I am a bit late on this one, it would have been nice to get it posted on Indigenous Peoples Day (13th October), but really, we should be ready and willing to think about, and listen too, indigenous people no matter the day or season.
We were of course, all of us indigenous at one time or another, but for most of us the wisdom and teachings of our indigenous ancestors have been interrupted so long ago that we have forgotten our roots.
The relentless (and ongoing) march of colonization has not only disconnected us from our own pre-industrial heritage; worse it has coopted many of us into the prevailing dogma, that this way of living is somehow better for all the whizzbang gadgets, shiny toys, and flashing screens, and we’ve unknowingly become participants in a system that not only benefits from poverty, but actively creates it.
Not firsthand of course, but certainly by extension of our addiction to a system that is inherently exploitive of the lands and labour of people that were and remain the traditional owners and custodians of almost every corner of the earth.
I don’t write this in some low blow attempt to make anyone feel bad or guilty. I write because I want people to consider what’s been taken away…. from all of us.
You often see in the news conservative voices talking about the perceived “attacks on traditional families”
But I would argue the real attacks already took place much earlier, the nuclear family was just a pale adaptation to industrialization and the commodifying of human labour.
It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child and it’s true.
That is what we have lost,
community.
Small, mobile, egalitarian, and deeply concerned for the wellbeing of one another.
If you struggle as a young mother or father of a newborn, or perhaps you have a child that seems to become most active in the middle of the night, while you desperately need sleep, it’s worth considering that this is not natural for us as a species.
We once had a community with which we once shared the load.
Not just the acquisition of food and shelter but parenting duties too.
In 1966, Marshal Sahlins put forward the idea of “the original affluent society” in a paper titled Man the Hunter. In it, he posited that the hunter-gatherer only worked three to five hours per adult worker each day.
Which would leave an awful lot more time leftover to get much needed rest, or to pursue the activities we want to do.
Or do a better job of things that matter, like art, music, storytelling…parenting.

