Modernity is High on Itself: Visions from an Airplane

Now above the earth, hurtling through the sky, all too fast for my own ancient soul's ability to keep up, I look down at my Mother and see more clearly how we have insidiously imposed ourselves upon her sacred Body. As Boston gets pulled beneath me like a tablecloth leaving only dirty plates and silverware, I see the glut of houses and building, the endless scab of highway and avenue, the cutting wounds of an adolescent and unwell society carved painfully into her deity.  I see the networks of electrical firestorm that so recently turned the indigenous spirit night of peace into a constant blaring din of constantly hungered day. 

From this lost and lofty place, I can see the, I can feel the, I can smell the shitstorm of body refuse, industrial disease and anti-cultural soulid waste coursing its way through toxic veins back to the oceanic heart of the world about to arrest us off the face of Her.  It, this modern endeavor, looks so inert, but feels so overdone, so wrongly complex (like a bad website!), so powerfully arrogated. Why does everything a thoroughly modern human makes look so very much like it doesn't belong in the world of sacred life?  What happened here? And why am I so high in the air, going so fast?  Really, why?  Since when was how fast you moved through space and time the trump card to how well you moved through space and time?

Clouds smoothly step in to obscure my view of the scene of the crime, carrying the peace of Kuon, the purification of Sapla, spirits of water humbly teaching me, reminding, again, reflecting, again, the proximity of the energetic cure.  Water is the baptism from the addiction to fire...still constantly burning globe, cultural sovereignty, land,  forest, tree, grasses green, the easy possibility of hope.

Modernity is high on itself.

We have harmed Home, our home, our mother, The Mother...

....but her beauty will remain, will reflower, even after we walk silently off the precipice of industrio-digital ascendancy. Modernity seems to like high places. It's where it perceives its uber-mind to be, its G-O-Ds, its wrongly conceived as untouchable patriarchal and racial privilege.  It's how we know modernity is sophomorically upside down as those two embedded philosophical pathologies are exactly what, in part, will bury it soon far under the ground...unluckily for the Great Mother to have to accept the invasion of that last toxic gasp of man's worst faux-glittering, faux-shimmering, faux-sane, faux-sure anti-social escapade, now then far from yon dizzying heights of, flights of fancy.

Never leave Home...not when Home is Earth...and you are human.

I didn't say don't fly.  Just don't leave Earth.

(written November 2013)

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.

Racism Is Not Prejudice + Hate

I was just pondering on the use of the word 'hate' with regard to racism. It always strikes me as incomplete as it refers to someone's feelings, not their ability to directly and negatively influence my life. Whether a person hates me is not the immediate issue.  Whether they can and do exert negative and destructive force and influence in my life, community and environment IS. 

Racism includes feelings in its vile mix, on the side of the oppressed and the oppressor, the marginalized and the privileged, the target(s) and the agent(s) of racism, but how we feel is not the primary element that affects the lives of people daily harmed by the effects and outcomes of  racism. 

Sitting in your house hating me is one thing. Sitting in your house while a group of police officers in militarized cars that you helped pay for out of the ongoing profit you extract from stolen land and resources looks for people who look like me (an African person) to harrass, detain and incarcerate is a whole other thing.

Racism IS a power dynamic, a control mechanism, a function of material and energetic exploitation that is de-energized when physical (police, military, technology) means of exerting power are pulled out of the mix, the complex of systems and structures that define this pathological and cancerous anti-social surreality...when European/white and male and other privileges and abuse are dismantled and consciously and exuberantly given up.

Racism IS prejudice plus power, not prejudice plus how someone feels about someone else.  Racism and sexism are structural, systemic, dependent on troubled and imbalanced people to actively (consciously or unconsciously) apply their life force to diminish the life force of others.

It may be ultimately appropriate to advocate for and promote the expansion of love in the world (also a work of systemic transformation, not just interpersonal romanticism ), but it is not directly helpful to continue to assert that we are in a battle with hate. We are in a struggle to observe, see, assess and transform interrelationships of power and control, of groups of people's ability and seemingly comfortable willingness to continue to exert destructive anti-cultural, inhuman "wetiko" (Jack Forbes) power and influence over other groups of peoples.

