Category Archives: Indigenous Issues

Sociology of Knowledge & the “Discovery” of the Americas

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, racism, Sociology of Knowledge,

The story of exploration, “discovery,” conquest, and colonization of the western hemisphere By Europeans is incredibly important and incredibly interesting. The explorers were astonishingly brave. They sailed towards what many people thought was the edge of the world where they would fall off. Yet they did it. They plowed ahead no matter what the dangers. They were brilliant in their adaptions. Yet, also importantly, there was a dark side to the impact of conquest and colonization. That dark side, in my view, grew out of the soil of the Original Sin. Often it showed the utter brutality of the conquerors. The Christians, for examples, seemed profoundly barbarian.

We must always remember that all “knowledge” is coloured by ideology. This is what the sociology of knowledge is all about.  We see the world through the invisible lens of our own beliefs and presumptions. It is very difficult to avoid this. As Wade Davis in his brilliant book The Wayfarers, said “Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and interpretation is too often an expression of convenience.”

The study of anthropology was born out of a deep attitude of superiority, as did so much of “knowledge.”  People believed in an evolutionary model in which 19thcentury men like Herbert Spencer saw that societies developed in a linear progression from savagery to barbarism to civilization.

In time anthropologists learned a lot more and abandoned the error of their earlier ways. As Davis, reported,

“Such transparently simplistic and biased interpretation of human history, though long repudiated by anthropologists as an intellectual artifact of the nineteenth century, as relevant today as the convictions of Victorian clergy who dated the earth at a mere 6,000 years, has nevertheless proved to be remarkably persistent, even among contemporary scholars.’

Davis gave a powerful example of this in a  Canadian book, Disrobing the Aboriginal History: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, that ridiculed the very idea that the original inhabitants of the Americas had anything useful to offer to the Europeans they encountered. Here is what that book said, “Never in history has the cultural gap between two people’s coming into contact with each other been wider.” The profundity of this ignorance is astounding, and I will have a lot to say about how wrong this idea was as we meander through this issue. That does not mean the idea is not common and deeply pervasive.

It is pervasive because it is deeply embedded in the ideology of supremacy that grew out of the fundamental sin–White Male Human Supremacy has been the implicit underlying ideology of the west for centuries. It cascaded through the generations. It blinds everyone under its influence, both the alleged superiors and the presumed inferiors. Everyone has been infected. It makes the privilege invisible.

For generations indigenous peoples have been taught they are inferior. For generations white people have been taught they are superiors. And likewise, men are superior, and women inferior. Or that Christians are superior to all others. And finally, and still largely underappreciated, that humans are superior and animals and nature inferior. These attitudes are so pervasive that it is almost impossible to dissent. These assumptions are invisible. They imbue nearly everything that happens in the west. Any dissent from the predominant ideology is automatically seen as irrational if not insane. As Herbert Marcuse noted, dominant groups rarely acknowledge anything that undermines their dominance. They just don’t see it.

Members of the dominant group do not even see their privilege. This is just who they are.  Only those who relentlessly try to act like ideal impartial observers with fellow feeling and are armed with critical thinking skills are able to extract themselves from the influence of the dominant ideology and even then, only with great difficulty.

The Luxury Trap

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, The Simple Life

 

Like most big changes, farming arose gradually. It did not happen all at once. The change from hunter-gathering to farming occurred incrementally in small almost imperceptible steps.  Had the changes occurred rapidly the reaction of humans might have been very different. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on the stove. If you throw a frog into a boiling pot of water it will leap out immediately. In such a case no harm is done. The frog does not get seduced. If you place a frog into a cold pot of water and then turn on the element so that the pot is heated very slowly, the frog might stay in the pot until it boils to death. It does not notice the gradual changes until it is too late.

The change from hunting and gathering to farming happened slowly like that. Had it occurred rapidly humans would likely have jumped out before any harm was done. Where the change is gradual, humans can accept it and then become enmeshed in the new system.

Humans initially arrived in the Middle East about 70,000 years ago. For more than 50,000 years humans there were content. Humans did very well withoutagriculture. When humans started to settle more, perhaps because of the availability of food, their natural population control mechanisms started to produce more offspring as a result of hormonal changes.

The last Ice Age ended about 18,000 years ago as the climate warmed. Temperatures rose, but so did the amount of rainfall. The new climate was perfect for wheat and other cereals. People ate more of these cereals. They were not easy to eat. People could not eat the wheat and other cereals without first winnowing, grinding and cooking them. People began to carry the grains back to their temporary homes. No doubt some grains dropped to the ground. Some were lost, but others sprouted along human trails and campsites. Humans burned down forests to help desirable plants to grow and this also helped wheat to grow. As a result nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers started to give up their nomadic lifestyles and settled down into more permanent settlements. At first they likely stayed in one place only for short times, but in time, they stayed longer and longer as more and more cereals grew. Gradually hunter-gatherers added farming to their survival arsenal, without giving up foraging. Farming increased greatly. No one knows exactly when the decisive transition from hunting and gathering to farming occurred.

