Delivered November 1, 2019. Northern Michigan University Sonderegger
Symposium: Anishinaabek: East, South,
West, North. Marquette, MI. Video available soon.
Overview
I’m
going to cut straight to the point: averting
climate change is not going stop the global collapse of the
planet as we know it.
Don’t get me wrong. Climate change is a global emergency and will cause tremendous damage, and, in
fact, already has for many.
But
the thing is, massive, global-scale
destruction has been going on for a long time even before climate change. Although it has roots that go back further,
1492 marks the beginning of this global emergency.
So,
first, averting climate change will not stop the global emergency because
climate change is only one part of this global emergency.
Second,
addressing climate change using the values and viewpoints of this Western culture
will only exacerbate the problem. The
disease powered by solar fields is still the same disease that is powered by
coal.
Third,
Western industrial civilization is the cause of the global collapse of the
planet as we know it.
Thus,
fourth, this Western culture must change if we want to save the planet
as we know it.
Finally,
fifth, we need to look to healthy cultures for answers about how to change this
diseased culture so we can not just avert climate change but also end today’s
global ecological collapse. One way to
do this is to become acquainted with the resistance movements of healthy
cultures. We have examples we can learn
from right here in Anishinaabe territory.
Identifying
the Problem
To
begin at the beginning, what exactly is the problem?
In
1800, half the planet’s land was still in tribal hands.[1]
Over the next 150 years, “virtually all indigenous territory” in the
world was taken over “by colonizing industrial states” with around 50 million
Indigenous people dying in those 150 years alone.[2]
In the Americas, this genocide began in 1492 with some estimating as
much as 90% of the Indigenous peoples here wiped out.
As this settler culture spread, it deliberately destroyed not only Indigenous human peoples and their ways of life but also the lives and cultures of the Indigenous non-human peoples. Untold numbers of plant and animal relations driven to extinction or near-extinction. Waterways choked with poison. 80% of the planet’s forests annihilated.[3] Grasslands destroyed. Children stolen. Cultures shredded. Or to quote one British author extolling the virtues of European colonization of Indigenous Africa: “This great work of progress will be accomplished through the religion of God. Africa shall be redeemed . . . Her morasses [swamps] will be drained; her deserts shall be watered by canals; her forests shall be reduced to firewood. Her [African] children shall do all this . . . In this amiable task, they may possibly become exterminated. We must learn to look upon this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong.”[4]
Manifest Destiny — John Gast ca. 1872
The
majority of people in the settler culture not only stood by and
watched this apocalypse but actively promoted it as Progress, although a few
wept tears for the passing of the natives.
Still, even for the sympathetic, it was assimilate or be annihilated –
Progress is inevitable.
Then climate change came along. Suddenly the privileged elites felt threatened realizing
this time they, too, will be feel the
impacts of their own destructive culture.
This time, they are concerned and want to take urgent action to stop the
destruction.
The
problem is their version of “urgent action” doesn’t call on sufficient change
to address the problem because they don’t understand the cause of the problem. Most climate activists look at this
industrial civilization and boldly claim the urgent action we must take is to stop
powering this civilization with fossil fuels.
We can do this, they say, with a carbon tax or a carbon dividend. We can do this with mega-wind and
mega-solar. Their version of “urgent
action” means getting off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and replacing
them with “green” energy sources. A
technologically intensive civilization powered by wind, they argue, is the wave
of the sustainable future. If we do
this, as long as we haven’t yet passed the tipping point, we will stop global
climate change and save the planet. Then we can get back to the business of
Progress as usual.
The changes the elites want are only those changes that will allow them to continue their materialistic, colonizing way of life. Swept up in the urgency of things, everyone else gets swept up in their fervor, a fervor that feeds the disease and keeps it going. Haudenosaunee philosopher-activist John Mohawk compares it to being rabid.[5] Santee activist John Trudell calls it being “industrially insane.”[6] Aboriginal Australian singer/songwriter Bobbie McLeod sees it as a culture of Wayward Dreams. It is the culture that needs to change, this disease that needs to be cured. From there, all else will follow.
Artist: John Hunter (Gamilaraay)
Other Indigenous teachings from the Honorable Harvest to the Hopi Prophecies to the Anishinaabe Seventh Fire prophecy talk about what happens when a culture is out of balance with the Earth. The problem we need to address today, according to these teachings and prophecies, is not so much whether industrial civilization is powered by wind or coal but whether or not industrial civilization itself is sustainable. It also the raises the question: is the inherent parasitism of civilization even moral?
Industrialism
has greatly exacerbated the disease of civilization. Yet Columbus landed in what we now call the
Americas well before the Industrial Revolution. The Western cultural arena he came from was
already grossly disconnected from the land, its burgeoning population well
beyond the land’s carrying capacity[7], and thus most of Europe, even
before the Industrial Revolution or before capitalism, was already wreaking
havoc with its landbase.
Europe itself had undergone
colonization by civilized cultures some centuries before Columbus. Prior to the civilizing of Europe, Europe was
alive with tribal societies. The
civilizing of those tribal societies by colonizers is likely where much of
Europe’s disconnect from the land arose.
Yes, I just contrasted tribal societies with civilized cultures.
Um…what?
Trudell says, “The Great Lie is that it is
‘civilization.’ It’s not civilized, it has been literally the most
bloodthirsty, brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not
civilization […] The great lie is that it represents ‘civilization.’ That’s the
great lie. Or if it does represent
civilization and it’s truly what civilization is . . . then the great lie is
that civilization is good for us.”[8]
This is the conclusion many anthropologists, such as John Bodley, have come to. Civilization is not the human ideal we’ve been trained by this civilized culture to believe it is.
According
to anthropologists (and as can be seen by the definition and origins of the
word itself), a civilization is a society that is city-based. The city is the central point of power. Some of the traits that define a city-based
society, as opposed to a tribal society, include the rise of economic,
religious, and political power hierarchies and stratification within the urban
society. The city needs these oppressive
power structures for it cannot provide for itself from within its own
borders. It needs the resources of the
people who live on the land. This it
most often obtains by force through such means as taxation, tribute, or
outright military conquest. The primary
target for an urban area to use for resources is the surrounding countryside,
thus the rural area is made subject to the urban.
But
the surrounding countryside is usually not sufficient to satisfy the urban
appetite. Disconnected from the land and
thus from understanding carrying capacity (or ignoring it), the urban world
needs ever more land and resources for their ever-expanding populations. To get it, city-based societies or
civilizations engage in what some anthropologists call “predatory expansion”
against their neighbors.
For the last 6000 years, Indigenous people and their tribal societies have been targeted by civilizations by their predatory expansions. Europe itself was once a region of tribes who, if they followed the general pattern of tribal societies, would have lived in relative balance with their land and all their relations. Eventually, however, one by one the European tribes fell victim to the predatory expansion of their more civilized neighbors and became themselves one of history’s most destructive colonizers of tribal peoples.[9] As urbanite and historian Theodore Roszak writes, ““Whatever holds out against us[, the city] — [be it] the peasant, the nomad, the savage, we regard as so much cultural debris in our path.”[10]
Europe's tribes ~ Approx. 54 BCE (Image: historyfiles.co.uk)
But
in the 6000 years of civilization and its predatory expansion, Indigenous
peoples and other peoples of the land have resisted the incursions of
civilization and its power inequalities, its colonization of rural/tribal
areas, and its attempts to disconnect people from the land.
It
was a mere two hundred years ago that, Indigenous peoples and their healthy
lifeways protected half of the land on this planet. It is because of this that we have what
little healthy land we have today. And
it is this land today that is
most targeted by resource
corporations and their puppet governments in the Western world.
Despite
the fact that some cultures got off track and became diseased with this
cultural maladaptation of civilization, the Indigenous way of living with the
land respectfully and in a good way is our heritage as human beings. All of us have a human heritage of more
than 300,000 years of living well with our relations. It’s only in the last 6,000 that some of us
have fallen ill and fallen out of balance.
But it is human to live in harmony with the Earth. It is human to be at peace with the planet.
So,
how do we cure this disease and move, once again, to a healthy way of living
with Mother Earth?
Living
the Circle: Learning from the Past
If
we see the world through the lens of the Medicine Wheel, we will see our
history is not a linear lockstep “progression” leading away from those good
lifeways but rather a circle leading us back to them.
Our
elders represent some of the greatest repositories of how to keep walking that
circle. Climate activists of all ages
can learn from them, and in fact many climate activists are those elders who
have been on the front lines for decades. Without the work of these elders, we
wouldn’t have the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Clean Water Act. Without them, we
wouldn’t have the treaties and the struggles to protect those treaty
rights. We wouldn’t have had Wisconsin’s
mining moratorium. The older generations
have worked hard, sacrificed much, thinking of us today and those who are yet
to come.
This
resistance movement to protect this planet and all our relations, is
generations old and has very ancient roots.
If we follow the teachings of the Medicine Wheel, we know
we need the gifts of all ages, from the young to the elders, to realize our
full power as a people.
Here
in the northern Great Lakes area, the rural resistance movement to Western
industrial civilization has been alive and well for some
time. Most of the rural resistance I’ll discuss here comes from the Anishinaabe
communites, but some also comes from the non-Native people of the northern
Great Lakes area.
