only 20% found things wrong with it. Right, that's how powerful. So Greg and I said let's sell these attributes of traditional, pre-colonial indigenous wisdom generosity, humility, honesty, courage, deceit and show how we'll get our neuroscientists from our university who are getting their degree in neuropsychology of the art documents and studies and then we'll talk about how they prove indigenous worldviews importance. Well, we get the documents back and there were things like a laboratory experiment and a playing Monopoly where if you were tapped on the shoulder you'd give your monopoly money to somebody and then your brain was all wired up to see what that act of generosity even a questionable generosity. But what they concluded even from that was because one little place in the brain lit up. It happened to be the same place where a selfishness experiment showed it lit up. So they write this peer-reviewed article saying there's no such thing as altruistic generosity. All acts of generosity are ultimately about selfish, getting something back on Same thing with honesty.

Wahinkpe Topa: 10:49

Tom Cooper wrote a book called A Time Before Deception. The Lakota used to do ceremonies of healing when treaties were first broke because we thought it was a mental illness, right. And so here's this other study showing that now deception is an important human survival mechanism. So Greg and I said what are we going to do? And we decided let's just change the name. So we coined the term critical neurophilosophy.

Wahinkpe Topa: 11:18

All right, so you can see how that ties into Ian's work. What he did to me was really tragic because in real life he and one of his podcast did refer to it the indigenous culture as having been immune to the problems that he rightfully was describing. You know, of what's happening in our world. That's a good part of the book, right? But 2,500 pages of not acknowledging 99% of human history. You know all these pages and in my critiques I've referenced his sources. His sources were a book on the American founders who talked about this one reference he does to a Iroquois twin hero story which he misrepresents.

Wahinkpe Topa: 12:33

If he had studied and realized that the twin hero stories are the ultimate description of this non-binary worldview. They're the ultimate description because no matter how different the two are, they're always. Whether it's a boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl, no matter how different, no matter how much they even argue, complementarity is the ultimate. I often give the story of the Namaho Dene story, where the two come to the father and monster slayer is the solar twin, child born of the water is the lunar twin, and that's the representation in all of these. It's just solar and lunar. It's rarely masculine and feminine and the goal was for the two to become four the solar and lunar, and both, and so the monsters, of course, are those things that humans have a potential for jealousy, greed, et cetera.

Wahinkpe Topa: 13:39

Right Now, you can't romanticize it. You know indigenous peoples because they knew that this was a potential for all and their origin stories say so. Their origin stories are all about the horrible things that we do, but they're told to say we've got to remember the teachings of the animals and the trees and the mountains, and so, and they did it, we did that without you know polluting water. I mean, what was the study in the Amazon rain bases of 13,000 years? Tremendous impact of humans. We have impact, just like the beetles, right, but no negative pollution of air or water.

Wahinkpe Topa: 14:23

You know black earth, and so this twin idea is very complex and very difficult to understand. I'm so happy you brought it up and showed how the goat crust hardly doesn't get it. And even my very pro-indigenous liberal friends when they see my worldview chart they see it. Oh, this is a rigid binary for us. You can't do that right. Well, things are binary. We do have cold and hot and in and out, and this is how humans see the world. We don't see the world. But the non-binary, you know, and you know a Western psychologist like Carl Jung, you know, also talked about this union of opposites. But probably Hilary Webb's dissertation does the best on the Andean concept of theonatan. But in essence what it means is that ultimately life is symbiotic.

Wahinkpe Topa: 15:34

Even Darwin said this and when he talked about his theory of evolution he said look of evolution. He said look, this is a long-term process of adaptation that I'm going to talk about and it in no way changes the fact that the earth is based on mutual aid. And then Peter Kropotkin I never can pronounce that right wrote a book called Mutual Aid, right, at the same time saying that all these neo-Darwinists who are looking at survival of the fittest and dog eat dog and all of that, are totally not getting it. So how do we do this? We can talk about, but it means that I'll give you one example on the worldview chart. That, like I'll give you one example on the worldview chart, the dominant manifestation in our education, our religions, our cultures, our economics is a low respect for women.

Wahinkpe Topa: 16:33

That doesn't mean everybody has it, but you know, the worldview chart is contrasting worldview, moral precepts that generally manifest themselves and the culture, and so a low respect for women is pretty acknowledged in the research, that that's pretty themselves in the culture. And so low respect for women is pretty acknowledged in the research, that that's pretty much defining the Western Eurocentric worldview. High respect for women matriarchies are generally assigned to our indigenous traditional cultures. Well, someone can look at that and go, well, yeah, I'm talking about a liberal person who was really on the side of indigene, looking at, studying and understanding the concept of low respect for women. Knowing where it is empowers you to do the high respect right.

Wahinkpe Topa: 17:36

So you know, but that's an extreme example. Most of them, like let's take hierarchy, you know, indigenous cultures manifest an almost non-hierarchical system, except during buffalo hunts, the Lakota, which are patriarchal, non-hierarchical. When the buffalo hunt comes, they become hierarchical and they say this is, you know, the leader, he's the top guy and he's going to, you know, and then they choose a different leader the next hunt or whatever, and it changes again, right? So some of these are more like a continuum, right.

D. Firth Griffith: 18:40

And we have to foot in both of them and we've got to understand the balance. So it's complex and it's just brilliant that you opened our conversation up. Message that he's getting at is we are not at war with something deep. Rather, it is the mastery of our left hemisphere over our right. That's what we need to consider. It's not a problem of civilization. It's not a problem about the genocide, the colonization, the termination of an indigenous worldview 10,000 years ago till today, we don't have to look at ourselves. We don't have to actually truly start asking these deeper questions. Rather, we just have to start letting our right brain dominate Like that's the solution, and so it's off-putting or othering right, putting this other idea over there and calling it another that we don't have to consider the role of place-based wisdom and the role of indigenous worldviews and everything else, and focusing on something that is like easily controllable.

