Martín Prechtel: Relearning the languages of land, plants, and place (Ep443)

Written By kamea chayne
“All of the people who were forced to speak [English] had Indigenous languages and were forced underground with it. The biggest problem with losing who you are to the colonial conundrum is you end up promoting the thing that overran your ancestors...”
— Martín Prechtel

In this conversation, Green Dreamer’s host kaméa chayne is joined by Martín Prechtel, who speaks to us from Northern New Mexico where he lives with his family and their Native Mesta horses.

Having grown up with a Pueblo Indian upbringing and later becoming a full member of the Tzutujil Mayan community in the village of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, Prechtel draws on his deeply embodied experiences of various Indigenous languages to invite us to unravel the meaning of “real culture.”

What does it mean to re-member and re-learn the languages of land, plants, and place?

Join us in this enriching conversation as we explore the contentious politics, practice, and (re)embodiment of Indigeneity, and what it means to become culturally indigestible for the sterilizing stomach acids of the “monster of modernity.”

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

As an avid student of indigenous eloquence, innovative language and thought, Martín Prechtel is an award-winning writer, artist, and teacher who, through his work both written and spoken, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony, and premodern vitality hidden in any living language. A half-blood Native American with a Pueblo Indian upbringing, he left New Mexico to live in the village of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, eventually becoming a full member of the Tzutujil Mayan community there. For many years he served as a principal in that body of village leaders responsible for piloting the young people through the meanings of their ancient stories in the rituals of adult rites of passage.

Once again, residing in his beloved New Mexico, Prechtel teaches at his international school, Bolad’s Kitchen. Through an immersion into the world’s lost seeds and sacred farming, forgotten music, magical architecture, ancient textile making, metalsmithing, the making and using of tools, musical instruments and food and the deeper meanings of the origins of all these things in the older stories, in ancient texts and by teaching through the traditional use of riddles, Prechtel hopes to inspire people of every mind and way to regrow and revitalize real culture and to find their own sense of place in the sacredness of a newly found daily existence in love with the natural world. Prechtel lives with his family and their Native Mesta horses in Northern New Mexico.

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interview transcript

Note: Our interview transcripts are lightly edited for brevity and clarity and are not transcripted word-for-word. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Martín Prechtel: My father's mother was from Ireland, named Winifred Reagan. His father's name, Edward Prechtel, is a very German-sounding name, but his mother was a Native. It was a Lenape name, originally from the Pennsylvania area. And then his mother became a citizen of Ohio. She married a missionary Moravian family, which is where the “Prechtel” comes in. And so my father is a quarter Native and my mother is eighty percent Native.

[My mother] is Mohawk, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Swampy Cree, and Huron—which in the United States, is called Wyandotte. And I got a little bit of Scott in there too. So that great stew of who I was genetically.

It ended up being a lot of nonsense because there is no such thing as genetic culture. Culture comes from language. And all the Natives where I grew up, in Guatemala, and anywhere I've ever lived know that. When they lose that, it's because of outside forces that make being a Native a political thing to get your land back. You have to prove you have a certain amount of native blood to do so. Which is that white supremacist garbage.

But a lot of people say, “I'm Black because I'm Black.” No, Black is a white man's designation. There are tribal designations or Indigenous designations that are not about that. They don't even have a word for it in English and that’s really good.

I spent my whole life redefining languages, redefining words in English to make them carry things that English doesn't want to carry.

I ended up living with and becoming a part of the Tzʼutujil people, and fell in love. And then when the wars came I had to go. I was still there, and my heart is still there. The Tzʼutujil are considered by linguists to be the southern branch of the Kʼicheʼ people. I can speak K'iche' and I speak Tzʼutujil.

Nothing takes place there in another language. In other words, you cannot do the Tzʼutujil ritual. You cannot eat Tzʼutujil food. You can't talk to each other and be Tzʼutujil if you're not speaking Tzʼutujil. That’s because of all of the magic, all the differentiations, all the delineations of the universe. The way you pray and the way you go about it. You couldn't be a Native Tzʼutujil and speak Spanish or speak English.