At first the humans probably stayed at their camps for about 4 weeks during the harvest season.  When wheat plants multiplied and spread through more areas of the Middle East the Homo sapiensstarted to stay put longer. Evidence of this has been found by scientists and historians. They have found evidence of stone houses and granaries for example.  The people learned to save some part of the harvest to sow the fields with seeds. Later they discovered how to plant seeds deeper into the ground and this produced more wheat.  Then the people adding hoeing and plowing to their techniques. Of course as the people put in more effort to improve their corps, they had less time to travel and hunt and gather. They never gave up foraging or hunting entirely, but people spent more and more time cultivating just a few crops.

As Yuval Harari said, “But by 8500 B.C. the Middle East was peppered with permanent villages such as Jericho, whose inhabitants spent most of their time cultivating a few domesticated species.”

Life changed slowly but over time dramatically, as more and more people became farmers. First the population began to grow. Remember that is not necessarily a good thing. In fact some have said that it is the worstthing!

As humans gave up the nomadic life women could have children every year. As Harari said, “Babies were weaned at an earlier age—they could feed on porridge and gruel.” Is that an improvement? Babies had to grow up faster to help in the fields. Lucky kids. Of course the extra mouths to feed wiped out the “benefits’ of having more food. That meant more fields had to be sowed. More work again.

More and more people began to move to towns and even cities. More close contact meant more diseases. Things got tougher. As Harari reported, “As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings , child mortality soared.” More dubious progress.

Even though many children died young, more children were being born than died. So the population increased. It appeared that things were good. Yet, the agricultural revolution was not an obvious success. As Harari said,

 

With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome.  Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 B.C. lived a harder lifethan the average person in Jericho of 9500 B.C. or 13,000 B.C. But nobody realized what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements,’ each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of the farmers.

 

All of these gradual changes ended up in disaster and no one noticed until it was too late to do anything about it. Like the frog in the pot of boiling water. People forgot what life had been like. People could not grasp the consequences of what they were doing, just like we in the modern social media digital age have not been able to comprehend how life is changing and too often assume, without good evidence, that things are getting better because we have more and faster computers.

Each of the changes the Homo sapiensmade required a little more work.     People thought the increased harvest would be worth the extra work. People worked harder, but they did not realize that with more children the “benefits” would have to be shared with more children. The extra “benefits” could not keep up with the extra burdens.

Are things so different today? How many modern “improvements” are just more powerful chains tying us to our personal air-conditioned prisons? How has the digital revolution improved our lives? Have our “time saving” devices saved time or squandered it?

Of course the newly minted farmers of the Agricultural Revolution did not understand that feeding children porridge instead of breast milk would weaken their immune systems just as more of them lived in crowded places where diseases were rampant. As Harari said, those “permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.” As well the increasing reliance on a single source of food exposed them to serious risks. Droughts now could be disastrous after people lost their foraging skills. As large granaries were needed to product the grain from bandits. As a result they had to spend more time “building walls and doing guard duty.”Not so much fun.

Humans screwed up. This has happened before and will happen again. As Harari said, “The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens today.” I know many young law students who join large law firms where they are expected to work inhuman hours in the pursuit of immense “billable hours” so that eventually they can retire and live the golden life. In time many of them realize they have pursued a chimera and their life is not worth living.

This is what Harari calls the “luxury trap”. Our luxuries become the prisons inside of which we live. Or as he put it,

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations…The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water under a scorching sun.”

It is requires a complex calculus to determine whether the life of the hunter-gatherer was better or worse than the farmer. People may disagree. But what is unarguable is that saying the life of European farmers was a vast improvement over the life of Indigenous people of the Americas, is a monumental assumption. It takes a stubborn over-confidence to stick to such a presumption.

 

History’s Biggest Fraud

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

 

For about 2.5 million years Homo sapiens were pretty content feeding themselves by hunting and gathering. During this time the plants and animals on which the humans dined lived without human intervention. Even though humans spread around the globe they continued their basic traditional means of finding food. They did that because their means of living were pretty darn good. As Yuval Harari asked, “Why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics?”If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

This changed about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapienslearned to manipulate the lives of a few animals and plant species to their “advantage”. At least they believed it was to their advantage. But was it?

Harari described the life of humans after the invention of agriculture this way,  “From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain, and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived—the Agricultural Revolution.”