Wahinkpe Topa: 19:31

It's just the end of language, is just the exact opposite of mastery. You know I can share with you one doctoral dissertation that you know doesn't give a conclusive response to this, but I have to share it with you. It was a long time ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago. It was a South Korean student who had access to MRI machines in South Korea because her uncle was a neuroscientist to do a Savara yoga thing about nostril breathing and had the theory that the right brain hemisphere correlated with the left nostril dominance, et cetera, and the opposite, and that if someone was stressed, something would happen that was out of balance and if someone was unstressed, something would happen that was in balance, with both nostrils having the same freedom of breath. And so what she did is she created a little film called Simple Sounds and Sights of Nature Little brook and tree and little rabbits and stuff like that. And then she had a segment of Al Gore's film, an Inconvenient Truth, where they pulled the ice core out and it showed we're in bad shape. This is scary. And in the machine she had buttons where if your right nostril is dominant, you press one button. Vice versa, based on watching each of the films, and so you know, when it was all over with it turned out that her theory had been right, or the ancient Suvara yoga theory had been right or the ancient Suvara yoga theory had been right.

Wahinkpe Topa: 21:26

But what blew the minds of everybody except kind of her and I kind of slapped hands right, all the neuroscientists they're looking at it and they go wow Was when they watched the scary film of the ice core. Both parts, the Corpus Colossum, was pretty blacked out. That joins the hemispheres and the two hemispheres had little places of light where the pituitary gland kind of lit up. Different places were lighting up on both sides of the brain, showing stress, but on both sides. Then when they were really calm and they were watching this beautiful little film, what happened was both sides of the brain completely black, no activity, but the corpus callosum was lit up like the Golden Gate Bridge and I just kind of want to tie that.

Wahinkpe Topa: 22:23

I didn't really tie that to McGillicrust until this moment, right, but I mean it kind of want to tie that. I didn't really tie that to McGillicrush until this moment, right, but I mean it kind of totally blows his thing out of the water. It shows that these two agencies are working in a complementary way that, ultimately, the bottom line is in the bridge between them. I mean, you know so, I wish that particular study would be replicated, or whatever I think it. You know so, I wish that particular study would be replicated or whatever.

Wahinkpe Topa: 22:47

I think it's kind of a sidebar on. That is, I participated as a subject also, as also the chair of the committee, and when I got out, the scientists were looking at my brain waves and they were. They were like going in their language. They were like going, you know, in their language. They were like shocked and and I thought, oh shit, I gotta, I gotta break too, first.

Wahinkpe Topa: 23:13

I was about 65 at the time and uh, and so I I called over uh, the zhang min, who was our actually a third co-author of the book. I should have mentioned him, but I said what's going on here? And he went and talked to them and it turned out what it is. As you get older, those worms of gray matter. It's separated more and more and more and more, so you can tell someone's age by how tight they are. A young person they're very tight, so apparently mine were as tight as a 40-year-old and the reason for that is that the more thinking you do, the more creative you are. That kind of stuff, the less space goes. That's just a sidebar. Yeah, excuse me.

D. Firth Griffith: 24:06

Yeah, well, it's just, you know, in your book, which I have here and I don't want to let another minute go by without telling you know this is one of my favorite books of all time it truly is Restoring the Kinship Worldview that you co-authored. I think it came out two years ago, three years ago, oh, thank you. Out 28 indigenous precepts in the copy. But in the intro we dive into this understanding what a worldview is historically and you talk about Immanuel Kant, you bring up Heidegger I think you mentioned that he says it's world intuition and then you quickly redefine it to like a world sense. Quickly, let's unpack this idea of worldview, because we've been using it, and then get into how this affects this understanding of this non-binary world.

Wahinkpe Topa: 25:10

Yeah, in my 19, I think, maybe 2008 book it was Unlearning the Language of Conquest, university of Texas published I had a chapter of. You know, I had Vine Deloria Jr and a whole number of people submit chapters it was his last chapter, by the way. Wow, and I had a guy I said you know what I hate the word worldview. Would you end this by saying that my use of this throughout the book deserves skepticism? So he did, and he did a good job of it, because indigeneity is really about beingness in the world and this idea, this European, eurocentric idea of seeingness, is in itself colonial. And yet I stick, and Darshan and I when I told her about this story, you know. And yet I stick, and Darshan and I when we, when I told her about this story, when I invited her to co-author the book with me I thought you just referred to. You know, we came up with Existence Scape, which we borrowed from somebody. We came up with Cosmovision. You know, none of them really worked because the literature has grown so much since Weltanschauung and the German people that brought that forth it really has. And then Robert Redfield and his work saying there's really only two worldviews. If you look at conversations that really go deeply. If you look at conversations that really go deeply, they always talk about well, nature-based versus human-centered, materialism versus spiritual, and they come up with and he says there's really essentially two tragedy of human history was the overshadowing of what he calls the metropolitan worldview, which I'm calling the dominant Western, eurocentric one, that that overshadowing of what he called the primal one is the greatest tragedy in human history. And this is out of the University of Chicago and he's considered the father of social anthropology and I really you know that's my shtick you know that cultures, philosophies and religions can all be placed under one of these two worldviews and I've shown that in my research has gotten to be understood more or less as the relationship of humans to humans, humans to other forms of nature and humans to the sense of what happens when we die, right, and then the moral precepts that those understandings bring forth are the basic kinds of easy-to-understand ways of being that our worldview chart does. We just got a grant for the Veterans for Peace I'll announce it here the first organization, I think, in the world to do this.

Wahinkpe Topa: 28:21

Two years ago I keynoted the Veterans for Peace, I founded Chapter 108 and talked about worldview and they really got it and most of them are kind of old white guys, right, but they got it because of where they've been and where they're going and where to go. So now I've been invited to come back again, but this time with a grant that we got for them, where they're going to look at the worldview chart, and now we've got it up to 50 precepts Darsh and I added 10 to the ones that I originally did and the Red Road, and they're going to study them for like 10 minutes a day, that's all. Study them for like 10 minutes a day, that's all. And they're going to see where am I? And with the problems I'm having with my chapter meetings, with our goals of bringing peace into the world, or with my own personal lack of peace or peace in the world, where am I out of balance at in this continuum between the dominant and the indigenous? And just with 10 minutes a day. We're asking them to do this and and at meetings, we're asking them to start out with having a poster on the wall which people can get from Kindred Media and let's see if anything happens.

