Compassion for Colonization
Compassion for colonization? What is this?
Many of the conversations I frequent have something to do with the cumulative state of the world, the human experience, and its impact on a wide and diverse aspect of the global ecology.
You’re familiar with these, I trust. “How did we get here?” “Where did we go wrong?” “What must we do to make amends?” “Are we really just screwed?” Of course there are countless variations on the theme.
A favorite of mine, uttered by a friend the other evening, “we have to recover what we lost, what we have forgotten…” evokes the oft romanticized view of the “native peoples” of the earth. The implication being that once, before we “departed” the land for the more “permanent” infrastructure of the town and the city, we knew better than to have made such a mess as we have.
[Process note, for those keeping track — writing this in my Windows emulator environment using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 15 software, and Scrivener from the good folks at literature and latte; the accessibility solutions for voice transcription remain well far from perfect. — The previous four paragraphs took almost 30 minutes to compose (including research time attempting to get the software to work better.)]
That last idea, “that we knew better,” is a particularly tempting sell. Undoubtedly, the material and philosophical separation from the land has and will continue to wreak havoc on our deeper wellbeing until we practice a new paradigm of REAL interdependence.
And yet…
As I myself continue to reflect on these questions of “where do we go from here?”, indeed one of the wisdom sources I hold most sacred in the inquiry is the long story of those indigenous peoples of the Australian continent.
David Graber and David Wengrow wrote a little history in the Dawn of Everything; a story, arguably of “my” lineage as a WEIRD descendent of emigrants. That story covers a span of 10,000 years.
My cousins on the Australian continent tell a much longer story, one that seems to date back roughly 70,000 years, and as haggard as it may be today, that story continues to burn on, a candle in the storm.
So if the wisdom of “my people” (indeed I do in fact count ALL people as my people, all living beings for that matter), those “Modern” humans descended through the 10,000 years of the story of the Davids, carries the wisdom of a 10-year-old, our brethren down under are speaking with the wisdom of an elder of 70.
All of which is simply to say that I find nothing wrong in caretaking a deep appreciation and wonder for the wisdom of those of us “indigenous” alive in the world today.
And yet…
I was moved to consider this reflection, Compassion for Colonization, recently when in one of those aforementioned conversations, a group reflection hosted by one of my very favorite co-leaders, I noticed a general agreement and disdain for not only specific instances of, but the construct in general of “colonization.”
While certainly there is an easily accessed and obvious recent history to act as an cautionary tale when it comes to the immediate AND long-term cumulative violence wrought by imperial occupation of less nakedly industrial societies. The act of colonization itself is not inherently evil.
Do a quick search of the definition of the word, both on my regular search engine and also using ChatGPT directly, and the whole and direct assertion is that very act of violence. Indeed I have to dig further into the Merriam-Webster’s third subsection of the first definition to find what I’m looking for: the spread and development of an organism in a new area or habitat —
In this view, I’ll take “organism” in the broadest sense, to include not only members of the species, but also ideas, cultural expression, even the nature of a seemingly formless divinity as it colonizes emptiness with form.
Certainly, from a thousand perspectives, we can label the destructive colonization by an imperial culture of a remote people as profoundly devoid of ethnic and even quite simply in word, “bad.”
But what of one more perspective, 1001, a perspective that says simply, “it happened so.” Those perpetrators, for what it’s worth, conceived that it was the right thing to do, and it has been done, and here we are.
The orca whales colonize the life of the seal pup on whom they will dine. Not only consuming the body, but devastating any sense of peace the animal may have had while they quite literally beat the life from it over a much longer period of time than would be necessary for a simple chomp, crunch, done.
Daylight colonizes the darkness, and shadow the light. Ideas of peace and justice continue to colonize each day further into the territories of my mind that otherwise thrashes about for certainty and control.
The natural forces of time and space mix and form subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, compounds, patterns arise, shift, recombine and are washed away, leaving in their wake so many influences of their passing.
All of this creates today. A sunny day, a rainy day, a dark day, a day of hope, a day to die, to be born, to wed, to speak, to hold silent, to think, to witness, to share, to remain, to pass on…
I would not want someone to come to my home, to kill my loved ones, to enslave me, to take and destroy the things I hold dear, to separate me from my relations, and they from me. I would not want to surrender my way of life to them in exchange for something strange and separated from the wholeness of life, some exchange to leave me impoverished and wondering in the dark.
I would not want that, and I would not want to do that to another. But I will most likely eat the fish again, remembering as I do the devastation wrought upon the ancestors of that sacred friend whose life I devour. And I will remember the brothers and sisters of those ancestors, the forests and the herds and the skies filled with life, all of whom who have fallen silent to one degree or another, whose numbers have diminished.
Colonization arises everyday, and all of nature it seems is a mix of doing something in the moment, something right, something devastating, something that nourishes life, something that takes it.
Let us embrace one another with our hearts. Let us not condemn a person or a people, particularly not for a natural act. Let us learn from what we see and what we have seen. Let us do better, perfectly in some moments, failing in others, and let us have compassion for ourselves as we live this moment and in our innocence, our ignorance, our hope, and our violence, to colonize the next.