People don't like to hear that. They say, my mother was a Cherokee, so I'm a Cherokee. But you're not Indigenous until you are Indigenous. And this is not a popular notion because the idea of getting an identity by the fact of your genome sounds absurd to Natives. It has to do with being a human being.

The other thing that was interesting that was in my favor and why people are having such a hard time now in the world, is that you're not born a human. The great capacity with language comes when you're young. American woo-woo people always say, “Oh, the baby is so free, so clean, he's so clear.” Natives believe they're born with domesticity, they're born with the whole world planned out. And they don't start becoming human until they become adolescents and go through that time when your skin's just not big enough for what's inside. Until you're busting loose and you want to do this and that. That's the time when they bring everybody into initiation.

When you start noticing people in an amorous way, that means that you're starting to recognize the divinity in the world. You think that's the person you're in love with; a man or woman, whatever. That's a person, but it's not. And if you make the mistake of trying to love that person, then you'll find out that they burp and have opinions and you don't like them that much. And because what you're seeing originally is the beauty of that person as the divine thing, but not human. It's also not inhuman.

I became initiated at one point and, way before me, they would bring all these kids together much against their will. But it was a tradition whereby they had to put the universe back together again for the adults. By being as wild and crazy as they were, they were taught poetry and the way of being a human being. And that's when you start to become human. And when you start to become that kind of person, you learn how to speak that way. So you have the speech of the ancient people, where the grass grows because of the way you talk, where the wind stops and listens. And then all of the doctors and what you're calling shamans know, have the speech that can cure people. 

You ask, what’s my greatest influence in my life? It continues to be language.

It’s always the languages that contain these things, but not in a voyeuristic way, as entertaining as some of them are. Language can magically incorporate the world into the person’s very own body. In other words, the only reason I still speak Tzʼutujil is because I still speak to the Holies. There are no Tzʼutujil people around here to talk to. The Tzʼutujil have gone down a rough road. They were intact before I left, but they were in the process of being bulldozed and they got bulldozed like everybody else. They have a culture that's now formaldehyde to look like Tzʼutujil, but it's not the same thing. A lot of Natives have experienced this. Maybe things will come around.

What happened is that I don't have anyone to speak to in human form, except a couple of my sons who pass through once in a while. I speak to the gods, I speak to the holy, I speak to all the things, and so I still speak Tzʼutujil because I'm talking to things that are not human. That's why I'm fairly radical as people today go. I'm not a part of anything sort of mainstream. 

Kamea Chayne: Thank you. There's already so much in what you just shared and so much that I'm curious about. I appreciate this emphasis that languages, it’s not just translating from other languages, as in this word equals this word and something else. They embody different worldviews and philosophies and ways of relating to the world and so on.

It’s a much more expansive way of understanding language and alternative ways, as you mentioned, of understanding Indigeneity as well. Which I know can also be contentious because it has been politicized. So how would you address this idea that a lot of people with Indigenous lineage no longer speak their languages, through no fault of their own, but because of colonization and so forth?

Martín Prechtel: Well, first of all, you've got to realize that the colonists also started Indigenously. Colonization is not Indigenous, necessarily, but the so-called colonial who stops you from speaking the language was at some point stopped from speaking their language too.

It's like English — a very interesting language, it's kind of insidious. It never existed as an Indigenous language. They talk about old English. Old English is not English. It's a German language. And then it gets combined with a little bit of Celtic and a whole lot of Latin. English came about as a language of colonization. In other words, it started as a colonial language. It never existed as an Indigenous language. And all of the people who were forced to speak [English] had Indigenous languages and were forced underground with it.

The biggest problem with losing who you are to the colonial conundrum, which is a very big thing, is that you end up promoting exactly the thing that overran your ancestors.

You start trying to legitimize yourself to your enemy. Once you start having to legitimize yourself to your enemy in the conditions that your enemy puts out, you've already been eaten alive by your enemy. So the point is that you cannot blame, as you say, anybody who loses their language because they're forced to. And you cannot just find the language, especially if it's been pushed so far that there's no living relic of it.

