Indigenous Ability

Nea kaht’u mak’u meek’u, Nea t’zare tubuniti, Nea t’zare supikaahkat’u. Scratching your head at that? It’s OK, Comanche is a dying language and I’ll offer the translation in a moment; the video will provide the tonal qualities. Warrior cultures the world over, past and present, make much of living ready, being ready. It is not mere lip-service. Something to be scanned in an online article, nod assent to and then proceed to the next bit of trivia to scan and nod to. Awareness, presence, aliveness is something to aspire to. Something to strive for. Something that must be worked for. Warrior cultures have always recognized the easy temptation to make “eyes open, senses alive” go dead by distraction or being lost in one’s own thoughts. Remember, lost in thought is lost in the world. Sentries must be awake; you are the sentry of your own life. Scouts must see sign, you are the pathfinder of your own life. Warrior Cultures asked Warriors not fo...

“Nuusukat’u tenap’i yukar’u.” [“The Happy Man Moves About.”] Humans can focus on only one object at a time—this is attentional bias. What feels like multi-tasking is actually a series of attentional shifts. We have a blindness to the duration of attentional shifts hence the perniciousness of distraction technology. We witness this when we see someone stare at their phone far longer than they realize, all the while forgetting that our own peer at the screen is likely equally misjudged in duration. Consider post-accident reports of “I only looked away for a second.” Not likely true, but the blindness has us assume it as true. We have less control over attention than we would like to presume. This is one reason why mulling and stewing in negative/peevish thoughts manifest more often while alone—few human “distractions” to veer our thoughts. Alone time can lead to cycles of repetitive thoughts, if they are n...

There are so many examples of blind training, or blindfold training that the paltry examples below don’t even scratch the surface. ·         Blindfolded Chi Sao [“Sticky Hands”] training among Wing Chun practitioners. ·         Blindfolded disassembly and re-assembly of the M-16 by armed forces cadre. ·         Blindfolded judoka and jiu-jitsu practice. ·         Emperor Joseph I, challenging the young Mozart to play the violin with one-finger, and to play the clavichord with a cloth lain on top of the keyboard. [BTW-The young prodigy did both unerringly.] And perhaps most intriguingly, to me, at least… ·         There was a “war game” engaged in by many American Indian tribes to prepare the young for all contingencies. The Comanche called the practice Pui Wha’i . Essentially, Pui Wha’i invol...

First, a definition. Tubunitu is a Comanche word/phrase/command to be awake. In the cultural context it is less about the opposite state of being asleep than it is about full-engagement, full-awareness of your environment. It’s actually a little more complicated than that but we’ll come back to Tubunitu . For those who wish to nail the pronunciation-the above spelling is phonetic as there is no written Comanche language, but to nail the “u’s” instead of pursing your lips outward, pull them back towards your teeth when you give voice to the “u” vowel and you’re good to go. Legend and anecdotal evidence abounds in regard to the scouting, woodcraft, bush craft, outdoor awareness survival skills of hunter-gatherer cultures of the past and extant hunter-gatherers. Some of these stories border on the supernatural to our eyes and ears as many of these accounts seem to stretch credulity to the breaking point. And I have no doubt that in some cases exaggeration takes an upper hand b...