Who is Sherri Mitchell, and what are her Sacred Instructions?

Who is Sherri Mitchell? #

A Penobscot woman, born and raised on the Penobscot Indian Reservation, an island in the Penobscot River in central Maine. The Penobscot are one of the Wabanaki nations, with the Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Mi’kmaq, whose homelands lie along the waterways of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.¹ She took her law degree at the University of Arizona, specialising in Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy, and worked as a lawyer before founding the Land Peace Foundation, which works for indigenous rights and the indigenous way of life. She has served as an adviser to the Indigenous EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this and Medicine Peoples Council of North and South America.² Sacred Instructions has been published in four languages, and she has contributed to more than a dozen anthologies.³

Her book draws on the teachings of the tribal elders who helped raise her, and on her own experience. It does not describe how the Wabanaki lived before colonisation in terms of hunting, gathering or farming; it writes of a living people today, with their own language, stories and ceremonies.

What are Sacred Instructions? #

Guidance each of us carries from birth. In her words, “We all come into this world with a set of instructions.” These instructions lead towards our highest purpose and the truths that live deep within us; she writes that they vibrate in us down to the level of our cells, that every living being has its own tone, and that together these tones make up the voice of creation. Learning to listen to that voice lets us bring our daily lives into step with our purpose. None of us, she says, is here by accident, though many of us are “out of step” with our true path.⁴

The instructions also live in a people’s way of life, in the stories, values and ceremonies handed down by the ancestors. At the close of the book she calls the sacred instructions left by the ancestors a map that can lead us back to the humanity and the connections we have lost.⁵ This oneness, she says, is no call for everyone to become the same, because “oneness is not sameness”, but a weaving together of different gifts.⁴

What does she teach about colonisation? #

That it has not ended. “Colonization is not only alive, it’s thriving. We simply call it by different names”, one of them being “progress”. She likens it to an infection that spreads through a whole body, which separates a people from their values, their land, their food and water, their language and their rituals, and then imposes its own.⁶ Underneath it lies what she calls the Myth of Separation, the belief that we are not connected to one another or to the divine, which in the West wears the disguise of rugged individualism and leaves us isolated and cut off from the natural world.⁷ Reconnecting with the Earth is, for her, at the heart of decolonising.⁶

The Wabanaki way of life she sets against this rests on relationship. The words “all my relations” (N’dilnabamuk) name kinship with every being, the two-legged, the four-legged, the winged, the plants, the trees and the living Earth.⁸ This is why the Wabanaki do not see themselves even as stewards of the Earth; “We are only keepers of a way of life that is in harmony with the Earth.” They are taught a responsibility to speak on behalf of the natural world, not because humans are superior, but because humans speak the language other humans understand.⁸

What does she teach about trauma and healing? #

That the pain of history is carried down the generations until it is faced. In her account, trauma the first generation cannot hold passes to the next as fears, sadness and anxiety whose source they cannot name, and whole groups can come to hold on to their suffering as part of who they are. What a person carrying this needs is for their trauma “to be recognized, accepted, and held gently.”⁹

Healing, for her, begins with telling the truth about shared history, including the genocide of Native peoples, and with all sides being heard. She asks for specific acknowledgement of what was done and what it led to, such as the loss of culture and the removal of children to boarding schools, rather than a blanket apology, and for the harm still happening now to stop.⁹ See What is trauma, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism understand it?

Should non-Native people take up these teachings? #

Native people themselves hold different views on sharing their teachings with outsiders. Some Native activists and elders object strongly to non-Native people taking up and selling Native ceremonies; a Lakota declaration of 1993 condemned the exploitation of Lakota spirituality, naming ‘shamanism’ workshops among the exploiters.¹⁰ See What is ‘plastic shamanism’?

Mitchell’s own book shows the question from the inside. One of her teachers, the elder Bennet Lyons, had never supported putting the teachings into writing, yet urged her to write the book. She read each section to a close friend, Miigam’aghan, to keep a balance between informing the wider public and “protecting what we hold most sacred”, and she offers the teachings to any reader in the hope that they help light the reader’s own path.¹¹ The ceremonies in the book, such as the pipe, the sweat lodge and the moon lodge, appear as parts of living traditions, and this answer does not present them as practices for readers.