I was pondering that today.

#decolonize

Relearn to relate.

Racism at Home and Abroad: Julius Malema Draws a Line In the Azanian Soil Against White Supremacy

There is much here for Europeans, Africans and others in USAmerica to consider. To miss the possible linkages between racism and white supremacy in Azania/South Africa and the USAmerica would be to miss how racism works at all,  that it is not just a domestic issue between individuals, not just transient transactions of "hate". Racism works in a context of nationalized and internationalized/globalized power.

In north America we must acknowledge and struggle for alliance with the indigenous peoples whose lives were/are so seriously affected by European colonialism and the racist structures it developed. The ongoing genocide and oppression of indigenous peoples is central to the empowerment of European/white supremacy and racism in Canada, the USAmerica (and Hawaii), Mexico and beyond. In Azania, Africans are the indigenous people. This is an important distinction, not an inert nuance. We must be able to see how racism obscures the struggle to understand the negative and the liberating relationships to land and culture.

Here, Malema calls racism out and draws a line that must be drawn everywhere....if we are serious about freedom and justice. Notice the similarity in the European reactions/responses to strong statements of self-determination by Africans in South Africa or Africans and others in USAmerica,  i.e., Black Lives Matter etc... Racism/white supremacy has global intentions and global effects.

From the article:

""We will never tolerate white supremacy, racism. Down with racism, down!”

Malema is the only party leader in South Africa thus far who has boldly spoken to and challenged the ongoing problem of racism in our society. His call for the dismantling of racist institutions and practice in South Africa is a promise to people who have been directly affected by pervasive white supremacy that this issue is high on their party’s agenda.

“We will not be speaking this reconciliation nonsense, which only perpetuates white supremacy,” he assured the masses of largely economically disenfranchised followers gathered in the streets of Sandton.

Many white people responded to Malema’s anti-racism utterances on social media by denying being white supremacists or racists.

They said Malema is irrational and aggressive and he is speaking only about the right wing supremacists that are aggressively racist towards Black folk in South Africa but painting all whites with the same brush. Instead of seeing his utterances as pro-equality, they said his discourse is “anti-white” and claimed he was being unfair to them.

Except he is not. Malema’s forthright challenge to white people about personal lateral and systemic racism is the truth that resonates with those on the receiving end of it.

This should not be overlooked by white South Africans.

Instead it should be seen as an opportunity by us to examine how racism and whiteness are intertwined and how this has thwarted authentic transformation and egalitarianism in South Africa."

http://www.africanglobe.net/africa/malema-whites-south-africa-join-struggle/

Rescinding the Doctrine of Discovery - Resources

Indigenous Leaders Want Pope Francis to Rescind Papal Bull Justifying Colonialism

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pope-francis-doctrine-of-discovery_56058eb9e4b0dd8503076c17

 

"Pagans In the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery", Steven Newcomb

"Pagans in the Promised Land provides a unique, well-researched challenge to U.S. federal Indian law and policy. It attacks the presumption that American Indian nations are legitimately subject to the plenary power of the United States. Steve Newcomb puts forth a startling theory that U.S. federal Indian law and policy are premised on Old Testament narratives of the chosen people and the promised land, as exemplified in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh, that the first "Christian people" to "discover" lands inhabited by "natives, who were heathens," have an ultimate title to and dominion over these lands and peoples. This imporant addition to legal scholarship asserts there is no separation of church and state in the United States, so long as U.S. federal Indian law and policy are premised on the ancient religious distinctions between "Christians" and "heathens."

http://www.fulcrum-books.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=5923

 

 No Saint Junipero: Ending the Doctrine of Discovery

http://www.nostserra.com/

 

Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum

7 - 18 May 2012   UN Headquarters, New York

Special Theme: "The Doctrine of Discovery: its enduring impact on indigenous peoples and the right to redress for past conquests (articles 28 and 37 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)". 

