Another sacred plant for the Amerindians is tobacco. Tobacco is a plant which allows special communion and communication with the spiritual world. It is an offering which pleases the ancestors, a medium by which we testify of our gratitude for life and the beauty of the world, and it offers our spirit a special inspiration to hear Divine will in us. Tobacco was even sometimes used as a medicine for certain health problems. Tobacco originally came from the Americas.

Westerners have no idea of what they are doing when they light a cigarette. By misusing a sacred sacrament, and tobacco is exactly that for traditional Native Americans, they harm their spirit and body. This is typical of the misuse of all sacred substances. When a “teaching plant” as we call these special plants that can alter ordinary perception and lead to superior consciousness, is misused, it has an opposite, perverse effect. The spiritual energy cannot release itself, because the personal gratification intention with which the tobacco is used will turn against the person and cause a decrease of the vital energy as well as poisoning, which can eventually lead to disease and death. Furthermore, Westerners, by their thirst for profit, have filled tobacco with chemicals and by-products to increase certain cosmetic, addictive and commercial qualities. To traditional philosophy this is blasphemous. If they could spend more time listening to our wisdom, which persists even today, we would not witness thousands of persons suffering from a plant which, properly used, could lead them towards a better understanding of spirit, religious community and unity with nature.

Those lines are extracted from an interview with a friend in Belgium

Luke: Referring to the workshop ‘Shamanism and ecology’, where you are using shamanism to heal or to restore our connection with nature, how do you do that?

Blue Eagle: The main focus of the workshop is to look at life as a whole. Like there are seasons in the year, and in the seasons of the year, there are specific celebrations that man does with nature, and this establishes communication with nature, and thus gives to the people the weather they need in the coming season. When you stop doing ceremonies, the weather goes haywire, and you no longer have any influence over it, whereas normally, in our culture, you get the weather that you require, that you ask for. Two weeks ago, my daughter said “We haven’t had snow for a long time”, so I said “Let’s make snow happen”, so we did the ceremony together, and it gave me an opportunity to show her how to communicate with beings of nature, and a few days later, the only big snow we had in the last two months came, and this within only a few days. And these are natural things, these are things that every human being can do, but often we have lost contact. And by doing the regular equinox, solstice ceremonies, we establish that communication. And the same thing is true in the life of the human being; we have seasons: we have birth, we have coming into puberty, and becoming an adult, we have marriage we have becoming an elder and finally  dying, or rather moving into the next world. These are seasons in the life of a human being, and there are rituals that accompany that, so that it happens beneficially, that we can grow in harmony. For example, in western society, you have this very strange period of life that you call “adolescence”, where the young people do all kind of crazy things, and the adults haven’t got any more control on them. Why does this happen? Because there are no rites of passage. In Native society, they go from childhood to adulthood in a few days, and they don’t have adolescence. Because they have a way of going from one season to the other, which is the rite of passage. So we are going to study all of these, and if there are any of them that we can do during the workshop, we are going to do that. And by studying these seasons of nature and these seasons of human life, we get an understanding of how human beings should live. And this is of great importance for our re-harmonising with the ecology and finding our place in the universe.

Luke: Is there a way we can support adolescents or youngsters to find their place in the world?

Blue Eagle: Yes, through rites of passage. All nations have rites of passage for the young ladies and for the young men, usually done at around thirteen, fourteen or fifteen years of age. It was different from one nation to another exactly how that would happen, but they all had it. There is no nation that didn’t have these rites of passage. And it also implies that there is a circle of the men, and a circle of the women, that take care of these rituals. So, community needs to happen, there has to be some communal relationship between the older members of the community, that will assist the young people when they are ready for that stage, so that they can understand what is to be a man, what is to be a woman, what does that entail, what does it mean? They need to understand these things, especially the man, for whom it is much more extreme than for a woman, because the woman has a monthly cycle and her monthly moon, therefore she cannot forget what it is to be a woman. So that is why Native people will say that she naturally has more power than a man. But man, to get to that level of power, has to go through a rite of passage that is always extreme, because it has to be so strong, so powerful, as he will never forget it for the rest of his life. So it is always more extreme than what ladies have to go through. But these things have to happen, and for them to happen there has to be a circle of older men and older ladies to assist with the process.