Editor’s Note: In our fight for the defense of the natural world, it is important that we feel connected to nature. Given that there is so little left in the world that could be called “natural,” it may be hard to do for many of us. It is in this spirit that we bring to you a story of a walk into the wilderness of Nuyts in the south west of Western Australia. At the beginning of the year, we hope you feel closer to your roots: the mother Earth.
Finally, exactly two months after my birthday, we had the time, headspace and energy to go do the Nuyts Wilderness Walk that was my birthday hike choice for this year. We had done a gorgeous reconnaissance hike in preparation for it a couple of months back, and it was good to at last have a day set aside in good weather for this long and special wilderness trail.
We began near the Deep River bridge and set out for Thompson Cove.
Did I mention the old-growth Karri/Tingle forest is awe-inspiring? There is so little of it left – I wish I could travel back in time 250 years to see this place before it was colonised by a destructive industrial culture which has chewed its way through most of the coastal ecosystems since arriving – and to put an invisible shield around Australia to stop Europeans from ever finding this continent. Imagine Australia if it had remained in the hands of its Indigenous people, who lived here for 60,000 years without utterly destroying the place.
Track maps and information on local hikes were posted near the bridge.
Today we were heading for Thompson Cove, but we are keen to do this gorgeous walk all over again to check out alternative destination Aldridge Cove.
On our reconnaissance walk into the Nuyts we had gone from John Rate Lookout via Mt Clare to this bridge – which is so wobbly we crossed it one at a time so we’d not fall over!
Nice views of the Deep River in either direction – this is one of the few rivers in South-Western Australia which still has intact riparian vegetation and relatively clean water. Most of the others, including the Swan and Canning Rivers in the state capital, are polluted sewers with denuded and eroded banks. When we walk in conservation areas like this, we get a glimpse of the world as it was before Homo colossus began to systematically destroy it.
You may notice the water is brownish. This is caused by natural tannins in the riparian vegetation. Imagine it as a kind of cold-brewed tea. There are many rivers and inlets on the South Coast which naturally contain tannins from the surrounding native vegetation. In Scotland this happens in peat bogs; people traditionally tanned leather there. Here’s Tom Langhorne explaining how that is done, without causing the kind of environmental damage and waste associated with industrial tanning. By the way, many hides these days are going into landfill because of vegan objections to leather, and the low cost of synthetic and non-biodegradable substitutes – which is so utterly wasteful, earth-polluting and nonsensical.
One of Tom Langhorne’s many wonderful videos on traditional survival skills in his native Scotland
The first walk section immediately after the bridge took us through Karri forest. Here’s some of the beauty all around in that place. This vibrant banksia flower below was one of a cluster on the ground. Local cockatoos often nip off flowers and fruits this way – but only some of them.
Walking, you will often go through stands of Casuarinas in the forest, which create a little world of their own. The path we were on was wonderfully soft and springy; the sort that you would walk on for hours just for the joy of it. The aromas in the air were a lovely mix of freshness, recent rain, earth, aromatic oils from the various myrtaceous species, fungi, and the decomposition of plant materials in the humus layer. Get down on the ground sometime after rain in a natural forest, lift some of the leaves off the ground until you get to where the fungal mycelia are, and take some deep breaths. One of the best smells on the planet.♥
And this is not the same in a tree plantation – yet many modern people would not be able to distinguish between a natural forest, a logged forest and a plantation. Of course, there are few remnant forest ecosystems left, so most contemporary Westerners have never walked in one; we’re lucky on the South Coast of Western Australia that there are still patches of it around. Those places are incomparable and took many thousands of years to become what they are. One of the reasons I write these hiking photoessays is to show people who haven’t had the opportunity to experience for themselves what Australian remnant ecosystems look like up close.
And here’s one of Jess and me.
I always find it astonishing to look at the impoverished parklands people create around cities that they apparently find aesthetically appealing. I hike in what nature has made; it’s absolutely no comparison. This forest is a wonderland filled with life and its life-sustaining processes. It is species-rich, complex and interconnected to such an astounding degree. If anyone hasn’t read Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life yet, let me highly recommend it.
We took lots of photos of mosses, lichens, fungi. This is nature recycling, and making a great deal of beauty and life doing so. Our culture talks about recycling and it’s mostly a myth – in nature it’s a law.
Below you can see the construction of an ant-lion, who creates a funnel to trap prey insects to feed on. In nature, the population excesses of each species become food for another species so that no species assumes plague proportions, and diversity can flourish. It is important for Westerners to have a good look at their attitudes to mortality, which is not the tragedy it is made out to be by people who are more invested in fear and ego survival than they are awed by the circle of birth-life-death-life in nature, going around like a gift and creating the most astonishing and beautiful world in which we get a brief turn on the stage which we should honour, and learn our kinship in.
Most people who haven’t grown up near places like this see predator-prey as “nature red in tooth and claw” – well, who’s projecting but Homo colossus, the most destructive species of them all, harbouring many pathological individuals who kill for kicks or greed, not for basic sustenance – a culture that has destroyed much of the biosphere itself, instead of taking basic sustenance from other species’ reproductive excess and yielding themselves in turn at the end.
Woodland and heathland alternated with patches of forest as we progressed towards the coast.
It’s fungal fruiting season since the autumn rains finally saturated the earth, and it’s spectacular. We took lots of photos and we know Sara will enjoy those.♥ Fungi are amazing creatures. I would really like people to understand that all life forms are alive and precious – not just humans and the animals we find cute. Also, that all life is sentient, not just things with a nervous system like our own.
Also that the species is more important than the individual. In nature, individuals feed on other individuals in the food web, but they do not exterminate entire species – something our completely insane ecocidal culture does routinely, and currently at the rate of ~200 species every day. I can’t tell you how obscene that is; and the utter irony that so much destruction is being carried out as we speak by making so-called “green” technologies.
Also news flash: “Green” vegan soy (which is grown in destructive monocultures and shipped from far away) isn’t a lesser environmental problem than people eating the grass-fed herbivores on their own locality’s existing pastures. People should eat as locally as possible and avoid as much as possible all forms of intensive animal or plant production. I’m having a relatively easy time avoiding feedlotted animal products as a smallholder, eating the beef off our own grass, pastured eggs and dairy grown by other local smallholders, and accessing organically grown F&V from my own garden. I am having a very hard time coming off the intensively farmed plant products that form the backbone of calorie intake for most of us: The cereals, the legumes, mostly grown as monocrops with high fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide and fossil fuel inputs in devastated countryside far from where I live. The flour for my bread, the lentils for my soup. No wonder Irish peasants ate a lot of potatoes, and that I am always trying to grow more of them. It’s the most calorie-dense plant food I can grow, but it’s not an easy crop. I need to collect a lot of animal manure to grow it.
The central problem is how far we have drifted from being a part of the food web. Ideally you’d be hunter-gathering, but most of the world’s natural ecosystems have been devastated by our industrial culture, and most of us have neither the constitution nor the skills required for that kind of life. We are moored in our own modernity, with the wreckage all around us. The best I can do is to try to grow my own food and eat as locally as possible. My husband and I consider native ecosystems sacrosanct and live where we do to steward for conservation 50 hectares of native sclerophyll woodlands and heathlands that came with 10 hectares of pasture on which we run a smallholding according to organic and permaculture principles. We’re planting shelter belts and wildlife habitat into the pasture, battling invasive species (like local pasture mainstay kikuyu, an African runner grass) with glyphosate to be able to do this (the lowest-impact herbicide for conservation work – please read the downloadable pdf in this link if you want to understand the context), don’t have tractors or any other fossil fuel driven farm machinery and are feeding ourselves and others while fine-tuning our practices.
In an ideal world we’d all be working on getting back to entirely local low-external-input food-growing systems that allow wildlife back into devastated areas, while drastically reducing our family sizes to counteract the at least tenfold overshoot of our species – but that’s another topic. When we are hiking in natural ecosystems like this, I can’t help but be aware that human beings lived in and off these original Australian ecosystems for 60,000 years without bulldozing or ploughing or polluting or concreting over anything, and without taking more than they needed. They also took active steps to limit the offspring they produced and lived in a harmony with their environment that our own massively destructive and ever-expanding coloniser culture can only dream about.
Do you notice how the leaf margins of the tree seedling above have been gnawed? This is normal life in a food web. Were this an ornamental in a park or garden, many Homo colossus would reach for a bottle of pesticide and exterminate insects, who are “bad” for causing such “damage” (we’ll skip the massive irony over who is saying that). But in a natural system, a degree of herbivory on the leaves of plants is as normal and necessary as a degree of predation on animals, for reasons discussed earlier. There is inbuilt resilience to such losses, and if you plant some eucalypts away from their natural ranges, they may break entire branches from excess weight because their foliage isn’t being appropriately pruned by the herbivores that feed on them.
Below we have a photo of a Macrozamia palm. Local Noongar people collected their large seeds to eat. Like many of their traditional plant foods, these seeds required soaking to leach out toxic chemicals. The local Indigenous diet was quite high in animal foods and comparatively low in plant foods. Australia is one of the most difficult places to survive hunter-gathering. Local marsupial mammals have an about two degree Celsius lower body temperature than the average placental mammal, to conserve energy on the available resources. The kangaroo has one of the most energy-efficient locomotion methods on the planet. Koalas, surviving off difficult to digest eucalyptus leaves, are super-slow, like sloths.
To survive in the Australian bush, humans have to be prepared to eat whatever is available: The plant seeds, tubers and greens they can find and detoxify if necessary, larger animal species like kangaroo and emu, the small mammals like bettongs and possums which have gone into rapid decline since the arrival of the Europeans, birds, eggs, fish, shellfish, lizards, turtles, frogs, and insects like the Witchetty grub, which an elder from a different Australian region to ours shows us the ins and outs of in the clip below.
I love the attitude of the Indigenous people in this clip to eating the grub. It’s just food. If you see a white Australian demonstrate how to eat a Witchetty grub, there is usually a lot of chest-beating and machismo to go with the meal. The kids I taught in high school often wrinkled their noses at the idea of eating a grub, but as I pointed out to them, most of us love and regularly eat evaporated condensed bee vomit (honey). It’s just that we don’t call it that.
We also eat matured plant ovaries (fruit), ground-up plant embryos and their endosperm (flour), whole plant embryos (in almonds, peanuts etc), and mussels which are during the breeding season largely ovary and/or testicle, and all their other innards. Then there’s eggs; I’m sure I don’t have to explain where those come from. And cheese, well, that is a product made from the secretions of a modified sebaceous gland, fermented by microbes and containing their excrements. And it’s delicious.
To which the middle school age range often said, “OK, Miss, I’m never going to eat anything else again!” But of course they did; the point is, it’s just that much of what we do is not considered, it’s unthinking autopilot. Especially if you’re buying processed food or even packaged meat, you can be totally divorced from the consciousness that living beings are the sustenance of other living beings (unless you can photosynthesise, and even then, plants need the minerals from the dead bodies of other living things and help recycle those). You don’t see where your food came from and you should see where it came from. If you grow your own, or even buy from local growers, you can be much more aware of what is sustaining you, where it came from and whether you are OK with that.
And you can at leisure consider whether it is fair on other life forms to have more than one child in our current human overshoot situation, where we have already converted much of the planetary biomass into humans and their agricultural plants and animals and driven countless species into extinction with our anthropocentrism and narcissistic focus on individual rights to do as we damn well please.
People lived here once, and ate what the forest provided, and did not take more than they needed, or sell any of it to anyone, for a profit or at all. And before our ecocidal culture, so did our ancestors; don’t forget this. We are all descended from people who once were hunter-gatherers, and were conquered by the sociopaths who were advantaged by the toxic culture of conquest, and their enablers. Remember this when you notice sociopaths and their enablers in our own day and age.
