Waking Our Indigenous Souls

The World Is Alive and Always Talking to Us

WAKING OUR INDIGENOUS SOULS: On Animism, Amnesia, and the Persons Who Are Not Human

You check your phone. You open Netflix. You can’t say, without looking, where the moon will rise tonight.

And yet: You are Indigenous. We all are.

Somewhere in your bloodline—9 generations back or 400—your ancestors were native to a particular place. They knew the land. They spoke to it, and it spoke back.

Then the cords were cut. Sometimes slowly, through the creep of empire and the severing of old ways. Sometimes violently, through conquest, colonization, forced conversion. However it happened, the connection was broken. (White Christian Europeans devastated the Indigenous cultures of Europe before they decimated America’s Indigenous cultures: tinyurl.com/IndigenousEurope )

Now we live on land whose original languages we don’t speak, whose waters we can’t name, whose Indigenous peoples were displaced for our presence. We scroll through spiritual Instagram posts about “connecting with nature” while we can’t identify five birds in our own backyard.

This essay is about those severed cords and whether they can be reconnected. It’s about animism as visceral connection with the natural world. It’s about the Indigenous person within us who never died, just went into hiding.

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THE COST OF CONQUEST

The experiment called the United States was built on the systematic destruction of over 500 Indigenous cultures in North America and the violent decimation of hundreds of Indigenous tribes in West Africa. Stolen land. Stolen labor. Stolen lives. The wealth that made the United States an “economic powerhouse” was extracted from enslaved bodies, stolen land, and decimated Indigenous cultures.

We know this intellectually. But we were schooled to be numb about it. Our history textbooks gave it a paragraph, maybe a chapter if we were lucky, always framed as “unfortunate” or “regrettable” but ultimately necessary for “progress.” We learned about “Manifest Destiny” as if the land was empty and waiting, as if the people who had lived here for millennia were scenery.

In 2025, how many Americans can name more than five tribes and identify where they lived? How many understand that enslaved Black labor was foundational to the emergence of the US as a global economic power?

This amnesia isn’t neutral. It’s active suppression, and it’s hurting us.

When we are complicit in the damage wreaked on Indigenous peoples, we don’t just harm them. We damage the part of ourselves that knows how to be Indigenous. We wound our own capacity for relationship with the living world. We sever ourselves from ancestors who knew how to listen to rivers, read the language of birds, and live as kin with the more-than-human world.

Mythologist Michael Meade says: We all have an inner Indigenous person, and we need to be in close contact with them. Not as a lifestyle choice or wellness trend, but as a fundamental necessity for preserving the natural world and ensuring our survival as a species.

But how do we wake that inner Indigenous person when we’re karmically interwoven with the collective act of destroying Indigeneity itself? How do we learn to see animistically when our culture has spent centuries insisting that rocks and rivers are “just” matter?

This is the work.

WHAT ANIMISM ACTUALLY IS

First, what animism is not: It’s not a “belief system” we adopt. Not a spiritual aesthetic. Not something we “practice” for half an hour twice a week. And definitely not something we learn from a weekend workshop taught by a white person who once did ayahuasca in Peru.

Most Indigenous peoples don’t have a word for animism in their languages. Not because they lack the concept, but because it’s so fundamental, so woven into existence, that it doesn’t need naming.

For Indigenous peoples worldwide, animism isn’t a religious belief. It’s an ontological fact and a lived reality. The world is populated with many kinds of persons, only some of whom are human. Rivers are persons. Mountains are persons. Animals and plants and fungi are persons. Human beings exist in reciprocal relationships with all of them.

An old rootworker I met, Mama Crossed-Rivers, said: Our kin aren’t just the humans with our blood. Our family includes the mountains and rivers, the animal and plant elders, the fungi networks underground, the spirits who dwell in places, the planets and stars, the deities and unseen ones—all those whose lives are tangled up with ours.

This isn’t poetry or metaphor. It’s reality as experienced by people whose perceptual doors haven’t been slammed shut by materialism.

Animism is relationship. The recognition that we live in a world of subjects, not objects. That the forest is speaking if we know how to listen. That the creek carries intelligence and memory. That the coyote who crossed our path has something to tell us.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

Last autumn, I spent three months visiting the same bend in a creek near my home. Not hiking past it, but sitting with it. The first dozen times, I heard nothing but water over rocks. My mind chattered. I checked my phone.

