Gary Snyder’s poetic homage to Native American and East Asian cultures

Abstract

This essay explores some essential aspects of Native American thinking and culture, including its commonality with traditional East Asian thinking and culture, as these are described, analyzed and above all poetically expressed by the American eco-poet and essayist Gary Snyder. The key themes addressed here are those of the natives’ closeness to place (earth, land) versus the abstracted “location” of the white majority or (more generally) of the forces of colonization, driven by globalized capitalism; historical versus trans-historical (or pre-historic) time; rational-dualistic thinking versus an immanent earthly thinking that breaks down dualities while seeing the larger picture; a transcendent Judeo-Christian religion versus communal-immanent tribal religions; and an “educational” system based on teacher–student oppositions versus one grounded in an oral-narrative tradition that is indistinguishable from the community itself.