Wahinkpe Topa: 29:35

Right, and the reason that I wanted to do this and it starts in about a month is a couple of my doctor students have done similar things. One of them was a director of an institute where people were working adult people were working with adult mentally ill people and were suffering from compassion fatigue and diagnosed with it and burning out. He did a similar thing with worldview reflection and practice and using trance-based learning to make the changes, which is what ceremony is. We've known that for 99% of human history and by golly he got statistically significant with his psychometric reductions in compassion fatigue just by looking at these fundamental beliefs that guide us in the world, and so that's why I think you know UC Berkeley I think there's Science Center for the Greater Good selected that book you're talking about as one of the most thought-provoking, inspiring and practical science books of 2022. And I hadn't thought of it as science, but it is, and worldview science, I think, is starting to really emerge. Some top people have said it's probably the most important thing we're not looking at science.

D. Firth Griffith: 31:07

I mean, I think today it's being prostrated before us as this savior to what we popularly call the meta crisis, which is a term mcgill chris uses quite often. Um, I'm not saying it's a bad term. What I'm saying it's a connecting term between the conversations and the threads that we've been enjoying here. I wanted to to ask you. About a year ago, I reached out to you because I was in the middle of writing another book and I was coming to the conclusion that we can't save the world, and I wasn't okay with my conclusion that maybe it's too late, that civilization is run amok, that civilization is run amok and trying to engineer new stories, new creative solutions, new energies, new technologies to save the world that we perceive to be around us, which often feels increasingly like a fake world that we have constructed, and I think you and I would agree on that. It's disheartening, and you said something to me that changed my life life and we don't have to repeat it here.

D. Firth Griffith: 32:07

But I want to start unpacking this side of the conversation because if there's only two worldviews and I agree with you and let's just take that as as the foundation to the question the first worldview is that humanity and nature are one and cannot be separated, and that it is intelligent and wonderful. And the second worldview is that humanity and nature are not one, cannot be separated, and that it is intelligent and wonderful. And the second worldview is that humanity and nature are not one and that we are separated, and that we are animate and intelligent. And nature that surrounds us the tree outside of my window or whatever it is is not animate and not intelligent. What do you think about the arguments and energies around solving this quote unquote metacrisis that we live in today? Are they a waste of time? Do they have good energies to them? What is the role that either indigenous worldview, as we've discussed here, or even place-based knowledge and indigenous ancestral wisdom can play in regard to our understanding of our current moment?

Wahinkpe Topa: 33:03

Wow, that is a powerful question. It's a big one, sorry, it's a big one, and I think my answer is going to maybe be a disappointment to some of your listeners. It was when I, right before the COVID hit, I was presenting at the University of British Columbia's college of education and I, at the end, they asked me a similar question. They said so do you think we can turn things around if we? Um, you know, and this might've been, I think, what we talked about, but you think we can turn, turn around things? And it just came out of me. Uh, and, as I think I told you, they went from loving me to hating me in that second and their hands went up.

Wahinkpe Topa: 33:55

Why are you here? You know your book profits go to. You know indigenous causes. Why are you writing books? You're traveling, you know.

Wahinkpe Topa: 34:06

Well, I said I'm going to quote Sitting Bull. I said I'm going to quote Sitting Bull, and Sitting Bull was asked a similar question by a reporter when he was in prison and just before he died. Why have you been so full of life and generosity and writing your songs and singing your songs, doing sun dances, right up until you got caught, or whatever? And and you know, and your art, and when smallpox has wiped everybody in your culture out and and and the Buffalo are all gone, and you know all the horrible things. And he said because I'm still a human being, and and because I'm still a human being. And really I think what he meant by that was that we are creatures of this planet. You know, I have to admit that I wrongly saw humans as a cancer to the planet, maybe 30 years ago. I'm so sorry for that because we are children of Mother Earth, just like the ants and just like the trees and the walruses, and so I take that back. But if we are human beings, that are a species that is part of this symbiosis that we talked about earlier then that's our mission. And if we understand the indigenous understanding of a human being, it is that we are spiritual entities in a container that we call a body that we have chosen. And you know, and now you know I don't want to get new agey on this and we don't understand details of something called reincarnation.

Wahinkpe Topa: 36:00

But the University of Virginia's Perceptual Studies Program it was touted as being by a Nobel Peace Prize winner in quantum physics. I can't remember his name, but he said their research on after-death experiences is as good as anything in quantum physics. And of course they say in their science that there's something that happens, that it's the best explanation, that reincarnation is the best possible explanation, right? A study came out out of British Columbia called Amerindian Rebirthing. It was something like 40% of the people that had seemed to have bona fide reincarnation stories that the reincarnations could be or were other than humans, you know, and animals and even trees, right Cedar trees. So who knows how it works?

Wahinkpe Topa: 37:05

But this idea of recycling and making decisions, of being a spirit, is in all of the diverse indigenous cultures and probably most of the Western ones have some part of it. I think it was taken out of Christianity and Constantinople because it didn't have a political cloud that the one life, one, god. So okay, so to your question if we are spirits, we're probably coming back to deal with whatever horrors are happening or are going to happen. And if we really understand that we are human beings that are like other creatures, spiritual entities, we're all in this together and we'll continue. Energy doesn't die, energy continues.

Wahinkpe Topa: 37:59

And if the many, many, many, many traditional stories of our ancestors all kind of point to this, you know, whatever the differences are, they're minor. We go up to the Milky Way and we decide where we're going to go. Do we go to another planet? Do we go into the cosmos? Do we come back to this amazing gift that is Mother Earth? Prove any better than the Institute of, you know, at the University of Virginia, I guess, but it doesn't matter.

Wahinkpe Topa: 38:37

You know, if we can think of that as being a human being, then even if and it's possible we could turn things around, it's just not likely, based on what we're seeing, until great calamity comes, even greater, but the kinds of calamities being represented in Gaza today. Right, and it's a forewarning, and yet we can't even agree with the world court on this. I'm talking about we, the United States of America, and and its allies, you see all these congressmen standing up and clapping to Netanyahu's lies, and and you know, and now, I was there in 1999. And so I saw Gaza, I saw, I saw the horrors of both, on both, on both sides, but especially the rationale for the suicide bombings in Gaza. And so you know people that say this started on October 7th, right, we're like watching.

