Reflections on Native American Heritage Month as a Non-Native to this Country

Image: Wikimedia Commons

“The only certainty is that nothing is certain.”Fortune Cookie

I sit at a Taoist meditation gathering, legs crossed, balanced on a plastic folding chair.

My Qigong teacher has just given a lecture on the Tao, and I expect now to sit in silent meditation and take in the familiar sound that always ends these nightly talks: the music of the gong.

“The gong” is what my teacher calls it, anyway. What I call it is a crystal singing bowl. The diameter of a beach ball, it’s a half-cut oval of frosted white glass that rings when struck and sings when stroked. When a musician sits down to play the bowl, gliding a wooden dowel around its outer edge in unbroken spiral after spiral, the crystal begins to sing. It starts quiet and scratchy, and builds to a crescendo of expansive song so loud and wide that it penetrates the air of the room and and cancels all other information inside.

The loudness of the gong silences everything in its wake.

The music of the gong is one of my favorite sounds. It’s a mystical sound, a sound seemingly from another world that somehow crosses into this material world and touches spirit to ground. Its ring expands through space like dust of a galaxy, enters my ears, and rings into my brain, echoing and bounding inside my skull. Every time I hear it, the song cuts through my consciousness so completely that it clears away everything in its path: any residue of thought, any dust of impure emotion.

I’m left afterward contemplating pure sound, hearing it recede, feeling my own self floating halfway between worlds. I myself feel momentarily both in this world and in the world of the unseen, the gong having transformed even my own energy into sound. I am left clear, renewed, with a sense of seeing and hearing again for the first time.

The clarity lasts for a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Then, inevitably, whatever is inside my psyche and experience will begin dropping its litter into the pristine fields of pure mind, and my neural highways start to become congested again. Life traffic builds up and starts honking.

I once told my teacher, “I love the sound of the gong. It opens me up like the sky.” He replied with a nod, “The gong is a great teacher.”

Tonight, back on my plastic chair, I once again await the gong. But tonight it doesn’t come. Instead, the voice of my teacher reaches into the dim light of the room, announcing that instead of meditation, tonight we’ll be gifted a unique presentation from some special visitors.

In November, we celebrate Native American Heritage Month in our country. As I ponder the meaning of that celebration, I think of a comment I heard recently from philosopher Noam Chomsky, remarking on a review of a book by someone he calls a “major American historian.” He said, the book’s author mentions that when early European explorers came to the Western Hemisphere there had been approximately one million native people living up and down the length of the continent. But the historian was far off in estimates of the true population, which Chomsky says would have been closer to 60-70 million.

Why the discrepancy? How did a historian miss 59 million-or-more people and instead only report one million?

Answer: by failing to count the millions upon millions of indigenous people of those lands who were killed—by disease, famine,