Maurizio Benazzo: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever in the world you are, it's a joy to be here with you.
Zaya Benazzo: Welcome everyone, wherever you're tuning in from. My name is Zaya Benazzo.
Maurizio Benazzo: My name is Maurizio Benazzo. We are speaking to you from the Ancestral unceded territory of Coastal Miwok and South Pomo, currently known as Sebastopol in California
Zaya Benazzo: People.
Maurizio Benazzo: Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: So welcome and thank you. We are really delighted for our conversation today with Dr. Leroy Little Bear. What an honor. Welcome. Let's see if we can have you on screen [00:01:00] with us. Yes. Thank you so much. Such an honor to be in conversation with you. And we usually read bios, but we don't feel that's appropriate.
And we would ask you if you would introduce yourself the way you do, and if also maybe in your language, if that feels appropriate to you.
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Nice.
I was introducing myself in our Blackfoot tradition, and that is, my Blackfoot name is Low Horn. It's named after the, uh, buffalo on the plains, [00:02:00] and I'm of the small robes clan. I belong to Ghana, our tribe, and we are of the Blackfoot Confederacy. So that's, that's where I come from and that's what makes who I am.
Uh,
Zaya Benazzo: thank you. And, uh, just for our audience, we'll be closing the chat during this first part of our conversation, and then we will open and you can send your questions in the q and a box. And we will read them when it's time for questions from you. So, please try to formulate them clearly so it makes it easier for us to communicate your questions.
Thank you. Mm-hmm.
Leroy, maybe we can begin with. In, [00:03:00] in the Western thought the self is seen often as separate as an individual identity is somehow fixed, is personal and it's internal. How would you say a self and identity is understood in the black food worldview and ways of being?
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: Oh, very good question. In order for people to understand, let me, uh, go over some basic foundational basis that we use that is different cultures use.
For identity and for ways of thinking. Okay? Now, in the Western world, [00:04:00] everything is about matter. Everything is about matter, knock on wood. In other words, anything you can see, touch, smell, and so on. We limit ourselves to our five sense, uh, in, and also the thing is the world as we see it is stagnant. It doesn't change and so on.
We might take talk about evolution, entropy and so on, but the best example is Stein and his phrase, his bumper sticker [00:05:00] that says, God does not play dice with the universe. In other words, this is the way he made it. This is the way it'll be forever and a dare. Okay? Now the another point of Western way of knowing is, hey, we may.
Talk about, you know, we may start out from a very broad perspective, but eventually we use a funnel and we come down to the point and which means then this is it. Okay, this is it. And consequently, [00:06:00] we're very, we always look at that final deal, that final point. And this has lots of implications because it then comes down to there's only one way of looking at the world.
There's only one right answer. There's only one true God and so on. Say you can think about school, all the kids, the students, and so on. You have to come up with the right answer. And that words, we've come to the point. Okay? And as a result of that, we come with the notion that, hey, if we're talking about a [00:07:00] point.
We look at everything from a singularity perspective, it's singular and you know, there's no, it's kind of like there's no other way and so on to look at it, you know, it's singular and things are not re related. We don't talk in terms of relationships, say, and of course a human invention. The notion of time comes into the picture.
Everything is about time. It runs our lives, for it's, that clock runs our lives. And this, this particular conversation, Hey, it's going to start at [00:08:00] 10 o'clock Pacific time. See that's an example. And so those foundational basis of thought come up with what I call a, uh, an interpretive template that we walk around with the notion of interpretive template.
A quantum physicist Steven Weinberg, you know, talks about an interpretive template and that interpretive template then is what we walk around and we filter everything through that interpretive template say. And so that results [00:09:00] also in social values. The social values. Now social values play basically two, two basic roles.
One of them is their standards that we use for judgment and so on, and they also played a role of goals that we should strive for, see, so in Western thought. Very quickly that, but just as an example, bigger is a social value, faster is a social value and so on, see more, et cetera. And our whole economic systems are good example.[00:10:00]
They run on that basis, bigger, faster, more, and so on. Now, if you can keep those in mind, let me shift over to the Blackfoot ways. So on the Blackfoot approach is it's not about matter. Everything is about an energy force, energy forces, and there's lots of them out there. Energy waves so you can picture yourself as your ordinary kitchen radio.
Okay. And the energy waves are out there and the radio is just filtering them out. Filtering them and so on. And if it doesn't filter them [00:11:00] correctly, hey, all you hear is static say, and so it just filters them and so on. So it's not the radio that has the, the, info within itself. It's the energy waves, it's the radio waves out there.
