Chris Peters
Chris Peters is the director of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and maintaining the uniqueness of Native peoples throughout the Americas.Videos featuring Chris Peters
-
By Force or By Will
Chris Peters, director of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, asks whether cultural awareness will rise to meet the coming changes toward ecological awareness and sustainability. Chris explains how ceremonial lifeways provide optimism that these changes will happen by will rather than by the force of environmental disaster.
(2 min 18 sec) -
What Happens If You Don't Have a Relationship to the Land?
Chris Peters, director of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, says the dominant culture's relationship to the land must change radically. To avert a serious ecological crisis, Chris says that Euro-Americans must become "native": not in the sense of emulating Indian cultures, but rather in establishing an authentic spiritual connection to the land, and reversing the centuries-old notion of an otherworldly heaven that leaves no incentive to protect the earth. Chris asks, can the Euro-American worldview change in time?
(7 min 31 sec) -
Ongoing Revelation
Chris Peters, director of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, describes how oneness operates at a ceremonial level in indigenous cultures. Engaging the spirit world, the community and the land in ceremony creates a combined energy of oneness that can bring about profound change. Chris calls this a form of ongoing revelation, which is desperately needed in human cultures at this time of global crisis.
(5 min 29 sec) -
Chris Peters: Complete Interview
In this complete interview Chris Peters, director of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, talks about indigenous perspectives on the current ecological and cultural crises. Noting how indigenous cosmologies and ceremonial lifeways provide both self-knowledge and a needed balance to the destructive, mechanistic worldview of the dominant cultures, Chris also shares how the indigenous history of exploitation and basic struggle for cultural survival make sharing these perspectives a risky endeavor. With no desire to "mend" non-native cultures, indigenous people are nonetheless implicated in the current spiritual and ecological crisis of the world, and thus look on with both a particular set of concerns and a profound sense of purpose in an era requiring unprecedented levels of change.
(27 min 42 sec)
"I think the ceremonial life provides the optimism, provides the hope, and throughout indigenous worlds and indigenous peoples, we're the keepers of that optimism."
From
On the web