EP 206: Ilarion Kuuyux Merculieff | Spiritual Self-Care

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Fleet Maul and today I'm happy to share a conversation that I had recently with Elarian Merculiev, an Aleut leader from Alaska, originally from St. Paul island in the Bering Sea, who is an advocate for restoring Indigenous land rights, Indigenous rights altogether, and for bringing forth much needed Indigenous wisdom into our modern culture. He has organized many global meetings between Indigenous leaders from Indigenous communities worldwide and and we've had a number of conversations and this one is absolutely fascinating and incredibly powerful. We talk about the importance of shifting from a mind driven consciousness to a heart guided approach, making that much needed shift from the mind to the heart. The mind is obviously a very important part of who we are and our incredible abilities, but it needs to be heart guided. We talk about recognizing the that physical illness is really a manifestation of imbalanced thoughts and feelings and that it requires spiritual healing. We talk about creating positive change by focusing our energy on what we desire or aspire to or can envision rather than what we don't. We talk about envisioning a heart guided society and its potential impact and embracing inner wisdom and recognizing unique gifts that we all have to offer as believed by Indigenous elders. So before we get started with the conversation, if you really love our interviews, and I hope you do, please never miss an episode. Subscribe now on your favorite platform. You can download my free Neurosomatic mindfulness ebook@www.heartmind.co NSM podcast. You can also order my book Radical Responsibility and by going to the Radical Responsibility Book website which is radicalresponsibilitybook.com and there you can order the book on your favorite online bookseller, whatever that might be, Amazon or Barnes and Noble and so forth indie books. And then you simply put the order number or receipt on our site and you will receive over $1,000 in free bonuses including courses and challenges. So go to Radical Responsibility Book.

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Welcome, Larian.

Thank you Freit. Good to be here.

It's really great to be with you. And and we're going to be focused on the spiritual dimension of self care, spiritual self care today and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio to familia, familiarize our audience with your background and your work and then we'll jump into the conversation. Sound good?

Sounds good.

Great. So Alerian Queeu Merculev was born and raised on St. Paul island in the middle of the Bering Sea. St. Paul island is part of a five island group called the Tribal of Tribal of Island. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. And that's like the Russian name anyway, right?

Yep, it's Pribilovic.

Okay. Pribilov Islands. And that's in the Bering Sea, kind of between Alaska and Russia, that area. And he's of the Unangan people, sometimes also referred to as a lute raised and was raised in a traditional way there on St. Paul Island. Throughout his life, Valerian, who goes also by Larry, was focused on traditional knowledge, wisdom and spirituality gained from culture bears around the world, acting as a bridge from the past to those alive today. He lived on St. Paul island for half of his life and now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. El Erian has almost four decades of experience serving as people, the Aleuts or Unangan people of the Pribilof Islands and other Indigenous peoples in a number of capacities, locally, statewide, nationally and internationally. For his entire career, he has been a passionate advocate for Indigenous rights and wisdom and harmonious relationship with the Earth. Our first mother. He was the first Alaska Native Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development, a State Cabinet post. He also served as the chair of the Indigenous Knowledge Sessions of the Global Summit of Indigenous Peoples on climate change in 2009. Larry is the co founder of Indigenous Peoples Council for Marine Mammals, the Alaska Forum on the Environment, and the International Bering Sea Forum and the Alaska Oceans Network. He has received many awards, both for his activism and his writing. His latest book is titled If I'm pronouncing it right, tanam awa, which means the work of the land in the Unangan language. He is also the author of Wisdom Keepers, One Man's Journey to Honor the Untold Story of the Unangan People, which was published by North Atlantic Books. He's currently an independent consultant and president of the Global center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways, or gsil, and serves as senior advisor to the World Wilderness Congress and advisor to the Native Lands and Wilderness Council. His passion is speaking of traditional elder wisdom for modern challenges, particularly about restoring women to their place as original healers and balancing the dysfunctional masculine. Okay, Quite a background.

Yeah.

So. So, Larry, you grew up on St. Paul island, one of the PR off islands, a small island in a very kind of very remote location out in the Bering Sea. And you grew up much closer to nature than most of us, and also in a. You were raised in a traditional way, in the midst of traditional culture.

So.