Wahinkpe Topa: 39:40

Columbus and his annihilation of the Taino people on Democracy Now, okay, that's what's happening, right. And so how can we look at the reactions to that, the continuation of that, the continuation of the war against nature, the infamous 900-page book, the 2025, and what it's talking about? They've already gotten under Trump's previous administration. They already got the Endangered Species Act gutted and it's getting worse, right. Already got the Endangered Species Act gutted, right, and it's getting worse, right Even under Biden, right. And so, wow, it's hard to be optimistic that any of the stuff that we're doing is going to work to stop things. I think it's, and I think what I might have shared with you is a new definition of hope, and I think what I might have shared with you is a new definition of hope, and that is hope is not fair or high certainty or expectation that things are going to turn out all right. It's the certainty that what you're doing is the right thing to do, regardless of the outcome, and I think that brings us to this idea. One of the worldview precepts about a fear-based culture, which is the Western dominant worldview, is based on that and a courage to fearlessness based. This idea of fearlessness has been put down by Western philosophers, including Socrates. I think Gandhi was the only one who said fearlessness is a good thing, but I've seen it in indigenous cultures around the world and in my studies of indigenous, traditional indigenous cultures that are still, against all odds, holding on to it and and so moving from courage to fearlessness, I think, is the answer to the problem you're putting forth, of the pain, of the wow, why are we doing this? And and and the fearlessness can be defined as a and the fearlessness can be defined as a deep trust in the universe and in these things. We've been talking about spirit and body, and so sometimes I describe this as if I'm going to get you to come to here, and right now I'm on Vancouver Island, on Toquah Indian land, and about two miles down the road is this stairway to heaven, a big log with stairs on it that goes to a waterfall. And I'd bring, I'd say, come on, first, let's go upstairs and climb up this place where the bears climb and grab salmon, and we'll be like a bear, we'll go up there and then we'll jump into the water. I've already chucked it out. It's still deep, there's no logs in it, it's safe. They're about 30 feet. Well, most of us kind of go whoa. It's kind of be afraid to jump off of something like that, but we can get the courage pretty easily, people like us, and so we get the courage. Well, that's an emotion. It takes some stress to have courage and you jump and you go. Ah, you hit the water, you get out and you go. I did it, I did it. You want to do it again? No, that was good.

Wahinkpe Topa: 42:56

Now indigenous people understand how to move and a number of people have learned this, I know that are not indigenous to move from courage to fearlessness. So now I say, come on, let's go back up again. This time you're going to do it by moving into fearlessness. So now I say, come on, let's go back up again. This time you're going to do it by moving into fearlessness. He said, okay, I trust you, we'll do it.

Wahinkpe Topa: 43:17

Now you go up and I kind of say do some self-hypnosis, use this natural trance movement, and I want you just to really imagine, first of all, how safe it is. You already did it and proved that. Now I want you to imagine how beautiful it was and how you might have missed some of the beauty and I really want you to go into this idea that, no matter what, when your feet leave the ledge right, then there's no need for anything but knowing you're doing the right thing right. Well, now you go and you take a breath, you kind of imagine this, you trust the universe and you leap. It's a different experience Now. It's almost like slow motion. You see an eagle flying overhead as you're going down, you see a salmon go up towards the waterfall. You feel the air when your feet first touch. You notice it in the bubbles of the water coming up that you just are amazed by.

Wahinkpe Topa: 44:21

You know, and that's how I've experienced the Kogi Mamos when I was with them.

Wahinkpe Topa: 44:27

That's how I experienced the very similar old people when I was with them. That's how I experienced the very similar old people I was with. That's how I experienced the pockets of Lakota Sundance. It's where we'll hit bottom and then come back up and are back to who their culture once was.

Wahinkpe Topa: 44:43

That's what you see. You see this sense of fearlessness, this sense of humor and joyfulness and generosity, and it's like. You know, it took me a near-death experience to realize it. But we don't have to do that. Just study the worldview chart and start practicing it and use the trance-based learning, and you know we can at least and this will be the last part of my answer to your question we can at least be ready to rebuild when we come back. We can hope that the vibrations of the podcasts that you do, of the books that you write and many of our other colleagues that are working in this direction, that those will be the things that guide whoever rebuilds, and not what you see in the post-apocalyptic movies. There's another guy with a machine gun and dragging a woman by the head right, and so you know, to me that's worth keeping up this work.

D. Firth Griffith: 46:00

Yeah, yeah, it's that redefinition of hope, like you were saying. It impacted me more than I think you'll ever know. I mean, it is really the foundation of my latest book, stag Time, which I should send you a copy of. Let's make sure that tell me the name stag time stag time yeah, we can talk about it later, of course.

D. Firth Griffith: 46:22

Um, because, like it's just, you know, we are surrounded by you and I, this idea that we are, you know, I see this quite often. I see this in a lot of writings that I unfortunately have surrounding me, that we are a culture in between two stories. You know, we see these ideas that we need a new story, we need to create these new stories, we need to start telling a new story, and I think some of the people arguing for this would agree with you and myself, but I think a lot of it is still casting. How do you want to say they have deep trust in the fact that, through courageous action, we can erect a new edifice for humanity, which is the opposite of what you're saying?

Wahinkpe Topa: 47:18

Yeah, Let me jump in on that because I'm bumping into that all the time with dear colleagues who really keep talking about well, we've got to come up with a new way. Now. It's understandable that people are saying that if you look at what's the tragedy in so many indigenous cultures, with alcoholism and domestic violence, all that right. But if you look at our website, proven Sustainable we just got actually a trademark for that provensustainableorg. We're showing existing cultures that are doing this, that are because of their indigenous worldview. You know, if your reader goes to and puts in the media missed a message. The Nation Maybe we had four errors, but it'll come up right away.

Wahinkpe Topa: 48:17

My article in the Nation is about the largest study ever done on biodiversity in 2019. That showed and they used the word indigenous worldview I mean that was used. It blew my mind. The word indigenous worldview I mean that was used. It blew my mind. They say where indigenous worldview was operating and allowed to have some control of the land. The extinction rate that we have decided, which was frightening, was non-existent or severely reduced, and this is mentioned seven times in this. Reduced, and this is mentioned seven times in this. This was like 50 countries, 450 interdisciplinary research scientists, 15,000 peer-reviewed papers and they came up with this conclusion and I wanted to get it into a popular magazine. So I went to the oldest one, the liberal one in the United States, and they published it, they named it, they called it the media myths and important message in the UN biodiversity report. That's the name of it. And so I mean, we've got this evidence. We've got this evidence of it being proven sustainable, so why would we look for something new?

