We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope

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APOCALYPSE

The Mystery and Miracle of Survival

The mystical theme of the space age is this: the world as we know it is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end.

—Joseph Campbell

WHEN I WAS six years old, I was taught to hide under my desk at school in the event of an atomic explosion. As ridiculous as it may seem now, this exercise was practiced throughout this country. This was in the early 1950s, during the Cold War, a standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union (Russia). Both sides were armed with nuclear weapons, and the threat of their use was always a possibility. Consequently, a sense of dread hung over my childhood. The end of the world seemed just around the corner.

We are still hiding under our desks, waiting for the big one to drop. As a society, we are still living in anxiety. We are still afraid. Only now we have much more than nuclear war to worry about. We have global pandemics. We have social turmoil. We have irreversible environmental collapse. More than that, we face these threats while coping with our own personal issues: family troubles, illness, financial struggles. The combined weight of all these realities can push us to the brink of despair. It feels like we are living in a time of apocalypse, an age when everything we take for granted is starting to collapse around us. It feels like the end of the world.

In this book, I invite us to crawl out from under our desks—to stand up to face our challenges without fear and to discover new spiritual ways to cope with times of trouble. This situation is nothing new for me as a Native American. My ancestors already lived through an apocalypse. For us, the end of the world is been there, done that.

In 1831, the world came to an end for my family—and for all the families that were part of Chahta Yakni, the Choctaw Nation. That year, we were forced off our ancestral homeland and made to walk on a death march we called the Trail of Tears. Thousands of our people died. We lost our homes, our way of life, even our graveyards. We lost everything—everything, that is, except the one thing they could not take from us: hope.

This book has grown from that seed: the idea that people can survive an apocalypse. How they do so is the vision at the heart of this book. My ancestors are a case study in survival. Not the grim survival of bunkers and bomb shelters, but the liberating and hopeful survival of a spiritual community. Native American culture in North America has been through the collapse of civilization and lived to tell the tale. My goal is to investigate how my ancestors were able to do that—and what their experience can teach all of us who are living in uncertain times.

But first, we need to be on the same page with our use of the word apocalypse. What does it mean, and how will we use it in this book? While many of us equate apocalypse with catastrophe or even with the end of the world, that is actually only half of the meaning. In Greek, the word derives from apokaluptein, which means to uncover or reveal. Originally the word meant a vision of the future, a revelation about what was to come. The last book in the Christian New Testament is called the book of Revelation. It is the vision of the end time—the cataclysmic transformation of reality—at least as seen by the first-century mystic who composed it.

In fact, it was the writer of the book of Revelation who gave the word its second meaning by describing that transformation in such graphic and fantastic imagery. Over time, people began to interpret the meaning of apocalypse not only as a visionary revelation but an actual event. The two definitions began to merge. In Europe, for example, from 1346 to 1353, a pandemic known as the Black Death moved slowly across the continent, killing millions of people. People in the path of the plague saw it as an apocalyptic revelation of God’s anger at them. They understood it as a message, a warning, from heaven. And once the plague arrived in their area, they saw its devastation firsthand and interpreted it as the end of their world. In this way, apocalypse became a term to describe both a vision of what is to come and a description of what is already happening.

The word apocalypse is now used to describe disasters of all kinds, including the Hollywood vision of a zombie apocalypse. As we will see later in this book, it can also describe our own personal apocalypse: an emotional, financial, or health crisis within our own lives. It is a popular shorthand term for total destruction. In this book we will use the word apocalypse with both meanings: a vision and an event. We will understand that the two meanings describe a process. The two meanings work together like an engine: the vision of an impending apocalypse is the fuel, and the actual events of an apocalypse are the combustion. When people are anxious about their future, when they see storm clouds on the horizon, they speak of an impending disaster waiting to happen. This apocalypse is a revelation of what is to come. Then, when it does happen, the apocalypse embodies the predicted event.

Apocalypse is what we are living through. It is the coming true of our worst fears, which in turn generates more visions, either of salvation or destruction. In human history we can trace how this process has unfolded over and over. Cassandra-like prophets rise up to warn us of a coming disaster. They suggest how it will happen and why. Then the prophesied event either occurs or fails to happen, and the process of apocalyptic thinking repeats itself. This process takes place throughout history and in all cultures and faith traditions. The revelation of an end time is universal. Like the story of the great flood, which appears in many religions and cultures, it is a common spiritual theme for humanity, something we have all experienced.

Conquest, war, famine, and death: the four horsemen of the apocalypse are still with us, both as fear and experience. Today we live in an age of anxiety. We are in that part of the apocalyptic process where wars and rumors of wars abound, where we watch the specter of environmental collapse coming at us with what seems like unstoppable certainty; where institutions on which we have always relied are starting to wobble and crumble; and where disease can reach pandemic proportions that we struggle to control or contain. Consequently, millions of people sense an apocalyptic dread rising up around them. Perhaps you are one of them.

