Becoming a Real Human Being with Ilarion Merculieff

Welcome to Becoming a Real Human Being, with Ilarion Merculieff

Ilarion is the President of GCILL, the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways. A beloved teacher and mentor, he is the convener of Wisdom Weavers of the World, a coalition of 13 Indigenous Elders from cultures around the world that he convened in 2017 to deliver a message to humanity. He is a bringer of ancient wisdom and culture into the modern world: a bridge and translator, which is in fact the responsibility carried in his traditional name: Kuuyux. Among the last generation of Unangans to be raised in a traditional manner, Ilarion grew up on St.Paul Island, among the Pribiloff Islands of the Bering Sea, 300 miles off the coast of Alaska. Here the Unangan people have been living for nearly 10,000 years, and created a thriving and prosperous culture in a difficult climate. The Unangans built the most densely populated linear shoreline in North America, and traversed the Pacific to the tip of South America in their skin boats, ooloxtahns (two holed kayak-pronounced oo-loxt-tawn), and igyaxs (one holed kayak) pronounced ick-yax). Ilarion had an acha, a traditional mentor, from the age of 4 to the age of 13, who trained him in what it meant to be a hunter, and an Unangan man. At an early age he learned to silence his mind and drop into his heart, becoming, as the Unangans say, "a real human being."

In this course, he shares parts of his story, the incredible beauty of the Unangan culture, and an Indigenous perspective vital to us in these modern times.