Wild Free and Happy Sample 11

[Note: This is the eleventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Social Structure

You and I are tropical primates, and our family tree originated in Mother Africa.  Africa played a primary role in the evolution of our bodies and minds.  Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers for at least two million years.  Because they were predators on the savannah, they could not live in large herds.  Too many hunters spoil the ecosystem.  Their ability to function as high level predators was heavily dependent on powerful technological crutches.  At the same time, they were pitifully slow, plump, juicy, walking meatballs.  They were far too vulnerable to survive as solitary predators, like tigers or bears.

The key to success was to live in small groups of maybe 15 to 30, work as a team, and move elsewhere when food got scarce.  The normal daily experience of wild hominins included constant exposure to a wide variety of other species.  In the family of life, we were a wee minority group, not the dominant animal.  Ancestors spent every day of their lives in a healthy natural habitat, not an ugly noisy stinky industrial gulag of concrete and steel.

Joe Kane spent time in the Amazon rainforest.  He noted that, prior to contact with outsiders, most Huaorani never encountered more than seventy or eighty people during their entire lives, most of whom they knew by name.  Imagine that.  Mentally, we are far more comfortable being in small groups where we are known and respected.  It’s not groovy being a stranger in a vast mob of strangers, day after day, year after year.  You might feel like a zoo animal, serving a life sentence for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Functioning as a wild hunting and foraging team was very different from civilized life.  Sharing was essential.  Nobody went hungry unless everyone did.  Louis Liebenberg mentioned a study of San hunters.  Of those aged 15 to 38, just 17 percent of the hunters were responsible for 70 percent of the kills, while half of the hunters killed nothing at all.  If meat was not shared, many would starve, and the community would blink out.  Cultures had different methods for distributing portions of the meat, but this task was never a job for the day’s lucky hunter, and his portion was never the largest. 

It was essential for effective teamwork to avoid personal conflicts, and to promptly resolve the ones that occurred.  Clans typically had time-proven strategies for nurturing good interpersonal relationships.  A humble and respectful demeanor encouraged warm drama-free relationships.  Self-deprecating discourse (the opposite of boasting) was common among wild people.  Peter Freuchen wrote that when an Eskimo hunter brought home a primo feast, he would shamefully apologize to the others for bringing back crappy meat that was unfit for dogs.  The people nodded and smiled.

Bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers had no tolerance for bigheads.  Whenever someone displayed the first symptoms of pride, they were mocked, teased, or shunned — whatever was needed to restore the swollen head to normal size.  Then came reconciliation and forgiveness.  Uppity males who could not be reformed might be deported to other clans.  Incurable jerks sometimes had to be euthanized.

Christopher Boehm described how an American anthropologist created an ugly scene while staying with the Utku Eskimos of northern Canada.  She behaved in an ordinary American manner, sometimes a bit moody, occasionally displaying a flash of anger when irritated.  This was totally uncool in a culture where folks spent long, dark, frigid winters in close company.  Folks were expected to smile, laugh, and joke — to display good manners. 

Everyone’s highest responsibility was to maintain the stability of the group.  In the Utku culture, except for childish outbursts, it was rude to show your emotions, because strong thoughts can kill or cause illness.  Anger was dangerous juju, highly toxic.  Eventually, the natives ran out of patience with the American drama queen, and she became a nonperson. 

A primary benefit of nomadic life was that you couldn’t have more belongings than you could carry in both hands.  This avoided all of the bad juju of hoarding, inequality, and hierarchy — the core curse of modern society.  In regions having abundant wild food, like the Pacific Northwest, tribes became sedentary, lived in permanent dwellings, and became able to hoard stuff.  Those with lots of stuff tended to look down on folks who don’t.  Inequality was a reliable cause of resentment and conflict.

