Crucial indigenous responsibilities

By Marcelo Saavedra-Vargas

The following notes were prepared as the basis for the opening address at the teach-in Lessons from Bolivia: Building a Global Movement for Climate Justice in Toronto on Saturday, November 13.

WE ARE PACHA MAMA

We must recognize the fact that we are all expressions of Mother Earth, of Pacha Mama. We must acknowledge and honour this fact. This is not a metaphor or a poetic exercise.

I am going to put it in the way traditional Mik’maq Elder Stephen Augustin explained it to me, very elegantly and sincerely: “we peel off Mother Earth,” he told me.

We belong to the mysterious circle of life and we have our place on the circle where we establish horizontal and sacred relations with others – even though the current system tries to make us forget this.


In indigenous legends, myths, ceremonies, prophecies throughout the planet, we find this same ontological notion of all being part of a continuous process of creation and recreation. In fact, our Others, the animal nation, the plants nation, the tree nation , have convened that we humans be the guardians of the sacredness of these set of relationships. We are the guardians of maintaining the equilibrium so that life will happen on our planet.

We live on a very particular planet; it is both our home and the source of our existences. Some say, this is a Rare Earth, because of all the particular incidents that had to happen for our planet, and our existences, to form. Things like being at the precise distance from our sun, not too close so our atmosphere would not evaporate because of the heat nor too far so our water wouldn’t freeze everywhere. Our sun is just the proper size and our planet just the just size to be orbiting its sun at the proper speed. We are even so lucky that in the formation of our planet, a twin planet to ours, Theia, collided with our vessel so our core could be enriched with iron and create not only the proper gravitational force to hold our atmosphere but also form a magnetic shield that protects us from celestial harmful rays. The debris from this collision, as if we were not lucky enough, provided for our moon to form like a stabilizer body that regulates our seasons and our path as we revolve around our sun, and our solar system revolves around the center of our galaxy. On top of things, we also have Jupiter, a true guardian, whose massive gravitational pull, keeps many potentially lethal bodies from hitting our home. One of these bodies hit our vessel 65 million years ago. That incident wiped out a species that had roamed the planet for about 150 million years, the dinosaurs. It opened the way to a new dominant kind of beings, the mammals, and among them, our own species. We are truly lucky for having such a resilient mother, such a loving Mother.

We find references to these facts in a number of myths, legends and prophecies of our indigenous peoples.

DEFENDING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN BOLIVIA

The Cultural Revolution in Bolivia opens up crucial spaces for debate, for empowering the visions of indigenous peoples, for re-establishing forgotten equilibriums. As indigenous peoples, we are truly defenders of this process because it is a set of possibilities for us to give to humanity the richness of our cultures, indigenous cultures. The cultural revolution taking place in my home country, Bolivia, is not only inspiring for indigenous peoples across the planet but a powerful example of the way history is shaped by people who are in close contact with their inner selves, their true selves.

And it is as the product of that process of change, of cultural revolutionary change, that the Cochabamba Accord came into being. This accord demands and challenges the international system of nation states to acknowledge the rights of Mother Earth, without compromising the rights previously established universally. Acknowledging these rights signifies recognizing we are all part of the sacred and mysterious circle of life and that, for the time being, we are using modern instruments to protect the only support system we will ever have, our planet, our Mother Earth, our Pacha Mama. Is this a figment of indigenous imagination? Is this an Indian nonsensical hallucination?

WHO IS INDIGENOUS?

Well, let me first discuss who is indigenous.

Am I talking here only about those who have a different culture as compared to Western and modern cultures? Am I talking about those who have arranged their societies following a close understanding of Mother Nature’s cycles, like the Aymara, Guarani, Hopi, Haudenosuane, Anishinaabe, the San? Am I excluding those that are living other ways of arranging their societies, following other principles, like the Western modern human being?

In my belief, we are all indigenous to this planet. So far I have not met anyone who was born outside this planet, whether be in a space station, or the moon, or Mars. We are all indigenous to planet Earth. Furthermore, we are all a physical expression of the elements that Mother Earth generously provides for us, way beyond the arbitrary “free-market” price system.

If you would manage to chemically and physically analyze yourself, very closely, you would find that your organism is but a complex set of relations of the four sacred elements: water, air, fire and earth. It is not a romantic or poetic endeavour. We are not trying to be fashionable or politically-correct back-to-the-landers in the year 2010! We just want to acknowledge who we were, we are and we will always be dirt, sky, water and photosynthesis. We are still homo sapiens, we still need land, crops, animals, weather, oceans, atmosphere, and so on.

In that sense, we are still the same naked bipedal upright folk that started wandering about 200,000 year ago, as our foremothers and forefathers. Really, we never left the land, we never abandoned the planet. None of us. Yet, we are forgetting these sacred relations. We have been living through a process of inversion that is bringing our species to the verge of extinction.

Some people argue that our planet is in peril of a catastrophe, that she is going to perish. Pacha Mama is very resilient, she is a survivor. She’s gone through five massive extinctions and it took her just some millions of years to regain life everywhere on her territory. In fact it is a result of these massive extinction episodes that we came to be a dominant species on the planet. What a great responsibility we bear towards ourselves, our future generations and all other beings on our planet!

