Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [99]
It is beyond passing strange—I would say obscene, as well as absolutely typical—that so much of our discourse concerns so many pieces of information that do not matter to our lives—I think I can state categorically that the knowledge that Angelina Jolie has a tattoo on her genitals and that Nicole Kidman doesn’t wear panties will never make a tangible difference in my life—yet we know almost nothing of the land we inhabit, and of our living breathing neighbors who share this land.
That is a textbook example—textbook, as though a book written by someone far away carries more weight than my own direct idiosyncratic experience—of a discourse of occupation. Bring on the bread, and most especially bring on the circuses. And whatever you do, don’t wake me until it’s too late, until there’s nothing I can do to resist, until I can in no way be held responsible for my failure to effectively act.
The conflict resolution methods of a culture of occupation will be different from those of a culture of inhabitation. The Okanagans of what is now British Columbia, to provide a counterexample, have a concept they call En’owkin, which means “I challenge you to give me your most opposite perspective to mine. In that way I will know how to change my thinking so I can accommodate your concerns and problems.” The Okanagan writer and activist Jeannette Armstrong told me why her people developed this and similar technologies: “We don’t have any fewer problems than you guys getting along. But we know that whomever we’re having trouble with, their grandchild might marry our grandchild. So we have to accommodate one another. I have to ask myself how I can change to accommodate you. At the same time, because you, too, are Okanagan, you will be asking how you can change to accommodate me. We’re going to be leaning toward one another.” She talks of how all the people in her community share one skin. They share that skin with all of the people who came before, and all who will come after. This applies in a sense to their nonhuman neighbors as well.
In the dominant culture, familial and sexual relations are relations of occupation, not inhabitation. Rates of rape and child abuse reveal the degree to which the bodies of women and children are considered the property of their masters (husband: from Anglo-Saxon husbonda; hus, house, and bonda, master). Vaginas become resources to be exploited (or at the very least husbanded), and those who live in the bodies containing these resources become pesky inhabitants to be terrorized into giving up the resource.
But something even more intimate than our family lives is infected by this complex of beliefs: our sense of what we consider a self. Who are you? Who, precisely, is the you that you consider you? Chances are good it’s what Catherine Keller called the separative self, an isolated monad cut off from all others by psychological, spiritual, and existential barriers much stronger than skin. If your goal is to attempt to minimize acknowledging damage to yourself as you exploit others, this sort of self is just the ticket. If your goal is to inhabit relationships, this self is a really bad idea.
If you do believe you are a separative self, or act as though you believe you are a separative self, whom, exactly, are you cut off from? Do you consider your self to include your family? Your friends? The air you breathe? The Aplodontia rufia who live far closer to you than Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman? The solitary bees digging their nests in the dirt outside? The dirt itself, the living breathing dirt? The water that acts as intermediary between all of these? Are these all part of you? Are any of these