Vine Deloria noted that everyone is a descendant of tribal ancestors.  In each tribal homeland, unique spiritual traditions emerged, fine-tuned to its landscape, ecology, and climate.  Every homeland had sacred places where the community participated in special ceremonies.  All members of the tribe had deep roots in the homeland, and all shared the same worldview.  A tribal person “does not live in a tribe, the tribe lives in him.”

In modern society, neighborhoods are constantly-changing swarms of occupants having highly diverse incomes, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and political views.  People may live side by side for years, yet have nothing in common, and sometimes intense differences.  Many do not know the names or faces of most folks in their neighborhood.  This is not a coherent community sharing a profound sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of their ecosystem.

Colin Turnbull wrote that in the Pygmy world, it’s hard to see a clear boundary between work and play.  The vital task of maintaining social harmony required generous amounts of singing and dancing, followed by gathering ripe fruit, or hunting, or fireside chats, or teaching the children.  They enjoyed a society harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, and lifestyles.  Everyone was on the same channel.

Modern society is a cranky boisterous mob of numerous cultures, classes, ideologies, and religious beliefs.  We are expected to accept diversity, and even take pride in our tolerance of those who are different.  Turnbull realized that “a society that was not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all.”  It was just a mob of folks kept under control by law and force.

Turnbull spoke fondly of Father Longo, a Catholic missionary.  Pygmies had no word for evil.  “In order to convert them, then, he would first have to teach them the concept of evil, and that he was not prepared to do.”  He left them unmolested.

John Gunther saw that folks in the wild animist tribes of Africa were of one mind.  When missionaries taught them Christianity, it was highly disruptive, because it taught the importance of the individual, a foreign idea.  While you might have a salvation experience, your friends and family might not.  The unity of the group could be rubbished by spiritual discord.

In modern society, everyone is an individual, and we spend our lives competing with everyone else to climb the organizational ladders, and proudly display our glittering status trinkets.  Self-centeredness is the norm.  Jay Griffiths wrote that missionaries in South America often provided the natives with mirrors, to heighten their sense of individuality.  She learned that in Peru, four Christian groups used helicopters and speedboats in their fierce competition to locate uncontacted tribes.  They fully understood that they would inevitably be sharing the diseases of civilization, but they didn’t care.  In some places, half of the natives died within two years.

Daniel Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  Eventually, overwhelmed by the absurdity, he became an atheist, abandoned the project, and lost his family.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living.  They would laugh until they could no longer stand, and then sit down and laugh.  We tend to regard our childhood as a golden age of innocence and joy — before we’re shipped off to dreary schools, jobs, and nursing homes.  The Pygmies did not idolize childhood, because they spent their lives in a place of wonder, and with each passing year, the wonder of it all kept growing.

Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, communicating telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

Knud Rasmussen traveled across the arctic, from Greenland to Siberia, from 1921 to 1924.  He enjoyed the Eskimo people.  “A notable feature was their lively good humor and careless, high-spirited manner.”  The women worked very hard, but “they were always happy and contended, with a ready laugh in return for any jest or kindly word.”  Eskimos perceived whites to be uptight and coldly impersonal.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  He wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.”  Inuit women had “perpetual smiles,” and “they seem to have more natural grace, more zest for life than their white sisters.”

Joe Kane was impressed by the fact that Huaorani men and women enjoy equal status.  It was always unacceptable to give orders, or to raise a hand against a woman or child.  Family harmony was important. 

Richard Lee spent time with the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert.  He noted that the women were quite independent from their parents and husbands.  “The many forms of sexual oppression that women experience in other societies, such as rape, wife battering, purdah, enforced chastity, and sexual double standards are absent in !Kung society.”

 

Tribe



Sebastian Junger’s bestselling book Tribe is fascinating and perplexing.  He’s a journalist who has covered a number of armed conflicts.  As a result of these experiences, he’s developed an admiration for war and warriors, because chaos brings out the best in people.  It creates an alternate reality in which it is acceptable and desirable to behave like human beings (sort of).

