A Conversation on the Urgency of Indigenous Values

In short, neither this book nor the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center would have been possible without the groundbreaking work of Charles Long and the History of Religions. My wife Sandy Bigtree and I were introduced to Professor Long in the early 1980s in Boulder, Colorado where I was working for Davíd Carrasco in the Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project. I was very young and enthusiastic, but Long put me on a path to working collaboratively with Indigenous peoples by using ideas like sacred space, hierophany, and ceremonial gift exchange. The difference between Mircea Eliade and Charles Long, however, was the important elements settler-colonialism that always frame and interject themselves into our academic methodologies. First, this book addresses Long’s ideas by integrating a collaborative method, which is derived from the first formal agreement between the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and European settlers called the Two Row Wampum. This was a co-habitation agreement between what we would now characterize as between Indigenous and settler-colonial people. It has been systematically violated since it was struck in Albany, New York in 1613. Second, “religion” is problematized as consistently used as a weapon against Indigenous Peoples. This is mapped with respect to the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, where a series of papal bulls from the Vatican are written between the 14th and 16th centuries to justify the enslavement, and seizure of lands and goods by Christian explorers when they encounter non-Christians.

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