Reyes García | Chicana/o environmental ethics

Sisnaajini. Mount Blanca massif as
viewed from San Francsico, CO

Photo by Devon Peña

Moderator’s
Note: Reyes García introduced me to
the bioregional cultures and acequia-based livelihoods of Colorado’s San Luis
Valley in 1984. He is a native of the Valley and the sole heir of a
multigenerational acequia farm in the land grant community in Conjeos County across the Rio Grande
from Costilla County. It has been an interesting thirty years and both of us
are still living and working in this high altitude cold desert environment
surrounded by some of Colorado’s highest mountains – the San Juan volcanic
uprisings to the west and the fault-block wall of the Sangre de Cristo uplift
to the east – and oldest families and communities.

Dr. García is a philosopher and retired college
professor. In 1998 he published a chapter in a book I edited, Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics:
Subversive Kin  (University of
Arizona Press). In today’s post, he revisits the concept of (home)land ethics,
an idea he promoted in the original 1998 essay, which drew from his
dissertation studies in the field of ethnophilosophy, the study of indigenous
(other than Western) aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, ontology, and
metaphysics. Indeed, one of the lessons drawn from the near half-century of
writings and musings Dr. García has done on this topic is that indigenous peoples
tend not to split these fields apart and instead aim for a more integrated and
holistic way of thinking and being in the world. Reyes seeks to arrive at a
spiritual understanding of nature and ecology and is among the first Chicana/o
writers to explore these questions alongside thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa.

It is my privilege to present this work to our
readers. This paper was originally presented at the annual Headwaters Conference
at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado on September 21, 2013 and is
posted here with permission of the author.

Reyes García.

Photo by Devon Peña

Further
notes on (home)land ethics

THE
BORDERLESS DEPTH AND DIVINITY OF HOMELAND

Reyes
García, Ph.D. | Antonito, CO | June 30, 2014

                                                                                                                                   

[Do you] See: one’s hopes and
wishes to return to one’s homeland and origin – they are just as moths trying
to reach the light. And the man who is looking forward with joyful curiosity to
the coming years – and even if the time he is longing for ever comes, it will
always seem too late – he [who thus aches for the future] does not notice that
his longing carries within it the germ of his own death.  But this longing [for homeland] is the
quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which through the soul is enclosed in
the human body.  You must know that this
very yearning is the quintessence of life, the handiwork of nature…

The
Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, E.
MacCurdy (1938),  pp. 80-81.

One

 

In my studies I have found that our indigenous
peoples generally regard the world of spirits as the primary and primordial
world.  Once a friend visiting my family
ranch for the first time many years ago remarked, as we approached in the night
the silhouettes of the big alamos
(cottonwoods) close by the Rio de los
Conejos (River of the Rabbits): 
“There are really a lot of spirits here.”  These words coming from a person I regard as
being blessed with a seemingly supernatural sensibility reminded me of one of
Henry David Thoreau’s comments somewhere in his writings:  “The world of nature is an ocean of
sensibilities.”

This quote in turn reminds me of the insightful
response of mi novia (my fiancée), Tracy Davis, after I told her of the profound and
unique feeling of being especially bonded to a new friend, while walking around
the ranch with him recently, who was a little lighter-skinned than I:  “Different color, same skin” she smiled. And
we were wearing the exact same shoes, different colors, with exactly the same
worn places, and both of us had trekked a few years apart in those same but
different running shoes to the icy source of the Ganges high in the Himalayas.

Let me interpret these recollections philosophically.
To this day I carry with me the influence of having devoted myself for many
years as a graduate student to the study of phenomenology, which as I
understand it attempts to apprehend reality as it appears, in its own light,
while refraining as much as possible from imposing pre-formed conceptual
schemes on what is experienced.

There are two very original and dynamic
ontological/epistemological categories proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which
I have found to be most seminal for me in evolving toward a spiritual
understanding of nature and of ecology. He was exploring them in the
posthumously published book, The Visible
and The Invisible, when death took him prematurely. One category he termed
in French “le chair,” translated
simply “the flesh”; the other is what he deemed “the ultimate truth” and which
he termed “

















réversibilité,”  “reversibility.” 