So I think especially for our audience meeting you for the first time, it'll be really helpful to have them understand a bit of that. So I'm wondering if you could share a bit about what it was like growing up in that small, remote island very close to nature, growing up in a traditional way, just kind of. What was that like for you? What did you. I don't know. You could write a book. You have written books about that. But. But anyway, maybe just, you know, kind of give us a sense of what that was like and what were some of the things you took with you from that background.

Yeah. Well, perhaps I should start off by the history of our people. We have stories about coming out of Egypt, going to. Out of Mongolia, to Siberia, to Kamchatka, and across by traditional craft, not across the Bering Land bridge, as most anthropologists say. And we developed quite a flourishing culture. We.

Had before the most densely populated linear mile of shoreline in all of North America for our time. And we flourished by. Because our people were very spiritual, and they never planned what they're going to do the next day or where they're going to go to get food. They just simply trusted in a faith that is really the true understanding of what faith is. And we even didn't wear footwear in Alaska.

At all. During any time of the year, even in the wintertime. We were like the llamas of Tibet, where we. We'd sit on the snow and melt it, you know, and we developed a very Swiss cave, but basic form of brain surgery. For a time we had names for every part of the body, inside and out. We even have had a word for billion. Why would anyone want to have a word for billion? We could. We can't count a billion anything, but we did. And we didn't have any food storage technologies except for air drying. We were one of the few people that didn't have food storage technologies in Alaska. And so that's the history of my people.

Now.

I lived on St. Paul island, as you said, where we had. I grew up with 1.2 million northern fur shields, two and a half million seabirds, a thousand reindeer, and 500 Unangan people. It was quite the magical place to be raised at that time.

And in contrast to that, we were slaves of the US Government. That's something that very few people know, but it's in my book, Wisdom Keeper. But anyway, this was a very magical place to be. As a child. My parents would let me go out during the morning and stay out all day after school, government run company school. And we, I would just wander the island every single day.

And I would explore the near shore or the shoreline of all the living things that it had there. I love to watch the seabirds, you know, two and a half million seabirds on a tiny island like that. We only had seven bird rook three. So underneath each rookery might be more than 10,000 seabirds of all kinds of species. And I would love to go out.

Be amongst these birds every single day, starting at age six. And I had a mentor at six years old. It's called an ocha. And not. Your relationship is not prearranged. The young person meets the older person and they know that that's my ocha. And so we call each other ocha. And he taught me much of what I know about being a man, about reverence for nature, about hunting and fishing and the values of the Union people. And yet, from the time that he had me under his wing from age 6 to 13, he may have said no more than 200 words to me.

That's because words are considered superfluous by our people or might be dangerous. So we don't use much word. Except now when I do these talks.

The elders say, you've got to go out there and explain what's happening. And so.

I went fishing with him where we'd fish for halibut.

And we do it hook, line and sinker on a small boat. And we could tell.

When the halbert is near the line. We don't, we didn't have any range finders or, or things like that. To identify that there's a Halbert coming. We just felt it. And then as soon as the Halbert hits the line, we can tell if it took by the lip or the jaw or the side of the body. And we can tell what size it is. 3 foot, 4 foot, 5 foot helmet. And most of the time we could tell whether or not it's male or female. And we could tell based on how it's hooked whether how it's going to fight on the way up. And all these pieces of information are necessary for good fishermen. And, and so we had a great deal of knowledge and experience with fishing. You know, one time, I remember one time a man came out from California, I think was University of California, and they were studying how far up above the bottom of the water do Halbert feed. And of course we, I knew that when I was 11 years old.

But they didn't think to ask us. And you know, we have intimate knowledge of the wildlife because at that time our people depended on it. The survival of our people depended on it. And so that's basically my story.

And living and growing up that, that close to nature, I mean, self care wasn't even an issue. Right. And unfortunately, we modern humans have kind of gotten out of relationship with the earth and with life altogether. So self care has become an important issue. And I want to talk more about that in a minute. But, but first, I wonder if you could say something about the name that you were given at one point. Kuyuk. I know it has a particular meaning and a significance in terms of your life path, so could you share a little bit about that?

Yeah, and that's pronounced Kuya.

Kuya, okay.

Means like an arm extending out from the body, a carrier of ancient knowledge into modern times, a messenger. And I have lived the legacy of my name most of my life. Now I'm going to be 70, 40 years old. And it's, it's something that I've always known about me, that what I'm to do is to carry messages of elders from throughout the world. And today I'm working. I had a vision about bringing elders, indigenous elders from all over the world together. So we got together in 2017 and now we are engaging in something that hopefully we can talk about as this show goes on.