The
two-plus centuries of rural resistance in our region emphasize how important it
is to:
- Resist
civilization in its attempts to control
- Resist
removal from the land
- Resist the
predatory expansion efforts of urban areas/civilization
- Resist the
ideologies of human supremacy
As
these rural resistance movements up here show, we can do this by:
- Becoming a
member of the community of a particular land or region by living on the land
- Maintaining
and reclaiming self-sufficiency and the necessary land skills for that
self-sufficiency
- Respecting
the sovereignty of all our relations in accordance with the Honorable Harvest
This
Land Is Our Home:
Resisting Removal from the Land
From
the beginning of the treaty era in the Anishinaabe homeland, people showed
their reluctance to sign away their land or to leave the land they had belonged
to for generations. Alfred Brunson, an
outspoken Indian agent at LaPointe (whose criticism of the American
government’s treatment of the Anishinaabe lost him his job within a year), wrote
in January of 1843, “[S]o much dissatisfaction exists among the Indians and
half breeds of the Chippewas of this agency” that there are “many omens of a
Threatening Storm,” some of which included “a party of warriors & braves on
the [1842] treaty ground.”[11]
During
the discussions leading up to the 1842 treaty, Acting Superintendent of Indian
Affairs Robert Stuart told the Anishinaabeg “it was no difference whether they
signed or not” as the land would be taken anyway.[12]
He also issued a veiled threat of outright removal from their lands. While uttering assurances that it was only
minerals not the land that the U.S. wanted at
the present time, he
suggested that in the future they would be removed like so many other tribes
“sent west of the Mississippi, to make room for the whites.”[13]
After his words, as historian Ronald Satz writes, the representatives
“of the Wisconsin bands from the Lake Superior region remained silent.”[14]
They were “not . . . willing to sell or make any agreement.”[15]
Eventually
and reluctantly, however, the Anishinaabe did sign. Brunson points out that “the Indians did not
act free & voluntary, but felt themselves pressed into the measure,”
largely by Stuart’s tactics. [16]
Photo: Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission
In 1850, Stuart’s threat of eventual removal became U.S. policy. An executive removal order was issued by President Zachary Taylor to remove the Anishinaabeg of northern Wisconsin and the western U.P. to Sandy Lake, MN by moving the location of the tribes’ annuity payments.. Closing the Indian agency at Fort LaPointe on what many know today as Madeleine Island, the Anishinaabeg of the 1842 ceded territory were told they’d have to travel to the Sandy Lake agency to receive their annuity payments of cash, implements and food. The idea was to use a velvet glove to force the Anishinaabeg to settle around Sandy Lake (and out of the 1842 territory). To the U.S., the Anishinaabe land in question was known as “the mineral district” and removing the Indigenous people from the area could prove beneficial to mining interests, particularly as the Anishinaabeg had already shown a resistance or dissatisfaction to mineral exploration on their homeland. Many refused to make the trip to Sandy Lake. Those that did arrived in October to find they had to wait weeks for what turned out to be only a very small part of the annuity payment in early December. Dysentery and malnutrition weakened and even killed some of those who waited at Sandy Lake. Understanding the intent of this maneuver, most made their way back home in early December. Over 250 more people died along the way. The entire incident is often referred to as the Sandy Lake Tragedy.
Once
back home, the people refused to move and instead organized a petition drive,
obtaining signatures from the Native and non-Native community. A delegation, headed by Chief
Buffalo, then an elder in his nineties, traveled to Washington D.C. to present
the petition to President Fillmore. The petition, the delegation, and
the refusal to be moved from their homeland were all eventually successful as
the executive removal order was rescinded.
Defending the
Land: Resisting Civilization’s Predatory
Expansion
Those who live on the land and
call it home are more apt to defend that land from those who threaten it. As you see, we have a long history of such
land defense in the rural resistance of the northern Great Lakes area.
Prior to Sandy Lake, back in 1820, the territory of Michigan
organized the Cass Expedition whose purpose was to assess the natural resource
wealth of the Anishinaabe homeland, land still legally Anishinaabe territory as
the major land cession treaties were still over a decade away. The Cass Expedition was, pure and simple, a
predatory expedition, surveying another’s homeland to assess its potential to
benefit American civilization.
According
to Henry Schoolcraft in his Narrative Journal of the Cass Expedition, the
Anishinaabe people resisted giving him information that would lead the
Expedition to the minerals they sought.[17]
This was an early example of the Anishinaabeg resisting the mining that
has plagued our region for the last century.
In another instance of such mining resistance, a contemporary historian
writes, “We know that the upper lake Indians traditionally opposed white mining
exploration before and after the treaty [of 1842], and that Father Baraga had
opposed mines in the Ontonagon and Keweenaw country.” [18]
Anecdotal
evidence of resistance to industrial civilization on the part of the
Anishinaabe in the Great Lakes area also comes
from Broker’s account of her great-great-great-grandfather who worked in the
settlers’ logging camps. “I do not like
cutting the trees,” he says. “I think
too often of the animal people. They
will be few, and they will be gone from this land. When we have enough of the lumber, I shall no
longer cut the trees or travel the rivers on them. My heart cries too often when I do this.”[19]
1910 Wisconsin Lumber Camp — Wisconsin Historical Society
In Anishinaabe country, there are
and have been non-Native people who struggle to defend the land they’ve come to
call home. One of the ironies of history
in the United States is that this is a nation founded on freedom and
overthrowing colonialism. Yet the the
nation is also founded on that same colonialism and thus is founded on the
destruction of the lives, freedom, and lifeways of the land’s Indigenous
peoples. That is still an identity
crisis most Americans have yet to deal with.
It’s why you can have American historian Frederick Jackson Turner
decrying, and accurately so, that the closing of the frontier sounded the death
knell for American democracy, yet, with no sense of irony, also firmly
believing that taking the land from its Native people was all a necessary part
of creating that beloved frontier.
