Reconciliation
The morning I opened my computer and saw the image below I felt a chill, a wave of how it must have felt to be out there, looking out to sea, watching for a hostile visitor.
Is this where we came from? Is it any wonder that we are where we are today? Is this all there is?
When I compare it to what Europeans found when they arrived in the Americas, civilizations as old as others in the world, one great tragedy is how little they learned from their hosts. The ancient civilization they found here had never developed weapons that were comparable to those of the Europeans, because they didn’t need them. Sure they had wars, but war was not the norm. Instead of observing the truth of that and trying to learn from it, the Europeans concluded that this ancient civilization that could not compete militarily was simply primitive.
I think we still don’t get it. Their agriculture was superior, they lived longer and they towered over the newcomers. The French, who took the most time to observe, noted that they were very affectionate among themselves and discussions held with any of them showed an intellectual development that was pretty universal among them. There was no hierarchy to compare with the European societies. Decisions had to include everyone, and their society was not gender focused, but focused on the animate, the living world around them.
The most insightful observation of the difference that I have found comes from Anke Becker’s study, not of the civilizations of the Americas, but of the Eurasian societies’ male dominance and its probable origin. Her original paper was called Herding and Male Dominance, and while she was looking for the roots of female genital mutilation, what struck me was the aspect that concerned herding. She showed in her study that male dominance was not an innate aspect of human society – a discovery that others have made as well – but that there were large areas of human society that did not herd. Those societies, in the Americas, central Africa and Australia, were generally not gender-based hierarchies. The other realization that this led me to was that we have always placed herding in with agriculture, but the primary agriculturalists, the ones who gave us half of the vegetables we commonly eat today, did not herd.
Herding needs a separate category – hunter-gatherer (including agroforestry and aquaculture), herdsmen, and agriculturalist. (Becker does not include animal husbandry with herding, so it also may need to be seen separately.)
Aside from gender hierarchy, herding led to the absorption of zoonotic diseases that made the survivors into carriers, causing them to unwittingly become the dominant hierarchy through contagion. It also led to social hierarchy, and that led to a concept of movable property and the development of a military hierarchy to protect it from other military hierarchies.
In the civilization that the philosopher Georges Sioui calls the Nadowek-Algonquian Civilization, the hierarchies of Europe are not found, and there are ethics that trace back to an understanding of belonging-to, rather than owning. Belonging to Mother Earth, they fit into a family of which humans are the youngest sibling, the one who learns from the elders, and belonging-to is the opposite to owning. Their ethic regarding their siblings would not lead to ownership. Instead, it led to an ethic of respect for the space and the rights of their elder siblings and to an ethic of deep respect for Mother Earth herself.
People wonder why the Indigenous people can’t simply join the melting pot and put their past behind as a part of their historic identity. Virtually all the newcomers share a value system based on the dominance of herding, even if just through their disease resistance that herding developed in the herders. The Indigenous people, who have maintained their ethic of respect, at first treated the European people as needing their help, and some saw the newcomers as an elder sibling whose ideas and beliefs had to be deeply considered. But as the Europeans quickly demonstrated their inability to share, some saw them as the windigo. Simultaneously, as many as 90% of members of the Indigenous societies succumbed to zoonotic diseases introduced from the herders or the immigrants the herders had contaminated in Europe
By our time, their survivors have mostly become as immune as the European-descended people, but they have maintained their very different ethical guidelines. Today, we talk about reconciliation, but to achieve it we have to consider all of this, to learn to share, – and we have to do it all together. If we do, we will not need to build better forts.
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