03/17/24 - Dr. Tink Tinker
Makes you such a threat? We choose the right to be who we are. We know the difference between the reality of freedom and the illusion of freedom. There's a way to live with Earth and a way not to live with Earth. We choose the way of Earth. It's about power.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:You are listening to First Voices Radio, and I carry the name Tiokasin ghost horse, sending you greetings and strength from the highlands of the Esopus in the lands of the Munsee speaking Lenape, often referred to as the Catskill Mountains. This is an all native hosted, all native produced First Voices Radio, and Liz Hill from the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation is a producer of First Voices Radio. You can hear us on Itunes, Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Spotify, as well as First Voices, indigenous radio dot org for archive, downloading, and listing. Our guest today, George Tink Tinker, is the Clifford Baldridge Emeritus Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, where he taught from 1985 until 2017. Tinker is a citizen of the Wasache Odusseid Osage Nation.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:For 25 years, he served pro bono as a director and spiritual leader of Four Winds American Indian Council, also a leadership council on the American Indian Movement of Colorado. His best known work, American Indian Liberation, Tinker argues that, quote, the intellectual and religious realms have been crucial to colonial political and economic domination of indigenous peoples. He believes that Native American Christians need to separate themselves from the colonial thinking of European settlers' withdrawal from Native American spirituality and its emphasis on space, nature, and community. He developed this further in the coauthored book Native American Theology. And now, Tink Tinker.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Thank you for joining us here on First Voices, and it's just an honor every time I talk with you. And I can't say I learn or anything or I'm I'm I'm renewed or anything like that. I just know that the energy now currently is what is going on with our consciousnesses as native people. And that that's why I wanted to talk to you because you seem to be in the present all the time. And that that's more worth more to me as a younger person thinking I understand a lot of things, but I don't.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So I'm putting this place of it's an honor to hear your voice and be in the present of your thoughts. You know, we hear these definitive statements about we are part of earth, we are earth. That sounds subjected to accepting that thought. So then I go back to the language as you do in in your language of When we're born, we're coming into earth and learning to breathe and walk and eat and drink. And and then as we're living as we are now, we're still becoming Earth.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:We're still in that motion of becoming earth. And then when we're dying, we're still becoming earth. That's where it is. And so this term, becoming Earth.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Let me begin by saying, I just went through my 80 80th winter. I'm still learning, still sorting out the world, still struggling to decolonize myself because our thinking is so we're we're having this conversation in the colonizer's language, in English. And the truth is, I can manipulate English much more easily than I can Wazhaji because I live in the city a long ways away from, the place where Wazhaji has spoken. Plus, the colonizer put so much energy into erasing, our native languages, And we're nearly successful with Wazhaji, and it's just been the outstanding work of a handful of people that have held on to Ujjazi and are now teaching it, to children, on the reservation in Oklahoma. But that's an ongoing process of learning, and I assume I'll be learning until the day I take my last breath in this world.
Dr. Tink Tinker:That means, steadily, for the past 60 years, I've been relearning what the colonizer tried to erase, tried to weed out of our living, out of our experience. This business of we are the Earth. I just finished a paper. I haven't published it yet, and I may wait and publish it as a chapter in a book, but it's titled The Rights of Nature. And I begin the article by saying the problem with this new legal discourse called the rights of nature that tends to be more progressive, more liberal, is that it uses 2 words we don't have in any Andean language.
Dr. Tink Tinker:We don't have a word for rights, and we don't have a word for nature. As Euro Christians use the word nature, Nature is something out here away from human beings. And yet, for us, that's an abstract concept that just doesn't ring true because we're not apart from the rest of the world. We're not apart from the Earth, but we're a part of that whole. I think the first thing and I've said this to you before.