Here in the northern Great Lakes
area we have that same irony.
In
the nineteenth century, as the Anishinaabeg were dispossessed of their land,
settlers, land speculators, and resource corporations came in. The trees were cut and almost all
of Northwoods’ pre-colonial forests were
annihilated.[20]
Mining corporations formed and tore up the Earth for minerals, poisoned the
waters with mine run-off, and kept their laborers as serfs. Settlers came in an attempt to
farm the cutover areas, areas that once rang
with the laughter of Anishinaabe families and once were rich with the
wellspring of Anishinaabe culture: the verdant and generous woodlands of the north
country.
Those
settlers who arrived to make a living on the land were often in competition
with corporations and land speculators seeking to get rich off the land. This produced some interesting
scenarios. These days, mining
corporations may have convinced many in the U.P. that mining is our heritage
here, or, as one oil and gas representative told me, that “Yoopers like to be
exploited.” But that prejudice ignores
the rest of the U.P.’s heritage. In
fact, one could argue environmental resistance is our true heritage here in the
northern Great Lakes area, a heritage the corporations would prefer we
forgot. Finnish immigrants who worked
ardently to unionize miners and then sought refuge in the backwoods from
corporate thugs, are yet another example of this. And there are more.
We’ve
even had what one historian calls “guerrilla warfare” launched by non-Native
homesteaders against logging corporations up on the Keweenaw in the 1890s. A lumber company named Metropolitan Lumber claimed
to own land that the U.P. homesteaders saw as their own. To protect “their” land from corporate
interests, these nineteenth century Yooper homesteaders engaged in what we
would call eco-terrorism today. Draft
horses pulling corporate sleds of logs were shot and killed. Steel spikes were driven into logs that were
intended for the Metropolitan Lumber sawmill.
Iced corporate roads, perfect for pulling out heavy loads of timber,
were melted with hot ash. One woman lay
down in the middle of an icy winter road to prevent a horse-drawn sleigh from taking
away logs that Metropolitan Lumber had cut on her land.[21]
[22]
In
the last several decades, the Anishinaabe also have risen in force to protect
their land from mining interests. In
Wisconsin, one of the most successful mining resistance movements around the
world came out of the struggle to exercise the Ojibwe treaty rights to hunt and
fish in the 1842 ceded territory, a fight for the right to maintain
self-sufficiency. This fight for treaty
rights took on racism in some of its ugliest forms. The struggle merged with the movement to
protect the Northwoods from the opening of a metallic sulfide mining
district. In doing this, the Native and
non-Native people of Wisconsin foiled the multinational mining corporations. As Anishinaabe activist Walt Bresette often
mentioned, the corporations seemed intent on dividing the people of the
northern Great Lakes area by fanning the flames of white supremacy and
racism. In this way, Bresette pointed
out, they attempted to manipulate the people of the Northwoods into fighting
each other while the true threats to the land moved in and tried to open up a
metallic sulfide mining district in northern Wisconsin. The people of the land, Native and
non-Native, however, united despite their differences, and fought off the
multinational mining corporations with the passage of the mining moratorium,
also known as the Prove It First Law.
This hard won struggle marked Wisconsin, according to one mining
industry representative, as the toughest place on the planet to put in a mine.
Then
we have the Bolt Weevils of central Minnesota.
The
Bolt Weevils were farmers who organized in the 1970s to protect their lands and
scenic areas from high-voltage transmission lines. The lines were intended to bring power from a
coal-fired power plant in North Dakota through Minnesota’s rural areas to the
urban populations of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. From the beginning, the power companies told
them the same thing the U.S. government told the Anishinaabe: you can resist us, but it won’t matter
because we’ll get your land anyway.
Local
public opinion strongly supported the farmers in their opposition. The farmers used every legal means
possible: public hearings, planning
commissions who denied the permits, lawsuits.
Despite it all, it was determined that the greater number of people
living in the city counted more than the smaller number of people living on the
land in the rural areas of Minnesota. As
one veteran powerline resistor, Verlyn Marth, who lived in the area said, rural
people are seen as “just a colony to be used.”
He told them, “You are being programmed to think you are helpless. But they are an evil cartel assaulting
individual farmers…It is your responsibility to beat the line. You are the stewards of the land.”[23]
Despite
the farmers’ objections, the power lines in rural Minnesota were approved and
construction began. But the farmers
didn’t stop. Their resistance to the
lines turned to physical violence against the power lines. The state governor called in the state
troopers to protect the powerline as
it was built through the rural areas. The
Twin Cities got their coal-fired electrical power.
But the farmers still didn’t stop. As singer/songwriter Dana Lyons so aptly describes in “Turn of the Wrench.”
Farmers opposing the powerline
The
thing is, when a society is civilized, this type of thing is part of its
predatory means of obtaining resources for its urban populations. Even if the power had been wind-derived, the
powerlines would still present the exact same issue for the farmers: destruction of their lands in order to supply
power to the city.
