Medicines for Dissolution
By Leora Cockrell
For people who are not ancestrally Indigenous to the place where they live, the processes of becoming “good guests'' to their Indigneous hosts and the land is a current inquiry held by many. How do settlers, immigrants, people of enslaved African lineages, displaced Indigenous people and/or guests acknowledge and heal from centuries of Indigenous genocide, make reparations if appropriate, and begin to imagine how things could have been and one day might become? What work must be done internally and collectively before we are able to open and touch those wounds (Gould) and move into those imagined futures?
How do guests follow the leadership and protocols of the people Indigenous to the land where they live, reconnect with their ancestral land-based spiritualities (Kimmerer), and take responsibility for “cleaning up the mess of settler-colonialism” (Cordero) if they benefit from it? How do the triple oppressive forces of white- supremacy, ecocide and settler-colonialism intertwine and feed off a similar root and what is the medicine needed for their dissolutions? This is my thexlogical reflection on becoming good guests, medicines for dissolution and my role as a leader from the positionality of a white, Jewish, queer, rurally-raised diasporic settler currently living in Huichin in Lisjan, Ohlone land.
Medicine for White Supremacy: Collectivism
One of my first steps into the inquiry of “what does it mean to become a good guest?” was realizing that the question itself was a barrier. In the white-supremacist overculture the value of the accomplishments of the individual is so deeply ingrained that even in the work of moving towards decolonization I was finding my impulses to obtain personal gain, notoriety, recognition and the “consumption” of Indigneous time and relationships. I wanted to be a good guest, as in I wanted to be seen as better than other non-Indigenous people who are bad guests. Recognizing this impulse for hyper-individuality and the good/bad binary, I decided that I wanted to join a group of people and ask together how we might become good guests. In becoming part of a group, I could experience my needs for belonging, accountability, being seen, and participating in collective creativity while also practicing humility and allowing someone else to speak on my behalf to those who speak on the behalf of Indigenous people.
Around the same time I said that prayer out loud, Rabbi Dev Noily and Ariel Luckey met in a coffee shop and discussed creating a group that would be named Jews on Ohlone Land (JOOL). Rabbi Dev and Ariel had years of experience knowing and working with Lisjan, Ohlone leaders in the land of Huichin (S.F. East Bay) and wanted to organize Jewish people around giving money to the Women-led Urban Indigenous Land Trust called Sogorea Te’. Six months later I started my graduate program at Starr King and attended my first JOOL meeting. A year after that I started my first semester interning with JOOL.
Rabbi Dev and Ariel are the only members of JOOL who have direct relationships with the Lisjan, Ohlone leaders of Sogorea Te’. Together, they decide which questions, requests, and offerings of our group are appropriate to bring to Indigneous leaders. All other members of JOOL can attend talks or events or listen to recordings of Indigenous leaders but do not have direct contact. We may not organize in this way forever, but for now our process feels aligned with Pippi Kessler’s goals for white causes spaces (which feel transferable to settler causes spaces): process white feelings, retrain white socializations, and take collective actions to shift power. Together, through JOOL we are processing our feelings about being diasporic Jewish settlers, retraining the ways we’ve been entitled to living here or to weaponize a victim mentality about Jewish persecution to rationalize living on stolen land, and we are organizing Jews to collectively distribute money to Indigenous people and show up for Indigenous-led actions and events. One medicine for dissolving white-supremacy is belonging to a collective, being one of many, no more or less important. Collectivism can also be internalized on a species level - seeing humans as no more or less important than any other creature in the whole of creation (Kimmerer 2014).
Medicine for Ecocide: Intimacy with Place
The ability to see ourselves - as individuals and a species - as part of the whole and unique but not special, is an essential difference between Western and Native ways of knowing. As Kimmerer writes, “In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings with, of course, the human being on top - the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation” (2014, Pg. 9). However, in Native ways of knowing humans are the “younger [siblings] of Creation” (2014, Pg. 9). In Native ways of knowing, humans are students of our plant and animal teachers who have been here, evolving and adapting to change, sustaining life for far longer than we have. In Western ways of knowing we not only disregard the wisdom of our teachers but actively attack them.
