Thursday 🇵🇸 Reflections

Reflections on Day 286 of genocide

As I write this I am a passenger in a minivan driving from the foothills of the sierras back into the Central Valley and up towards Sequoia national park. In the last 20 miles we have come close to hitting (and killing) a flock of Quail, a snake, a dog, and a Turkey. (Editors note: Driving back I also almost hit a fox, bats and infinite moths.)

Over the weekend at the Ekklisia Project gathering, my sister led her performance art piece howl. In the piece Patti draws our attention to roadkill, our neighbors slaughtered by a way of life dependent/on metal death boxes and climate catastrophe. She also disrupts our anthropocentrism (centering of the human) by examining and grieving with the Howl of the Corvids.

The collaborative performance art piece responded to a question proposed by the Rev. Dr. Hannah Malcom, who or what do we believe deserves grieve? How is our grief a reflection of our political context?

Unbearable stories continue to flow from the survivors of the Israeli and US genocide in Gaza: a young adult with Down syndrome left to die after the IDF sent a attack dog to maul him, families executed in their homes, a school bombed while people play soccer. The politicized grief of the settler powers burry their heads in the sands of October 7th and the death and maiming of soldiers carrying out the genocide.

As Ched Meyers pointed out in his Ekklisia plenary, settler colonialists desire and are addicted to elimination of the native and anthropocentric domination of the land. (I can look out the window for evidence:

We just drove past a man lake owned and operated by US army, most houses in this area are adorned with the US flag, and the last 2 places we have stayed at were close to “veterans of foreign wars” buildings ). For those of us in the global north, we are finally realizing that the consequences of our attempts remake the world in the service of capital are inescapable. How then should we process this climate catastrophe?

Meyers argues against a settler arrogance that believes this is the first time people (or no people as Patti beautifully demonstrated) have faced apocalypse. On Turtle Island (the indigenous name for North America), disease and genocidal policies of white settlers caused the death of more than 90% of the continents inhabitants. In the following centuries nationalists carved up the land with arbitrary borders and highways. As was demonstrated by the near murder of various indigenous (minus the dog) inhabitants on my drive today, these roads are more akin to death ways.

Though I was raised to be “environmentally conscious” and anti-nationalistic, the ongoing genocide against Palestinians has opened my eyes in a new way to the horrors of the present. It has been possible for me to abstract away the horror of American highways as death-ways or the California Genocide. Independent and Palestinian coverage of the terror wrought by the occupying Israeli army on Palestinians has torn away abstraction.

The “civilizing project” of settler colonialism is not just in the past. With the express intent of elimination of the native, the IDF has built a road effectively splitting the Gaza Strip in half. This death-way is the entrance through which the occupying army launches its attacks and massacres.

Military roads (in brown) encircle and split the Gaza strip. Source: UN 7/3/24

What does it look like to grieve well? Rev. Dr. Malcom believes it starts with naming. We must learn to name the creatures that are our companions in our environments. We also must be direct in naming the people, systems, and powers responsible for their destruction. Grieving is also necessarily a collective transformative task that remakes ourselves and our relationships to the environment around us. Meyers also insists that this must take the form of decolonial action. We must learn from our indigenous neighbors who have survived apocalypse and who took care of the land for centuries before European settlement. An entire wall in the museum of big trees in Sequoia National Park was dedicated to educating the public about how sequoias need fires to reproduce. For years, the NPS prevented any fires because they did not understand how the environment actually functioned. The massive forest fires in California over the past couple of decades are in part due to this failure of the settler/capitalist way of relating to nature. In sharp contrast, the indigenous peoples of North America had been using controlled burns to care for the land for centuries. This history is completely absent from the NPS exhibit.

We must learn to grieve well. To name, to decolonize and to howl.

Today I saw the largest tree on the face of the earth. And I saw it’s siblings, scattered over miles of meadows. Some of the trees bore the scars of fire. Fires that have both the possibility to consume them, but also to spread their seed and plant the next generation of 2,000 year old trees. Some of them have been alive for 1,600 years before the advent of capitalism and the arrival of european settlers. I wonder what they will see 2,000 years after capitalism falls. Some of the trees wept from their burn scars. Sap flowing and hardening. I wonder what the sequoias might teach us about grief.

What I’m Reading/Watching This Week: