To read this post, one might do well to start with this article linked below. It will also introduce the reader to "The Tyee," a word that those of us who had Mildred Colbert, Chinook elder, for a 4th grade teacher will know is another term for a leader.
Lopez asks, "What comes after capitalism? What comes after democracy?" I ask, "What comes before we leave capitalism and democracy?" Both of us are talking about sequence, cause and result, process, the flow of events and the lives they shape. I'll tell you the answer to my question. It is now.
I do think that we will find the new eco-social patterns that will save us, but we don't know their names, though we might know the concepts somehow right now. But I also think that the climate change, famine, environmental disasters, limits of material resources, blackouts and internet failures, resurgent microbes -- all these things will persist and kill us in great numbers. We saw this coming. I used to have nightmares about it, but not now. Now I just live in circumstances that are modest, beneath notice except for this blog. I'll slip away quietly.
Though I have no descendants in the direct sense of children, I have enormous respect for demographics. The kids I taught in the 7th grade in 1961 have carried the Blackfeet rez (which includes more than Blackfeet in addition to Blackfeet of every kind and degree with the BIA on their back) through fifty years and the whole area is better than it was. (One must take into account that I do not get excited that Browning, the capital, is no longer a town. I don't care what you call it -- it's organic.)
Those 7th graders were identified as future leaders and the designators were right, mostly because the kids were part of conscientious families. They were the parents of the first Head Start kids and that movement has been a key to progress. Head Start was a valuable institution, but it also paved the way for many other experiments like Immersion School or Catholic school. (I always remember the kid who came to an early school so full of hope and love that he had put on that morning the only clothes he could find, which happened to be his grandmother's. Luckily, she wore jeans and sweatshirts.) These were the kids who made their parents stop smoking. Now those same kids, after decades of service on the rez, are retiring. Charlie Farmer is in the paper because he's retiring! Whaaat! I still remember him vividly as a kid full of beans and ideas.
All the time this community has been growing and worrying -- it's drugs that they feel are a problem at the moment -- a world of research and thought that reaches around the world has been revealing a planet of exploding knowledge. One silly guy will say, "Well, we've made all the discoveries, been every place, taken history as far as it can go, founded all the nations, etc." And a good proportion of the rest will roll on the floor laughing.
Life is a process and no sooner do we think we've got it all nailed, than it changes. Have to start all over again. I'm reading Quamman (horizontal gene transfer) and Porges (the third vagus nerve complex of the autonomic nervous system.) Most of the pretentious atheists or apologists never escape the Christian system which they claim is Judaic, while they demonize Islam which is a direct derivative. They ignore Asians and make the autochthonous Americans into fantasies. When they say they value all religions, they usually mean they have collected the bells and whistles of many places and stashed them in their bookcases. But the people who are coming out of biology, medicine, close study of the land -- they sound to me like 19th century Transcendentalists in terms of their wonder, their acceptance of all things being related. A new religion?
No, because the way we think of religion is as established, bureaucratic, monetized, architectural, political power-mongers, wearing grandmother's clothes. They say "sacredness" but they really mean, "We get to draw the lines." Myself, for one thing, I would "love" to see the social lines on sex redrawn, since they have become so embedded in hypocrisy, ownership, stigma, pharma and so on. But I would never expect any lines about love (limerence, attachment, response) to be successfully drawn. It blows where it listeth.
I'm saving articles about the new ways to organize land, since the ocean is redrawing the coast again (I said, again). One way is to organize around city/states. (Again.) I would like to see Valier reorganized complexly to include water service area, service area for gas and power lines, same for phone and internet, and to supply rational transportation. Another way is to organize according to the carrying capacity of each eco-system, particularly in terms of water available. But who says who can live where? Before destiny intervenes.
Enough.
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