Excerpt and paraphrase from Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.
I am particularly drawn to the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her telling of the Seventh Fire Prophecy as told in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. I am drawn to this not only because of its poetic telling of our past and orientation of understanding our present, but, because of its call, specifically on how we, here, living together in on Turtle Island/ the United States, could imagine growing into becoming the 7th Fire People together.
It is that dream that I hope this space can contribute too (listen to episode one for more details).
In Braiding Sweetgrass,[1] , Kimmerer retells the Seventh Fire Prophecy as passed down from the Anishinaabe knowledge keepers including Eddie Benton-Banai and other elders. The story tells of the movement of the Anishinaabe people, with the first fire aligning with the dawn of the people as they lived on the Atlantic shore. They needed to move West to avoid pending destruction, looking for the place “where the food grows on the water.” When they found this place, on Lake Huron, which is today, Detroit, they rekindled the flame (the Second Fire) carried there in bowls of shkitagen. The Anishinaabe then divided into three peoples, which included Kimmerer’s ancestry, the Potawatomi, who moved to the south, and, together with the other two tribes, formed the Three Fire Confederacy and the Third Flame.
The Fourth Fire is a critical juncture and so I will quote Kimmerer’s description directly:
“At the time of the Fourth Fire, the history of another people came to be braided into ours. Two prophets arose among the people, foretelling the coming of the light-skinned people in ships from the east, but their visions differed in what was to follow. The path was not clear, as it cannot be with the future. The first prophet said that if the offshore people, the zaaganaash, came in brotherhood, they would bring great knowledge. Combined with Anishinaabe ways of knowing, this would form a great new nation. [emphasis added]But the second prophet sounded a warning: He said that what looks like the face of brotherhood might be the face of death. These new people might come with brotherhood, or they might come with greed for the riches of our land. How would we know which face is the true one? If the fish became poisoned and the water unfit to drink, we would know which face they wore. And for their actions the zaaganaash came to be known instead as chimokman—the long-knife people.”
- Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (pp. 366-367). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Sadly, we know the history of this nation and, thus, what came to pass was that of the second prophet’s warning. This era, called the Fifth Flame, involved the peoples of the Anishinaabe taking up the teachings and books of the light-skinned people and being genocided, and moved to reservations. This would transition into the Sixth Fire, whereby “the cup of life would almost become the cup of grief.” Even still, some wisdom remained that would not be extinguished.
With this, we now move to the prospect of Seventh Fire People, which I will quote directly from Kimmerer.
“The young man came to the people with the message that in the time of the seventh fire, a new people would emerge with a sacred purpose. It would not be easy for them. They would have to be strong and determined in their work, for they stood at a crossroads. The ancestors look to them from the flickering light of distant fires. In this time, the young would turn back to the elders for teachings and find that many had nothing to give.
The people of the Seventh Fire do not yet walk forward [emphasis added]; rather, they are told to turn around and retrace the steps of the ones who brought us here. Their sacred purpose is to walk back along the red road of our ancestors’ path and to gather up all the fragments that lay scattered along the trail. Fragments of land, tatters of language, bits of songs, stories, sacred teachings—all that was dropped along the way. Our elders say that we live in the time of the seventh fire. [emphasis added] We are the ones the ancestors spoke of, the ones who will bend to the task of putting things back together to rekindle the flames of the sacred fire, to begin the rebirth of a nation….”
The Seventh Fire prophecy presents a second vision for the time that is upon us. It tells that all the people of the earth will see that the path ahead is divided. [emphasis added] They must make a choice in their path to the future. One of the roads is soft and green with new grass. You could walk barefoot there. The other path is scorched black, hard; the cinders would cut your feet. If the people choose the grassy path, then life will be sustained. But if they choose the cinder path, the damage they have wrought upon the earth will turn against them and bring suffering and death to earth’s people. …
In the valleys below the hill, I see the people of the Seventh Fire walking toward the crossroads with all they have gathered. They carry in their bundles the precious seeds for a change of worldview. Not so they can return to some atavistic utopia, but to find the tools that allow us to walk into the future. [emphasis added] So much has been forgotten, but it is not lost as long as the land endures and we cultivate people who have the humility and ability to listen and learn. And the people are not alone. All along the path, nonhuman people help. What knowledge the people have forgotten is remembered by the land. The others want to live, too. The path is lined with all the world’s people, in all colors of the medicine wheel—red, white, black, yellow—who understand the choice ahead, who share a vision of respect and reciprocity, of fellowship with the more-than-human world [emphasis added]….
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (p. 367-369). (Function). Kindle Edition.
How might we cultivate a culture and systems where flourishing is mutual?