This shift began in about 9,500-8,500 B.C. in the Middle East  of Turkey, Iran, and the Levant. It probably started with the domestication of wheat and goats. As Harari explained, “By 3,500 B.C. the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all of our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between about 9,500 and 3,500 B.C.—wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet, and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.”

At one time scholars believed that agriculture spread from this single source in the Middle East around the world, including the New World. Now most scholars agree that agriculture started up in other parts of the world without benefit of the Middle Eastern ancestors. For example, people in Central America domesticated maize and beans even though they knew nothing about wheat and pea cultivation in the Middle East. China domesticated rice, millet, and pigs. North American indigenous people cultivated pumpkin. In New Guinea the people domesticated sugar cane and bananas. In Africa they domesticated millet, sorghum, wheat, and rice. From these places agriculture spread around the globe.

The fact is that it is very difficult to domesticate plants and animals because few are good candidates. Where those species lived is where agricultural domestication began by very smart humans.

I have always thought, along with most other people, that agriculture was a tremendous advancement for human society. But was it?  Wendell Berry called agriculture one of the world’s worst disasters ever.  Yuval Harari came pretty close to saying this too. This is how he described agriculture:

“Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity.  They told a tale of progress fuelled human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often Spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.

That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers, knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.  The Agricultural Revolution enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible?  Neither kings, nor priests, or merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens rather than vice versa.”

 

As wild as these statements seem they do make sense. Look at the results. 10,000 years ago wheat was just a wild grass found only in a small area of the Middle East. Within a few thousand years it had spread around the world. Wheat became one of the most successful plants ever!  As Harari said, “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” Wheat sure was smart. Maybe humans not so much.

Now you could reverse this argument of Harari.  After all, since the domestication of wheat humans have prospered around the world so they now number nearly 8 billion. But the point Harari made it is that wheat and these other domesticated products did not really benefit individualhumans. They are no better of he claims. It did benefit the species because there are so many of us, but how does that benefit me?

As Harari said, It

“enabledHomo sapiensto multiply exponentially…This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of Homo sapiens? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution is a Trap.”

The Original Affluent Societies

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

 

Most people assume that hunter-gatherers had a much more difficult way of life than farmers. Indigenous people in North America were bothfarmers and hunter-gatherers in different places and different times. However, the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers was quite different from what many have assumed.

As Yuval Noah Harari explained in his book Sapiens,

“The hunter-gather way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers, an office clerks who followed in their footsteps.”

As we know people in modern societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week. In fact surprisingly perhaps, in the last couple of decades the average weekly workweek has been increasing. It seems the more “advanced” we get the more we work. What kind of advancement is that? Yet today, as Harari said,  “hunter-gatherers living in the most inhospitable of habitats—such as the Kalahari Desert—work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up to just three to six hours daily. In normal times this is enough to feed the band. It may well be ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.”

Harari  also pointed out that according to his research, “The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do.”

European people ate much less nutritious food than the Indigenous people they encountered in North America. At first contact, Europeans were surprised at how fit and healthy the indigenous people were. As Harari said,

“In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising—this has been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants.  Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty-four years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality…The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet.”

The reason for this is that foragers were not as dependent on one food as so many Europeans were. As a result they were much less likely to be ravaged by famine. If they suffered a loss of one of their staple foods the hunter-gatherers were easily able to switch to other species or move to a better area.

As Harari explained,

“Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements.”

Of course this became a serious problem when indigenous people in the New World were contacted by Europeans who had built up immunities to many of such infectious diseases. the Europeans  were able to spread their diseases quickly and with deadly efficiency to their indigenous hosts. Usually this was not done deliberately.

For all of these reasons Indigenous hunter-gathering societies were pretty good places to live. They were not perfect and we should never idealize them, but they were a lot better than many non-Indigenous people believed. Their prejudices against the Indigenous people were without foundation.

As Harari said, “The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working hours have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.”

We must as careful not to idealize them as we should be careful not to be biased against them. For example, in Paraguay there was a tribe of indigenous people that were called Achépeople. They were also hunter-gatherers and when an important member of their band died their custom was to kill a little girl and then bury the two together. If an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of society a young man would sneak up behind her and kill her with an axe-blow to the head. This does not sound ideal.

Yet Aché people had societies relatively free of violence. They smiled and laughed a lot. The things they valued the most were good social interactions and good friendships.  Interestingly this is exactly what modern research has demonstrated that this is precisely what leads to the happiest lives. If only we in the west could learn the truth of this.  It is also interesting that “the Aché were hunted and killed without mercy by Paraguayan farmers.” If only we could learn to be as smart as the hunter-gatherers.