He thought of the world, most obviously in the form
of human beings and other animals, as made of “flesh,” whose fundamental
characteristic is to be able both to touch and to be touched, to see and to be
seen, to hear and to be heard, etc., at the same time, simultaneously.  That ability is what he termed
“reversibility.” 

In a similar way, what he characterized as either
“idea” (the medium of thought) or “sense” (the medium of sensation) were also
reversible, like a coat the inside of which could on occasion be the outside.
Inside and outside, the inner life and the outer life are to Merleau-Ponty two
aspects of a unitary reality he called “the flesh,” which in his view needed to
replace the more abstract category of “being” that has too long dominated
Western philosophy.

It seems to me there is literally common ground
between the thinking of the great French phenomenologist and that of the nature
writer who has exercised such a solid influence on so many of us over the years,
namely, Barry Lopez.  The axis of flesh
along which inside and outside revolve is for Lopez the region of being to
which he refers, in an essay entitled “Landscape and Language,” as a place of “congruence”
between the inner landscape of mind, or psyche, and the outer landscape
comprising the Earth. For Lopez, truth is formed where congruence between inner
and outer landscapes occurs, where the visible and invisible worlds emerge from,
and illuminate, one another by means of mysterious, spiritual processes.

But how can we apply the thinking of Merleau-Ponty
and Lopez in ways that might enhance our understanding of the “environment”? I once
heard David Brower, during a public lecture in the 1970s in Boulder, give a
definition of wilderness I have found helpful in this regard:  “Wilderness is a place where there is an
unbroken continuity between the present and the beginning of time.” 

Although there may not be any actual wilderness left
on the planet from this perspective, surely we can imagine places in the world
that Aldo Leopold would regard as models of land health, for example, the Weminuche
wilderness area north of Pagosa Springs and Durango, the Gunnison Gorge
Wilderness, or the Penan rainforest of Borneo. 

Mount Blanca and Rio Grande from
Lobato Bridge.

Photo by Devon Peña

For my purpose here, I ask you to consider La Sierra
Blanca, northeast of my ranch home, as containing regions of wilderness.  Of course, the mountain we may be accustomed
to calling “Blanca” has other names in other languages.  In my limited understanding, to the Diné or
Navajo, the mountain is called by at least two different names, depending on
the season: “Black-belted Woman” in Summer and “White Shell Woman” in Winter.”  These are the manifestations of “Changing
Woman,” who is their underlying reality. And to many indigenous peoples of the
American Southwest as well as to anyone sensitive to the spiritual dimensions
of nature, she is a most sacred landform, perhaps the holiest of the four
sacred mountains that include Mount Taylor to the South, the San Francisco
Peaks to the West, and Mount Hesperus to the North.

La Sierra Blanca is not only a visible formation
within a geological landscape but also simultaneously an invisible personage
within an interior landscape, a spiritual landscape.  Changing Woman exists in a mythological,
psychic landscape connected to the very beginning of time, as is wilderness in
Brower’s, definition, and to the original Creation itself.  Thus to pray on the summit of La Sierra
Blanca, communicating at once with both her inner and outer landscapes, is to
unite the inner and outer landscapes in an unforgetably meaningful way and to
experience the truth of an ontological, metaphysical congruence.

I was no doubt inspired by my consciousness of such
possibilities of congruence so many years ago when my older brother first gave
me the sole responsibility for irrigating our 770 acres of vegas (meadows) along the Rio
Conejos.  Instinctively following a
custom about which I learned later, I went to open each headgate on the river
in the Spring, and as the first water flowed into the the acequia madre (mother ditch) I bowed low, and with both hands
scooped water onto my head to bless myself and to thank earth and sky for the
miracle of water.  A few weeks later I
found myself spontaneously kneeling in a meadow of irises, declaring to the
holy Mount Blanca: “A sus ordines – I
am now in your service.” To be an irrigator is sometimes to serve the need of
the land for water and need of the spirits residing in the land for
recognition, which together constitute a much needed, spiritually responsive awareness
of homeland.

Cliff swallows chicks in mud nest.