That's where the point of grief comes in. Because you've got to figure out where this capacity to be an Indigenous person comes from. It doesn't come from a manual. It doesn't come from a book. And it's not a certain style. It comes from the natural world. It comes from the actual living, spiritual being of all the different things that are in the world. And that's where those original languages come from, where you can speak an original language with the people who speak in the original language.

You end up being obliged and having a huge responsibility to keep the roots of those things alive because you're speaking that way — it's the same thing as an eagle's cry, the same thing as a hoopoe cry, the same thing as a badger when they speak.

It's very fascinating, in Tzʼutujil the way you say the “nature of anything,” like “this person has this nature,” or “the badger has this nature,” or “a jaguar has this nature,” or “grass has this nature.” The way they say it is: [Martin speaks in Tzʼutujil language]. Everything's alive. When there's absolutely no sound anywhere to be heard, that's Jaguar. Because when Jaguar comes around, everything's quiet. In the jungle, there's never dead silence. In Tzʼutujil language, that's the animal’s name. The animal’s name is also his nature. 

Language is a powerful, powerful capacity that people have — not to manipulate each other but to make more beauty, to keep it going beyond themselves for a time beyond their own.

Kamea Chayne: Can I just clarify, when you say that English is not an Indigenous language and it replaced other Indigenous languages people knew, so by Indigenous language, it's really about that language having a relation to place, right? Like, being the language of a land?

Martín Prechtel: Being a language of more than the land. It's even before the land, but what's in the land and the plants mostly. The people who end up speaking English and promoting the terror that has been promoted, I'm talking about even the small, subtle, depressive mentality of Victorians and all this nonsense. They lost their souls there. And so they keep looking and tearing everything apart to fill that vacuum.

That's what colonization is. That's what Elon Musk is doing, blasting off to Mars and trashing the Earth with all their gizmos. Same thing, ain't no different. But the idea that you can just all pick up and wear their outfit and speak a few words and not know what they mean and then be an Indian—or be a this or be a that—it's not bad, it's just sad. It's just heartbreaking and grief-stricken. 

Grief doesn’t mean just crying.

The recognition of something so deep and magical having been compromised. This does not mean that deep and magical things have disappeared. It just means its relation with you has disappeared.

I don't know if you know the writer Anton Truer. He's a very good writer and Anishinaabe guy. He's gay too. And he said, “We didn't lose our languages. The languages lost us.” The languages are there, but where are we?

So when it comes down to the capacity to understand and speak, it's so difficult. I'm speaking in English right now, but everybody notices I'm subverting English as best I can. And if you read my books you'll see the editors had many heart attacks. The loveliness of people is that they can think of these big things and have language that expresses these big things and speaks to one another. Language is always an approximation. It's never going to be exactly what you see. And that is the problem with English. Because English is a verb “to be” language, just like French and Spanish and a lot of the Romance languages.

Not all the languages of the world originated with the verb “to be.” It's like Hebrew. The original Hebrew was never spoken by any Jewish people. It was used only for rituals, before they had synagogues, only in the temple. They spoke all different languages. They spoke Aramaic, Syriac, and all sorts of languages depending on where they were living.

Hebrew was there for God only. And there are only certain things that you said in Hebrew only for God. But then when they make the Israeli state, they try to develop a language that has the verb “to be”. Ironically, they didn't have the verb “to be.” And so when they started having secular Hebrew, they had to make one up and they did. And then look what we got, you know?

They're not the only ones. There are lots of people like that. But the verb “to be” when this is a cat, this is a dog, this is not a person, we just don't have that in Native tongue. In Tzʼutujil, for instance, you're sitting there with all your friends drinking coffee and the fires going. And it's always extremely eloquent. The worst gossip is even just so beautiful. Even when they chew each other out, you have to know the lineages of all the people, where their moles are in their body and what their grandfather did and didn’t do. And all the illusions are so far removed from anything anyone else could ever understand. It's amazing.

In Tzʼutujil, you wouldn't say “There goes a cat,” or “That is a cat.” You would say, “that animal has cat-ness.” But you can't get that across with the verb “to be” speakers because they don't get it. That's a different mentality of thinking. And it's extremely advanced.

