White people seeking their Indigenousness

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golly
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White people seeking their Indigenousness

Post by golly »

Indigenous. This word is powerful. I don't even know how to analyze it or put it into English.

The dictionary.com definition states:
  1. originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native (often followed by to):
    the plants indigenous to Canada.
  2. Indigenous. relating to or being a people who are the original, earliest known inhabitants of a region, or are their descendants:
    the Indigenous Maori of New Zealand;
    the Indigenous languages of the Americas.
  3. innate; inherent; natural (usually followed by to):
    feelings indigenous to human beings.
- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/indigenous

The meriam-webster.com definition states:
indigenous adjective
in·​dig·​e·​nous | \ in-ˈdi-jə-nəs \
  1. a) produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment
    indigenous plants
    the indigenous culture

    b) Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group
    Indigenous peoples
  2. : INNATE, INBORN
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indigenous

... and the Oxford definition is simply:
belonging to a particular place rather than coming to it from somewhere else
- https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries. ... indigenous

When people native to an area use this word, we should trust they have chosen this word for good reason.

Today it's important for me to look at my own indigenousness or indigeneity, because it's increasingly coming up as something colonialist white culture has abandoned, damaged, insulted or even forgotten about itself. And, if I am to connect with the Earth and serve it as a good person, I don't think it's so good to continue doing that bad thing.

It may read strangely for readers but imagine someone raised "White" personally suffered from Whiteness. I can assure you it's felt damaging to me at times, despite and because of so-called privileges of being treated unfairly, or "more than" fairly. Naturally, I am not speaking for the people who truly suffered and I understand all who feel the need to avoid my narrative. Let my feelings and writings serve who they will; it is all composed with the highest most authentic intent of alleviating suffering through truth telling.

As someone who innately distrusts the bad ways of our society, and as someone who is very empathetic, I have an inordinate amount of "culture cringe" when I navigate colonized structure, imperial ways and I view their abusive relationships to the natural world. It began with strange feelings about consumerism, and the health impacts of the marketed junk food; it merged with deep concerns with Western medicine when I was prescribed an anti-depressant at age twelve for what they determined was something related to manic depression. It continued, even under the spell of the experimental drug, as increasing skepticism toward all notions of "success" portrayed by movies and the media, towards the institution of Christmas, and so on.

What they did not realize, nor did they have the wisdom to teach, nor did my parents and guardians have the spirituality to navigate, and I had to ultimately teach alone and by myself through innate gifts was ... my spirituality. So from single digits, I was blessed to be partially "ejected" from Western culture by default and it was not until much later that I realized it was a blessing rather than an alienation.

Eventually I came to recognize that of the "Caucasian" and "Asian" stories of biologically and spiritually influential ethnicities I come from — Irish, Ashkenazim, Luxembourgish, Tatar — I was retaining a number of traits. One is a sort of "indigenous" draw to nomadism. Another is a draw to basketing, woodworking, herbalism, foraging and gardening as means of providing shelter, medicine and food. That is to say, I recognized that something innate and ethnically default "activated" when I felt betrayed and harmed by my guardianship existing in colonialist culture; and this was a survival mechanism of some powerful type. It was also something that I very much, very deeply and spiritually respect, as opposed to the opprobrious marble and concrete catacombs, heavy locked doors, labels & filing cabinets and torture chambers that represent the power centers of "white" survival.

How could I respect the pillaging, piracy, rape, genocide and domination of costumed "law makers" and "bankers" that had no more connection to the Earth's gifts than their religion that forgave all their idiocy by default? How could I believe the bizarre (later I learned to recognize as a "supremacist") notion that this way was considered somehow more advanced, futuristic, contemporary, realistic, pragmatic than my own in-born skills that actually gave me the mental and soulful fortitude to see the love and opportunity my parents were trying so hard to impart to me? In short, how could I live the lies that ingratitude tells us once I awakened to how grateful I truly felt?

