As regular readers of this blog know, I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers' playfulness ; their playful religious practices ; their playful approach toward productive work ; their non-d
Global warming is a threat to all of us regardless of our politics, religion, or culture. People from all walks of life are realizing this and converging to address this common threat and 350.org , Bill McKibben, along with The Sierra Club are leading the charge. "At 12 Noon on Sunday, February 17, thousands of Americans will head to Washington, D.C. to make Forward on Climate the...
A team of three passionate environmental filmmakers recently returned from the Amazon and Choco´ rainforests of Ecuador, beginning their journey to make a documentary featuring the best ways to save tropical rainforests. During the month of February, Earth Soul Productions is turning to Kickstarter, a "crowd-funding" website, to raise funds to cover the expenses of documenting...
Idle No More is an indigenous peoples movement born in Canada. Their mission is described as follows: Idle No More calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit...
If indigenous and modern world views are going to inform each other to shift the trajectory of humankind toward a just, thriving, and sustainable future , an important step in this direction is for the modern world to better understand indigenous peoples’ stories, perceptions, and values. In the past, indigenous peoples’ perspectives have too frequently been told by outsiders...
If we all treat one another with the best principles of human relationships, it is analogous to complying with Nature's biophysical principles by taking responsibility for our own behavior. In other words, if I want to become acquainted with you, it is incumbent on me to determine how I must treat you in order to allow, even encourage, you to reciprocate in kind. Thus, for me to receive the...
I love Columbus Day. Each year, I recall the simple song I learned as a child about the man who "discovered" America. I still recall the innocent boy whose imagination was taken by the story of adventure and discovery. In fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. On Columbus Day, I reflect on the facts of that fateful discovery. Hispaniola at the time of...
The following is an excerpt of “Columbus and Western Civilization” written by Howard Zinn that appears in the Disinformation anthology You Are Still Being Lied To edited by Russ Kick. Author’s Note: In the year 1992, the celebration of Columbus Day was different from previous ones in two ways. First, this was the quincentennial, 500 years after Columbus’ landing...
Excerpt from A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, Chapter 1: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet...
It speaks the language of riffles and babbles, not legal rights and codes, but the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third largest, has received something no other river in the country – and possibly the world – yet has: a legal voice. In a framework agreement signed last week between the Crown and the Whanganui River iwi (the local Maori people), the river will be...
An irony of modern life is that, in spite of spectacular increases in material abundance and centuries of technological progress, hunter-gatherers, people who have lived with almost no material possessions, have enjoyed lives in many ways as satisfying and rewarding as lives led in the industrial North. Many hunter-gatherer societies have been affluent in the sense of having everything they...
Editor's Note: Limited Wants, Unlimited Means is a collection of essays that challenges much of our culture's invisible assumptions about tribal societies, which also allows us to see the assumptions we have about our own culture in a new light. This book was an inspiration to the Films For Action project, and it comes highly recommended as a source of inspiration for ideas and perspectives...
The Black Hills were stolen from the Sioux in 1877. Now, Indians are in a desperate quest to buy back their sacred sites When I was a little girl , a long time ago, we would go camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We had to pay, just as tourists do, to camp there and enjoy the beauty of the Black Hills or, in Lakota, of the Paha Sapa or He Sapa. When I say we had to pay, I...
The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is Russell Means's most famous speech. A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, he was perhaps the most outsized personality in the American Indian Movement...
“You say laughter and I say larfter,” sang Louis Armstrong. The difference is subtle. Across the world, however, from the Amazon to the Arctic, tribal peoples say it in 4,000 entirely different ways. Sadly, no one now says “laughter” in Eyak, a language from the Gulf of Alaska, whose last fluent speaker died in 2008, or in the Bo language from the Andaman Islands, for...
Residents from 10 Bidayuh villagers this week set fire to five logging camps and thirteen heavy machines in a stark protest against logging activities on their land, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As reported by Free Malaysia Today , the Bidayuh villagers took matters into their own hands because of the governments refusal to address their complaints about logging activities within...
Kansas City, Thursday March 1, 2011 a group of concerned citizens gathered at the Cherith Brook Community House ( A Catholic Worker House ) to educate and plan protests against the building of nuclear warheads in Kansas City. Dorothy Day was the matriarch of an anarchist movement in the earlier part of the twentieth century. She began what is known as the catholic worker movement. The...
Consider this: thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects are in the process of creating the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism. It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood...