Abstract

An African-American woman coming of age during the fifties in the deep south, I responded by following the way of the warrior, becoming a social activist and civil rights attorney. The 1963 Birmingham church bombing in which two close friends were killed launched me on a quest for justice and decades-long path of activism in a wide spectrum of social change movements. But a persistent yearning for wholeness would not allow me to continue pursuing visions of social transformation which disallowed Spirit. In cosmological terms, fires of resistance would be quenched by waters of healing. Through divination, dreams, illness, and a homeless prophetess, the Great Mother called me into her womb-cave to seek ancestral wisdom. ;The subject of this inquiry is my response to that call. It is at once the story of my own personal experience of recovering indigenous consciousness and the emerging story of the tentative first steps I have taken on the larger human journey toward a new way of being, a journey into wholeness all must take if we are move into a future. ;The inquiry falls within an indigenous paradigm in which the cosmos is alive and steeped in sacredness. In this paradigm, all of creation participates in an infinite and luminous weave of interrelationship and wholeness. The research methodology is indigenous in that the inquiry is cultivated as a sacred, creative process arising from the fertile realm of the Great Mother. Though I focus on inner transformation, I do so with an eye for my story's confluence with a greater story of the collective human transformation now unfolding. ;Honoring the multi-dimensional nature of reality and multiple ways of knowing that characterize indigenous sensibilities, the inquiry is informed by intuition, dreams, divination, prayer, ritual, totems, ancestors, nature, and synchronicity. In western research terminology, my work falls within a participatory research paradigm and is a blend of heuristic, organic and narrative methodologies. ;In harvesting the meaning of my initiatory journey through telling this story, I continue to be transformed. I hope those who hear it will be inspired in their own movement toward wholeness