Well, I could not. And as much as I spent my twenties trying to connect this sort of indigenous identity to my immediate family and friends, I saw a greater and greater gap between us. I tried to identify it with the emotions I felt, the emotions that had been my guide and my friend when they turned me to my own inherent gifts. However, sorrow, frustration, sadness, feelings of weakness and impotency were not serving as useful identifiers of what I was experiencing.

In retrospect, the problem could be broken down in this way: If some of my family respected and encouraged my deep interest in natural diet, other members of my family would scoff and laugh at such interests as if they were ridiculous elitist notions of supremacy. If some of my family respected and encouraged my deep interest in spirituality, energy work and our connection to ancestors, others showed disgust, fear, horror or even entertainment at the idea of "gruesome" topics of spirit. At times I would find this entertainment value the only means of accessing a way to commune with myself and living relatives on Earth with living relatives in the ether or hereafter. If some friends could understand my whim to avoid, redefine and question the concepts of "ownership" of all kinds, others would seek property, material gains and accomplishments in the colonized structures I found just as ridiculous and gruesome as they found me.

Quite painfully, I could see that none of this was solely a fault, and much of it was the result of trauma based responses to authentic, epigenetically instilled existential terror. Gradually, and most recently thanks largely to the work that my father Willing is doing, I have come to understand more intricacies about the existential terror that white people instill in life forms: the "shows of power", the "shows of strength", the possessiveness, the unnecessary obsessive exactitude of what is "proper", the intolerance, the deep insecurities and the fears of inadequacy.

I can't speak for all people who are considered the supremacist cultures, who "pass for" White or who are called White from birth and are given "White people" things, identities and privileges. Yet my journey through whiteframe (and to a minor extent "Jewframe"), from my perspective as a soul experiencing the honor of a human relationship to loyalty (to life and Earth), to sacredness (of life) and to arts (of creation and medicine), has proven to me that sadness and weakness are intricately and intimately tied up, in the minds of white people, with indigenousness.

It is partially this reason that white people have such difficulty connecting with their true selves and so easily float around "trying on" the identities of others. These are not just attempts to address feelings inside them, but to actively and aggressively deny them. They are the ways of those white people, which we might call the colonized colonizers (or sexually abusive sexually abused, or tortured torturers) of trying to deny life in the face of life: by constantly redefining the inherent self as arbitrary, unreachable, unrooted, based in nothing, totally and completely relative to abstract thought, the white person hopes to "rise above" the intergenerational trauma and also forcefully "lift" (forcefully remove) others from it as they are causing it. It is the mind abused mind abuser that beats someone and then offers the drug to quell the pain, and thinks of themselves as savior. The more victimhood they can gather and collect as aspects of self-identity, the more narcissistic and tiny they can make their world, and vice versa. Hurting and curing individuals on a one-on-one basis is a cultural mode that colonization is entirely intrigued and preoccupied with.

So much so, that it is the basis for stories of heroism and villainy in the most popular stories that Hollywood exports to the world — with the heroes being the ones that "learn the right lessons" from the trauma, and the villains being the ones that fail to learn from the trauma. Part of the American dream is the delusion that the broken person who puts themselves back together and "picks themselves up" by "their own bootstraps" is the only practical form of every-day healing that can be done, over and over.

This isn't to say white people are totally free of victimhood. On the contrary. Whites and the frantic Zionist Jews that talk of the greater tribe as mere "goyem" are traumatized (traumatizers), which re-introduce the cultures of abuse continually because they are haunted. Abused abusers are re-living and re-enacting stories of abuse in an attempt to sort the fact and fiction from their past and present. When were they truly hurt, when were they merely insulted, when did they lose control and snap, when did they project their traumas onto others, and when did they (in fear) begin plotting to damage others in a "strike first" policy?

Part of metabolizing trauma, as psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem sagely suggests, is the ability to recognize it happened. To get through the dizzying mental illness of "detachment" that pervades whiteframe and colonized colonizer culture is going to take work.

golly
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Re: White people seeking their Indigenousness

Post by golly »

So what kind of work is going to be necessary for me? That is an adventure that I am thrilled and privileged and blessed to be able to undertake. So here is how I might start to try to define my work in seeking reconnection to the sacred.