Primitive peoples are evolving into something more ample, more beautiful, more robust, just like plants. Opening, opening, opening like a plant.

We can change our language by design, but it's usually an ulterior motive run by a colonial brain. Even if you're left-wing, even if you're open-minded, you can't decolonize your language. But that's a colonial effort when you're trying to do something to manipulate and dominate a language. You have to allow it to be colonial and then you have to bring things in with it that make it inefficient. 

You’re from Taiwan so maybe you’ve run across some people in the Pacific around there speaking pidgin. In New Guinea or Australia—or any of the ocean states that were forced to all their terrible English influence and everybody, but they come up with a language that's so lyrical and so expressive and so amazing. It's making English carry a non-English thought. But it grew organically.

It was not concocted, or somebody thought it up and did it. It just grew organically out of the people's hearts. Those are exquisite examples. And there are many people, there are a lot of official languages now that started that way. Urdu is like that. I'm sorry, I'm getting kind of a little too specific. I mean, plants are a language.

Kamea Chayne: This is all thought-provoking. And I think another word that perhaps we have to question and pick apart is “culture” because I feel like that word is thrown around a lot as sort of this broad term. But I know one of your overall intentions is to inspire people to “regrow and revitalize real culture.” So I'm curious when you talk about growing culture and real culture, what do you mean by that?

Martín Prechtel: I've written about five books on that [laughs], but I can begin to scratch the surface. Thank you for asking that. The thing is, it’s very arrogant sounding to say, “What is ‘real’ culture?” And it also goes with your question about intactness. That modern culture is not culture. I call it a cultural avoidance system.

Most people who have been proselytized by the situation of global education believe that people started as these little grunting furry beings sitting around the fire and then they slowly evolved into Napoleon and then all of a sudden we got the real big shining people of Europe. But actually, in the last 6,000 years or so, what they're calling “civilizations” are people who are running away from realizing how small they are.

Culture is always small but has huge self-esteem between the people — whereas intact people have culture. And culture is always small. It never looks big, especially not to civilized people. They don't see it as big. They see it as small. But it has a huge thought and huge self-esteem between the people. Even if it looks small to these other guys, their bigness, their civilization's bigness and what they're trying to make, wants to outrun their smallness. Instead of staying small and beautiful, they're trying to be big and powerful and dominating.

And so what I'd say about trying to revitalize or refine or grow is to heal language. Everything is grown. Everything’s a plant. Your ideas are plants. Time is a plant. Nothing can be made and stuck there. It can’t be fabricated. It can’t be synthesized. It can’t be technologically conquered. It has to grow organically from something — that’s what we call spiritual DNA, if you want.

This growing culture is full of grief, full of failure, but full of beauty. People can do that because they have done so around 300,000 years. There's so much evidence of people living in incredible ways all over the world, in South Africa, Java, the Caucasus mountain, and the north coast of Morocco. There is archaeological evidence of it that is very old.

Modern civilization sees only people who can manipulate their surroundings, tear down things, make big buildings, terrify the neighbors with big old armies, or enslave the neighbors and all the animals and plants as somehow evolving people. There is so much peace, but not peace in an inactive sense, of just laying around or something, rather, active living peace. I say, vestigially in people's souls, it still exists.

I think people are not very happy. Their bodies are rebelling because we still have a place to see a body that's trying to live with all of this stuff, overbearing, overwhelming junk thrown on top of it. And it just gets thrown, knocked to pieces, and just totally undermined.

But deep inside, I think there is this vestigial, seed-like, Indigenous human being, who, somehow, cracks open and grows in the soil and becomes a culture of hope and beauty that is very much original culture.

And not just one. There have to be hundreds. There have to be many. That's the main thing — not a single civilization. That's gone. There have to be multiple small cultures. And that is what I work toward. Everybody knows it's impossible. Everybody knows I'm going to fail. But if you fail beautifully, at least you took a step toward that. 

