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Actually Ed, I agree with Keith on
this. Anthropologist Rayna Green the Cherokee anthropologist
and administrator at the Smithsonian, did a study of the farm culture in rural
Vermont and New Hampshire and found the same symptoms that you describe for your
communities. Her point was pretty much the same as
Keiths. Like the college inmates in the prison study that he pointed
out, it doesn't really matter where you are from, if you get put into a
situation of environmental stress, and hopelessness the answers are pretty
universal. The problem in those communities are not from within but
from without. Rupert Ross has written extensively about the legal
issues in those communities and the Iroquois communities in Canada have, through
a resurgence of the religion and education been experiencing a mighty
renaissance in Eastern Canada. I went to an Iroquois Condolence
Ceremonial tonight and the Mohawk folks who had accepted the European path were
all literally blown away with the depth and richness of what they had lost
through the oppression. They signed on to the
Renaissance. The same is happening with the Sun Dance cultures and
even our secret culture is springing to life in the children. The
point is whether we can teach them or not. Whether too much has been
lost for them to have a whole life. That is the challenge for
traditional peoples everywhere.
Generally I agree with what you have written and I
certainly don't mean to demean your experience and considerable
insight. I'm just saying that it is good to look in the other
direction such as my well worn comments about both you and Keith calling
forester cultures "Hunter Gatherer" when that is a political term from a
European American Racist Lewis Cass which has been taken on by Archeologists to
describe tribes in the pleistocene. These people are much more
sophisticated than that and their educational techniques have evolved along with
the rest of the world and the religions are more accepting of current science
than the European religions. So foresters and gardeners they are
while some groups have lost control of their land and forgotten things once the
forest went to seed. Another possibility is that they have accepted
Harry's second assumption and now just do what they can to get by.
But I don't think so. We could say that heresy in any culture
is a universal problem.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2004 7:01
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for
Manhattan (shortened)
Sorry Keith, I don't think we're talking about the same kind of thing. You
are talking about communities in transition, that need to make adjustments to
change and make them in a variety of ways, some healthy, others not. I'm
talking about communities that have been left behind in the process of change,
communities where a lot of things have happened but nothing further really
does - stuck communities where people are losers, but that's OK because it's
not your fault. Someone else has done that to you - government I guess, or
whatever. I describe my impressions of some communities in northern
Saskatchewan on my website at : http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/north_saskatchewan.htm .
Do take a look. I haven't looked at it for a couple of years but, to my
surprise on revisiting it, I still think it says something.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2004 10:10
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for
Manhattan (shortened)
Ed,
I venture to chip in here:
At
08:40 04/01/2004 -0500, you wrote:
Thanks for clarifying, Natalia. I don't think I can add much
to what's already been said except that all people share a common humanity
that consists of a variety of elements, good and bad. How these
emerge and are excercised depends greatly on their circumstances, and only
the people who live with those circumstances have a real understanding of
them. One would expect that the more isolated our Aboriginal
communities are, the less they are influenced by mainstream culture, the
healthier they should be. As one learns from the boreal and Artic
communities of Canada, it ain't necessarily so. In many of the
communities, the young sniff gas or commit suicide, while parents won't
stop drinking until they are dead. Is this the impact of mainstream
society, or is it something else, perhaps endemic to the
culture?
I would suggest that there's nothing endemic
here. Basically, the individuals in these indigenous communities (that is,
those that are fast becoming ex-communities) are intrinsically as
psychologically healthy as anybody else. But I'm increasingly convinced that
culture shock is vastly under-rated. All this alcoholism and so forth seems
to be repeated everywhere in the world when cultural adjustments are needed
or expected or enforced. Adjusting to a totally new culture is a
multi-generational, historical matter and achieved only with difficulty.
This is the big problem with the Middle East countries, too -- except it's
not alcoholism in their case but aggression against the west. (They'd like
to incorporate some of the products of the west, but only selectively, and
don't realise [understandably] that our products are embedded within a
totally different culture.) In truth, modern civilisation is
disembowelling their communities without offering anything that's obvious or
satisfying in return -- only artificial substitutes (consumer goods).
As a study I did on community and social health in northern
Saskatchewan some ten years ago revealed, we simply don't know. It
goes on, seemingly beyond our ability to understand
it.
