Unshod with D. Firth Griffith

God Is Red: Rediscovering Turtle Island and an Indigenous Cosmogenesis with Taylor Keen, Episode 6

• Daniel Firth Griffith • Season 4 • Episode 38

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In this 7th installment of the God is Red series, Taylor Keen (Omaha / Cherokee) takes us deep into his book, Rediscovering Turtle Island. We discuss the idea of Indigenous civilization, Alexis De Tocqueville's view of the "pride of the native american," and why an Indigenous Cosmogenesis is so important for our world today--that the divine lives in all of us. 

Whether you're indigenous to the Land below your feet or not, these ancient stories offer profound perspective on what it means to live in right relationship with land, community, and Spirit. They remind us that mythology isn't just about preserving the past—it's about creating possibilities for a more beautiful future.

Learn more about Taylor's work HERE.

Purchase Rediscovering Turtle Island HERE.

Learn more about Daniel's work HERE.

Daniel Firth Griffith:

Hello. Welcome to the podcast. I want to first apologize for the delay in publishing these episodes. Taylor and I have been busy recording and yarning, discussing uh what is becoming to be a sub-series within the series God is read within the podcast Unshod. And uh I've also been neck deep in the dark waters of finishing up uh what is my sixth book. Uh it's called Bloodless We Go Buried. It's an Earth Mother Horror. At the beginning of this next episode, Taylor and I discuss a little bit about it and the horror genre. And so I'll leave it at that. More information on upcoming podcasts uh on that. Uh but this episode, it's really the seventh yarn between Taylor and I, my brother, with his book uh and the concepts, the indigenous worldview and uh cosmology that it contains, uh, rediscovering Turtle Island. Hitherto, Taylor and I in these God is read series, we've discussed uh these things um ad lib, I think, just openly deciding one rock to the other to cross the stream, if you will, as we're standing in the stream. This sub-series uh within the within within the series God is read, uh, episode by episode, chapter by chapter, we're going to walk through his book, Rediscovering Turtle Island. This episode, the first of the subseries, uh, we discussed the prologue in chapter one, and every uh episode that follows is the uh the next chapter. And so if you have yet to read Rediscovering Turtle Island and uh you want to jump in, this is a perfect time to do so. Uh to some degree, what Taylor is providing us, uh gracing upon us, honoring us with, is to do a read-along with him uh with his book, Rediscovering Turtle Island, as he's finishing up book two, which he acknowledges uh the title and subtitle of which at the end of this episode, which is really exciting uh that he got to do that. And uh I think that's gonna be released sometime next year, early next year. And so again, thank you for joining us. Uh the Goddess Red series has been one heck of a journey for the podcast, for my own journey, my own path, my own trace. Um, it has sparked many conversations between me and my friends, my community, to many, you know, with many of you listeners which are listening here. And uh and we couldn't be more thankful. And so, again, uh the next, I don't know, 10 episodes of this series uh will be us walking through uh Taylor's book. And so I'll put a link in the show notes where you can purchase the book. Uh, please do so. Taylor's work, I truly believe is uh momentous. It's it's truly needed uh today. As we step into the rearing and the raising of the seventh generation of children who are looking back into these older ways, these ancient ways, these rays written into the marrow, the blood memory of all of us, uh, but are also held a little bit more topically, a little bit more accessibly with uh with our indigenous brothers and sisters. No matter where you listen to this episode. And uh and so that's that. I'm rambling, I'm happy, I'm blessed. Uh, enjoy this episode with Taylor King.

Taylor Keen:

Only the good Indians just had me so perplexed. Um, yes. I shared it with um some of my friends, and I think we're gonna get together for uh dinner tonight. And um, but you know, there's it's so hard with only the good Indians to figure out what is reality and what is not. But it was just I'm still trying to figure out like he cuts the baby deer out of his dead wife.

Daniel Firth Griffith:

Yeah.

Taylor Keen:

Did that happen or was that imaginary?