Kamea Chayne: I'm aware, as you said, that some of your Native friends think that you're crazy for trying to teach these things to people…

Martín Prechtel: They don't think I'm crazy. They think I'm being naive and that I shouldn't do it because they want them to drown and they want them to die. I say, “No baby, there's a piece of your soul that's their soul too. And they got a piece of yours in there too.”

I remember talking to Russell Means in the old days. He said, “Just let them all swim back to Europe.” I mean, Europe used to be Indigenous, man. Everybody sinks if one person sinks. So we got to somehow stick together.

Kamea Chayne: Something that I don't have the answer to that I'd be curious to hear you speak to is, how you teach people in “cultures” who have lost these ways of remembrance and also have the hubris to think that they know better, that they're more advanced, and so their knowledge is more “credible” than knowledge that is coming from what they label as more what they label as “primitive cultures.”

I think oftentimes, people have to be at least open to and receptive to having their worldviews cracked open for us to be able to remember and relearn something deeper. So then how do we try to shift consciousness in a world in which the people who are at the top with the most power, however that is defined, and the people running this monster of modernity, they're the ones who may seem the most disconnected and also are the most rigid and self-righteous in thinking that their ideas of progress should universally rule the world. How do we confront this paradox of power and humility?

Martín Prechtel: Hey man, we’ve only got an hour [laughs]. I'm writing a book on that, so if you like I'll give it to you when I get done with it. That’s exactly the point, exactly what you're saying. But the one thing that you have to give up on as far as I'm concerned is changing the world. I'm not going to, as you wonderfully say, get the hubris out of the fascist mind.

What I'm saying is that all of these people come from a suffering background, not a personal background, but a suffering civilization. They don't come from cultures. There is no culture. They come from civilizations that only get a jolt from getting the next jolt, and so on. The old 60’s things of filling a hole by digging another hole sort of thing.

The point is I'm not going to change the world, they're not going to do it. 

I’m trying to stockpile seeds of real culture and get them started so that… there will be little crumbs, leads, ropes, knots, ways, and techniques—little places where the seeds of possibility can sprout again.

I'm a cause fighter from way back when. It was the hardest thing for me to learn with my teacher, Nicolas Chiviliu, that I could not storm the Bastille and get rid of the bad guys and put my good culture in there because I was just as bad as the other guys. By the time I did what I had to do to storm the Bastille. By the time I had to get the weaponry of the thing that I was trying to get rid of, I was the thing I was trying to get rid of.

I was worse than the thing I was trying to get rid of because I couldn't see myself. And the idea was to carry the baby, as Chiviliu used to say. He says, carry the baby through the hoop of fire. “I know you can fight, Martín”, he'd say, which is true. [Chiviliu] said “I know you're a struggler, I know you're a warrior. It's time to give up that image. It's time for you to carry a baby, look weak, carry this little seed.”

Plant it wherever is copacetic and don't get mad with what it looks like when it grows. And I didn't know what he was talking about. Well, I thought I did. I was a hot-shot kid. But what he was saying was that when the thing that is so precious, the spiritual core of it is planted, it never comes out like you want it to come out in a frozen image of what it used to be like. It comes out as something with its mind. And then you have to recognize that and cultivate that and let it live its own life. What it looks like is none of your business because neither you nor me will see it. But we've got to keep those seeds alive for a time when they will grow. And it ain't in heaven. It ain't in Shangri-La. It ain't in Ashbury. It's not a place exactly, but every place.

So what do you teach people? Well, first of all, if somebody wants my teaching, they're already there to a degree because otherwise they wouldn't come around. I never advertised. I never went around saying, “Now you need to listen to me.” Never. Matter of fact, in the village, if someone came over, we always sent them away. They had to ask three times and then couldn't use the travel rule. You had to respond. I would always say, “Okay, the first thing you got to learn to do here is how to say words in other people's languages and to understand that that changes the muscles of your face.” And everybody looked at me like, “What are you talking about?” 

There was an old crazy, amazing gay man named Aurel Stein. He was a Hungarian who worked for the British Raj during the 1940s and 30s. With a little coat and cane, he walked all over central Asia. He was a surveyor. And there was one town, where a bunch of guys had gone from India into Kashgar, up in the Taklamakan Desert area, and started up a business with their families.