http://undesadspd.org/IndigenousPeoples/UNPFIISessions/Eleventh.aspx

‘Doctrine of Discovery’, Used for Centuries to Justify Seizure of Indigenous Land, Subjugate Peoples, Must Be Repudiated by United Nations, Permanent Forum Told

http://www.un.org/press/en/2012/hr5088.doc.htm

Papal Bull Rescission Committee - Loretto Community
http://www.lorettocommunity.org/mission-work/justice-and-peace/papal-bull-rescission-committee/

The Call To Rescind the Doctrine of Discovery - National Catholic Reporter
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/call-rescind-doctrine-discovery

Romero Institute
http://www.romeroinstitute.org/projects/petition

"Acquiring Empire By Law"
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.academia.edu/437323/Acquiring_Empire_by_Law_From_Roman_Doctrine_to_Early_Modern_European_Practice&usd=2&usg=AFQjCNE2ET36M3wqB4Zj467pwPbpe6_apQ

Mennonite group working on dismantling DoD:
"For more than five centuries, the Doctrine of Discovery and the laws based upon it have legalized the theft of land, labor and resources from Indigenous Peoples across the world and systematically denied their human rights. This Doctrine originated with the Christian church in the 15th century.  It is now the church’s responsibility to undo it."
http://dofdmenno.org/

Text of the Papal Bulls of 1452, 1455, 1493 that form "rationale" for Doctrine of Discovery  (facebook Notes w/ URL links)
Dum Diversas 1452:  https://www.facebook.com/notes/ukumbwa-sauti-med/papal-bull-dum-diversas-18-june-1452/10153704284042704
Romanus Pontifex 1455: https://www.facebook.com/notes/ukumbwa-sauti-med/papal-bull-romanus-pontifex-nicholas-v-january-8-1455/10153704359727704
Inter Caetera 1493: https://www.facebook.com/notes/ukumbwa-sauti-med/papal-bull-inter-caetera-alexander-vi-may-4-1493/10153704365327704

CNN, Colonialism and the CaNoNization of Genocide

Watching the Catholic News Network, CNN, "report" on the pope's unethical visit to Turtle Island. jernalissed Chris Cuomo has done more roamin catholic grandstanding in the last hour than the papacy did in 1492.  Constantly stating how people who are present at his circus parade are blessed because they are in the "shadow of Peter". Chris Cuomo just stated that he was a catholic after shouting "Papa Francisco!!" and "Pope Francisco!!" from his "professional" video setup.  This is horrendous reporting.  This is not journalism.  This is not truth-telling. This is validation of colonialism and brutality and conquest. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Africa

This is not only complete disrespect and dismissiveness of Native Americans and indigenous peoples, but also every African affected by the African holocaust and European slavery trade given blessing and support by the papal bulls of the vatican.  We are raising our voices that #BlackLivesMatter today precisely because the roamin catholic church, papacy and vatican created the fantasy of religious and cultural superiority, codifying the religious and European privilege that would usher in the most heinous wave of brutality and exploitation that would ever sweep over the earth. 

Now, as I watch the "faithful" yell and scream (even the giddy CNN reporters) and reach for his clothing a la the British Invasion of the Beatles, my heart breaks that this society is truly doing no better now than when it began.

 We hear and see the effects of evangelization and missionary work and introducing the "European God" (as one reporter clumsily, but truthfully stated) to people who never needed that god and then were summarily subject to genocide and holocaust and we have no moment of grief, no moment of insight, no moment of compassion for a people whose voice has never been silenced, but severely diminished. 

We have no general moral outcry about the abuser narrative that pope Francis represents, a retraumatizing visit to all the victims of roamin catholic molestation and abuse, a patent disrespect to the legacies of predation that the roamin catholic missionary evangelization process/colonialism represents, the dismissiveness for Africa and Africans in the ongoing circus horror show of papal criminal permissiveness...every enslaved African was branded with a red hot cross.

How much time will Catholic News Network/CNN give to the voices of indigenous peoples and Africans whose narrative crushes the lie of the sanctity and righteousness of evangelization and the vaunted, martyred noble missionary and the universal, nay globalized, "moral good" of the roamin catholic papal criminality to dust.  We listen less to the liberating voices of the indigenous peoples, who are still under attack by the papally blessed colonizers of past and present, less to the voices of Africans struggling dutifully to have our lives validated and secure albeit on the lands of those that the roamin catholic papacy gave brutal colonial and genocidal conquerors holy, "sacred" permission to steal and exploit.