Photo by Marta
Domínguez Garrido

Two

This past Summer there were 66 new mud nests circling
the eaves of my ranch home.  They are, I
assume, the same families of golondrinas
(swallows) that have returned for numerous generations.  In a south-facing window of my former office
at Fort Lewis College in Durango, which I kept open a few inches all year-round,
there was a nest that for several years provided a home for house wrens, who
were also multi-generational occupants of the same nest refurbished with each
Spring.

The swallows and wrens that return each year teach me
not to cling too strongly to my homeland here on el Rio de los Conejos. Yes,
they return here to nest and raise their young, as I once did.  But they do not stay beyond that season of
their lives, which are too short for lingering, no doubt.  They travel on, to where I know not. Nor do I
know where they come from.  It is enough
that they know. And they remember well enough to repeat their cyclical journeys
their whole lives, to which there is a mystical completeness, like the
all-encompassing environment of earth and sky surrounding every single being.

This completeness informs their cheery songs and is
expressed succinctly in this mantra from the Ishavasya Upanishad, here translated from the Sanskrit by one of my
Hindu teachers in India: “This is complete. That is complete.  From a complete only can a complete be
born.  We are children of the complete. May
we return to the complete.” It is said this mantra sums up the teachings of the
all the early scriptures.  For me as an
environmentalist this mantra represents a fundamental insight of all wisdom
traditions: that the systemic wholeness of the totality of the universe comes
from the invisible spiritual energy that sustains and transforms the visible
world.

Three

I once heard Winona LaDuke translate the phrase in
her Anishenabe  for “the good life,” in
the language of moral philosophers like Aristotle, more literally as
“continuous rebirth.”  Whenever I recall
that marvelously deep gloss on an idea perhaps at the heart of all ethical
reflection, I can’t help recalling in the next moment as saying of Wendell
Berry from The Unsettling of America: “Whatever
dies is never dead for long.”  Isn’t it
obvious that reincarnation is a fact of nature, of the outer landscape. And is
it not also necessary to consider whether it is equally true of the inner landscape.  As LaDuke also stated unequivocally:  “Our ancestors are also our descendants.”  There is recycling in the spirit worlds, too.

I would add to these thoughts another, related
one:  the very idea of the circle of life
implies that there is always completeness, but that wholeness is only realized
through time that gives birth to itself over and over, surrendering always to
life’s fluidity and constant change. 
Here again I am reminded of the one-sentence answer I got from a swami
who lived in a ashram on the holiest river in India when I asked him what the
Ganges River meant to him:  “The word ganga comes from the Sanskrit and means “ever-flowing,”
like life,” whereupon he laughed and laughed with the pure joy of that idea.
And just so does the living world overflow and surpass us.

Four

In a section of his Notebooks entitled “Philosophy,” Leonardo da Vinci makes this
statement about the world: “Every part is disposed to unite with the whole,
that it may thereby escape from its own incompleteness” (MacCurdy 61).  If we combine this quotation with the epigram
at the beginning of this paper, I believe we are led to a more genuine
understanding of the meaning of  “the
environment” than a narrow ecological sense that does not recognize and honor
its spiritual dimensions.  For to honor
the spirituality of nature is to honor the human spirit has well, of course,
but it is more than that. For isn’t the natural world simply another dimension
of ourselves, and vice-versa:  we are
made of the same flesh and gifted with the same reversibility that allows us to
experience the truth that is the ideal completeness of a world that is one
world: all the kingdoms of life in all their wondrous variety are still always
emanations of the one world.

The acequia parciante. Art by Randy
Pijoan.

Photo by Devon Peña

When the water comes down the Rio de los Conejos in
the Spring and reaches the García vegas,
the meadows, after traveling 70-80 miles from the high country headwaters and finally
flows into the acequias for the first
time, the slow-moving edges of water snake slowly down these narrow arteries of
the river and crackle over the dry vegetation and glitter magically in the sun,
and bees hover there, humming.  Often
when my hands touch water, I remember what Barry Lopez writes at the end the
last story in River Notes called
“Drought”:  “To put your hands into a
river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together.”

When in communion with Earth and Sky, what surrounds
us sometimes reveals to us glimpses of the borderless depth of the completeness
and of the divinity of the Homeland to which we belong -- and which is secure,
very simply because it is the world, both beyond and inside us.

Dr. Reyes García is a Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at Fort Lewis
College in Durango, CO and Adjunct Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at
Adams State University.