World-renewal and the Indigenous

In the name of sustainability, powerful “Foundations” inherit the mantle of empire. They turn living cultures into museums, elders into photo opportunities, and rituals into decorative prayers for conferences. They host gatherings with Indigenous leaders dressed in regalia, a choreography of symbolic inclusion that conceals systemic exclusion. It is the old colonial theatre restaged under the lights of “philanthropy.”
-- Jay Naidoo

The excerpt above, from an article by the South African elder Jay Naidoo, speaks to why I sometimes cringe when a conference trots out an indigenous person to invoke the Four Directions before everyone settles into their auditorium seats for the business of the day. We are treated, perhaps, to a song in a native language, and a lesson about the sacred hoop of life; then the indigenous person exits the stage, or everyone exits the circle and returns to the auditorium, and we resume the timetabled agenda of speakers and slide shows, panels and breakout sessions, metrics and solutions.

My visceral response to indigenous songs and ceremonies is quite different when I witness them in their natural context, entering into their reality as a humble and honest guest.

Yet, I am not quite as cynical as Jay Naidoo seems to be in the article. I also recognize a sincere striving among those NGOs and conference organizers, a genuine impulse to reach beyond their familiar ways. On some level, they recognize the inadequacy of their inherited means, methods, and mindsets to meet the present crisis of civilization. But often, this striving devolves into mere “inclusion.” Indigenous females and queer non-binary persons of color may replace white males on the stage, but replacing parts does not change the workings of the machine.

The structures and unconscious habits of the machine easily hijack the best intentions of inclusion. The physical spaces of conference rooms, and especially the electronic spaces of virtual gatherings, reinforce those habits. They induce familiar ways of thinking: mechanical, abstract, disembodied. The organic intelligence of the cosmos seems, in those spaces, theoretical.

Some understandings are difficult to have indoors or while staring at a screen. They seem wishful, fanciful, delusional. Outdoors in the rain forest or the desert or on a sailboat, they are as obvious as the sun.

That’s why bringing indigenous people into boardrooms and conference stages won’t change things much. Certainly it is better than excluding them, but we want to do more than replace the operators of the world-destroying machine with new ones of different colors.

We think the drivers drive the machine, but it is much more true that the machine drives the drivers. They conform to the roles that the system dictates. Stick me in a backhoe and I will learn to work the controls.

Take someone out of the rain forest and plug them into suburban America, and soon they will behave like a suburban American. Plug them into corporate boards or government ministries, and soon they will behave like corporate directors and government ministers. Certainly they can bring their original values with them, just as you can plant coastal shrubs in inland soil, but they will wither there.

For our civilization to make different choices, to set a new course, including new voices in the old structures is not enough. Using them as decoration, even less so. Using the indigenous to brand events as “conscious” won’t achieve much either. Nor will expropriating their rituals as “content,” their stories as AI training data, or their sacred sites as spiritual tourism destinations. The economic growth machine is always hungry for some new form of capital—natural, cultural, or spiritual—to convert into money, requiring ever-new forms of colonialism.

There is an alternative. Many now see what Jay Naidoo sees. We who see the bankruptcy of modern narratives of development look for other mythologies, and along with them other ways of being human, other ways of relating to the rest of life and the material world. We look to the indigenous for needed assistance in the project of global transformation, and seek to support them in their contribution. We do not patronize them, imagining that we know how to live better than they, imagining that we know how to know better than they. We don’t try to make them like ourselves, to enroll them in failed notions of progress. We don’t broker access to them in exchange for donations to our NGOs. We don’t attempt to plug them into a system that we no longer believe in.

We understand that for humanity to pass the initiatory threshold that is upon us, we must gather together all that modernity has exiled to the margins of reality. Therefore, we value intact indigenous cultures not only for the contributions that fit easily into mainstream paradigms of land stewardship and ecological conservation, but also for their cosmologies; their stories; and their technologies of mind, sound, symbol, body, and matter.

The familiar causal framework of science can recognize the indigenous for tending ecosystems and living sustainably. Invisible in that framework, yet plain to those who are willing to step outside it, is the role of indigenous cultures in maintaining networks of sacred sites, earth shrines, ceremonies, and stories that hold the world together. The modern mind believes that we make stories about the world. Other minds have believed that stories weave the world. They have believed that words, sounds, gestures, songs, rituals, etiquette, and prayer influence matter by means beyond force-based causation. According to Mircea Eliade, many cultures believed that if they did not reenact world-renewal ceremonies, the world would cease to exist. Creation would fall apart. In the Yurok and other California traditions, world-renewal festivals were conceived as a kind of maintenance or repair of the world.