These pretty shelf fungi are rumoured to be edible. Of course, as was explained to me when I was little: All mushrooms are edible; some only once. I love mushrooms, to look at and to eat – but as I am living outside of these remnant ecosystems, and my later ancestors were agricultural people, I feel duty bound to try to scrape my food from what I can grow in an ecocide zone that I am simultaneously trying to help the wild things back into.
Xanthorrhoea preissii, the grass-tree pictured below, was dubbed a Blackboy by Europeans for its resemblance (when it carries a flower stalk) to an Indigenous hunter standing on one leg holding a spear. It’s an image that makes the child in me smile and the adult in me long for the time when that would have been a common sight in this part of the world. Those were far better days, ecologically and in terms of social justice. The ecological part of my statement is self-evident. The social part: Indigenous societies, while not perfect either, did not routinely dispossess a large part of their tribe in order to provide a small part with unjustified riches and a pedestal from which to spit on and oppress others. Unemployment and homelessness were not things that plagued their worlds. Yet our Western culture has made many people homeless, and so many billions and billions of wild creatures that it crushed and drove out.
The tree below lost its top some time ago, maybe to lightning or a storm – but look how it grows regardless, and is beautiful in how it is shaped by its responses to challenges. You don’t see trees like this in city parks – they would be considered objectionable, like a supermarket apple that doesn’t look like a plastic model of an apple and exactly the same as all the others. Anything like that, our ignorant and soulless culture wants to throw out, cut down, dismiss, destroy, replace with something “better”.
I love wild places like this, and feel deeply at home in them. I remember I am an animal and the earth is my mother. And though the people of my own culture have ransacked this planet and its wildlands, and driven many of my brothers and sisters to extinction, and brought genocide and awful ongoing suffering to cultures more benign and wiser than our own, my heart recognises my home and who I was supposed to be; and this I will try to be, for as long as I have breath.
Credit for my hiking staff goes to my husband, who began making them a few years ago from selected branches of different origin. Mine is made from a pine sapling that is an invasive species here and grew in a grove across the road from us, where each year dozens more pines pop up, potentially displacing trees more useful to wildlife. At least the cockatoos eat their seeds, but this also spreads them.
Next we crossed another footbridge over a nice clear stream. This is like something out of Lord Of The Rings, like Rivendell. I think one deep reason many of us are drawn to imaginary places like that is because so much of that was once real – the natural world before civilisation, industry, pollution, power lines, roads, cars – and are an alternative route we could have taken, had sociopathy and soullessness not created Homo colossus. Our culture is the Orcs, is Sauron, slicing up the Ents and anything else it can get its hands on as fodder for its greed and its never-ending wars.
Here is the base of a Karri tree so you can see it bark. Karri is called Eucalyptus diversicolor because of the colour of its bark.
In the next photo, we are looking up at this massive tree, and it is impossible for me to fit all its branches into the frame.
Remember, all these things make themselves and each other. It took millions of years to get here, and our mainstream culture has no qualms about getting its chainsaws out in a place like this, or bulldozing it to the ground to make way for its suburbs, freeways and industrial estates. Homo colossus takes living ecosystems, degrades or outright kills them, and turns them into dead commodities and built environments. The word some American Indigenous tribes have for that kind of insanity is wetiko – literally a virus of selfishness, an evil spirit that invades the human mind and makes a person insatiable.
These are blackboy stems, in various stages of being recycled.
I just love the way some trees grow all gnarly in a natural ecosystem.
Increasingly, the coastward path took us through heathlands with very sandy, acid soils.
This is where you can find a lot of carnivorous plants. Western Australia is estimated to have over a third of the world’s carnivorous plant species. The soils here are ancient and have been leached over millennia of the fertility of geologically young soils. The sand in valley floors like this is referred to by farmers as “gutless” but hosts many of our biodiversity hotspots. It turns out that challenging conditions combined with geological stability and a long continental isolation result in a plethora of evolutionary solutions, including many unusual cooperative relationships. The carnivorous plants are straightforward – it’s an advantage to be able to catch your own organic fertiliser. A number of lineages did that, and evolved into different directions which differentiated into new species over time.
These lovely rosettes are sundews (Drosera spp), of which there are many different species. Some are rosettes, other filigreed climbers. The rosette varieties tend to throw up one central flower sometime in spring, usually white. If you look closely, you will see “dewdrops” at the ends of fine hairs. These are sticky secretions with digestive enzymes. Midges and other small insects are caught like on flypaper and digested in situ. The minerals are absorbed through the leaves.
We were now mostly in coastal heathlands with clumps of stunted eucalypts, and could see the edges of the coast.
At this point we reached a track turning that made a good lunch stop.
Behind Brett is an access track that looks like it might be worth exploring in future years, as this is such a lovely area.
Both the Bibbulmun and the Nuyts tracks turned left at this point. This was the view ahead.
We sat under a tree at the track intersection and had slices of “dog food” – nicknamed thusly because it has rice and animal protein like a dog kibble and is a fairly complete food. It’s actually a baked rice slice with tuna, cheese, egg, yoghurt, spring onion and cracked pepper. Even the dog likes it, of course.
And then we were off again for the second half of the trip to Thompson Cove.
We found an ants’ nest with a quite spectacular ground cover next to it.
There was a strange denuded area that ran right and left of the track at one point. It is really tempting to blame humans for that; must’ve done something…
In the distance in the picture below is one of those famous blackboy flower spikes that looks like a long spear held aloft.
If you get photographed in front of one, it gives the impression of having an exotic over-the-top hairstyle.
We were heading for that coastal headland in the distance that is just creeping over the horizon.
We got to a lovely large stand of banksias. These are highly susceptible to the imported pathogen Phytophthoracinnamomi; this was still a dieback-free area. Many banksias have been killed in Australian conservation areas by the spread of this disease.
