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Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton on Indigenous Wisdom
By Matthew Fox 3/06/2026 |
Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day were good friends. He admired her life and work, and she visited him on several occasions at the monastery and at his hermitage. They had friends in common, including Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan who had a strong mentor relationship to
Merton. |
Merton frequently contributed articles to Dorothy’s newspaper The Catholic Worker, including an essay on “The Root of War Is Fear” in October, 1961. In a letter to her he wrote: “I think it is a scandal that most Christians are not solidly lined up with you. I certainly am.” One observer wrote that |
“Thomas Merton & Dan Berrigan” — two men of the cloth, both courageous activists. Photo by Jim Forest, November 1964, on Flickr. |
Dorothy’s “prophetic witness to non-violence and pacifism disturbed many in the Catholic Church” but “challenged and inspired others, including Merton.” Dorothy Day wrote the Foreword to Merton’s book Ishi Means Man, which is a meditation on the Native American plight at the hands of European Americans. A number of the essays in Ishi Means Man were first published in The Catholic Worker, and in her succinct Foreword she alludes to
that. She confesses to how she was raised on the cowboys vs. Indian stories of America and Hollywood where the Native American was always the “aggressor and villain.” She read about how Indians tortured French Jesuit missionaries in Canada and how Indians were the enemy. She laments how we forgot how Indians assisted the earliest
colonists. |
“Ishi’s life stands as the final breath of a vanished culture and a silent witness etched into the memory of humanity.” @Past-Visions | She talks of her “abysmal ignorance” toward
Indians that was finally shattered when she read a book by John Collier on Indians of the Americas. She states how much “primitive cultures” have to teach us today and closes with a debt of gratitude to Merton for his book. |
Ishi was the last survivor of the Yahi people who were hunted for a bounty on their head in California for fifty years. His entire family went into hiding but after they all died, Ishi surrendered to the white race on August 29, 1911. He lived four years longer with an anthropologist’s family in Berkeley, California. In 1964 a book by Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America recounted this history, and that triggered Merton’s book. Merton begins his essay on Ishi this way: Genocide is a new word. Perhaps the word is new because technology has now got into the game of destroying whole races at once. The destruction of races is not new—just easier. Merton celebrates the courage, resourcefulness, and the sheer nobility of these few stone age men struggling to preserve their life, their autonomy and their identity as a people. Merton compared the Ishi story to the Vietnam War then raging in the sixties. Viet Nam seems to have become an extension of our old western frontier, complete with enemies of another ‘inferior’ race…. What a pity that so many innocent people have to pay with their lives
for our obsessive fantasies. |
He praises indigenous ritual for accomplishing a full integration into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly…. One fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars. He praised recent revelations from an archaeological find
in |
Modern Mayan players of the 3,500-year-old Mesoamerican pok-ta-pok game. Wikimedia Commons |
Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley for a culture that possessed “almost total neglect of the arts of war.” In another essay Merton says that in fighting indigenous peoples, “We have not understood their playful modes. We have fought Eros.” A fear of the via positiva? All dualism makes a foe of Eros. Indigenous wisdom, which
has been called “aboriginal Mother Love,” does not despise play or Eros. To be continued. |
Queries for Contemplation Do you think we are still fighting eros? Or distorting it? Do you seek ritual
that is in step with the universe and the liturgy of the stars? What lessons do you take from the Ishi story? |
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