First Stewards #6: The New Tip of the Spear
They have been living in the same place in the same traditional way for centuries, perhaps millenia. They embody old cultures, ancient cultures, and as such are never prepared for the modern world of today. They are the stagnant, stuck images that define the prowess and the adaptability of the modern subject.
In the case of the United States for example, this relationship is necessary because of the way in which the origin of the nation is inundated with a dependency upon the native. Early settlers of North America struggled to survive and only did so through their cooperation and learning from Native Americans who were already familiar with the land and the climate. Without them the first settlers would have died out, never survived. They were only able to take root because of the pity that Native Americans took upon them.
The Thanksgiving Holiday is intriguing in the way in which
it effectively takes that primal dependency and transforms it into a rite of
passage. In most Thanksgiving stories the dependency is largely absent, as is
the eventual genocide. What instead becomes front and center is the exchange
that takes place between the pilgrims and the natives. That exchange becomes
the metaphor for the assumed bequeathing of the land and the destiny of the
land from small tribes to the great white country that would later be born. The
gifts of ma’ise that the Native
Americans gift are in truth the “keys” to the American nation, it is a moment
in which they give up their previous sovereign control, that resulted in
centuries of charming and quaint stagnation and instead let the white settler
take charge and guide the land into a bold new direction.
It is a similar sort of scene that is portrayed in the
infamous Marshall Cases. In a sort of
racial/legal alchemy that should leave one breathless, the political gold of
treaties signed between Native Americans and the United States become the lead
chains that are meant to forever enslave them as subordinate to US Federal
interests. The treaties the Native Americans signed and the relationships that
they had started to form with the United States were used in the Marshall Cases as evidence of their
dependency upon the US, and as evidence that even if they once had sovereignty,
that had clearly lost it long ago. This should confuse you since the purpose of treaties is the opposite, it is meant to establish a relationship between equals, but since the US was full of people who wanted Native lands and governments that wanted Native Americans gone, a massive fantasy took the place of truth and has been built upon ever since.
The Natives, the indigenous people thus become a residue
leftover from the birth of the nation. There is an icky, unfortunate quality to
their existence. Something that you don’t quite know what to make of. There is
also a sort of magical quality to them, because they bear the marks of the
birth of the nation and so they also exist to perform the sovereignty of the
nation. As the natives that remain even after the nation has surpassed and
usurped them, they are stagnant fragments of the nation’s origin that you can
still make use of it to reflect back the power and ability of the nation.
The indigenous person gets stuck in time and stuck in
history. The past may belong to them, but the future and the present always
belong to someone modern. That is why indigenous people are always supposed to
be just about to disappear. The horizon of their non-existence waits just
around the corner. Their culture has been disrupted and has been shattered.
What they have now are just simple pieces of it. With each generation they
become less and less of who they are, always lured away by the promises of the
present and the future. The modern ensnares them and pulls them away from their
stagnant, grounded culture.
This is the way things are supposed to be. This is the way
that the world and history have been established, especially through the
previous epochs of colonialism and imperialism.
A very different narrative was asserted at the First Stewards
Climate Change Symposium, one that inverted this idea in an inspiring and
interesting way. While the modern subject may argue its existence as the spear
of history, the thing that pierces the veil of the future in the name of all
mankind, the thing that can change its stars, determine its own destiny and the
destinies of others, we have come to a point in history where this is clearly no longer
true. In terms of climate change, global warming, rising water levels and other
environmental problems, what we see from the modern world is stagnation
and paralysis. They are unable to do much of anything. They can talk big about
it, can blame everything under the sun for it, but in the face of the next
level of existence, the natural order, mankind, especially in its most modern
dimensions appears to be almost pathetic in its inability and stuck in ways
that you could easily call criminal.
Indigenous people on the other hand are the ones who are
leading the charge for radical action in terms of climate change. They are the
ones who are changing the most and appear to be the most adaptable to the
situation. Throughout the First Stewards Climate Change Symposium, stories were
told from across the Pacific and the Western United States of communities who
were taking aggressive action to try to fix things, to adapt to what is becoming
more and more obvious and clear in our lives. Part of the reason is of course
because they are being affected the most. They are the ones who depend most
directly on certain resources, for example the ocean and the creatures that are
in it. For much of the world adverse effects may take much longer in order to
be felt as so much of what people eat comes across borders and is dependent
upon the exploitation of lands and labor from elsewhere. For a fishing tribe in
Alaska the effects of global warming are apparent and clear as land is
literally disappearing beneath the water, glaciers are melting at alarming
rates and fish are no longer found where they have traditionally been.
It is an interesting turn of events when the nature of the
world is reversed in this way. The question is whether or not those who have
placed themselves at the top of the world and oppressed and subdued indigenous
people in so many ways, will set aside their pride and allow things to change.
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