An introduction: For years I've photographed sunrises and sunsets, and, until I got a leased car, had "SKIES" on my license plate. When I finally became an internet user, "SKYEARTH" came easily as my e-mail name (although it has the number 1 after it). I've been reading "SEEKER" articles for nearly two years, mostly because I know one of the writers quite well. It seemed to follow, upon being invited to submit material, that I would speak about books that I'm reading. Two years ago, I embarked on what has become an ambitious self-education, although that wasn't the original intent. It has opened up wide vistas of possibilities for further study and for greater activism. In fact, the trouble with at least five major interests is choosing a concentration. So I haven't. I have umpteen books on my list that I want to read and I hear of more nearly every day.

I am undertaking a major life change also, in leaving my home in Vermont for the past 28 years and moving to Colorado with my daughter's family while she attends graduate school. It is a different experience of earth energy, I'm told, in the West than what is in the East. And Coloradans have such a wide range of beliefs, from Amory and Hunter Lovins'institute focusing on conserving and protecting our environment to religious fundamentalist media/member headquarters whose ambition is to proselytize non-believers and to foment hate of "others." Not that Vermonters don't have an equal range; there's just a feeling here that a person's beliefs shouldn't be steam-rollered onto everyone else.

This is where I'm coming from. If we aren't seeking further growth of self and spirit, then the only thing left is deadness. I choose growth, as I'm sure the readers and writers of SEEKER have. The books I'll be talking about are ones that strike chords in me. Perhaps they'll do the same in you.

Cherie Staples

It has been two years since I read The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler. Two years of cutting away from Christianity to affirm a deeply-felt theology of earth. It was Vine DeLoria's God is Red that turned me into the Indian experience. The more I read, the more I recognized that the earth-centered spirituality of America's natives was what I had felt and believed in for a good share of my life. A healthy earth, not ravaged and polluted, and a way of living that honored all life became more clearly the right way to live.

But I also felt that it wasn't respectful to intrude my desire to participate in native cermony and dance when, as far as I knew, there was not a drop of native blood in me. In attending local pow-wows this past year, I contented myself with watching the dancing, letting the drumming beat through my body, and looking through books by North American Native Authors, presented by the Greenfield Review Press of Greenfield Center, New York. At last month's gathering, I perused the table of books again, picking up and scanning and putting down. Finally, Eagle Man, Ed McGaa's Rainbow Tribe settled into my hands. I recognized the name from last summer's brochure from the Rowe (MA) Conference Center. He was going to lead a weekend of "Native Wisdom," and I had wanted to go. But didn't.

Here was Eagle Man again, ready to talk to me. I wasn't quite sure just who the Rainbow Tribe were supposed to be, and it took a bit to clearly understand that he meant people like me -- whites and people of any color who feel strongly and deeply for the earth, who know that we are perpetrating a massive destruction of species and landscapes and know that it has to be stopped, who are respectful of native ceremony and who honor the earth.

Rainbow Tribe welcomed me, as I had not been welcomed by a native writer who suggested that Euro-Americans should go dig into their own Celtic roots, instead of infringing on native tribal roots. And really, who can blame that writer? Eagle Man admits that in his earlier years he also felt that whites should be kept out of tribal ceremony. But he has grown to feel and understand that when it comes down to saving the earth, it is going to take every earth-committed person there is. The bloodlines won't save a person if "home" is ruined. His chapter on Rainbow and Celtic Relationship talks about how, quite possibly, the Celts were in North America early enough to have brought teachings and beliefs to the northeastern tribes.