I ask people of good conscience to take this moment in history, this moment in European-led settler colonialism on Turtle Island, as a European classical music ensemble plays a rousing Serra anthem to his unethical canonization as a colonial pope totters up the steps of a catholic university cathedral to commit a spiritual misdeed in front of the whole world, to take this profane moment as an opportunity for insight and contemplation, not discompassionate adulation of some distorted status quo.

Are we truly unaware of the glaring dissonance, contradictions and tragic colonial retrenchment of exploitation in one of its worst expressions?

"RESIST The Unist'ot'en's Call to the Land"

Please watch this half-hour video produced by Simple Matters Films to support the Unist'ot'en camp's work to protect the land and waters and their people's national and international security and sovereignty.



And another where the Unist'ot'en kick out TransCanada crews who did not get proper authorization to be on their land, about 2 min.:


For more info, visit: UNISTOTENCAMP.COM

from www.unistotencamp.com

Canonizing A Predatory Missionary: Validating the Genocidal Mission System of Junipero Serra

This September 23rd, 2015, roamin catholic pope Francis is scheduled to canonize Junipero Serra, a predatory missionary that is gaining increased ire from indigenous peoples across Turtle Island, especially those like the Kizh whose Ancestors were directly and mortally impacted by the violence and brutality of the likes of Serra, other christian missionaries and the Spanish conquistadors.

 The catholic cable tv channel, Eternal Word Television Network/EWTN and the Knights of Columbus have been running promotional programming to support the roamin catholic church's plan to canonize Serra and to promote his great legacy of evangelization, as they like to call it (the Knights of Criminal Columbus said the same about Criminal Columbus on their website in the past, but that statement has seemingly been removed from their website).  EWTN is currently running a documentary over five days in half hour segments called “Serra: Ever Forward, Never Back”,  an arrogant fantasy of small screen cinematic proportions.  The Knights have posted a short, but equally misleading and culturally insulting promotional video entitled, “Blessed Junipero Serra: Apostle of California, Exemplar of Evangelization”.


Click link to see KoC video:    https://youtu.be/lhl9ePF8Gy8


Organizer and activist, Toypurina Carac, has been answering the roamin catholic church’s validation of indigenous genocide by creating and sharing a powerful statement in the form of a moveon.org petition that is very near its goal of 10,000 signatures to convince the vatican and pope to reconsider their (in)sightless and discompassionate plan.  Ironic that the vatican is calling the papal visit a “Mission of Love”.  If you were to speak to those who are the offspring of those who were brutalized by Serra’s predatory mission system, they have a much different story to tell.

From the petition:   http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/urge-pope-francis-to   
 (please share widely; organizers are planning protests in DC and NYC)

“Urge Pope Francis to abandon the canonization of Junipero Serra

To be delivered to His Holiness, Pope Francis 

Pope Francis is coming to Washington, D.C. to canonize Junipero Serra as a Saint. It is imperative he is enlightened to understand that Father Serra was responsible for the deception, exploitation, oppression, enslavement and genocide of thousands of Indigenous Californians, ultimately resulting in the largest ethnic cleansing in North America.” 

Tweet the Knights at @KoC, EWTN at @EWTN and the pope at @Pontifex to let them know your perspectives on this important issue.

 

 
UPDATE:
The petition was sent to pope Francis today Sept.17 at about 12noon. Toypurina Carac and others have organized and will speak at two press conferences in NY and Washington DC on the 21st and 22nd of Sept. respectively. Please let your networks know so that we can be of substantial support during the press conferences to help send a powerful message of support to our indigenous sisters and brothers and their blessed Ancestors who suffered tremendously at the hands and whims of Junipero Serra and his brutal system of land theft, exploitation and slavery.

