Man reigns supreme with his dominion over nature. He is white. He believes in and owns property. His relationship with the earth and other life is motivated by profit. He has no regard for ways of life not his own. Women and children have been spared no mercy. He does not remember the song of the birds or the feel of the wind. He does not remember his connection to the earth, our first Mother, who births and sustains life.
The primary victim of man’s attack on life has been the natural world. Gone is the buffalo herd stretching for as far as the eye can see, past the horizon, a river of life and sustenance; the migration of the passenger pigeon no longer blocks out the Sun; the salmon that once swam upriver from the ocean, so thick you could walk on water, now regulated by dams. The forests diminished. The air polluted. The vastness of the ocean interrupted with the waste of humanity.
Most of us today live disconnected from the land. For nearly all of us, this disconnection is ancestral, many generations of lost connection. Humans are ghosts without this connection. Our souls cannot find grounding without a connection to the earth, a relationship to the land.
The world has been torn asunder in the shaking and the separation. The human family is split into factions, unholy alliances of death and despair. The same oppression being acknowledged by whites against blacks and peoples of color is the same oppression humanity has imposed on the natural world. Yet we carry different responsibilities. Today some hold power and privilege which maintains these systems of oppression. This power and privilege is primarily due to race. The creation and maintenance of this oppressive system traces back to an ongoing conception of reality which is fundamentally false.
The history of civilization is the story of an ongoing, violent expansion across the globe. This process began many thousand years ago, with the emergence of an agrarian lifestyle that required more and more territory. This need increased exponentially from the late fifteenth century until after World War II. Over five hundred years of increasingly efficient ways to lay waste to the people and plants that stood in the way of colonial expansion.
The global conquest of dark-skinned people has been a product of Western European brutal militarism, economic disadvantage, political disenfranchisement, and social dominance. Its underlying unifying principle has been racial in nature. It posits that to be white is to be human, with particular and clear distinctions as to what is acceptable for those who are white/human and non-white/other, sub-, non-human. This false conception of reality distorts the reality of the individual: socially, politically, economically, morally, and the ability for one to discern what is real and unreal.
Regardless of color, humans no longer remember where we come from, disconnected from our source of life. We have no memory of the earth in their bones. For many, our tongue will never speak the language of our grandmother, whose name is barely remembered and never spoken. These memories have been stolen along with a way of life created in harmony with the land and all of creation.
Our missing connection from the land creates within each of us fear and doubt. We are ungrounded. We do not remember from where we come. This separation defines our psychology and our social order. The separation is a lack of understanding of true reality, in its place a special kind of human arrogance, an arrogance which places humans at the center of all things. This arrogance breeds the entitlement required for human dominion over Creation.
To penetrate ancestral suffering we must be with it. We must, as Gandhi said, "...look the world in the face with calm and clear eyes even though the eyes of the world are blood-shot today.”
Truth, reconciliation, and peace is the path of healing for the brokenness of humanity trapped in the cycle of ancestral suffering. Harmony relies on the emergence and acknowledgment of the truth of what has passed. In the presence of truth all voices are heard. Understood by the heart, truth is accepted. In the presence of truth, repentance and forgiveness are possible. Those who have done wrong accept their wrongdoings; those who have been wronged make their wounds available for healing. Vulnerability, intimacy, and healing is available. In this way, brothers and sisters may return to the way of peace.