During times of helter-skelter, people shift into a tribal mode.  Divisive stuff, like race, religion, and politics, are largely swept under the bed.  Emotional disagreements over beliefs that are irrelevant to the immediate situation can get everyone killed — the opposite of the preferred outcome.  In chaos, people share, cooperate, care for others, and abandon class roles.  The tribal mindset feels pleasantly natural and satisfying, a refreshing change.  They cease being the isolated individuals that industrial society excels at mass producing.

In combat, warriors become capable of great courage and great cruelty.  They transform into fearless beings of holy rage who laugh in the face of death.  “They wore amulets and magical charms and acted as if they were possessed, deliberately running into gunfire and dancing while firing their weapons.”  They were intensely and absolutely alive (sort of).

This reminded me of stories about wild European warriors.  Berzerkers were sometimes swept away by a state of fury they could not turn off.  They killed everyone in sight, even friends.  In Ireland, Cu Chulainn was so overheated with battle rage that a group of naked women was sent out to calm him.  He was put in vats of cold water, which boiled and evaporated.

Junger noted that when a deployment ends, warriors plunge down a chute, back to consumer oblivion.  They return to “a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.”  It’s a sharp slap on the face.  Equality comes to an abrupt end, class roles resume, and some brave warriors once again have to move to the back of the bus, work crap jobs, and suffer the arrogant rudeness of petty tyrants.  It immediately becomes apparent that the society that they had fought to protect is insane.

Back in consumer wonderland, herds of strangers, blissed out on antidepressants, devote total attention to tiny glowing screens.  Roads are jammed with frantic reckless drivers who have no sense of courtesy or common decency.  Alpha consumers proudly posture beside their shiny $50,000 pickup trucks and pretentious McMansions.  It’s like a loony zoo for primates born in captivity.  Warriors feel completely out of place.  Many snap.  Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common. 

Junger is fond of American Indian tribes, because they honored and respected warriors, and performed ceremonies to help them successfully reintegrate into civilian society.  The mindset of modern warriors has elements in common with the tribal cultures of wild societies.  Humans have a powerful desire to be close to others.  Hunter-gatherers learned to share food, help one another, promptly resolve conflicts, and cooperate in team hunting and group defense.  Self-centered individualists were annoying pariahs, because they were a threat to group stability.

Junger reminds readers of colonial times, when whites captured by Indians actually preferred living in the wild society of their captors.  Many refused to return to rigid Christian society, even when begged by relatives.  This was so common that laws were passed that prohibited settlers from abandoning their communities and voluntarily choosing to live in tribal freedom.

Page one asserts that the white colonizers were aggressively conquering Stone Age Indians who had barely changed technologically in 15,000 years.  I disagree.  During the colonization process, Indians acquired horses, guns, and metal tools.  Horses dramatically cranked up the velocity and intensity of warfare, enabling the rise of the Comanche empire.  Hunting on horseback made it much easier to kill bison, which increased the possibility of overhunting and population growth.

The three sisters system of agriculture (corn, squash, beans) began expanding around 800 A.D., following several centuries of experimentation.  It allowed far more nutrients to be extracted from the same land area.  This led to surging population, increased conflict, mutual defense alliances, hierarchical chiefdoms, and large villages surrounded by rugged wooden palisades.  Junger mentions that the Iroquois empire dominated just about every tribe within 500 miles (804 km).

Tribal towns emerged at Cahokia, Illinois; Spiro, Oklahoma; Moundville, Alabama; and Etowah, Georgia.  Each invested many years of manual labor in building monumental earthworks.  Mound 72 at Cahokia contained the bodies of 52 young women, sacrificed in some way that did not leave marks on their bones. Their bodies had been stacked in two tidy layers.  South of the border, in the motherland of corn, Aztecs apparently sacrificed thousands of people every year.

Junger’s short book often feels like a supertanker of testosterone.  It feels like its primary message was a celebration of war, warriors, and tribal culture.  But anthropologists tell us that war is not a normal component for all tribes.  There have been many exceptions, and these cultures did not domesticate grains, or enslave horses or livestock.