Wonderful. So, yes, I know you've, you've been living and that name was given to you by your elders or at some point or.

Oh yeah, this was given to me by a man from a different island. You know how the Dalai Lama is identified?

What, what they do and what? Remember about the past. And they look for that person. Well, my Kuya looked for me. He went to every island and finally found me on St. Paul. I was 4 years old at the time when he gave me his name, Kuya. And this is a.

Legacy that has passed down the thousands of years. And now I'm at the point where there is not going to be a next after me because we either change our consciousness now or we lose it. And in either way.

A new Koyak is not going to be needed.

Well, there must be. You must have something to share about self care because you're a very young looking 74 or soon to be 74. We're contemporaries. I'll be 74 this year as well. I've got a little more, I got a little more gray hair than you do though.

So. So this summit is focused on how we can make improvements in our self care to enhance the quality of our, our well being for ourselves and for our own lives, as well as for our relationships and our communities and so forth. And in particular today we're focused on spiritual self care. Now, according to the indigenous lifeways of your Unangan people and your experience as, as a, as a family man and as, as an activist and an organizer and someone who's obviously been very, very active in Alaskan government and in all kinds of international affairs and environmental affairs and your, your tribal affairs and so forth. I'm curious what that term might mean to you, but does that term resonate with you? I realize it's kind of a Western term, but what, what would self care and spiritual self care mean to you? And you know, what would you understand about the relationship between that and how we show up in life and how we can serve our communities?

Yeah, well, as you know, everything is connected. And so we don't have words for the kind, the kind of things that Western civilization specializes in. By defining everything, we like to separate.

Everything into pieces and give it names.

Yep. And, and so we live a life where.

We don't see. What do they call it in the Plains Indians call it? If you're unbalanced, you're crooked. Well, this is very similar to the union way where what you're thinking, what you're feeling, what you're doing, what you're saying, all should be in alignment. And that when it's in alignment, one is balanced. And when you're off, which most people I think are, they think one thing and then they say one thing and then they say they do another thing that, that it creates a very crooked person. And most people aren't aware or don't think in this way. I'm going to speak in terms of what I understand from traditional peoples all across the world that they feel like we've got to change our consciousness now. And the consciousness that we are operating under goes from the mind to the heart. When traditionally we would go from the heart to the mind, the mind. The heart would tell the mind what to do. Now the mind tells the heart what to do. And it's created all the ills around the world from the perspective of indigenous elders. And that when your heart. When you see my experience has been. My heart never guides me wrong, it always is impeccably right. Every single thing that you do in the world over time is in alignment and in harmony with Mother Earth. And this is a way of health that covers the mind, the mental, the spiritual, the physical, and all of that. And we also understand that when we get to the place of illness, some kind of illness physically in our body, that's the last part of the manifestation of imbalance. Thoughts and feelings. But. And it goes all the way back to the spiritual. And the first thing that. That we do when medicine men get together, for example, they try. They work at healing, they work at all aspects of this. The being, the mental, physical and spiritual. And this is the way that we work to stay healthy is to. When we find something that is, we are ill with, we go to the spiritual first, because that's where it started. And it goes to the mental and the physical. And the physical is the last manifestation of the imbalance that we experience. So. Mm.

Yeah. And so, you know, we. That imbalance you're talking about, I mean, in Western modern culture, we all experience this as stress, right? And. And, you know, rumination and. And emotion, dysregulation and, you know, just unhappiness and suffering of all kinds. And.

And then out of that, we act in ways that creates further trauma for ourselves, for others, for the earth. It can. It becomes kind of a vicious cycle. And we've become so disconnected from the earth. I have a friend who says in Western culture, our brains have been relegated to being nothing but.

I mean, our bodies have been relegated to be nothing but brain taxis. Just something to carry around this brain, you know, and so we're disconnected from the heart, from the body, and from the earth. And.

The Tibetan was called the monkey mind.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, that just. And when, you know, when we don't, we're not able to direct our Mind our focus, we don't have that natural alignment. Then the mind is just jumping all over the place. And modern neuroscience, they talk about an overactive default network that's just racing everywhere all the time. And that was that expression like a whole lot of monkeys up in a tree running, you know, that, that kind of expression.