We should always look at such societies without prejudice or bias. We should keep our blinkers off. As Harari said, “The truth is that Aché society, like every human society, was very complex. We should beware of demonizing or idealizing it on the basis of a superficial acquaintance. The Aché were neither angels nor fiends–they were humans. So, too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers.”

In any event, any presumption that Europeans were vastly superior to Indigenous people like so many people now seem to believe is entirely unjustified.

The Smartest People Ever?

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

I read a fascinating book called Sapiens that was written by Yuval Harari an historian from Israel. It was one of those books where I learned something new on every page. Harari doesn’t just think outside the box he doesn’t recognized boxes. He is an original thinker like few others.

Harari pointed out that usually in most habitats Sapiens did not feed themselves by hunting. Usually they gathered.  They were hunter-gatherers. Harari described it this way:

“In most habitats, Sapien bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter,’ gathering was Sapiens main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood, and bamboo.”

This not the romantic or idealized picture I had of our ancestors.  I thought they were tough courageous hunters. They were that. But more than that, they were scroungers.    But sometimes the idealized version of events we hold dear has to give ground to other truths. And sometimes we learn our ancestors were amazing. They were just as amazing, but  in ways we have never thought of before. Harari added to his description of them this way:

“Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximize the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about he growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded thunderstorms or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, now to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and now to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Masters of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely.

In other words, the average forager had wider deeper, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited  to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.”

To support this startling conclusion Harari said, “There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain actually decreasedsince the age of foraging.”

I admit I never thought of our  ancestors quite that way. I think the use of the feminine “she” in this quote is not just a nod to avoiding masculine pronouns . This process of foraging, or gathering, was led by women.  Women  were vital in this process. Most of those important jobs were performed by women, while the men went hunting. It reminded me of what I learned in Africa.  The women did the hard work of fetching water I (among many other tasks). The men sat under trees discussing important matters! Women were incredibly smart in hunter-gatherer societies.

In other words ancient Sapiens were smart. Perhaps the smartest in human history as Harari suggests. They had to be in order to survive in a very dangerous world in which they were far from the largest, fastest, or keenest observers. They had to be smart—very smart. And this is what indigenous people were like when Europeans first contacted them! Makes you wonder why anyone would presume they were smarter. Only a deeply entrenched bias could do that.

 

The Original sin

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, New Attitude to Nature

 

Some of my Catholic friends might be surprised that a heathen like me believes in original sin. But it’s true. It is just that it is a little different form the original sin they are supposed to believe in.

When Europeans arrived in North America, (they did not discover it for it had been there a very long time) they came with that a lot of baggage. In particular they came with arrogance epitomized by that famous European attitude of superiority. They were better than everyone and more important than everything else. Everything was subordinate to them. I think this attitude was best exemplified by Cecil Rhodes that famous English colonialist from Africa. He said, “We happen to be the best people in the world. And the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.”These attitudes led to the genocide of indigenous people, barbarous enslavement of African-Americans, domination of women by men, the debasement of all religions except their own nasty versions of Christianity, and the subjugation of nature to the will and power of men.  This genocide Tzvetan Todorov in his book The Conquest of America called the “the greatest genocide in history.” Those attitudes were the original sin of the western hemisphere—the Americas.

The original inhabitants of North America had a very different attitude. Their attitude was more like this:

“Native America is alive. Its roots stretch back 13,000 years…to America’s original explorers. New people who create a new world. From North to  South America distant peoples share one common belief a deep connection to Earth, sky, water and all living things.”

The original explorers of the western hemisphere were not Europeans. They came here long before then. They came before the Egyptians built the pyramids. They came before Christ was born. They were different. They avoided the original sin. Fundamentally, they had a different attitude to nature and to people. They were the ancestors to the Indigenous people of today.

Teresa Ryan, in a recent PBS documentary series, Native America,  put it well, “We are part of this forest as much as the forest is part of us.” This is a fundamentally different attitude to nature and to all living things in it.

Beau Dick, n the same series,  added to that: “All of our ceremonies illustrate that one notion connectedness— not only with our fellow beings with animals and other creatures, but with all of creation.”

This attitude I have called Affinity. This is my word. I have applied it to this philosophy because I wanted a convenient handle. I considered the expression “being-in-the-world” invented by Martin Heidegger. But his philosophy is very difficult and  I am not sure I entirely understand it. He really uses it to apply just to humans, so it seems to me, but it does latch onto the very important basic notion that we are not separate and apart from nature. We are not alienated from it. We not apart from the world; we are a part of the world! We cannot hope to understand humans unless we take into consideration that they are part of the world. But, in my view, unlike Heidegger’s, this applies to all beings not just human beings.