I had a flash of excitement when Junger briefly mentioned the !Kung people of the Kalahari, the northern group of the San hunter-gatherers.  Louis Lieberman noted that the San are genetically among of the oldest modern humans.  Their hunting culture survived into the 1950s, and may have survived continuously for 200,000 years or more.  They possess all the positive characteristics of tribal people, minus the warrior tradition.

Junger’s book devotes abundant attention to the holiness of warriors.  Do you think the pathology of modern society could be cured by becoming more war oriented?  The book devotes far less attention to the creepy soul-killing civilian culture that warriors hated returning to.  Modern societies fail to provide a way of life that is comfortable, normal, and natural for primates.  We weren’t meant to live like neurotic caged animals amidst crowds of strangers in sprawling concrete metropolises.

The book’s subtitle is “On Homecoming and Belonging.”  Home is far more than a group of humans.  Even more important, home is also a place that supports a complex family of life — wild life.  From what I gather, Junger grew up in Boston, and has spent most of his adult years in New York City.  I sense that he, along with most Americans, has never experienced a healthy lifelong spiritual connection to a healthy wild ecosystem.  We are a society of lost and lonely homeless critters.

If this disconnection does not change, we can have no long term future.  Modern societies are possessed by a collective trance — an overwhelming blind faith in technological miracles, perpetual growth, and endless progress.  We are the greatest, and the best is yet to come!  It will take a profound cultural awakening to break out of this toxic trance.  Junger scores points for pointing out how dysfunctional our society is.  In order to successfully break the spell of powerful illusions, millions more need to join him in delegitimizing the black magic juju.

What’s missing is a heartfelt celebration of wildness, and the powerful medicine of healthy connection.  Also missing is a deeper discussion of the conflicts he reported on.  In two sentences, Junger mentions that he did not support the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War.  So, on the battlefields, young warriors learned some beneficial aspects of tribal relationships.  But the warriors were risking their lives to participate in wars that were not justified — wars that should never been started.  Might there be better ways of learning how to have healthy relationships with the family of life?

Junger, Sebastian, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Twelve Books, New York, 2016.

Kitchi-Gami



In the Ojibway language, Kitchi-Gami means Lake Superior.  Johann Georg Kohl (1808-1878) was a German travel writer, geographer, and ethnologist.  In 1855, he spent six months visiting trading posts and missions in Ojibway country near Kitchi-Gami, mostly at the Apostle Islands off the north coast of Wisconsin, and at the settlements at the base of Keweenaw Bay, in northern Michigan.

Kohl’s book, Kitchi-Gami, was published in 1860.  It presents a different perspective from John Tanner’s 1830 book, The Falcon.  Tanner was a white man, kidnapped as a boy, who spent 30 years among the Ojibway, had a hard life, and described his many struggles.  Kohl was a visitor from outer space who was fascinated by the Ojibway.  He interviewed many, learned a lot about their culture, and discussed numerous subjects not mentioned by Tanner.

Kohl was eager to record as much as possible about the Ojibway, because it looked like Native Americans were rapidly dying off, and would soon be gone.  At the same time, the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were working to preserve remnants of the traditional culture of Germany, because the rustic folks who still remembered bits of it were also dying off.

Both the Ojibway and wild Germans were cultures that inhabited vast ancient forests, sacred places of magic, mystery, hungry wolves, and mystical little people (fairies).  Kohl noted that the folktales of both had similar themes and lessons.  Ojibway birch bark wigwams were of comparable quality to the huts of poor peasants in Lithuania, Ireland, or Polish Jews.  Like Scandinavians, the Ojibway fished at night using torches.  Germany had witches or sorcerers who could cause others harm by curses, charms, or spells.  The Ojibway had Windigos, men or women possessed by evil spirits who were terribly common.