Dr. Tink Tinker:The first thing the colonizer did when they invaded Turtle Island was to go about the conversion process, not converting natives to Christianity, but converting our grandmother, the land, into property. Another abstract noun, but what it did was chop up our grandmother into bits and pieces and assign ownership, another word. We don't have words for property or ownership, either one in our native languages. Again, those are abstract nouns. Something English and other Euro Christian languages are, absolutely famous for.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Abstractions are important to them, whereas it's the verbs that are important for our people. And it's the belonging to the earth, the living with the earth and with all our relatives, all of whom are part of the earth just as we are part of grandmother and emerge from grandmother. So that'd be where I would want to start that conversation. We're coming up, next week on this change of seasons, and we'll we'll be going out to our ceremonial grounds here south of Denver, a place called Tallball Memorial Grounds, in order to mock that change of seasons. And we'll mark the change of seasons, particularly, by showing our gratitude for all of our relatives on this land, saying thank you to the buffalo who live out there near our ceremonial grounds And the the the ground squirrels, the hawks and the eagles and the sparrows and all the other flying ones, all the the mountains that we can see from that ridge where we have our, our our sweat lodge, the streams, the rivers, the waters, especially grandfather Wazhaji.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Ni is our word. Ni, just slightly different from mani in, Lakota. Ni'i tikko, grandfather water.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:When when you talk about the changing of seasons, and I know that I was told this, is that there's not really 4 seasons, Tink, that there really is 8 seasons because there's a transition period from winter to spring and then also from spring to summer and then summer to fall. So these are motioning like, our verbs.
Dr. Tink Tinker:At the same time, there are four moments when the sun moves in relationship to the Earth or the Earth moves in relationship to the sun that we mark, as important, ceremonial moments.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:You know, this is what it does is you mentioned something about relearning. And learning is something that could have many definitions and how we do that, showing or teaching or instructing, demanding, commanding, and or, you know, fact fact baiting, I call it. But there's also learning in a sense of how do we learn what we know now, in this language, of course, is colonization. And a lot of people are decolonizing, which to me says unlearning. And then we get to a part where we're unlearning, and now there's the the presence of relearning, but we don't want to relearn what we learned and how we learned in the first place.
Dr. Tink Tinker:That's an incredibly difficult problem that you've just spelled out, one that we need to take seriously be because learning is different in both world views. We've both gone to school. We spent a great deal of energy in learning content, learning sets of facts. Well, fact is another abstract now. When I teach my kids, 3 of them are long adults now, but but but I've got a 15 year old daughter here at home.
Dr. Tink Tinker:I can't just teach them facts because I can't expect them to know what I know until they have experienced it, lived it. So I've got to provide them the opportunity to have the experiences. Well, when we go into Iombe, sitting with the stone ceremony, what you all call ini bi. I'm at a point in my life where I experience those wenoke when they come in. Sometimes I can see them.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Often enough, there are 4 voices that I can hear, regularly, including 3 eagles and an old coyote, a black coyote that that come into those ceremonies. I can't expect other people to believe me when I say that, but on the other hand, has nothing to do with them because it's not just a fact. It's my experience. And they can, they can believe that or not, and depending on whether they trust me enough. And that's up to them, and I can't ask them to do that.
Dr. Tink Tinker:They have to come to that on their own. So until my daughter can come into that ceremony and experience the Wenoki there and maybe see other Wenonchi than the ones I see. She hasn't learned yet. All she knows are the facts that she reads online, And that's different from having the experience.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So a lot of questions I get from from students is the first word is three letters. How to do something? Their learning was instructional, not shown, you know, where you had a freer choice. The thinking became very, I would say, pathological. It was always cause and effect, which made way for facts, you know, because someone could control facts as much as anything else, but also thinking about the colonizing language that that we both speak.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:When when I get through interviewing you sometimes, it's I could have said this, I could have said that because maybe I'm not understanding the energy with the language I'm speaking.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Sure. Yes. Yes. Because when we're speaking English, we're speaking nouns. I've tried to make that change in my own use of English.
Dr. Tink Tinker:I've I've tried to emphasize, you know, verbs and verbal actions, But we fall into a pattern of reciting the nouns as if the nouns had meaning. And in English, verbs build upon the abstract quality of nouns. Whereas, for us, it's just the opposite. Any nouns and names build on the verbs. In our early story, there was aji ancestors who came down from the Milky Way.