From this fundamental principle, so different from the Europeans who later invaded their territory, a multitude of important consequences flow. As the PBS documentary Native America, said, “From this deep respect for nature, people create great nations.” That does not mean they were perfect. Not at all. But they were different in important respects. They had a lot they could contribute to the invaders, and they had a lot to learn from them. It is however very difficult, as the Europeans found after they invaded, to learn from the other whom you despise or at least do not respect. Feelings of supremacy are not a sound basis for learning. This does not mean they learned nothing from their hosts. It is just that they could have learned so much more had their feelings of superiority been blunted.

Many of the nations in the New World grappled with war and peace. They “develop governments from dictatorships to a democracy that will inspire the United States constitution.” Yet amazingly, here comes that powerful feeling of superiority again, that same constitution contained racist presumptions of superiority that helped to install the original sin as the basis of their society and has to this day prevented the United States from healing from that fundamental sin against at least 3 groups of people; Native Americans and African-Americans, and lets not forget, women. Of course, these white men also presumed to be superior to women.  That was also part of the fundamental sin of white male supremacy that still haunts the United States,  Canada, and frankly this entire western hemisphere. Not that the other hemisphere is much better. The other aspect of white male supremacy is supremacy over all animals, and even, all of nature. This last bias is still the least understood of these presumptions, but I believe eventually we will catch on that this too was a powerful illusion. It too has had a profound effect the west.

Sadly, the Europeans who arrived in the New World thought they were superior to the natives they found, to anyone who was not white, to women, and to all of nature. As a result they often failed to learn from their “inferiors.”

That deep sense of superiority drove the settlers in the New World and ultimately poisoned their relationship with indigenous peoples and African-American slaves.  The west is still suffering from that influence and non-Indigenous must recognized that ill influence or that relationship will never be whole.

 

Indigenous Peoples: Meandering Towards the Truth

Indigenous Issues

 

Many years ago a good and knowledgeable friend told me that Canada had a massive problem with Indigenous people in this country. He said, this problem would cascade through the generations and Canada had no idea how to deal with it nor how bad the problem was. We are doomed he said. He actually said that though in much more crude and graphic terms.

It shows you how ignorant I was of this issue that this comment surprised me.  And he lived in the United States! How I could I be so ignorant and he so smart?

Then a few years ago another good friend of mine—a wonderful person filled with the generosity of the human spirit—asked me “Why don’t native people get over it?” I’m sure many of us have heard similar questions. Why are native people always standing around doing nothing with their hands out asking for money? Well meaning people ask such questions. They are not all bigots. But—and I say this with respect—I think they are ignorant.

Many of us are just plain ignorant. I know my ignorance continually appalls me. On the issue of indigenous people my friend’s questions led me to decide to learn something about indigenous people. I want to reduce my ignorance. As a result I have read a lot on the subject and it has been slowly simmering. I have still not learned much. I know just a little. And, of course, as they say, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. So I know I am on dangerous ground here. But ignorance has never stopped me from giving up my opinions in the past so why start now?

I want to talk about what I have learned, even though I admit my knowledge is far from deep. I want to learn as I speak. That is one of the reasons I blog. I want to put my ideas out there. I want to respond to challenges. I want to consider counter arguments and other points of view.

I think the question of indigenous people and how the rest of us relate to them is a very important question. In fact, I think it is one of the most important questions  Canada is facing. Recently I heard a talk at the University of Manitoba and the speaker said that many of us in Canada don’t know Canada very well. Canada is not the country we think it is.

I know it will take a while to deal with these questions, but I hope to do that in my typical (and probably infuriating) style. I will try to amble towards the truth.  That will take quite a few blog posts. This won’t stop me from dealing with other matters as well from time to time. After all I always meander. I don’t understand straight lines. I hope some of you will accompany me on this stroll and even, if you can, contribute a thought or two or a question from time to time and even gentle criticisms. Isn’t that how we learn? Maybe we can all learn. I hope so.

Montezuma’s Castle

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Ancient Humans, Arizona, civilization, Indigenous Issues

Our son Stef and his friend Charli came to visit us in Arizona. One fo the things they wanted to see was Sedona. So we headed out one day. Along the way, thanks to Chris’ insight,  we stopped at the badly misnamed Montezuma National Monument.

The Monument illustrates wonderfully the life of the southern Sinagua Native Americans who lived here hundreds of years ago. The Monument is located in the Verde Valley. The northern Sinagua people as well as the Hohokam people’s culture heavily influenced the architecture and farming that was developed here.

