In my over 36 years of professional Shamanism, as well as my over 62 years of simply practicing it, there has been one delusional belief that I have most often encountered. This belief is based upon racism and territorialism. It is the belief that white folk don’t know Shamanism.
Here is the thing. People who believe this are extremely misinformed. Shamanism has been in absolutely every culture from the beginning of time. It is something that you will find in a variety of forms everywhere on the planet. It is not something that belongs to only one group of people. It is the birthright of ALL people.
When you look at Shamanism from a universal perspective you cannot help but see that some of the very basic teachings have within them the truth of universality. For example, no matter how it is said or in what language it is spoken, the basic truth that “We are all one” means what it says. We cannot hold that concept as truth and then tack on, “Well, except for YOU folk!” That would be racist. And when we look at the concept of cultural appropriation, we also have to look at what that means about Shamanism. Because it is everywhere and within every culture if you look back far enough, nobody is appropriating anything from anyone else by simply practicing what the ancestors before have practiced for thousands of years. The universality of Shamanism is actually affirmed by the many similarities around the planet…similarities that would be difficult to manifest from one culture to the next considering that they had no contact with each other.
That concept of “We are all one” extends not just from one human race to another. It also extends to all living creatures on the planet, all trees, all rivers, all rocks, all mountains, all valleys, all deserts and so on. We are ALL intrinsically connected to this earth, no matter where we live, no matter from where our ancestors migrated. What has really messed this all up is the fact that humans cannot seem to grasp the concept that we are a HUMAN race, not just one portion of it verses the other portions of it. Instead of treating each other as brothers and sisters, we tend to treat each other as enemies. Instead of caring for the earth, we tend to want to own the earth, or at least our small patch of it.
All of us, if we go back far enough, stem from nomadic peoples. These people wondered the earth freely, going where they would best find food. Eventually, some found that planting crops was something that made the gathering of food easier. Others continued to wonder. Neither decision was wrong or right. It simply was the decision that was made. Both decisions had within them positive aspects and negative aspects. It was about a way of life, not about being right or wrong.
Many traditions have within them stories of us descending from the Star People. Cool. Now I have to ask…if we came from the stars originally, then are we not all immigrants in the first place? But there were also some who were here before the Star People, according to legend. Great. And then we mingled with the Star People and made an entirely new hybrid of a race. So that means we ALL BELONG HERE. We are of the stars and we are of the earth. Tada!
There really is no “us and them” to anything. Yes, we can disagree on things, but essentially we are still all one. And we really need to grasp that concept as our people are beginning to again explore the stars. Our universe is full of life forms, some of which we may even be related to!
Universality is a thing in Shamanism. We cannot limit it to just “them” or “us” because that completely goes against all the core teachings of Shamanism.