Dr. Tink Tinker:They were brought down, on the wings of spotted eagles, and, the eagles put them in the branches of oak trees. And they couldn't come down out of the trees because the ground was covered with water. And, the bull elk, saw the people were in need, and he threw himself in the water in such a way that it splashed all the water away and created dry ground for them to come down on and walk on. That's how we came to this Earth and became a part of the Earth. And out of respect for or the bull elk, they called the bull elk.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And Christian interpreters Euro Christian interpreters came along and translated that into English, earthmaker. And just like that, they turn Opuntonga's new name into a noun, an abstract nominal that matched up with their notion of creator god. So opponent on as creator. Well, that's not what the old Osages were saying. Is a sentence, not an noun, and Gake is he makes Mongeon the dry land.
Dr. Tink Tinker:He makes the land. That's very different from earthmaker. And once we understand that, we begin to see how verbs work in English names, in Indian names, and how English customarily translates those verbal sentence nouns, proper nouns, names of people into abstract nominals. I've got a painting behind me on the on the wall done by Rick Reagan, and he calls it stands in peace. Well, the guy who made the print didn't understand stands in peace.
Dr. Tink Tinker:He stands in peace. And so he has it captioned, Stand in peace. A an interdiction, a command. No. It's he stands in peace.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Which could shortens in in English as stands in peace, but it's certainly a verbal, sentence.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:It is very simple when I'm thinking Lakota. It's very yet very vast and expansive and allows you to to to grab imagination or knowledge or whatever that is, and and it's it's instantaneous. But when I'm thinking in English, I have to think about I don't know. What I can I say ignorance and how much I'm not or how much I am? That example of you saying that that he couldn't understand, stands in peace, yet to have it one place, stand in peace.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:It reminds me of a term I came across lately called premeditated ignorance. Yes. And it's in institutions and it's promoted by language? Yes. Sure.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And the colonizer has demonstrated their premeditated ignorance persistently since the first landfall. They they didn't understand anything that the natives spoke because they spoke a different language. And, of course, the colonizer had this, technology that enabled them to write down their interpretation, and that becomes fixed then in academic libraries as the only evidence for our early ancestors on this continent. Beginning with Columbus, it's all premeditated ignorance. He made stuff up.
Dr. Tink Tinker:They think we're gods, Columbus said. How did he sort that out? He had no idea whether Indians had a word for god or not, but they think we're gods. In other words, he's living out of his own romantic imagination. They're naked and wear clothes, so we must be superior.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Of course, the European stank because they hadn't changed clothes in several months at that point. And that's the first Osage memory of Europeans.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:It's that first memory. Right? Wow.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Yeah. Yeah. No. It smell for us. They they stink.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Well, you know, I'm of course, we're talking in in this context of of of educated modern mind, civilized, and all that. But, you know, the the the the history that we are talking about, it's not really accepted in schools. It takes almost a a drill that we have to bore into this system to be able to understand. Even if we talked about that we've been shackled as a people, been enslaved and branded and castrated and lynched and massacred and tortured and burned and all all of those things. And yet the turnaround to say, well, you didn't contribute anything here.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So, therefore, you know, that attitude and it makes me think a friend, Steve Newcomb, shared something with me, and I still haven't figured out what what it meant. He's a little ahead of whoever I am, and we all look at things in a legal context. It's decided by a gavel in the end. And then he said, now they're deciding through lethality,
Dr. Tink Tinker:The lethality. That's Steve's newest word, lethality, and I love it.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yes. Talk about that a little bit, Tink.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Let me take a step back and come at it. One story I keep telling over and over again these days is that my 15 year old daughter, her first 6, 7 years in school from kindergarten through 6th grade, every year, a teacher would get to a science lesson talking about the difference between things that are alive and things that are inert, not alive. Things that are biotic or nonbiotic. And an example is rocks are inert. Stone is nonbiotic.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And my daughter from the time she was 5 years old in kindergarten would interject, oh, no. They're not. We know they're alive. And each time the teacher being progressive and and and liberal would say, oh, yes, kids. We have to remember that some people believe stones are alive.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And I'd have to go rushing into school the next morning to talk to the teacher and say, please don't demean Indian science by reducing us to a belief system. That's your word. We don't have a word for belief. All we can tell you is what we know, and the word science comes from Latin, and it means knowledge. So this must be our science.