Ancestors of today’s Puebloan people started building the “castle” in the wall about 700 years ago. No one knows why they built their huge connected homes onto the side of the cliff, but there are various theories that have been proposed. Defence was likely part of the reason. Once the step-ladders would have been withdrawn it would have been difficult, but not impossible for invaders to attack. From the cliff the residents enjoyed a commanding view of the creek, the fields, and surrounding countryside. It was also a place where the occasional flooding of the Beaver Creek would not have cause serious problems. Having homes on a south facing wall would have been very advantageous in winter.

What is now wrongly called the castle, probably housed about 35 people. Including families in nearby pueblos and rock shelters 150 to 200 people may have lived here. It is a five-story 20-room building that occupies a cliff recess 100 feet above the valley floor. Early European settlers marveled at it and wrongly assumed it was Aztec in origin. That is why they named it after Montezuma. Very close to it was a  larger 45-room condominium that has most disappeared. Only the remnants remain. For most of the time it was occupied people found a reliable source of water in the creek below.

The indigenous people who lived here belonged to a network of villages united by kinship, agriculture and cultural traditions that stretched for miles along the nearby Verde River into which Beaver Creek flows.

There were scattered villages in the region ranging in size from about 600 to 1,100 people. By 1200 CE (Common Era) communities extended all along the Verde River and its tributaries, such as Beaver Creek. Around 1300 C.E., they were all part of a complex settlement network that is now largely lost on account of modern residential developments. 40 large villages in eh area. The flood plains below were used to grow crops. They were also used for travelling. About 6,000 people in the valley were connected to much large populations of Native Americans to the north and south.

Originally, Indigenous People roamed the region for thousands of years, hunting and gathering food. The area’s characteristic farming and architecture emerged later influenced by near by Hohokam and the Northern Sinagua.

The first permanent settlement is believed to have been established by Hohokam people between 700 and 900  (CE). These farmers grew corn, beans, squash, and cotton using sophisticated techniques like canal irrigation to draw water from large distances. These people were civilized!  I want to emphasize that. This is a them I intend to return to in my blog. They also produced their characteristic red-on-buff pottery and built ballcourts. They had one-room pit houses perched on terraces that overlooked their fields in the bottom-lands.

The people lived mainly by farming but supplemented their staple crops by hunting and gathering.  Game included deer, antelope, rabbit, bear, muskrat and duck. Corn was a very important food. They also mined a local salt deposit a few miles away. There is evidence that they traded widely. Likely salt was highly sought by indigenous people throughout the west. They lived a good life, probably a lot better than the Europeans who came to visit (and plunder).

Sinagua craftsmen and artists created stone tools like axes, knives, and hammers. They created manos and mutates for grinding corn. Other crafts included bone awls, needles, woven garments of cotton, and ornaments of shells, turquoise, and local stone (argillite) for personal wear.

Southern Sinagua builders used local materials for their pueblos. The cobble walls Chris and I saw a nearby Tuzigoot a couple of years ago, are very large but poorly balanced. The limestone at Montezuma castle is fairly soft and splits unevenly. Yet Montezuma Castle, protected as it is from the elements, stood for more than 700 years. I don’t think my house will stand that long.  It is one of the best-preserved prehistoric sites in the American Southwest.

By the 1950s the “castle” was no longer stable and visitations had to be prohibited. Until  then tourists could crawl around the homes.  In 1964 the ceiling had to be repaired. Maintenance now is constantly required.

Indigenous groups occupied the cliff dwellings between approximately 1,100 and 1,400 A.D. the area also contain a larger pueblo and many small alcove homes in the cliff face along Beaver Creek.

The buildings they built above ground and often on the cliff face, were masonry dwellings that started appearing in about 1125. At first these were small structures, but later they built pueblos. By 1150 they started building large pueblos often on hilltops or in cliff alcoves. Montezuma Castle and nearby Tuzigoot village, which Chris and I visited a couple of years ago reached their maximum size and population in the 1300s.

Various theories have been offered as to why the site was abandoned in about 1,400 a couple of centuries before the Spanish arrived. The leading theory is prolonged drought caused by climate change. Over population may also have been a factor, as is happening again in the much of the southern US. People tend to flock to nice places! Look at us. Diseases and conflicts between groups may also have influenced the move.  Some have speculated that they left for religious reasons. People do strange things for religion. Many southern Sinagua people migrated to the north to pueblo villages. Some likely stayed in the Verde Valley and returned to hunter gathering.

Today we enjoyed a brief but fascinating journey into the land of Native Americans of the region. It was worth the trip. Next I will blog about Sedona.

David Suzuki and the Indigenous Attitude to Nature

Affinity, Climate change, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

At the University of Winnipeg talk after showing the film Beyond Climate, Suzuki also discussed a new attitude to nature. He  began by talking about the American economy.