Wahinkpe Topa: 49:37

This is my, this is, I think, what, what just you know now, no, don't get me wrong, you know it's always getting newer. I mean, things change, we change. You know, the indigenous worldview is, you know, is, is, is God, it's basic understanding, but the operations of it, you know, have progressed. You know, in ways I'm not saying that there isn't going to be a new, unless I even use the word new, because I think that's the problem.

D. Firth Griffith: 50:10

Yes, exactly.

Wahinkpe Topa: 50:11

There's going to be some modifications from what we learn each day. We can then make better what it is that we're doing, but we'll still hold on to the fundamental worldview that we are all related right, that nature is the, the laws of nature over the laws of humans, you know, or that that you know that, in other words. So we've got to come up with, you know, maybe a modify word or are adapting to the current situation or whatever. But this whole idea I keep seeing it over and over again of philosophers and authors coming up here is a new paradigm. We've got to seek a new paradigm for the future. Why? When we have a truly proven, sustainable and proven and this is not romanticizing, we've already covered that.

Wahinkpe Topa: 51:17

The evidence is just clear on so many levels that the health profile if you take away early childhood deaths, if you look at the I mean people that came over here and warred against indigenous people. They'd learned about that and they went AWOL when they had serious health issues. You should go with the indigenous peoples right Happiness are suffering through so much, the way that they can manifest a sense of community, and those that are still using the old ways and happiness, and this has been validated in so many studies. Now is it controversial? Yeah, I mean Levitt's work back in 1977 in the Yale archives essentially say that around 80% I think he said 77, around 80% of all pre-Columbian, pre-contact tribes of the Americas meet the criteria of being a peaceful society. Now it doesn't mean that there weren't these you know, the anger or killings or whatever, but that the definitions of the research on peaceful societies are very clear about that. Those are allowed for, right, but they're not like a war society. And the ones that were not there were reasons for it. They were patriarchal. They had serious problems that the patriarchy took advantage of in ways or something. There's a whole way of scholarship on that, but essentially the research is strong on that. But essentially the research is strong on that.

Wahinkpe Topa: 53:13

There's even a book out called the New Dawn of Everything where they show that the enlightenment of people that we love, like Henry David Thoreau right In Great Britain, who then were allowed to go and give presentations and get group meetings, who were saying the horrible things about all the rats and the lack of sanitation and the inequities. You know and we know now that Thoreau had over a thousand pages of notes of his local indigenous people right, his local indigenous people right, and so the enlightenment is. But we just have such a hard time because of our propaganda, our anti-Indianism, our belief that only humans have intrinsic value. You know which? My co-author in the book Differing Worldviews, walter Bach, who I invited to write because he disagreed with everything you know well, I disagreed with everything he'd written he believes that you know, and you know, all the humans have intrinsic value. Everything else on earth is utilitarian, and so we're trying to find something new. But you know, I don't know why.

D. Firth Griffith: 54:29

Yeah, well, no, you bring up this idea of anthropology and the history and the noble savage, that terminology that we use here in modern history, about this pristine otherness of the indigenous person, pre-columbian contact here in the Western Hemisphere, turtle Island. I think it's just too simple. I love what you said earlier. I mean, I don't think this. I've many people think this and I think you you've well demonstrated um it during our time together. But we want you know this. You said the word c-ness as opposed to b-ness, or seeingness as opposed to being, as these these two worldviews summarize them down to that. So much of our culture's mythology. So much of that is about seeingness, it's about separation, it's about otherness. Now, there's nuance there, of course, but birth out of this worldview of seeingness. In the modern era of the meta crisis of the world in ruins, at the world on the edge, we want to see our way through to a solution. Being seems way too simple for us. That's what the noble savage did, somebody that we can respect, but somebody who exists outside of civilized history.

Wahinkpe Topa: 55:44

Yeah, and that phrenology thing. Historically the medical science was continuing to promote a Eurocentric way and that was another way that Maslow created his and known incorrect approach to understanding this knowingness, this idea of self-actualization being natural. And yet he wrote about it, about the truthful version of it. I don't know if your readers know about, you know the Blackfoot, but he went to in 1936, right at the end of his doctoral dissertation, he went to further prove that 80% or more of people are not self-actualized. You know which was at this little remember, there was a triangle. That's something he didn't. He didn't create the triangle, but that's how people represented it. And at the very top was self-actualization. And you had, you know, at the bottom, all the things that you need from, from shelter and love and belongingness and all that stuff, and that very few people get through that, to self-determination, up to self-actualization. And he went to. He said, well, that surely will be the case on these poor savages, on the Blackfoot Reservation, right, but he was blown away at the opposite. But he was blown away at the opposite. He was blown away that these people, the 80%, was the ones that were self-actualized. It was just the opposite.

Wahinkpe Topa: 58:03

And then he wrote about this, referring to something I think he used the word bastards of his, the people that were his crowd compared to these people, but he did not publish it. He did not make it public what it was because he knew he'd be laughed out of the academy if he was saying that these savages were superior in their life ways. And what a tragedy that was. How different things would have been if Maslow would have created a true which. Now people are writing about it. They're putting the pyramid upside down, that when a baby is born and they look at it, they see a self-actualized being, and so in the new pyramid they have that the whole bottom is self-actualization, and then there's only two things on top of it, and that relates to the community being able to promulgate ideas. Continue this anthropocentric, human-centered, anti-nature in a way. I mean you can't even look up the word nature in a dictionary and not find definitions all over the place, including Oxford, everything but humans and what humans make. How far can we get right? Which?

D. Firth Griffith: 59:53

you know, which I mean.