M'mm ..... I think it *is* understandable, as
I've tried to indicate above. I think there *is* a new sense of community
building up in the developed countries but it is a subtle one among the
middle-class and intellgentsia, and not based on locality but on the
telephone. It is called "networking" these days. (A brand new urban-type
community to replace the previous countryside communities was building up
fast in the 1860-1930 period in England -- the co-operative movement, the
building societies, the trade unions (the flavour of which I managed to
experience myself in teenagerhood in some of the "slum" districts of
Coventry) -- but this, in turn, has been quickly overwhelmed with the onward
march of technology. There are *no* "ordinary" communities (that is, of
mixed abilities) anywhere in England now. (The only one possible communities
I can think of these days are the football and rugger crowds that meet once
a week at a match. Even the pubs are losing their community basis as they
become restaurants for the middle class.) I think that the need for local
community is very powerful and it will return, but *how* it will do so
intrigues and worries me, and whether it will take place only among
the middle-class/intelligentsia (because only they will have dependable jobs
and homes they can maintain adequately in the coming years) worries me even
more.
Keith Hudson
Regards, Ed
----- Original Message -----
- From: Darryl and
Natalia
- To: Ed Weick ; Ray Evans Harrell ; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2004 10:39 PM
- Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for Manhattan
(shortened)
- Hi Ed, More below in italics.
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Ed Weick
- To: Darryl and
Natalia ; Ray Evans Harrell ;
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2004 11:22 AM
- Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for Manhattan
- Natalia, a few comments below.
- Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Darryl and
Natalia
- To: Ed Weick ; Ray Evans Harrell ; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 5:52 PM
- Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for Manhattan
- Thank You Ed and Ray,
- Ed, I appreciate what you have written and understand that you have
more in-depth knowledge of Native Peoples' histories than most. Your
posts are indeed sensitively presented, as Ray said.
- Let me mention a couple of things. You said we paint Native people
as simple, peaceful and trusting. I would not use the word simple unless
it were to denote truthful, and by that I give credit to living
according to needs of a full rich life that harms no one and ensures
well being within both community and environment. Simplicity is the
prerequisite for all invention and usually the answer to our most
complicated problems, materially, intellectually and spiritually. Our
complication of the hierarchy of needs has so fractured Western society
that we can't even admit that we need to clean up pollution in our air
and water. We fear more what we'll do without our pollution and wars
than the price we pay to have them. Short term gain disinherits the
children, and reverses almost every bit of progress we have made, but
our priority of needs continues to cloud our minds to the fact that we
are seriously dishonouring our home planet, and the life upon it
including ourselves. Even our intellectual solutions, I'd suggest, are
competing for complexity, and come with a hefty price. Most often as
well, these solutions are giving into the reality of complication as a
necessary thing, thereby overlooking the obvious as the solution.
- Unfortunately, today's Native people, because of modern society,
cannot afford not to deal with the complexities that have been
thrust upon them. I think, however, that their belief in what is
obviously a healthy and well spirited approach to life will win out in
the long run, as it will for all of us.
- I don't know about this. Native
people, even before contact with whites, led lives every bit as complex
as Europeans or indeed any other people. They had to battle with
hunger, cold and disease and very often with each other. They had
to govern themselves and placate whatever Gods or spirits they had to
deal with. To raise them up on some kind of pedestal is, IMHO, to
deny them their basic humanity.
- *** Before contact with whites, Native people did not deal with
forty-fifty different government departments just to live in accordance
with law. Displacement, suppression of spirituality/religion, families
torn apart, forced sterilization, abuses and injustices of all sorts,
having to abandon a way of life and adopt new survival methods within
the asphyxiating pressures of racism. These were additional
complications which I do not suggest they can't deal with. I believe you
are misinterpreting what I am saying about the rewards of a life without
Western complications. Their life was as complicated as a life need be.
This is not to say that their lives were not complex. It is that their
focus was more aligned with good values, in my opinion. This is not
deification. There are other people round the globe who (have) lived as
peacefully or even more so. But this is their land, and in my estimate,
their basic beliefs, had they been followed by the colonizers, would
have resulted in a healthier environment with fewer injustices. I do not
believe in deification of my fellow humans. We are equal in every sense
that is true, and when we forget that it is true, we are crying out for
help.