So in other words, you can begin to see yourself if you are an E, if you're all about energy, you as a human are just filtering energy waves that are already out. Yeah. Wow. So you are not, you're, they're not. So in our Blackfoot waves, we say it's the energy waves. Our elders, we speak about it as the [00:12:00] spirit.
So when they're talking about spirit, they're really talking about those energy waves. So in the Blackfoot way, hey, we're about energy waves. Okay. Because those energy waves are all about motion. They're not still, they're forever changing, transforming, deforming, reforming and so on. Hey, we, you know, are just filtering those.
Okay? And we might talk about, hey, talking about knock on wood, well, what is, what ends up being matter and so on. Hey, those are just descriptions [00:13:00] of combinations of energy waves. They could change any time, see, and. When you start thinking about that, you start to see, hey, you've gotta have a great big spectrum of things as opposed to down to the singular point.
Okay? And consequently, everything becomes interrelated. So in the Blackfoot world, everything is about relationships, okay? And everyth, since everything is in motion, everything is ate. So those rocks, those trees, those plants and so on, everything is ate. [00:14:00] Whereas in a Western world, only you and I are ate.
There might be those birds out there, but we don't take them into consideration. Only you and I are anate. See, so, but in the Blackfoot world, everything is anate, rocks, trees, the sky, the clouds, and so on. Everything in the environment. So when our elders talk about relationships, they're talking about all my relations, which means all those other spirits, all those energy, other energy waves out there.
So that's who are all my relations. We're not talking about human biological notions about [00:15:00] relationships.
And. Land. The land the place is very important. The land is going to change. Just like in that flux of change, Hey, the land is going to change, but it does not change as fast as other things. So at least for the time being, I can hang my head on it and use it as a reference.
Just like time is used as a reference, say. And in both cases, the language that develops for each society compliments. Those interpretive [00:16:00] templates. So I walk around with a Blackfoot interpretive template, whatever comes to me. That's what goes and is filtered through that in a Western way.
Hey, a very different interpretive template. And if we use science as an example in the Western world, if it's not measurable, it's if you can't measure it, it's not scientific. You can't measure love, you can't measure relationships and so on. So those are not about science. In the Blackfoot world, if it's not about relationships, it's not scientific.[00:17:00]
Yeah, that's, it's not, everything is about relationships. So if it's not about relationships, it's not scientific in the Western world, if you can't measure it, it's not scientific, say big difference in energy waves and thought ways, ways of thinking. But that's what, that's the interpretive template that Blackfoot people, other indigenous people walk around with.
Whereas in the western world, I'm looking at everything through that interpretive template. See, and what we've been telling scientists especially is that, Hey, I'm [00:18:00] sitting in front of my window over here looking out. It don't matter how I lean over and look through that window, eventually that window will only allow me to see a certain amount of what's out there.
Okay? And I tell people, especially the scientists, let's enlarge the window by adding the Blackfoot window to it so that you'll see a bigger spectrum of the reality out there. Say. Now coming back to the notion of reality, and your original question is, see people like [00:19:00] Weinberg, Steven Weinberg says there is a objective reality out there, but as soon as you put a human being in the picture, that interpretive template comes into play.
So you use your interpretive template to try and interpret the real objective reality out there. So every ti every morning when you wake up, you think you are waking up to the reality. Right. When in truth, you are waking up to the interpretation of the reality, the human interpretation and more specifically the cultural interpretation, say, so [00:20:00] when I wake up, I wake up to a Blackfoot interpretation, and that's because of those interpretive templates.
See, so when we're talking about who we are, you can begin to see where my identity arises from. So I say I, I'm part of this Blackfoot traditional territory. That's where my reality arises from. And consequently, that's where my being, my identity arises from. See Western world, depending on where you are, well to a very large extent, [00:21:00] the western world has colonized and spread itself over the globe, but they don't really have that identity of place.
So time becomes the reference point. Say,
Zaya Benazzo: So in the Western world, the self is fixated. It's private, it's separate and it's time-based. We have to run, we have to hurry, and we live. Right now, our world, western world is very much in anxiety, in depression, the what we call mental illness [00:22:00] is skyrocketing.
I'm curious from black food worldview, when the self is influx, is energy is relational, what does, uh, wellbeing means and it's connected to the land, and what does healing means to heal oneself?
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: See, let me use England as an example. Okay.