How does Therapeutic Shamanism stand towards indigenous teaching? #

With gratitude, and without taking. Cultural appropriation is when people from a dominant culture take up the customs, practices or ideas of a culture that has been oppressed, without its permission and without acknowledgement, respect or real understanding, and given the history of colonial exploitation, anyone piecing together a modern shamanic path needs to be mindful of it.¹² For this reason Therapeutic Shamanism does not base itself on any particular indigenous culture. It builds on core shamanism, the practices found across shamanic cultures the world over, and keeps the work “culture-lite”; certain practices and beliefs may belong to particular cultures, but shamanism as a whole is the birthright of all human beings.¹³ See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?

Alongside this goes a debt. The peoples who kept shamanic and animist knowledge alive have been “the wisdom-keepers through the dark times of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer”, and the gratitude owed to them is immense.¹⁴ That gratitude is not a claim to their ceremonies, and Therapeutic Shamanism does not speak for any indigenous people.

Therapeutic Shamanism does use the phrase ‘the Original Instructions’, which comes from indigenous North American peoples, for the animist template of how to live in right relationship, drawn from how hunter-gatherer animists lived and translated for the present. Mitchell’s Sacred Instructions are her own teaching, from her own tradition, and the two are not presented here as the same thing.

Where do her concerns and Therapeutic Shamanism’s meet? #

On colonisation, separation and what heals them, each in its own terms. In Therapeutic Shamanism, colonisation is the Taker cult at work, and for the Taker cult ‘civilising’ indigenous people has usually meant killing them and taking their land, and this is still happening now in many parts of the world.¹⁵ Our separation from the living world shows up as Power-loss on the scale of a whole culture, and is healed by reconnecting with the Animal, Plant and Stone People and the living Earth, and by giving back for what we receive. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?, How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural Power-loss? and What is right relationship and reciprocity?

Both also name a cannibal spirit of greed. Mitchell tells the Wabanaki story of Kiwawk, the Cannibal Giant, known to other Native peoples by other names, among them Wetiko and Wendigo. In her telling he sleeps until the cries of the Earth Mother wake him; his one task is to protect her, and he does it by infecting humanity with a sickness of endless consumption. The only way to put him back to sleep “is for us to wake up.”¹⁶ In Therapeutic Shamanism, wetikoWétiko. The parasitic, cannibalistic thought-form of Taker culture (the term is from the Algonquian peoples of North America, via Jack Forbes and Paul Levy): it drives its host to consume, dominate and set itself above nature, and it infects all of us to some degree. Read the full answer is a parasitic, possessing spirit of greed and excess at the heart of Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer, held firmly in check in hunter-gatherer societies. See What is wétiko, and what is co-wétiko?

On inherited trauma, Therapeutic Shamanism also sees our whole culture as wounded by domestication and the Fall, with those wounds passed down through how families raise children and the stories they tell; whether trauma is also passed on in the genes is still debated by scientists. See What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?

Where does Therapeutic Shamanism’s view differ? #

Mostly in what it takes as its template. Therapeutic Shamanism looks to the animist hunter-gatherers who lived before farming, and holds that ‘indigenous’ and ‘hunter-gatherer’ are not the same thing. Virtually all shamanic societies today are agricultural or herding, and so to some degree touched by Taker thinking. In North America, though, colonisation came comparatively recently, so pre-agricultural knowledge and ways of thinking can still be relatively intact.¹⁷ None of this is a criticism of present-day animist peoples, whose relationship with the Earth is much healthier than that of the cultures that abandoned animism; the criticism is of Taker thinking wherever it is found.¹⁸

This answer makes no claim about how the Wabanaki lived in the past or live today, and the general point about Taker thinking is not a judgement on her people. Mitchell writes from the life of her own people, and her book does not frame its teaching in these terms. Her ideas are given here as hers, and Therapeutic Shamanism’s as its own, side by side.