Silence, the Word and the Sacred

Evoking the Sacred through Language, Metalanguage, and the "Arts" in Native American and Arctic Experience

Chapter 7 EVOKING THE SACRED Through Language, Metalanguage, and the "Arts" in Native American and Arctic Experience Joseph EpesBrown Within and across the many still surviving Native American indigenous languages there resides a rich legacy which tragically, through ignorance or ill-will, is either ignored or purposely destroyed by a dominant Englishor French-speaking majority. This situation may rightlybe called tragic, due not to some vague romanticism, but rather because of our impoverishment in not being aware of the remarkable range of sacred values born by such primal languages with their rich verbal and nonverbal expressions of what may be called metalanguage. Major contributors in the progressive compromising of tribal languages are in large measure those presiding and prejudicial assumptions of the "Western" modern world that literacy is an unqualified good and an indispensible prerequisite for culture. The persistence of prejudice against non-literate transmission or communication has contributed perhaps more than any other element, not just to the compromise of most indigenous cultures of the Americas, but even in numerous cases to their actual extinction, since ultimatelyit is language which bears culture. In the eventual resolution of these problems in our relations with primal peoples we would do well to look back to Plato's dialogues in the Phaedrus where Socrates tells us of the god Theuth who came to Thamus, the King of upper Egypt, telling him that writing "... is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discoveryprovides a recipe for memory and wisdom." To this the King replied: If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not of memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its 141 142 Silence, The Word and the Sacred semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them, you will make them seem to know much, and as men filled not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows Anyone who supposes that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded. To this day we find at the heart of Native American and Eskimo cultures livingexpressions and experience of this Greek wisdom and even elements which go beyond the understandings of the Classical world. Among all Native American and Eskimo languages, for example, there obtains what may be called elements of metalanguage where the process of life and time is experienced in cyclical manner, not in terms of the linearity, that is, a presiding perspective of the "modern" world and thus integral to the dominant and questionable Western vision of progress. Further, in Native American languages, as in primal languages in general, the spoken word or name bears an immediate sacred presence by virtue of the understanding that words are produced through the agency of breath, and in these traditions, particularly among hunting peoples, the breath, whether of the human or non-human being, is understood as a physical expression of the sacred life-principle. Further, the source of breath is the lung which resides next to the heart which is understood as the spiritual essence or centre of the living being. It is due to this understanding that among hunting peoples when an animal or seamammal is slain, the hunter blows his breath into the nostrils of the slain being as a ritual act of responsibility by which the taken life-breath is restored. Extension of this sacred understanding of breath and the spoken word is provided by Robert Williamson: Sila is the word for air, without air there is no life; air is in all people and all creatures; anything deprived of air ceases to live. In that air therefore gives life and without air there is no life, the Eskimos believed that they are part of the Life-Giving Spirit, that each individual is animated by the Life-Giving Spirit, and that the part of his soul, that part which is the essence of all things living,is part of the ultimate deity Sila This is of course something which never dies, air and the life-giving force go on indefinitely,so then does the soul of men. When the air passes out of the...