If anybody can tell us the story about the real first and indigenous people of that island that we refer to as English. I don't think there's very many that can tell you that. Why? Because like we [00:23:00] said, every interpretive template has scattered us all over and so on. Okay. And. So the whole notion then is, hey, it's kind of like cultural borrowing.
Hey, I'll borrow a little bit from Roman. I'll borrow a little bit from the Celts, the Anglos, the Saxons, and so on, see. And so it starts to become a real mixture and so on. But people are really longing for that place, that notion that we can use as identity, and consequently, a large part of the way [00:24:00] we do things, especially running by the clock.
Takes us out of that sphere, and that's where the mental notions, mental illnesses and so on. In other words, because we're running with the clock, everything is about speed, faster while we all become very tense, and the notion of stress really is the basic cause. Because if we're stressed out all the time while our immune systems and things like that get depleted and.
Consequently, [00:25:00] the illnesses, including mental illnesses, come to the forefront in the Blackfoot world. Hey, we didn't run by the clock, okay? And we ran, we con, when we do refer to the, to the notion of time, if we can put it that way, is, hey, we use large environmental phases, continuing phases like the moons, the stars, and so on.
Those are very large phases. And when we talk about time, let's say on a day-to-day basis. We talk about, we could say un [00:26:00] meaning now,
meaning tomorrow, missed day after tomorrow, and we stop there. Not because we can't count beyond two, we do the same thing backwards and Mr. Uni, we stop there. Anything beyond the two days is, hey, becomes amalgamated into the western notion of past, present, future. See, it's all in, in other words, even somebody like Stephen Hawkins says, it just is sick.
In other words, it just is. [00:27:00] And so that's the earth. You know, we, so we don't run by the clock, okay? We let things happen and so on, and we adjust to all my relations. In other words any changes and so on that work occur. We do the adjusting, we adjust and fit ourselves into it. So that whole notion of just is not well understood in the Western world, but.
What has happened with the notion of mental illness and so on is because people were, we were colonized and that colonization process is still going. The story I tell [00:28:00] is the Spaniards came to North America. Okay. I mean, not to North America, to the uh uh, south Central and South America with Columbus.
Okay. They had been around for over a hundred years when people like DeSoto came up from Mexico into what is now North America turned, turn the eastward. Over to the Mississippi and on back down to Florida. She brought with him something like five or 600 men and 300 or so head of pigs, [00:29:00] swine for food and so on.
He talked about towns that we would call cities today, up and down the Mississippi River. He said there were towns of 60 to 70,000 in each town. Okay. This was in his notes, say the thing is they have, we've heard about swine flu. Okay. Okay, the thing was, Europeans have always been herdsmen.
They hurt their domesticate animals, and so they become more immune to diseases that are transferrable [00:30:00] between humans and animals. The Plains Indians, as an example. Hey, we never domesticated our animals. We let them be and we chase them only when we needed them. So we go out hunting and so on. The health profiles of Europeans is they're more immune to infectious diseases such as tb, smallpox, and flu and soba.
The Plains Indians were more immune to parasitic type of diseases, so they didn't, they didn't, uh, but not infectious diseases. [00:31:00] So when the infectious diseases hit us, you can use COVID as an example. Hey, it just ran wild from estimates of people in the Americas. Prior to Columbus was 125 million people, more people than all of Europe at the time.
Well, a hundred years after DeSoto came up to towards Florida, it was 1600, 16 0 4, when, what is known as James Town was the first permanent settlement by the British. They knew about North America. They came back and forth, but never settled it [00:32:00] like the Spanish did in Central and South America. And so the diseases just, pandemics.
And so when the British came. They thought the land was empty because there were so few people. So think about 125 million in the Americas to almost nothing. See, that's the vulnerability we had at the time of colonization. So our whole thing was being colonized. And it's from that stress that is a, that arises from colonization, that we've gotten all these diseases and we go through mental stresses [00:33:00] today and those mental stresses, people try to, you know, I.
Do it themselves. DIY, you know, do it yourselves, but a lot of them end up doing it the wrong way and get involved in drugs, alcohol, and so on that. So colonization really caused dysfunction. And so that's what you hear on your films. Like the, uh, when an owl calls my name, hey, the elders are trying to guide their people back to what it used to be.
See. It's a long, slow process, but it is [00:34:00] happening. But to a very large extent, that's where the illnesses, the mental illnesses arise from that. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Disconnection. Uh uh, yeah. Relationships that are broken, relationships with the land. The Europeans came with a broken relationship to the lens, right.