Last summer I gave a sermon at the church I've attended for some 18 years. In it I explained why I could no longer call myself a Christian, or anything else religious for that matter. Eagle Man's comments on Christianity echoed my own conclusions. In his introduction, he says:

"Rainbows will not follow the patriarchal hierarchies where fundamentalist-fomented fear, manipulation, and oppression have reigned. Rainbows use their minds to find their spirituality!" (p.xi)

He talks much of sweat lodges and describes the earliest one he did that included whites. It was for about 50 journalists from all over the world, including the eastern block countries, which at that time were behind the Iron Curtain. He says:

"I learned a good lesson. "We had Muslims sitting next to Jews and Russians along-side Americans and Germans. When it came time for each person to pray in the third-endurance portion of the ceremony, they all prayed reverently and in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. Those sweat lodges showed me that natural ceremony can truly bring people together in a bond of harmony and respect for the earth." (p. 26)

He discusses the native belief that when a person dies, their spirit is released to associate with the spirits of ones who have died before. The tradition is that how you lived your life, whether you have done good things and not created harm, or you have done things that have hurt people, created "heaven" or "hell" for your spirit, because eventually your spirit would meet the ones who had been helped or hurt. But as to the Biblical heaven and hell, he just doesn't believe that people can do anything, no matter how awful or evil, during their lives, and be forgiven and taken to an ethereal heaven.

His book contains a number of first-person experiences related by Rainbow Tribe people, some of personal quests, some of sweat lodge experiences. He also describes visiting the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and being asked to do a ceremony in honor of the dead. His introspection about the war, in which he flew 110 missions, and his speech at the conclusion of the ceremony are strong statements from a man who recognizes that "in the old days of leadership, and I believe a much more prudent leadership, the chiefs and their sons were the first in battle. This was a great detriment to foolish war." (p.193-194) For it is his point that sons of political leaders and the heads of major companies that supplied the war didn't fight in Vietnam.

Eagle Man believes strongly in the vision of Nicholas Black Elk, related in John Neihardt's book Black Elk Speaks. (He was given his tribal name by Black Elk's son.) He speaks of a visit that he paid to Neihardt's daughter who grew up helping her father put together all that Black Elk shared with him. The meaning of the four directions, the colors associated with them, and the six powers, and their appearances in ceremony are sprinkled throughout his book. I read Black Elk Speaks a year or so ago, and now feel it is time to read it again, together with Joseph Epes Brown's Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Sacred Rites of the Oglala Sioux.

He ends by calling on:

"tribal peoples to understand the need for the rest of the world, the non-Indian world, to improve its philosophy and spirituality by observing the wisdom of the Natural Way....We are much more dependent upon that world than we realize...In the end we will all be in the same spirit world, and the generations to come of all colors will appreciate that the new friends we generated [the Rainbow Tribe peoples] also helped the environment." (p.253)

He also calls on:

"the white people who do not respect our Indian Way and somehow wish to "save" us--I ask you not to get so shook up because we are going in our own direction....Start to realize that you are only two-leggeds and do not know any more than we do. We are all mere beings here, and there are many mysteries. One mystery you should recognize is the natural connection found in all things created--a creation over which you do not have dominion." (p.254)

He ends by quoting an Oglala Sioux holy man, Fool's Crow:

"The power and ways are given to us to be passed onto others. To think or do anything else is pure selfishness. We only keep them and get more by giving them away, and if we do not give them away we lose them....The survival of the world depends upon our sharing what we have and working together. If we don't, the whole world will die. First the planet, and next the people." (p.254)

That is truth. It was about 30 years ago that I read my first Audubon magazine. The environmental battles then and the environmental battles now are too similar. Congress still hasn't repealed the 1872 Mining Law, the great give-away of the West. We have Clean Air Acts and Clean Water Acts that we've had to fight to renew, when the particulate matter in the air crossing Vermont is still oppressive when the wind is from the southwest. And now they want to "restructure" the utility industry so that coal-burning power plants located in the midwest can produce electricity like crazy?

Thirty years ago, Florida was building the Cross-Florida Barge Canal which ruined the flow of water from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades. Now Florida is having to spend billions of dollars to bring water flowage back into the Everglades. Do you think they will ever get it? Certainly the Congress we have elected doesn't.

Eagle Man offers hope for communality between Native and non-Native peoples. I hope to meet up with him sometime, as I seek my own experience with the earth spirituality he describes. And I want to read his other books, Mother Earth Spirituality and Native Wisdom.