And then we could smell the ocean we were rapidly approaching.
At the Thompson cove turn-off, we saw that the track would take us down a steep V-shaped valley with a stream running through its centre. This was fun to walk, sort of like a place in a child’s adventure story from the time of Enid Blyton or before, when many Western children still routinely went to interesting natural places on foot or by bicycle. It is extraordinary how this has changed in a very few generations; now most Western children grow up like battery chickens in suburbia, usually cooped up indoors, and in severe nature deficit. The world population has more than tripled since Enid Blyton wrote her stories, and much of that extra population has been crammed into cities. This isn’t fair on children, or on the wild places that have been exterminated in order to grow the human population further into overshoot – or for that matter on the wild places that remain and don’t have the love and respect of those children.
And there was Thompson’s Cove (which should of course have a Noongar name, since Thompson was not the first person to encounter it).
Little teensy coves like this are scattered along the South Coast in-between the bigger coves and bays. It is always a pleasure to discover them in your own life during a long walk. I am one of those people who believes coves like this should only be reachable on foot, though of course, the mainstream is trying to “improve accessibility” for the disabled (which I can understand) but mostly for the lazy who think it’s too much effort to get fit and walk on your own two feet. This is why more and more habitat is being bulldozed for 4WD access, and more and more remote beaches are churned up as members of Homo colossus treat them like their private demolition derby tracks, scare the wildlife off them and leave their rubbish and excrement behind everywhere.
Places that are only accessible on foot on long walks tend along our South Coast to still be free from the tide of plastic rubbish that is choking the natural world. It’s funny how the hikers tend to be a different type of person to the 4WD-ing general public – and in Australia, the majority of people who can afford the loans now drive 4WD and SUV. These monstrosities now outnumber erstwhile “normal” cars on our roads. This is one reason the fuel efficiency of the average car on the road hasn’t improved in Australia since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the population of the country more than doubled, and an even bigger percentage of that bigger population now drive cars, neatly demonstrating that both skyrocketing population and increasing consumption per capita are killing our planet.
We found no rubbish in Thompson Cove and I do not need to tell you how rare an experience that is becoming. It’s also likely that the kind of hikers who visit here would pick up any rubbish they see in a place like this and carry it out. And this is a good time to mention Melissa from our online group, who does exactly this at Lake Tahoe in America.♥
We sat down to have afternoon tea on the side of this cove: Slices of home-made pecan pie and slugs of hot tea from thermoses.
Southern Ocean seas are massive this time of year; the waves crashed spectacularly over the rocky points. Across the water, far away, only Antarctica. So, there is a wide fetch that the Roaring Forties can work into a frenzy.
In a cove like this, you have to take off your boots to feel the sand beneath your feet.
And you have to bestow affection on the aging dog, who has been just the best dog ever the whole 10 years since we adopted her from a farm dog breed rescue when she was 9 months old and had been discarded by a Homo colossus into bushland far from any town to fend for herself (and I would like to do the same with her erstwhile owner). The ranger thankfully came across her, but she was still very skinny after being fed for a few weeks at the rescue.
There was a fair bit of upside-down wiggling and doggie laughing. We once caught that rigmarole on film at a hiking hut on the Nullaki Peninsula:
Occasionally you visit a place where you don’t just take off your boots in response, but your whole kit. It’s a bit like taking off your shoes when you visit a temple. It’s just that nature is the actual temple, and when you get to an unspoilt place like this where the temple has not been sullied, it’s an instinctive response to strip yourself down to your essence and to shed all the layers that civilisation has put on you – both clothing and metaphor.
We thought about including some spontaneous black-and-white photographs of bare backsides and the sea in this actual report – just like in National Geographic articles on members of other cultures than Homo colossus which still survive in small pockets around the world and practice their traditions. However, those didn’t turn out, and those that did – well, we weren’t going to inflict anything full frontal on our audience, for various reasons, although it would have led to an extended rant on the current fashion for infantilising adult females by getting them to remove their pubic hair, something that has astonished me for a long time. I don’t partake in that, thank you very much – I like having a bush, and pubic hair has several useful functions, one of which – friction reduction on delicate bits of undercarriage – should be fairly obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time hiking; but it seems some people prefer to take off what nature has kindly provided, and then use products with names like Anti Monkey Butt, which will help keep our economy rolling etc.
Then yours truly and lovely husband retraced our steps up the steep valley around the little stream that pours into the sea at this location.
Halfway up there was a flat area where other visitors had put on a camp fire recently.
This was the view back to the cove. This really is an incredible place.
We have a few more photos from the return trip; here’s a group of vistas taken from near the banksia grove in the vicinity of the track turning where we had had our lunch earlier.
Back at the track turning, we had a rehydration stop. The dog has her own bottle when we go to places there isn’t plentiful fresh water.
Beautiful large Karri tree that has been there since before I was born; and these days, that’s saying something. I now keep age-related matters simple by rounding myself up to the nearest 100.
Even a tree hollow is its own universe. Everything in nature is like one of those Matryoshka dolls – layers and layers and layers, except each layer is unlike the one before. You could find more layers going up closer, over and over until you end up with subatomic particles and energy and space, and the further mysteries of that. Or you could zoom out, to the tree, to its immediate neighbourhood, to the forest, to the regional biosphere, to the continent, and go up and up until you were in amongst the stars looking down at the beautiful, fragile, once blue-green planet floating like a marble in space. And you could go further out until you are in the Horsehead Nebula, and then some.
Meanwhile Homo colossus is focusing on its toys, status, drama and political cycles, busy obliterating the biosphere of that fragile marble so that its investment portfolios can grow, ho hum, pass the butter.
I really hope this eucalyptus seedling grows into a hundred-year-old tree…
More beautiful little universes. How anyone could on reflection think them worth trading for the universal dross of Homo colossus is beyond me.
And this concluded our Nuyts Wilderness hike, for this day. The old dog had enjoyed herself and was looking forward to a decent meal, followed by curling up on her sofa at home.
