Reconcile and Prosper

Last week we attended a Truth and Reconciliation session, which had me wondering again how the ancestors could have thought it was a good idea to displace indigenous people, suppress their culture, abduct and abuse their children, and exploit their land for profit. 

What were we European incomers thinking? Did we imagine that because the natives didn't belong to our empire we were allowed to move in take possession and crowd them out? Did we think that because we know what's good, God is on our side, giving us permission to do what's bad? 

Now that we know better, why are we paving protected greenspace, clear-cutting forests, laying waste by mining and drilling, putting pipelines and golf courses on unceded land, and leaving messes for our children to clean up? It's a puzzle.

If anyone knows how this works, it's not me. Yet because I am one of the beneficiaries of the invasion, I should try to understand. Here is what I have been thinking.

We humans thrive in community. We are stronger together. Because we are products of different histories, we bring diverse perspectives enriching our understanding. As individuals, we specialize and become expert at doing a few tasks. Then as part of the community, we trade the fruits of our labour to meet needs that we cannot satisfy on our own. Furthermore, sharing risks in a dangerous world moderates the threat of disaster, and living with friends we trust reduces conflict so we can be less vigilant and more productive. 

The obvious benefits of community are not free. We surrender some autonomy to restrain us from pleasing ourselves at the expense of others. The tension between rights and duties is regulated by custom and law and a social contract to which we tacitly assent. 

What then of those who don't belong? Do they have no rights and no duties, or do they belong to other communities with their own social contract? Perhaps their community protects them from us, which leads us into conflict, winner take all. Thence came colonialism, now regarded as a vestige of archaic social evolution that we hoped would make us winners until we won and discovered too late what we lost by turning potential friends into victims. We need to get over colonialism for our sake as well as theirs, for we are stronger together.

We are getting over it. Communities associate forming larger and larger collectives, with added layers of custom and law, rights and duties. So we organize into provinces, countries, international alliances,...United Nations.

Our story, dark as it has been, may continue with a more enlightened version of humanity regarding the entire biosphere as family. 

We may not have noticed that the enlightened inhabitants of this continent were already ahead of us, thriving for ten thousand years or more in a sustainable relationship with plants, animals, earth, ocean and sky. We, the "civilized", are contriving to use it all up in a few hundred years. 

Now judge. Which is the virtuous vector of progress, outwards to a lasting community of everything or inwards to exclusion, conflict, plunder, leaving destruction in our wake until there is no safe place to go? 

We have been on the wrong side of a history requiring allegiance to the crown and faith in a tribal god who will forgive our excesses and take care of us, if we say the right prayers.  

If we listen to native elders, we hear that Earth imposes duties of respect, restraint and reciprocity as the price of her gifts.

Hear the truth.
Reconcile and prosper.

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Grace Dove: Bones of Crows, five part series.

Indigenous Peoples and the New Social Contract: United Nations