Well, first of all, white people do need to understand what the strong people they have traumatized or attempted to traumatize have tried to communicate to them. These are lessons of patriarchy and misogyny and sexism, racism and bigotry. Yes. Naturally. If we could simply listen to the wise women (or less "macho masculine") of our own families it could be a step in the right direction.

In my experience, we should also add to the basic lessons we teach our children about: we should teach of the consequences of hate, its partner ignorance and of colonization. We cannot just say that it's all in the past, all behind us, we are learning and we are getting better. We can and must earn the right to say those things, and I ought to use affirmative language. However, in my experience in order to effectively communicate with white people about these subjects, I must be clear to reinforce that white people are not basically flawed. Trauma has happened to them and it needs to be acknowledged.

This first lesson is so basic and yet so huge, that it is almost ignored and forgotten all over again.

Acknowledging trauma has happened is key, or if the words of PTSD psychotherapy or other English is too triggering or alien (and I must constantly face that English language is inextricably a colonized colonizer), acknowledging these points are key:

1. one can be abused and an abuser.
2. experiences are not "all relative", and the collective weighing of the experiences should be heard and understood by community.

It is not just the white person's equivocation and waiting for their turn to speak that will solve the white person's injuries. We must listen to each other. I must allow the person who wants to heal to have air, to have voice and to connect with others around them. I think a person who rejects their own community because they throw a tantrum for being seen as less the victim than another is almost beyond help, because community is needed to heal. There must be recognition when someone is poked and another is stabbed; there is a difference, and it's not "all relative" but too often in isolation it can appear that way.

I am not sure how I have come this far if I haven't been a part of a number of communities, even if they are dysfunctional and imperfect. We have to start somewhere. I owe a great deal of thanks to family communities, learning communities, artistic communities, research communities and "intentional community" communities that, despite existing in systems of colonization, have retained enough wisdom and connection to give perspective outside the mind of the colonized colonizer, and in some beautiful cases have even strived to overcome it. I cannot say the same for the government, the Church communities and the business communities, which I know have been seen as "nourishing" (or at best "necessary") to many in my family and friends groups, but have, personally I would say, been the biggest irresponsible parties in terms of active abuses, and active destruction and dismantling of effective healing methods. However, I can thank them still for the valuable perspective and for the joy of meeting certain members within those groups, some of whom are fighting corruption within.

I also wish to give land acknowledgement when doing speaking or doing events and gatherings. Because it's the indigenous people of a given area that have retained culture and practices that we all benefit from. I think we are also supposed to gather, based on the Native people who do this practice, that it's a really effective way to give thanks. There have been many lands that served all my learning experiences and being. In Europe, the native Bohemians, Celts, Roma, Bavarians and countless other tribes (that I must learn) stewarded the lands there long before the events of Mamwlad. I visited Europe on occasion and was disturbed and affected by the enormous grim churches, stolen artifacts and edifices of layered trauma. I also saw remnants of surviving ethnicity that lasted the torture chambers, inquisitions and other forms of local-on-local oppression.

I want to thank the Dakota people for stewarding the land I grew up in, and their countless community contributions to the people and communities of the Twin Cities, the Korean people for stewarding Korean land in Korea (and Japan), the Ainu and other native people of Japan for stewarding the land there as well as the indigenous Japanese. The issue of Japan is complex for me because I unfortunately have a great deal of ignorance when it comes to understanding these distant languages and cultures. I know that the Japanese culture is highly supremacist and they have a great deal of ethnic cleansing history they need to come to terms with. I want to thank the Tohono O'odham, Apache, Pueblo, Navajo, Yavapai, Coconino, Latinx and other native peoples of the low and high desert. I have been living in the desert for six years and it's painful to see the mistakes and decisions of the Arizona government when it comes to designing what they consider civilization, while blatantly ignoring the native wisdom of the area, in regards to food, structures and other basic things. The pollution here is not only a shameful and embarrassing mark of colonization, but it's actually physically hurtful. I hope that soon the Valley of the Sun will be healed and rejuvenated by the re-centering of native voices.

