Reflections on Flourishing Diversity Series: Indigenous Listening Session with the Guarani and Ashaninka

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… the visitor wanted to try out his new gun. He saw a bird in a nearby tree and trained his gun on it. Moises’ four year old grandson, seeing this, ran without hesitation toward the visitor and held onto the gun barrel “You cannot shoot our brother” he said… 

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“We are not poor for not having what we do not need…” she said, adding that the world is in trouble because there is too much ambition to have things people don’t need – a leader of the Guarani people

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“Nature is not a resource for the economy: nature is a source of life” Satish Kumar

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“Will money make clean water rise from the ground, or fruit grow on trees?” Benki Piyãko

The Ashaninka and the Guarani peoples may live on opposite sides of the Amazon, and have different languages, customs and ways of life. Yet the presence of some of their leaders at a remarkable event in London last week is testimony to their common struggle to save the rainforest, its waters, its trees and plants, its creatures and – of course - its people, from annihilation. This is not just a struggle for indigenous rights against unjust and murderous incursions by the so-called civilised world: it is a struggle for the very life of the biosphere as we have known it, and therefore a struggle they mount on behalf of all of us. 

As so much of the Amazon burns before our eyes, there could hardly be a more poignant moment for the visionary Flourishing Diversity Series, held on 7-11 September 2019 in London, which hosted events where leaders from indigenous peoples from around the world came to shared their wisdom. We met in a concrete steel and glass building in the City, home to a law firm – Simmons and Simmons – which supports the rights of indigenous peoples. I was eager to understand how these leaders’ experience and world view might help us address the ongoing threat to life on earth from the lethal scissors wielded by the hyper-developed post industrial north: one blade the unquenchable and rapacious thirst for money, power, growth and consumption – seemingly at any cost; the other its shadow, namely the climate, pollution, war, terror, inequality, refugee and poverty emergency on the planet. And I was equally eager to find something that would help me understand my own life and its meaning in the midst of this tumult. 

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An addict who has nearly drunk himself to death in a moment of sobriety invites a wise physician to give an honest diagnosis and prognosis and prescribe a course of treatment for his affliction. In a fit of drunkenness last night, he set fire to the physician’s house – an incident from which the physician and his family barely escaped with their lives. Vaguely cognizant of this, and suitably contrite, the addict asks the physician in and promises to listen. He does not yet know how serious his condition is or whether the remedy to be recommended will be curative or palliative. 

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Notwithstanding the small, energetic number among us who devote themselves to activism, for people who think ourselves ‘educated’, ‘civilised’ and ‘advanced’ we are remarkably docile, complicit and seemingly powerless in the face of the atrocities played out on our device screens every day. It is really as if we are intoxicated. I note this in myself – that sense of outrage, of being incensed by the daily news of the latest depths to which Governments, Leaders, Corporations or ‘the public’ have plunged, and very quickly afterwards returning to the job of cooking dinner with a sense of resignation and ‘what’s the point?’. Perhaps because, given the systematic violations to which they have been exposed over centuries, it was a miracle they were even in the room to share their wisdom with us, the eight people arraigned in front of the audience on 11th September had no such invisible shackles tethering their spirit. Winona Laduke, Native American activist and writer once said:  

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“One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don’t feel powerless. White people don’t feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.”

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I am not white, but I get her drift. Like Moises Piyãko in his story about his grandson and the bird, Laduke is pointing to a very important distinction between those indigenous people who have – against the odds – managed to ensure the continuation of their wisdoms and ways of life, and so many of the rest of us. As Moises Piyãko put it – “We know who we are”. His four year old grandson is fully congruent in his understanding of his relationship to the bird. Knowing his relationship to his relations in other species, he is absolutely clear about who he is: this is not merely an intellectual understanding. It is lived, embodied, visceral. Infected by splitting of mind from heart from body that is the signature of our civilisation, I can hear myself say “All species, all plant and all animal nations are my relations”. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? But would I throw myself at a man with a gun to stop him killing a bird, or to save a tree? Would I be able to do so without anger, but with the cleanness and clarity of deep connection with life itself? I am not so sure. 

The physician examines the patient carefully. Your affliction, he says, is serious: there is a well which holds the water of life. Lured by your sense of adventure, you wandered away from it and lost your way home. Thirsty for the water of life, you tried all kinds of other liquids, and finally found one that made you feel better. But the feeling did not last, and you were very soon thirsty once more. So you took it again, and found you needed a little more this time to satisfy your craving. Each time the thirst returned you increased the dose until you no longer even knew or cared how much you took. Meanwhile you neglected everything that you once valued and made you happy: your garden, your home, your spouse your children, friends and relations, your animals and your sacred time. Slowly everything other than the liquid ceased to matter. Under its spell you have committed all kinds of transgressions. Diagnosis: you no longer know who you are.  

There were two women speaking from the Guarani people. One described how her mother had been horribly assaulted and permanently mutilated by loggers but survived. Part of her mother, she said, had died in the forest that day. But they continue. 