Then one day, I realized the bend in the creek had a personality. A quality and a presence. The way the water moved around certain rocks felt intentional, even playful. The pool where leaves collected felt like a place of gathering, of holding. I found myself saying “good morning” when I arrived, and meaning it. I gave this bend in the creek a name: Sweet Medicine

This wasn’t hallucination or projection. It was perception finally coming online. The creek—including “my” bend in the creek—had been a person all along. I had simply been too numb to notice.

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THE AMNESIA THAT KILLS

Most of us have no idea where we are.

We don’t know our water’s source or where our waste goes. We can’t name five birds or trees. We don’t know where the sun rises in winter or what moon phase it is. We don’t know the story of the soil under our feet.

We live on this earth like hotel guests—passing through, using resources, never learning the place’s name or history or spirit. We have no relationship with where we are because we were never taught that relationship was possible.

This isn’t just sad. It’s suicidal.

Author and activist Arundhati Roy tells us: “To annihilate Indigenous populations eventually paves the way for our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. They may be the gatekeepers to our future.”

The ecocidal juggernaut of modern civilization isn’t an accident. It’s the logical result of a worldview that sees earth as dead matter to exploit rather than a living community of persons to relate with. We can’t destroy what we love. But we can easily destroy what we’ve been taught is “just” a resource, “just” stuff.

Indigenous peoples avoided this trap because they knew, in their daily lived experience, that the river is their relative. They understood that the salmon are people and the mountain participates in the drama of the world.

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THE PROGRESSIVE MATERIALIST PARADOX

Here’s what perplexes me: Why are so many politically progressive people adamantly materialist? They are rigidly “skeptical” of the spirit realms, even while knowing that relationship with spirits has been central to virtually every Indigenous culture.

I’m especially puzzled by the dogmatic materialism some environmentalists cling to. They advocate for the earth while refusing to acknowledge that Indigenous peoples’ loving relationship with the land is inherently spiritual—and that this spiritual dimension is essential to their love.

This is more than an intellectual contradiction. It’s a crisis of imagination that cripples our movements.

If we can only defend the earth through policy arguments and carbon metrics, we’ve already conceded the ground. We’re speaking the language of the system that’s killing the world. We’re trying to save what we love by reducing it to data, to resource value, to ecosystem services. This is the very logic that made it killable in the first place.

Indigenous peoples don’t protect the salmon because of their ecosystem service value. They protect the salmon because the salmon are their relatives, because the salmon are people who deserve to live, and because the salmon carry knowledge and memory and deserve respect.

Until we can feel this—not just understand it intellectually, but feel it in our bodies—we will keep losing.

Dream author Robert Moss says: “Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow the natural path of our energies. Yet many of us have lost this primal connection, or know it only as a superficial wannabe symbolic thing that we look up in books and medicine cards without feeding and living every day.”

The question isn’t whether spirits are “real” in some scientifically provable sense. The question is: What becomes possible when we relate to the world as if it’s alive, aware, and populated with other kinds of persons? What changes when we approach the forest as we would approach a gathering of elders: with respect, attention, and the willingness to listen?

Everything changes.

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THE RECIPROCITY

Animistic consciousness isn’t a spiritual wellness practice. It’s not about us feeling more connected or peaceful. It’s about recognizing that we have obligations.

If the river is a person, we have responsibilities to it. If the forest is our kin, we have duties. If the animals are elders, we need to listen and learn and give back.

Reciprocity is the foundation of Indigenous ethics. We take, we give. We receive, we reciprocate. We don’t just extract. We participate in the ongoing cycle of gift and gratitude that maintains the world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, teaches that the first step in reciprocity is simply paying attention, which is itself a form of gift. The land has been ignored, objectified, exploited, and used. To truly see it, to learn its names, to notice its patterns, to recognize its personhood: This is an act of love.

The second step is asking: What does this place need? Not what do I need from it, but what does it need from me? Sometimes the answer is simple: Remove the invasive species. Pick up the trash. Sometimes it’s more complex: Advocate for its protection. Change how we live so we take less.