Dr. Tink Tinker:We know that stones eat are alive. They're our oldest ancestors on this earth. And when we go into Iombe's ceremony sitting with the stones, we know we're bringing in our grandparents, our grandfathers, these stones, who are giving themselves in the heat of the fire, one last time in order to enable us to be in connection with that wenoki world, to talk to those ancestors. And, of course, the teachers were always embarrassed and backpedaling, and whether it does any good or not, I know I ended up having a 2 hour Zoom meeting with her 6th grade science teacher who just could not wrap his mind around this other world view that that rocks might be living relatives and and not things. In that process, I have decided in the last couple of years to struggle with this decolonizing project of no longer using the words it or thing in my use of English because we don't have either word in Osage.
Dr. Tink Tinker:We don't have a word for objects, stuff, things, and no neuter pronoun. It in fact, our pronouns pronouns don't distinguish between male or female, singular or plural, so my pronouns are eiita, which is he, her, and them, with theirs, they, his, and hers. And it's only context that sorts out whether it's male, female, singer, or fascinating stuff. Now in terms of Steve's notion of lethality, I need to think longer and harder about that. I mean, it's clear to me.
Dr. Tink Tinker:I call this Euro Christian worldview an extractive worldview because it's focused on extracting this thing they call resources from grandmother, whether it's mining or oil or slave labor, or whatever it is, extracting what John Locke calls wealth can then make that an abstract too that they call money. And you have the introduction of a money economy because it's only through that abstract of money that people can store wealth because food will rot. Various stuff. Really curious stuff. But in order to go after extraction, one has to have a banal attitude towards lethality because you've got to kill, take life in order to dig the earth to extract minerals or oil, or you've got to hurt people in order to create slave labor or wage labor for that matter and maintain, you know, once you've got a money economy, you've got to control how much money poor people can earn because, otherwise, they might become your class.
Dr. Tink Tinker:So lethality is a part of that. Another part of it is is you Christian fundamental commitment to seeing the world in terms of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. See, we don't have a word for evil in Osage. The closest we can come is Bijie, bad. How do you feel today?
Dr. Tink Tinker:Bijie, bad. Bad dog. Don't be chewing up the paper that way. Or or, bad buffalo, which is a personal name. And and that's a name of great respect.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Me meaning he's showing some some tendencies for protecting the cows in his in his herd. Biji, just an everyday word meaning bad. The missionaries picked it to mean their word for evil because they have to have this cosmic struggle between good and evil. Now that's not just a religious struggle between good and evil, but it prevents everyday life in the Euro Christian world. It is the foundation of US foreign policy.
Dr. Tink Tinker:There's always got to be an evil in the world against which we're encouraging the house and the senate to vote for appropriations to increase American lethality, to erase the evil in the world. So you see, it's not religion. It really is much more than that. It is the whole ball of wax, and when you have that cosmic struggle between good and evil, one of the tools, one of the abstract nominals that makes that work in your favor is Steve's notion of lethality. So you want to increase the ability to take life.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Stay with us for the second half of George Ting Tinker, a scholar of the Osage nation. This is First Voices Radio, and my name is Tiokasin, ghost horse.
Music:Come as you are, as
Narrator:you were, as I want you
Music:to see as your friend, best
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Come as you are originally by Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. This one this version is sung by Genevieve Chadwick for playing for a change 2024 release. Now we get back to George Tink Tinker, our guest, and we were talking about the definition of of lethality, lethality. This is First Voices Radio. Thank you for joining us.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And taking life in that sense, as you you said, you know, of course, we can take lethality and go to the UN, and it's really they're assessing the damage and who gets what, but they will never talk about Earth in in favorable terms. Underpinning is that we don't wanna pay attention to the bad things that the system is doing. So when I think about now this is a jump here, Tink. A few years ago, there was Hillary Clinton was saying something about it takes a takes a village to raise a child. I thought, well, that's really anthropocentric.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:But maybe she means something else. I don't know, but that's what I got out of it. What I thought was directly from what I heard when I was growing up. It takes the land to raise a child, and that land is is not there anymore. And so you have a lot of people who are stagnated or stunted from seeing all the stars.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:They only see the the points of light from the city. And so the the the lethality of how to live in this society has turned their their eyes, their spirits towards the the city. And this is what we grew up because we we we run to nature when we can, while we can. But when that's running out, then where is the land to raise a child rather than it takes a village, when that village doesn't even know who they are anymore?
