Plenty Coup and the notion of Ontological Collapse

Our World is dying. Like the Native Americans who survived the holocaust that was the arrival of Western civilization in the new world, we must learn to “cross the bridge” between two worlds.

Plenty Coup, the Great Crow Chief, who presided over his people moving to the reservation after the last buffalo was gone. In doing so he faced the collapse of the space in which all meaning arose for himself and his people. When asked what happened afterward, Plenty Coup’s response was “nothing”.  It is a strange statement given that Plenty Coup, went on to do many things including becoming a farmer and a writer and going to Washington DC to represent his people in Congress.  But, to him, nothing else happened because the narrative of his world as he had known it and everything that had given meaning to his individual self – the stealing of horses and the planting of Coup Sticks upon his enemies - no longer existed.

The word paradigm can be applied in many ways. But true world-shaking global Paradigm shifts don’t come along very often.   The certainty of our old Paradigms has been shattered. And with it our Epistemological certainty. Like Plenty Coup we are experiencing the collapse of the Space in which meaning occurs.

The Quantum Leap: Inquiry, Identity and the key to Transformation

Plenty Coup inquired:   What is the role of the Warrior? To protect the people. Learn to write and to farm. What enabled Plenty Coup to carry on was a shift in Identity. The crow were great warriors. Yet in the new world everything thing that had defined greatness was gone: the planting of “coup sticks” which was the honorable killing of those who crossed crow boundaries as well as the stealing of horses was now verboten. Plenty Coup contemplated the role of the warrior and recognized that it was to protect the people. He realized that the best way the warrior could protect his people was to take up farming and writing.

We are terrified by not knowing.  

But as we saw with Plenty Coup, he went on living even though he couldn’t see across the bridge between the two worlds when he first began to cross it (and even though he never recovered his fundamental sense of his original identity).