Group items tagged

In the 17th century, the West began its colonial expansion into the region - and Baalbek’s Roman complex was ripe for centuries of orientalist appropriation

The economic and political growth of Europe occurred alongside what became a rapid decline of Ottoman power in the 19th century, Mahlouji explains. “The Europeans expand their interests in the roots of their own civilization, beyond the glory of Rome and Greece, into the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, and by extension claim their own roots beyond Europe."  

“They [Europeans] discover the Indo-European languages, which link to Asia, and their notion of Europe expands into Persian, Egyptian, Phoenician,"

In 1920, the French Mandate decreed the Bekaa was officially Lebanese territory and the grand Roman complex became the emblem of the new nation. Its pillars appeared on stamps, banknotes and postcards

In 2019, the divide between the needs of the ancient site and those of modern urban residents still exists, if less pronounced than in the past.

visitors come to the ruins at the north-western edge of the city, yet don’t enter the city proper

The Lebanese government has focused on Heliopolis, adding large parking lots and making the site more accessible - but it comes at the cost of the rest of the city’s attractions. 

“What needs to be done is to stop the segregation between what is archaeological, and controlled by the Tourism Ministry, and the living city,” Mahlouji explains. “They’re creating wider roads leading to it, fencing off and making a museum city that is detached from the living city.”  

Like the rest of the United States, the Washington of today sits on land that had long been inhabited by indigenous tribes — particularly a group called the Nacotchtank or Anacostans. Rule's project draws attention to that physical history of the land. The guide's second site is a large island in the Potomac River that once hosted Nacotchtank settlements, while another site marks indigenous artefacts found on the grounds of the White House.

"It's important to acknowledge ... that native communities, leaders and other individuals have continued to come to Washington, D.C. over the years on behalf of their people," said Gokey, a member of the Eastern Shawnee and Fox tribes.

"Colonization did happen, but this is still Indian land,"

lands are being stolen and mismanaged by colonists who believe that their environmental and clean energy projects – eco-tourism, national parks, and hydroelectric dams  – will be more effective than millennia of land stewardship by Indigenous Peoples

The idea that we could build a truly fair and sustainable society using those foundational European institutions and environmental relations must be thrown out entirely. This makes many people, even the most anti-racist leftists, deeply uncomfortable, because it means we have to reorganize all aspects of life as we know it.

When coupled with the cattle’s overgrazing, invasive Eurasian plants began beating out native grasses and plants while retaining less water and carbon in the soil. Concentrations of cattle increased throughout the 20th century, and instead of letting them graze, farmers began fattening them up in crowded pens called feedlots, which in turn increased the need to cultivate wheat, corn, and soy to feed the cows. Ancient, well-managed prairie was aggressively tilled for the first time, exposing the soil to the air. Some experts have argued that it resulted in a period of severe and destructive dust storms on the Prairies in the 1930s. Today, farmers help prevent this erosion and increase their crop yields with intensive irrigation from underground aquifers that are nearly bled dry – a practice that some studies estimate will leave millions on the Great Plains without water for crops, livestock, or human settlements within a century.

Before colonization, an estimated 30 million bison roamed Turtle Island, but by the end of the 19th century their numbers dwindled to fewer than 1,000 thanks to colonial policies and hunting by settlers. “The majority of Indigenous people have forgotten their connection to our ancestral animal,” Joely says. “Most have never eaten buffalo, seen a buffalo up close, smelled one. Almost all have never scraped the fat and meat off one to tan it.” In 2015, she co-founded the Buffalo People Arts Institute (BPAI), a non-profit whose mission is to “bring back the buffalo emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically,” including by running workshops on bison hide tanning.  

Like oil and gas, commercial wheat, beef, and salmon farming on Turtle Island are unsustainable extractive industries with product prices that do not match the real human and ecological cost

“We’re willing to wield science as a tool in our work because truly, our people were scientists,” Jess tells me. “We had systems for organizing and transmitting knowledge. We developed practices, teachings, and laws based on our careful experimentation and observation, our code of ethics, our rigour, our intelligence, our drive to understand the world around us. We don’t differentiate between ‘our knowledge’ and ‘science.’ We differentiate between frameworks: ‘Haíɫzaqv science’ and ‘western science.’” There is no confusion in the community about which methods are most appropriate for Haíɫzaqv people or their territory. “We’ve seen decades of academics coming into our territory to earn degrees studying obscure things that have no practical application here. That doesn’t happen anymore. We now have relationships with academic institutions that allow us to be an early point of contact for researchers in all fields who want to come into the territory. They’re expected to develop projects that will advance our territorial governance and stewardship.”

fish farms are disease accelerators,  making both wild populations of fish and humans more vulnerable to a host of pathogens while the industry focuses solely on streamlined production

“The way the western world talks about Indigenous knowledge by and large does it a disservice,” Jess says. “It’s treated like a new-age novelty or a tokenistic box to check on a referral or consultation strategy. It’s deeper than that. It’s sacred, nuanced, organized, and rooted in deep relationships with the world around us. It’s careful. It’s observant. It’s adaptive. It’s not fodder for some generic inspirational Indian proverb meme. It’s a living system by which many of us still organize our lives and map our identities.”