Ecocide is the human degradation and destruction of the more-than-human world. Ultimately, this is a drawn-out suicide as we depend upon the more-than-human world for our own lives. At the root of ecocide is a clear disconnection between ourselves and the more than human world. If we understood, felt and acted on this ultimate connection - and valued our lives - we would no longer participate in destroying the more-than-human world. What is required to feel this connection and value our lives? Through the teachings of many, I have come to believe the medicine for the dissolution of ecocide is intimacy with place, giving us both a sense of belonging and purpose.
Imagine noticing the signs of when willows are about to bud each spring because we need to harvest the shoots to make baskets. Imagine noticing on which moon mugwort returns because we need to ration the dried medicine from last year to connect with our dreams. Imagine noticing the signs of when it will start to rain because we need to harvest acorns before they are maggot-eaten. These intimate layers of awareness become not only necessary when we orient towards our lives depending on the land but also a source of belonging and purpose. As Robin Wall Kimmerer expresses,“becoming Indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s futures mattered, to take care of land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it” (Pg 9). What happens when we track intimate details of a place? When we immerse ourselves in the incredible beauty and details of creation? When we notice the seasons change or the cycling of the moon or the in and out flow of the tide - do we feel our inner changes are mirrored and connected to a rhythm greater than us?
No matter who we are, what identities we hold, which combination of oppressed and oppressor lineages we carry, how close or far we feel from dirt, “each of us comes from people who were once indigenous” (Kimmerer 2014, Pg. 377) and each of us can once again attune to the places where we live. By attunement, I mean to become aware of, in multiple ways of knowing. When Kimmerer reflects on attunement for people who are not ancestrally Indigenous to the places where they live, she offers…
“When I think of displaced people learning from the land, really listening to what that land tells you about how do you make a home here, and remember[ing] that...home-making is when we come into reciprocity with our places…whether it’s our ancestral homeland or not...” (Kimmerer 2018).
Attuning to the land is not only what we do materially, but also in the stories we tell of who we are in relation to the places where we live. Kimmerer offers immigrants the sacred practice of writing our own ilbals, our own “precious seeing instrument, or lens, with which view our sacred relationships...As the world changes, an immigrant culture must write its own new stories of relationship to place - a new ilbal, but tempered by the wisdom of those who were old on this land long before we came” (Kimmerer 2014, Pg. 344).
As part of my internship with JOOL and leadership development, I have been gathering experiences of the land, stories, fragments, practices and collective wisdom for what a diasporic Jewish settler ilbal might be here in the land of Huichin. While that story is still cooking, I have been working on an ilbal of a greater scope - that of settler-colonists healing the wounds we’ve created and carried.
Medicine for Settler-Colonialism: Initiated Adults
Through my studies and experiences, I have come to believe that at the root of all forms of oppression is the absence of initiated adults. The absence of initiated adults results in cultures (or lack of) that reward people who are self-centered, competitive, and unable to put the needs of the whole above their own. When cultures reward these behaviors, people are allowed to concentrate wealth and power and feed their, or enable other’s, desires for control and domination that exist in all of us without accountability.
Extrapolated out to a societal level, when groups of uninitiated adults hold decision-making roles that affect the lives of others, they are unable to hold the well-being of those people above their own resulting in physically violent domination and/or psychologically violent patronization. In the example of settler-colonialism, uninitiated adults of European descent focus on their/our own personal gain in material, power and control and inflict tremendous physical and psychological violence on Indigenous people. My ilbal of this story is as follows…
Every creature is born knowing how to fulfill their unique niche in the ecosystem within which they live. Humans are the only species that forget this soon after being born as we become busy with learning human culture - language, customs, taboos, etc (Plotkin). In order to remember what we were born knowing is ours to do - how we can uniquely be of service to the human and more-than-human ecosystems in which we live - we need to go through an initiation journey (Pretchel). On this journey, we are guided by teachers and elders to reconnect with our own inborn knowledge of the gifts we carry, the parts of our lineages we were sent here to repair, and what is ours to bring to the source fire for healing (Kimmerer). Through this process of initiation we become truly useful to the world and can engage in a reciprocal relationship with all that sustains us.