So he met them and he left them there. And then he came back 10 years later. All their kids and the guys didn't recognize anybody because all the muscles on their faces were in such a different confirmation from speaking the local language, the language of the so-called “barbarians.” They were almost entirely changed. They still knew how to speak their local dialect of Hindi but speaking a Turkic language up there changed the physicality. 

The physicality of learning other people's language is one thing, but then you start to learn the languages of matter. And that matter is not a resource. Matter has a soul. It's not a “soul” like a Christian “soul,” not that garbage. It's a life force that has words. And so when the Mayans would say, “These clouds are seeing themselves into being, anything that has form is considered a form of speech that is being sung.”

As you look out of the world, all of the plants and all the animals doing what they do all together is a gigantic symphony of form that is made of language.

The first place you get to start teaching people is to start teaching language. And they of course have to do all the learning because you can't teach them to think and teach them to learn. They have to try hard. And that's a long process. I have a school, and that's what I do where you learn to do things with your hands that you’ve never done before. 

I grew up in a place where a lot of stuff had been destroyed, but everybody knew how to do a whole lot of stuff. And one of the things nobody knew how to do anymore was tie knots. All of the Aboriginal peoples of the world, way before the Flint nobody hunted mastodons with spears. This is such garbage. Those were all offerings left there. They hunted with fiber. Everything was fiber. And you had to know how to knot this and knot that. Men and women would go out into the bush and come back with loads of wood or a load of water or other food and wild plants. And they would carry them in a net of fiber that they had made out there. And then they would come into the compound and announce themselves and everybody would come running with something to wipe their brow.

And then they would just pull this little piece of fiber sticking over their shoulder. Just pull it and boom, the whole thing came apart and everything was stacked. All by itself right there where they stood. That finesse, that's what I call real culture. Without that, where you just have a one-size-fits-all technology for this, throw it away, we use something else, that's the death of the human. But that's all based on language. And then there are small little things, which people call primitive arts.

I dislike the term “primitive arts” because they are not primitive. Second, it makes them seem optional rather than essential to sustaining a culture.

“Primitive arts” are small and extremely eloquent and elegant in the way they move through the world as a welcome guest with nature. Without that, we are trampling big old trundling ogres.

You don't teach people. You show them where you can. I honestly believe there's a vestigial being that knows. And when you give some place for it to live, some place for it to smell, some place for it to stick his head out and say, “That's the word I want to hear, that's the music I want to hear, that's the thing I want to feel in my hand,” they'll slowly come out of that little place and start to appear.

But it's not something to take lightly because when it comes out, the culture will smash it and chase it right back. So you've got to teach the people how to keep from getting their heart smashed by this. And that's a bigger thing than I think we have time for in the program to talk about. But it's very important.

Kamea Chayne: I remember earlier you said that there's no manual for a lot of these things. And I want to weave in this really powerful quote that you shared: “You can't keep seeds alive by preserving them in a museum. You can't keep seeds and knowledge alive by having them stuck in books. You have to have teachers to rehydrate those seeds and regrow those seeds in every generation.”

This reminds me of our past guest Enrique Salmon when he shared that most Native people aren't comfortable with the idea of memory banking or preserving Indigenous knowledge. What would you like to share on this front in ways that aren't so much about building upon this skyscraper generation after generation versus allowing it to be more alive and reiterative?

Martín Prechtel: It's got to be alive because, the thing is, if you start to seed-bank something, it's already dead. It's dried and stuffed in formaldehyde, and that's not knowledge. It cannot be kept in a museum. It has to be in the living people, which means you have to have a really small culture. Most of the people who are intellectuals or looking at things like this analytically are all Europeans.

But the people who have it are still alive, they start to mine it. And this is a global civilization of extraction, whether they're mining the fields or whether they're mining agriculturally, or they're mining intellectually. But Native ideas and ways of being are not mineable. There's something that has to be taken with permission and it has to be given with a pure heart, a volition of the people, and then you have to take the time to learn it.

