An Ancient/Future Paradigm of Abundance
Less than a few a hundred years ago, wild buffalo - what we nowadays refer to as bison - roamed in their millions across the vastness of North America. They were revered as sacred by the diverse tribal nations across the continent, each people having their own ways of honoring, communicating and working with the animals.
Buffalo were essentially synonymous with the web of Native American culture - their relationship was that important. (The mass culling of wild buffalo and the genocide of the native people of North America are often seen as one and the same.)
The Great Plains Indians sang songs about buffalo, depicted them in their art, and prayed to them. They recognized that buffalo sustained human life in the sparse plains, and that the mutual thriving of buffalo and human was deeply interdependent.
Hunting buffalo was a sacred rite where the hunters ceremonially connected with the spirit of the buffalo, and the animals were respectfully slaughtered for their meat in ritual gratitude and thanksgiving. These tribes famously used every bit of the revered animal for food, clothing, shelter, weapons. Nothing was wasted or treated with disrespect.
To the Native American, these magnificent animals sustained all life. The Lakota people, for instance, regarded the buffalo as a gift from Great Spirit and viewed them as a relative. Whenever one was killed, its sacrifice was honored as a blessing from Wakan Tanka - Great Spirit.
“The buffalo meant everything…they provided us our shelter, our food, our weapons, our toys. The lives of the people once revolved around the way of the buffalo. The buffalo was a connection to the Creator. The buffalo provided for the people spiritually, culturally, and socially. The buffalo gave the people life. The buffalo is life.”
Excerpt from Bison, Givers of Life, Indian Country Today
More than just a feel-good concept, this was an example of interdependence in action. The buffalo were a source and symbol of nature’s abundance in all its many forms and as such, they were treated not only with deep respect but with great responsibility.
There is a relationship to abundance here, a reciprocity. It was not something to be exploited, dominated and possessed. In this world-view, the notion of scarcity in the way we experience it nowadays would not have existed because there was a kinship with the current of abundance in all its forms, based on trust, interdependence and responsibility. People living in this way would have understood the rhythms of the seasons and the moon as natural expressions of the ebbing and flowing of life.
Yet through this ebb and flow that was Nature’s rhythm, there was plenty for everyone. And that plenty was related to and treated with honor and responsibility.
(This ebb and flow is present in the very thing that keeps us alive: our breath. When we're not breathing properly, we’re not properly resourced, we’re disconnected from our life-force, our innate abundance.)
Following Columbus’ fateful arrival here, European settlers swarmed across the continent propelled by their self-proclaimed “manifest destiny”. They came armed with mechanized weapons, and the insatiable hunger for domination, extraction and exploitation.
They came with their own psyches colonized by a breathless, debilitating scarcity: one that was rooted in an unforgiving sense of deficiency within oneself (the beginning of Self-alienation) which then fanned out into the world.
There was not enough, never enough - which is the birthplace of greed. And we know what happened to the abundant herds of buffalo as a result of this insanity: within decades, the animals went from tens of millions to practically extinct.
But it hadn’t always been this way with the European.
The Sami people of Scandinavia + Russia are the last surviving Indigenous European tribe. They have a similar relationship with reindeer that Native Americans have with buffalo.
Pre-Christian, Indigenous Europeans had also lived in a holistic, interdependent way with the land, with the animals, with their larger more-than-human family. They had also known themselves as part of a vaster web of life, where abundance was woven into the natural order. They had also innately understood that relationship, respect and responsibility were necessary to maintain balance in this natural order.
We know this because the old European pagan myths and stories described this way of things, because of archaeologists such as Marija Gimbutas. This was the flowering of a truly civilized consciousness in Europe - a consciousness organized around certain principles and observations of the natural world - which has been dated to around 7000 BC, the period of the Great Goddess.
By the end of the fourth century, the revolutionary teachings of a dark-skinned Levantine called Yeshua ben Joseph had been distorted and canonized into law - enforced by complete submission or torture and death. Distorted because his teachings had the potential to awaken people to their innate divinity, showing just how dangerous this was to the Roman Empire.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell has written about how, before the reign of the Church fathers over Europe, the people were considered citizens of the land. Following the monopoly of institutionalized Christianity as the only sanctioned religion and the systems of governing that arose from this, people became subjects of the state. And despite the separation of Church and State, this centralized system of governing - originating in patriarchal monotheism - continued, and continues to dominate to this day.
To quote Campbell:
“Christianity swept into Europe with real force with all humankind inheriting Adam’s sin….This became the official state religion of the Roman Empire; people weren’t allowed to think anything else. So this totally alien point of view was imposed on Europe. Europe had perfectly good religions and mythologies, and then this other thing was brought in on top of it.”
The “inheriting of Adam’s sin” - the notion that the human is fundamentally bad, wrong and sinful - became the bedrock of the colonized European psyche.
This sense of inevitable and hellish deficiency informed the outpicturing of a world-view based on scarcity, creating the rotten top-down systems of government and leadership that we're still struggling to evolve out of.
Meanwhile, in Earth-based Indigenous cultures the world over, this upright triangle, with (white-skinned, male) humans at the top - separate, dominant and unchecked - is turned on its head, with humans at the bottom, reliant on all life.
(Incidentally, an upside down triangle is a symbol of the feminine in many esoteric traditions.)
A universal quality of indigeneity then, is allowing in that humility of knowing that we are interdependent with all life. That all life, including those our dominant culture deems ‘too other’ to matter - like bugs + insects + plants - sustains us, sustains the natural order.
Not power over, but power with.
From this place, it becomes a natural next step to work with and relate to the abundance all around us with respect and responsibility. It becomes a natural next step to question unnatural, oppressive narratives of deficiency + scarcity that cause us to reflexively behave in ways that exploit our own, each other’s and the planet’s resources.
From here, it becomes a natural next step to ask:
How does abundance want to co-create with me?
How can I become a clear conduit for abundance in the world?
How can I work with abundance responsibly?
What systems am I participating in through the abundance in my life?
Because the truth is, plenty is available to us when we step out of the constructs of inner/outer deficiency, and treat abundance with respect + responsibility - whether that be the current of money, the current of natural resources, or the current of our time + energy, to name just a few expressions of abundance.
Join the 2 hour online workshop on November 16th to dive deeper into this terrain:
Decolonizing our Relationship to Money + Becoming Stewards of Abundance