First, Contact
On Colonization, Memory & Reconciliation.
Sept 30th weekend marked Truth & Reconciliation Day in Canada.
This is a day to grapple with the history and ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples in Canada, especially the legacy of the residential school system, which gained even more notoriety with the discovery of the mass graves of First Nations children.
Many folks, settler and indigenous, wear an orange T-shirt with the words Every Child Matters.
I think of my own son, now almost 5, torn from my arms and sent off to be “educated” by foreigners and their strange religion, and my heart breaks. I can scarcely imagine the rage and the grief that would have surely overtaken me. Many of these children never came home, and the ones that did were subjected to a horrific number of physical and sexual abuses.
The goal was to eradicate their distinction from the settlers, in culture, language, and spirituality.
In the words of former Prime Minister John A. MacDonald:
“The Government will in time reach the end of its responsibility as the Indians progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate and distinct people, not by race extinction but by gradual assimilation with their fellow-citizens.” - 1931
Like many settlers, I have grappled with my part in contending with this legacy.
Over the last 10+ years, I have sought to understand the colonial mindset and the ancestral losses that have cascaded for generations, each traumatic wave building upon the next.
With gratitude to my indigenous mentors & teachers including: Pat McCabe, Chiyokten, Pulxaneeks, Bill Jones, Klasom Satlt'xw Losah, Rainbow Eyez, Taiaiake Alfred, Tyson Yunkaporta, Jared Qwustenuxun Williams, Dallas Goldtooth, Teo Montoya, Stan Rushworth, and more - I offer these words here in my attempt to contribute to the efforts of settlers and indigenous folk alike who are engaged in this important work.
I don’t pretend to speak “for” or “to” indigenous people, but rather, this is a willingness to wonder aloud for other unsettled settlers like me, and how we might proceed differently.
A FEW YEARS AGO, I was commissioned to do a short film about Stan Rushworth, an elder of Cherokee descent, a professor and accomplished author. The film chronicles his childhood and the encroachment of capitalist modernity upon his bioregion and the subsequent degradation that followed.
He also speaks about the history of genocide and displacement of indigenous peoples that was required in order to extract the “resources” that were under indigenous stewardship.
You can watch the full 12 minute film here:
Stan was humble, gracious, and represents to me an invaluable bridge-builder for settlers who are attempting to free themselves from the spell of colonization.
Because that’s what it is: a spell.
Colonization is a spell of forgetting.
THE ADVENT OF MEMORY
In 2019, I attended the Imagine Convergence on Orcas Island alongside fellow luminaries and participants. It was also where I premiered an updated cut of my short film ‘Sacred Economics’ with Charles Eisenstein.
On one of the evenings, I caught the presentation by scientist Dr. Bruce Damer who shared his research on recreating the conditions that led to the origins of life. (You can watch the full presentation here, which to be honest gets into some pretty wild stuff by the end.)
One part that struck me deeply was where he spoke to the sequencing of life in answering how complex life forms could develop through a seemingly “unconscious” intelligence. It shares echoes of the classic dilemma of ‘intelligent design.” After all, how could a watch be created if there was no watchmaker?
He spoke of the evolutionary shift that made this sequencing transition from blind repetition to the beginning of memory. Because for life to develop along a multitude of novel pathways “unconsciously”, it had to at least know what it had tried before. And therefore, the advent of the capacity to remember was vital for the origins of complex life.
I began to think of culture vs colonization.
At this point already a number of years studying with the teachings of Stephen Jenkinson, I understand that culture is not simply “what people of a society do” but rather, true culture is a particular kind of achievement - one that is fragile, because it requires significance diligence to maintain and is certainly susceptible to erosion.
Culture is how humans remember.
Or in Stephen’s words: “It’s human to forget how to be one, on occasion. The real danger is if everyone forgets at the same time.”
LAST MONTH, I found myself with my family on Orcas Island once again, this time attending the Imagine Festival. It’s a glorious gathering of art, music, connection, a particular sweet blend of elements that have come to coalesce under the moniker of “transformational festival.”
The opening ceremony included the words and storytelling of Paul Chiyokten Wagner, an indigenous musician and activist I have had the pleasure to meet on a few occasions. As one who is truly “from” this particular region of the Salish Sea, he offered precious stories from the local history & ecology, including how his grandmother would speak prayers to the sea before the fishermen headed out in their canoes for the day’s harvest.
More than simply “affect” or sentimental nostalgia - Chiyokten conjured a window into what it is like to be in sacred relationship with the land and the fellow beings who belong here too.
Last week, I attended another prayerful gathering in Victoria, Canada led by Chiyokten and other indigenous activists, in support of Fairy Creek and the Old Growth elders who are continually at risk of being decimated.
According to this study, “less than 1 per cent of all forests in B.C. are the type of old growth made up of big trees.”
It seems a clear mark of colonial insanity that amidst the growing climate emergency destabilizing the planet, the idea of cutting down old growth trees is even considered, let alone needs to be ongoingly defended by front-line activists willing to stand before the chainsaw blade.