Daniel Firth Griffith:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I mean, uh as as you know, in uh John Neathart's, I mean, I don't know, I don't know. I I think this is one of the truest things I've ever heard. But in John Eathart's uh Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk says, um, everything in this book is true. Or everything in this book is not true, but if you think about it, you'll see that it is. And and and I love in fiction when that is is is also the truth of the book, right? Like, no, he did not cut the baby deer out of his wife, but yes, he cut the baby deer out of his wife. And and somewhere between those, that you know, whatever that is, that muddy murk is is truth. I I think it's those are my favorite authors. I think Stephen Graham Jones does that really well. I'm excited to dive into the antidote of Karen Russell's work now that you've recommended it. So good. I love that. Like where it's it's just well, because like I was saying, like with horror, um I think like a lot of like the best-selling books today, they're they're really created in this like Western storytelling complex, where it's just the plot and it's A to Z and it moves linearly, and the story develops and the characters rise, and then they might fall a little bit, and then they rise and they grow. And when you read, I think really good stories, especially stories written by different minority cultures that we just don't get exposed to historically as much, that finally thank God we are. Like Tony Morrison, I think, is one. Um, I think she's an amazing, I think Stevie Graham Jones classifying as a minority author as a little ridiculous. But um, like his stories, there there's really no beginning or end. There's no linear story development. There's a lot of the times where you're like, wait, did that did that just happen? Or do I think that just happened? Or maybe it didn't happen, but you want me to think that it happened, and that's the point. You need me to think something that's not true, that is true, that actually is more truth than the truth itself, or like that's that's that point where you really get that introspection into like the real human in life experience on earth. I don't think so many of us think that science is a good exemplar or um describer of human experience or just all experience. I think horror is a good genre to do that too. I think mythical or magical realism, I think is an another amazing genre that plays with that. Um Clive Barker. Have you read any Clive Barker? I mean, I know the name. Um I have not. Crazy dude. Really, really crazy dude. But he has a book. It's a string of, I think there's like four novellas, but they're or shorter books, shorter collections of short stories, but they're called the Books of Blood. And not all of the short stories are amazing, but so many of them. He has this uh short story called The Midnight Meat Train. Really long short story shorter. It's about the serial killer in New York City who in the nighttime in the subway systems um basically turns into like a butcher, and he like butchers the human body for like cannibals. And this cop is trying to catch him, you know, and he's on the New York subway system in the middle of the night, and uh and he finds them and ends up being caught by him, and and then the subway train takes him to the heart of New York City. And the whole time the the police officer or the investigator or whoever the main character is that's trying to find the serial killer, this this meat train butcher, if you will, he's just in love and enamored with New York City and the beauty of it, and the glistening mirrors and steel and concrete and busyness and capitalism. Like he's just he's in love with these things. And then the midnight meat train with the butcher and the cop or the investigator, they arrive in the middle of the city, in the middle of the night, in the heart of the city, the womb, and there's all of these figures, and and and all of these figures are just feasting on human flesh. And uh it's it's a little crazy. Oh, it's a lot crazy. It's it's quite disgusting. It's real though, because the point is real. And he says, All of the things that you love. This is the butcher of the Midnight Meat Train talking to the inspector. He said, All the things that you love are fed and uh and find sustenance in human meat in order for you to like the glistening capitalism or whatever it is, the New York City and what it stands for. There's a price of blood and meat. And so he sees like the New York City's founders, and then he sees like the American founders. I think George Washington is under there, just feasting on flesh, you know. And uh I think it's one of the strongest, most potent, most real um, and honest critiques, real critiques of um American exceptionalism or Western civilization or whatever, all through like this midnight meat train butcher cannibalism sort of short story. It's really powerful. So, this is the first you know, I'm going through and editing our past conversations, and and to me, this feels like a really appropriate next step. We've built an unbelievable base, in my opinion, about story, indigenous pathology, sacred kinship, all of these things, different episodes, different conversations. Um, and we've you know been beating around uh all of these cop topics around your book, Rediscovering Turtle Island. I know you're writing the next uh chapter of this book, the next you know, book of the series. And so what I'm gonna do, um, and I and I imagine that our conversation is not gonna stay as contained as you were able to stay in your book. I imagine we're gonna have tangents this way and that. So it might not be overly ordered. Um, but we'll walk through your book chapter by chapter. Maybe we'll skip a chapter, maybe we'll stay uh two episodes on a chapter, whatever feels real to you.

Taylor Keen:

