Indigenous Ability

Today’s sermon will weave a tale of housecats, early American colonists’ observations regarding battle-prowess in Native Americans, gang-bangers, good ol’ boy hunters, fox-hunters in the Old West, gamers and screen-users, Afghan Combat studies and, if we’ve done our job right, make a case for making risk part and parcel of cogent combat training. Let’s start with the adorable housecat, Felis catus . Study after study has recorded that outdoor housecats are responsible for an astonishing amount of depredation. Any of us who own one of these “awesome prowling machines” [tip of the hat to Les Claypool] is aware that they can go through chipmunks, field mice, and birds like nobody’s business but…the story is deeper than that. For every kill you see, there are likely a double handful that you were not privy to witness.  If you want the skinny on just how serial-killer-esque the common cat can be, Pete Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center authored a book on ...

Let’s start with a little Old West history and then walk that into a mighty pragmatic drill-set that trains sensitivity, sensory deprivation, and overall resourcefulness. Our first stop is a little horse-breaking practice that will upset horse-whisperers everywhere. In the wild and wooly old days horses were mighty useful companions and work-mates, but, and this may come as a surprise to many, horses don’t pop out of the womb with a hankering to be ridden. In our best-case scenario, a young horse is acclimated to people, raised around people, seen other horses ridden, and even then, the initial acceptance of bit, saddle and rider is still a slow process. This rider-acceptance is all the more recalcitrant in a freshly captured mustang, a wild adult horse that has not been socialized to humans let alone fostered any unfulfilled dreams of losing its liberty and having a curiously garbed ape perched atop its back. Compassionate “gentling” takes some time. Gentling is the...

[The below is a brief sample from the The Suakhet'u Program —Our Indigenous Based Warrior Awareness Program. The Program provides in-depth description of the practices, their use in cultural context, and how it was originally trained. We demonstrate each practice/exercise with a step-by-step series that enables you to bring a bit of this lost wisdom into your own lives.  Some practices border on the edges of “just beyond.” That is, when originally encountered by Western minds or confronted with little information the skills have been chalked up to something supernatural. Some things are not so much supernatural as outside current context or simply misunderstood. To de-bunk the “supernatural” factor each practice will also provide the current state of research regarding how such “beyond” practices may in fact be not so much supernatural as highly trainable. The below offering is a highly condensed version of the approach. Where the “Training Hack” at the end o...

How’s your eyesight? Good? Fair to middlin’? How’s your eyesight underwater with no diving mask on? How about if I told you there may be a way to gain a bit of improvement in both above-water and below water environments? An improvement that calls for a remarkably short time investment on your part? Stay with me as we learn a thing or two from the Moken. The Moken [literally “sea people” or “sea nomads” or “sea gypsies”] are an Austronesian people that inhabit the 800 some odd islands of the Mergui Archipelago that are claimed by both Burma and Thailand. The Moken garner almost their entire livelihood from the Andaman Sea. You may have read about them in the pages of National Geographic or seen them in videos making lengthy hunting dives free of breathing apparatus, diving fins, or diving masks. Images of them moving agilely about on the sea floor are beautiful and inspire wonder [and a bit of envy in this viewer.] The human eye has evolved to ...