Exactly.

And you know, as a result of that we create labels, ADHD and all that.

Exactly. So.

You know, clearly we do need a change of consciousness. We've created an existential threat with human caused global warming and you know, and the clock is ticking on that. And it seems we need a change of mindset, a change of heart set. So how do we, how do we begin that work of, of coming, recognizing how that we are out of balance and finding our way back into balance, but within the body, within the mind, with Earth, with our relationships. What could you share about how we begin that work of rebalancing?

Well, I guess I can. You know, the Colombian elders have recently formed a national organization of elders. And we are working with them. They've asked us to help them out. There are over a hundred tribes and the membership in this organization is over 400 people. And they, this gets to quantum physics and quantum mechanics.

Finally the science is starting to come to where indigenous people understand. And so we're hopefully able to talk with people who are scientifically oriented to help them understand that. What I'm about to say is quantum physics.

What the elders of Columbia are saying now is that we must create a vibrational field worldwide that is an alternative to the field that we are trapped in now, which is the field of the mind. And this masculine imbalance that when we create this field through ceremony, this is again something that most Westerners have a hard time understanding, is that the ceremonies are really more important than, than the actions that are taken. Because when you tap into this alternative energy that is that that is going to be available. It's. It used to be available regionally around the world. And there was no need to link up all of these people with ceremonies in the past. And so what we have now are individual groups that are doing their ceremony. And these ceremonies create the field in their region. But there hasn't been an effort to link up all of these ceremonies for simultaneous ceremonies to take place to create this field. And so until that happened, we are stuck in a mentality that.

We can't get out of. And that in order for that to happen, for people to have the opportunity to heal, we have got to first create this vibrational field and so the elders of Columbia have asked us to help them.

A link up with people all over the world.

To engage in this ceremony. And they are already, the Colombian elders already have started their thing and they're creating ceremonies during the moon, the very significant moon times. And they're asking people of like minded heart, not mind and heart, like minded heart.

To join them in these ceremonies until finally we can feel that this is worldwide.

It's a very ambitious thing. But this is what is needed now because all of the indigenous elders that I work with around the world say that it's not a question about whether or not we can save Mother Earth. Mother Earth can take care of herself. She's lived for billions of years, she's going to live for billions more. It's a question about whether or not human beings as a species will survive. And until we have this field and then from there we go to our hearts and our hearts will tell us what we need to do. It's the view of indigenous elders that every single person in this world today has a gift to give during this time. And Mother Earth is helping, which we can talk about later. But.

This gift is, is a gift for the world. And every one of us are gurus now. There's no singular guru anymore. We, we are gurus. And the answers to what we must do lies in our hearts, not in our minds. It's not a logical or rational thing. This is trans. Rational.

So it's an incredible gift being offered by indigenous peoples. And, and you know, we've been hearing from indigenous people for a long time. I mean, certain of the tribes in Colombia have been reaching out with this message about the climate for many, many decades. And then they're the Hopi prophecies. So we've been, and you know, of course we've ignored it. Finally we have the science that's become obvious that climate change is real and global change is real. And we're recognizing, except for the few climate deniers and politics, but other than that, we're recognizing that, you know, that we do have this existential threat, but this idea of living a ceremonial life, I mean, in the west we've gotten so far away from that, that recognition of the sacred. We've, we've relegated like, you know, the body to be nothing but a brain. Taxi. As my friend said, we've relegated the natural world to be this inanimate world that we just exploit for resources. And, and so, you know, is there, is there a place for non indigenous people to, to cooperate in some way with this Global effort, you know, by, by, you know, I mean, you know, interesting. One thing I, I recent interview I did with one of the researchers at Heart Math, the Heart Math work and they're very much into this kind of. What you're speaking about from a more, you know, Western scientific perspective is that actually, you know, the earth has its own electromagnetic fields. And those electromagnetic fields have the same wave frequency as the human heart. And so spending time in nature helps us realign. Also there's waves that, there's energy, electromagnetic energy that kind of bounces between the sun and the earth. And though the wave frequency of those matches the wave frequency of the brain when, when it's aligned.

Right.