And yet, this is the consequence of the spell. To enact instead a complete inversion of what constitutes the “real.”
Alanis Obomsawin, a celebrated indigenous filmmaker, is credited in 1972 with the words:
Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
Returning once again to memory.
Life has taken millions of years to unfold its myriad tapestry of diverse beauty and the vast web of relationships between these beings. As each species slips from view under the grind of colonial destruction, it is also the loss of that storehouse of memory.
Like a musician that can no longer remember the songs of their vast catalogue spanning decades:
If disturbed, old-growth forests take a very long time to recover, repopulate, and reach their former density — but severe disturbances mean they cannot recover at all.
Said differently: it’s clear that Life can forget how to life.
And more than that, the Old Growth elders that still stand are a needle of cognitive dissonance to the colonial mindset that cannot bear to let in the thought: “it wasn’t always this way.”
There was a time before the modern era, when these towering elders were recognized as our kin. As guardians of the forest, as taproots of medicine and stories. And to cut down these elders would have been unthinkably profane.
Paul Chiyokten, last week standing in the circle of mostly settlers, offered poetic and potent words that spoke to the vital role of humans in the web of life, to uphold all the other beings who “came before us.” He urged us to become strong, to discover our medicine and apply it to these times.
He offered a glimpse of what it would be like to “To see with indigenous eyes. To feel with an indigenous heart.”
This is an act of spell-breaking. This is an act of Remembering.
I gathered his words here:
THE PAIN OF REMEMBERING
You’ve probably heard of Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome.
It’s the documented phenomena of folks leaving the immersive theatrical world of Pandora and returning to the “real world” - a world of parking lots, chain stores, and cultural destitution.
Re-watching the first film with some family, one of the younger women present remarked with more than a tinge of longing: “I wish I was Navi.”
What I hear behind that statement is this:
I wish I could experience the world as magically alive as the Navi
I wish I knew how to communicate and connect with the creatures of this earth
I wish I lived a life of deep meaning & solidarity with others
I wish I was part of a We
This longing is completely understandable in settlers who long ago, lost the threads of our own ancestral lifeways, as we ourselves were fragmented and shattered by colonization, cast across landscapes and seas.
I’m reflecting once again on the brutal oppression of indigenous people on Turtle Island by those who arrived on these shores. It appears true that the first to come were the explorers and the fur traders, and many were supported by the indigenous peoples they met (or they would not have survived).
The settlers that came after truly began the era of violence, theft, murder and displacement.
It is easy to write this off as a fundamental flaw in “white people,” who sought, and continue to seek, the continual commodification of the biosphere, drunk with greed and ultimately unable to change course.
I’ve come to wonder on another layer to this story.
Might it be that as we fled the mayhem of our own places and encountered the indigenous people on this continent, perhaps what we found…was us.
Perhaps we encountered who we were before we were colonized, peoples living in accordance with natural law, participating in a dynamic tapestry of reciprocity and relationship within a cosmology of profound meaning.
Perhaps we encountered the goneness of our own memory and the presence of our own forgetting. And perhaps it was so painful to live with that poverty that we had to almost immediately, set about eradicating the hurt by eradicating the people who were the embodiment of that memory.
And perhaps that is what drives and devils our current relationship with indigenous nations, who are rising again, despite the onslaught of centuries of oppression.
They hold the memory of what it means to be here, in specific places, where the language from their tongues is the language of the place, speaking.
AND SO, there is a case to be made (as Stephen Jenkinson does in my recent interview) that as settlers, we have yet to arrive here in this place.
It is clear when you examine the names of cities and places that bear no resemblance to the web of relationship that harbours them. Instead, they are often named for the explorers who “discovered” them (like Captain George Vancouver) or the places we left behind (like Nova Scotia = New Scotland).
We are somewhere, but it is not the realm that is inhabited with an indigenous heart and eyes. We are still living in the European fantasy of “The New World”, which ensures we will never actually arrive.
This calls into question the validity of reconciliation. “Re” meaning “again.” We must have first met, as honourable and distinct peoples, to have the capacity to meet again, to reconcile the harm that was done and continues to occur, and to step towards a future from a new foundation.
As far as I can tell - we need decolonization (the act of spell-breaking) and reindigenization (acquiring the skill of being bound once again to the nature of place).
It’s a work continually in progress.
In the words of Stan Rushworth at the end of my short film above, he says “Nobody is going to get back in their canoes and row back to Europe. We’ve got to figure out how to do it here together.”
May these words take a little of the weight off indigenous folk in carrying this burden, and may settlers find new courage in continuing to shoulder what is rightfully the spirit work of our time.
To learn more actionable ways to support indigenous efforts, visit the Reconciliation Hub.
Gorgeously written. Flows like a river~~
Thank you for sharing this. I believe we need to join up the dots of this terrible, heart-breaking story. I often wonder if it would be helpful for settlers to learn the histories of the countries their ancestors came from. There are people on the Europe side of the pond - both old-world types who remember fragments of how to live with the land, and new-age types who are trying to build this mindset anew - who hold a little knowledge of what we once were. I wish you luck and love in your journeying