I want to thank the native people of Russia and "the Stans" including my Tatar and Ural-region ancestry. I want to thank the Arab, Palestinian and other native people of the Levant for trying to maintain peace in contentious times, but also the numerous cultures that have shown tolerance and openness and acceptance for the nomadic peoples and the settler peoples of the Hebrew tribes. I have not been to Ireland but I visited London, and I want to thank the native Beakers, Celts and the natives before them who withstood colonization as long as possible, and who were welcomed in Ireland and who resist and maintain valuable connections to their land and culture to this day. I am always trying to learn and connect with my estranged Irish roots and I thank them for maintaining the authentic Irish culture, language and practices that the world benefits from. I have not been to Luxembourg but I want to thank the native ethnic people of that land and the nation of peace that Luxembourg has tried to represent.

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Re: White people seeking their Indigenousness

Post by golly »

Nomadism, settler culture, colonization and nomadic cultures ... a very interesting subject.

I need to do more studying and listening on this subject but my present idea is that cultures of the whole spectrum between nomadic and settler are important. I think my Tatar family was highly nomadic. They were able to manipulate and move heavy rocks and minerals with their voice. They were able to weave baskets and homes and travel and thrive upon landscapes the colonized mind might be tempted to call "severe". That, to me, is a kind of indigenousness that respects and honors a range of lands, and should not be discounted just because it isn't into permanent structures.

In fact, pyramids and A-frames and stunning gorgeous works of art from Egyptian and Islander and closely related people are very impressive. And the woodworking and furnishings and house building of indigenous Nordic, Russian, Scandinavian and European peoples is admirable. Yet, when I search in my soul for what moves me, it's not permanent structures or heavy reliable objects to pass down from generation to generation; rather I would prefer few possessions entrusted throughout the community, a light structure I can pick up and move, to leave little trace behind, and which would permit my community to move with the weather.

If settler and colonizing people like my ancient Asian ancestors are a form of "Earthed" indigenousness, perhaps this body I inhabit feels a greater ancestral pull to an "Air" or "Water" or "Storm" indigenousness — a kind of native to a set of weather conditions that are just as natural as a particular land that we plant our feet on and in.

I don't want this to be conflated with the colonized mind's tendency to connect to weather with an RV, a road trip, a flight, an escape or a socioeconomic migration related to intracolony movement. I can't at all equate a "Snow bird" behavior (a pre- or post-retiree who travels from the Chicago to Phoenix or Milwaukee to Florida when the gray cold skies roll in for five months) to this sort of native nomadism I am discussing. It is not supposed to be Thoreau's grumpy and recalcitrant one-man performance of an illusory independence.

What my body and soul yearn for as an embodiment of my ethnic authenticity is to live and move with my people, the animals, the leaves, the clouds and the precious fleeting emotions of the land itself — to watch for augury and signs and respond with the Earth's sensitive cautions for us.

I wish to divest of the colonized mind's idea that this only exists in the past, or that I am somehow only dreaming when I talk of these feelings that come from the very core of my soul's stirrings. I know this is a real way to live. Now. And sustainably. It is not a "visit to the past"; on the contrary it is what evolution may have in store, with all the lessons we can carry away from a crumbling obsolete old philosophy of "empire". It could be possible soon, with just a change to the way we think of how we serve life, the land and each other. Instead of propping up fence posts, we learn borders through relationship to each other and to the land in full confluence.

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Re: White people seeking their Indigenousness

Post by golly »

What I've learned so far about my indigenous ethnicities:

As an Irish people, the Konrardy family wished to keep their roots unclear or hidden due to Irish persecution in the United States. Hints came down that their "English" was actually Irish through my father Willing's mother. She didn't have a lot to say about it but she did say "You can wear green today," on Saint Patrick's day without elaborating. Much later, it came out through genealogy exploration of Willing's father and mother (and brother, who sort of inherited the projects) that there was more to it.

On Turtle Island, during the days of mass invasion from Europe, Konrardys and Rathburns/Rathbones came from: the United Kingdom and Luxembourg.

