104 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
practices and beliefs and our thinking about the theories and practices
of a nature-oriented approach to expressive arts.
The lessons we have learned from our experiences with indigenous
cultures are not meant to generalize to all native people, nor are they
meant in any way to minimize the intergenerational trauma and real
issues of poverty and other social ills present in many indigenous
cultures today in the aftermath of colonialization and cultural
degradation. Ideas that have emerged as important contributions
to our understanding of a nature-based approach to expressive
arts include: (1) the belief that the world is alive and interrelated,
(2) the importance of community, (3) the importance of story and
imagination, (4) the idea that human creative process is a part of the
creativity of the natural world and (5) the belief that the arts belong
to everyone in the service of life as enacted in ritual and ceremony.1. Everything is alive and interrelated
The sun was lighting up the red walls of the canyon as we entered
the east-facing doorway of Annie Khan’s hogan near Lukachukai,
Arizona. She called her home nizhoni , “it is beautiful.” Annie
advised us to get up before the sun in order to pray the sun up. We
understood this teaching as a paradigm shift from our mechanistic
Western perspective. We understood her meaning, that every day it
is important to find our place in relationship to all the forces of the
world that are larger than our little selves. “Each time you trust,” she
said, “a strand comes over on your side. At first you may have only a
few, but later you will have enough to weave a strong braid of those
strands. And then what are you going to do with your braid of
power?” she asked us, her dark eyes meeting ours.
In his seminal work The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian
(1992), Joseph Epes Brown says that a fundamental and characteristic
belief among all Native American tribes of North America is that
everything is alive and that all of life is sacred and interrelated. He
terms this “a special quality and intensity of interrelationship with
the forms and forces of the natural environment” (p.4). The phrase