Learning to navigate relationships with other-than-human persons isn’t an optional spiritual hobby. It’s a fundamental life skill and a source of real joy and intimacy. It’s the only foundation healthy culture can be built on.

Healthy culture means right relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Recognizing our place in the web—not above it or outside it, but woven into it.

CAN WE ACTUALLY DO THIS?

Is it possible to resurrect our inner Indigenous person?

The answer is both no and yes, and the tension between them is where the real work lives.

No, we can’t erase the history. We can’t undo the genocide, the displacement, and the cultural destruction. Because we benefit from the desecration—even if we and our direct ancestors didn’t personally perpetrate it—we carry that karma. We live in the world created by those unimaginable losses.

We also can’t simply transplant ourselves into Indigenous cultures that aren’t ours. We can’t bypass our own lineage, our own ancestors, our own karma. Cultural appropriation isn’t just disrespectful; it’s spiritually ineffective. We can’t skip the hard work of reclaiming our own severed traditions by borrowing someone else’s intact ones.

But yes, we can wake Indigenous consciousness within ourselves. We can relearn how to be in relationship with the living world. We can recover the capacity to recognize personhood beyond the human. We can remember that we are Indigenous to Earth, if not to this specific place.

This isn’t about becoming Indigenous to where we are now. We’re not. It’s about awakening the Indigenous consciousness that exists in all humans, the original instructions we all carry about how to live as part of the world rather than apart from it.

So how do we do this while carrying the karma of being complicit in indigeneity’s destruction?

We start by acknowledging the contradiction. We don’t resolve it or transcend it. We hold it. We let it be uncomfortable. This discomfort is appropriate. It should be uncomfortable to benefit from stolen land while trying to reconnect with the land. This tension is the price of consciousness at this moment of history.

Then we do the work anyway, not despite the contradiction but because of it. Because the only way to begin repaying the karmic debt is to become people who are capable of relationship again. To become people who know how to love and defend the land. To become people who can be good ancestors.

This requires:

• Humility. We know nothing. We’re beginners at life arts our ancestors once embodied. This will take decades, not weekends. Good. Let it be humbling. Let it crack open our arrogance. The land doesn’t need our cleverness. It needs our willingness to be taught.

• Attention. Real attention. Not scattered, screen-addicted attention, but focused, patient, sustained attention that allows relationship to develop. This means showing up to the same place, repeatedly, in all seasons and weathers. This means putting the phone away. This means being present enough to notice when the red-tailed hawk perches in her usual tree, and when she doesn’t. Attention is the first gift we can offer.

• Time. We can’t speed-run this. There are no shortcuts to intimacy. We have to spend years in the same place, with the same beings, learning the same lessons over and over until they sink from our heads into our bones. The land will teach us on its timeline, not ours.

• Relationship. Multiple kinds:

With the land where we are. Learn it. Love it. Defend it.

With the Indigenous peoples whose territory we occupy. Learn the history. Support their sovereignty. Learn from them if they’re willing to teach. Many Indigenous cultures on this continent are alive and thriving. (https://tinyurl.com/IndigenousToday)

With our own ancestors. If we go back far enough, we’ll find the ones who knew. They’re waiting in our dreams, in our bones, in sudden moments of recognition. They want us to remember.

With the more-than-human beings we share space with. The creek. The crows. The oak tree. The mycelial networks. They’re already in relationship with us—we just haven’t been holding up our end.

• Reciprocity. Give back, always. We can’t just take. Find out what the land needs and provide it. Practice reciprocity in your specific context. Sometimes it’s removing trash. Sometimes it’s planting natives. Sometimes it’s fighting for legal protection. Sometimes it’s singing to the plants, tending them, thanking them. Sometimes it’s putting down herbs or pouring water as an offering. Ask the land. Listen for the answer.

• Action. This isn’t just personal spiritual development. Our inner Indigenous person cares about what happens to the land, the water, the beings we share space with. We defend them. We protect them. We make our animistic knowing political. We show up to the city council meeting about the creek. We block the pipeline. We change how we live. Love without action is just sentiment. The land needs our bodies, our voices, our choices.

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THE YEARNING

The world is aching for us to remember.

The land where we live is waiting for us to pay attention. The creek wants to speak. The birds carry secrets they’re ready to share. Our ancestors are reaching through time—watch for them in your dreams—trying to remind us what we’ve forgotten.