Dr. Tink Tinker:Couple of things. First of all, Hillary Clinton didn't invent that. She stole it from African tribal people. For them, it has deep meaning. In Hillary Clinton's context, it no longer has any meaning whatsoever.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Villages become an abstract nominal because there are no villages anymore. We don't have that in the Euro Christian world. We have to go to a reservation on Turtle Island in order to find a village where people are related, where they know each other. They know each other's business. Your village ought to evoke people living together closely.
Dr. Tink Tinker:We don't have that here in the city. People may there may be a 1000 people living in a huge apartment complex in New York City, but they don't even know each other, don't even do more than say good morning to each other when they pass one another in the elevator. And I've walked the streets of New York. People don't even look you in the eye when you pass them. There is no hello on the streets, whatsoever.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Curious stuff. In other words, this sense of lethality has come back to bite your Christians because their mode of living has created a world in which people don't interact, well at all and and and, in fact, are killing life in order to have bigger and bigger cities. That's part of the lethality, the unspoken part of the lethality. And and Steve, I think, would would affirm that 100%, that we're talking that way. So it's not just the bombs and the guns, but it's the cities we've built that are lethal.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And we now know that as we go into, the the end of the the human epoch, if you will, where we're killing off human beings through this thing we call climate change or the climate emergency. But you and I talked about that before too. I mean, elders used to say 1 50 years ago when I was young, don't worry about grandmother earth. She'll survive once she gets rid of this human virus.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Thinking out of that, you know, these these psyche terms or denatured terms of trying to rationalize why one must accept civilization, live in civilization is because that's the way it is. That's their terminology. But, also, if you talk to someone who hasn't grown up with earth, there's there's this biophobia. There's this denatured language, because you don't hear about nature in in the city, but they talk about it easily and they take it across the shores. And our dictionaries are are about codifying, and we talked about this before too, codifying our language or the truer meaning into some noun.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So when I think about biophobia, the students that I'm hearing are talking about nature in that as earth comes first. They're talking about how much money can we get so we can get away from the city to go to nature. See, the whole process is skewed in the first place like you you alluded to.
Dr. Tink Tinker:That's right. Yeah. Nature is somewhere far from the city. So going back to nature requires considerable resources. I mean, it, first of all, it involves, fossil fuels to get there.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Right? And then you've got to have the equipment to get back to nature. You've gotta have a ripstop nylon backpack, a ripstop nylon tent, a down sleeping bag because it might be up in the mountains where it gets cold at night. Yeah. That's going back to nature.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Nature is not the park around the corner from where you live. That's still a city.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Just to go back to the beginning when you talked about going into the INEPI, accepting, at least for you, knowing these entities are are present. I had recently had a interview with a person who is Ojibwe. She works in the state of Minnesota with elders, and these characteristics of recurrent visions of nonphysical world as it as it were. You know, the the treatment paper, how they treat elders, native people. And in that is psychoactive drugs is to stop their transitioning because Yes.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Crazy making in this society is actually the transitioning that native people are feeling. And so a lot of native people are saying, no. We have to let this happen naturally. Right? And so Right.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:That is a new study that on its way, because psychoactive drugs has stopped us from dreaming in that real time, basically. It it's it's on its way. It's here already. So we we understood this. We understand that.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Even as we are in this present dimension, we understand. And because it's our ceremonies that allow us to understand but feel what that means to living as compared to dying, and yet it's it doesn't feel like it's dying. It feels like we're just beginning to live. That renewal that we say that comes out of being in the in an Niipi. As we come out, we understand more.
Dr. Tink Tinker:It's interesting to me that you're a Christian medical science is now discovering that they can use salicylic mushroom in order to help people heal from anxiety and depression. Curious stuff. It was made illegal back in the sixties, became a scheduled drug, and now they're saying, wait a minute. We missed something here. Maybe this could be life giving, and and and not life taking.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Yeah. I think we want to be careful when we have relatives who are seeing people, hearing people. The go to is they're hallucinating in the Euro Christian world. They're hallucinating. They're hearing voices.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And we know that, for instance, this guy in Minnesota in, Maine who killed 15 people, I think it was, was hearing voices. We know it can work that way in in a society of lethality where it's uncontrolled, but we also know that if I have a relative who's talking to people in that Wonaki world, I better pay attention to that person and not simply find a way to fence them off out of my life and tell them they're crazy and they need to be on a psychotropic drug. Maybe they have something to say to me that's helpful. You and I both know we have a whole cadre of of people called interpreters, Yeshka, who, white people call medicine people. People like Joe Eaglehill used to assure me, we don't have medicine men.