D. Firth Griffith: 59:54

It does shine a lot of light into the narrative of, you know, the save the world metacrisis, techno-social collapse, I mean, like all of our attempts to maintain the world, as is from regenerative agriculture to, you know, the meta crisis, and you know, ai and everything in between, is we, we have to assert more control over those things that surround us, or that, you know, our lives around is probably more accurate, 94% of all mass on earth is, you know, from an animal perspective, is domesticated humans and our domesticated animals. And is you know, from an animal perspective, is domesticated humans and our domesticated animals. And so, you know, we kind of surround the rest of it. But if everything else is inanimate, if everything else is unintelligent, but all of us are in trouble, then it's up to humanity to rise up, to control our way to saving the day, right, and so it's not a trust in the environment, like I'm thinking. Still back to your courage versus fearlessness. We, we feel a sense of courageousness because we feel a sense of dominance, but fearlessness to me, yeah, that's the opposite.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:00:55

One ops yeah, that, yeah, that's the. I think our competitive sports represent that. In competitive sports it's so beautiful to see how indigenous traditions have operated. I mean stories like two groups will form a team of 10 people and then they go out and get a dead log and then they have to go over mountains and for 50 kilometers know 50 kilometers and you know to really push themselves. Well, then one team starts to get ahead and people are, you know, even betting on it, sometimes right, that are involved with it, just to see which team will happen to come across first. Well, what happens on the trail is, as soon as the one with the lighter log gets too far ahead, people drop off of it and go back and help the guys with the heavier log, right, you know that kind of thing. I mean. At Carlisle, you know, the coaches you know were unbelievably angry about how the football teams Jim Thorpe being one of the great players kept tying with West Point and some of those Eastern schools back in the days, right, and they couldn't understand why they kept tying right, because they were so much better. Well, people kind of backed off just enough to keep it going right, competition was always seen as an opportunity to push one another to your highest potential right.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:02:38

I watched a heap of run with the Robert Murray in a very remote place a three-day hike into. You can go on YouTube now I put the remnants of my photos on it's called the Shaman's Message and see the two trips into Copper Canyon. But the run was. They start by each family making this wooden ball out of oak and then, with the end step it's kicked up and down this 8,000-foot canyon on the top levels of it. But it falls sometimes 1,000 feet down and it's an amazing thing they wear deer antlers to keep from falling asleep. The race lasts sometimes 20, 22 hours, and so everybody came from around 100 miles to this flat plain area over the top of the canyon and everybody was drinking corn, beer and passing and things around that they had made and gambling, you know, and who would come first, and the first team comes across and there was absolutely nothing except exchanging of stuff and the athletes went to their wives and got massaged and food and water.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:03:54

And so I stupidly this is a long time ago I stupidly asked my translator to ask Augustine Ramos, the medicine man I was with, this was like an Olympic event. Why are the athletes not being praised for winning and being put up on the shoulders of people and getting awards, and I'm so embarrassed, I'm admitting. I asked that question and he talked for, I think, five minutes and I could tell by his expression that he knew this was definitely a white guy question. And then the answer that my translator came back. He said well, somebody had to come across first. That's all he said.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:04:51

Right, but this idea of competition in our world, whether it be capitalism or sports, has the same fiendish, unfortunate kind of way of being. I was a sports psychologist for a long time and I quit because I saw people that would win gold medals fall apart psychologically after that for all, because that was all their dad said was important. And now it didn't seem so important and that kind of stuff, right. And so that's another concept that is, in our worldview precepts about competition to feel superior versus competition to increase your full potential.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:05:38

And so if we could just get back to these basic worldview precepts and start to say, oh, okay, that makes sense. Now let me use some trance-based learning to visualize doing it and let me then take action and actually do it. And bingo, and I'm getting letters all the time of people that are starting to do this and it's transformative and I've got at least three doctoral students at Antioch that I just want to. I'm working for Antioch now. I left fielding and I don't know. It'll be interesting to see if enough people can do this to rebuild properly.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:06:26

Yeah, I think the response that you're voicing to the crises that surround us so much of them call us to go outward, to create new solutions, to create new stories, to erect these new edifices, et cetera. I think Ian McGilchrist's work has been so powerful to a lot of people because it asks us to come inward, into our mind and start seeing how that's balanced, and we're drawn to that. But I think the issue is, as you've well demonstrated here, is it's not a mind's problem to some large degree. Obviously, the body is one, but to isolate the mind above feel intelligence.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:07:06

But he's not even talking, mind that's true, he's talking to physical organs, right, so you know.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:07:14

I mean, yeah, so we can look at the really mostly inaccurate ideas about one brain does this and one brain does that, you know. But then when we're doing that, we're starting to get into worldview precepts, you know. If you start so that's the way I think. Well, okay, so maybe you're right, maybe we have lost, you know, some of the strength of one. That that's. There could be a lot of truth in that, but to have one be the master is going in the wrong direction, and so, but what are you going to do? Go up there and get inside and twist them around.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:07:54

You seem to be giving voice to this idea, this ancient, indigenous idea of worldview being the whole right. Like the heart matters, the feelings matter. Your ancestors, your legacy matters, your DNA, like all of these things, matter because it's just one essence, like you're saying, where the spirit, there's energy, there's vibration inside this clay form that is potentially reborn or moves on or extends outward in the atmosphere, into the cosmos, whatever that is, whatever that looks like, but it's a yes, it is a return back into oneself, but to the all of oneself, yes it is a return back into oneself, but to the all of oneself.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:08:30

That's right. Your consciousness is as much outside of us as it is inside of us, right? Just?

D. Firth Griffith: 1:08:38

go out and be with a tree in the wilderness for a while. A dear friend of mine is a Maori healer herbalist of the Waitaha Nation in northern New Zealand. I believe is where her father's people are from and she's coming to the States here for a little bit of a journey in her own way. But she's stopping here at our land here and we're going to do a four-day I think it's going to be a four-day which she calls Tree Festival, which is this ceremony, this experience of getting into the natural world and having a confrontation with boredom and oneness and togetherness and communication with, as she would say, our relations, our cousins. And it's hard for people Like you're saying. You know, coming inward to some degree is easy. Allowing that inward understanding to enter the oneness that surrounds us is a huge step for many people but, as you write, a needed step.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:09:36

That's right, and you know, talking about New Zealand, I mean it's tragic. What's happening right now? Yeah, what's happening right now. And because the new right-wing movements that are happening all over the world not just in the United States with Trumpism are starting to say that, even though the Maoris still suffer more than the non-indigenous people, like in most places, they were so far advanced with bringing language into schools and stuff like that, and now the new right wing coalitions are trying to put all of that back backwards again, and so it's really sad.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:10:18

