Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day were good friends. He admired her life and work, and she visited him on several occasions at the monastery and at his hermitage. They had friends in common, including Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan who had a strong mentor relationship to Merton.
Merton frequently contributed articles to Dorothy’s newspaper The Catholic Worker, including an essay on “The Root of War Is Fear” in October, 1961. In a letter to her he wrote: “I think it is a scandal that most Christians are not solidly lined up with you. I certainly am.” One observer wrote that Dorothy’s “prophetic witness to non-violence and pacifism disturbed many in the Catholic Church” but “challenged and inspired others, including Merton.”
Dorothy Day wrote the Foreword to Merton’s book Ishi Means Man which is a meditation on the Native American plight at the hands of European Americans. A number of the essays in Ishi Means Man were first published in The Catholic Worker, and in her succinct Foreword she alludes to that.
She confesses to how she was raised on the cowboys vs Indian stories of America and Hollywood where the Native American was always the “aggressor and villain.” She read about how Indians tortured French Jesuit missionaries in Canada and how Indians were the enemy. She laments how we forgot how Indians assisted the earliest colonists.
She talks of her “abysmal ignorance” toward Indians that was finally shattered when she read a book by John Collier on Indians of the Americas. She states how much “primitive cultures” have to teach us today and closes with a debt of gratitude to Merton for his book.
Ishi was the last survivor of the Yahi people who were hunted for a bounty on their head in California for fifty years. His entire family went into hiding but after they all died, Ishi surrendered to the white race on August 29, 1911. He lived four years longer with an anthropologist’s family in Berkeley, California. In 1964 a book by Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America recounted this history, and that triggered Merton’s book.
Merton begins his essay on Ishi this way: Genocide is a new word. Perhaps the word is new because technology has now got into the game of destroying whole races at once. The destruction of races is not new—just easier. Merton celebrates “the courage, resourcefulness, and the sheer nobility of these few stone age men struggling to preserve their life, their autonomy and their identity as a people.”
Merton compared the Ishi story to the Vietnam War then raging in the sixties. Viet Nam seems to have become an extension of our old western frontier, complete with enemies of another ‘inferior’ race….What a pity that so many innocent people have to pay with their lives for our obsessive fantasies.
He praises indigenous ritual for accomplishing a full integration into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly….One fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars.
He praised recent revelations from an archaeological find in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley for a culture that possessed “almost total neglect of the arts of war.” In another essay Merton says that in fighting indigenous peoples, “We have not understood their playful modes. We have fought Eros.”
A fear of the via Positiva? All dualism makes a foe of Eros. Indigenous wisdom, which has been called “aboriginal Mother Love,” does not despise play or Eros.
To be continued.
Banner Image: Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Photos combined by Felton Davis on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you think we are still fighting eros? Or distorting it? Do you seek ritual that is in step with the universe and the liturgy of the stars? What lessons do you take from the Ishi story?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, pp. 96, 139f., 156, 196f.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
5 thoughts on “Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton on Indigenous Wisdom”
In Australia the colonialist damage done to our Indigenous brethren is profound and mainstream Australia -to our shame- did not support a voice to parliament for them – we have a long way to go for healing and reconciliation to take place
Yes, sadly, we are still fighting Eros… The Divine Feminine Spirit with All Her Love, Wisdom, Sacredness , Beauty, and Creative Diverse Oneness has not been valued enough in human egocentric, dualistic and anthropomorphic history, especially as manifested by our tragic treatment of our indigenous ancestors who have suffered exploitation and genocide in the past and present. With increased awareness in the last few decades of the destruction and pollution of Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/Her graceful abundance by modern civilization with its consequent climate change imperiling our survival as a human species, we’re beginning to realize the value and wisdom of indigenous spirituality with its wholistic connections to Our Mother Earth and Our Sacred evolving Cosmos. Hopefully it’s not too late in our human evolution as a human species…
When my daughter was two or three, we went to the county fair where I had entered my chutneys in the preserves judging. Among the things we watched was Mayan dancing in costumes like the ones you’ve shown above. For days after that, she danced the way they had. Even though I wondered it it was cultural appropriation, the naturalness and beauty of what she had experienced allowed me to join in with her, and we danced together singing the foot and drum sounds as we danced. It was joyful. No one was watching. There are some sounds that live deep in our souls and it heals us to let them out. I think that was the year I won first prize for my pineapple guava chutney.
Ishi lived with the parents of Ursula K. LeGuin, a gifted author. She wrote for children and adults, and was one of the first women recognized writing Science Fiction. She also was a poet, essayist, and a brilliant speaker. She learned much from her childhood experience of living with Ishi. Many of her Science Fiction books are not the “ray guns and spaceship” type, popularized by the men writing early in her career. She writes of relationships between the peoples of different races and planets. Her small book “The Word for World Is Forest” is one of my favorites. It tells the story of the conflict between an Indigenous tribe and the “modern” men who came to rape their planet, at whatever cost, of its natural resources. She learned from Tolkien that words are sacred, and each word should mean something. Her writing stays with me always.
God is one spirit, and God’s creatures are uncountable and unique in some ways. It’s a gift to feel at one with someone different in some ways but not different in the most important ways, as our kin, family members within the family of all creatures. Recall the Golden Rule, and loving strangers makes perfect sense. The word “enemy” derives from the Latin *inimicus* meaning “not a friend.” What a thin conceptual line of demarcation between those we respect and those we fear and often seek to destroy. In America going to war against Iran our political leaders have fallen into the illogical trap of dualism reframed as hostility. Pray to the only One with the power to change minds and hearts, that “all may be one as the beautiful creature and Creator are one in love.