Dr. Tink Tinker:He said, I'm just an a just a Yeshka, an interpreter. And if you come to my ceremony, I can tell you what the Wenoke have to say to you. And what you do with that is up to you. Yeah. That's an important role, though.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Joe died now 30 years ago, and I continue to miss him every day, along with you know, my brother died now 3 years ago, 2 years ago. Man, he was my anchor back home. I would go home and spend 3 days just sitting on the couch talking to my brother because he had that deep knowledge that comes from being a a a yishka. And and a deep knowledge, he knew the language much better than I, knew the history much better than I. He lived there most of his life instead of going off to do something in name like get a PhD, which which enabled me to do certain things, but stop me from other kinds of development.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And I'm only now playing catch up trying to learn some of the things my brother knew intuitively.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:No. This is great conversation. Thank you for that. And thinking about the complications of interpretation as as I would think, we're always dealing with their illusion or their hallucination of who we are. And even when it comes to culture.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:The children, your daughter, when she was young, when my son and daughter were young, they were seeing little people. They were seeing young Oh, yes. Others. And so we accept that. But when a person gets older, it seems torture that we we can accept that.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Yeah. Right.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And this this comes into that that lack of I mean, as I call it, premeditated ignorance. Right? It's put in place so that it proves to me that how little we know of regard of American Indian culture. Right? And, spiritually, how we're affected by the interpretation of their hallucinations because that's they took hallucinations or these drugs to get away from themselves, to get away from life.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Yes. Right.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Right. Like they're still applying that same method with mushrooms, in this case, cyprosylla.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Yep. Yep. Yeah. My, middle son into his early thirties would have dreams where he would travel. They call it astro traveling, I guess, star traveling.
Dr. Tink Tinker:And he was worried about it. He went to his uncle, my brother, to ask him about it. And brother said, oh, don't worry about that. When it happens, go with it. See where it'll take you.
Dr. Tink Tinker:You you'll learn things. He said, you you've got to do it now because, eventually, that'll stop. So you better pay attention now. And sure enough, he's in his forties, and all of that has gone away now. So he only has the memory of it, but the memories are good because he, was was able to talk it through with with my brother Larry.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Keep compelling me to think further is that your brother, your son your son went to find transition medicine. And in that, you go to other places to bring the medicine back to understand the transitioning. And I think that's kind of, like, what we're missing here in this Sure. We we're we're we don't have transitioning medicine anymore.
Dr. Tink Tinker:That's right. Yep. That's right. That's right. And I suspect that, some Indians across the continent use those mushrooms for that, just as they use marijuana for that in some nations.
Dr. Tink Tinker:But but it had to be used within a particular context and not used recreationally, had to be used ceremonially, in a careful way, paying attention to that mushroom as a relative and not just as a thing that you eat in order to have a particular experience. So you talk to those people, those relatives in that ceremony before you, ingest whatever it is you're ingesting, whether it's peyote or, mushroom or or some some tobacco that you're smoking that will give you a different kind of vision.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Far too often and I I don't even know if this is a word, but the west seems to dogmatize that experience or experiment rather and turn everything into a religion.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Well, they turn it into a noun, which becomes an abstract. And then you can write books about that one abstract in books that disagree with one another. But but everything has been codified, classified, categorized into different nouns. And if you give it the right name, you control it. So it's not about actually knowing.
Dr. Tink Tinker:It's about being able to name something.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:We're almost out of time. I wanted to get your thoughts on this. I often tell the students, I don't want to know what you know. I don't want to know your information. I want to know what you're thinking.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:That brings it into the current. That is all merit based, the way education is given. What are you thinking now with what you're doing? Or if you didn't have education, who would you be?
Dr. Tink Tinker:Powerful question and impossible to answer. But because education has been both a negative and a positive. It set me back 20 years in my development, but it enabled me to understand things about decolonizing myself that maybe I never would have learned if I'd been uneducated or or or educated in the old way. I think sometimes what it would have been like to have grown up completely in that old culture with without the colonial influence. And and that's a romantic ideal that I can't get rid of, but at the same time, we can never achieve.
