#stan rushworth

[julesofnature]

“The difference between a western settler mindset of, 'I have rights', and an indigenous mindset of, 'I have an obligation'… Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.” ~The above quote is attributed to indigenous Cherokee elder, Stan Rushworth

[erin-hart]

The single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of, “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations.” Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”

I love this.

[pmmdj]

[halowmoon]

One of my favorite books 🌾

[florianjonquil]

But these men had lost respect for all women by now, had forgotten whose wombs they emerged from. They were already transformed into kings in their own minds, great warrior kings who’d lost their knowledge in a long drawn-out process they’d succumbed to. They had become their own bitter lost empire. There would be no remorse spoken of for what they’d done, as arguments would play out across the country for years on what was done that night. They’d forgotten their own histories, who they were and therefore who they must become again. I can see this now, how the killers were victims too, yet still killers. But I could not see it then, not when I was young.

Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain, a historical novel by Stan Rushworth

[safirefire]

We often hear that “We have never been here before.” A great number of species are going into extinction, we are experiencing a global pandemic, global changes in weather patterns are causing social and environmental upheavals worldwide, the Earth is on a trajectory of warming certain to cause further upheavals in both human and nonhuman communities, and scientists debate the origins of what they call the Anthropocene period, said to be the cause of all this havoc. For a great many people, the statement that “We have never been here before” means that the results of human behavior impacting Earth and the future were not apparent to them until now, yet this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story many generations long.

For the Plains people of North America, elimination of the buffalo, from 60 million down to a few hundred, took only one human generation in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Near the turn of the twentieth century, a Plains Indian man famously said, “I know more dead than I know living.” For California Indians, a greater than 90 percent population reduction occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century as a result of sanctioned settler mayhem. These are only two examples in one short time frame, examples of a vast and radical change begun centuries earlier than this one for tremendous numbers of people, wherever colonizing societies reached them. For Indigenous throughout the Americas, disease, starvation, resource extraction, and enslavement have taken huge tolls, and the repercussions, if not the specific perpetuation of those same forces, continue to cause radical alteration of “life as we know it.” The same experience holds all over the world.

We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth

Edited by: Dahr Jamail Stan Rushworth

[safirefire]

We Are the Middle of Forever:

Indigenous Voices From Turtle Island on the Changing Earth

Link

I’m only halfway through this and it’s so insightful. One thing I never thought about before this book was the idea that indigenous people have already faced massive climate change through forced displacement and living in entirely new environments as a result. There’s some aspects I can’t fully reconcile with yet like the idea of men’s work and women’s work but the authors still present them outside the white supremacist gender binary with full respect to transgender identities so I’m just listening and thinking about all these ideas.