The Invisible Ecosystem

In memory of Lance Foster, Ioway cultural teacher and indigenous archaeologist

Indigenous archaeology and cultural resource management communities just lost a light this week with the sudden passing of Lance Foster. Lance was the Tribal Preservation Officer for the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a tireless advocate for tribal historic preservation. He also established of the Ioway Tribal National Park, the largest tribal national park in the US, which remains totally under tribal sovereignty.

Lance attending the 75th anniversary at Effigy Mounds, courtesy of his public Facebook page

As quoted in a heartfelt and extensive tribute from the office of the Iowa State Archaeologist:

Suzanne (Wanatee) Buffalo poignantly expresses what she and many of us feel with Lance’s passing:

“This is a great loss to everyone, even those who never met him. He was a kind, wise, creative, generous, humble man who leaned into strong headwinds his entire life. Never wanting to be a leader, Lance invariably found himself being one in all the worthy endeavors he was involved with. He leaves behind big shoes to fill, but he also left good directions and sound advice to follow. I will miss my colleague and friend.

Thank you, Finds-What-Is-Sought, for sharing part of your life with us and for finding so many good, beautiful things in this world.”

I followed Lance’s frequent musings on Facebook for a decade. He inspired me personally and encouraged me to write more about my personal experiences of archaeology and the weird, a topic that often is pilloried as pseudoscience but was core to his own holistic understanding rooted in indigenous science. His encouragement is what led me to start this newsletter with its focus on the confluence of material realities and mystical existentialism.

Lance wrote a wonderful chapter in Jack Hunter’s Greening the paranormal that detailed his own perspective of mysterious happenings, and how they show up in our lives. Lance actually rejected the term “paranormal” completely as an etic reduction that says more about western dissociation than his lived reality as an archaeologist, a community member, and a human embedded in an ecology. He wrote, “The things we experience are every bit as normal as anything else, in the sense that being part of nature, of the mystery of the world” (2019, p.90).

Lance retells the story of Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow Nation, (1848-1932) who as a young man had an extraordinary encounter with a water spirit (Coup’s own term) on the Missouri River. It’s a creepy tale that tweaks at my boggle threshold, and is not mine to retell here, but the ethnographic remembrance makes clear that Plenty Coups reacted to his encounter by leaving a blessing, and not going back to “that bad place.”

He called it “the invisible ecosystem.”

The indigenous way to encounter the invisible ecosystem was summed up by Plenty Coups: when you encounter strange things in this life, you just acknowledge their right to be there, the same as anything else; you leave them along and you go on your way.

One of the most pertinent questions Lance asked is, at a time when researchers say they are ready to respect indigenous cosmologies, why are we not listening to what indigenous people actually say about the world(s) they experience? “I’m not talking about intuition and the imaginal here,” he clarifies, “I’m talking about something experienced as consensual reality by many clear thinking and practical people, seen by several at the same time, in the literature but also in my own life.”

Lance questioned the western compulsion to prove everything (show your receipts as we say today) rather than making space for mysteries to simply exist. He was also deeply skeptical of any institutional take on “the paranormal,” noting that every time something new about nature is discovered and “proved,” (replicated on demand) it’s quickly extracted, weaponized and packaged to make profits.

(The film Staring with Goats is a hilarious take on this theme, by the way, based on when the US military tried to bottle remote viewing for espionage. A more serious read is Chris Gray’s excellent 2010 paper “Consciousness studies: The emergent military-industrial-spiritual-scientific complex.”)

Instead, Lance Foster encourages us to live and let live. And rather than trying to extract and bottle the weirdness, what if the extraordinary in life inspired us to repair our relationship with all of nature?

One could argue that if one accepts the invisible ecosystem in reality, it should also be an extension of their ecosystem we know. Consequently, principles for living should also be an extension of ecology. Principles like trophic levels, niches, habitat, biodiversity, natural selection, invasive species, and so on. Everything exists in a web of relationships, a reality in Native American philosophy and social organization, and ecology. That could be the next step, rediscovering those relationships to the invisible spectrum, and repairing them (p.96).

These are my takeaways as I work on my own ancestral repair, spiritual discernment and ecological belonging: Acknowledge, honor, give space, and move on with a new appreciation of the mysteries of life.

Rest in Peace, Lance Foster. Thank you for your tenderness, your kindness, and your wisdom.