Culture is Our Relationship to the Earth

Culture, in the modern context, often gets reduced to "arts" and literature and exoticized material production like clothing and spiritual items. This is limiting and dangerous as it allows those in the throes of modernity to sidestep equitable considerations of nature, land and people, allowing corporate control of lives and livelihoods, of land and commodified resources, making profane the sacred.

Culture is a dynamic of wholistic and integrated relationship between all things, between humans and their immediate environment, the land, nature and each other.  Modern industrial colonial society is anti-cultural and exploits and destroys the "naturo-spiritual (human) dynamic" that has defined human presence on Earth for over 3 million years. This is dangerous to all life as colonial capitalist control destroys earth and its ecosystems and organic human cultural relations.

Culture, to be progressive and positively transformative again, must be organic and based in right relationship to land, nature, peoples' basic and expanded human needs and All That Is.  Spirit is part of culture.  Animals and plants are part of culture. The Earth Her/Himself is part of culture. Any reduction, disintegration or dissolution of these interrrelationships is anti-culture, destructive and ultimately a negative expression of human potentiality.

A People Subjected to Trauma...

A person subjected to trauma, like physical violence, emotional abuse or rape, by another person will never seek or find empowerment and liberation from that trauma by staying in the ideological or even the physical context of that other person.  Likewise, one would think that Africans would not look to or provide sustenance to the colonial system, European conceptions of divinity or exploitative, but normalized relationships with nature.

Land, Culture and Settler Consciousness

People's culture and strength is tied to land. Native American cultural strength is tied to Turtle Island/North America. European cultural strength is not tied to North America as it is an oppressive presence, not one of oneness with the earth or nature OR the original people here. Remember, Europeans were originally welcomed here, but they forsook that welcome because they came as christian dominators, not allies or humble tenants. They systematized genocide and holocaust in North and South America and Africa and beyond. So how can their children, who still benefit wildly from that original oppressive crime wave, claim to have some ethical, political, social connection to this land? The math doesn't add up unless you steep yourself in the groundless fantasy of christian Manifest Destiny/Doctrine of Discovery, "cowboys and Indians/western movie narratives and bulls**t "American exceptionalism" fantasies. On another level, settler colonists, most of the people living in USAmerica/Canada are leeching off the death, genocide and current oppression of First Nations/Native American peoples....real humans that are alive now who still remember their Ancestors who were terrorized to death then in true ruthless fashion....by people with bibles and crosses. The only way forward is to decolonize, to engage in anti-colonial social change and act like real, intelligent, informed ethical adults. Part of this transformation will be the shift of non-Native populations and individuals from settler-colonists to settlers. Settler-colonists live in privilege based on the historical and current theft of land, indigenous cultural destruction and rampant, destructive exploitation of land, nature and resources. A major element of the oppressive settler-colonial presence is the sustenance of dominator, colonizer ideology most currently expressed in the concepts of "patriotism", "american exceptionalism" and "christian religious privilege", the presumptive diminance of "G-O-D" and the culture from which the dominant ideas about that mythological deity emanate. Settlers consciousness comes into play in a much more ethical and intelligent way, defining a new egalitarian, respectful relationship with the indigenous nations, their members and the political and cultural endeavors and aspirations of those nations, including the honoring of treaties made between these indigenous nations and the settler-colonial governments of Canada and the United States of America. Becoming a settler is a radical project, challenges many, if not most of the ideological tenets of industrial corporatocracy and is absolutely necessary to the idea and work of living in correct relationship to Mother/Father Earth, nature and all its now fleeting tenants.

"The Great Forgetting"

Core thoughts relating to my concepts of Disintegrated Indigeny and Devolutionary Energetics.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/have-you-heard-of-the-great-forgetting/

Knowings in my bones...(#4)

In the context of a concerted (understatement) effort on the part of evangelical and roamin catholic christians (amongst others) to spread the ideology and culture of christianity to every continent and nation and all the peoples of the world - and have them summarily accept that missionary position, it is more than reasonable to deeply and constantly question the conditions, process and effects of that imperial proposition, along with vehemently resisting the assumptive necessity of same, particularly with respect to the presence of the christian missionary and evangelical message 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 366 days a year on all platforms and modes of media communications, through myriad social and political channels and with the tacit support of the dominant culture giving it validation, moral and financial support to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

Translation:
Don't question people for challenging missionaries and evangelizers who have way more money and time to push their shaky, narrow, privileged message on the whole world.