Myth

Chapter 5 invokes the same triad of scholars as in the previous chapter but dives deeper. Deloria’s indigenous notion of a dread and foreboding Land Presence encountered as revelation by many Native American communities living in a local ecozone over generations anchors the exposé. The experience of “being watched” and in effect made aware of a human/non-human boundary delineating a given terrain as sanctuary of the Other World as indeed of Wild Nature “Herself,” is a kind of primordial baseline that Deloria likens to, and differentiates from, mystical encounters in various “world” religions. For Deloria, it is an experience of being objectified before a much bigger Subjectivity of Place.[1] The chapter juxtaposes to Deloria’s evocation, Kimmerer’s description of a big Anishinaabe “Stalker Spirit” (the Windigo), incarnating insatiable hunger during the late winter “thin times” and Long’s mobilization of Otto’s Tremendum relativizing Euro-colonial terror to explore what might be said to happen when human communities transgress the natural limits of their places of residing or globalize “sovereignty rights” and “consumptive appetite” as a logic of supremacy. How such insights and convictions from the “other side” of Christian mission and “dominion” invite a quite different construction of biblical reports of divine encounter and serve to focus the question of mysticism in the more-than-human world round out the chapter.