Holthaus - Learning native wisdom: what traditional cultures teach us about subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality

Culture of the Land

A Series in the New Agrarianism

This series is devoted to the exploration and articulation of a new agrarianism that considers the health of habitats and human communities together. It demonstrates how agrarian insights and responsibilities can be worked out in diverse fields of learning and living: history, science, art, politics, economics, literature, philosophy, religion, urban planning, education, and public policy. Agrarianism is a comprehensive worldview that appreciates the intimate and practical connections that exist between humans and the earth. It stands as our most promising alternative to the unsustainable and destructive ways of current global, industrial, and consumer culture.

Series Editor

Norman Wirzba, Duke University, North Carolina

Advisory Board

Wendell Berry, Port Royal, Kentucky

Ellen Davis, Duke University, North Carolina

Patrick Holden, Soil Association, United Kingdom

Wes Jackson, Land Institute, Kansas

Gene Logsdon, Upper Sandusky, Ohio

Bill McKibben, Middlebury College, Vermont

David Orr, Oberlin College, Ohio

Michael Pollan, University of California at Berkeley, California

Jennifer Sahn, Orion Magazine, Massachusetts

Vandana Shiva, Research Foundation for Science,

Technology and Ecology, India

Bill Vitek, Clarkson University, New York

Copyright 2008 by The University Press of Kentucky

Paperback edition 2013

Axe Handles, copyright 1983 by Gary Snyder, is reprinted from Axe Handles

(Berkeley, Calif.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005) by permission of Gary Snyder.

For Those Who Love Nature, copyright 2003 by Boston Wesleyan Press, North Berwick, Maine, is reprinted from The Unauthorized Bible: Selected Readings by permission of Boston Wesleyan Press.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the personal correspondence from Gary Snyder that appears on page 50 of this volume.

The University Press of Kentucky

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Holthaus, Gary H., 1932

Learning native wisdom : what traditional cultures teach us about subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality / Gary Holthaus.

p. cm. (Culture of the land)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-2487-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Environmental ethics. 2. Sustainable living. 3. Indians of North America. I. Title.

II. Series.

GE42.H65 2008

179'.1dc22

2007052577

ISBN 978-0-8131-4108-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of
American University Presses

For Robert D. Arnold

(19312003)

Dorik V. Mechau

Ted Chamberlin

Gary Snyder

Colleagues, friends, inspirators, conspirators, mentors, participants in
many adventures, longtime companions along the way

One afternoon the last week of April

Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.

He recalls the hatchet-head

Without a handle, in the shop

And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

A broken-off axe handle behind the door

Is long enough for a hatchet,

We cut it to length and take it

With the hatchet head

And working hatchet, to the wood block.

There I begin to shape the old handle

With the hatchet, and the phrase

First learned from Ezra Pound

Rings in my ears!

When making an axe handle

the pattern is not far off.

And I say this to Kai

Look: Well shape the handle

By checking the handle

Of the axe we cut with

And he sees. And I hear it again:

Its in Lu Jis Wn Fu, fourth century

A.D . Essay on Literaturein the

Preface: In making the handle

Of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand.

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

Gary Snyder

Why learn native wisdom? Because if we want to think about a sustainable culture and find ways to create one, we have models right at hand, as Gary Snyder indicates in Axe Handles. The models have roots and forms in several cultures, but in each case they grow from antiquity. Im thinking here of Eskimo and Indian cultures in Alaska, whose roots are older than even those Chinese sage kings who preceded Confucius, and may be three times as old as Western culture. They have been around long enough; there must be something we can learn from them, if we have sufficient humility and wisdom of our own.

What are the links among subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality? We are in a fix, caught in a species die-out at a rate never before seen. Our earth, upon which we remain totally dependent, has become infected by its own chronic wasting disease, losing its ten thousand things, as the ancient Chinese called the myriad creatures, plants, animals, and rocks that cover the planet; we have gotten caught in our own desires, greed, conceits, and arrogance. And there lies the heart of it. The evidence seems clear now that the real root of these issues, both cause and cure, lies not in our science or technology but in our own spiritual and intellectual povertyor, more hopefully, in our own spiritual and intellectual resources. Those Neo-Confucians from around the twelfth century would have called these the heart-mind.

There is a paradox at work here that puzzles many of us. Religions are booming around the globe, with adherents willing to lay down their own lives, and the lives of many others, to foster faiths that are not alive and awake to their own best spirituality but are now given to revenge, power, violence, and excess. All the great religions and philosophies and their indigenous forebears that we know of insist that revenge, power, violence, and excess prohibit our living out a faith that must include others in the arena of our concernmust protect the weak, feed the poor, and treat the ten thousand things with deepest respect. We are failing on all counts while politically and socially powerful persons who practice Christianity, Islam, and Judaism ignore their own most basic precepts and subvert their religions best intentions and hopes. We are fortunate that there are cultures far older than those of the desert trinity from which we can learn another wisdom that may save us yet.