2020-11-06, The Things We Live for

I was asked two questions, from different folk, that have ended up tying together: 1. “Would you please define ‘indigenous,’ as you use it?” 2. “Is it really fair for you to keep referring to colonial society as though it’s not your society?”

But first I’d like to thank everyone who has been reading this newsletter so far, and has offered feedback. I especially appreciate y’all bothering to read because, so far, I haven’t taken tremendous pains to edit what I’ve been posting, and that ability to write fairly spontaneously has really helped this feel like communication, not broadcasting.

Before I get started, here’s a photo from my garden.

(A bundle of raspberries ripen against a ground covered by chickweed, wild onion, and marigold leaves. A few raspberry leaves are close to the camera, and two spinach plants flank the far side of the shot.)

So… “Indian.” Or “Native American?” “Lakota” or “Indigenous?” What about “indigenous?” Most folk have a really complex set of vocabulary they use to describe themselves, in my experience, and the more they deal with a type of identity, the more they develop their language around it. I’ve dealt with my Indigenous identity a lot the past few years, and so I’ve come to develop a lexicon around it. I’d like to define, as best I can, how I use these terms, when I’m talking about myself and other people. It’s important to note that none of these terms exist in a vacuum: I might choose or be forced to change my language in a situation depending on a variety of reasons. But when I’m speaking under my own terms, this is how I tend to define them. It’s also important to note that capitalization matters: Indigenous is different than indigenous.

I’ll try and work from least to most specific, and least to most offensive, I guess?

So first, native with no capitalization is a thing that people (plants and animals) can be, and it means that they’re from a place. Colloquially, a cactus can be native to a desert, a white person native to Oklahoma, or code native to an organization. However, in scientific writing, using “native” in this way has fallen out of favour.

Now, people prefer indigenous with no capitalization, which means the same thing as native if you’re talking about anything except human people, and most folk use it synonymously with Indigenous if they’re talking about human people. I don’t: I can’t tell which wider subculture it is that shares my precision here: I reckon it’s either Indigenous people that share my age, “political” views, or have also lived in urban environments, but of course I have no data.

To me, indigenous is something anyone can be. I’ll encourage y’all to read Braiding Sweetgrass, where the author talks about becoming “indigenous to place,” and I think that really hints at what indigenous can and should mean: someone who lives in a system of 0 with their environment.

Hmm… let me get back to that; it’s beginning to get clumsy to not explain Indigenous, with a capital “I.” There are Indigenous cultures: those which live in that “system of reciprocity,” and so there are Indigenous people, but not every Indigenous (capital I) person is indigenous (lower-case i). It isn’t a political designation like some of the terms I’ll talk about shortly, but a… recognition of the cultures long-standing relationship with the world around them, and the knowledge and experience that relationship has imbued over the centuries.

So what is this “system of reciprocity with an environment?” Certainly too complex of a thing for me to explain off-the-cuff here. But… alright, let me give some sort of explanation of something here a try.

Maybe this is a hold-over of being raising under a Catholic backdrop, but it seems natural to me to view the human world right now as split between two different intentions, that I contrast in many different ways; if you’ve read past newsletters or writing of mine you’ve picked up on it.

There’s one side: the contemporary kyriarchy. (Not “the kyriarchy,” because there can be many, in the past, and in the future, it’s just the contemporary one.) And on the other side, there are emancipators. Colonials, and Indigenous.

These are the “habits” cultures fall into, though some walk the line for long stretches of their history. Cultures are active, not just philosophical, and these habits have mechanisms. The kyriarchists seem unable to view the world except as resources to be manipulated. And indigenous peoples seem unable to view the world except as a web of relationship.

(A tangent: I don’t think contemporary kyriarchists actually view the world this way; this model was lost with the aging-out of the architects of Modernism. I think contemporary kyriarchists exist within a simulation of a reality in which they can emulate their God.)

So, indigenous people are people who don’t view the world as a set of resources to be manipulated, but those who view it as a set of relationships between everything in the environment, and things are constantly giving gifts to each other: dirt gives energy to the plants give leaves to bunnies give poop to vines give squash to humans give work to the dirt which gives energy to the plants. Obviously it’s not a clean and simple loop like that: the humans work the dirt and catch seeds on their trousers and carry them to new locations, a gift of sorts.

(Above is a photo of Rama Tulsi growing next to the train tracks here in town, where they intersect with the main street going through town. The seeds almost certainly fell off my clothes, because I have two Rama Tulsi I pass as I leave my home. I took this photo today. I’ve done a lot of work this year to spread medicine in my community: active labor to get it done. This is… something else: it’s medicine I spread just by living my life the way I do. I only noticed the plant growing today, as I was carrying lettuce back from the grocery to the free market.)

