On this wet snowy evening at Studio M* in Calgary, Alberta, Canada surrounded by Michael's art on the walls we had an intimate book reading with R. Michael Fisher from his book - an intellectual biography on the life ideas of Four Arrows - an indigenous-based educator. It felt that we were in the presence of ancestors on this first night of October as Michael read from Fearless Engagement of Four Arrows: The True Story of an Indigenous-Based Social Transformer. Grateful that this work is out in the world.
From the reading:
"A giving soul by nature, Four Arrows works hard to that end. Walking his talk--on a path of integrity, sometimes self-sacrifice--is the only option for a life worth living. And living in the everyday, within the context of Western society's predominant violent value-system and dominant worldview, pushes him to continually search for and facilitate spaces of nonviolence, peace, integrity, balance, harmony, learning, and healing sacred practices....."
Four Arrows calls the "mass hypnosis syndrome" we live in the dominant worldview "Trance-Based Learning gone awry, [a]s the only explanation that makes sense of how modern educated societies especially, have rationalized their technologies of domination, their polluting of their own nest, and their addictions to ways of life that paradoxically destroy Life. [His] own vision of rehabilitation from this destructive path is that Fear and courage concepts are essential to understand as they drive learning and development in a "good way" or "bad way."
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