Sounds good. Can I ask you to um offer the blessing this time? Oh, I feared you were gonna do that. My brother, it is an honor. Um before we begin jumping into rediscovering Turtle Island, a quick blessing. Creator, God, thank you. Our hearts are thankful. I share a great gratitude to be as I am with my brother Taylor, with these words, the soul that is expressed in in these conversations I know is helping many, and that brings me great joy. I thank you for the day, the rains that fell this morning, the heat of August. I thank you for Lunasa, the celebration of this paradox between husbandry and hunting between the wild places, the hinterlands, and the hearth and the home. Teach us to be grateful, teach us to always appreciate what we are given, this gift, and teach us to be kind, as you are kind. Thank you for uh for that blessing, brother. Beautiful. Taylor, I am excited to jump in. I read your book maybe a year and a half ago when it first came out. I don't think you know this. I heard you on some podcast long before um you were on what? Kyle Kingsbury's podcast, which I think is how we got introduced. Um it wasn't Meat Eater. Oh well, it might have been Meat Eater. It no, it actually might have been Meat Eater, Ronella's podcast. Um I heard it and uh I didn't get your book then, but I was really interested in it. I listened to the episode and was drawn into your words. Um, and then you were on the Kyle Kingsbury podcast, and uh Kyle, our mutual friend, uh introduced us. I then bought your book, read your book then, had you on the Unshod podcast a little bit after. And uh it was funny, right after that podcast, um, right after recording it, our first introduction to each other, I I walked inside to my wife, who's always interested. She never listens to these things. I don't know, I've probably done hundreds of podcasts. She's never listened to one of them. Um she says all she does is hear me talk, she doesn't need it anymore, which is true, which is true. But I came in and she goes, How was it? Because I was really nervous. I was I was really nervous. Um I I I I I love the book. I loved your book. Um, but there's a soul that I think people have have have discovered, have interacted with in this this podcast series, this God has read series, uh, to you and your words that um complement your book really well. And I wanted to do to do a good job and have a good interview, and and it was interesting. And so she asked, because I was, like I said, I was nervous and she asked, What how was it? And I said, Well, it seemed like the first half of the conversation was us feeling each other out, and then the second half, um, which wasn't bad, it was good, it was still flow there. But then the second half was like, wow, wait, there is some kindred ship there. There's there's a shared heart there. And and I and I I thought we really fell into a really good fluid conversation, a really solid yarn um about your work and the book. And so to now, after so many other podcasts that we've been able to do together, so many conversations we've been able to sit with in this space, to jump through rediscovering Turtle Island um chapter by chapter in a little bit more orderly of a fashion. I struggle with too much order uh and framework, but we'll try our best. There's a there's a quote in the in the preface that you write that I wanted to read only briefly, um, and then and we'll set the conversation up that way, and then I know we'll dive into chapter one, cosmogenesis. Um and I don't know, I fear that we might have a two-hour conversation that follows. So we'll be brief in this first part. Um, but I'll read the quote and we'll go from there. This is on the the pre in the preface uh page uh 16 or 17, XVI. It says, but more important is the beauty of what ancient indigenous peoples accomplished, a complex archaeoastronomy of earth and works to reflect the heavens above, the journey of the souls, in a Principia theologica, a true indigenous esoteric tradition tied to the original truths of a central humanity found in ancient wisdom across the world. I think through the nature of the conversations you and I have shared over the last four or five different episodes in the series, God has read, um, that is not a new thought. I realize that. But I wanted to contrast it. I don't know if you've ever read this in your academic life. I doubt you've ever read this in your pleasurable life. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Have you ever read this? I have. I have. I read this in college, and it was always so interesting to me. Tocqueville, so he wrote this in like the 1830s, this Frenchman who came to the United States, the early fledgling United States, and wanted to know more about what is this American democracy. But he writes about the indigenous relations. He has a whole chapter on it. He talks about where's this quote? He says the Indians of North America had only two options for salvation: war or civilization. In other words, they had to destroy the Europeans or become their equals. And there was a word that we discussed in class, which I didn't like the way at the time, and I definitely don't like the way now that we discussed about it, but the way that the professor talked about it, but this idea of salvation, that the indigenous peoples, the savages of America, the Indians, um, the native races, as sometimes Tocqueville called them, required salvation. He said they were outside the idea of civilization, um, that it just didn't make any sense to them. It said uh not only do the Indians not possess the indispensable preliminary for civilization, that is to say, they can never actually achieve civilization, but it's very difficult for them to acquire it. And and the reason I bring this up, and I don't know, we can do a whole podcast on the idiocy of Tocqueville, I guess, but at least in this perspective, there's this contrast between the indigeneity of especially the Western hemisphere and the Western civilization of Europe and maybe Eastern Europe, Western Asia at the time. That on the one hand, we have the savagery of the woods, a tocqueville turn term, and on the other side, we have this civilized architecture of written languages and everything that defines civilization. And so there's two questions here. The first that I wanted to, I just I don't know, I want to get your opinions on these things. In your preface, you write that the ancient indigenous peoples, you accomplished these traditions and ancient wisdoms found in other areas of the world and yet remained distant or different. Right? So while Tocqueville sees great difference in the intrinsic operations and worldviews between these two worlds, Indigenous of the Western Hemisphere, and let's say the enlightened West of Western civilization, this enlightenment idea of what civilization is, and has been over the last couple thousand years to their to their history. Well, no, let me speak even clearer. It seems to me like the indigenous of the Western hemisphere arrived at the same wisdom traditions as some ancient cultures around the rest of the world, which we've talked about in this Principia Theologica and Journey of the Souls and those sort of topics, and yet at the same time didn't fall prey to or didn't fall under the same tyrannies that Western civilization imposed on the rest of the world. I'm not entirely curious as to why that exists, but maybe why that's important. My first thoughts are um going back to the timing of the writing of the first chapter and the preface. So I think we've discussed this. It took me a very long time to write