Category: Culture

by Nowick Gray

‘They stole the children from the land. Now they want to steal the land from the children.’ —Tahltan protest sign, Kabloona Keepers

On the small island where I live we are blessed not only with abundant and intimate connection with nature in its beautiful, unspoiled state; we also have cultural resources rare in rural communities. This week’s annual film festival returned after a covid hiatus, showcasing documentaries that celebrate both natural and cultural treasures and the imperative to preserve them.

The festival was particularly strong in covering Indigenous issues, from the plight of the Sinixt of interior BC declared extinct by government decree, to the ongoing battle to save old growth forests from logging in unceded territory known as Fairy Creek. Protest also figured in other films portraying iconic struggles in Chile, Tasmania, and Vietnam-era USA, along with contemporary topics such as gender politics, nuclear power, and opioid addiction.

Such hot topics notwithstanding, it seems some subjects nevertheless remain off limits, at least for now. Conspicuous in absence were the supremely contentious issues of a pseudopandemic and all-too-real government overreach, experimental vaccines and sudden deaths, the corruption of media and capture of science. But perhaps I ask too much, too soon. How about a feature on the Freedom Convoy, or Died Suddenly, next year?

Festival organizers only grudgingly advised that facemasks, by now discredited by every reputable scientific study, are still “appreciated but not required.” Tellingly, the festival did include a film about Iranian women throwing off the head covering known as the hijab—apparently required but not appreciated. Facing our own masks means looking in the mirror; too scary!

With this broad brush I have not yet conveyed the emotional power of the films I saw today: Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence; Before They Fall (about Fairy Creek); and Franklin (about the 1980s battle to save Tasmania’s wild river). Each film spoke of heart-rending loss and destruction at the hands of colonial blindness and greed.

Maybe it was my personal connection to each of these campaigns that made them hit home so hard. Participating in logging blockades that were unsuccessful in Sinixt watersheds, and that are ongoing at Fairy Creek; and enjoying Tasmania’s primeval wilds on a visit two decades after their narrow victory (achieved finally with a national election and high court ruling).

Partly it was recognizing in these struggles that humanity itself is threatened now just as these film subjects were threatened with brutal erasure. A whole people, language, and ancestral home, in the case of the Sinixt; a priceless and irreplaceable ecosystem at Fairy Creek; a determined movement of mass action for wilderness protection, in Tasmania.

The forces arrayed remain constant: police, industry, the courts, the government, the rule of colonial law, pitted against independent media, grassroots activism, principled nonviolence, spiritual connection with land and ancestral values. In between are factions, pawns of the government, vying for economic crumbs and conditioned by centuries of exploitation, domination of the earth.

Today defenders of land and traditional humanity face off against multinational interests, global resetters, media and tech collusion, soulless financial entities. The battle goes on, with brushfires everywhere, stakes escalating, time running out.

Awakened and reawakened to our vital and sacred connections with each other and the earth, our hearts beat stronger. Our will to survive and prevail, undeterred. Filled with new love and respect—in solidarity with those on the front lines, and those who have shown the way. Ever more committed, resolved.

Mother Earth, Homo sapiens, not yet extinct, the fight goes on.

‘Technocrats, the bio-security pandemicists and transhuman global eugenicists want you to hate your humanity, hate your biology as a thing abhorrent, lose your useless eater life in drugs and entertainment media – trust The Science and get on your proverbial knees. The post-modern wokesters would emotionally stunt you and have you subsumed in the trans, non-binary collective, shame you as an oppressor/exalt you as a victim, reverse your order. Don’t breed for the sake of the earth. If you can’t get along, kill yourself. If you must live, you will do as we say. Take your shots. Don’t ask questions. Obey.

‘I prefer to embrace nature, celebrate biology… I prefer to trust myself, to know what is best for myself, I have no need for transhumanists, wokesters, technocrats, media or Intelligence Agents to tell me how to be. Our human biology is the culmination of four billion years of life on earth. I don’t need any high tech to see that, to find myself.’ —William Hunter Duncan

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by Nowick Gray

In the Civil War, slavery didn’t end; it just got shifted onto another segment of the population.

‘The 1860s US Civil War was primarily an economic paradigm war. The Southern agrarian plutocrats backed the Black manned slave labor system. The Northern industrialist plutocrats favored debt-wage slavery powered by European mass immigration.’ —Richard Solomon, Imagining US Civil War 2.0

In our so-called cradles of civilization, whether Babylon, Egypt, Greece or Rome, estimates run as high as forty percent of the population living as slaves: bound, beaten, and essentially forced to work to death. Wars brought new slaves. This pattern by no means was exclusive to the West.

Also in the Western system there arose principled opposition to physical slavery, so instead debt slavery was imposed. Once again the elites who pay for the system they desire turned metal chains into money chains. Those in the slave quarters now could buy comforts if they rose in the ranks by brains or brawn. They could roam free in spare time if they bought time back with genius or extra effort.

Today we are free to stare at our cell phones all day long, content again long into the night. With all the “trusted” information, virtual friends and lovers at our fingertips 24/7, who could want any more freedom than that?

If there’s something else you might want, something different, don’t even think about it. It will show up anyway on your real-time report. You can’t fool AI, even if you try. Especially if you try (that is, when we get the bugs worked out).

A Short History of Freedom

On a return flight home from a short vacation in Mexico, I finished two key books I’ve been reading in a quest to get to the bottom of the evils plaguing humanity’s presence on this beautiful planet. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) sources both archaeology and ethnography to answer core questions about social inequality, violence, hierarchy, domination, and freedom. David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (1997) delves into the origins of written language and its implications on our relationship to the natural world. The insights from both books help to dispel deeply embedded myths about our origins and intrinsic nature, to stop taking for granted our ways of living and thinking, and to open fresh possibilities for more humane and natural solutions to the challenges of life on earth.

Graeber’s survey of history and prehistory revolves around three “fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations.”

Freedom to Move

It is important to distinguish the first freedom from a mere escape, or negative freedom, the fate of the outcast or exile. Graeber frames it in more positive terms: “to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place.” Such an extension of nurture and care was made possible by cultural interconnection: by

far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies.

Examples included the early Native American and Australian clan systems spanning continents, offering hospitality and refuge for those estranged from their own tribe.

Freedom to move in our own time entails financial means, or trespass. What rights are guaranteed are given as a favor of the state, with innumerable limits delineated and enforced as such.

Lockdown, curfew, quarantine, imprisonment, medical incapacitation: these are all currently practiced tools of authority that seek to quash the first human freedom, the freedom to move.

Now they have you tied up, they come with the needles.

Freedom to Disobey

“Just say no.”

—First Lady Nancy Reagan

The freedom to disobey has depended on one’s particular milieu, widely variable over time and geography—in contrast to what we’ve been programmed to assume.

Our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex, was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique. (Graeber)

The narrative of God-given hierarchy and “dominion over the Earth” was challenged in the West when aboriginal societies without such institutions of domination were discovered. Matriarchal cultures, women’s and men’s councils, even thriving cities with their pyramids long unused. In response, the dominant paradigm, the Western pyramid of power, was reinforced and further codified to justify itself as inevitable.

‘Political authoritarianism is indeed—as Étienne de La Boétie pointed out more than 500 years ago—a form of voluntary servitude.’ —James Corbett, The Law of Rule

What gives any human authority over another?

As usual in our conception-centered modern era, it all comes back to narrative, our operating system, our world view.

Freedom to Create

If we are responsible and respected in the cocreation of a meaningful narrative, an open source operating system, and an open-ended world view, we are free.

Free, we challenge authority and stand our ground. We refuse to follow dictates that would do us and others harm. And we think and act outside the box of prescribed remedies.

In the absence of state or tribal coercion, our limits are set by innate morality—what Gandhi called ahimsa, or the classic dictum, “Do no harm.” Nothing is required; and nothing is forbidden but that which would cause harm.

Of course, there’s the rub, because harm is woke-weaponized in today’s culture war. “Somebody might be offended.” “It might encourage an extremist; so it’s extremist too.” Or my favorite, “It’s missing context, and therefore dangerous.”

The Law of Rule

‘If we begin to interrogate our own assumptions, it is possible for us to formulate a seemingly equivalent but actually radically different concept of law and order. Yes, there can be no freedom without laws that form a framework for order. That is to say, there can be no freedom without common laws derived from centuries of community experience that form a framework for spontaneous order.

‘In this apparently slight philosophical adjustment, we begin to see a way to abolish the killing machine of the “law of rule” and to institute a true rule of law.

‘But as long as we continue to believe our erstwhile rulers’ lie that “the law” is whatever they write down on their magical pieces of paper, we will be subject to the current governing paradigm of the planet—the law of rule—and the killing machine to which this law of rule inevitably gives rise.

‘The choice, as usual, is ours to make. And, as usual, we find that the true battlefield is not the streets of Ottawa but the space between our ears.’

—James Corbett, The Law of Rule

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/the-law-of-rule

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This post first appeared at Nevermore and my Substack channel, New World Dreaming.

New publications from Nowick Gray…

This week I launched a new free Substack channel, The Wayward Flute. The journal-style blog will chronicle my ongoing explorations with the bamboo and silver flute, both through pure improvisation and more focused scale study. Without pretensions of playing or even understanding the music at a professional level, this amateur’s approach might speak to the other amateurs out there looking for tips and inspiration.

Subscribe for free and add your comments, or pass the link along to someone you know. https://kokopelli.substack.com/

At my other Substack channel, New World Dreaming, the essay Freedom, Slavery, and Magic Spells first appeared at Nevermore, where I have just joined as a contributor. Check out the other writers there, some of my favorites, including Paul Cudenec, Margaret Anna Alice, CJ Hopkins, Iain Davis, James Corbett, and Whitney Webb.

Finally, a new volume of haiku has just launched, featuring the natural charms and human foibles of Salt Spring Island, BC, where I make my home. This third volume of haiku introduces the reader to the island’s unique character amid a precarious world drift. Includes sections on Homecoming, Housekeeping, Zeitgeist, Equanimity, Expression, Insight, and Witness. Original photographs complement over fifty haiku and senryu, blending personal observation with larger social issues and redeeming spiritual grace. Order now from Amazon.