In
fact, in the heart of Anishinaabe country at the turn of the twenty-first
century, the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Lake Superior Chippewa and eleven rural
Wisconsin counties also opposed a
400 kV transmission line. The line was
to connect central Wisconsin to Minnesota’s energy grid, helping, in part, to
increase Manitoba Hydro’s ability to bring more electrical power to urban areas
in the U.S. The power would come from
“green” energy which actually meant the
expansion of mega-dams that threatened traditional Cree homelands. The Cree helped the people of Wisconsin
resist the line. When all counties
passed resolutions opposing it, however, American Transmission Company told
them they’d take their land anyway, only for less compensation under eminent
domain. The line was built. The mega-dams expanded. Wisconsin bragged about how wonderful it was
they’d obtained more “green” energy. Ask
the Pimicikamak Cree and the people of northwestern Wisconsin how “green” that
energy truly is.
Likewise here in the U.P., several communities have opposed energy projects sold as “green” projects. Most climate activists hearing of wind projects will uncritically support such projects. Summit Lake Wind Project near the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the Heritage Wind Project on the Garden Peninsula are two such projects generating both rural resistance and knee-jerk climate activist reactions.
KBIC
successfully opposed Summit Lake, not because
they oppose wind in general, but because this “green” energy project would
first clearcut an area that is 94% forested and full of all the gifts a forest
offers. Further, in industrializing this
wild area with the extensive road network needed for the turbine construction
and to transport the heavy equipment for the project, KBIC feared it would open
up the land to mining interests eager to get at the ore underneath the
extensive forest, part of one of the largest wilderness areas left east of the
Mississippi.[24]
The
other example of this type of “green” energy project here in the U.P., Heritage
Wind is built along a major bird migration route and, as such, is opposed by
the USFWS among others. Although
concerns are many, unique to the area are concerns over culturally significant sites,
like the limestone caves containing pictographs of Anishinaabe constellations. To safely hold its 400+ foot wind towers,
Heritage drills 200 foot deep foundations into the peninsula’s limestone. Some of the turbines will be built near the
caves. Will the limestone be strong
enough to resist collapse?[25]
One of the pictographs on the Garden Peninsula, Hole-in-the-Sky is an Ojibwe constellation.
The Pleiades is the Western name for this grouping of stars.
None
of the power from either of these wind projects would be generated for the
rural communities they are placed in.
Instead, for projects such as these the power they produce is loaded
onto high-voltage transmission lines and made part of the national grid to be
sold to urban areas. The rural area is
the site for the energy generation. The
urban areas are the sites for the energy use.
This is energy colonization. The
rural areas are being used as energy colonies for corporate “green” power
production.[26]
Instead
of colonizing rural areas with ever more electrical projects and ever more
transmission lines, however, what if we as a society admit we have a problem –
we are energy addicts. The biggest
hurdle for any addict is first admitting there is a problem. Until then, the addict will do anything, no
matter how destructive, to get what they crave.
That’s happening right now. It’s
time for it to change.
Resisting Control: The Right to Self-Sufficiency
The
history of civilization’s attempts to colonize rural-wild areas to satisfy
urban appetites clearly shows that destroying self-sufficiency to
force people off the land into wage-dependency is an essential component of the
colonizing process. Self-sufficiency makes
people difficult to control.
more time spent in wage work, the less time
there is available to engage in traditional land skills. This both makes peoples easier to control and
weakens a people’s knowledge of the land and how to live with it. Colonial governments on Indigenous lands
around the world have used Western-style education, wage-labor, and other
civilizing methods to dispossess people from their homelands.
Robert Stuart, Acting
Superintendent for Indian Affairs, was well aware of this colonial
strategy. In 1843, he wrote about the
Anishinaabeg, “There are those who think that
all these Indians should be at once removed to the unceded district,” but this
could not be “easily accomplished just now, as they have considerable game,
fish, and other inducements to attach them to their present homes; but so soon
as they realize the benefits of schools, and the other arts of civilization,
which I trust we shall be able to cluster around them, there will be less
difficulty in inducing them to renounce their present habits” and
thus be able to remove them.[27] This approach was used around the world in
colonization to varying degrees, including in Kenya where Indigenous workers
were forced into wage labor by various taxation laws and then were forbidden
from quitting their job, on pain of torture, without permission of their
employer.[28]
Social engineers in the twentieth
century employed a similar mindset with
planning out what they saw as proper land use for the northern Great Lakes
area. These social engineers came from urban
universities. For example,
P.S. Lovejoy (1918-1941),
for example, was from the University of Michigan. George Wehrwein (1883-1945) from the
University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point.
Both were well respected men in the early twentieth century, and their
ideas about how the northern Great Lakes area should be regulated to allow for
a healthy regeneration of this cutover area were highly regarded.
In their view, everyone in the Northwoods should be productive members
of the national industrial economy.