my first book from uh inception of the audacity of trying to walk in Vindaloria's shoes of uh disbelief to I really should give it a shot to the first few months of writing where um I would sit there for hours in front of a blank screen, finally eke out something. Uh proud that I eked out a couple of paragraphs, read it the next day, wanted to puke, deleted it all. Um to finally, after about three months of writing, I was able to stomach what I was writing and um finally began to find my voice. Um that was after the research phase, which I still love, love, love, uh, which I could do all the time, every day, 24 hours. Um but once I finally started writing after year three, it uh took me another two or th two or three years to geek it out. And then the pandemic hit. So from the beginnings of writing Cosmogenesis until the preface was a gap of about ten years. Um I still think the finest part of the writing of the book is the preface from my perspective. Um so going back to the origins of that or um it's been quite the journey, you know. Yeah. I would uh encourage everyone who has the desire to contribute something to humanity, um you should write a book because it's hard as hell and it's the best thing that I've ever done and um the hardest. So just thinking about all those all of that growth, all of the things that I've been through in life in that time frame. Pandemic worked in there. Um it's just really interesting to look back upon the evolution of thought, you know, within myself. Um it all came together, uh for me in that book. That was the last thing that I had to do for my publisher was to write the preface. And it was the only time that I sat down and wrote it all at once and didn't have to edit anything. And so that's kind of where it all came together. Um back to your question about civilization, as it were, from a European perspective. I have such a different point of view about indigenous histories now that I've written all of this and and and continue to research um for my second book, my second installment. And I struggle so much with that term civilization. Um I often describe civilization as the confluence between um mass religion and mass food. And um that seemed to happen in the Americas around 1050 at OK. Um we have this story of death, rebirth, and ascension of the morning star. Not unlike Christ or Mohammed or Osiris. Um I used to scoff at I believe it was young who um hypothesized that you know dreams and visions are all just part of this collective unconsciousness. Yeah, young and I used to scoff at that, but once I realized that there perhaps was this Principia theologica, um that there was, you know, one story. Or maybe it's the truth, I don't know. That our souls come across the Milky Way and there's one great tree of life. Um that just fascinates me and speaks to my soul. Um the other reason that I'm so um torn about the term civilization is um you know the ending of Cahokia was so bloody and uncivilized. Um reminds me of you know the horrors of European quote civilization and the fact that one race of people can be aided by guns, germs, and steel and can justify the genocide of another by calling them uncivilized. To me that's such a glaring truth that I can't get around and I can't blame because I've got European blood as well. And being a student of history, it's so complex. But it's uh psychology that I find so fascinating that one race, one civilization can do so many horrors and then yet think of themselves as civilized. And I and it goes the same for the Mississippian era. To have done such atrocities in the name of a dynasty and then have the same thing happen to them. The ironies of humanity abound. We're all the same. Generally speaking, from a historical perspective, so much of the othering is in uh so ingrained, it's it's it's implicit into the happenings of that of that culture. So, right, in in the Greek era, we had the barbers, those whose language was not Greek and existed more towards the north and west. And so my ancestors who spoke in a language that sounded to the Greek ears like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, and so they were called barbers or barbarians. Even the term heathen, right? If if if you were to say, Oh, you're a heathen, it's a very negative term, especially in many white cultures to be a heathen. But the word heath or heather or hearth, right, these are all coming from the same word that really just describes those who live close to the hearth, those who live close to the land. So even being a heathen is to some degree all I want to do. Um and so and my point is implicit to the West the Western concept of civilization is the language of othering. I mean, there's plenty of books. Uh Albion Seed is one of them, Richard Tullian's uh Regeneration Through Violence. Have you ever read that one? He's an American political philosopher, historian of the early American West. He has this quote. You know what? I was just looking at the quote earlier today. Hold on a second. Was it right here? Yeah, this is hilarious. I was just looking at this today, but um, I wrote this in in my book, Stag Time, that came out last year, but so I'll read it. But his historian Richard Tulian wrote that uh during the colonization of the early American West, the settlers exhibited, and this is the quote, an ambivalence that cherished the open landscape and freedom of the West, the frontier, the open land to the West of American or uh European colonization on the one hand. So they cherished the ambivalence and open land and freedom uh of the West on one hand, but hesitated to embrace the frontier characters and their sociocultural life on the other. The point being that even in Western civilizations, understanding of what civilization and culture truly means, uh, even outside the implicit denusion of language and the language of culture and the language of conquest is this inherent yearn for the open, free, vast plains and vistas uh of the alternative. But even the making of the alternative, um, which I think a lot of your work speaks to that, especially as we get into the first chapter, Cosmogenesis. Whereas Tocqueville writes that the frontier characters or savages or Indians of the Western hemisphere of the American continent were adversed or counterposed to the idea of civilization, um, that which defines Western civilization just in a much nicer way is what is implicit or omnipresent in my experience, um, with you, with other um indigenous mentors, brothers and sisters, but also just in your book, meaning that while Tocqueville looked at the character of the quote savages of North America as being an uncivilized, counterposed culture to the European civilization from the ground up, the way that they ran through the woods and found their sustenance on the land and weren't habitated in place and all these other things. I guess one of the questions that I wanted to ask, and then we can get into it, it's the difference between, well, really, it's the question about the nuance of the term. So much of civilization seems to be black and white, polar, up and down, north and south, this and that. Um, but when you really start to unpack a lot of your work, a lot of your writings, especially what you talk about in the preface about the garnerings of ancient wisdom without the failings, failures, inheriting the failures or redoing the failures of ancient Western civilization, it speaks to a non linear. Evolution of humanity socioculturally. I think it also speaks to not just the non-linearity but the non-conclusiveness about the degradation of