Luxembourg is known as the Gibraltor of the North. This is because of the fortifications set up during intra-European conflicts, for the geopolitical position between France, Germany and Belgium. They issued a bond for taking apart the huge old fortifications recently in agreement with European powers.

It was also a place of garrisoned military for the Roman Empire. They accommodated the military probably as a measure to keep their safety and roots to the land intact. It could be said they are amazing compromisers (and it's probably healthier for me not to read "collaborators" at the moment, since this does make me concerned for their role to fascist movements).

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Re: White people seeking their Indigenousness

Post by golly »

I will now relate a story about "reactions" to nature, which is both deep and personal. So please do not be offended by anything I have to write. My intentions are purely a means of sharing something that I hope helps others on their own journey.

I have a deep need to wander and travel, and as I've already mentioned in previous posts this has to do with something that I call my inherent need to do so. However, let me relate something else that deserves discussion or consideration. I look at the various environments I have been to: North, West, South, Central, East, Southeast, Southwest, Northwest and Northeast Turtle Island, Celtic, Germanic, Belgian, Dutch and Bavarian and Austrian lands, France, Switzerland, Bilbao, Basque, Catalonian, Adriatic and Mediterranean lands, Slavic lands, the many regions of a semi-united Italy and Korfu (an island of Greece), the Korean peninsula, the aboriginal land called by Euros "Australia" and the traumatized genocided land called "Tasmania", the islands called Japan, the Malaysian land of "Singapore", the land of Ural mountain people where my mother was born, the ancient land of Khmers called "Cambodia", and other places in this world, the one we call Earth.

When I've traveled, I have forever sought something to identify with, and something to identify myself, and it was not through architecture or people or music (although music most of all always felt like the best spiritual guide to a people group). It was mainly through the greenery growing through the stone, the cracks and sand in the pavement, the way water was treated, pooled and moved through a human developed area. When I looked at the plants and animals and I thought about them and reached out to them with my heart and mind, I would feel different things. Often, the quality of the "wildness" and the quality of the "welcomeness" (in a social sense) and the quality of the land's own feeling of being landscaped / managed / neglected / mistreated informed my feeling of the areas. Yet, almost always I can feel the types of connections I felt were beyond this. If an area was more "me" I could feel it, and it had nothing to do with my ability to exploit the place, my ability to enjoy the flora, my privilege or sense of social belonging, or my personal state of mind or body.

I felt that each place had a spiritual community I could communicate with, but I was lacking the culture to do so "right". I felt nature was telling me this each time I mentally slipped on the roles offered to me as a "whitey": colonizing teacher of colonizing language, abstracted artist of self career, self-realized tourist of privilege, enslaver and dictator of natural beings, consumer of local consumables, riser in imperial career. None of these roles fit me, the real me, yet that is all I was being seen as by family and friends of family. Family taught me to wander around, open-jawed, waiting for someone to put something in my head and to come back home to tell amusing stories of the flavors.

Pens, barns, cages, terrariums and aquariums of domesticated animals like turkeys, cattle, rabbits, chickens, fish and so on would especially cause me to glance around for the top of a tree, a bush or anything less like a slaughterhouse or prison or farm. Yet as a "white" person, my colonized mind would not be satisfied with the bountiful offerings of cherry trees, orange trees, or human run kitchens. I felt lost, disconnected and alien. I felt ever like a wanderer. It was not "right" for me to just take as a vagrant and it was even worse if I should end up in some domesticated "house" imposed on the land by an imperial State.

The indelicate human grooming of the land by aggressive, technological and reckless means was as "inane" to me as wandering in the wild. What I sought and could not seem to locate, until I worked on a farm north of the township of Ramsey (Dakota country), was something like an internship to learning proper human interaction with nature. Yes, I had been out of college for a few years and I was beginning to wake up to reality and not the fake bubble universe of our default purpose (get a degree, get a job, make consumerist decisions, make personal partnership decisions and then die). I was awakening to spirit, interdimensional beings, and the practice of living like my bohemian/wandering ancestors in a settled area. The goal of a spiritual bohemian life in a settled area is to avoid attachments to master-slave jobs, to get by and procure with income and resources collected as a team by a variety of low-key means, to repurpose abandoned structures, infuse them with soul and life and music and laughter, clear the angry spirits and ascend the lost spirits; and generally to introduce healing to unsustainable ways of life.