Came from I want to bring again what you started with that the language and the templates. Right. The language represents the templates that we use to interpret reality. So a lot of indigenous languages, and you can speak to the black food language, are um. Our English language is known based. Based, right?
It's object based and that informs how we see the world, how we relate to each other, to the [00:35:00] indigenous languages are more, you can tell us how indigenous languages represent the relationship to reality that indigenous people experience and, and maybe for you, the conflict, if you've experienced the conflict in walking in these two different worlds and two different templates of
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: interpreting.
Yeah. Very interesting question. And language, like I said, develops to compliment the interpretive templates of now in your role. Languages like English, we all speak English and so on, and a lot of the world speaks English and so forth. Let me, let me [00:36:00] just throw out examples of the difference and so on.
Number one, of course, English is a very noun based language. It's all about names. English is very good for categorizations counting, et cetera. Okay? And the thing is, let me just throw out an example. Okay? The example is you, uh. In the ordinary English sentence, a very simple sentence. It's A is and underlying is B.
A is B. Okay. That's the ordinary English cent[00:37:00]
when you stop and if you stood back and say, if A is B, why do you need B?
Oh, what's going on? Yeah. Okay. So in other words. One of the things that arises out of that is in the English language, because of the noun based notion. We always need the other.
We always need the other. Now in Blackfoot, there's no such a thing. It I just, I'm it. That's why our elders can say, [00:38:00] I am the buffalo, and the buffalo is me.
Zaya Benazzo: See, wow.
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: We're all energy forces. You are just manifesting in a different combination of men energy forces. I'm I am. I am the land. In English, we can't do that.
So now in English, it's, you can go down the list, good, bad Saint Sinner talking about duality, saint sinner, dark, you know, light, et cetera. Those are what we use within our interpretive template in Blackfoot. Hey, there's no dis. Not that we [00:39:00] can't make distinctions, we can make the distinctions, but to a very large ex extent, it's all about all my relations.
Say, yeah. Let me give you my, one of my favorite stories and so on. Me and a friend of mine Woody Morrison, talking to a Haida elder, the notion, it's a long story about the notion of dynamics without motion. Think of that dynamics without motion. And he just took it a few, just a little bit of thought, and he said, oh, that's easy to answer.
He said, [00:40:00] consider yourself out on the ocean because they're from the coast in a, in your canoe. You are far enough away from the land where you can't see the land anymore and not, you can't use the land as a reference anymore. In other words, you're just out in the middle of the water, the ocean, and he says, your canoe is moving because you are rowing it.
Okay? But 360 degrees around you, you are always the same distance from the horizon. It says, that's dynamics without motion.
See, now in English, [00:41:00] that's not possible. So, in other words, that interpretive template does not include that. See, in, in the indigenous world, we do that. I'll give you another example. The in English of course, especially when I'm tired and little bit sleepy, I can say, I'm gonna go lay down. Okay, I'm gonna go lay down, meaning I want to take a little bit of a nap, a little bit of a rest.
Okay? Now in Blackfoot, we say Texas. Texas talks. What the, if a Blackfoot speaker were [00:42:00] asking, interpret that to English, they'd probably say all the way down. But the deep meaning of Texas Talks says, and the best English translation for it is, I'm going to make myself thin.
May sound a little bit funny when you say, I'm going to make myself thin, but think about it. If you, if you are coming at the notion from an energy wave perspective, so that if I'm standing up, all those energy waves are hitting me and going through me. Causing my, my, uh, tiredness, my, and [00:43:00] so, but if I laid, make myself thin, less of them hit me.
Yeah. Not as many of them are going through me. If I make myself thin, very different, say very different way of looking at, and that's based on the language. My wife, amethyst, her favorite example is in English. We could say a dog, well, in English, because it's a name. A dog is a dog, is a dog, is a dog. Okay.
In Blackfoot, we say
is not [00:44:00] about a dog as in English. It's a being of some kind that's on the moon. We never say what it is, and the reason we don't say what it is is because those energy forces can change. In other words, the transformation can occur at any time.
Yeah. So we never talk about a finality, right? All we do is describe what we're doing, what's what we see happen.
That's what we're, that's what we're describing. So that's why a large part of someone is just description.
Zaya Benazzo: It's
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: just description about what's happening [00:45:00] in Western thought. We always wanna come with the finality, but the, this is the way it is. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: it comes to mind the beautiful quote from the poet Rumi who said, you are the universe in a static motion.