And as you learn it, you become something you weren’t before you started. I don’t know how many crazy guys came to Tzʼutujil land trying to become “Martín.” I would give them an ear of corn. They’d say, “What’s this?” And I’d reply, “This is everything. Do you want to learn everything? Here’s everything. Now go plant it.

And when you’ve grown enough corn, year after year after year, the way everyone else in this village grows it—with all the prayers and all the rituals—then we’ll talk. Up on the side of the hill, you’ll need to get someone to loan you a piece of land, way out there on the volcano. When you’ve grown enough to feed my family for two years, come back, and I’ll teach you everything.”

But by then you'll know everything you will have to know. Martín’s doing the same thing. He was a humorous old dude. But the thing is that you can't get it. You can't obtain it. It has to be cultivated and left to its own devices to grow and become what it must be. And your participation in that is to recognize yourself as the same sort of growing thing in a field.

As I said, the big cultures and big civilizations are so full of depressive hatred for everything. Just by the way they speak and go around things because they want to dominate this. Not because they're evil, but because they don't have anything else to give them a jolt. Once you have this vision, then you become very uneconomical. You can't make money out of this. That's what everybody wants. All the people that have me for interviews, always want to figure out how you can economically do this or that. You can't. There's no such thing. 

Humans are not here to get what they want. They're not even here to succeed. And that's the one great thing when we're getting initiated as kids and getting initiated as shamans, we're never supposed to serve that. And that's the left wing's motto and it's the right wing's motto too, but only for them. 

Humans are here to make beauty to feed the holy that feeds everything with our hands and our voices.

We have two very precious things. The capacity of our hands to make things with the opposable thumb. Those of us that still have our hands. Not everybody has their hands but they know all about it. And then the thought pattern, the great deep language that comes up through our speech and our voice. Not the written one, the spoken one. I know I write a lot of words, but they're all meant to be spoken out loud and more than that.

Talking is not just vague talking, not just iPhone talking, but this deep speech and understanding coming up just like a plant. So when what you're talking about planting the knowledge that grows again into another form that—it was not originally—but what it's got to be to survive under the conditions in which it finds itself.

When you recognize that, then you can continue that and cultivate it. There was a tribe that lived around here. There are still descendants of this tribe which are known as the “Numic”. You've probably heard of them as the “Comanche”. And they had an amazing custom. They were a confederation, they were not a people.

Most Native are mostly confederations that were put together to deal with colonialism. But the different little groups that joined to make the Comanche people had an amazing custom where people would get named after something. For instance, the name of a horse or a type of grizzly bear. And when that person died then that word had to be retired. And you could never use the word for grizzly bear ever again in that language. It belonged to the dead person. Because the dead person became the spirit of whatever he was. And he started giving life to the living. And so then you had to develop another word for the grizzly bear itself to talk about grizzly bears or talk to grizzly bears.

Pretty soon the language is so renewed and so brand new and constantly new that the person who spoke it in 1830 couldn't understand what anybody was talking about in 1870. I have three dictionaries, two written by a Spanish guy and one by an Okie guy. I just loved that so much, where they retired the word because it belonged to that person's soul. And then they developed a new word. And then the new word got retired and then the new word, and so on. Instead of saying, “We have discovered this thing and this is what science says. Now we put it on the shelf and that's what it is,” let's sit back and love what's here and renew.

And that's the big problem with civilization versus real culture.

Real culture never advances through “progress” because the same knowledge must be relearned by each generation in the same way the previous generation learned it. Therefore, all their inventions must be experienced anew.

So they never go beyond that. They go right where they are. One guy, or a person, or a woman, will tack something new on. That's true. But then everybody has to experience that during the initiations, how that came about. And then it's mythologized. And then the culture keeps going around and around and around. The outside world of colonialism and industrialization says these people are backward. They're getting nowhere. There's no material advancement. Yeah, but there's no Earth-rape either. I get going and I start to sound like some preacher, man [laughs].

Kamea Chayne: I think I would like to close off on finding the cracks to be able to exit the body of the numbing “monster of modernity.”