Farmers should not farm for subsistence but should be for-profit
farmers. People who lived far back in
the woods, should be induced by zoning laws to move closer to towns. After all, George Wehrwein argued, without
neighbors to watch over them, “people in the forest might resort to a sort of
savagery, bereft of any standard of morality or cleanliness.”[29]
Without this type of social engineering, Lovejoy argued, the northern
Great Lakes area would continue “breeding paupers and morons and fires.”[30] [31]
Out
of this mindset came elitist game laws, intended to preserve wildlife for
future generations of sportsmen rather than for those who hunted for food. They completely ignored Anishinaabe treaty
rights. Despite having their way of life
outlawed unless they could afford to buy the proper permits, people resisted
these laws and managed to provide for their families regardless. As Ignatia Broker writes, “Then came the laws
to control the fishing, the hunting, the trapping, even on the reservation
lands…The Ojibway, however, continued to net fish and hunt deer as they had
always done . . . [They] still laid nets for the fish and pulled them in early
in the morning. But they had to clean,
salt, and dry their catch inside their house instead of in the outdoor ovens,
so the man who enforced the laws against using nets would not know.”[32] [33]
Biskakone on traditional Ojibwe deer hunting
One
of the major obstacles to controlling a people, as identified by colonial
agents, is a peoples’ ability to provide for themselves from their own
land. One of the key causes of our
current environmental and climate crises is that people around the world have
been thrown off the land by this civilizing process. As a result, like Europe in 1492, most people
today are disconnected from the land and no longer possess an intergenerational knowledge and
love of a specific land. As such, we are all subject to ever greater
control by our governments, and we face global ecological
crises of cataclysmic proportions. As Okanagan author Jeanette Armstrong says,
the corporations know “how powerful the solidarity is of peoples bound together
by land, blood, and love.
Resisting Human Supremacy: Respect the Sovereignty of All Our
Relations
In
traditional Anishinaabe teachings, living with the land involves an intricate system
of values that is based on seeing all beings as relatives, respecting their
right to self-determination. Respecting
the sovereignty of all our relations.
In
striking contrast, Western industrial civilization is based on a belief in the
supremacy of human beings. This Western
belief in human supremacy[34] is found in its religion. It’s
found in its secular views on other species. It’s found in its science. It permeates Western culture, justifying its
takeover of the planet through industry, science, consumerism, and even conservation-minded
management.
The
Indigenous concept of respecting the
sovereignty of all our relations is complex yet straightforward. Potawatomi biologist and author, Robin Wall
Kimmerer, describes it well when she refers to this relationship as “the
democracy of species.” Being a part of
this democracy means participating as a respectful member of a community, not
as its tyrant or emperor. Part of it
involves giving respect to other beings so that we can see them as fully functioning,
sentient, intelligent beings. Not as our
slaves. Or our wards.
From a traditional Anishinaabe perspective, all species are sentient whether they are plant or animal. Yet there is the recognition that life gives its life for other life to continue. Part of living in this democracy of species as human beings is to follow the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest. In fact, hunting, fishing and gathering in the respectful manner outlined by the Honorable Harvest connects us to the land in an intimate manner. This connection helps us understand the land.
The
Honorable Harvest also
recognizes the sentience of all relatives.
When harvesting blueberries, for example, you first ask permission of
the blueberries to harvest. If they
don’t give you that permission, you listen and do not harvest them.
One
recent example of respect for the sovereignty of all our relations comes from
the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Isle Royale is part of the traditional
territory of the Grand Portage Band. As
you know, there’s been an ecological conundrum of late as the predator/prey
relationship of the moose and wolf is currently out of balance. The U.S. government determined relocation of
wolves from other areas to the island was the best way to resolve the imbalance.
Grand Portage, however, initially opposed the relocation of wolves to Isle Royale. According to the band’s reply to the National Park Service Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the relocation plan, “The Grand Portage Band observes a cultural value that allows for natural cycles of predators and prey and the cultural philosophy of management only when necessary.” The band continues, “Thus, we urge non-interventionist policy for management of wildlife on Isle Royale National Park and feel that upholding the Park principle of maintaining unmanaged wilderness is most appropriate.” Wolves, they say, have only been on the island since 1949. Ice bridges often form between the island and the mainland. Wolves have used this ice bridge recently to cross to the island. But they choose not to stay. The band argued that for the next ten years at least, we should let nature take its course. [35]
The
National Park Service eventually obtained the band’s cooperation when they
agreed to first relocate Grand Portage wolves to Isle Royale. This, the band felt, would protect Grand
Portage wolves from diseases and parasites that could be brought in if wolves
from outside the area where relocated to the island.
However, of the four Grand Portage wolves relocated to Isle Royale, one died from the stress of captivity. A second died a month after being relocated to the island. Another wolf, a female who was radio-collared, left the island, crossing back to the mainland via an ice bridge – according to leading Western expert on wolf biology, David Mech, relocated (I’d say kidnapped) wolves released within eighty miles of their home will often return to their home.
A Canadian wolf escapes human captors on Isle Royale.
Photo from National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation.
The
White Earth Land Recovery Project refers to Ma’iingan (the Wolf) as “[t]he one
sent here by that all-loving spirit to show us the way.”[36]
Ma’iingan, one of our very home-centered, family-oriented relatives, did
once again shows us the way: our animal relatives are not there for us to
control. A central tenet
of traditional Indigenous philosophy that can be found around the world is the
development of a relationship with all our relatives that respects the
sovereignty and life force of those relatives as a whole and as individuals. The settler culture, however, being the
civilized entity that it is, seeks to control that which is out of its
control. This is central to the disease
that so besets a civilized culture.
