This is a story about genocide
This is a story about genocide. Joe turns toward me. His eyebrows are raised, his mouth down-turned, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking straight up.
I mean the dire harm we are doing to this planet and in so doing, the harm we are doing to you. I point at him with my thought.
He smiles and points to his T-shirt: a row of “lower-forty-eight” Indians and the words: Terrorism: We’ve been fighting it since 1492….” Oh yea, and happy birthday,” he says, grinning.
Joe keeps saying we’re losing daylight but I can’t see that there’s any to lose. The night sky is wiped clean by a white-out with short glimpses of the revolving airport light, or a snowmobile dashing by.
Joe says,
My mentor, Paul Tiulana, took me aside one day when I was young and said, ‘The society that rules us thinks we’re problematic. But we’ve lived here successfully for 15,000 years. Those who say we’re trouble have only been here for 200 years.’
“Pre-contact, we were one of the great civilizations alongside the Aztecs and Mayas and the Sioux. We were warned that going to school would teach us only one thing – to be a recipient of welfare. In the old days in Wales, our parents taught by example: ‘This is the way to live in order to be.’”
Clifford Seetonik comes to visit. “You can be out on the ice and every few minutes everything switches,” he says. Real dangerous. Last time I was out the wind changed from NW to South/SE and that brought on high water. You can see the current out there. He points to what used to be a protective barrier of sand dunes. That’s where all the erosion is.” We go to the front door and open it. Snow blows into our faces and down our necks. Hands freeze instantly. The sky is black. The wind howls.
Climate change by itself is not the whole story: human-caused global warming is only a symptom of a badly overstressed planet. With half its surface given over to human use, its oceans stripped of three quarters of its fish, its atmosphere used as a trash bin for airborne contaminants, seasonal burning in Africa and South America, overgrazing almost everywhere, topsoil loss, and huge water consumption, we find that almost every major ecosystem is in some phase of collapse. and our long list of threatened, endangered or extinct will now include polar bears, walrus, ring seals, ivory gulls, and human beings – wholes within wholes all falling down, mirroring what has been an ongoing and murderous attack on indigenous peoples wherever they have lived.