civilization. Like in the indigenous cultures of America, to some degree, we are witnessing or able to witness, thanks to historians and storytellers like yourself, a similar beginning with an alternative ending. And that seems like there, if there is hope in your preface, it seems like that's the hope. Or maybe I misunderstand. What do you see? How do you see that? I'm probably jumping to a narrative from a later chapter, but when you speak of the Western narrative, um that's from a European context, and everything's very linear. And Vine wrote about that. Um my interpretation was that the Western narrative could be doctored because it was so linear, because nobody could really see back into back into the no one could really see back into the past with clarity. That's changed now because you know we live in the age of perfect information, and we can ask AI what happened back in the 1680s with the first captivity narratives, and we find Mary Rowlinson's truthful narrative, and all the rest seem to be fictional. Um so it's really disrupted the Western narrative because it can't be uh sanitized and cleaned up anymore. Um, but the indigenous narrative um is somewhat fatalistic in the fact that um what is is what is. Um seldom will you find indigenous peoples um lamenting what's happened. And that's the part that seems to be fatalistic to me because we don't think in that way that you know humans only get greater and stronger and didn't have a dark past. Um that's how I see the Western narrative. It's just uh psychologically in denial about the horrors that it did to get this country that we now call America. But one will seldom hear an indigenous person say, Oh, woe is woe is me. Because we believe that time is fluid, that it's um cyclical. There are ages and cycles and prophecies of different generations and things were just meant to be. You know, that we were to suffer for six generations until the seventh came. Um you won't hear indigenous peoples um louding the good times as well, because that's just not how we are. It is what it is. And uh the times of suffering are just times of suffering. And um I'd like to think that indigenous peoples have weathered those generations of suffering, but I know that we didn't weather it well. But um seldom will you hear an indigenous person complain about it. It is just the way that it is. And who knows what the future might offer. Um I had a dear friend um really probed me after listening to one of our podcasts, and he's kind of a contrarian, and um he's parked black feet and is really exploring his own heritage, and uh we share the love of Stephen Graham Jones, and he's been listening to these podcasts, and he really wanted to um challenge me at one point and send a note and says, you know, we're gonna meet up at this place and at this time, and we did. And um his companion was very moved by the thought of Sacred Seed and going back to the earth, back to the land, and um they had listened to the uh podcast, or at least Gary did. And uh I think we were talking about what it means to live back to the land, and she was ready to burn the grass in her in her backyard and start planting vegetables and perennial herbs and all these lovely things, and he wasn't against it, but he really challenged me and said and asked the question um why are you even trying to do all of this when you know that you can't really go back and that world is not there? And um I tried to use your your uh family's experience and the compound and the acreage that you have as an example of how it can be done. But the reality is that you know we all have to go into town and you can't really do it all the way. And back to your experience, brother, people um enjoy to come to your place to the experiences that your family has there, and they um have to serum, they have to take life in a ceremonial fashion, and they're taken by it, and it it feels primal or real to them, and then they leave and they go back to McDonald's or whatever. And that's what he was challenging within me. He's like, you know, it's aspirational to try to go back to the beginnings, but you're never gonna get there. And how do you feel about that? And I said, I I feel the tension, you know. Uh the times that I'm in my garden and my hands are in the earth, and I'm back in tune with the cycles of the sun and the moon, and somewhat the stars, and then the next day I'm, you know, forced to eat fast food because I didn't plan well or something, and while on the road, and um it wasn't lost on me what he was really asking, but Gary didn't stop there. He kept pushing me of saying, Will this ever be possible again? He's like, people love convenience, and he wouldn't stop. He kept pushing and says, What's the only way that that world is gonna come back? The thing that you aspire for. And it made me very uncomfortable because I knew what the answer was, and I didn't want to go there. And I said, the only way that it's gonna come back is if this dominant society has to be subjected to the same type of epidemic like smallpox, really was the equalizer that allowed Europeans to have a cakewalk into taking America. The only thing that's gonna equalize it is an equal and opposite pandemic, where native peoples are more immune to it, and European stock is not. And I didn't want to go there, and I know that he wants me to write about it, and I'm shocked that I'm even bringing it up, because it's such a um horrible thought to think that that could happen to another race of people. But maybe in the bigger picture of time, um that's the story of humanity, right? We we suffer these things, and it's not like Europeans haven't suffered from the plague or Black Death or any of these things, but I guess my point is with all of this is that um time history repeats itself over and over again, and and it's folly for us to think that um one era or one dynasty is gonna last forever, everything's gonna change. But I think it's this constant struggle between civilization and yearning for a more simple life to be a heathen. On that topic, I think we should make a t-shirt about that. Something about heathens. I guess is my psychology trying to uh dampen a very dark thought about future pandemics and the impacts and post-apocalypse. There's a book that many people who think similarly as I read. I was on a phone call recently, and maybe there were eight or nine people on the call. Someone brought up this book, and everybody save me just drooled at the mouth over this book as their favorite book, they all said. Have you ever read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael? No, but I've heard of it. Yeah, you don't need to read it. You can read it if you like. Um you could have written it. Um But it it's it's a pretty it's a pretty serious book that uh looks at the Judeo-Christian genesis all the way through its eruption and climax in Western civilization and enlightenment thought, and to some degree puts away with it. It's kind of the essence of the book. And I'll leave it at that. But uh in the 25th anniversary edition uh to the book, Daniel Quinn is writing a preface, a new preface, an updated preface or foreword or whatever it was, to the 25th anniversary edition. And a couple years ago I was reading it, because I've read the book many times. It's very hard for me to get on a podcast as the guest and not be asked about Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. So I try to frequent it to some degree. Um, even if it's just to know what parts I want to discuss and not want to discuss. But I was I was reading the preface of the forward to the 