Thank you for joining us on our hike and our reflections. We hope you have enjoyed the photographs of this beautiful wilderness area that we wanted to bring back for those of you who are in different parts of the world, and that you can feel that a part of you has now been there too.♥
All the pictures in the post are taken by Brett and Susanne Coulstock
A Note of Gratitude
At the end of the year 2023, we would like to thank all of our supporters. Your constant support, by any means that you can, has helped us to do our part in defense of the natural world. Thank you!
Also, at this moment, we would like to inform you that there had been some technical glitch in our normal donation server. We would like to humbly thank our donors for bringing that to our notice. For those of you it has inconvenienced, we would like to sincerely apologize and inform you that we have set up a temporary donation site for that purpose: https://givebutter.com/SA0iCU
Species extinction. Plastic pollution. Global warming. Catastrophic floods. Raging fires. The failure of coral reefs. Whales dying en masse. Forever chemicals contaminating mothers’ breast milk. Where is our spirit?
Our planet is in crisis. And while the wealthy and governments pour trillions into technological so-called “solutions,” things are spiraling out of control.
What if solving the ecological crisis depended on falling in love with the natural world, and acting to defend those we love?
What if a biocentric worldview — one which places the natural world at the center of our morality — could help us access the courage needed to stop the destruction?
On October 21st, join us for special 3-hour live streaming event on Facebook or Givebutter:
Ecology of Spirit: Biocentrism, Animism, and the Environmental Crisis — “the spirituality of the front lines.”
This live event will explore the connectedness of all life and focus on organized resistance to the destruction of the planet.
It starts at 1pm Pacific Time / 20:00 UTC, and features selectedspeakers including:
Tiokasin Ghosthorse
Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 27 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington.
In 2016, he received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. Other recent recognitions include: Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellowship in Music (2016), National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Nominee (2017), Indigenous Music Award Nominee for Best Instrumental Album (2019) and National Native American Hall of Fame Nominee (2018, 2019).
He was also awarded New York City’s Peacemaker of the Year in 2013. Tiokasin is a “perfectly flawed human being.”
Suprabha Seshan
Suprabha is a conservationistand environmental educator committed to the rewilding of habitat and human beings. She lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary (GBS) in the Western Ghat Mountains in India, which she often describes as a refugee center for hundreds of species of plants which are rescued from threatened places, and for the wildlife who they support.
Learning from nature to protect nature better is the work of GBS, through its integrated conservation practices in land, species and community-based ecological nurturance. On behalf of the GBS team, Suprabha received the prestigious Whitely Award for Nature in 2006.
Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen is a leading voice of cultural dissent. A longtime activist living in Northern California, he has been described as an “ecophilosopher in the anarcho-primitivist tradition.”
He explores the nature of injustice, how civilizations devastate the natural world, and how human beings retreat into denial at the destruction of the planet. His work examines the central question, “If the destruction of the natural world isn’t making us happy, then why are we doing it?”
Keala Kelly
Keala Kelly is a filmmaker and journalist living on Hawai’i Island. Her works depict the critical links between cultural, Film, and spiritual survival in the movement for Hawaiian self-determination and Indigenous peoples’ struggles for territorial and environmental survival.
She is an outspoken advocate for Indigenous self-representation in mass media. Keala is a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow and has an MFA from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.
Lierre Keith
Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. She began her public involvement in the feminist movement as the founding editor of Vanessa and Iris: A Journal for Young Feminists (1983–85).
During this same period, she also volunteered with a group called Women Against Violence Against Women in Cambridge, where she participated in educational events and protest campaigns.
In 1984 she was a founding member of Minor Disturbance, a protest group against militarism from a feminist perspective. In 1986 she was a founding member of Feminists Against Pornography in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is a founding editor of Rain and Thunder, a radical feminist journal in Northampton.
Sakej Ward
Sakej (James Ward) belongs to the wolf clan. He is Mi’kmaw (Mi’kmaq Nation) from the community of Esgenoopetitj (Burnt Church First Nation, New Brunswick). He is the father of nine children, four grandchildren and a caregiver for one. He resides in Shxw’owhamel First Nation with his wife Melody Andrews and their children.
Sakej has a long history of advocating and protecting First Nations inherent responsibilities and freedoms, having spent the last 21 years fighting the government and industry. This deep desire to bring justice to all Indigenous people has given Sakej experience in international relations where he spoke on behalf of the Mi’kmaq Nation at the United Nations Working Group for Indigenous Populations (WGIP).
For his efforts in protecting Indigenous people, freedoms and territory he has received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award.
Will Falk
Will Falk is a writer, lawyer, poet and environmental activist. The natural world speaks and Will’s work is how he listens. He believes the ongoing destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. For Will, writing is a tool to be used in resistance.
Will graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and practiced as a public defender in Kenosha, WI. He left the public defender office to pursue frontline environmental activism.
So far, activism has taken him to the Unist’ot’en Camp – an indigenous cultural center and pipeline blockade on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in so-called British Columbia, Canada, to a construction blockade on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, to endangered pinyon-juniper forests in the Great Basin, and to Thacker Pass in northern Nevada where Will is trying to stop an open pit lithium mine from destroying a beautiful mountain pass.
Rebecca Wildbear
Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute.
A long-time yoga teacher (since 2003) and a former faculty member at Nosara Yoga Institute (2008-2017), Rebecca created Wild Yoga™ — a practice of worship, veneration, and advocacy for Earth — while teaching yoga in a variety of wild places, including the tide pools of Costa Rica, the mountains and rivers of Colorado, and the ancient red rock canyons of Utah.
Max Wilbert
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He has been an organizer for more than 15 years. Max is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance and serves on the board of a small, grassroots non-profit. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Communication and Advocacy from Huxley College.
His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays written over a six-year period, was released in 2018. He is co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies,” which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” to the climate crisis.