This is the pushback that's happening in the world and I think one way that we can think of it is that during times of stress, all creatures become hyper-suggestible to the perceived communication of a trusted authority figure, and I taught hypnosis for an FCC licensure at UC Berkeley and it was a controversial hypothesis. I learned it from wild horses. If your readers go onto YouTube, just put in the wild horse hypnotist. But the reason that the wild horse can respond is to telepathic communication, which we all used to be able to do is trust, but that trust has to be earned and the fear is a survival mechanism that causes the trust to happen in a perceived trust and authority figure. In this state of hypnosis where we are afraid because of our jobs, our incomes, climate change, all the things that are causing people to be afraid, if that concept of, during times of stress, people become hyper-suggestible to the communication of a perceived trusted authority figure, well, that's why we are falling into the lap of these loud speaking, dictatorial kinds of individuals who are calling out the sort of the wishy-washiness of Democrats, right, and this is happening all over the world, right, and I think it's a hypnosis.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:12:29

You know Dr Michael Fisher, who wrote a book about fearlessness. I just called it Fearless Engagement of Four Arrows. He calls it an intellectual biography of me, fearless Engagement of Four Oaks, and I think that I have a copy of it handy, but he's got like 150 footnotes, end notes at the end of each chapter. So it's a very scholarly book. But he refers to the cat-fawn connection, which was a vision that happened to me, on a kayaking accident on the Rio Urique River where I came upon a mountain lion that was in a cave, for my partner and I were firefighters at the time. The river was the whole river, disappeared into our underground drainage and took me into it and then we had to stay in a cave that kept getting higher and higher, we kept getting higher and higher on ledges. A mountain lion showed us the way out and that became the CAT, c-a-t Concentration, activated Transformation, which means self-hypnosis. And then we came upon a total model. It run down they're great runners a deer, a baby deer, a fawn, and was carrying it, and so the fawn came to me as F-A-W-N and so the faun came to me as F-A-W-N.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:14:05

Fear, authority, words, nature. Well, how the dominant worldview deals with worldview, then it becomes an opportunity to practice a virtue like courage or generosity or honesty or humility. Authority is always only your own lived experience and reflection on it. You know, you have respect to listen to elders or medicine people, but they had no authority. Words were sacred vibrations, it had to be spoken and of course it was easier to do in the verbatim languages of truth. Nature was our teacher, right, and so, by taking these two things and moving them forward. Well, michael Fisher refers to that cat phone process and, of course, in his book on me, as a de-hypnotizing technology. I love that. I love that because I think it's using hypnosis to de-hypnotize.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:15:27

I don't see how else we can explain what we're doing on Earth, of intelligent people doing what they're doing, standing up and clapping for genocide, ignoring the? I'd rather pollute the water and make my profit than have clean water. It has to be related to this phenomena that indigenous cultures always knew existed, without knowing the technological ideas or the brainwave frequencies. They knew if they didn't do ceremony they would not be as optimal, as generous as a good a hunter. Ceremony is a form of hypnosis. If you define hypnosis as believing in an image, remember Einstein said imagination is more powerful than knowledge. Believing in an image when you're at a lower brainwave frequency than we are right now, maybe even just alpha, that's all. Hypnosis is because we know that when that happens, the combination of ideomotor neurons and other things that occur you have a tendency to do this. This is why there hasn't been a gold medalist in the Olympics for 50 years, who hasn't had a sports psychologist teaching them how to use visualization or hypnosis right. And yet all the Abrahamic religions say it's of the devil. Hollywood bastardizes it. And who controls it? Frank Luntz and people of the right wing that are doing these repetitive statements, that they're doing these repetitive statements and the you know and you know, and it and it's like we've got to re-embrace this understanding and start using it because it's you know, it's got to be incorporated into our transformation. We, we just don't do it. Often it only takes a few seconds and you don't have to pay anybody. And if you don't know how, or if you're in that state to allow for a positive image that's positively phrased.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:17:41

A book that I wrote on medical emergency hypnosis in 1991 that Prentice Hall published called Patient Communication for First Responders. It was banned. I was in Brisbane, australia, and speaking to emergency room physicians about it and they said we can't get your book. Well, some big shot wrote an article for the Journal of Emergency Medical Services saying this should be used only by licensed physicians certified in hypnosis. Right, 20 years later, last year no, this year one of my doctoral students who's a 20-year paramedic and I said he said this book's got to be republished. I said it's yours.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:18:22

So, anyway, routledge of London just republished it. This time it's called Hypnotic Communication and Medical Emergency Settings and it's got back cover endorsements by two of the most renowned emergency room physicians. And this time, because I had computers, we have a lot of case studies supporting how you can, as an adjunct to standard medical care, you get somebody to stop bleeding by saying when I count to three, I want you to stop your bleeding, right? So that's just the ultimate example that, during times of stress, your words can cause healing, and the medical emergency is the extreme example of it, right? So another one of those things of indigeneity, this understanding of spirit, this understanding of ceremony, this understanding of being one with all, they're so basic and that we have so hypnotized ourselves away from them.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:19:37

There's a quote in the intro to your book Restoring the Kinship Worldview, which I was trying to find by the time you concluded that sentence, but I'm failing, so I think the last question I want to get into, which is a derivative of what you're saying here, is so much of either decolonization or indigenization which I realize are not the same thing, of course but so much of both of these narratives today have such a prevalence, such an ability to culturally appropriate something that is not healthy in the slightest. Just say it that way, you are obviously a proponent of the indigenous worldview becoming whole and real and living in us modern people, regardless of our ability or our history of holding place-based wisdom, which is why you separate these two things, of course. What is the role of somebody like me, an American-born Irishman, in relearning, reawakening, re-inhabiting these ceremonies? There's this place of hypnosis Fool's medicine crow, Fool's crow.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:20:56

Yeah, fool's crow.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:20:58

That's the quote that I'm trying to find, yeah.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:21:01

Yeah, his famous quote, I can send you the reference. Yeah, his famous quote, I can send you the reference. But Fool's Crow said that people who do not share this medicine don't know the medicine, and he refers to that. And White Standing Buffalo is what you know.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:21:17

I did a presentation with Greg Kahetty and Robin Kimmerer. I had, you know, darsha got a lot of money for us to bring indigenous speakers to University of Notre Dame for a know-how, indigenous know-how conference. And after the first day and it was Barbara, alice Mann and some of my friends at Indigenous Women they said we can't do this to this white audience, we're giving too much information away. And I just, my heart just sunk. And well, I had brought white standing Buffalo and I had to kind of fight for him because the university would only give money for PhDs and he doesn't even have a high school degree. But he's a Sundance chief that I have a great respect for and I just had this intuition Spirit told me to bring him. Well, it was a good thing I did, because I would have blown it, because I was like this is why I brought you here. What are you talking about? But I just said standing Buffalo, we were in a circle. Can you speak to that? Oh man, did he speak to it for 15 minutes? And he said the same kind of thing that Fool's Quill was saying. And these wise women who were great indigenous scholars, they said okay, okay. And then we continued and know, and so it's.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:22:47

This is tough and we are divided. Indian country is divided and you have to appreciate both sides. You know the misappropriation and and I sometimes I say, you know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe bringing this into education has been the wrong thing, since education itself has been the enemy, and maybe I'm just giving the educational people enough to rationalize that maybe they're doing something good when really they're not even coming close. So I can take either side and argue it. Well, however, all you got to do is look at what's happening in Indian country and how it's being lost and say, well, who's left to teach this?