Something that I'm not sure I feel aligned with is these calls to make this body more inclusive for people and communities who are resisting and don't want to be consumed and have their cultures become sterilized by its strong stomach acids. What if I want to be pooped out by this body and learn to live and relate differently?

I think I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on reorienting how we relate to justice. How we become more regenerative and enriching members of the planet, while at the same time, having to navigate being inside but wanting to be excluded, to exit, but still be entangled?

Martín Prechtel: That’s part of the initiation.

You gotta get used to being lonely. That's the hardest thing for people. You gotta get used to being lonely for not being admired. Being lonely is an initiation of the real individual.

Not the person who's going to have a community, but a person who's working for a community in a time they will not see. So to make a time that is full of hope that we will not see, there are like minds, there are similar people, but it can never be done for yourself to want it.

I like your stomach acid inside the monster analogy. Because I always looked at myself as kind of like something that the dragon couldn't digest and would spit out. And what is it that the monster can't digest? It’s beauty. And if the monster could digest beauty, then you might stop being a monster and slowly metabolize.

So my idea, you may not like this, but that's quite all right, is that we don't need to kill anything. We don't need to break anything. We don't need to run away from anything or even be pooped out of it. We need to metabolize it internally. A real revolution is akin to how nature has revolution built into it. It knows how to evolve. And it knows how to make itself over again. If we don’t do that, we get stuck. So the point is to make sure that all the irritation and all the crap that is thrown your way makes a pearl. That it makes more and more beauty in your soul polishes you even better and becomes less and less digestible by the monster.

But in the process of trying to be digested by the monster, you metabolize the monster and the monster begins to break down into compost, into its primal origin parts, which are not the horror that you think they are. It's amazing how much terror and awful stuff, all of these fascists and mass killers and all these things come from.

There are so many Native stories about this, but we don't have time. But the little ones that we forgot about, our inventions that we make that we don't take care of, they are children to us. And when you throw them out they become hungry monsters. And when they congeal, it becomes war, and then it becomes a fascist culture.

If you can metabolize a little bit of that back into its prime original shape before it was thrown away, then there's hope for a time beyond our own. And if not that exactly, at least you will become an ancestor worth descending from in this time. But you can't tell anybody to do that. You can't teach them to do that. You can't proselytize. You just have to be that thing.

// musical intermission //

Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?

Martín Prechtel: I read Rashad Al-Din's, History of the World from 800 AD and stuff like that. But recently, I'd like to say Ed Yong’s, An Immense World. I love it so much because he’s a scientist trying so hard not to be a scientist. It’s very amazing.

Kamea Chayne: And what is a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay rooted?

Martín Prechtel: When all else fails, make beauty. Feed everything. Invite the fascists to dinner. Invite your friends to dinner. Invite the unknown to dinner.

Kamea Chayne: And finally, what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Martín Prechtel: As much as I talk and complain about everything, I'm mesmerized by people's deep souls and they're trying so hard. It takes courage to be a human being. So they're my greatest inspiration. I like my horses too, of course, and all of the natural world. I can't even compete with that.

As crazy as it is, we're not here to make it. We're not here to succeed. We're not here to get what we want. But there are so many people that are just majestic, precious treasures. Just say “hi” to them, you might see something.

Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your final words of guidance that you would like to leave with our listeners?

Martín Prechtel: The main thing is to understand you're not going to make it. You're going to die, but you want to keep your kids alive. You got to give them all the best things that you know. So you have to keep up with learning. You have to learn, teach, learn languages—keep yourself occupied with making beauty.

And then when they shoot you off the cliff, you'll be the most beautiful thing that was ever shot off the cliff, and you will feed nature in just the way you hit the lake. And it's how you live, how you go, how you do—not whether or not you survive. 

Surviving in this culture means you’re part of the crap. But by being beautiful in the process, you’re suddenly not anxious because you’re not trying to escape anymore. You're sitting right where you are.

As a lot of Natives around here say, “Shoot your arrow through your sash into the ground, stand on the ground, and be beautiful.” And your beauty, alive or not alive, will never die. It will feed everything.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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