FEAR & ARROGANCE

The imposition of an arbitrary system, that of capitalism, colonialism/imperialism, and most of all, patriarchy has resulted in a peculiar process of inversion and the pervasive feeling of fear and arrogance on the part of this particular civilization project.

Modern society is living in a state of low-level, subtle, toxic, all-pervading fear. This fear gets readily transformed into arrogance and a false sense of superiority over all things around us, especially what we term the wildlife. We assume this wildlife (the natural world) to be out there, where, in reality, it is in us, here in our hearts. We are the territory, we are the geography. It is not that the territory can belong to us. No, we belong to it; we are part of Mother Earth.

HUMILITY

Let’s be humble, truly humble.

It only took our universe 13.75 billion years to get to the point of you being here. Sitting here and now was preceded by a wild sequence of events, going against all probabilities, with the result that you, that beautiful you, are here, now, with us, as we dream together.

Just imagine the probabilities of you coming to life... 1,050,000,000 (more than one billion) spermatozoids at the time of your conception and only 1 – that is 0.000000017% – probability (for scientific and all other practical purposes, that is zero), that that one would be the exact one to give birth to the specific you. Isn’t that magic? According to the law of probabilities, you were not meant to be here, yet, here you are, wholesome, total, and committed to change our planet! If that is not magic, then what is it? And that one, you, inhabiting this incredibly beautiful planet, our mother, revolving around an unimportant star that is itself revolving around the center of another unimportant galaxy, the Milky Way – just a speck in the grand order of things. Yet, I see you, I feel the strong spirits you embody. We all resonate with each other.

We need to stop living in arrogance, having the false presumption that we are the summit of the evolutionary journey of all species. Acknowledging and, furthermore, honouring the rights of our planet, is an act of humility and courage. It means that we would not have fear in our hearts, but rather, with love, humility and courage we can acknowledge our belonging to this planet, to this land, to this territory.

When Europeans settlers came to the Abya-Yala (otherwise known as the Americas), our ancestors received them with open arms. They taught them how to hunt, how to use plants and vegetables; they shared their stories, legends and ceremonies with them. Our ancestors showed them how harmoniously and freely Anishinaabe, Aymara, Mohawk, Wendat, or Mississauga people could live with Mother Earth, on Turtle Island, in the Abya-Yala. The prophecy of the re-encounter of the Eagle and the Condor (and other prophecies of our indigenous peoples, like the Anishinaabe prophecy of the Seven Fires or the Mayan calendars) announced a time in which we, meaning human beings, would have to choose which way we should be heading. Clearly, the Western, capitalist, colonial and patriarchal way has failed. We need to renew our initial covenant with our Mother, our land. We need to choose responsibly. We need urgently to be responsible. Responsible is being able to respond, have response ability. That is why we are here.

OUR RESPONSIBILITIES.

But what kind of responsibility? The responsibility to be truly free in an indigenous sense. You are free only if you can take on your responsibility, if you can be true to your responsibilities, honour your obligations towards the small circle you belong to and to the extended circle your community is part of. At the end, it is also a matter of honouring those that came before you (your ancestors) and those that are still in the spirit realm waiting to become human beings through you, your next generations up to the seventh skin. That is the sacredness of your circle. You also have to be in terms with your inner self, your most precious and sacred circle, being true to your nature in this cosmic journey we call life.

A SENSE OF BELONGING

Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that during 99% of our journey as a species we lived under the invisible and unspoken covenant with Mother Earth by which we were going to respect and honour it. In all the myths of indigenous peoples, we see that other beings on this planet, animals, forests, rivers, lakes, plants, got together in a circle and decided to give us the responsibility of being the beholders of intelligence, guardians of time, and keepers of fire. That was the grand plan, that was the guardianship we are beholders of, as designated by the other beings on this planet.

This has being betrayed, especially for the past 200 years and even more so since privatization took a grip on everything that is part of this planet: especially the Commons.

Painting by Savin Thanda, one of my students in the Program of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Ottawa, March 2010

For far too long, things have been inverted. We are living a particular time of anomaly. This came as a warning from several indigenous Elders when they noticed small changes in their surroundings. As I have already affirmed, indigenous peoples are their territories; we cannot put them apart as peoples on one side and the territories on the other. John Amagoalik, an Inuk Elder, stated that “we don’t look at land as something to be owned, something to be given away or sold. It’s a heritage. It’s something inside you”. We are the geographies; we have keen chorographic knowledge and wisdom of which we are, that is, our lands and territories. Chorography is like geography; it studies the Earth, its lands, rivers, inhabitants and so on, but on a specific level, locally. For instance Anishinaabe people have unparalleled chorographic knowledge of the land where we are having this meeting right now, because they are that territory. This transient, episodic and anomalous time has made us believe that we can own the land, the territory, where for most of our existence, the opposite has been true. We belong to the land, to our true Mother, to our Pacha Mama.

It is our obligation to restore this sacred and vital relationship to its proper form.


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I am deeply honoured to have shared this time with you and having been able to reflect your feelings and been in spiritual communion with you.

Thank you
Gracias
Meegweetch
Paschi
Jallalla!