The Red Road is how many modern indigenous people refer to their practice of ancient indigenous spirituality . Upon hearing the term the Red Road many people mistakenly think the Red Road refers to the red race. This is not the case, the Red Road refers to the color of blood, which is the same for humans as for all mammals. Blood is sacred because it carries the treasure of our genetic code, which goes all the way back to the beginning of life. This is why indigenous spirituality refers to all life as “our relations.” When people hear an indigenous person pray or speak, and they refer to “our cousins the four legged,” or “our cousins the winged,” or “our cousins the insects,” or “our cousins who live in the waters of the world,” they may think it quaint or simple, but it is in fact scientific. We have more in common with our pets , or plants in our yards, than we do with our flatscreen TV’s or computers. All life is truly related.
The Red Road also refers to our individual lives, the time that we spend on our Mother Earth, starting with our birth and ending with our death. In indigenous spirituality, our life here on Mother Earth is our greatest gift from the Great Mystery. To truly appreciate and understand this gift we must understand and accept our mortality. To face your death is to understand that some day the sun will rise, and you will not be here to see it. You are mortal, your time here is finite. Even though we live and think as if we were immortal, we are not. By facing our mortality, we can begin to appreciate what a precious gift life is. Each sunrise is an opportunity for a new start, each day an adventure, where no one knows what will happen tomorrow.
Native spirituality is all about living in the here and now. You cannot change the past and the future is a mystery. To truly be on a path with heart, a spiritual warrior on the Red Road makes the most of each hour, minute, and second of his life. He realizes what a marvelous and mysterious place the world is, where each individual can be aware and interact with this multi-dimensional universe, to realize that the has his own individual relationship with the whole and how that whole has a relationship with the individual . Each person has a cosmic relationship with the earth, the moon, the sun, the universe and all it contains. The body of the Great Mystery is the universe, and you are inside that body, you are a part of that body.