Yet there are non-Native people
in the northern Great Lakes area who also demonstrate resistance to aspects of
this diseased culture by protecting our non-human relatives. A retired teacher who has lived in my area
since childhood is a recent example of this.
A pillar of her Christian community, a well-respected member of various
community organizations, this outspoken rural woman who usually votes Democrat,
although she preferred to vote Green rather than vote for Hillary, lives at the
end of a dirt road with her Republican husband.
She loves and nurtures monarch butterflies. When the county Road Commission brushcutter
headed down her way one summer, after having destroyed a milkweed patch along
her road the previous year, she blockaded her end of the road with her car to
protect the milkweed there, milkweed reserved for the monarchs. I call it, the Monarch Blockade, yet another
great example of rural resistance. As the
Earth-advocate Derrick Jensen often prescribes, find something you love, then
stake yourself to it and protect it.
The Oshki-Anishinaabeg and the Green
Path: On Being an Evangelical Heathen
I
recently learned this summer that the word “heathen” comes from a time when
England was converting to Christianity.
People who lived in the city became Christian. These urban people looked down on the people
who lived on the heath. The heath was a wild, “uncultivated” land. The people who lived there kept to the old
tribal ways. The people of the city, like
so many urban people of today, ridiculed the rural people as unenlightened and
backward because it was those people, the people of the heath, the heathen, who
kept to the old ways. [37]
Well,
I have decided I am an unequivocal, evangelical heathen. I firmly believe returning to the wild,
“uncultivated” lands and the old ways that belong to them is our way out of
this mess. Our way out of climate
change. Our way out of the larger global
emergency that civilization has brought to this planet.
To
quote a scientific report done in 1964, “It is realized that a whole system of
culture and an age-old way of life cannot be changed overnight, but change it
must, and quickly.”[38]
Like
so much of civilization’s attempts to control and manipulate the people of the
land, this report was directed at forcing the self-sufficient tribal peoples of
India’s Chittagong Hills to become cash-croppers.
But
this sentiment needs to be reversed.
Indigenous
peoples around the planet were forced to change quickly from living in their
well-adjusted tribal cultures to becoming
part of the colonizers’
diseased, maladjusted one. The rapidity at which this happened
shows how quickly cultures can change.
But this time, it’s Western industrial civilization’s turn to change and
change as quickly as possible. For those things that cannot humanely change
rapidly (for example, in dealing with our overpopulated numbers), we need to
start planning now on how to get to where we need to be. All of this needs to be part of a Seventh
Generation Sustainability Plan wherein we work out where we need to be seven
generations from now. Part of this involves
long-range planning. Part of it involves
urgent immediate changes.
As Trudell said, “Earth is a living
entity. It is not in man’s destiny to destroy the Earth. That’s arrogance. What
it is man’s destiny to do is destroy civilized man’s ability to live with the
Earth… the antibiotic will come, in a planetary sense. If it means…letting it
wipe out civilized man, then the Earth will do that. The Earth will continue
on.”
The
question is, will we?
The
thing is, we have various Indigenous teachings and prophecies that are there to
help. According to the Anishinaabe
prophecy of the Seventh Fire, this is not only a time to be choosing the Green
Path over the Burnt Path, but it is also a time when the oshki-anishinaabeg,
the New People, will rise. Various
culture bearers from Eddie Benton-Banai to Nick and Charlotte Hockings to Walt
Bresette and others have felt this includes both Native and non-Native
people. It refers to those people
working to bring us back to the Green Path through finding that which was lost
during the process of colonization.
1000+ year old cedar forest on the Garden Peninsula — Photo: Aimee Cree Dunn
The
root causes of this global collapse are ignored, and in many cases, even exacerbated
by the solutions proposed. Even if the
ice caps stop melting and climate change is averted, as long as this
industrial, technologically intensive, species-isolated culture continues as
is, the apocalypse will continue until there is nothing left for us as human
beings.
If,
however, we recognize our potential in becoming the oshki-anishinaabeg we are
prophesied to be, leading this society to the good path, we can enter a future
where we don’t have to fear for our children and our children’s children.
I’d like to end with some words from Anishinaabe activist, Walt Bresette. As usual, in this excerpt of a speech he gave to a crowd at Northland College in Ashland, he offers us a way to build that bridge together and move into a world that, seven generations from now we can look back on and say, “We’re proud of what we’ve done.”
Miigwech. Mii i’iw.
~ Aimee Cree Dunn
[1] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY:
Rowan & Littlefield, 2016.
p7.
[2] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY:
Rowan & Littlefield, 2016.
p10.
[3] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY:
Rowan & Littlefield, 2016.
p184.
[4] Winwood Reade. Savage Africa. 1863.
[5] John Mohawk. Thinking in Indian: The John Mohawk Reader. Ed. Josée Barreiro. Golden, CO:
Fulcrum Publishing, 2010. p260.
