An Encouraging Trend in (and of) Resistance
Published at 18:14 on 17 September 2016
New insights which should have happened to me long ago (given how obvious they are) keep happening to me. Take yesterday, for example. There was a solidarity rally for the Standing Rock Sioux and their struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in downtown Seattle then which I happened to attend.
One insight that’s not new to me is that ecological consciousness can be a struggle to adopt on a widespread scale in the United States because we are such a new nation. We don’t have a long history of inhabiting the land here. 200 years is a long time and 500 years is an extremely long time. Yet even 500 years isn’t very long at all when one takes geological or ecological time scales into account. Americans simply lack anything approaching the long-term view that one needs to adopt a truly sustainable society.
Of course that’s only really true for the majority that is descended from primarily European settlers, which is the delayed insight that I had. Native Americans have been living here for thousands of years. While they don’t have a long history (history is a written record, the vast majority of tribes were pre-literate, and the few that were literate had virtually their entire corpus deliberately destroyed), written records are not the only records. There are oral records, something which every people has.<
Yes, oral records are imperfect, but so are written ones; the latter are typically distorted by servitude to power and authority (freedom of expression is a relatively new invention, and even in open societies there is a lot of self-censorship and acquiescence to power). Moreover, the orally-transmitted knowledge of how to live and survive on the land tends to be accurate, because it is continually subjected to a process of testing; if such knowledge becomes faulty, the outcome will involve hardship at the least.
The process of social contact with Europeans was extremely traumatic for most tribes, and they are only now starting to bounce back from it. Many tribes have had success winning back ignored treaty rights in recent decades, then came the economic success of tribal gaming (no small thing; it’s been a source of funds free of the paternalistic and bureaucratic encumbrance of Federal sources), and now in the NoDAPL struggle we finally see a degree of Native American unity really starting to develop; tribes that have historically (and prehistorically) been enemies have joined forces in this struggle.
The latter is an amazing and encouraging accomplishment, one that I think offers all of us, Native American and not, some real hope. We need the voices of those who have lived with this land the longest.