Ya Salam

I need to be clear about this. Although there is much I admire about many indigenous cultures, and much I despise about my own tradition, it would serve neither me nor the world for me to turn my back on my dominant culture and attempt to be something that I’m not. I’m white, of Danish, French, Scottish descent. I’m civilized. I’m not and will never be from an indigenous culture. That doesn’t mean I cannot establish a relationship with the land where I live, based not on indigenous beliefs and practices but instead on my own primary experience. Nor does it mean I cannot help bring to a final halt the pervasive destructiveness of our culture.

On the contrary, it seems traditional indigenous people generally have their hands full maintaining their cultures under the social, ecological, economic, religious, and military stresses placed on them by our culture, which means it falls primarily to those of us born in the dominant culture, those of us who know it most intimately, to eat away at it from the inside, to break it down, and ultimately to destroy it before it takes down with it the rest of the planet in its final act of other- and self-consumption. Our culture has created this mess, and it seems only appropriate that in attempting to rectify it we begin by looking inside.