After World War II and the end of the Great Depression, America President Franklin Roosevelt realized that the war economy had saved capitalism from self-destruction. But a war economy carries with it enormous unpalatable costs far beyond mere economic costs. He realized that what it needs is consumption. Constant relentless consumption. That was his solution.

Of course what the United States has actually done is to maintain both a consumer economy and war economy. The U.S. spends as much on the military as the 9 countries that are next in line, spend combined.

Suzuki thought we needed a better way. Climate change was just one of the things such an attitude had ushered in. He said  he had learned a lot from indigenous people. In fact he said, “Indigenous people have taught me all I know.” This was important because much of the film dealt with the opposition of First Nations to the plans of Alberta and the Canadian government to build pipelines from the Oil Sands of Alberta to transport liquefied natural gas (LNG) or oil or bitumen to the coast of British Columbia. Alberta was upset that the federal government could not ram through the pipeline approval process. Of course that is just not feasible. Those days are done. The Supreme Court won’t put up with it.

In the late 1970s Suzuki realized that we needed a new attitude to nature. And he found it. He found it in the 1980s when he went to interview indigenous people at Haida Gwaii. He wanted to talk to them about the protests by indigenous people over logging on their land. He talked to forest company executives, environmentalists, politicians, and, most importantly Haida. That was how he met Guujaaw a young artist who was leading the Haida opposition to the logging.

Suzuki wondered why the Haida were so vehemently opposed to logging since many of their own people got jobs with  logging companies. And many of them badly needed jobs. Suzuki asked him, “What would happen if the trees were cut down?”  His reply was profound, but Suzuki did not realize at first how profound. Guujaaw said, “Then we’ll be like everyone else, I guess.”

A few days later Suzuki thought about that answer and it “opened a window on a radically different way of seeing the world.” As we keep getting reports from the World Wildlife Fund and others about the incredible impact humans are having on the world, I think a new attitude to nature is exactly what we badly need. Suzuki explained it this way,

“Guujaaw and the Haida do not see themselves as ending at their skin or fingertips. Of course they would still be around physically if the trees were all gone, but a part of what it is to be Haida would be lost.  The trees, fish, birds, air, water, and rocks are all part of who the Haida are. The land and everything on it embody their history, their culture, the very reasons why Haida are on this earth. Sever that connection and they become ‘like everybody else.”

Indigenous people around the world have similar attitudes. They  are based on a deep attachment to the land they occupy. They are connected to that environment. It is part of who they are. Suzuki like other people from the west had a different attitude to nature and that has made all the difference. To the Haida, and other indigenous people, and as Suzuki concluded,

 

“…there is no environment ‘out there,’ separate and apart from us; I came to realize that we are the environment. Leading science corroborates this ancient understanding that whatever we do to the environment or to anything else, we do directly to ourselves.The ‘environmental’ crisis is a ‘human’ crisis; we are at the centre of it as both the cause the victims.”

 Suzuki realized he had found the new perspective he needed. It allowed him to see the world through different eyes.  He realized, as the Haida had before him, that what we needed to survive and thrive was not more money in order to live rich and healthy lives. This new attitude to nature was reflected in all the Haida did and found its fruits in how they wanted to interact with the land. As Suzuki said, “Rather than being separate and apart from the rest of nature, we are deeply embedded in and utterly dependent on the generosity of the biosphere.” I use the word “affinity” to describe this new attitude to nature. I will comment on again in these blogs.

It is this attitude that Albertans don’t understand. It is not just a matter of paying the Indigenous people money. They want jobs, they want money, but not at any cost. They don’t want it at the cost of their identity. That is why some of the indigenous people, but not all of them, do not want pipelines on their land and will sacrifice the jobs if necessary. I know that seems bizarre to Albertans and most Canadians for that matter. Alberta and Canada have to learn to respect that. Only then will they be able to successfully deal with Canada’s first nations.  And perhaps Canada will learn something valuable in the process. Perhaps there is something of value in that new attitude to nature.

Gimme Some Truth; Beyond Climate

Affinity, Anthropocene, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Movies, New Attitude to Nature,

I attended the showing of a new film on climate change at the University of Winnipeg in November  2018 as part of the Cinematheque Gimme Some Truth documentary film festival. The film was called Beyond Climate Change and was directed by Ian Mauro of the University of Winnipeg and narrated by David Suzuki. Cinematography was by Len Peterson. The showing was followed by a discussion between Mauro and Suzuki during which  Suzuki delivered a stirring address that all the ingredients of a lively religious Revival. I called it a secular revival.