It was the experience of apocalypse, not just the fear of it, that my ancestors faced. On Turtle Island, the name many Indigenous nations give to North America, the apocalypse began its inexorable consuming of our Indigenous way of life from the moment European settlers reached our shores. Our people died from a host of diseases for which they had no immunity or cure. The Mayflower was a plague ship. It, and the countless others like it, brought smallpox, measles, and influenza—diseases we had never known before that wiped out whole communities to the last person. At the same time European colonialism, with its rapacious hunger for our land, brought war and destruction upon us no matter how many peace treaties we signed. Whatever we gave, it was never enough. Many of us were forced onto death marches, like the Trail of Tears, that claimed the lives of thousands of people, especially our elders and infants.

Over time, our children were taken from us. They were taken to boarding schools where they suffered physical and sexual abuse. They were forbidden to speak their language or wear their cultural styles of hair or clothing. The animals on which we relied for food were systematically slaughtered and left to rot. Racism made us objects of derision and scapegoating. Even our ways of prayer and worship were outlawed. We were left in poverty and isolation, with the expectation that our genocide would soon be complete.

If you wanted to find an experiential example of an apocalypse, you would be hard pressed to find one more total than what North America’s Indigenous civilization confronted for more than four hundred years. If apocalypse means cataclysmic destruction—in essence, an end of the world—my ancestors went through it.

But they did not all die. They did not become victims of genocide. They did not disappear. They survived. Even if only as a remnant of what once had been, they came through the nightmare to live another day.

How? That’s the question this book seeks to answer. And finding the answer is crucial for all of us who worry that we are sleepwalking toward other pandemics, other wars, other times of corruption and cruelty. What enabled Native American communities to withstand the devastating blow of European colonialism, with all its death and fury? How did they achieve the miracle of their own survival? What can we learn from America’s Indigenous people that may not only help us to endure an apocalypse but, even more importantly, prevent one from happening? Given my ancestors’ experience, there are no better teachers in all the world on this subject.

Looking for an answer begins with apocalypse as revelation. An uncovering. A discovery. A vision. Rather than being mesmerized by the actual events of the American Apocalypse—the term I will use to describe the historical experience of North America’s Indigenous nations—I began my search in the realm of revelation. What did the American Apocalypse reveal about my ancestors? What did it uncover about their survival? Where did their strength come from?

What I call the apocalyptic process happened here in North America just as it has in other global communities. When the early Christians, for example, who lived in the first century after the death of Jesus, saw an apocalypse gathering over them like a storm, when the persecutions and killings began, they turned to apocalypse as revelation, looking for a vision of a future they could still hope for and believe in. They turned to people like the mystic who wrote the book of Revelation. They turned to their prophets.

I decided to do the same thing. In trying to discern how and why my ancestors lived through one of the greatest human cataclysms in history, I decided to rediscover the prophets of my people: the prophets who had seen it coming and who, once it arrived with a vengeance, helped their people live through it with courage and dignity. I followed the path of apocalyptic revelation to uncover the mystery and miracle of Native American survival. I listened once again to the voices of Native American prophets to discover what they could teach me about the world in which we live today.

In the end, I found what I was looking for. But before I share it, I need to say a word about the prophets themselves. Prophets do not arise out of a vacuum. They are part of the apocalyptic process. They appear first as an early warning system within any culture at risk. They fulfill the classic role of the prophet as herald of a vision of what is to come. Then, as the apocalypse becomes ever more real, they serve as teachers to instruct people about what to do to end the suffering and alter the course of destruction. Finally, they are mystics who describe the future and guide people to find it within themselves.

In carrying out these roles in the apocalyptic process, the prophet strives to stand on solid ground, even while the earth beneath their feet is moving. That is, prophets not only talk about the future but the past. They ground their prophecy in the bedrock spiritual traditions of their people. They recall the ancient stories and covenants between the divine and human beings. They reinterpret ancient teachings and remind people of old promises. Prophets are immersed in tradition even as they talk about how that tradition will need to change to meet new apocalyptic challenges.

In Native America, that spiritual tradition is as deep and rich as any culture on earth. Native American prophets who arose during the worst years of our suffering stood in a spiritual history thousands of years old. Their messages, therefore, need to be understood in context—not only in the apocalyptic context of historical colonialism, but in the even older context of Native American religious ritual and practice. A prime example of this is the importance of songs and dances in all Native American prophecy.

Imagine if the writer of the book of Revelation had not used written words to convey the vision, but instead had composed a song to be sung and dance steps to be followed by all those who wanted to understand the prophecy. That is what is distinctive about Native American apocalyptic prophecy: it was interactive. People not only read or heard the prophecy, they physically participated in it. They embodied it in sacred dances.

Each of the prophets I have selected to explore in this book believed deeply in their ancient traditions, and each created songs and dances as a bridge between those ancient beliefs and the demands of a new reality. It would not be wrong to say that my ancestors sang and danced their way through the apocalypse, physically moving from one reality to the next.

Another aspect of the prophets I have followed in this book is that they were all very human