But I didn't want to forever live as the Death card of the city Tarot. I wanted also to encourage and nourish bounty itself, to connect with my own indigeneity with natural community and love living life. When I realized that, I first sought connection to this through my European family, and I accepted an invitation to live there and really grow close with ancient Italian ways of grooming Italy, where they had procured a house. This seemed to be a proper human interaction with nature of some kind. At the time, I did not realize Italy's millennia of landscaping and mobster rule had torn its people from the land and infested their ways with corruption. But one thing I knew was that getting a crash course in natural ways was needed beyond the second grade introduction to gardening. So I looked for an internship on a farm.

My first instinct was to seek one in Ireland, where I could connect with my own indigeneity (my spiritual life already involved a great deal of ways considered Pagan or Wiccan, which is well and alive in the emerald Isle). At the same time I decided I could connect with indigenous praxis, not even knowing yet that my indigenous ethnicity involves Irish ancestry. However, a family member suggested that "there are people who need help here" and I thought it certainly sounded noble to try that and to not use the jet fuel or romanticize Ireland. After all, "help" was just what I wanted to do in attempting to live and/or embody the truth of natural laws.


The Farm

Now, this place on Dakota land that was recommended was not at all the ideal I sought. It was the Summer of 2008, five years til the imported European ways of Garden Farme would be considered a century old and get privileges from the State of the settler colonists who do not recognize or reward (indeed, who actively punish) the tens of thousands of years of native caretaking. This old Anglo farmer was looking forward to the boon, and his even older ailing relic of a mother called my friends "colored people" in grumbling tones because they were not of European descent. He said, "Do you see what I grew up with, and what I escaped? Now you have an idea!"

He was raised cantankerous, but turned it into a righteous rebellion. He wanted to be in alliance with all the civil rights movements available. When the media began showing story after story of heavy State on citizen violence in the 60s, he asked himself what actually has future potential and determined that natural law was it. He had been entrusted with the farm in the 1970s and took advantage of its natural pure condition by phasing in permaculture, gaining 100% organic (pesticide free) status of the gardens before organic certification even existed. He became friends with others awakening to wise indigenous ways and even traded his tasty organic honey for other natural product from well-known indigenous activist and Green politician Winona LaDuke.

The entire experience working with him was positive but mixed. On the one hand he sometimes treated me like a servant asking me to do menial tasks that I didn't refuse because of my natural tendency to want to be useful, and because he was an elder. He would bark and lose his temper at tiny incidents and slam things around out of emotional reactionism and frustration. He would disappear in his room after telling me he intended to give instruction on something, and needing to think he would smoke a great deal of marijuana in order to do so. I enjoyed the "hands off" aspects where I could plant seeds, water, grow, raise, weed and gather. We struggled any time he wanted to be "hands on" because his manner was rough, authoritarian, emotionally charged and occasionally desperate and immature. The words "we struggled" is my way of imparting that I struggled to feel emotionally safe around him and he struggled to not blast his trauma out on others.

On the other hand, he genuinely did need down time to think, he genuinely came up with amazing ideas and plans, he ran several acres practically by himself (except for his good friend living on site, his cousin that would come and go, and a rotating cavalcade of interns like myself). He was deeply soulful and poetic and hilarious, had a huge variety of interests and always kept on top of the latest communications about justice. His wit was as sharp as a tack. I remember him laughing at the stupidity of politicians on talk radio and giving counter-point lectures to anyone in the room, which more often than not for several months was me, the dog and a wild bunch of semi-feral cats that only trusted him. When other garden workers came, I truly relished the knowledge of plants (and people) we would share over the farmer's curiously Masonic seeming 33-inch by 33-foot raised beds.

Some of the stories of the place were symbolic to the point that I felt pain thinking about it. In one prairie he received compensation for a fantastic program that rewarded the careful restoration of indigenous natural prairie grasses to several tens of the ninety acres of the farm. In another field, he was bribed to accept terrible decomposing plastic bags full of leaves; damage to the soil that would not be recovered for any foreseeable time.