The film was preceded by an important message by First Nation elder Dave Courchene of Manitoba. He emphasized some important matters. I will paraphrase his remarks since it was impossible to make an accurate word-for-word transcription. He said that climate change was a direct consequence of our moral failure to follow our moral obligation to moderate our consumption and protect the earth. Our consumptive society, he said, is based on fear, greed, anxiety, stress, discontent, and ultimately genocide. Those were unsettling words. He said, “We are a species out of control.”  This attitude comes from looking at the earth as a non-living entity.  “We need a change of heart to survive as a species,” he quietly but powerful said. We must remember, as aboriginals have always preached, “What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.” This of course follows from the fundamental premise of many indigenous people that we are fundamentally connected to the earth; we are not separate and apart from it. We have to renew the spirit—i.e. we need to awaken our deep feeling of kinship and affinity with each other and the earth itself. I have already blogged about how this is in my opinion a deeply religions notion.

Courchene added, “We need to disengage with a life that is not in alignment with the earth and aboriginals have an important role to play in this process. They can help the rest of us do this.”

Early in the film Suzuki quoted from American poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder. He was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Petr Kopecký called him “the Poet laureate of Deep Ecology”. Snyder, according to Suzuki said that the two most important words were “Stay Put.” I think he meant that we should resist being removed from the place we call home. We should stay connected to it. That is our base for all we do. We should not sell that home to anyone for money. That is what the first nations of British Columbia are doing when they refuse to sell rights to oil and gas companies to build a pipeline over their land to the Pacific Ocean.

Suzuki pointed out that “climate change is the critical—the existential issue of our times. The science has been in for 30 years. We know that the problems our children and grand children face will be immense.”

If you think this is alarmist or bat shit crazy here is what the World Health Organization had to say. Climate change is “the greatest threat to global health in the 21stcentury.” “Climate change is a global emergency.” But it is not all bad news.  The policies that we must adopt have demonstrable health benefits beside the climate benefits! However our Canadian government that held such promise when the newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada was committed to the Paris agreement on climate change, has been disappointing. Committing billions to supporting the purchase of a pipeline for bitumen without adequately assessing its effects on health or the environment is a big step in the wrong direction. As Tim K. Takaro and Jennifer Miller said, “Our government must invest in solutions to, not the causes of, climate change.”

The film emphasized what we already know, particularly after this horrific year that brought us record wild fires, spectacular storms, and brutal heat waves, and that is that extreme weather events will relentlessly plague us and we had better get ready for that. This is not how things are supposed to be, but this how they are. As Suzuki said, “the entire planet is at risk because humans have become so powerful that we are actually impacting the water, the air, the soil in a way that no other species has ever done.”

Albertans are very upset that BC and some indigenous nations are objecting to their project to bring liquefied natural gas and oil to the Pacific coast through the province of British Columbia and over indigenous land. But what do they think gives them the absolute right to bring a project to the land of others without their consent? Just because such projects produce a lot of money? As one indigenous leader said in the film, “Fundamentally there are just some projects that Canadians, and indigenous peoples, and British Columbians have the right to say no to.” As another leader said, “It is not just about corporate quarterly profits.” Another indigenous leader said, “I don’t feel comfortable pushing this off to my children.” These leaders summed up the issue precisely. Albertans by and large don’t understand this. Each of us has to take responsibility for this issue. We all have to do our part.

I liked many things about the film. For example, I liked the sign held high by one of the protesters: All you need is less. That is what we always forget and this is the problem. We always want more. I loved another sign, “Live gently upon the earth.”

I liked the scene in the film where a young aboriginal boy made a sensational jump when he drove his bike into the wall of a sandbox filled with a big mattress. The photographer caught him in midflight as he lifted off after hitting the board “flying” through the air completely horizontal, with a massive grin on his face and a bright gleam in his eye. The boy was obviously confident that he would hit the mattress. He knew he was resilient. He had hope.

I loved the comments about British Columbia and Vancouver in the film designed to explain to us why many of them  opposed pipelines into their bay up the coast. I did not know it, but Vancouver is the major city with the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emission in North America. This has been achieved at the same time that Vancouver has undergone significant growth: 27 per cent increase in population and 18 per cent increase in jobs. They are justifiably proud of that.  Why would they want to lose that? I wonder how much of this achievement is the consequence of their carbon tax?

Suzuki was interviewed for his views a number of times in the film. He was clearly sad that although fishing had always been a very important part of his life from the time he was 4 years old, he could not fish in the streams outside of Vancouver anymore. He could not bring his grand children to those streams. That is a pity. Not only that, it is important. It is not all about money. As one indigenous leader said, “you can’t eat money.”

I won’t say that I learned a lot new from the film, but it did inspire. The talk that followed did more than that. Suzuki in particular was in fine form. His speech was powerful. It was a secular revival. My kind of revival.