Dr. Tink Tinker:We can only imagine what that was like. And to think of myself without these experiences I've had, I have to go back to my reservation and and look at my relatives there. And, you know, we're in trouble, I think. I've been a city Indian. My communities were in the Bay Area and now here in Denver for 40 years here in Denver.
Dr. Tink Tinker:A member of the American Indian Movement of of of of Colorado for 40 years. An activist, fighting with the colonial system. And finally, after 31 year struggle, we got the state legislature to pass a law getting rid of the Columbus Day holiday. A minor victory, but but a victory, nevertheless, to alert our Euro Christian relatives that they're on a destructive path of lethality when they celebrate people like Columbus. When I go home and I have to tell you, I'm a bit of an outlier, especially with my brother gone now.
Dr. Tink Tinker:We were outliers because the vast majority of Wazhaji, people have become Christian. They're either Catholic or evangelical Protestant. They've traded their worldview for one of that renaissance radical individualism. It's about the me, about my salvation, about whether I'm going to heaven or not going down. We don't have words for heaven and hell in in Osage language.
Dr. Tink Tinker:All of a sudden, it's become the determining factor for so much of life on the Osage reservation, and it dictates all kinds of other responses and ensures that, that we continue to move more and more into that world of nominal abstraction and wave verbal experience of the world. I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up even though I'm not even nearly a done deal yet.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Compels me to think of one more thing. Talk about the abstractions. In in that world where Crazy Horse went to and Osage and other native peoples who were living in a world where there was no opposites, That good and evil didn't exist because we were in the motion of energy. We were we were now. We were here.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And and so when I think about the borders and right and wrong and good and evil, this is this is the the world of opposites we're living in. Gotta have an enemy. But in the liminal world that doesn't see liminal space, there is that place where there are no opposites. And we can't think out of that in this this mentality of the west, but I could feel there is really no opposites because it Yeah. Has to keep going energy behind energy.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yeah.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Good and evil is an example of what I call oppositional dualism. And our worldview didn't have that. It's dualistic, but it's both and. You've got to have both. You have to have sky and earth, night and dark, male and female, in order to have a complete home.
Dr. Tink Tinker:So for us, it's about accomplishing that coming together of the two halves, what Barbara Mann calls the twin halves of the universe or twinned pairs, she'll call them. Bringing the world into balance, not fighting evil with the best lethality you can manufacture, but bringing the whole into balance. And in that bringing into balance, you allow people to be who they are. You allow that buffalo to defend his cows. That that bad bull.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Yeah. That's where, you know, that's where I think we need to correct this Euro Christian world with all of our energies
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:is to
Dr. Tink Tinker:bring them into an understanding of we've got to create balance, not get rid of the evil.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yeah. Tink, it's really good to talk to you.
Dr. Tink Tinker:It's always good.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yeah. Good conversation, and, we'll have to talk like this soon again.
Dr. Tink Tinker:You always push my thinking, to the edge, so I'm always trying to to to think my way through interesting problematics that you that you present.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:But but I I know you understand. That's the deeper meaning of all this because, yes, it comes from somewhere. Maybe it's the DNA of Earth. It's in our DNAs as related tribes, if you will, as peoples, as human beings. So that's the part that I talk about, the indigeneity in all of us, that a lot of us has forgotten that indigeneity and put on the airs, performed, and all that for somebody else.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Well, earth is not in hope earth's never hoped. Right? It's always done what it's required to do. Yes.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Required to do. It is. Yep. It is. She is.
Dr. Tink Tinker:See there, I used that word it again. Yep. And I'm trying to erase that.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yeah.
Dr. Tink Tinker:Your grandmother is she, not it.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:That's right. So that that is for this is like a learning curve for a lot of people hearing us talk about decolonizing or unlearning and learning differently. But, again, it's,
Dr. Tink Tinker:Be well with. It's
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:good to have all of you listening out there on the First Forces Radio. I wanna thank you, especially appreciate your awareness bring to this radio station. You bring to those others who you pass word on or pass the message, and it's all for earth and for the future of all life. My name is. This is First Voices Radio.
