Journal Notes: Disconnection From The Land is the Root Of Our Enslavement
Rod MacIver
I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.
— Ten Bears, a principal chief of the Yamparika Comanche, speaking to U.S. Commissioners at a treaty-making gathering in 1887
I love a people who have always made me welcome to the best they had...who are honest without laws, who have no jails and no poor-houses.. who never take the name of God in vain...who worship God without a Bible, and I believe God loves them also,...who are free from religious animosities...who have never raised a hand against me, or stolen my property, where there is no law to punish either...who never fought a battle with white men except on their own ground...and Oh, how I love a people who don't live for the love of money!
— George Catlin, Letters and Notes On The Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians. Written during Eight Years Travel (1832-1839) amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America
Geneticists have recently established that the species to which we belong Homo Sapiens branched off from other humanoids about 197,000 years ago. For almost all of our existence we have been hunter/gatherers and subsistence farmers, living in close relation to the land. Things only began to change three thousand years ago, when, in ancient Assyria, the plow was discovered. Since then an ever-shrinking proportion of our population has been involved in growing food and more and more of us have been engaged in business, art, science and war. For similar reasons, three thousand years is roughly when recorded history began, when hierarchies of power evolved. Life gradually became more complex. But 98.5% of our evolution happened out there, out among the rapids and the lakes, the forests and plains, and the massive animal migrations.
Rene Fumoleau talked of freedom from time enslavement. When I think of freedom, I think of what the Dene and Innu call "the land." I think of canoe trips where time gradually ceased to matter. There is something about a seemingly endless chain of days and an endless chain of lakes, about living according to the rules of nature rather than the rules of man, that frees the spirit. Imagine, if you can, a life consisting of days of extreme exertion and an equal number of days of not much to do. Imagine a life where instead of careers or deadlines or progress or getting ahead, all was a cycle: sunrises followed by sunsets, springs followed by summers. Days of feast and days of famine. Friends with whom you would share anything and who would gladly share anything they owned with you. That is our heritage, now mostly forgotten.
In the book Border Crossings (The Complications of American Psychology, Civilization in Transition) Donald Lee Williams says "The land no matter what we do to it, what abuse we heap on it, no matter how we use technology to separate us from it; it is still here. Nature, and the timelessness of nature will, in the end, combine to win. We think we own the land on which our houses stand, but long after we are gone, the land will still be here. The land owns us. And inevitably, the land speaks to us, and seeps into our unconscious. Over time, over millenniums, if humans survive, our spirituality will be the spirituality of the native peoples." Then Williams quotes Carl Jung: "There is nothing miraculous about this. It always has been so: The conqueror overcomes the old inhabitant in the body but succumbs to his spirit." That seems an elegant thought. I wonder, though, if our spirituality will ever be the spirituality of the native peoples. Perhaps in ancient times, when one tribe overran its neighbor, the conqueror eventually acquired the spirituality of the vanquished. It seems logical both were exposed to the same nature, the same climate and geography and food.
In my early teens, I met and got to know a Metis (part native American, part French Canadian) in his fifties or sixties who made beautiful mooseskin jackets. He saw our culture as only an outsider can and he had a profound influence on my life, although within four years of meeting, our paths diverged and I have never again talked to him. We would spend hours together exploring philosophical subjects, and one of the things he would talk about was language. He would point out the relationships between words and hidden deeper meanings. For instance, live and love. God and good God being the singular of the plural good. Evil and devil. He would also talk about religion and region about how religions took their form out of a landscape.
I remember reading of the frustrations of a priest among the Algonquin peoples in the 1600s. The savages, he said, would not believe him or his Bible because once he had mentioned that in Europe people ate every day. This was impossible to believe, therefore everything the priest said was suspect. It seems likely that people who don't eat every day have a different spirituality from those who do. Uncertainty lends itself to humility, to gratitude. People who must hunt and kill to eat have a different spirituality from those who have their killing done for them. As our ability to eat became less dependent on the cycles of nature, our religion changed. Instead of pantheism seeing that of God in the rocks, the clouds, the rivers, the animals we came to see one patriarchal God, a God who gave us mastery over the Earth. As our region changed, our religion changed. Judaism and then Christianity emerged. And now, as we get more insulated, isolated from nature, as our technology gets ever more powerful, we seem to have less need for a spirituality. The less our need seems to be for silence, for nature.
An estimated 60-75,000,000 buffalo once roamed the Great Plains. Instead treasuring and caring for and sharing that abundance, we shot the herds, left them to rot, imported cattle from Europe and put up hundreds of thousands of miles of fences. Claiming riches for oneself is our cultural imperative. The promise of an affluent life is to us more alluring than the gift of natural abundance.