[6] Trudell: A Film by Heather Rae. Passion River, 2007.
[7] Anyone who thinks overpopulation is not a problem,
that overpopulation is not something that we should be concerned about, needs
only to look at Europe in the fifteenth century. The overpopulation of Europe, like steam
coming out of a boiling kettle, launched Columbus and the ensuing colonization
of Indigenous lands around the world.
[8] Trudell: A Film by Heather Rae. Passion River, 2007.
[9] In fact, that is the danger in existing as an
Indigenous person within a colonial society.
The pull to assimilate is strong, to go with the crowd, even when it’s
the liberal wing of the colonial society.
Such assimilation, over generations, leads to becoming colonizers
ourselves.
[10] Theodore Roszak. Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial
Society. 1978.
Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1979. p243.
[11] U.P. Indian
Treaties. Institute for the
Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan
University Olson Library. N.d. p36.
[12] Qtd. in Satz, Ronald N. “Chippewa treaty
rights : the reserved rights of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in historical
perspective.” Transactions of the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Vol. 79, No. 1. p38. <http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=div&did=WI.WT199101.i0012&isize=text>.
[13] Satz, Ronald N.
“Chippewa treaty rights : the reserved rights
of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in historical perspective.” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts and Letters.
Vol. 79, No. 1. p37. <http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=div&did=WI.WT199101.i0012&isize=text>.
[14] Satz, Ronald N.
“Chippewa treaty rights : the reserved rights
of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in historical perspective.” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts and Letters.
Vol. 79, No. 1. p38. <http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=div&did=WI.WT199101.i0012&isize=text>.
[15] Qtd. in Satz, Ronald N. “Chippewa treaty
rights : the reserved rights of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in historical
perspective.” Transactions of the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Vol. 79, No. 1. p38. <http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=div&did=WI.WT199101.i0012&isize=text>.
[16] U.P. Indian
Treaties. Institute for the
Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan
University Olson Library. N.d. p36.
[17] U.P. Indian
Treaties. Institute for the
Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan
University Olson Library. N.d. p8.
[18] U.P. Indian
Treaties. Institute for the Development
of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan
University Olson Library. N.d. p8.
[19] Ignatia Broker.
Night Flying Woman. St. Paul, MN:
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983. 72.
[20] Most estimates place the amount of pre-colonial forest
remaining in Michigan and Wisconsin at around 1%. Dickmann and Leefers write that by 1926, after
less than 100 years of colonization in Michigan, only 7% of the original forest
was left, most of that in the Upper Peninsula. They add “most of that has since been cut.” Donald I. Dickmann and Larry A. Leefers. The
Forests of Michigan. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press,
2016. p173.
[21] Theodore J. Karamanski. Deep
Woods Frontier: A History of Logging of
Michigan. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1989. 101.
[22] This is not intended as a promotion of violent protest
but rather simply referencing histories that are all too often ignored.
[23] Barry M. Casper and Paul David Wellstone. Powerline: The First Battle of America’s Energy War. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. p44.
[24] Rural Resistance Network. http://ruralresistancenetwork.wordpress.com.. 2019.
[25] Rural Resistance Network. http://ruralresistancenetwork.wordpress.com.. 2019.
[26] See the film Planet
of the Humans by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore for a deeper discussion of
this issue.
[27] Qtd. in Satz, Ronald N. “Chippewa treaty
rights : the reserved rights of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in historical
perspective.” Transactions of the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Vol. 79, No. 1. p39. <http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=div&did=WI.WT199101.i0012&isize=text>
[28]John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
p148-151.
[29] James Kates. Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
p158.
[30] Qtd. in James Kates. Planning
a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great
Lakes Cutover Region.
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001. p48.
[31] For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my
article “Listening to the Trees:
Traditional Knowledge and Industrial Society in the American Northwoods”
originally published in Honor the
Earth: Indigenous Response to
Environmental Degradation and Beyond.
Ed. Phil Bellfy. Now available
at https://voiceforthewild.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/listening-to-the-trees/
[32] Ignatia Broker.
Night Flying Woman. St. Paul, MN:
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983. p117.
[33]For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my
article “Listening to the Trees:
Traditional Knowledge and Industrial Society in the American Northwoods”
originally published in Honor the
Earth: Indigenous Response to
Environmental Degradation and Beyond.
Ed. Phil Bellfy. Now available
at https://voiceforthewild.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/listening-to-the-trees/
[34] Derrick Jensen.
The Myth of Human Supremacy. NY:
Seven Stories Press, 2016.
[35] Brian Larsen.
“Grand Portage replies to Draft Environmental Impact Statement on
reintroduction of wolves to Isle Royale.”
April 1, 2017. Cook County News Herald. < http://www.cookcountynews-herald.com/articles/grand-portage-replies-to-draft-environmental-impact-statement-on-reintroduction-of-wolves-to-isle-royale/>.
[36] White Earth Land Recovery Project. http://www.welrp.org.
[37] Joseph Bruchac.
The Dark Pond. NY:
HarperCollins, 2004.
[38] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
p19.