- I am aware that not all Native people lived peacefully, nor do they
today. I made a generalization, which was not intended to deify, but
drawn as a comparative. Their way of life was generally more respectful
of others and the life around them, otherwise towards the end of Native
peoples' fifty to one hundred thousand years of responsible dominion of
the lands the colonizers would have found a toxic wasteland. This has
nothing to do with lack of ingenuity, sophistication or even luck. It
was the result of living a life more in keeping with the laws of
Creation. I call the colonizers mean and ignorant because they were
both. They did intend genocide, and they were ignorant, just as most
people (governments) are today, because they would destroy or exploit
whatever came their way, making their own needs, so-devised, as
pre-eminent.
- I'm not sure of what you mean by "the laws of Creation". If there are
such things, are you suggesting that some people have special access to
them and others do not? And, as far as Native tenure over the
lands of the Americas goes, anything I've read suggests that it does not
extend back more than 20k years and 30k years at the very most.
For a very readable book on the topic, take a look at Elaine Dewar,
"Bones - Discovering the First Americans". And, as for the
colonizers, they were indeed mean though not, as I argued previously,
necessarily ignorant. And, for the most part, they may not even
have that mean. Ever so many people came to Canada to escape the
tyranny, poverty and oppressions of Europe and to take up land that they
genuinely believed were empty and therefore available for farming.
My grandfather, a God fearing man without a mean bone in his body, was
one of them. My point is that people in high places may have known
those lands were not empty, but I don't think the ordinary pioneer
farmer gave it much thought. He just wanted to look after the
survival of his family.
- As above, I do not belief specialness leads to anything but our
undoing. Yes, I heard about the thirty year tenure, and thought I'd
hypothesize a bit for the sake of accuracy when posterity reads this.
Keith's posts got me wondering, but I think there's still a lot to
uncover about human history all over the globe. We disagree about
"ignorant", yet I would say it of the Canadian government isolating the
Japanese immigrants in special camps, of not just German government,for
enslavement/genocide of the Slavic, Jewish, Gypsy, etc. people during
WWII, and of the U.S. government for today's overseas oil wars. The
ordinary citizen of any of these countries is not necessarily
responsible for poor government, but colonizers knew pretty quickly that
they were deposing Native people of their lands. They didn't usually try
to be fair about forced sharing/turfing. Native people were more willing
to share, given their belief that no one owns what "Creator" has
provided as a gift. Also, the notion that colonizers came to escape
tyranny was usually negated by burning uppity women as witches,
intolerance of Native peoples' religion, and slavery of blacks--to
mention but a few.
- "Laws of Creation" as in the Creator's Laws--nothing to do with
Creationist theory. I thought that consistent with Christian
understanding, but perhaps I could say God's Laws -- also up for
interpretation by humans.
- Trust was used by me in every sense that Christian philosophy would
imply. The alleged message of Jesus was to always trust in your
brother/sister. Where would we be, for example, without genuine
forgiveness? This is not the same as saying trust blindly or simply to
obey the laws of religion. If one chooses to trust another knowing that
great harm will come then you honour neither party. Trust that deep down
everyone wants peace, trust that we all come from the same Source, and
that we would do harm to our own selves, or dishonour the Creator's
trust, when we harm others--that is the trust of which I speak.
- I think Native people learned not to
trust us very early on, whether by "trust" you mean something legal or
something more fundamental. Quite rightly, they never did trust us
and still don't, which is why all those treaties, agreements, pieces of
legislation and government departments dealing with White/Native
relationships. A few years ago, Angela Slaughter, a Micmac, and I
put together a primer on the treaties and claims process in Canada and
you might take a look at it at:
- http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/native_claims.htm
- I meant it in the fundamental sense, and I didn't think that my
Christian example could be otherwise interpreted. Yes, they did trust
white man in the beginning. Today, that trust is still extended to
individuals, though rightly not to government.
- I'll check out the above site, and thanks for the road trip
account.
- Natalia
- Regards, Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Ed Weick
- To: Ray Evans Harrell ; Darryl and Natalia ; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 9:53 AM
- Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for Manhattan
- Thanks, Ray. I'll file your posting
for future reference. Incidentally, I visited the site of the
Wounded Knee massacre in 1983. If you want my impressions, go to
http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/black_hills.htm
.
- Ed
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mailing list
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Keith
Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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