Wet’suwet’en defend their lands and waters from colonial RMCP and fossil fuel pipelines.
This is what I see.For the first time in my life I see a human, Wet’suwet’en, standing and their environment. identify with it.
The quality of their environment – “You can drink this water here…it feeds all our territories all the way to the ocean” – as their life work, their integrity, their core mission and identity.
doomed
It was then that my entire universe was turned upside down. Because the words of Molly Wickam, the Wet’suwet’en spokesperson, who was severely arrested at the end of the video, actually freed me “from the limitations of my previous understanding”.
In my previous understanding, there was a troubled, extractive and exploitative relationship between humans and their environment. Of course, this history has had its ups and downs, unequals and differentiated responsibilities, but the core facts of abusive and destructive relationships are unquestionable.
My main hope lies in a very speculative and uncertain paradigm change, a change of heart. But here, there is evidence of a fundamentally different relationship that predates any civilization I’m from – ie: settlers, colonists, Europeans went too far in their own binary Cartesian minds , as I have learned.
At the heart of this fundamentally different civilization is respect, love and protection of the environment on which they depend. The people of that civilization were willing to risk everything—arrest, injury, violence—to stop the destruction of their environment by fossil fuel pipelines.
It’s simple, here are the humans standing and their world, not against it. The landscape this opened to me was breathtaking: a future of life and purpose aligned with our world, rather than conflict and doomed destruction.
Quite simply, humans become humans. human beings possible. Humanity becomes real.
worldview
I don’t have to be in conflict with others and the air, water, mountains, forests, plants and animals around me. I can exist with them.superior Their On one side, on the other side are my children and his friends. I can stand on the side of life. Others can too: our human culture can shift to the side of the life world on which we depend and with which we relate.
It struck me that the hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en had animal figures on their traditional cloaks. At the apex of their human roles, in what Aristotle called “honorary” roles, they represented the animals that lived in their territorial environment.
I’m trying not to obsess, idealize, or appropriate a culture that’s clearly not mine, and I’m far from understanding. I try to explain to you, whose culture may be close to mine, and what it means to me to see humans, leaders of their communities, marching under the banner of life forms: amphibians, birds, plants, insects.
Scientifically speaking, we know that we are not separated from and cannot be without other life forms, from the basic function of ecosystems. So seeing at the highest level a culture that represents this interdependence, this relationship, made me realize that human beings already exist – and can exist again – far beyond Cartesian dualism.
Embarrassingly, the Wet’suwet’en resistance movement wasn’t the only YouTube video that changed my life and worldview within minutes of watching and accepting it.
ecosystem
Seeing and listening to other people who don’t lie and just communicate their core truths has a liberating power that can take us far beyond our previous state.
As expected, the second video is Professor Robin Wall Kimmererbotanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation.
