On the Problem of Being White or Indigenous

A Canadian fellow named Tad Hargrave posted a piece of writing to Facebook which I will replicate here for continuity of your experience of this -

"Dear White Men,
White is not skin colour. And there was a time when you were not white. White is new. White is amnesia. White comes from a particular place and a particular time.

There was a time when you were French, English, Irish, Scottish, Russian, Croatian and more. And there was a time before that when there were no nation states and no clean borders when you would have known yourself by some word that likely just meant 'the people'. It was a time of elders, deep culture, language given to you by the land. This is more you than 'white' is.

Whiteness is the recent amnesia that stops you from remembering this. Your deep ancestors have more in common with the world's remaining indigenous people than they do with you. No matter what others say, you come from something beautiful. You have indigenous roots in you just as real as any other culture. You didn't ask to be born into these times where people who look like you are dealt a mixed hand of obscene privileges and immense poverty, you were borne here by those ones who came before you, planted here in these times, their best response to the world as it is. You are the way they love this world, hundreds of generations pouring their love into the spiral of time and fashioning you to redeem those forgotten ones, to weave back together the torn fabric of human culture and to use the tools at your disposal to remake kinship with your human brothers and sisters, the non-human world and everything unseen.

White men have done terrible things to this world in the name of many seemingly noble causes and you weren't born into this world to feel guilty. You were planted here as a response to them.
Being white doesn't mean you're bad, it means a sort of imposed forgetting.

Whiteness is the shrink wrap placed around your soul; a soul that wants to be bigger. Whiteness is the thing that keeps you from remembering those old ones who sent you here and keeps them from recognizing you when they see you. Whiteness is sameness. Whiteness is the end of diversity. Whiteness is the spell of the eternal. Whiteness whispers in your ear, "It's always been like this." Whiteness is among the most recent steps in the making of Empire. Whiteness is the shroud woven to cover your still living cultures and your indwelling but uncultivated capacity for culture-making.

Ask yourself, 'When did my ancestors start knowing themselves as white? Who benefited from this? Under what historical conditions did this happen? Are those conditions being repeated anywhere else in the world today? At whose expense was this done? What stopped when this started?" Ask yourself those things, ask those things of the world and be staggered by what you find.

White is not skin colour and there was a time when you were not white. White is new. White is amnesia. White comes from a particular place and a particular time."

To which I add - You are capable of recovering your indigeneity and losing your "white" by simply shifting back to the mindset that made your ancestors indigenous and applying that mindset with diligence to your current "place", your land and water and air. That is how and where you now need to be indigenous. Indigenous is a matter of your viewpoint, your attitude, and your engagement, while "white" may well be the absence of those things, the "amnesia".

There are tough times coming but they will be much less tough and they may be survivable if you can remember how to be, and respect being, indigenous. Then you will become neo-indigenous. It means to be a person of ethical, moral, spiritual, physical, intellectual, and actual relationship with the "new" land that you occupy. It means to have an eco-ethical view of life and living along with how your 'place" fits into all that and you into it.

My great thanks and deep respect to Tad Hargrave for writing the piece quoted here (and quoted, I should add, with Tad's permission)

Keep your candles lit and your powder dry, and..
thanks for being there and reading this,

The Smokemaster

The Internal Work That We All Have To Do... For Human Survival

The cat in this picture is an American Short Hair Tabby - meaning very hardy because it could/does have any number of other breeds in the genetic mix and any color you can imagine. She’s a mutt cat and, in this case, has coloring that is a collision of so called “wild” coloring with calico, and her name is Amber Smoke. She’s also intelligent, skillful, self-aware - yes, that’s what I meant - she IS capable of distinguishing herself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals - and she has a personality. She feels pleasure, and pain, and she will fight for her life. She does things as a matter of preference and personal style that her siblings do not do. In this case she transited from the bedroom to my chest in about 1 second of blindingly fast movement, stopped instantly without apparent effort, and circled up on my arm, which extended as soon as she arrived. She is demonstrating absolute trust in another animal that is 62 times larger than her by weight, is not one of her kind (and she knows it) but who takes the time to connect with her and “understand” her as best it can, and that has demonstrated a high level of trustworthiness to her. This is all in proper keeping with the ancient bargain that was agreed between our kinds millennia ago.