And so anyway, you know, maybe there's ways that we can slow down and, and begin to think about. We don't want to appropriate indigenous ceremonies obviously, but maybe there is some way that we can begin to live in a more ceremonial way closer to the earth or, or more recognizing the sacred dimension that we're part of.

Yep, that is absolutely true. There are many needs for this and for this call for this field, this quantum field that, that needs to be created. Now that got lost because of the imbalance that the world suffered and the way that our allies, people of like minded heart who are not Native, who don't have this tradition, can be allies in a real sense. I mean, Native people have been calling for these allies for a long time. But here is an opportunity to make a real impact on the direction that the world is going. And you're right that you know, scientifically, you know, the kind of work that Heart Math Institute does.

Has not gone to the point of ceremony. But I'm going to.

Contact the Heart Math Institute to ask them if they would join in this effort. Any other organizations through the wisdom Weavers of the world, this is what we call ourselves. We have.

Hundreds of allies around the world and we're going to ask them if they would hear out what the vision of the Columbian elders are. And if they agree with it, then we have monetary needs, we have organizational needs, we have.

All kinds of needs that to get it, to get it on a worldwide basis, the expertise and the technology that we're using now, social media, we need all of these things. And so we are calling together our elders, wizard weavers of the world to discuss this. And if they approve it, we're. The next step would be to invite these allies together who can help us with outreach and everything else that we need and to see if that we can get this going. And everyone that I'VE talked with says, yeah, okay. We have been needing this worldwide energetic effort for a long time now, and now we have the capability of doing this because zoom and other kinds of visible things like this links us up around the world. So that's what we're going to do. And, you know, Fleet, I'm hoping that we can list your efforts as part of it, in which case, you know, we'll make sure to send you an invitation.

Yeah, absolutely. We very much would like to be part of it. Hilarion, I'd be very happy to connect you with the folks at the HeartMath Institute as well. And one, as part of their research, they actually have monitoring stations around the world measuring the Earth's magnetic fields. And so that. And they're encouraging people to do this kind of work all around the world, whether it's meditative work, contemplative work, ceremonial work, things that can help realign our human cultures with the Earth and good at healing. So I'd be happy to put you in touch there.

That'll be great. And also, you know, we think in turn, because we're a definition world now, we define everything, where we segment them by the very definition that we use. So climate change.

The.

Destruction of trees in South America, all these things.

They are important. And people, good people of good heart are trying to deal with it. But the elders are saying that none of this is going to work until this alternative vibrational field is created once again. And.

It'Ll work short time or a short period of time, but eventually it's not going to work. And that what we need to do is.

Focus on.

This field is very important. I mean, the. The elders in Columbia are.

They have. They've arrayed all over the world and they're continuing to do that. Their key messenger is man by the name of Pacha Concha, and he is working with us, he's on our planning team to figure out how we would engage North America in this effort. And so.

I look back at my career and the hundreds of organizations I've been part of or heading up or chairing, and I'm realizing that.

This is what it was guiding me towards, is getting to the place where I can be an intermediary with organization now when the world focuses on stopping something like stopping the desecration of trees, stopping pollution, stopping, you know, stopping political corruption, refugee, that gross violation of women. They're. They're good people of good heart that are really trying to do that. But they said that when. Remember that we are energy beings, right? We have spiritual, mental, physical energy. And when we put. When we stop, when we focus our life on stopping something, the energy that we carry transfers into that which you're trying to stop and makes it bigger. And that they said instead of that, what we must do is focus on that which we want to see, not in reaction to anything. This is a very difficult thing to do. And for individual, you know, it's what we ask people. And we try to do things that help stimulate it to.

Go to your heart and stop the interference of the monkey mind and go to the heart and say, listen to what your heart has to tell you. But to go from the mind to the heart is the greatest distance there is. Right.

And so we are trying to help people negotiate this step by step. Under. So.

Women, for example.

Again, this gets into quantum physics. Women's work is invisible. The work is invisible, not the women. And the work is invisible because it's spiritual energy. And what the elders are saying is that if women get together in sisterhood and heal themselves, and they can heal very quickly, not like us men take a lifetime to under. To heals of the women could do it quickly because they carry an energy, an energy field in their bodies through the womb that is identical to what we call the. The energy at the center of the universe. We call it the womb at the center of the universe, a place of creation and creativity. And the women had the identical field of energy inside themselves. And that if women get together in sisterhood, heal themselves and then project energetically this field outside of themselves to create a container for something new to be birthed.