Like I said: it’s not a loop, but a web of reciprocity. It can seem very complex when you first start looking at it, but once you develop it into a more holistic perspective, it becomes quite simple. Things like all things being relatives, in the sense of kin, become easy to believe when you can perceive how even the clay under the soil has its role in this web: receiving a gift of water from the soil and gifting it it on to the aquifer.

Some people encourage an active development of their relationships within this web, these are the ones I call indigenous. Some cultures have encouraged that development for generations, and developed into the fabric of their way of living: these are the ones I call Indigenous.

In the last newsletter I included a photo of a cross-stitch which read, “It is only indigenous ways of living that can save us,” or something close to that. I want to really emphasize something here, that’s become… seemingly very imporant to emphasize, especially in my community-building.

Being indigenous is a way of life that requires believing in the indigenous perspective as a truth. It’s not an action or set of actions that can be taken, the way one way can garden: being indigenous is not a hobby.

If I tell you to think of some indigenous action, you probably thought of something, well, ecological: maybe gardening (I did just mention that,) or foraging, or maybe making a fire. But indigenous action doesn’t look like any specific thing: it’s a way of perceiving the meaning in any action: be it an act of emancipation or an act of coerced Collaboration.

Like I said, I’ve been asked if it’s fair for me to keep referring to “colonial society,” when I live in a colonial settlement: aren’t I a part of colonial society? I honestly reckon… no, I’m not. I could list a bunch of things I do in my day that are unlike the things colonial kyriarchists do, but even the things I’m coerced into doing that are things they do, I do with, it seems, a very different worldview. At the end of the day I’m not looking to live for personal prosperity or any of the other kyriarchal values, but to develop the strength of my relatives, and the best way I know to do that is by receiving and giving gifts between them.

There’s a lot of nuance I would prefer to get into here, about how almost everyone has been contaminated by colonial ways of thinking and living, so I’m not “fully” indigenous is this sense of viewing life as, and participating in, a web of reciprocity. I mean, right now I’m typing this on a computer that’s powered by coal. But, I’ve already rambled for quite a bit on this concept of indigenous, and I’d like to get back to defining terms. I’m sure I’ll come back to all these topics. There’s one thing I want to make clear before I move on though: you don’t have to be Indigenous to be indigenous. Anyone can develop a way of life that isn’t based in kyriarchism and resource extraction. A lot of people have; I’ll argue against anyone who says those of the African diaspora haven’t become indigenous to America. But, I want to wrap this up sometime soon, so on with defining terms:

CNN coined a new one on election night: “something else.”

I think this kinda forces a new question: stop asking me if I consider myself a colonial. Ask yourselves why your society won’t let me, and needs to literally go beyond referring to me as an Other and call me, outright, “Something Else.”

There’s a common wisdom among contemporary Indigenous activists from Turtle Island: “erasure is the mechanism of our genocide.” Presentation of the diverse set of cultures that make up the Indigenous peoples living within U.S. territories as “something else” is erasure; that simple.

(A political cartoon by Ricardo Cate. Pilgrims arrive on a beach and point at three Native-looking folk, and say “These people are something else!” The scene is captioned “Meanwhile, somewhere else at some other time…”)

Back to “normal” terms, with Native American. I generally see it as a “respectful” way to refer to anyone who is Indigenous to a territory claimed, at least in part, by the United States. There’s some issues with the term: for example, people may be members of tribes the U.S. government doesn’t acknowledge, yet also are encouraged to state they are Native American on the census. Like Indian, the term has been heavily intertwined with our politics, so can be complicated by that.

So Indian. As a general rule, this one is for people who are Native American from the “mainland” U.S. states to refer to themselves. Or, for other people to use if they’re referencing U.S. law where the term is used - but then it refers to a more specific group than above: what group might change depending on context; whichever treaties are relevant. A rough “exception” to whether or not colonists “can say it” exists for Indian Country, which can be used by anyone to refer to a contemporary geocultural region, but if you’re not in or from the region you’re probably not well-versed enough to be talking about it as one so don’t.

Lakota is a Native and Indigenous culture, one that I consider myself a part of, but it’s also a political tribe, which I’m not a member of. It’s also the name of the language, to further confuse things.

But, hopefully this newsletter as a whole didn’t add to your confusion. Feel free to ask questions if you have them; I know this one was more rambling than usual.