Our Innate Power

By Eric Thompson, Subtle Energy Sciences

Every storm has a name for its own power.

The Haudenosaunee called it orenda.

Not a god. Not a spirit. A force alive in things.

Rock, river, wind, warrior, word: all of it carries orenda in different measure.

A great tree holds more than a blade of grass. A roaring rapid holds more than a still pond.

The word travels under different names across the Six Nations.

Mohawk, Cayuga, and Oneida speakers called it orenna or karenna.

The Tuscarora called it urente. The Huron called it iarenda.

In 1902, a Tuscarora-born ethnologist named J.N.B. Hewitt gave the concept its English life.

He worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology, translating what elders and knowledge-keepers had told him for years.

He published his findings in American Anthropologist, calling orenda a “mystic potence,” a term he said no English word, not even magic, could fully hold.

For Hewitt, this was not simply superstition but a working theory of causation.

Where European thought asked what moved the wind, Haudenosaunee thought asked whose orenda moved it.

A storm doesn’t happen to the world. It expresses the world’s own intention.

Hewitt found kin ideas everywhere he looked.

The Sioux called their version wakan. The Shoshone called theirs pokunt. The Algonquian nations called theirs manitou.

Different peoples, watching the same aliveness, and giving it a name.

Power, in this world, isn’t something you have. It’s something you are, in a degree the world can measure.

If a storm has orenda, so do you.

The question worth sitting with isn’t whether the force is real. It’s how much of it you’re actually creating from.