Kohl’s gift to us is a remembrance of the closing days of the wild frontier, when Ojibway country was relatively unmolested, except for its furbearing animals.  The St. Mary’s River was the eastern outlet for Kitchi-Gami.  Bears crossed it during seasonal migrations.  In 1811, the migration lasted all summer, and 6,000 bears were killed, as many as 100 per night.  Before Kohl arrived, the greedy fur mining industry in the region had peaked, sharply declined, and moved westward.

Near the St. Mary’s River was a settlement named Rivière au Désert, because it was a ghastly, hideous eyesore in the wilderness — scruffy patches of oats or barley planted amidst stumps.  “Nature is here, at the outset, a pleasing wild forest garden; but when civilized man breaks into it, his axe and his fire produce a desert of half-carbonized tree stumps and skeletons.”  French Canadians call these patches of cultivation “un désert.”

Kohl was fascinated by the spiritual life of the Ojibway.  In Germany, the black robes commonly taught that the world is a hellish nightmare of demons, wickedness, and abominations.  The Ojibway, on the other hand, loved their sacred land, and cared for it.  Their culture was not fixated on the soul’s path in the afterlife.  They had a vibrant spiritual connection to life in the here and now.

Unfortunately, the here and now was sharply different from the good old days.  Kohl chatted with an old woman whose name meant “dawn.”  He called her Aurora.  The blitzkrieg of civilization had pushed the Sioux out of their forest homeland, and westward onto the prairie.  Tribal warfare intensified.  People no longer felt safe.  Aurora had lost three brothers, and ten other close relatives.  She said that the Ojibway were far weaker since the Long-knives arrived.  They used to be healthier and stronger, able to go ten days without food and not complain.  Their traditional culture was withering.

He was amazed to learn about the Ojibway vision quests, which were part of their rites of passage into adulthood.  Nowhere in Europe did young boys or girls courageously “fast for days on behalf of a higher motive, retire to the most remote forests, defy all the claims of nature, and fix their minds so exclusively on celestial matters, that they fell into convulsions, and attained an increased power of perception, which they did not possess in ordinary life.”  Sometimes it took ten days of fasting to have important dreams.

In Germany, Christian preachers taught their flocks to give away their wealth, and live a life of unconditional love.  Native Americans were perplexed to observe that the teachings of the black robes often had no association with their behaviors.  The aliens seemed to be possessed with a frantic desire to seize and hoard as much wealth as possible.  They were arrogant, domineering, and impressively dishonest — the opposite of loving.

The Ojibway actually practiced what the Christians preached.  “As a universal rule, next to the liar, no one is so despised by the Indians as the narrow-hearted egotist and greedy miser.”  Voyageurs and traders regularly travelled through Indian country with valuable goods and full purses.  There were no police or soldiers in the wilderness, but it was very rare for a trader to be attacked for the sole purpose of robbery.  But the two big fur trading companies “often plundered each other’s posts, and employed the Indians for that purpose.”

Kohl was impressed by the charity of the Ojibway.  “There are no rich men among them.”  An Indian will not hesitate to share his last meal with a hungry stranger.  The principle is “that a man must first share with others and then think of himself.”  He was also impressed by their egalitarian society.  No man, not even a cripple, considered another Indian to be his superior.

Kohl was not a hunter-gatherer in Germany, and he was not raised in an egalitarian society.  He did not understand that hunting abilities varied greatly.  In The Art of Tracking, Louis Liebenberg noted that among the San hunters aged 15 to 38, “70 percent of all the kudu kills were made by only 17 percent of the hunters, while almost half the hunters made no kudu kills at all.”

The “communist” Ojibway annoyed him with their absolute commitment to generosity.  The poor hunter “is forced to give all his spoil away, industry is never rewarded, and the hard-working man toils for the lazy.  A man often has to support others, without complaining.  So, all are fed, and none ever get prosperous.”  The heathens were more Christian than the Christians.