Alan Clements
Alan Clements was one of the first Westerners to ordain as a Buddhist monk in Myanmar (formerly Burma). In 1984, forced by the dictator Ne Win to leave the country, Clements returned to the West and lectured on ‘The Wisdom of Mindfulness.’
In 1988, Alan integrated into his Buddhist training an awareness that included universal human rights, social injustice, environmental sanity, political activism, the study of propaganda and mind control in both democratic and totalitarian societies, and the preciousness of everyday freedom.
In the jungles of Burma, in 1990, he was one of the first eye-witnesses to document the mass murder and oppression of ethnic minorities by Burma’s military dictatorship, which resulted in his first book, ‘Burma: The Next Killing Fields?’ In 1995 a French publisher asked Alan to attempt re-entering Burma with the purpose of meeting Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of her country’s pro-democracy movement and 1991 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The transcripts of their five months of conversations were smuggled out of the country and became the book ‘The Voice of Hope’.
Other special guests will attend the session as well. There will be opportunities to ask questions and participate in dialogue.
The mainstream environmental movement is mostly funded by foundations which don’t support revolutionary change. Radical organizations like Deep Green Resistance rely on individual donors to support our activism around the world, which is why “Ecology of Spirit” is also a fundraiser.
We’re outnumbered and we need your help.
There is a path out of the this crisis, and DGR is one of the organizations leading the way. But we can’t do it without you. We’re raising funds to support global community organizing, fund mutual aid and direct action campaigns, and sustain our core outreach and organizational work.
Whether or not you are in a financial position to donate, we hope you will join us on October 21st for this opportunity to connect with kindred spirit offering light in dark times!–
The final difference between the alternative culture and a culture of resistance is the issue of spirituality. Remember that the Romantic Movement, arising as it did in opposition to industrialization, upheld Nature as an ideal and mourned a lost “state of nature” for humans. Emotions were privileged as unmediated and authentic. Nonindustrialized peoples were cast as living in that pure state of nature. The Wandervogel idealized medieval peasants, developing a penchant for tunics, folk music, and castles. Writes Keith Melville,
Predictably, this attraction to the peasantry never developed into a firm alliance. For all their vague notions of solidarity with the folk, the German youths did not remain for long among the peasants, nor did they take up political issues on their behalf. What the peasants provided was both an example and a symbol which sharpened the German Youth Movement’s dissent against the mainstream society, against modernity, the industrialized city, and “progress.”86
When the subculture was transplanted to the US, there were no peasants on which the new Nature Boys could model themselves. Peasant blouses and folkwear patterns found a role, but the real exploitation was saved for Native Americans and African Americans. Primitivism, an offshoot of Romanticism, constructs an image of indigenous people as timeless and ahistoric. As I discussed in the beginning of the chapter, this stance denies the indigenous their humanity by ignoring that they, too, make culture. Primitivism sees the indigenous as childlike, sexually unfettered, and at one with the natural world. The indigenous could be either naturally peaceful or uninhibited in their violence, depending on the proclivities of the white viewer. Hence, Jack Kerouac could write:
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough music, not enough night.87
He’d rather be black? Really? Would he rather have a better chance of going to jail than going to college? Would he rather have only one thirty-eighth the wealth of whites? Would he really want to face fire hoses and lynching for daring to struggle for the right to vote? This is Romanticism at its most offensive, a complete erasure of the painful realities that an oppressed community must endure in favor of the projections of the entitled. And depressingly, it’s all too common across the alternative culture.
The appropriation of Native American religious practices has become so widespread that in 1993 elders issued a statement, “The Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” The Declaration was unanimously passed by 500 representatives from forty Lakota tribes and bands. The statement could not be clearer: white people helping themselves to Native American religious practices is destructive enough to be called genocide by the Lakotas. The elders have spoken loud and clear and, indeed, even reaffirmed their statement. We should have learned this in kindergarten: don’t take what’s not yours. Other people’s cultures are not a shopping mall from which the privileged get to pick and choose.
Americans are living on stolen land. The land belongs to people who are still, right now, trying to survive an ongoing genocide. Those people are not relics of some far distant, mythic natural state before history. They live here, and they are very much under assault. Native Americans have the highest alcoholism rate, highest suicide rate, poorest housing, and lowest life expectancy in the United States. From every direction, they’re being pulled apart.
Let’s learn from the mistakes of the Wandervogel. Their interest in peasants had nothing to do with the actual conditions of peasants, nor with the solidarity and loyalty that the rural poor could have used; it had everything to do with their own privileged desires. Judging from my many years of experience with the current alternative culture, nothing has changed. The people who adopt the sacred symbols or religious forms of Native Americans—the pipe ceremony, inipi—do it to fulfill their own perceived needs, even over the Native Americans’ clear protests. These Euro-Americans may sometimes go a step further and try to claim their actions are somehow antiracist, a stunning reversal of reality. It doesn’t matter how much people feel drawn to their own version of Native American spirituality or how much a sweat lodge (in all probability led by a plastic shaman) means to them. No perceived need outweighs the wishes of the culture’s owners. They have said no. Respect starts in hearing no—in fact, it cannot exist without it. Just because something moves you deeply, or even speaks to a painful absence in your life, does not give you permission. As with the Wandervogel, the current alternative culture’s approach is never a call for solidarity and political work with Native Americans. Instead, it’s always about what white people want and feel they have a right to take. They want to have a sweat lodge “experience.” They don’t want to do the hard, often boring, work of reparation and justice. If, in doing that work, the elders invite you to participate in their religion, that’s their call.
Many people have longings for a spiritual practice and a spiritual community. There aren’t any obvious, honorable answers for Euro-Americans. The majority of radicals are repulsed by the authoritarian, militaristic misogyny of the Abrahmic religions. The leftist edges of those religions are where the radicals often congregate, and that’s one option; you don’t have to check your brain at the door, and you usually get a functioning community. But for many of us, the framework is still too alienating, and feels frankly unreformable. These religions have had centuries to prove what kind of culture they can create, and the results don’t inspire confidence.
