Moriarty started with a Navajo story that told about the 2nd or 3rd day of the world. He called it the Great Creative Beginning. It is the story of the first man and first woman.
Moriarty told the story of the Buffalo Dance and the Buffalo song of the Blackfoot people of North America. It was the story of a buffalo and a beautiful young Blackfoot girl coming together and separating again. The Buffalo danced without damaging the grass. It seemed that the mountains were dancing with them as were the constellations dancing with them. They actually did that. Hundreds of thousands of bison (not really buffalo) would converge on the land the hooves cut the soil and the excrement fertilized it and the land was reborn. Moriarty said this dance was this was the song of the universe. It was the song of which the earth and the stars are manifestations.
This story came to Moriarty in Connemara Ireland where all the land was in commonage. All the farmers sent their cattle to that land. All used it together in common. As Professor Moriarty said about this Buffalo story,
“Unlike the Christian creation story where you feel a Berlin Wall between each day of creation, what this story speaks to me of is commonage consciousness. That there is one consciousness, one universal consciousness and it is there in buffalo, it is there in rocks, it is there in trees and there really are no fences between us.”
Moriarty says this story though it came from Indigenous people of North America, it could have been told anywhere. It was told in Europe and then went to Eurasia where it went to Asia and then it went down across the Bering Straits and ended up in Blackfoot territory and it could be our creation story. This story has survived in this old consciousness and the only way to save the world and make something new as D. H. Lawrence said is to go back into that consciousness. These old levels of consciousness are still alive in us. As Moriarty said,
“It is only in commonage consciousness that the earth can be saved. We have to take down the fences between us and animals. We have to take down the fences between us and stars. We have to acknowledge the oneness of consciousness that is in the universe.”
These are beautiful thoughts and they show how indigenous learning can teach us to walk beautifully in the world, which, of course, was Moriarty’s goal. He wanted to help us do that. I think he succeeded. Brilliantly. With the help of indigenous people.