Indigenous Influences and Perspectives on the Worldview of Dr. Carl Jung
In 1963, after I returned home from my first psychology class, my father and I had an immediate disagreement. My Psychology professor told me that we were simply products of our environment. My father told me human beings were not simply a product of their physical environment. He said that while certainly our interaction with the environmental world around us influences our growth and development as human beings, we are also influenced by genetically by our parents and ancestors. He told me, as well, that we are each the spiritual representative of all those relatives that went before us, both individually and collectively.
My father concluded by posing a question to me. “ If we were completely products of our environment, explain this to me with your professors point of view. You can raise an English Setter in a high rise in New York City for five years. Then you can take that English Setter to a farm. You can release the English Setter into a large wheat field where there are wild pheasants and that Setter will point pheasants, as if he had done it all his life. Why is that son?”
In Western Science my father’s point of view is called the epigenetic view of development. In essence, this view says we are influenced by both the environment and our genetics. Trying to balance and integrate my father’s Indigenous point of view and the behavioral view of Western Science caused me some intense personal turmoil, conflict, pain and confusion over the years. Especially balancing my physical and spiritual dimensions.
As I begin to open myself to new experiences, this time utilizing my cultural and spiritual background as a touchstone, I begin to find that that there were many others, not just “Indigenous Peoples”, that disagreed with these limited western ideologies and scientific perspectives that I encountered as a young man. Such a person to my great delight and enlightenment was Dr. Carl G. Jung. When I begin to reflect on and understand Jung’s lifelong experiences and writings, I found many of the same influences that inspired Jung’s teachings, also inspired our Dakota peoples in formulating their great understandings and insights of life.
These included, the collective unconscious, quaternity, archetypes, the Tree of Life, the animus and the anima, the hero and heroine's journey, interpretations of dreams, the shadow, death, the goal of human development (individuation), synchronicity, the power of “myth”, cosmology,, the family, relations with animals, visions, and other Dakota/Jungian concepts and insights.
In the winter of 1924-25 while visiting the United States, Jung visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico where he spent several hours with Ochwiay Bianco, “Mountain Lake”, an elder at the Pueblo. This was a seminal encounter in Jung's life. It impacted him psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually and had a sustained influence on his theories and understanding of the psyche, as witnessed by his reference to Mountain Lake in one of his last letters written shortly before his death.
In my Dekshi’s Vine Deloria Jr’s last book, “C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive,” published after his death, Vine says of all the European thinkers he read and studied that Jung came the closest to bridging the Western European and Dakota worldview. While comparing and contrasting Jungian and Dakota perspectives, Vines’s book , also, adds other Dakota experiences and perspectives that further deepen and expand Jung’s Work.
At the sametime, as he did in all his books, Vine did not hesitate to dissect Jung’s Western European thinking that had been corrupted by Jung’s colonial worldview. A colonial worldview that sees European inductive, scientific thinking and civilization vastly superior to“primitive thinking and development!”
When I first encountered Jung’s work,in the 1960’s, I called my father to share with him my new discoveries and ask him for his perspective. After I finished expounding to my father about Jung’s thinking, my father started sharing with me where Jung teachings left off. I was more than amazed! I asked my father, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” My father simply said, “You never asked me!”