Our inner Indigenous person, the part of us that never died but went into hiding, is ready to wake up. It’s who we actually are underneath the amnesia and loss and industrial-consumer programming.

This isn’t about adding something new. It’s about removing what obscures what’s already there. The capacity for relationship with the living world isn’t something we need to acquire. It’s something we need to uncover.

So start where you are.

Learn the names. Not just the common names, but also the Latin names and the Indigenous names if you can learn them respectfully. Names are the beginning of relationship.

Ask the questions. Where does my water come from? Where does my waste go? What grew here before the city? What’s the history of this place? Who lived here? What happened to them? What’s still here?

Pay attention. Go to the same place. Sit. Watch. Listen. Notice what changes. Notice what doesn’t. Let the place teach you its rhythms, its moods, its inhabitants.

Show up. In all weathers. In all seasons. When it’s convenient and when it’s not. Relationships require presence, not just when we feel like it, but consistently. The land will notice if you’re serious.

Be patient. This unfolds on geological time, not Instagram time. You might sit by that creek for six months before you feel anything. That’s fine. Keep sitting. The relationship is forming whether you feel it or not.

Give back. Always. Find out what’s needed and provide it. Let reciprocity become your default mode. Take one, give two. Receive, return. Be part of the cycle.

The river will teach you if you’re willing to be taught. The trees won’t speak in human language, but they’ll communicate through pattern, through presence, through the quality of silence when you stand beneath them. Animals will show you what intelligence looks like when it doesn’t wear human skin. The land will reveal itself as alive, aware, and full of persons.

You can indeed wake your inner Indigenous person. Not by pretending to be something you’re not, but by becoming who you actually are underneath the forgetting.

The world needs this from you. Your ancestors are calling you back. The land is ready to meet you.

Now close the screen. Go outside. There’s a creek waiting to know you.

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Here are the artists who created the art shown here, in order from top to bottom:

Howard G Charing

Malcolm Maloney Jagamarra

Wassily Kandinsky

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Links to all my other stuff: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of October 31

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In the late 18th century, Balloonomania came to Paris. Large crowds gathered to watch inventors and impresarios send hot air balloons into the sky. Spectators were astonished, fearful, and filled with wonder. Some wept, and some fainted. I suspect you’re due for your own exhilarating lift-off, Scorpio—a surge of inspiration that may bewilder a few witnesses but will delight those with open minds. Halloween costume prop: wings.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Don’t be too shocked by my unusual list of raw materials that might soon turn out to be valuable: grime, muck, scuzz, scum, slop, bilge, slime, and glop. Amazingly, this stuff may conceal treasures or could be converted into unexpected building materials. So I dare you to dive in and explore the disguised bounty. Proceed on the assumption that you will find things you can use when you distrust first impressions and probe beneath surfaces. Halloween costume suggestions: sacred janitor, recycling wizard, garbage genius.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In the tidepools of America’s Pacific Northwest lives the ochre starfish, a keystone species that keeps mussel populations in check. Remove the starfish, and the ecosystem collapses into imbalance. Let’s make this creature your power symbol, Capricorn. The visible effect of your presence may not be flashy or vivid, but you will hold a stabilizing role in a group, project, or relationship. Your quiet influence can keep things harmonious. Your gift is not to dominate the scene, but to keep the whole system alive and diverse. Halloween costume suggestion: ochre starfish (More info: tinyurl.com/OchreStarfish).