New York, Monday, September 21, 2015,
10:00 am- 12:00 noonSaint Peter’s Church…619 Lexington Avenue, NY 10022-4610. www.saintpeters.org
Balcony Room

Washington D.C., Tuesday, September 22, 2015
11:00 am- 1:00 pm
Plymouth United Church of Christ, Washington D.C.; 5301 North Capitol St NE, Washington, DC 20011
 

 

10 White Privilege Commandments

10 White Privilege Commandments:

1. Thou shalt not assume your experience or your feelings about your experience is equal or greater than the experience of those most affected by racism.
2. Thou shalt not shame or publicly deride “people of color” for speaking out against racism, enlarging your awareness or history and identifying your privilege.
3. Thou shalt not (mis)appropriate the material, intellectual or spiritual culture of others.
4. Thou shalt not ask stupid questions.
5. Thou shalt not arrogantly assume you can touch the bodies, hair, clothing or personal effects of people who you deem as “Other” or “exotic”.
6. Thou shalt not NOT listen actively and reflect inwardly about what you heard from people not of your culture.
7. Thou shalt not assume that your particular cultural content is the best in the world or that it is the best way to see the world
8. Thou shalt not be required to like the sins (or colonies or nations or political systems) of your fathers (and mothers)….nor is anyone else.
9. Thou shalt not assume that your god can beat other peoples’ goddesses/gods or spiritual entities nor should that god eclipse the presence of others or be used as a battering ram to support your privilege.
10. Thou shalt not knowingly (or unknowingly)  participate in, aid or abet the structural and systemic elements of racism.
11. Thou shalt not assume that ten commandments is enough to deal with racism and European/white privilege...let alone everything else pathological or out of balance in the world.

Bookmarking Cultural Genocide

It was interesting…and troubling… to listen to author Matthew Bunson ("St. Kateri: Lily of the Mohawks") talking to Doug Keck, Executive Director of Eternal Word Television Network and host of EWTN roamin catholic television's "Bookmark" (July 13, 2015) on the history of catholicism on Turtle Island. I observed them privileging the work of catholic missionaries above the colonial exploitation of the Spanish, British and French as if they were the singular light of redemption of that time in that place.  Talking romantically about the "black robes" as the "highly educated" Jesuit priests were called, they bantered about the Jesuits having set up a settlement so that they could "practice their faith" and "protect themselves", (gently) castigating the Iroquois for their "xenophobia" and for their concern of the encroachment of European settlers in their Ancestral lands. 

The casual nature of their conversation more than belied the brutality and genocide against First Nations, Original and Native American peoples on Turtle Island, recently brought to light and news headlines by an apology stated by the pope.  It submerged the voice, struggle and resistance of indigenous peoples against European colonialism, made more negatively profound by the work of predatory missionaries projecting foreign and unnecessary religious and cultural concepts into indigenous nations, tribes and bands, enacting, in essence and action, cultural genocide, none of which was brought into the conversation with any substance by Bunson or Keck.  Actually, their discussion was more a shaming of those who might dare to suggest that somehow the catholic church was involved in any negative way in the destruction of indigenous cultural, political and/or spiritual sovereignty, seemingly negating the sense of openness, at least in word only, that the pope created by his apology and his statements of the importance of indigenous peoples and their stewardship of the earth in the recent environmental encyclical, "Laudato Si".

 

This interview harked back to narrow and colonial ways of referring to indigenous peoples and resistance to the European holocaust on Turtle Island and beyond.  Its casual air was, again, troubling, as they reaffirmed a cultural arrogance, a matter-of-factness of religious and colonial privilege that stated strongly that being "saved" in the particular European derivation of christianity was and is required for their conception of redemption to become real and that that was still their conception about how the world should be engaged.  This kind of conversation is no different than the nature of the original vatican papal bulls of the 1400's that gave catholic and christian conquerors the blessing of the church to subjugate peoples and lands in the interest of saving souls and emboldening the colonial force of christendom across the planet.  This, again, seems contradictory to the recent statements by the roamin catholic pope himself, suggesting that there may yet be a currently silent rift or at least an important learning curve yet ahead in the catholic church's 1.2 billion members if the words of the pope are going to be taken seriously in the light…or shadow…of the recent encyclical and apology for the sins of the church against indigenous peoples.