Next up are the pagans and the Goddess people. Unlike the Abrahmists, they often offer a vision of the cosmos that’s a better fit for radicals. Some of them believe in a pantheon of supernaturals, and show an almost alarming degree of interest in the minutia of the believers’ lives. Other pagans believe in an animist life force: everything is alive, sentient, and sacred. But if the theology is a better fit, the practice is where these religions often fall apart. They may be based on ancient images, but the spiritual practices of paganism are new, created by urban people in a modern context. The rituals often feel awkward, and even embarrassing. We shouldn’t give up on the project; ultimately, we need a new cosmic story and religious practices that will keep people linked to it. But new practices don’t have the depth of tradition or the functioning communities that develop over time.
In order to understand where the pagans have gone astray, it may be helpful to discuss the function of a spiritual tradition. Three elements that seem central are a connection to the divine, communal bonding, and reinforcement of the culture’s ethic. What forms of the sacred are sought by the subculture, and by what paths does it intend to reach them? Obviously a community broad enough to encompass everything from crystal healing to “Celtic Wicca” will have a multitude of specific answers. But taken as a whole, the spiritual impulse has been rerouted to the realm of the psychological—the exact opposite of a religious experience.
By whatever name you wish to call it, the sacred is a realm beyond human description, what William James rightly describes as “ineffable.” The religious experience is one of “overcoming all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute … In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.”88 He describes this experience as one of “enlargement, union, and emancipation.”89 James offers a startlingly accurate description of that ineffable experience. But spiritual enlargement, union, and emancipation do not emerge from a focus on our psychology. We experience them when we leave the prisons of our personal pains and joys by connecting to that mystery that animates everything. The arrow—the spiritual journey—leads out, not in. But like everything else that might lend our lives strength and meaning, spiritual life—and the communities it both needs and creates—has been destroyed by the dictates of capitalism. The single-pointed focus on ourselves as some kind of project is not just predictably narcissistic, but at odds with every religion worth the name. The whole point of a spiritual practice is to experience something beyond our own needs, pains, and desires.
Ten years ago, I attended a weekend workshop called “The Great Goddess Returns.” I was already leery of these events back then, but there was one scholar I wanted to hear. The description, in so many words, offered what many people long to find: support, community, empowerment, relief from pain and isolation, and connection to ourselves, each other, the cosmos. These are valid longings and I don’t mean to dismiss anyone’s struggle with loneliness, alienation, or trauma. My criticism is directed instead at the standard form of the faux solutions into which neopaganism has fallen.
Drumming from a CD thumped softly through the darkened room. A hundred people were told to shut their eyes and imagine a journey back through time to an ancient foremother in a cave. I wasn’t actually sure what the point was, but I didn’t want to cultivate a spiritual Attitude Problem so early in the day, so I visualized. We were then handed a small piece of clay. No talking was allowed to break the sacrosanct if technological drumming. We were told to make something with the clay. Okay. It being March, and I being a gardener, I formed a peapod. Time ticked on. The drumming was more baffling than meaningful. And how long could it take people to mold a brownie size bit of clay? I kept waiting, the drumming kept drumming. Finally we were told to crumble up what we had made. All right. I smooshed up my peapod, and went back to waiting and my internal struggle against the demons of attitude. Boredom is annoying. It’s also really boring. I didn’t want to look around—everyone was hunched over with a gravitas that left me bewildered—but I was starting to feel confused on top of bored. Had I missed the part where they said, “Destroy your sculpture one mote at a time”? Finally, the rapture descended: further instructions. “Make your sculpture again,” came the hushed voice. What? Why? I hadn’t particularly wanted the first peapod. Did I have to make another one? Meanwhile, the drums banged on and on, emphasizing my growing ennui, and again, heads all around me bent to the work of clay like it was Day Six in the Garden. I reformed my peapod, which took about sixty seconds, then waited another eternity. I was ready to have a Serious Talk with whoever invented the drum.
Then the lights were slowly raised, a dawn to this long night of the bored soul. We were quietly divided into groups of ten and given the following instructions: “Talk about what you just experienced.”
Talk about … what? I made a pea pod. I crushed a pea pod. I remade a pea pod. For dramatic tension, I tried not to get bored.
Luckily, I was the seventh person in the circle, which gave me time to recognize the pattern and understand the rules. Because everyone else already understood. Being dwellers in the Land of Psychological Ritual, they knew too well what was expected. First up was a woman in her fifties. I don’t remember what she made with her clay. I do remember what she said. Crumbling up her sculpture brought her back to the worst loss of life, the death of her infant daughter. She cried over her clay, and she cried again while telling us, a group of complete strangers.
The next one up said it was her divorce, that crumbling the clay was the end of marriage. She cried, too.
For the third, the destruction of her clay was the destruction of her child-self when her brother raped her when she was five. She trembled, but didn’t cry.
The fourth woman’s clay was her struggle with cancer.
I had to stop paying attention right about then because I had to figure out what I was going to say.90 But I was also reaching overload. Not because of the pain in these stories—after years as an activist against male violence, I have the emotional skills to handle secondary trauma—but because the pain in their stories deserved respect that this workshop culture actively destroyed. This was a performance of pain, a cheapening of grief and loss that I found repulsive. How authentic to their experiences could these women have been when their response was almost Pavlovian, with tears instead of saliva? Smoosh clay, feel grief. Not knowing the expectation—not having trained myself to produce emotion on demand—I felt very little, beyond annoyance, during the exercise, and a mixture of unease, pity, and repugnance during the “sharing circle.” I had no business hearing such stories. We were strangers. I did not ask for their vulnerability nor did I deserve it. To be told the worst griefs of their lives was a violation both of the dignity such pain deserves and of the natural bonds of human community. This was not a factual disclosure—“I lost my first child when she was an infant”—but a full monty of grief. And it was wrong.
