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