Liebenberg wrote a lot about persistence hunting — running after game until they collapsed from exhaustion (a practice that led to our ancestors becoming bipedal).  Kohl noted that the Ojibway also did this.  Horses were not ideal for hunting in a forest.  Running down elk was easiest in the deep snows of winter, when the hunter travelled on snowshoes.  Sometimes bears were chased down.

One day, when Kohl was in the Apostle Islands, “A warlike maiden suddenly appeared, who boasted of having taken a Sioux scalp, and she was led in triumph from lodge to lodge.  I was told that a supernatural female had appeared to this girl, who was now nineteen, during the period of her great fasts and dreams of life, who prophesied to her that she would become the greatest runner of her tribe, and thus gain the mightiest warrior for husband.”

Women were healers, prophets, and enchanters.  “It may be easily supposed that these squaws, owing to their performing all the work of joiners, carpenters, and masons, have corned and blistered hands. In fact, their hands are much harder to the touch than those of the men; and, indeed, their entire muscular system is far more developed, and they are proportionately stronger in the arm, for the men do not do much to bring out the muscle.”

Raised in rigidly strict Germany, Kohl was amazed by how loving Ojibway parents were.  “Indians have an ape-like affection for their children.  Even fathers are very kind to their sons, and never treat them with severity.”  Europeans often exposed (abandoned) unwanted children, but the Ojibway never did.  But when the elderly could no longer keep up with the band, they were left behind.

In Kitchi-Gami country, there were numerous locations named Lac du Flambeau (Torch Lake).  In summer, when vast clouds of mosquitoes made life miserable, the deer waded into lakes and ponds, just keeping their heads above water.  Hunters in canoes quietly moved toward them from downwind, with birch bark torches burning.  The deer calmly stared at the light, and were easily killed.

So, dearest reader, there’s a sampler.  Kohl also described their wigwams, canoes, diet, food preservation, sugar making, fishing, clothing, revenge killing, warfare, spells and magic, medicine, vision quests, dreams, ceremonies, stories, reverence for copper, symbolic drawings on birch bark paper, and on and on.

Kohl, Johann Georg, Kitchi-Gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway, 1860, Reprint, Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 1985.

NOTE: Early editions of this book refer to the Ojibway as Ojibbeway.  These people are also known as the Chippewa and Anishinabe, in a variety of spellings.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Science is a painfully tight pair of shoes.  It perceives the family of life to be little more than a complex biochemical machine.  It has created powerful tools for ravaging the planet’s ecosystems, creating a hard path for our descendants.  It gives us knowing, but not caring.  It’s not about wisdom.  It’s about pursuing the wants and needs of humans, with less concern for the more-than-human world.

Robin Kimmerer is a biology professor.  After being trained in the rigid beliefs of science, she heard a Navajo woman talk about the realm of plants from the perspective of indigenous knowledge.  For that woman, plants were not subjects, but teachers.  In a flash, Kimmerer realized the shallowness of her scientific training.  It only provides a pinhole view of reality.  Science is not enough.

Her grandfather was Potawatomi.  When he was a boy, the government sent him away to the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was trained to become an English-speaking wageworker.  He forgot his language and culture and drifted away from his people.  He never felt at home in either world.

Kimmerer has worked hard to reconnect with her Native American roots, because traditional indigenous cultures are blessed with a far more holistic relationship with the family of life.  All people on Earth have tribal ancestors who once lived close to the land, but so much has been lost with the passage of centuries.  Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is a collection of stories that focus on living with respect and reverence for the land.

She once asked a city lad where his sense of place felt strongest.  He immediately responded, “My car.”  Her book is especially important for the impoverished millions, who have grown up indoors, in a ghoulish netherworld of glowing screens.  She has a strong and respectful relationship with the land, and she describes it beautifully.  It’s a perspective that is almost absent in our culture, and without it, a long-term future for humans is impossible.  We must remember.