This might seem like a fanciful superstition, except for the uncomfortable fact that, as cultures around the world abandon their traditions, creation is indeed spiraling into disrepair. Well, we might say, that’s because of mining, logging, climate change, plastic in the rivers, toxic waste in the soil. It’s not because indigenous nations are no longer enacting their ceremonies. Oh yes, we know so much better than they do how the world works.

Or do we? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” says the Bible. Helplessly, our society careens toward ecological, social, and bodily breakdown, even as the number of intact non-modern cultures dwindles. To the holistic mind, these trends are causally entwined.

Fortunately there are indigenous people on this earth still performing their ceremonies, speaking their languages, maintaining their shrines, and telling their stories. There are just enough of them that the world still holds together, as if by a thread. Once I heard a Kogi say, “You have to change your ways. Our rituals cannot hold earth together much longer.” The Kogi and other relatively intact cultures anchor a different reality on earth, one that bears a future much more beautiful than the hellscape toward which civilization is hurtling.

Most mainstream environmental activists and philanthropists do value indigenous peoples. Their operating paradigms recognize them for maintaining carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots, and, from a place of compassion, they wish to redress historical (and ongoing) injustices like economic exploitation and cultural appropriation. However, for them these are more matters of social justice than environmental necessity. Sacred sites and ceremonies enter little into the picture. Modern causality does not recognize their role in holding the world together. Therefore, far more energy (and money) pours into causes like “green energy” than goes toward indigenous rights. Sometimes, NGOs actively participate in the destruction of indigenous culture through “development” work, which seeks to establish modern education, modern infrastructure, and modern ways of life, with success metrics that prioritize a university education in the capital over a shamanic training in the village. To the generation thus “uplifted,” cultural traditions—and even their own language—often seem backward, embarrassing, or quaint. Even if they still perform the old rituals, they no longer bear the same power disembedded from their original world-story and ways of life.

However, just as there are still indigenous societies that have kept their language and culture relatively intact, so also are some in the modern world beginning to recognize them in the fullness of their importance for earth’s future. For us, there is no environmental issue more important than the continued viability of indigenous culture and territorial integrity.

I have been philosophizing on this topic for at least ten years now, and recently I’ve become more directly involved as an advisor to organizations that share my views. One of these is a new non-profit called Rooted. It gives equal weight to the environmental and cultural contributions of indigenous societies. Here are some of its initial projects:

1. Recovery of the territory of the Huni Kuin of Brazil. At present 80% of their land has fallen under the control of large farms, and the rest of it is severely degraded. One of their leaders, Chief Ninawa, has forged an alliance of 123 other chiefs and their communities to recover territory and, when that is not possible, relocate to forested land where they can practice their culture and apply their profound ecological knowledge.

2. Two post-COP gatherings in Brazil of indigenous wisdom holders and earth stewards from around the world. Their presence at COP is extremely important in order to shift the narrative away from carbon reductionism toward a living earth paradigm. Both these gatherings operate on a shoestring budget. When these leaders are able to gather and hold their story, their understanding, in solidarity, they are better able to shift ours.

3. Collaboration with the Earth Elders organization to fund indigenous shamans and lineage holders to weave a multi-cultural alliance. I personally know some of those they support. Many of them are not oriented toward asking for money. They are humble, uninterested is self-promotion, and therefore not easily visible to the funding world. Yet their work in cultural and ecological integrity is indispensable.

If any of you reading this article see what I see about the importance of the cultural integrity of indigenous nations, and the work of those who hold their ceremonies, stories, and shamanic practices, and you feel moved and able to contribute, I’ve put a donate button below. If you are in the world of philanthropic funding, then please reply to this email so we can introduce you to Rooted to explore making a 501(c)3 donation. The projects offer an extraordinarily high “return on investment.” In contrast to the billions that go into conventional climate initiatives, they run in the tens or hundreds of thousands but make an immediate, outsized impact.

I believe civilization can reunite with life, not through the repudiation of modernity, but through its metamorphosis; a symbiotic merger with ancestral ways of thinking, seeing, and being. Thankfully, these ways are not lost, but they continue to dwindle along with the territories that host them. May we value them once more.