Yeah. It's like, it could be a, a saying also from Blackfoot [00:46:00] perspective. Right. What. What drew you to David Bo's work and quantum physics, and do you see more parallels between Blackfoot worldview and the direction and or quantum physics is pointing to reality in
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: Yeah. Yeah. David Bo was very interesting person and we had, and had good conversations with him.
The thing is, in, in quantum physics, the, uh, the parallel between indigenous thought like Blackfoot thought and quantum physics is in the area of motion. In the area of motion, and they do talk about energy [00:47:00] waves, but a large part of that notion is overridden by the tendency towards now. So the quantum physicists talk about particles, you know, subatomic particles and so on, when in reality, those subatomic particles really are energy waves, see?
But they can't get away because the language won't allow them to get away from the notion of a particle and coming to the notion of a point. Whereas if you looked at it from an energy weight perspective, hey, no [00:48:00] problem. We end up having an overlap. And consequently why David Bone was even concerned about out changing, trying to change the English language more to emotion language.
He realized that, and consequently I was teasing him, telling him, Hey, you won't need your math. All your math that goes with your science if you spoke Blackfoot, that's true. Why? Why? Let me give you an example and you can find these in literature. Give a person by a linguist studying Navajo, a DNE language [00:49:00] for the simple phrase, English phrase to go, okay.
To go in, in Navajo you can conjugate to go 352,000 different ways. Wow. Okay. You can, yeah. Wow. Now the thing is, I know Blackfoot to be similar. You can you. And so on. But there's 352,000 different ways. Now, the thing is, that's the reason why the language is the English language is not a good science language.
We have to adopt a different [00:50:00] language like mathematics to describe what's going on. Whereas in Blackfoot or Navajo or EDA and so on, you don't need the math. Your language can describe all those aspects that quantum physicists are talking about.
Zaya Benazzo: Mm-hmm. Wow.
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: CNR, when we're talking from an energy weight perspective, hey, our elders can speak about that.
Zaya Benazzo: Wow. I am, I'm curious. When we met many different indigenous communities, let's say on an island on one side of the island, the language is so different from the language on the other side. Right. And we
asked
them, why is that? So do you know? And one group would say, well, we, our language came from the ocean, where the other [00:51:00] side, they would say Our language came from the mountain.
Yeah. So I wonder if the English language you pointed, it's kind of a mixture of wow. Of things that don't necessarily come directly from. The
Maurizio Benazzo: From the relationship. The
Zaya Benazzo: relationship and the land. Is that,
Maurizio Benazzo: yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Why is it so
Maurizio Benazzo: disconnected?
Zaya Benazzo: Not to fixate it again with an explanation?
Dr. Leroy Little Bear: Yeah, but the way we explain that is that how a particular society comes into existence.
There's lots of different theories about the origin of a particular society that might become a nation, a country, and so on, but how that society comes into existence sooner or [00:52:00] later that society claims a territory.
And when they claim at that territory, it's within that territory that all their relationships arise from say. And so for Blackfoot, were plain planes. We're planes people. So whatever we see on the land and all that, the stars, we see people from New Zealand, when they look up, they see a different set of stars.
Say we see a slip, different set of stars. So our stories come from. Those stars, et cetera, and so on. It comes from all the [00:53:00] lang, from the sounds of the land, whether it's the wind, the animals, and so forth. See, that's how language develops and so on. So that claiming of territory is the reason why languages and cultures are different, because hey, that's what we relate to see, and that's where things arise from.
See, and so, one side of the island, as you put it. We'll see different things. The other side will see different things. So you can begin to imagine at a global level how things might be, but it's the claiming of [00:54:00] territory. And within that territory is where the culture, the language arises with the relationship of what I refer to as the environmental totality, the environmental totality.
And so Plains environmental totality is where my people arise from so on. And so that's where our language and our culture arises from.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. So much gratitude, so much. Uncle. If I can call you Uncle Lee, Lee, little Bear, thank you for sharing. And may we carry those stories and wisdom into our lives, in our, to our communities and pass it on.
It's a medicine that this world needs. It's a [00:55:00] remembering. We all need to remember those ways of being
right. So.
So much gratitude. Then we live into receive the answers from everywhere to our questions.
If we can listen,
Maurizio Benazzo: and if you have not seen, if an owl calls your name, it's available, please watch. It is the last book of ours by donation. It's by donation, including zero. If you cannot afford it, it's okay. Share it, but watch it and share it if you may. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: So deep
Maurizio Benazzo: gratitude. Thank you,
Zaya Benazzo: thank you, thank
Maurizio Benazzo: you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you so much, Dr. Leroy. Thank you.
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