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I am no expert in understanding the great tapestry of indigenous world views. However, I do understand that indigenous peoples must not be romanticised or infantilised. Some of our paradigms of history, and also of psychotherapy, cast them as the ‘infants’ of the human race – living in a state of ‘innocence’ which has not yet separated or individuated from the Mother, namely the earth; which does not yet know the glories of literacy, agriculture, urbanisation and advanced forms of culture; which is somehow stuck in a time warp from which they must, however regrettably, be rescued. Ah the civilising force of the dominant paradigm! This Guarani woman’s heart-breaking story about the assault on her mother brings all of that claptrap to a thunderous stop. Told as a matter of fact, it reminded anyone in the audience who needed reminding, that real mothers, just like Mother earth herself, are at the very sharpest end of the assault on indigenous communities by Governments, corporations and associated agencies and para-agencies. 

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That these peoples have survived everything advanced society can throw at them – disease, murder, rape, enslavement, expropriation, destruction of their sacred lands - is remarkable. But even before the encounter with Europeans decimated their numbers, they had been around for thousands of years. They had survived and resisted invaders, all the while living in cyclical, dynamic, symbiotic coexistence with the earth, the waters, plant and animal life. They did so without degrading the environment. They did so without destroying other peoples. They acted as stewards of the earth and her nations. 

I may be of south Asian heritage, from a part of the world which has a 10,000 year old civilisation. But I am also very much a citizen and a product of a civilisation – the Western civilisation – which has lasted perhaps one and a half, perhaps two and a half, thousand years. In this time, particularly in the last three hundred years, this civilisation, for all the dizzy heights of its cultural, scientific and philosophical achievements, has brought us to the brink of destruction by creating so much toxicity, such a disturbance to the balance of life, such entrenched conflicts between social and economic groups, nations and geopolitical-industrial-military complexes  and so much mass extinction that we could make the earth uninhabitable even for our own species. We can no longer be sure that our ingenious problem-solving capacities, prodigious as they are, can get us out of this hell of our own making. 

In the west, we have, over the last twenty years or so started to use the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’, as if this were a new concept. When you have lived sustainably with as challenging an environment as the Australian outback for 60,000 years without rendering the land uninhabitable, or yourself becoming extinct - as the aboriginal peoples have - you really have a right to talk about sustainability! Such peoples, far from being children, stuck in a time warp, are the great great grandmothers and grandfathers of the human race – peoples who know how to live not only with the cycles of earth-time. Having built our agrarian and urban civilisations on their bones, having violated their lands and the laws and treaties that protect what remains of them, having degraded them in our history books, novels and movies, we now – at the eleventh hour - start to recognise how badly we need their wisdom. Nevertheless, we are people of a civilisation which is in some ways highly developed, and capable of achievements of breath-taking beauty, complexity and ingenuity. We can and must not deny our goodness, even as we confront its shadow. We must not idealise ‘indigenous wisdom’ so we can abdicate responsibility for claiming our own. This is not a call to ‘return’ in some collective romantic reverie to a longed-for ‘primitive’ state of innocence. That’s a lie that does not exist – for any of us. 

This is the time to be here now with our fellow humans, and conspire to go forward together bearing all our wisdoms – earth-based, holistic, spiritual, scientific, technological, artistic, creative, embodied, and intellectual – because this is the only way we can solve the crisis facing humanity and the biosphere. 

However, this difficult darning of a broken relationship does not begin on an equal footing. Indigenous peoples have been so degraded in our power structures, our cultures and our minds, that the conversation must start with a respectful listening, which reverses the usual order of things. That listening is a spur to both our inner self-examination and our outer change of behaviour in the world. Putting aside our obsession with ‘progress’, acknowledging that most western countries have wiped out their own indigenous (first, or original) peoples, this listening will help us learn how to be new natives in the lands we inhabit, as well as how to reach across the globe to lend allyship, material support and solidarity to those on the frontline of saving the ecosphere – natural and human.

It was humbling to witness the wise and beautiful people who spoke that evening who, despite all that has happened to them and their peoples, still have the generosity and goodwill to try and teach us a thing or two about how to live sustainably on our one planet in partnership with all the other species earth and with the earth itself. 

Finally, I was most struck by the simplicity of the answers the Guarani and Ashaninka gave to the questions put to them toward the end of the session. They involved the following advice: remember who you are; learn from your ancestors; forgive what has past; stay positive whatever the day brings; and do what you can and what you know is right with courage, tenacity and complete commitment. That is how they have survived, and that was the signature of their presence in the room with us. 

That sounds serious doctor, what should I do? The patient waits with baited breath for the doctor’s answer and is astonished to hear the following words: First, forgive the past. Second, go and touch everything and everyone that was once important in your life and smile - do not break your touch until you have remembered what it feels like to love. Third, since you have forgotten where the well is, sit on the earth exactly where you are and pray – do not move until the ground starts to open up into a new well beneath you. Fourthly, draw water from that well and give it to every person, plant or creature you meet without discrimination or distinction. If they shun you, let them be. The patient felt uneasy and asked But what about the other liquid?  What about it? the physician echoed. The patient was perplexed, but went on (he of course wanted to know the answer to the most important question) Doctor, his voice grew quiet and serious, How long do I have? Even I cannot answer that question, my dear man, said the wise physician. There will be many trials. But if you do as I say, the days of your life, however long or short, and those of all you touch, will be happy. 

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