And until this happened, the indigenous elders understand, until this happened, nothing new is going to be created in this world. Even the state of the art thinking, the state of the art technology is the old regurgitated as the new. And this is something that people.

A lot of people don't understand that, you know, for example, we went to hybrid fuels, right? And that's supposed to be a good idea. And when the US Went to hybrid fuel, many of the world's farmers converted from food crops to fuel crops. And it increased the cost of food and increased starvation around the world. That's an example of the. The old regurgitated as new.

Right?

Yeah. And, you know, for some of. I think for many of our audience, our conversation about kind of energy and energy fields and it's kind of energy work both individually and globally will. They'll resonate with that. For some of our audience, it may sound a little bit out there, but I would just remind People that we have, like Dr. Dan Siegel, who we have on a lot of our summits, a pretty hard nosed scientist physician, he talks about energy all the time and he says energy is not a woo woo concept. We are energy beings. We're energy beings living in an energy energetic matrix. That's what we are. In fact, he talks about, his definition of mind is it's a continual flow of information and energy and it's not just encapsulated in the body either, it's within a field. You know, we're connected energetically. Right. And so that, that the spiritual self care and the individual and collective work we need to do to become realigned and to rebalance ourselves and rebalance our cultures. It's obviously energy work. Right? It's obviously energy work. And there are so many types of energy healing even at the individual level that people do with, you know, with therapeutic touch or reiki work or, or all kinds of more energy focused healing work. Right. So yeah, it's, this makes complete sense. And I'm curious about for you.

Larry. You know, you were raised in a traditional way and you have that in your bones and in your blood and, and, and you've learned to stay focused on what your heart, how your heart directs you and that keeps you in good alignment, I'm sure. And at the same time, you've lived in the western world, you live in the western world, you've been involved in the Alaskan government, you know, you've been involved in the modern world. So I'm sure that does put some pressures of modern life on you. And I'm curious what you do, you know, even on a daily basis to especially maybe, or I don't know if you're as active now as you were then and some of the governmental stuff. But you know, how you took care of yourself, you know, how did you take care of yourself and keep yourself from getting pulled into that Western disalignment or imbalance?

Yep. Well.

You know, I took these jobs in the western world to understand what works and what doesn't work.

And so I took that experience that I had with western government to my own village. And at that time the, the federal government was going to leave the island lock, stock and barrel beginning in 1980 when Reagan cut their budget, cut the purple off island budget, which was like over $3 million, and did so without consultation with us. And here we were in a situation where we didn't know where we're going to get our $3 million from. We were just a small village. And so we decided to throw out all of the western thinking and go to traditional ways which involve consensus.

Decision making, treating each other with respect, knowing that everybody's got their own truth and your truth is equally valid as my truth. And all of these kinds of things that we incorporated and created tribal off island.

Council. And this council was to guide what we did. And here we were in a situation where we're getting hate mail from all over the world wishing our people to die horribly. We were forced to kill seals for food for the government which sold the pelts in the international market. And we didn't have any money at all except for enough money to buy people one way tickets off the island to Anchorage. And we didn't know how we're going to survive either there or on the island. And so what we did is we changed the energy from one of fear where each organization on the island was up against each other to one of harmony and consensus. And so everybody that was sat at the decision making table had the right to veto anything that we proposed. And so we did it that way. And within one year we went from zero economic base to.

$34,000 per capita. Four years later. No other community in the US I believe has ever done that where we went from 0 to 34,000.

In four years. And we did it because we didn't use the western way of decision making. And this again is something about, it says something about the value of traditional ways in helping modern people decide what they need to do.

And it takes a leap of faith because we don't work with agendas, we don't have agendas. And when I was called in to facilitate a meeting between all the district directors for the NRCS where it was called.

National Resource something Council.

They were calling all of their leaders around the US to be in this meeting. And I said the first thing we must do is get rid of the agenda.

The head said, ah, we don't know if that's a good idea. But it was. I said, you want to learn about the indigenous ways, this is one way you can do it. So we did that. And at the end they all said, wow. They were worried that they wouldn't accomplish their goal, but we focused on the process that was used, not the goal. And that's another thing that we did. On St. Paul island we focus on process. How we get, how we put the process together is more important than achieving the goal. And in the US for example, and most Western nation, they focus on goal and how do we get there. And this creates dissensions and so does one. One person, one vote kind of thing. It creates an opposition and consensus brings people together, but you've got to be able to do it.

