Witnessing Wetiko; The Destructive Imperial Spiritual Virus
Indigenous people have named Wetiko to be the very root of every modern crisis we face....
Right now we are standing up to endless cycles of imperial violence, some of us feeling in despair on how to safeguard human life and our beloved earth against insane scorched earth violences the world over. We must do the work and go deeper to the root of the current spiritual virus that is resulting in the devastation and destruction we are witnessing en masse right now. It is the urgent work of our times and understanding wetiko is critical to all of our social justice movements.
Wetiko is a Cree word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live. Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder.
Indigenous First Nations identified the affliction of the settler, upon his arrival to their native homelands, as “Wetiko,” literally translating as cannibalism: the consuming of another’s life for one’s private purpose or profit. "Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. This is the disease of consuming other creatures’ lives and possessions. This disease is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man” Jack Forbes says.
It is accurate to describe capitalism as the primary cannibalizing force of life on this planet; capitalism is consuming the life-force of this planet in service of its growth. Infinite growth in a finite system is called cancer and its ends are malignant.
"People under the sway of wetiko are implicated in and willingly subscribe to their enslavement. They do this to the point that when offered the way out of the comfort of their prison they oftentimes react violently. They symbolically—and sometimes literally—try to kill the messenger who is showing them the path to freedom." Paul Levy
Wetiko speaks to the greatest danger threatening humanity today is the possibility that millions of humans can fall into a collective terror, reinforcing each other’s inbalances in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in creating our destruction.
Wetiko induces in us a tendency to see the source of our pathology outside of ourselves—existing in “the other.” Wetiko feeds off of polarization and fear—and terror—of “the other.”
Wetiko shows up in all kinds of insidious ways and we must confront, dismantle and heal this when we see these wetiko behaviors emerging in our movements and communities, even inside ourselves because we've all been deeply impacted and acculturated to this cultural disruption and infection.
No one is immune to adopting the colonizer mentality that is Wetiko.
Wetiko is the disease of individualism and selfishness.
"Wetiko dictates that if we all prioritize ourselves and maximize our own material wealth, an invisible hand (ah, what a seductive meme!) will create an equilibrium state and life everywhere will be made better. We are pitted against each other in a form of distributed fascism where we cocoon ourselves in the immediate problems of our own circumstances and consume what we can. Under the sickness of wetiko it's easy to see why the banker who generates excess capital receives vast rewards and is labelled productive and successful, almost regardless of the damage s/he causes. Those who are less successful at producing excess capital, meanwhile, are rewarded far less, regardless of the life-affirming good they may be doing." - Alnoor Ladha
There is a way through. No one is free until we all are free. May we be the generation that unearths the deeper sickness and unites in solidarity to heal this deeper insidious virus that shows up as warfare, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, extractive industry, etc.
Another world IS possible, but we must see the root cause of these endless cycles of violence and unite to uproot them.
Lean in and remember our interdependence. Liberation for all beings under the tyranny of colonialism imperialism capitalism and wetiko proliferation.
Wetiko wants us to forget. We remember.
Wetiko wants us to isolate. We build relationships and cultivate connection.
Our solidarity is the medicine. Our relationships heal us.
Critical Reading:
Columbus and other Cannibals" by indigenous scholar Jack Forbes
Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World” by Paul Levy
Thank you. Thanks for the resources! Wetiko is the theme of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, though ofc he didn’t have that name.
Hell yeah. Thanks for this work.