When I left for the West coast to begin my journey into my family roots (including a new family I was introduced to on the farm, a beautiful woman residing in a region close to my uncle's) I believed I'd had a fine introduction to nature ... but a rather rough introduction to cooperative praxis with her. Two years later, after my attempts to grow into family roots turned into running away from family to put distance between me and their boot camp of colonization (there is your answer as to why I was running, dear friend, if you're reading this; I finally figured it out!) I returned to Dakota country in some emotional shambles. I immediately asked the farmer if he still had use for me, and my soul was renourished by interacting once more with the soil, the herbs, the intellectual conversation about nature, and the ramshackle community of people not "fitting in". I retained contact with him while trying to find footing again, and I would occasionally try to help with the "human" aspect by bringing friends new and old to the place and man that had become dear to my heart.

As the decade of the 2010s lengthened he was approaching the need for statements and actions of his legacy, so I was involved in trying to help him network with the University of Minnesota. He offered me an acre of land if I worked on the farm for a year but I was already gearing up to sever commitments in Dakota area so that I could take up my girlfriend's invitation to move in, down in the Southwest. In truth, one of the reasons I would have declined even if I were not under the influence of romantic love is that while working the land for a Summer (about half a decade prior) I was perpetually in that state of feeling empty and unconnected to the "good ways".

Despite his good practices and my deepened connection to soil, I still felt as though everybody was so busy trying to heal and reduce harm that none of us human beings were getting practice in perpetuating the cooperation with each other and with nature. Or rather, it was all practice and no arrival at something that wasn't liable to explode in triggered traumatic stress.

I realize now that all of this difficulty is partially because the design of the imperial system is specifically to prevent exactly what I am seeking to build, protect and carry out. Empire is designed to identify, consume and leave in ruins any indigenous people and ways it comes across, in order to feed its unsustainable need for ever expanding against and ever trying to conquer Creator's work.

golly
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Re: White people seeking their Indigenousness

Post by golly »

I am delighted to find out more about my Tatar and Ashkenazim and Russian heritages after scanning through videos and comments. I've started a topic about tangential conflicts in the Middle East (and Asia) here: viewtopic.php?p=197

My research has indicated to me something that I "felt" while traveling.

In Korea, I felt an incredible familiarity and I do believe that the Hermit Kingdom actually has strong interrelationship to Mongolian and therefore Tatar strains of humanity. We may be close cousins if in a distant way. However the familiarity was strong and felt. I also feel a very strong affinity to the images of Tatar people pre-colonization and more nomadic. So not the Abrahamic-converts and militarized imperial populations of Tatar but the free and natural people we were when we were connected to nature, animism and our Shamans. The basket weaving wanderers. Not riding horses with armor and swords, but living a ranging life with strong womxn leading our community.

To some extent, I am also open to my generically colonized European connections such as Irish/Celt, Italian/Ashkenazim, Germanic/Bohemian/Roma/Assyrian, Anglo/Saxon/Scandinavian and other agrarian-turned-urban lives that emerged out of surviving countless military conquests and oppressions and impositions on natural human life. I don't equate Western civilization, as it's called, with "progress" so much as "holding humanity back" due to its strong associations with violent war, colonization and mechanization of my ancestors. However, I can also appreciate the ingenuity and technologies and marvels that managed to come about despite it all, and I do appreciate the particular community and egalitarian collaborations and internships and projects in trade skills (in wood, paper arts, and finally animation and interactive virtual programs) that have served people well. Some non-superstitious and totally practical mystical traditions also survived, including herbology, naturopathy, Tarot, energy body work and even music and arts and storytelling styles.

It is very difficult to describe the feelings in words. Maybe I ought to find the English to use. However, what comes close is "positive energy" and "connection" and "belonging" and if it's offensive to suggest my ancestral components have relevance today, let me suggest to the reader that all I'm talking about is making space for thoroughly authentic lives free of slavery to any evil technocracy.

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