The rocks have been cooking in the outdoor fire for more than two hours and are glowing red. The people who have gathered for the sweat lodge ceremony begin to prepare themselves for the heat of the lodge. Newcomers—people who have finally gotten up enough courage to try their first sweat—have been well-teased about the heat they will encounter. In the joking that comes before the sweat, people tell exaggerated stories about “rocks so hot that they were on fire” and “the back walls smoldering from the heat” and about “feeling like my hair was on fire.” Then one of the elders says: “It’s a good day to die!” To a newcomer unfamiliar with traditional Native American concepts of death, these words may sound a little strange, perhaps even a little scary.
Traditional American Indian spiritual views of death are somewhat different than those held by some non-Indians. I’d like to talk a little bit about death and about the traditional Anishinabe view of death. (Anishinabe means “first people” or “original people” and is the designation that the Ojibwa/Chippewa people use for themselves.)
To understand death, we must first understand time. Among the Anishinabe, as well as many Indian people, time was—and often still is—viewed as an endless cycle. While there are creations stories (notice that this is plural, not singular), there was no single beginning point for the world. The stories are about cycles of creation and sometimes destruction and sometimes re-creation. Within this temporal perspective, death is simply a transition point. It is a natural part of the cycle of life, death, birth. This cycle is most visible in the seasons—spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, and so on.
“It is a good day to die—because I have lived well.” The traditional emphasis was—and often still is—on living well. The traditional focus was on life, not death. The traditional focus was on living life well. Living life well implies living in harmony with and in respect for all other living things. Traditionally, there was little concern for what happens after death. If one is disrespectful to others—humans, animals, plants, the earth—one doesn’t wait until death for judgment about one’s actions. One experiences the results of disharmony and disrespect in this life, often in the form of illness, misfortune, accidents. When we live well today—when we live in harmony with all other living things—then we will live well tomorrow.
The traditional Anishinabe lived in an egalitarian world. Unlike the Europeans, they did not view the world as being hierarchical. In an egalitarian world, humans did not have supremacy or dominion over the animal people or the plant people or the river people or the stone people or any of the other living things of creation. Like other living things, humans are subject to the same natural laws. Time is a cycle, a continuous cycle of birth, death, birth.
There have been a lot of fantasies written by sometimes well-intentioned Christians, including Christian Indians, who have attempted to put the traditional Indian ways into the hierarchical and lineal European worldview. These fantasies talk about Indians believing in a kind of primitive Christian heaven known as the “Happy Hunting Ground” (keep in mind that most Indians were farmers). Most of these stories are simply figments of the European ethnocentric mind. In reality, our traditional worldview was not comprehensible to most of the Europeans when they first encountered it.
The camping cat died a few minutes ago.
She will be missed.
Migwitch.