A Quest for Vision. Yes, it felt right. It wasn't just a matter of semantics. It was analogous to the difference between non-Catholics calling their spiritual work a Mass versus calling it a sacred communion ritual with Holy Spirit. I do take people on quests for vision. That's perfectly true, I thought. It's accurate and I need to stand solid behind what is true. I felt clear in what I had to do. I went back to the Lakota pipe holder and told him what had come through my prayers. He listened attentively, then nodded and said, "Ho, this is a good thing. I thank you for your listening. Tomorrow we will smoke the pipe together and give thanks to the Great Spirit. We have work to do together." In that moment, I felt our hearts join as one.

The next morning at the ceremony, the Lakota pipe holder gave me a beautiful Pendleton blanket. We smoked the Chanunpa and sealed our relationship. He gave me a leather pouch with powdered earth from Bear Butte, the sacred vision quest site of his people. "Give this to your people when you take them out to pray. It will help them on their quest." I carry him and the medicine he gave me in my prayers to this day.

The experience in Oregon heightened my sensitivity to the issue of non-Native people using shamanic ways. Many Native American people today are very upset with Anglos using shamanic practices. In looking at Native people's anger toward Anglo shamanic practice, it is mportant to recognize the historical context from which it springs--five hundred years of holocaust directed toward the indigenous peoples of the Americas by the invading force from Europe. We have taken their land, their lives, their children, and now, many feel, we are trying to take their religion.

My religious heritage is Jewish. I lost relatives to Hitler's genocide and I lost relatives fighting against it. This history of prejudice, discrimination, persecution, and violence is a part of who I am. My roots also include a long history of standing up against oppression and supporting justice for all peoples, a tradition of which I am proud. Yet while I value and respect my people's history, I do not feel connected with its religious practice. My way is of the earth, the way of listening to nature. I have found it amongst the shamanic people who still live according to the earth-based spirituality of their ancestors. It is these people who face an even greater holocaust than the one faced by mine, and it is still going on today. The genocidal murder of fifty million men, women, and children. The theft of land, the desecration of religious ceremony, the abduction and forced socialization of children according to the white man's ways, the destruction of languages, the destruction of ways of life thousands of years old--this and much more has been the plight of Native people on the American continent since the invasion force from Western Europe first hit these shores. It has not yet stopped. The result of this carnage today threatens the rest of the entire life support system of the planet. What can possibly help us bring healing to oppressed people and to an oppressed earth and ecosystem? I believe one pathway involves an exploration of the consciousness that existed on this land before its violation. No, we can't literally go backward, but we can resensitize ourselves to a consciousness of right relationship with the spirit of Turtle Island, which is what North America is called by some of the indigenous people of the Northeast. We can then use this consciousness to guide us in blending with appropriate technology and strategies of sustainable development to produce enough for "all our need, but not our greed," as Mahatma Gandhi used to say. One way to learn how to live on this continent in respectful right-relationship is to listen to its original inhabitants, the ones who have been following their "original instructions" from Spirit on how to be here in a respectful manner. They are the original ecopsychologists, the very first deep ecologists. We should not seek to copy Native people and be something we are not, but instead endeavor to learn from them, and with them, in cooperative partnership with sensitivity, respect, and humility, how to create a way of life that is in harmony with all the forces of creation and the spirit of this land.

First, we have to listen, then we have to learn how to give back. As psychologist Richard Katz, who has worked with indigenous peoples around the world, puts it, "When Westerners learn indigenous healing, what's important is not how they conduct the rituals, but how they conduct their lives. Only a true exchange, built upon mutual respect and accountability, can be our guide. Rather than focusing on which rituals to import and how, we can struggle to be good human beings."