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): For hundreds of years, the Blackfoot people of North America built buffalo jumps. These were steep cliffs where herds of bison could be guided and driven over the edge during a hunt. It required elaborate cooperation. Scouts tracked the herd, decoys lured them toward the drop, and prep teams waited below to process the meat, hides, and bones for the whole community’s sustenance. I hope you will engage in smaller versions of this project. Now is an excellent time to initiate, inspire, and foster shared efforts. Make it a high priority to work with allies you trust. Halloween costume suggestions: shepherd, sheep dog, cowboy, vaquero.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In the ancient Greek world, oracles spoke in riddles. This was not because they were coy, but because they understood that truth must often arrive obliquely. Directness is overrated when the soul is in motion. Mythic modes of perception don’t obey the laws of logic. In this spirit, Pisces, I invite you to make riddles and ambiguities be your allies. A dream, an overheard conversation, or a misheard lyric may contain an enigmatic but pithy code. You should be alert for messages that arrive sideways and upside down. Tilt your head. Read between the flames. You will understand when your heart recognizes what your mind can’t name. Halloween costume suggestion: oracle or fortune-teller.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): On the outskirts of a village in Ghana, a healer gathers plants only when the moon says yes. She speaks the names of each leaf aloud, as if to ask permission, and never picks more than needed. She trusts that each herb has its own wisdom that she can learn from. I invite you to emulate her approach, Aries. Now is a good time to search for resources you need to heal and thrive. The best approach is to be receptive to what life brings you, and approach with reverence and gratitude. Halloween costume suggestion: herbalist, traditional healer, sacred botanist.

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If you would like to support my work, please consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

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(contribute as Friends and Family)

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A well-cut ship’s sail is not a flat sheet. It has a gentle curve that the sailmaker crafts stitch by stitch so the wind will catch and convert invisible pressure into forward motion. Too taut, and the cloth flaps, wasting energy; too loose, and power dissipates. The miracle lies in geometry tuned to an unseen current. I invite you to be inspired by this approach, Taurus. Build curvature into your plans so that optimism isn’t an afterthought but a structural feature. Calibrate your approaches to natural processes so movement arises from alignment rather than brute effort. Make sure your progress is fueled by what you love and trust. Halloween costume suggestion: Wear a sail.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): All of us can benefit from regular phases of purification: periods when we dedicate ourselves to cleansing, shedding, and simplifying. During these intense times of self-healing, we might check our integrity levels to see if they remain high. We can atone for mistakes, scrub away messy karma, and dismantle wasteful habits. Here’s another essential practice: disconnecting ourselves from influences that lower our energy and demean our soul. The coming weeks will be a perfect time to engage in these therapeutic pleasures, Gemini. Halloween costume suggestion: purifier, rejuvenator, cleanser, refiner.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Deep in the Pacific Ocean, male humpback whales sing the longest, slowest, most intricate love songs ever. Their bass tones are loud and strong, sometimes traveling for miles before reaching their intended recipients. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to compose and unleash your own ultimate love songs, Cancerian. Your emotional intelligence is peaking, and your passionate intensity is extra refined and attractive. Meditate on the specific nature of the gifts you want to offer and receive in return. Halloween costume suggestion: singer of love songs.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Between 1680 and 1725, Italy’s Antonio Stradivari and his family made legendary violins that are highly valued today. They selected alpine spruce trees and Balkan maple, seasoned the wood for years, and laid varnish in painstaking layers that produced sublime resonance. Their genius craftsmanship can be summed up as the cumulative magic of meticulousness over time. I recommend their approach to you, Leo. Be in service to the long game. Commune with people, tools, and commitments that age well. Act on the theory that beautiful tone is perfected in layers. Halloween costume suggestion: a fine craftsperson.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Trained women dancers in Rajasthan, India, perform the ancient art of bhavai. As folk music plays, they balance on the dull edge of a sword and hold up to 20 clay pots on their head. They sway with elegance and artistry, demonstrating an ultimate embodiment of “grace under pressure.” I don’t foresee challenges as demanding as that for you, Virgo. But I suspect you will have the poise and focus to accomplish the metaphorical equivalents of such a feat. Halloween costume suggestion: regal acrobat or nimble dancer.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In 1968, researchers at Stanford conducted the “marshmallow test.” Children were offered a single sweet treat immediately. But if they didn’t quickly gobble down the marshmallow, thus postponing their gratification, they were awarded with two candies later. The kids who held out for the double reward didn’t do so by sheer willpower alone. Rather, they found clever ways to distract themselves to make the wait more bearable: making up games, focusing their attention elsewhere, and adjusting their surroundings. I advise you to learn from their approach, Libra. Cultivate forbearance and poise without dimming your passion. Harness small triumphs of willpower into generating big, long-term gains. Diligent, focused effort invested now will almost certainly lead to satisfying outcomes. So please prioritize incremental, systematic grunt work over stunts and adrenaline. Halloween costume trick: carry two marshmallows.

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