**Abstract**

This chapter presents a general background of the traditional and religious cultures of Africans and the Lakota of North America. Relying on pertinent works such as *Black Elk Speaks* and *Things Fall Apart*, the author shows parallels between both religious traditions. The Lakota and the Africans represent people who had learnt to live in harmony with nature before the advent of colonialism. Evident in the two religious traditions are important ecological themes or ideas that need to be revisited. These ideas are conceptualized in terms of the anthropocentric, theocentric and cosmic/environmental. These three 'realms', described by the author as *Costheanthropic,* represent the emphases on community, God, and the physical environment, respectively. All three exist in a unity of relationship. The author laments the hitherto misrepresentation of this type of relationship to the physical and non-human world as animism, nature worship or earth cult. The ecological relevance of the *Costheanthropic* worldview is rather compared to Pope Francis' emphasis, in the encyclical *Laudato Si*′, on the theme of human relationship with the rest of creation. Both the African and Lakota traditions, as well as other indigenous traditions, deserve further in-depth study towards a worldview that invites humanity to greater ecological consciousness.

**Keywords:** Africa, Lakota, religion, ecology, indigenous, Costheanthropic

### **1. Introduction**

It is important today to recall that traditional religions and cultures of the world have over many centuries evolved ways of living in harmony with the physical environment. That is why we are still here, living on this planet. Works of religious traditions ought to now attract significant attention at the highest level of scholarship. Two examples of such traditional religions and cultures are the North American Lakota culture and the African culture. Both traditions are well described independently in the published works *Black Elk Speaks* and, among others, *Things Fall Apart*.

Although am an African, I find *Black Elk Speaks* very appealing. The Lakota culture may appear to be one of the most distant from Africa; yet there appear to be parallels with the African tradition. The religious traditions depicted in *Black Elk Speaks* go beyond mere representations of the Lakota culture of North America. Similarly, the precolonial tradition presented in *Things Fall Apart* is more than the cultural practices of the Ibo tribe of West Africa—specifically south eastern Nigeria. Both represent traditions shared by a people who had learnt to live in harmony with nature before the advent of

colonialism. Are there ecological features in the religious tradition depicted in *Black Elk Speaks* and in the African religious tradition? As a background, it is helpful to point out briefly the socio-political context of *Black Elk Speaks* and that of traditional Africa.

#### **1.1 Socio-political and cultural context**

Both the Lakota and African societies faced colonialism as well as socio-economic and cultural intrusion. Stoeber ([1], p. 612) notes that the collaborative authorship of *Black Elk Speaks* is "complicated by the issues of colonial repression that Black Elk needed to navigate to make his voice heard…" However, the experience of colonialism depicted in *Black Elk Speaks* goes beyond politics and economics [2]: "… for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer, and the sacred tree is dead." Rather, colonialism would have had much cultural and religious impact on the Lakota people, as was the case in Africa, beyond the economic and political. African authors in the colonial and post-colonial eras have similarly struggled to express their traditional ways through the lens of the education they received from the colonialists. Similar to *Black Elk Speaks,* colonialism in the African experience went beyond politics and economics: Achebe [3] writes, for example: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."1 Note the similarity between the above statement and the words of Black Elk quoted earlier.

### **1.2 Aim/purpose of this paper**

The purpose of this paper is to first show a similarity, ultimately ecological and religious, between elements of the indigenous spirituality evident in *Black Elk Speaks* and an African traditional view of the world. I hope to first conceptualize some of the major themes that emerge from *Black Elk Speaks*, specifically the anthropocentric, theocentric and cosmic/environmental. Each of those three 'realms' represent the emphases on community, God, and the physical environment, respectively, which are similarly present in some African religious worldviews.<sup>2</sup>

This brief paper will not focus on tangential issues surrounding these two traditions. For example, there is controversy over the authorship of *Black Elk Speaks.* There is also dispute over the validity of speaking about a single African perspective – given the many tribes that make up the continent. Others have adequately discussed such matters [1, 6–8]. The view of this paper is that *Black Elk Speaks* and *Things Fall Apart,* as well as other similar writings about or from the perspectives of indigenous peoples, generally contribute important ecological ideas that need to be revisited and may otherwise be lost forever.

<sup>1</sup> Achebe [3] here voices his view on colonialism in his traditional African society. Also, in his book *Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa*, Mazrui [4] argues that although colonialism appeared initially to be only political and economic, it fundamentally had a cultural and spiritual impact on Africans.

<sup>2</sup> For want of a better expression I use the word 'realm', but more significantly I will use the term "Costheanthropism" to describe the unity of the anthropocentric, theocentric and environmental/cosmic realms mentioned above. The term is a combination of Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos, to represent the above three aspects of reality in a unity of relationship. Costheanthropic is the adjectival form of that word. I first used the term in a previous research study [5]. (Costheanthropos is in line with Raimon Panikkar's synthesis of the human, physical and ultimate realities, in terms of a "cosmotheandric" principle).

This paper is divided into five main sections or parts. Section 1 will be followed by a brief review of *Black Elk Speaks* to tease out the Costheanthropic perspective. The same will be done from an African religious worldview. A statement on the ecological relevance of both traditions forms Section 4 before the conclusion.3
