Believing and Knowing

"All it takes is faith and trust..." (and a little bit of pixie dust)- Disney's Peter Pan

Faith and trust, belief and knowing. The similarities are many and the differences subtle. It was very interesting to discuss belief and knowing in class on Tuesday. It's a big concept to wrap your mind around and I'm still working on it. These are my thoughts:

I know I am a female homo sapien. But that is because I have faith in the people who decided that it was the proper name for the species and gender I belong to.

I also know that Jesus Christ is my Savior. But it is not because I have faith in the "fact based" historians or the Discovery Channel specials, I have faith in Him, in God, in the comfort that comes with the whole set of beliefs that the Catholic Church has passed on.

"Believing" tends to connote that there is something "assumed," that someone or something has persuaded you to have faith in a certain "truth." Beliefs often shift, grow, disappear, and continuously change.

I don't think knowing and believing are completely separate things. Knowledge can help clarify beliefs just as belief can be the driving factor to find knowledge in a certain area of your life.

The Taiga Tribe--- It's not real!

I had intended this post to provide some historical background on the tribe to which the main character in Power belongs, but I have discovered that it is a fictional tribe- not even a wikipedia entry on it!
That being said, I will now discuss one of the general native American beliefs that have been included in the first section of the novel: the importance of animals.
To Indians, animals weren't just cute and cuddly pets, they served a purpose. The buffalo was a sacred animal on the plains and when the Spanish introduced the horse to the tribes, it revolutionized their way of life.
In Power, Omishto speaks about Aunt Ama and how she believes that the cat was born when she was and is with her for protection. Our narrator wishes she could have been born at the time when animals were 'assigned' to a person. She believes that even if there was an animal with her, it hadn't done her much good. This is a testimony of how she feels split between the world she lives in and the world she came from- the Taiga tribe, where animals weren't just twinkling eyes in the darkness, but sacred protectors of humans.