We live in a world where we as humans are surrounded by intelligent, sentient beings of other types, the intelligence of some of whom we are only just developing our awareness of. A number of those other beings are what we call domesticated, meaning they have become, by matter of breeding over time, accustomed to, and desire, the company and care of humans. In some cases they wouldn’t survive without it. For most of them this bargain was struck many millennia ago, and most modern humans have no inkling of that time or that bargain. They just think, as with much of nature, that they exist for human dominion and service. If modern humanity remembered those bargains, remembered the times and conditions under which those bargains were struck, respected our companions in the life walk - or more, respected ALL of the beings in the life walk regardless of such a compact or not, made more of an effort to live WITH them rather than OVER them in an assumed position of superiority, made the simple effort to understand them and communicate with them, in community, we could not and would not have done to the planet what we most certainly have done in our hedonistic pursuit of personal pleasure and power.

When I tell people we cannot save our species from the changes that are coming unless that we critically rethink how we “live with ourselves, each other in community, and the planet as a whole”, when I tell people that the first and most important change is a “deep cultural” change that has to happen in our own minds and lives, when I tell people that we must undergo a “conscious evolution”… this is what I am talking about. We need to respect all life enough to accept their right to be here as equal to ours and to make the effort to communicate with them just as they communicate already with their own species and possibly others in the great sphere of life. I hope this helps some of you understand. THIS IS THE INTERNAL WORK that must be done (and should have been done long before this) for our species to survive.

Keep the candles and powder dry, tough times are coming. Thanks for being there and being you.

The Smokemaster

The REAL issue could make the Anthropocene the shortest epoch in planetary history!

Most of the U.S. is aware of climate change but 90% think - 1) it doesn't apply to them, or 2) they can't do anything about it, or 3) it's a bunch of political bullshit (aka they're in denial). All of those viewpoints are grievously in error.

If we understand that WE are part of a materially finite system of life AND, at the same time, a human created system of social and material process that has foundational requirements (capitalism - endless growth, endless consumption, endless waste with no impact) that cannot be satisfied in a materially finite system, and we have pushed out to the limits of that materially finite system, then we realize we must make some choices. Failure/refusal to make a choice is a de facto choice in the negative, so... If we accept the current scientific understandings in climate, weather, ecology (including habitat for all of life on Earth), human habitat specifically, agroecology, paleo-climate, and more, then there are basic, systemic principles that apply to all of that life -

1) Climate and weather are the seasonal and real-time manifestations of Earth's constant energy balancing act - and more energy is entering and being retained by the system... unbalanced. As a result we WILL be facing and dealing with ever more violent and sudden energy balancing activities as planetary feedback systems try to balance increasingly out of balance energy profiles globally. Laws of physics applied on the global scale.

2) All living things on Earth have varying "zones" of conditions within which their life is possible - at the center of which their life is "ideal". Those zones are defined by temperature, moisture availability, nutrient availability, and shelter conditions (conditions which protect the life form from extremes of habitat condition and allow the life form to "rest"). We could ( and do) call this the "Goldilocks Zone" - where conditions are "just right".

3) Given that all life forms have a Goldilocks Zone, not all Goldilocks Zones are the same. If living conditions in a given location change so as to exceed the Goldilocks Zone limits, the affected organism suffers what is called a "loss of habitat". That organism must either move to new effective habitat, adapt to the current changed habitat, or die. A form of adaptation would include being protected by another organism.

4) Due in part to human activities over the last 100-200 years conditions for all of life on Earth are now changing rapidly and exceeding the Goldilocks Zone of many species alive today. Some species are moving, some are attempting to adapt, many are dying. The changes are accelerating and/or are moving much faster than predicted/anticipated. As a result the changes are too fast for many species to adapt, which means that they must either move, be protected, or die.

Because we are in an increasing exponential curve regarding the level and scope of life-threatening impact now occurring, the choices that we make in the next 5 years in relation to this basic and foundational knowledge of the systemic impact of our ecologically unguided and self-centered choices and actions over the previous two centuries, will affect all life on Earth immediately and the ability of Earth to continue to sustain carbon-based life as we know it for the next 100,000 years... and YES, this does include human life.

The actions needed are wrenching and quite realistically civilization ending. A complete cessation of all industrial capitalist activities. A complete reconsideration of how and what living on a planet with finite resources means for humanity and the life it is utterly dependent upon for it's sustenance. A complete reorientation of the human supporting food system. The magnitude of change rests on the magnitude of overall impact to carbon based life's ability to thrive on Earth at all. At best the saving grace for humanity may be aboriginal cultures that haven't entirely lost their sense of who they are and where they came from, and worst case, the extremophiles of Earth's Tree of Life, such as the amazing array of life found around highly toxic and anoxic deep sea high-heat thermal vents along volcanic fissures may be the only things that make it through

Welcome to what may well be the end of the shortest epoch in global history - the Anthropocene!