Many centuries ago, the expansion of the Roman empire brought the destruction of pagan, earth-based European cultures that initiated adults. The first act of Roman invaders was to destroy and outlaw gathering at the central fire, the heart of the village (Ruach Golden). Centuries later, Christianization and desire for concentration of economic power brought the demonization of women, femmes and non-binary people through burning at them stake and breaking matrilineal lines of land tending, sacred plant knowledge and the cultural tools to grieve collectively and initiate adults. These broken people, displaced from their own earth-based cultures in their own ancestral homeland turned on each other and brutalized each other through medieval torture as s form of public entertainment (Menakem). Having internalized domination and self-hatred and lacking the tools to heal collective trauma, people of European descent then spread across the world bringing their brokenness with them. On Turtle Island they committed (and continue to this day) acts of physical and psychological terror upon the people Indigenous to the land as well as people of enslaved African descent. In order to approach the root of this violence, people of European descent must both redistribute the material wealth if they have access to the people on upon whose suffering it was created and commit to remembering/recreating/rebuilding their own earth-based cultures that reconnect them to the earth, plant-medicine, collective grieving, and honoring of all bodies and expressions.
Only in cultures without initiated adults would the intimate relationships between the original human inhabitants and a place be disregarded and violently devalued. Only in cultures without initiated adults, would the most violent group of people be seen as superior, and only in those cultures would differences be understood through hierarchies of value rather than complementary (Quiquivix). Only in cultures without initiated adults would the source of our lives be actively poisoned, polluted and degraded.
Initiated adults are willing to risk personal comfort, loss, social acceptance and more if doing so is in service to the whole. Initiated adults don’t take these risks from a place of martyrdom, wanting to be remembered or self-degradation but rather from a place of intimately knowing they are connected to the well-being of all of creation. They take these risks because they are nourished by and given purpose through tending the web of life, knowing they are participating in mutually beneficial relationships. When groups of initiated adults hold decision-making roles that affect the lives of others, they are able to put the well-being of others above their own (if necessary) and embody the deeper meaning of “civil servants” - in service to the citizens.
Initiated adults are able to recognize the following six truths that are necessary to healing and transforming the deep pains of settler-colonialism, white supremacy and ecocide:
(1) the people who have an Indigenous relationship with a place have the most intimate relationship with that place and should thus be central in any human decisions made about that place
(2) intimate, mutually beneficial relationship with all aspects of creation is what nourished one’s life and makes it purposeful and all humans are capable of attuning to these relationships
(3) change is inevitable, if humans try to stop or control change out of fear or hubris the costs will simply be offset to a future of much more catastrophic changes
(4) we need to be able meet our basic needs - food, water shelter - without poisoning the source of those needs
(5) how we make transitions are equally important to what we transition to, cultural shifts can be pleasurable, relaxed, simple and elegant
(6) certain pains, discomforts and losses are inevitable yet others are unnecessarily inflicted by those who they themselves have unhealed wounds. Grieving and healing collectively are essential functions of healthy human culture, and our ability to full heartedly welcome joy, connection and gratitude deepens our capacity to grieve and heal.
While JOOL’s work doesn’t explicitly focus on re-building cultures in order to support the initiation of adults, there is a strong undercurrent. Together we are re-learning how to be together, how to be in this place and what it means to be in service to the well-being of the whole even if it requires personal sacrifice. In the first ever JOOL leaders council in March of 2021, participants reflected that the aspects of JOOL they value most is that it is intergenerational, welcoming, inclusive, collaborative, and iterative. These aspects are the foundations for healthy culture and can serve as building blocks for renewal as cultures based on oppression dissolve. I see my role in this work as one person who can dance between the “big picture” and the intricate specificity of the place where I live, one story-teller in a mosaic of many, and one bringer of the medicines for both dissolution and renewal.
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