While explaining the culture of sharing, respect, and gratitude, she does not conceal her scientist badge.  So, readers are less tempted to automatically dismiss her stories as daffy rainbows of New Age woo-woo.  Science is not worthless.  In the centuries of restoration that lie ahead, it can offer some useful ideas, if we keep it on a short leash.  Nature will play a primary role in healing the land as much as possible — it knows what to do.  The far bigger challenge is dealing with the monsters that inhabit the goop between our ears.

In the native world, when a patch of ripe strawberries is discovered, the plants are warmly greeted.  The people ask permission to take some berries.  If the response is yes, they take only what they need, never more than half of the fruit.  The plants are thanked for their gift, and the pickers leave an offering of tobacco.

Gifts and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin.  The berry pickers now have an obligation to promote the wellbeing of the strawberry people, by depositing their seeds in good locations (not a toilet).  This is a relationship of reciprocity between berries and people.  The berry eaters need the plants, and the plants need the berry eaters.

On the other hand, the relationship between mainstream people and nonrenewable resources is not reciprocal.  The oil, coal, iron, and other minerals do not need the miners, nor is their wellbeing improved by the mining.  The planet’s atmosphere does not appreciate our toxic offerings of carbon emissions.  The ecosystem does not enjoy being treated like an open pit mine.

Cultures that enjoy a direct and intimate relationship with their ecosystem have far more respect for it than those that forage at malls and supermarkets.  Consumer culture receives enormous gifts from the land, but gives almost none in return.  Kimmerer’s students clearly understand that the relationship between consumers and nature is abusive.  It’s difficult for them to imagine what a healthy relationship would look like. 

Kimmerer lives in the Onondaga Nation.  At the school, the Haudenosaunee flag blows in the breeze, not the stars and stripes.  There is no pledge of allegiance to a political system that claims to provide “liberty and justice for all.”  Instead, each day begins with the Thanksgiving Address, in which the students express gratitude for all of creation.  It helps them remember that, “everything needed to sustain life is already here.”  We are wealthy.

I had one issue with the book.  Natives from corn-growing cultures see corn as sacred.  Corn was a recent arrival to the region of the eastern U.S.  Its expansion spurred population growth and conflict.  We know that hunter-gatherers could succeed in achieving genuine sustainability when they lived with the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint.  But environmental history has not documented a culture achieving sustainability via intensive agriculture.

Potawatomi legends describe a dangerous spirit called the Windigo.  It wanders across the land in the lean months of winter.  It is always hungry, and never stops hunting.  It’s a selfish spirit that is obsessed with its own survival, by any means necessary.  The Windigo is notorious for having an insatiable hunger.  The moral of the story is to share, to take care of one another.  Don’t be a greedy butthead.

Much to the horror of the natives, the colonists imported a diabolical spirit of incredible self-destructive overindulgence — Super Windigo.  In white society, mastering the madness of insatiable consumption was seen as an admirable mark of success!  Kimmerer winces.  “We spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy.  It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

After a lifetime of shopping and discarding, we don’t return our bodies to nature.  The dead are placed in heavy caskets and buried deep in the ground, where nature will struggle for centuries to retrieve the nutrients.  I’ve always hoped that my corpse would be eaten by mountain lions in a wild location, an offering to an ecosystem upon which I have lived far too hard.

From other books, I have learned about cultures that did something like this.  Carl Jung noted that the Maasai tribe did not bury their dead.  Corpses were left outdoors for the hyenas to eat.  John Gunther wrote that the Bakutu people of the Congo recycled corpses by laying them on a termite hill.  In sky burial, corpses are fed to the vultures.  This is done in Tibet, and in Zoroastrian communities in India.  Evan Pritchard noted that the Western Algonquin people also practiced it.

Over the years, Kimmerer has heard the Thanksgiving Address recited countless times.  It is so inspiring to listen to people express gratitude for all of creation.  She longs for the day “when we can hear the land give thanks for the people in return.”  So do I.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2013.

Questions for a Resilient Future is a 17-minute talk given by Kimmerer.

Returning the Gift is a brief essay.