A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [171]
Without the courage of other people who were willing to speak their own truths, I would not have had the courage to be able to listen again, as I did as a child.
We are what we eat. If daily we take into our bodies the knowledge that Coke is the real thing, and that one can buy happy meals at McDonald's, then we will soon enough believe that Coke is the real thing, and that happiness is only a hamburger away. This means also that if we begin to listen to those other voices that have been speaking to us all along, of women, children, other races, other cultures, our own experiences, the songbirds that sing outside our doors and the ladybugs that land on our windows, we will soon enough reenter their world, the world into which we were born, the world in which we evolved, the world we have inhabited all along, though sometimes without knowing.
Connection and Cooperation
"The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibility to all living things." Vine Deloria, Jr.
THE COOPERATION I’VE BEEN invoking as a central tenet of existence is not a sentimentalized version in which death is vanquished, all beings live happily ever after, and the only suffering is incurred by villains, who even themselves suffer only inconvenience: a pie in the face, a fiery auto accident in which they walk away clothes blackened and mustache singed. Instead, this is a ruthless cooperation in which those who do not cooperate are extinguished—sooner or later, depending on their degree of insulation from the effects of their actions—but more importantly and to the point are by their refusal to cooperate banished from meaningful participation in the larger community.
A man owns a falcon. He moves from the west side of Washington to a small town near Spokane. His new home is by a lake. Every day he sees an eagle floating far above, circling by the hour and never seeming to move its wings. After the man has lived there a few days, he takes the falcon out back to let it fly. The falcon has barely left his hand when the eagle hurtles down to kill it. The domesticated falcon presumably had not known the rules of the lake, or knowing them had faced no choice when released from its master's hand, and the domesticated owner had not bothered to learn: I am here, so you should not be. Your presence is not helpful to this community, so I will kill you now. The community already had enough birds of prey: more would harm its prey base.
We say that Native Americans had, and some still have, good relationships with the natural world, and it is undoubtedly true, as Jeannette told me, that a primary difference between Western and indigenous philosophies is that indigenous philosophies do not view listening to the land as a metaphor, but it is also true that these nations devised complex rules to guarantee their cooperation with nonhuman members of their larger communities. An intricate network of treaties governed the take of salmon from the Columbia River system: each Indian nation could kill only so many, making certain to leave enough for other nations, for bears, eagles, ravens, for future generations of salmon. The relationship between the Indians of this region and the salmon was and is deeply spiritual and reciprocal, but the treaties were hardheaded policy agreements that worked for thousands of years. Similarly, the relationship between the Indians of the plains and the buffalo was deep and respectful. This did not stop Indians from enacting and enforcing sharp strictures against overkill. Tom McHugh describes what happened to a hunter who violated these rules: "After flogging him, marshalls confiscated or killed his dogs and horses, cut his lodge into pieces, burned his tipi poles, broke his bow or gun, took his meat supplies, and ripped his hides, reducing him to total beggary." As Richard Manning comments on these rules: "The buffalo culture depended upon cooperation and the rules were meant to ensure it." Note that McHugh described enforcement as it