Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
WilderUtopia celebrates world culture with a frame of environmental sustainability. Our inspiration sources from ethnically-based indigenous arts, myth and storytelling, as well as dance and music, played out in the rituals, customs, and traditions of the many peoples of the planet.
Among the Caddo People of Oklahoma, the Coninisi or those who know the spirit medicine through the Ghost Dance religion and the Native American Church, took on the role of mediating relationships between the visible and invisible realms of the world, and between the living community and the souls of deceased ancestors. Thus, despite a tragic history, a people survives today.
Northern Shoshone Myth on how the Wolf, father of the native people, defeated the white-man’s father “Iron-Man,” documented by Robert Harry Lowie in 1909.
Art Cisneros is a Chumash elder and firekeeper. The Chumash People are the original native peoples of the central California Coast. Art holds the sacred space for their annual Tomol crossing to Limu on the Channel Islands. Lately, he has undertaken a series of ceremonies focused on healing humanity’s relationship with the climate, responding to the ongoing drought and extreme weather, prayers that he shared with the people at the Great March for Climate Action LA Launch on March 1, 2014, in the Port of Los Angeles.
Watch the full documentary on the Huichol journey to Wirikuta, where they travel every year to collect peyote. The pilgrimage take place with the intention to return to where life originated and heal oneself and the community.
The story of a Pilgrim Thanksgiving was a fairy tale told by Lincoln to unite the Union. The Wampanoag version of the harvest festival with the English settlers is a day of mourning for a land taken away, a culture subverted and a people disappeared from epidemic and massacre.
A story from the Miskitu People (Miskito) of Caribbean Nicaragua, about a man who follows his beloved wife into the afterlife.
This Mohegan story about the benevolent nature spirits, called the Makiawisug, illustrates the spiritual potency of the Native universe, and the healing necessary to face the invading Pilgrims and their fear of the Antichrist.