I. I can cite so many examples of how this happened. And one of the things that is important in healing is to think positive. Not just out of, you know.

Make believe positivity, but really realign through listening to your heart, thinking positively. So, for example, one quick story is I was called by elders in southwest Alaska. They're Yupik. And they. They just called me up on the island. I said, okay, I'll come. I made a decision of following whatever the elders tell me. They never explained why they were. They wanted me there, but I went there. And when I got there, the go between explained to me that there's an election going on for the prime chief of 56 villages, and two of the most popular candidates were at each other's throats. So the elders did something totally unprecedented. They stepped in and took control of the election. Not because they were worried about who's going to win, but they were worried about the process that was being used. And so when we got to the gym, there were like 400 people there from all these villages. And the elders stood up and said, we took over control of this election because the disharmony is creating amongst people. And we only have two rules. One is that the candidate is going to speak about the other candidate. And there were seven of them at that time. And this next one you better pay attention to, because the one that speaks the most good about the other is going to be the winner.

That's really turning it on its head.

That's right. And, you know, you could hear the people in the room. They were just really engaged in what. What was happening. And, you know, the two people who are against each other in.

Fighting each other, this was creating dissension in all the villages. People were taking sides.

Yeah.

And so it was very disruptive. And so anyway, these two got together and they knew that if they exaggerated any good thing they say about the other, they're automatically disqualified. So they had to tell the truthful good thing. And one person said, you know, I. I know you. You're a good, good person, and you take care of your traditional ways, you share your food and all that kind of stuff. And the other did the same thing. And when they called this one person.

In response, that person said, I know I've said horrible things about you, and I'm sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness. And they hugged each other, and there wasn't a dry eye in the place. And the dissension amongst the villagers disappeared in three days. That's again, the heart guiding you.

Yeah, it's really beautiful. And that focus on process. And there's been a lot of experimentation in our Western culture, kind of the alternative process world of our culture with, you know, decentralized decision making and consensus and things like restorative justice. Unfortunately, it's not. There's a lot of it, but it's not the mainstream yet. It hasn't, hasn't, you know, really taken over the. The real levers of power or in the mainstream. Right. So we have a long way to go. But this has been incredibly enriching and hopeful hilarion and in pointing us in this direction. And I really want to thank you for everything you've shared with us. And I'm wondering how people in our audience could find out more about your work and perhaps find out how to support this work that's going on as allies or in any way they could support it.

Yeah, well, when the elders got together, we create the Wisdom Weavers of the world. And you can go to our website, www.wisdomweavers.world and you'll find out about the organization. But we don't want to be a singular organization. Our purpose is to weave together.

Other people and organizations of like mind and heart. Like Minded Heart. And in this singular goal of helping people to change their consciousness from the mind to the heart and G Cell, the Global center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways is gcill Dot World. And so this is a way you can get tied in, but we are hoping in the end that we have hundreds of organizations around the world that, that are going to take their, their lead and whatever it is that they decide to do.

Well, that's wonderful. And so I'll encourage people to check that out. Wisdom Weavers of the World and gsil, which stands for Global Council of Global.

Center for Global center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways.

Right. Yeah. And. And people can easily find those online. I've. I've searched for them before and found them relatively easily. In fact, even if people just Google your name, Ileriy Merculio, they'll probably find their way there. So I really encourage people to learn about these organizations and the wonderful work you're doing. And this project that's being sourced by the indigenous people in Colombia sounds incredibly important and I'd love to learn more about that myself. And please count us in your work and we really want to be part of your work and this community. So thank you. Thank you again so much for all the work you do, Larry, and for everything you shared with us today.

Yep. Well, thank you Fleet. And I'm hoping that people get something out of this that that resonates with them and, and follows through in whatever way they decide we don't. I don't.

Care about whether or not you follow what I'm saying. We can present what we have in a plate if you will. And whether or not the person picks up anything is their choice and it's their sacred path and it's none of my business.

Well, that's an incredibly statement of tremendous humility and and I think that's very much emblematic of your traditional ways and the native approach. So again, thank you so much. It's always great to connect with you. Larian.

Thank you. Wave.

Be well.

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