I am not trying to say that native people were or are good and Europeans were or are bad. We are all capable of good and bad. The most warlike of the native peoples were in possession of the most fertile land or that on which wildlife was most abundant. They got possession by defeating their neighbors, and they kept their land only through constant warfare. What we did as Europeans is nothing to be proud of there was much lying and duplicity and racism involved. That seems the course of human history. Those with the technology destroy or enslave those without. It happened a hundred and fifty years ago on the Great Plains and it is happening right now in the Indonesian factories that make our running shoes. Perhaps even more importantly than acknowledging the brutality of our history, we could have learned something from the native peoples. We could have learned about living.
George Catlin traveled for the eight years, 1832-39, among the Indians of the Great Plains. His book Letters and Notes On The Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians, is one of the best records of traditional Native American life. Much of his time was spent in a Mandan village, not long before that people died of the diseases of the white man. In his book, Catlin describes the lives of his hosts:
They live in a country and in communities, where it is not customary to look forward into the future with concern, for they live without incurring the expenses of life, which are absolutely necessary and unavoidable in the enlightened world; and of course their inclinations and faculties are solely directed to the enjoyment of the present day, without the sober reflections on the past or apprehensions of the future.
With minds thus unexpanded and uninfluenced by the thousand passions and ambitions of civilized life, it is easy and natural to concentrate their thoughts and their conversation upon the little and trifling occurrences of their lives. They are fond of fun and good cheer, and can laugh easily and heartily at a slight joke, of which their peculiar modes of life furnish them an inexhaustible fund, and enable them to cheer their little circle about the wigwam fire-side with endless laughter and garrulity. ...Their lives are lives of idleness and ease, and almost all their days and hours are spent in innocent amusements. Amongst a people who have no office hours to attend to no professions to study, and of whom but very little time is required in the chase, to supply their families with food, it would be strange if they did not practice many games and amusements, and also become exceedingly expert in them....
Why do we rush around so much? I know people who don't have jobs who are always in a hurry. Where are we all going? Why are we working so hard? Why do so many people drive the streets with looks of grim determination on their faces? Taken to the extreme in places like New York City, people wait for green lights with one hand on the horn to "wake-up the sonofabitch" who slows them down half a second. We buy so many labor saving devices: microwave ovens, dishwashers, chainsaws...even electric can openers. The more of these things we have, the busier we get. Of the total information accumulated by the human race over 197,000 years, approximately half has been accumulated in the last twenty years. Information and money now flows around the planet in fractions of a second, endlessly in search of tiny competitive advantages, minute increments in financial return. The pace of information growth is staggering and is changing human life everywhere. In the process, our religion is also changing. We lose intimacy with our souls, with silence.
Thoreau presented leisure as a subversive concept. One passage in particular often crosses my mind:
"I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the brain or the hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessantly good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly improve his indolence."
Rene Fumoleau said that our disconnection from the land is the root of our enslavement. You cannot enslave a people who live close to the land, he said, referring to the traditional Dene. By enslavement he meant subservience to a job, to the images of our culture: consumer goods, pensions, nice things. Clipped lawns. Monoculture. Suits and ties. When the government wanted to open the Dene's land to resource extraction, they enticed the Dene into congregated communities with nice houses. Shortly behind the arrival of television and consumer goods, came alcoholism, obesity and diabetes.
Then Rene said something like,
"Of course, the same thing happened long ago in the dominant cultures. The corporations, the people of money, have no interest in employees or consumers with a connection to the land. Their interests are in good consumers and in compliant employees."
The objectives are to sell, to maximize the return to the shareholders, to justify multi-million dollar compensation packages to top executives. People who put compassion and truth above profitability are obstructions to the system. Our schools, trainers of good employees, prepare us for a life of boredom, a life of compromise. "Line up, sit down, be quiet. Memorize this." Life on the land has certain rhythms, and people who know those rhythms aren't good employees. Or good consumers. More than one homesteader has said to me, "You don't know what it's like to truly be in tune with nature until you live without the barriers that normally stand between us and nature: electricity, running water, central heating..."I remember an old fly fisherman, formerly a judge, explaining on TV why he abandoned the city for secluded, wooded streams: "The places where there are lots of trout," he said, "are invariably beautiful, as opposed to the places where there are lots of people." It seems to me that the more time we spend in places where there are lots of people, the less contact we have with spirituality with our own spirit.
Among the Maoris every human being is regarded as a compound of four elements - a divine eternal principle, known as the toiora; an ego, which disappears at death; a ghost-shadow, or psyche, which survives death; and finally a body. Among the Ogala Indians the divine element is called the sican, and this is regarded as identical with the ton, or divine essence of the world. Other elements of the self are the nagi, or personality, and niya, or vital soul. After death the sican is united with the divine Ground of all things, the nagi survives in the ghost world of psychic phenomena and the niya disappears into the material universe.
