Native Thoughts on Good & Evil

This set of passages is taken from Seven Arrows, written by Hyemeyohsts Storm:

"Aaai ya hey!" exclaimed Yellow Robe. "...Do you know why the Center Pole in the Great Lodge is Forked?"

"No," answered Hawk. "No I do not."

"There is a Twinness about man," began Yellow Robe. "A Twinness of his nature. And there have always existed the Twin Parts of the People. It is always the Other Man who does not understand, or the Other Man who is the one at fault. This Other Man is represented by the Forked Tree, the Center Pole of the Sun Dance. It is Forked, but Both Parts of this are One Thing. Leaves are left upon the Forked Tree as a Sign to the People that these things of Twinness mirror Twinness again within the People. The Two Forks look exactly the same. And each Fork branches into many leaves that are acactly the same. But the question is always, which Reflection is which? Which one am I? Or am I both? It is a great Teaching, and that is why it is symbolized in the building of the Sun Dance Lodge. It has healed the wounds between many divided Peoples, and has brought these many different kinds together in brotherhood within the Renewal Lodge."
...
"One Half of you loves, and the Other Half of you at times hates. This is the Forked Medicine Pole of Man. The clever thing the Medicine has taught us here is this. One Half of you must understand the Other Half or you will tear yourself apart. It is the same with the Other Half of any People who live together. One must understand the Other, or they will destroy each other. But remember! Both Halves must try to understand. Even within yourself it is hard to know which of the Forks is which. 'Now Why did I do that?' One Half of you asks the Other Half. You do things quite often which you do not mean to say or do, sometimes to yourself and sometimes to others. But you would not kill yourself for these mistakes, would you? I am quite certain that you would not. Yet there are those who have done this, who have killed either themselves or others. These are men who have not learned. An entire People can be like this. These People and men are not Full, they are not Whole."
...
"These People [that we visited] had been taught by the Black Robes that good and evil existed as separate things. We talked with them about this philosophy and discovered their confusion. They had these two things set apart. But they are not separate. These things are found in the same Forked Tree. If One Half tries to split itself from the Other Half, the Tree will become crippled or die. These People we discovered were trying to split this Tree with their law. But you cannot split these things with law. Rather than taking this Barren Way, we must tie together the paradoxes of our Twin Nature with the things of the One Universe."
...
"No, my son, there is no such thing as good and bad. This is only a tool used by the white-men to create fear among themselves. It is only the man who searches for good who will also discover things that he will perceive as bad. If this man then tries to dictate his own perception of what is good to others, he will ultimately become a bad man himself. And now here is the next paradox, which is the Other Twin. The man who dictates his own perception of what is bad to otherse is also bad. One is mirrored into the other. Because in truth they are one of the same Forked Pole, and are always perceiving the mirrored image of themselves."

Analysis: Other than the differences in terminology (Twinness vs. Yin/Yang), this could have come from a Taoist text. Part that I didn't quote (because it would have meant including enough passages to explain the Sun Dance) says that Good and Bad come and go in cycles. That these two are "Twins" of the same whole, and cannot be separated. Ancient Celtic legends often contain similar themes (when I run across one again, I'll probably post it). I suspect that the reason for this is that these people had not yet begun to see themselves as Separate from Nature. They saw themselves as a Distinct Element of Nature, but not as separate. And in Nature, there is no good or bad except relative to something else. Why should modern human society be different? Because we place importance on labels. Human. Natural. Good. Bad. True. False. The label is not important; the thing itself is.