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:23:31

First of all, there's one big problem. We can go overseas, into places where 80% of the biodiversity on mother earth is on only 20% of the land. We can go to those people, but they're losing it too. I've been there, son of the land. We can go to those people, but they're losing it too. I've been there. And so, whoa, wait a minute.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:23:53

And who could say that a culture or a group of people have the right to claim how the world works? Well, they do have the experience. For those who are using that experience in their traditional, place-based language to say we know that this is the best science for how the world works, because it's proven itself for many, many generations. Right and so, but now they're disappearing all over the world. But now they're disappearing all over the world. You can't use a culture in Colombia to come over to a culture in Mexico, because that, then, is misappropriation, because the language is different, the ceremonies are different, because the flora and fauna and the wind and the climate are different, and that's the power, right?

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:24:46

So what do we do? Well, there's no option. There's no option but to re-indigenize ourself as best we can. If we're in a place where there are elders who know, then you have the obligation to call on them and hire them for their work, you know, and to support the sovereignty for anybody else who's trying to get there. But you know, like I say, 80% of the Navajo aren't there. What are we going to do? We've got to then. Well, okay, I live here now and you know, and I'll use, I use there's only a few TOCWA here, remember, and I'll use them when I can, but otherwise I got to go out. I got to use Google. You know, and you know I told you the Google story. We can end with this one, maybe Right, because we're at the 90-minute mark and I have a call coming up, because we're at the 90-minute mark and I have a call coming up. But you know, and this is one of those stories that I share with you and this particular audience that usually you shouldn't talk about.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:25:53

But I did go on an ombreche vision quest when I prepared for a Sundance when I was living in altitude and cool weather in Idaho and of course my sundress was on Pine Ridge and it was going to be 114 degrees. And I told my wife, I'm not acclimated, now I'm not living there anymore. I don't think I can tolerate four days without water. She said you better go pray on it. So I went up on the hill and the first thing I did I'm still in my Western mindset and I had my tobacco ties that I had done and set them in a circle, got in with my chin up, but right away a rat, you know, like a minute of silence. A rat comes in and starts eating on the tobacco one of the one of the you know, one of the ties and I kicked it away. I can't believe that. I kicked it away. Come on, that could have been the vision, the messenger. So I sat there feeling well, now I'm going to be up here for a long time for nothing, it's that kind of thing, right. But I got back into my energy and that mindset of meditation. I came back and I go okay, okay, okay, thank you, thank you, thank you, and started eating again. And then I stopped eating and I took a step inside the center, just in front of my knee, and faced the west direction that I was facing like a pet mascot. And now I knew that this was why I had come up to deal with this problem of the heat and the water.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:27:38

And so, at the end of my quest, I went down, made the fire for the Inipi ceremony, and what did I do? I'm in Idaho. I don't have any knowledge of elders here that have the wisdom. I'm at 5,000 feet near Sun Valley. I didn't know what to do. What kind of animal was this? What does it mean? So I go to do? What kind of animal was this? What does it mean?

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:28:07

So I go to Google, I'm on Google and I'm putting in mammals of North America. And there it is, and I can't remember the Latin name I should remember it but it was called the kangaroo rat and it said had a picture of it with his big back legs and a long tail, exactly the animal that was in the circle. And it said the first sentence the kangaroo rat is the only mammal in North America that can go a lifetime without a drop of water. Wow, wow. Now, so that's all it took for my confidence and everything, right, and I was using Google, right, and so, yeah, we got to support sovereignty and the remaining cultures as best we can. So they're a lot closer to this right and I'm a made relative of the Oglala Lakota and you know, one of the seven sacred ceremonies is the making of a relative ceremony.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:29:10

I have storified stories that I grew up with with my five aunts about a 16 or 15-year-old girl that escaped from the Trail of Tears in Joplin, missouri, and from Cherokee and was made a relative of the family and all that. But it's like it doesn't matter who we are. This identity thing has become, and originally was, a tool of divide and conquer, and so this is why Fool's Crow's statement is so important, and it's like folks like yourself who are doing this kind of work. You're going to always find somebody that's against it, right, it doesn't matter.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:29:58

I told you the story about the two medicine men that came up to me when I played a song afterwards, right, medicine. And they came up to me when I played a song afterwards, right After playing music for raising money for Mark Sorensen's star school, you know. And one medicine man said you know better than to bring that music, that song, out of the circle, you know. And I patted him on the shoulder and said brother, we agree to disagree on that. And then a minute later, another highly respected medicine man hugged me and said thanks for bringing it out of the circle.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:30:30

We got to realize that Indian country and everybody else is divided. We got to do what's right and the worldview belongs to all creatures and there's nobody that owns it. And I'm starting to refer to it now as pre-colonial as opposed to indigenous, so people don't think it belongs to a race or anything. I'm starting to do that more and more, but it doesn't matter. I still want to call it indigenous because of the remaining cultures that we've got to survive. So thank you so much for your work in the world, for your writing, your work and this amazing interview, and please let me know when it's available. I love to share this with people because your questions were, if I was going to have, if all the interviews that I've done in the last couple of years over 100, if I was going to say I want you to ask these questions because these are the things that need to be answered. Wow, you nailed it.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:31:38

Like I told you, when I emailed you last year out of the blue, just a cold email I never thought that you would respond. I truly didn't. You don't owe me a response. You didn't owe me a response then, but you changed my life, and so I'm sorry that it took us a year to come back together, but I'm glad that our coming back together meant something.

Wahinkpe Topa: 1:32:00

All right.