25th anniversary edition very recently, and I and I started laughing. And my wife, who was sitting close by, she asked me, What are you laughing about? Because it's not a book to laugh about. And Daniel Quinn in it said, at the very end of the preface, something to the regard of um, I am both excited and depressed. When I wrote the book 25 years ago, I never thought that I would sell so many copies. It sold millions of copies. And yet at the same time, I've never been so depressed because the world hasn't changed. So, in essence, I've had so much success in distributing ideas, but those ideas have had no effect, is what he was rejoicing and lamenting about. And he goes, comma, but that's okay, because 93% of all people will be dead soon, anyways. And that hit me really hard. Really hard. At first, it was a horror that you could only laugh about, and then it really sunk in. My point being, I think a lot of people see what you see. Quinn, for example, what you just shared as another example that um I think it's really hard to challenge our origin stories bastardized, ours as they are, without challenging the pleasure and leisure that we've grown accustomed to. Right? So, for instance, I was on a phone call, another one recently, which I try to get away from. I hate phone calls, especially conference calls on Zoom, but for some reason over the last couple of weeks I've been plagued by them. And it was this regenerative organization talking about this and that, and they were trying to do this regenerative thing or whatever. And and they asked me my opinion, and I said, Well, I you you're all talking as if humans are up here. And I quoted you. My brother, I quoted you and I said, But we're not up here, right? We have the plants and we have the animals and we have us. And so your your implicit organizational structure and theme and purpose is that humans have the ability to control our way to a better outcome. And and I actually think the opposite is true, that we don't steward Earth, Earth stewards us. That's why she's mother and we're not. To some degree, that's about what I said. And everybody didn't like it. Everybody hated it. I will never be asked on that phone call again. Um but it's very hard to fall from that place, right? Because I think a lot of what Western civilization and the Enlightenment thought, especially based upon this Judeo-Christian and general biblical sort of makeup, this worldview, this framework, this original thesis, if you will, is that humans can steward earth to a better state. Humans can steward our lives to a better state. We are created in the image of God to bring forward fruit and bliss and happiness in that. And I'm not saying those things aren't implicit to Earth, right? That is this a beauty and fruit. Like we're in the middle of another fruiting season, and yesterday my kids and I, we were out there for maybe an hour harvesting fruit, and uh and we found this bush. And and and you know these things. Um, you know, and you've been harvesting these. Every bush tastes different in in an uncultivated setting. Every bush has its own flavor, uh, expression of the earthy texture and the earthy vibrations purling through its veins, its roots, and and the way its leaves spread and the mineral profiles existing there. Like, as you know, when you wild forage foods, every bite is different. And so our kids and I, we we always spend so much time going from bush to bush. In this case, it's autumn olive season, this red berry that grows. It's the has the highest amount of uh vitamin C antioxidants and zinc in any berry that grows on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains. And it tastes like a sour Skittle. It's like pungent, it's so good. So much tannins and just aliveness when you eat it, your whole body just sparkles. But we go from bush to bush all over the place. I think it takes an hour to find a bush that really speaks to you like what you need that day, and you're just eating it, and you look to the side, and your little four-year-old is looking at you, and her eyes are like, no, it's not this bush. And so you walk for another hundred yards, and you find another bush, and you know, you eat it, and she tastes it, and then she smiles and she says, Oh, this one. And anyways, we found this one. All of our kids, myself, we just oh we just sat there eating and eating and eating for an hour. Um, it was just the bush for the day. It's hard to deconstruct the gods of a people without pain. I think foraging is a really interesting way of looking at that because you have to exist in a hungry state. Not to quote from Quinn in his book Ishmael, but he talks about how agriculturalists, that is to say, Western civilization, we live as gods' hands, whereas the hunter-gatherers or the honorable ones among us, um, they live in the hands of the gods. And and and that difference of position is everything. I think that's a really clear way of looking at it. Um, to some degree, my question looking at civilization being that when the civilized West came over to the Western Hemisphere, right, to Tocqueville in the 1830s, let's say, he looked at the uncivilized savages of the American woodlands and he said, you know, this is different. Your, you know, your lives are different. And he and he saw different, it's true, right? He had eyes, he saw what he saw. Um, but it's that reverse of the narrative. It's that alternative world view that humans aren't great so that we heal world or that we heal earth. Rather, humans are an aspect of earth and thereby we are great. The two different definitions of civilization seem to me to be the change in location of greatness. Are humans great so that we can steward Earth, or are humans great because Earth stewards us as Earth? Are we great because we are Earth and Earthlings? And that seems to me a central point in a lot of your book, even comparing um the morning star um story and its mythological symbolism to Osiris, Muhammad, and Jesus, and that rising savior mythos, if we can categorize it as such. It's not that there are two versions of humanity. It is rather, again, using Quinn's language, which I try never to do, but it's just too easy right now. You have the takers and you have the levers, those who are God's hands and those who live in the hands of the gods. And if you're God's hands, you have to be authoritative, you have to be in control. That's where colonialism and definitive industrial capitalism, globalism comes into the affair. But if you live in God's hands, you're gonna go from berry bush to berry bush. Right? You're gonna talk to the berries and find the ones that you need today. You're gonna live differently, you're gonna live more kindly, you're gonna live more, as you were saying, in that sedate state where um what you called it fatalism. To me, it sounds more like acceptance, maybe. So like what Tocqueville is saying is the only way you transition between these states is with war. And I guess what I'm saying is that doesn't seem untrue to me. It's just the war of what that seems to be misplaced. A war with ourselves, a war with our system collapsing, a war with maybe genocide or germ-based genocide, like you were talking about, this great you know, pandemic. I call this whole notion the uh hypocrisy of the anthro. I can never say this word right. The hypocrisy of the anthropocene. Yeah. Is that how you say it? Sure. Yeah, it's as good as it's as good as it needs to be. That bastard of a word. Anthropocene. Anthropocene. Anthropocene. The hypocrisy of the Anthropocene. Progress in history is defined by the victor, right?

Daniel Firth Griffith:

Yeah.

Taylor Keen:

And I think that's what all human beings seem to understand. That when you have the advantage, you have to take it to the fullest if your legacy is gonna be left alive. And that's the only way that I can explain European colonialism turning into settler colonialism. Going back to the good book, um father, forgive them for they know not what they do. But also from the good book and the meat shall inherit the earth. Which is in contradiction to what I bring up in Rediscovering Turtle Island is the smoking gun of all of this is what's in Genesis. For man to have dominion over over nature. I guess in my uh mindset at one point I was angry at that passage because it's led to so much of what we are doing wrong to this planet, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. I was trying to give an alternate perspective. And as you mentioned, people don't want to hear that. Or lots of people don't don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear that the ego that drives them for dominion may not serve them well in the end. There's um not a day that passes that I don't read something about how this landscape of America has been transformed. I was just reading an article about um this archaeological site in Illinois that, you know, has got thousands of years of history and there's mounds from I think it's like 1000 BC on the site. But by the time the Europeans got there, um there was a beautiful um bog and a lake that was there that brought all life to it. And the first substantial thing that the European settlers did was to drain the bog in the lake so they could farm it. And that's happened all over this country. And then, you know, I I drive across Nebraska or Iowa, and all I see is every aggrable acre of land is farmed, um, most of which we do not eat. Right. And I just think to myself, this can't be, this is not sustainable. Stories about the Dust Bowl and all those calamities, and I think this society is never going to learn. And when it tries, it imitates indigenous environmentalism and pats itself on the back for coming up with this great idea called regenerative ag a notion that we both lament. And probably a lot of a lot of your listeners are gonna hate us for it. We're just calling out hypocrisy. People don't like to be called out. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I've consulted in the regenerative ag space for about 12, 13 years, and I don't think I've ever been a part of a conversation in any land walk with a landowner, in any course that I've ever taught for farmers, any land design consultation and from 13,000 acre coal mine restoration projects all the way to a five-acre homestead. That doesn't include the conversation of we have to be good stewards, and yet we also have to make money. And I've never seen that dichotomy work like they think that it needs to work. Because you're always sacrificing one or the other. A dear friend of mine used to always say, Daniel, I know all of your indigenous friends, they talk about making decisions six, seven, eight generations into the future, and thinking, you know, in terms of that. I'm just trying to make decisions for the next seven seconds. Because the agricultural system is geared that way. It's very difficult to make money in the today if you're making decisions for seven generations in the future. A friend of mine is a uh call he calls himself a burn boss. That's the technical term for someone who is legally allowed to put fire on landscapes here in the East, prescribe burns. You have to be a burn boss, you have to be educated and licensed by the state to do it because of all these laws and such. And him and I talk quite often, all the time, really, um, about the hurdles to burning today, not policy, not governmental, but societal, culturally, on the land with landowners. And it's always if we apply fire to the land, it will, the land, the mother, will start to adapt and evolve in backward time. That is to say, the oak savannas, the hickory forests will be born, right? The Table Mountain pine stands, you know, just to our west and the Appalachian Mountains and the Cumberland Plateaus and the backside, like they'll be reborn. Fire, you know, will rebirth these systems. This this ancient memory, this blood memory, but written soiled and seed will be reborn. It's true, but you're gonna live through 50 years of just shit in between. If you take a forest full of maple and poplar, tulip poplar, and you start adding fire to it, it's gonna go from not productive to really not productive to minorly productive to really not productive, and then maybe 50 to 100 years later, you'll finally arrive in a place. Well, how are you supposed to make money between the starting of the you know, the placing of fire and the earliest stage of the end result? Not that the end result is ever static, but the earliest moment of wait, the story of this forest, this ancient hundreds of thousands of year-old forest is starting to be reborn. And that's a really hard thing for a lot of regenerative farmers to swallow, at least in my experience after 12 or 13 years of doing consulting and education with them. We have these dreams about health, and yet we still have the immediacy, the need to make money. Um, another way of looking at it is a good friend of mine. He says, Every day I feel like I'm trying to beat back the forest, you know, producing grass-fed and finished ground, you know, grass fed and yeah, grass-fed and finished beef or lamb or whatever it is. We're just trying to beat back the forest. All the land wants to be is a forest, and we just have to keep beating it back and beating it back and beating it back. How is this healthy? How is this right? How is this honorable? And I think these are really interesting questions. Questions that, as you know and I know, very few want to discuss. Very few want to discuss. I was on a consultation one time about four or five years ago, and the landowners they had just purchased the land, and I was there to do whatever I was there to do. And I was talking about why. Why did they just purchase this land? Why are they trying to do this project? They were trying to create a local food hub, basically. And they said, Well, we felt really called to be stewards of earth. I was like, okay, that's an interesting comment. Sounds good. And then the very next conversation we had was how to monetize it. How do we actually produce income on this land to be a steward of earth? And I don't think a lot of people really understand that. If your stewardship is sacred, it shouldn't have to depend upon modern industrial modes of capitalism and capital to exist. It could use that, it could deploy resources in that way, but to do to detrimentally depend uh on such measures is an interesting thing, you know. Tocqueville, because he was brought up, I'll bring up earlier in his Democracy in America, I'll never forget learning this decade plus ago in college. He says Americans have a weird way with art. Because if art isn't useful, it's not good. The only beautiful art is a useful one. And I think the same thing true with risk regenerative agriculture. Nothing can be Beautiful unless it's useful. And so you start asking these questions. And when I say regenerative agriculture, I think we can just insert Western civilization in that same conversation and be a little bit more general about it. I think that's fine. It sees beauty as use. Whereas I think on the other side, to some degree, the beauty is the use. It is contained in and of itself. I think story is the same way. I think story, that is to say, is a fine member of that beauty being the end result of art, not necessarily the use of beauty. Such a hard topic. It's such an obsession. But what's interesting to me about that topic is that Europeans, those that stayed there, don't have the same obsession. But I mean, when when you look at this landscape of America, it's just covered. It's not going to stop until it's stopped by some calamity. Or that you're forced to stop.

Daniel Firth Griffith:

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Taylor Keen:

Its very existence necessitates its very existence. I'm not quite sure how we got here, but I I think we can blame Detocville for getting us here. In past episodes, we've talked about the Earth Diver myth. Chapter one. Are there things that we need to revisit about the Earth Diver myth? The one question that I really wanted to dive into in this chapter one, this Cosmogenesis with you, dealing with the Earth Diver myth, is not necessarily its origins, but its acceptance of many origins and many evolutions. Something that you write about. I'm on page five of your book. You're talking about the Earth Diver myth, and I don't know if I'm going to pronounce his name right, but Vladimir uh Napolsky. Napolsky, something like this. Talking about the uh this worldview system was suggested to have been present in the uh proto-Uralic speakers, the culture there, which would be in Western Russia, by the way. I mean, it's in Siberia as well, but like the Ural Mountains um between the sixth and fourth millennium BC, um, in the Taiga Forest. I mean, that's that's Western Russia. And and and and yet you let's say the Omaha have your own evolution of that story. Maybe it's your I shouldn't say evolution, maybe your own branch of that story, or maybe your own understanding of that story, or however you want to say that. But the question that I I wanted to dive into and discuss is so many of the worldviews that we are given, especially this Judeo-Christian worldview, this just true genesis with a capital G, is conclusive and closed. It is this way. But the uh cosmogenesis or this ancient cosmological origin of this earth diver myth, diving some conduit of the great spirit, diving into the waters to bring up the clay of the earth, you know, this earthen continents. It's it's I don't want to say it's inclusive in the modern sense, but it's inclusive in the human sense, not necessarily only to a principia theologica, but in the in the sense of human experience being that divine relationship between us and the great spirit, us and the creator God, um, and how that matters and why that matters, and then allowing it to permutate and evolve and mutate and adapt in the local scene. So it seems open and fluid, whereas so many other cosmologies, so many other origin stories are the opposite. They're static and they're closed. When I began to think about trying to write a book that would um be helpful to the seventh generation, um I knew that I had to start with this story with an earth diver myth. And um back from the earliest memories I have of hearing that story, it just um resonated so much with my soul, but I couldn't explain why. And I don't know if I can still explain why it's such a powerful story. After doing all of the research for the book, though, um, you know, realizing that that story is 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years old, it's just mind-boggling. Um I think we've had a conversation about Hamlet's Mill finding that book for the first time and going through and realizing, you know, that these are stories about humans trying to understand their origins and the complexity of time and measuring the precession of the earth through story, I mean, or the movement of stars. Um began to make more sense to me about why I'm so drawn to that story. I think we as human beings need parables and stories to understand our complex world and our complex histories. I remember sharing um an early draft of Cosmogenesis with one of my friends and colleagues uh from Harvard Business School, and um she just didn't get it. I thought she might be impressed by the chapter, and she had no comments to make about it. And uh it's so interesting now that the book is out there in the world, and um I hear from listeners from Unchod who send me notes, I'm finally starting to get some of the love that you get from our conversations because it just uh it didn't it it didn't seem real to me. Um you saying that you've heard from people and that's really touched their lives, but yeah, I think I've only gotten two messages, so I think that's a part of the point of this podcast, is we would like to hear from readers with questions or comments. And at some point, we're gonna go through all of the or some of the chapters in my book, sometimes maybe uh a couple of podcasts on one topic, but eventually we would like to host a live QA about all of this and to have these conversations and to understand. Uh I'm trying to understand what of my culture and my journey um resonates with people. And I think we're all trying to do the same thing as we're trying to understand this crazy thing called life. And especially with disparate politics, which seems to be just par for the course all the time now. Um people are seeking deeper meaning. And if our conversations can be a respite for people out there, then so be it. Let's talk about it all. In the end, um with this book, I was just trying to answer some very questions. Uh a lot of these questions came from conversations with um younger um people from my tribes. Um in the end, I was trying to answer basic questions of who are we and where and where do we come from? And to begin with, the um Genesis story is the best way that I could come up with to discuss that. And to share with other people that um indigenous peoples uh have similar stories that are very, very important. I was just giving a talk to an audience in out in western uh Nebraska, very conservative, very Christian, and I was um through the lens of historical interpretation, was trying to uh have them understand the importance of the stories in uh Picture Cave and making that comparison between Morning Morning Star and First Father's death and rebirth and ascension making that comparison to the Son of God Jesus Christ in the hopes that they could better understand in indigenous peoples. I think that was kind of the whole point of of the book. Um twofold. One is to document things that I think are very important for future indigenous thinkers, just as the way that I was impacted by Vindeloria, uh John Tradell and others. But on the other hand, I wanted the book to be a conduit of a bridge, as you mentioned, between what was and what could be. And so I remember as I was getting close to publishing it, and I was afraid to put it out there, as one is afraid to put out something that's very intimate to them. Afraid of being criticized for not getting it right. And a friend said um to reassure me to put it out there was that um the world that we live in is so political right now that people want to escape, give them something to escape to. I said, all right. Let's put it out there. I look back on so much of the book, and for those people who've just recently read it or looked at it, um it's hard for me because I wrote most of that up over, you know, 10 10 years ago, and I think I could have done such a better job if I would have had the time to redo it. But I just was touching on topics of picture cave and trying to introduce readers to this pantheon of spirit beings, first father and first mother, and morning star, and the thunder twins, and the underwater serpent, and trying to understand why those stories are so important to indigenous peoples. I guess because it gives us a deep past and something to anchor our humanity in. I think that's the power of parable. The power of parable is to have the hope that despite all of our downfalls and mistakes in life that we can be saved. That we too, like Morningstar, can save your father who's gone and bring him back to life, then you can become the symbolic man. Maybe the the answer to the complexities of life are really that simple. You know, we just have to find the divine that's within us, and thus revealing the title of Rediscovering Turtle Island Part Two: Finding the Divine Within. Because in a world that's so chaotic, in this world of perfect information, that we can know all of the good and bad in life by just looking at our phone, maybe that is the answer that it just can be that simple.