Guest speaker: Mary Porter
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: 2017
Around the kitchen table, we hear from the powerhouse Mary Porter, a Native woman who, after her wild years staying away from the medicine, founded the Looking Glass Peyote Church. The episode ends with hearing from a discriminating young veteran about his experience, through Mary, finally finding a teacher and a path.
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Recommended Books
Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition by John G. Neihardt
My People the Sioux, New Edition by Luther Standing Bear
My Indian Boyhood, New Edition by Luther Standing Bear
Stories of the Sioux, New Edition by Luther Standing Bear
The Tragedy of the Sioux (Illustrated) y Chief Standing Bear
Fools Crow by Thomas E. Mails
I understood what it is your conveying. I thank you for doing what you do. As you know the peyote chooses you, you don’t chose peyote. Needing prayers for family and self please, blessings to you….
J sen
Looking Glass Peyote Church of Oregon
Sprague River, Oregon 97639
peyotechurch.oforegon@gmail.com
Someone: please tell Ms Porter that she needs to be less negative if she wants to reach people. It was like listening to an angry person ranting on the subway. I couldn’t take more than a few minutes of this podcast.
Thank you for your comment. I have never been on a subway, and I wasn’t angry at all. But Thank You
I agree that Back Elk Speaks is one of the great spiritual documents to come out of Turtle Island.
I enjoyed this podcast and wish it lasted longer . I would have liked a little more clarity on what Mary Porter meant about following nature’s guidance. One part of this that can easily be lost is the work required to establish a harmonious permaculture type means of feeding ourselves, and the minimization of fossil fuel use. The truth is many of us speak about getting back to nature but too many of us want to fly a jet plane to paradise.
I just read a recently published book that might be of interest to others in regard to native american spirituality and the 19th to 21st century peyote medicine practices. The book is called God’s Red Son: the Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America by Louis S. Warren.
Most of the book is an attempt to give the clearest and most sympathetic historic understanding of the Ghost Dance religion yet attempted from its origin and spread from a Paiute prophet named Wovoka to the massacre of Ghost dancers at Wounded Knee and its continuation after Wounded Knee.The research is very thorough and corrects many errors about this history. In the last chapters Warren follows how the religious persecution and criminalization of the ghost dance led into the same treatment of the much older native spiritual practices around peyote. ( Talk about the government blatantly preventing the free exercise of religion; US hypocrisy hits an all time high in the historic persecution and spiritual colonization of Native spirituality. )
Thank You for taking the time to listen and leaving a balanced comment. It’s funny you should bring up the Ghost Dance, at the Sundance where I had a spiritual smack down, one of the people attending was the Carrier of Jack Wilson’s Pipe-none other than Woovoka, the Piaute Prophet who brought the Ghost Dance to the People.
It seems to me you are on the right path, there are many right ways to approach spirituality. The best we can do as human beings is acknowledge the good things that the Holy Powers shows us and follow Natural Law.
Thank You again for listening.