The reason why California and the larger West is facing ecological catastrophe of this size, scale and proportion around fire is NOT just 100+ years of fire suppression by a white culture imprinted with thousands of years of undigested trauma of war which has made nearly everything they touch become destructive...
it's NOT just climate change. These are all symptoms of a much deeper ailment. The breakdown of cultural relational accountability that follows the destruction of land based cultures.
It is the outgrowth of horrifying genocide of settler colonialism, which slaughtered the people of this land and severed the people's capacity to uphold time honored agreements with the land, where fire, land, plant, humans and a million other beings worked together in complex seasonal renewal and co-evolutionary dance.
No matter what we do, how many acres people clear with chainsaws and equipment, how many FireWire communities emerge, how many panels of experts and roundtables are hosted, it's all for nothing if we don't focus on the deeper, enduring cultural solutions to this current problem, which is that most Western people have no idea how to be of Place, to be woven into a cosmology of healthy relationships where we are truly interdependent.
And while we can't undo the horrors that brought us to today, they must be reckoned with, metabolized and healed.
Relational Reparations must be tended and made. Engaging in LandBack in a way that is beyond transactional, that fully resources Indigenous people to immerse in a relational reality with the land, that transcends colonial proprietorship. We must return the original agreements that this land held with it's original inhabitants, and it begins with a humility and a reverence that is hard to find in people of this modern times.
Remember, Indigenous people and countless bodies of culture here on Turtle Island, we already experienced an apocalypse, a complete upending of everything we knew as normal, sane and familiar. We weren't supposed to have survived that genocide; the initial frontline, nor the continued hammer of the colonial project, the way it's malignancy steeps into nearly every aspect of life as an Indigenous person still living, breathing and praying in this modern world. But here we are. We are not a conquered people. But we are tired and exhausted in constantly looking over our shoulders, in silently burying our dead, in not having the time to adequately grieve before the next loss surfaces, to always be on guard because it has never felt truly safe here in so long.
Yet we still pray, sing, laugh, cry, nourish our people and make beauty even amidst the chaos. And we quietly look at whats unfurling around us with a deep ache, knowing the bitter root of all the confusion of these times comes from people who have no idea who they are and where they come from.
For many white folks, the changes that are occuring right now in the world are shocking, intense and jarring and are making you react in social spaces with fear, anger, shock and ungrounded action. A gentle remember that folks of color have been seeing, feeling,witnessing this coming for a long time. The violences of collapse have been creating death and destruction for centuries for the comforts and conveniences of modernity.
And we will be in no better place until there is a possibility of a culture of peoples that can emerge towards the sanity of truly living in the Earth and people understand that it's not just what we do but how we do it.
Change won't happen at the colonial table. That table will be broken and made into a council fire around which we will sit with the original inhabitants of this land, human and not. The furry fourleggeds and the winged ones, the mineral bodies and insects and all of our relations will be given a voice and consideration. We are in the epoch of responsibility, composting an era built by the myth of individual rights.
May we tend the possiblity of becoming a people again who can tend the old growth forest, cultures where old growth healthy forests and landscapes are even a possibility because the relationships needed for that to happen again are culturally encoded and held sacred. May us Indigenous peoples, who have endured and survived against all odds, now return again supported to uphold the agreements that we never forgot, that are imprinted in our bodies, held in the blood in our veins that are the wild rushing rivers, that are held in the little ponds of our grandmothers sweet womb waters inside of our spines.
Rematriate the land. Listen to the people have grown intergenerational senses to listen and live in relationship with deep time.
If you have any resources to support a Landback opportunity in the area where we live,
The Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe has a time-limited opportunity to purchase 232 acres located on a historic Nisenan Village site called Yulića near Nevada City, CA - what is currently known as Woolman.
As of January 8, 2024, CHIRP deposited $75,000 into an escrow account to acquire Woolman as a land base for the Tribe. CHIRP has until April 4th, 2024 to raise the additional $1.5 million to purchase the property, with a total fundraising goal of $2.4 million for the purchase price, government required improvements, and an operating endowment. They have raised nearly $1million dollars and are in the final pushes of their fundraiser.
This is the Tribe’s best opportunity to re-establish a homeland in more than half a century, but we need your help to make it happen.
"That table will be broken and made into a council fire around which we will sit with the original inhabitants of this land, human and not. " Thanks Rowen. So often the neoliberal environmentalist narrative is to "give them a seat at the table" it's like forget the table, forget the white people "allowing" people to be there or not, "giving people a voice" it's like people already have voices and they have been loud and clear!