"The movement goes beyond the transfer of deeds to include respecting Indigenous rights, preserving languages and traditions, and ensuring food sovereignty, housing, and clean air and water. Above all, it is a rallying cry for dismantling white supremacy and the harms of capitalism."
From FIX, November 2020:
"Returning the Land: Four Indigenous leaders share insights
about the growing landback movement
and what it means for the planet."
Last year I read Braiding Sweetgrass: INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF PLANTS by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and since have been learning about the multiple contemporary realities of Indigenous people in North America, especially reading social histories of those who lived in places I have lived: Massachusetts, California, New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. As Euro-Americans (we) requisitioned land and cut off indigenous use of it, we changed most of the names of cities, land formations and waterways. We made no attempt to preserve the livelihood, customs, and culture of the displaced and disinherited people. Indigenous stories reveal not only what we destroyed but what we might have learned from being better neighbors (I know that is an understatement). Thank God and Earth alike that people from many tribes still exist to tell their stories and to salvage something from re-educated colonialists. I'm grateful that I know a little more now than I would have known then. Grateful that I am learning how to listen.
In the article quoted above, the idea and practices of "Landback" are held up to view. In each case, note that action is underway but there is more to do. I am impressed by how much of it would help solve the climate crisis we share. I am not surprised that much of this work involves support for Black Lives Matter and others among BIPOC peoples, how much naturally accepts the many identities a person might have (intersectionality).
In Quaker meeting today, Pamela read aloud a page from A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman by Dawn G. Marsh. The author revealed Quaker complicity in Indigenous displacement--even sanctioning taking children from their parents for re-education. As of yet, I cannot put words to how horrible this is/was. Is it possible that we saved these people from a worst fate? If only I could believe that. Meanwhile, I begin to see why learning this and giving back seems so right to me.
Also in Quaker Meeting today, Anschel pointed out that no secular word exists for the action of doing good, no name for the person except "do-gooder" which has negative connotations.* "Benefactor" seems a patronizing word. Altruist? Humanitarian? Volunteer? Bleeding Heart? Good Samaritan? Helper? When enough of us show up, we'll learn the word. Maybe then we'll be neighbors engaged in "neighboring."
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* His source is "On Doing Good: The Quaker Experiment" by Gerald Jones.
2 comments:
This made me think of a lost word- kith. Of course I know it as in the phrase kith and kin- but what does it mean? In her essay Kinship from Belonging in a World of Relations, edited by Robin Wall Kimmerer et al, Lianda Fern Lyn Haoupt writes. "Kithship is intimacy with the landscape in which one dwells and is entangled, a knowing of its wymarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildings...Kithship is different. It is exacting intimacy, one born of nearness, stillness, observation, vulnerability. Kithship is hard-won, visceral intimacy, blood cut of thorn, bright stinging of nettle... [it] crosses dimensions of knowing that bring us to intimate specificity: alert wandering, knowledge of species, knowing who lives where and why, knowing who is flourishing and who is failing. Kithship enlivens and complexities kinship and it is essential if the fullness of kinship's wisdom is to be lived."
Perhaps "good" is the wrong concept. What is generative, or regenerative, rather than good. a "regenerator"?
This conversation also makes me think of some other newer definitions I am pondering. In one of the newer "episodes of the Human Energy Projects series on Creating the Nooesphere, Brian Thomas Swimme articulates, "Money is a way of storing human creativity. Wealth is the capacity for ongoing generation of human creativity."
I like how you question the concept "good." Thank you for visiting me.
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