Weirs have long been used by Indigenous fishers to track salmon populations and help make sure they weren’t overfishing – until the late 1800s, when the Dominion of Canada banned Indigenous fishing technologies, under pressure from industrial fisheries which wanted to exploit salmon stocks without competition.  Today, the revival of the weir allows scientists to monitor the salmon’s movement through their tags and study the impact that variables like water temperature have on their populations. They’ve found that high water temperatures are associated with higher rates of death in migrating adult sockeye salmon – a crucial insight into how climate change will affect biodiversity and food security.  A Haíɫzaqv-led non-profit, Qqs Projects Society, is a key partner on the project, and brings children to visit the weir, teaching them about their relationship with the salmon, the logic of traditional technologies, and the respect for life that is crucial to the continuation of their subsistence systems.

The legacy of colonialism and its style of private land management is still an obstacle in reintroducing bison to their ancestral habitats. Cattle ranchers vehemently oppose expanding bison ranches, arguing that bison may pass diseases to cattle herds.  But both Indigenous and settler sciences affirm the benefits of bison for both habitat restoration and human health.  “When the buffalo return, new species return, ecosystems return that were dormant. They can survive on their own with little intervention, in comparison to cattle,”

“Part of our work is feeding people buffalo at community feasts and getting them used to eating it again. Our diets, historically, were changed from buffalo, vegetables, and fruit from the land to pork, salt, sugar, and flour. There is no wonder why diabetes consumes our communities.”

“Looking back does not mean we need to stop our Indigenous cultures from growing,” she adds. “I support solar and wind power. I support modern technologies. There has to be a way to come together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures to join methodologies and practices for the health and well-being of future generations.”

In contrast to stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples as hunter-gatherers, oral histories and research prove that Indigenous Peoples in the Pacific Northwest have been farming clams for over 1,000 years – constructing stone terraces and stacking sediments in the tidal column to perfect clam-growing conditions and harvesting selectively to feed large numbers of people without decimating the clam population.  Even so, the myth that Indigenous Peoples were solely foragers, not farmers, was leveraged by colonial governments to justify stripping Indigenous nations of their land base.

The destruction wrought by colonization cannot be undone, but we can recover from it. Tiffany explains that one must “be strong enough to let the land govern you.” In this sense, “Land Back” is not just the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of First Nations, but a reminder that “the land is sovereign and the land is what you should obey,” she says. It is a call for us all to take responsibility in maintaining a meaningful relationship of reciprocity with the land. 

Our current problems are the result of a number of historical conditions being realized, and are not a fundamental manifestation of our nature, evolutionary trajectory, or destiny. Designing a society that makes happy humans with healthy bodies and minds in resilient ecosystems does not involve “going back” to any ideal period of history, but it does require us recognizing that Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship are and will continue to be successful; that ecosystems have regulating functions that are better at preventing pandemics and responding to climate change than present human technology; and that the legacy of industrial agriculture, capitalism, and its exploitation of people and the planet should no longer be the standard that shapes our vision of progress.

It’s time to divest from voluntourism. The push to overhaul the very systems that allow violent experimenting on black bodies in black countries should be amplified. New approaches to our work among our people should centre on dismantling both local and global unequal systems instead of donor demands and visions of Africa.

Voluntourism is rooted in unequal power, unequal wealth that is built on the exploitation of generations of people in the Global South. It is sustained by the belief in white supremacy, white intentions are all that matters and often requires infantilisation of the people. How else do we get all those images of Africa being represented by abandoned children? 

African volunteers in African countries are less likely to be taken on because, on the whole, Africans still face many barriers to safe and regular human mobility. In 2020, it is easier for an American volunteer to go to 65% of African countries visa-free while Africans can travel to about 53% of Africa without a visa. The work on our hands remains enormous.

The Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism protests are an African struggle, too. Yes, the manifestations of racism and racialised power might be different but the root is the same: white supremacy, patriarchal capitalism.