A true intimacy with ourselves and with others will die beneath that exposure. Intimacy requires a slow, cumulative build of safety between people who agree to a relationship, an ongoing connection of care and concern. The performance of pain is essentially a form of bonding over trauma, and people can get addicted to their endorphins. But whatever else it is, it’s not a spiritual practice. It’s not even good psychotherapy, divorced as it is from reflection and guidance. If you’re going to explore the shaping of your past and its impact on the present, that’s what friends are for, and probably what licensed professionals are for.
This “ritual” was, once more, a product of the adolescent brain and the alterna-culture of the ’60s, which imprinted itself unbroken across the self-help workshop culture it stimulated. No amount of background drumming will turn self-obsession and emotional intensity into an experience of what Rudolph Otto named “the numinous.” It will not build a functioning community. “Instant community” is a contradictory as “fast food,” and about as nourishing.
I have done grocery shopping after someone’s surgery, picked up a 2:00 am call to help keep a friend’s first, bottomless drink at bay, and taken friends into my home to die. I’ve also celebrated everything from weddings to Harry Potter releases. True community requires time, respect, and participation; it means, most simply, caring for the people to whom we are committed. A performative ethic is ultimately about self-narration and narcissism, which are the opposite of a communal ethic, and its scripted intensity is an emotional sugar rush. Why would anyone try to make this a religious practice?
I have way too many examples of this ethos to leave me with much hope. Some of the worst instances still make me cringe (white people got invited to an inipi and all I got was this lousy embarrassment?). I’ve been included in indigenous rituals and watched the white neopagans and other alterna-culturites behave abominably. Pretend you got invited to a Catholic Mass: would you start rolling on the floor screaming for your mother as the Catholics approached the rail for communion? And would you later defend this behavior as a self-evidently necessary “catharsis,” “discharge,” or “release of power”? When did pop psychology get elevated to a universal component of religious practice? Meanwhile, do I even need to say, the traditional people would never behave that way either at their own or anyone else’s sacred ceremonies. And they’d rather die than do it naked. Their dignity, the long stretches of quiet, the humility before the mystery, all build toward an active receptivity to the spiritual realm and whatever dwells there. The performative endorphin rush is a grasping at empty intensity that will never lead out of the self and into the all. Nor will it strengthen interpersonal bonds or reinforce the community’s ethics, unless those ethics are a self-indulgent and increasingly pornified hedonism, in which case it’s doomed to failure anyway.
So we’re stuck with some primary human needs and, as yet, no way to fill them. Many of us have traveled a continuum of spiritual communities and practices and found that none of them fit. My attempts to name cultural appropriation in the alternative culture have been largely met with hostility. For me, grief has given way to acceptance. The forces misdirecting attempts to “indigenize” Euro-Americans and other settlers/immigrants have been in motion since the Wandervogel. I will not be able to find or create an authentic and honorable spiritual practice or community in my lifetime. All I can do is lay out the problems as I see them and perhaps some guidelines and hope that, over time, something better emerges. It will take generations, but it’s not a project we can abandon.
Humans are hard-wired for spiritual ecstasy. We are hungry animals who need to be taught how to participate, respectfully and humbly, in the cycles of death and rebirth on which our lives depend. We’re social creatures who need behavioral norms to form and guide us if our cultures are to be decent places to live. We’re suffering individuals, faced with the human condition of loss and mortality, who will look for solace and grace. We also look for beauty. Soaring music produces an endorphin release in most people. And you don’t even need to believe in anything beyond the physical plane to agree with most of the above.
Some white people say they want to “reindigenize,” that they want a spiritual connection to the land where they live. That requires building a relationship to that place. That place is actually millions of creatures, the vast majority too small for us to see, all working together to create more life. Some of them create oxygen; many more create soil; some create habitat, like beavers making wetlands. To indigenize means offering friendship to all of them. That means getting to know them, their histories, their needs, their joys and sorrows. It means respecting their boundaries and committing to their care. It means learning to listen, which requires turning off the chatter and static of the self. Maybe then they will speak to you or even offer you help. All of them are under assault right now: every biome, each living community is being pulled to pieces, 200 species at a time. It’s a thirty-year mystery to me how the neopagans can claim to worship the earth and, with few exceptions, be indifferent to fighting for it. There’s a vague liberalism but no clarion call to action. That needs to change if this fledgling religion wants to make any reasonable claim to a moral framework that sacrilizes the earth. If the sacred doesn’t deserve defense, then what ever will?
With a Thanksgiving holiday release of “Moana,” Disney’s Polynesian cartoon extravaganza can simultaneously expand its lucrative enterprise of exploiting marginalized, indigenous peoples (Pocahontas, Lilo and Stitch, Frozen) while perpetuating American amnesia.
A note about Thanksgiving: Early feasts of giving thanks celebrated some notable atrocities committed against Native peoples, including the 1637 massacre of 700 Pequot Indians by white Christians and the 1676 butchering and beheading of Wampanoag Sachem Metacom, whose severed head was then displayed on a pike for 25 years at Plymouth. Ultimately it was President Abraham Lincoln who declared it a national holiday in 1863, less than a year after he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota men, which remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Given the pre-Halloween rollout of the Maui skin suit so that children would unwittingly promote “Moana” like human billboards, I doubt the choice of a release date was any less thought out. Some of the most experienced and powerful business minds in the world own and operate Disney — they’re not the type to leave a hundred-something million-dollar investment to chance.
Opening dates, promotion, and merchandising are carefully planned well in advance to achieve maximum financial gain. The skin suit and Thanksgiving release shouldn’t be thought of as unintended cultural faux pas — these were calculated risks. To give the benefit of the doubt to a $50-billion corporate predator waiting to vacuum up a few billion more off of our culture(s) is to agree with the offense.
Most indigenous peoples under U.S. control, certainly Hawaiians, have yet to carve out a meaningful space to represent ourselves, what we value and our reality in mass media and film largely because America’s master narrative relies on our subjugation. The truth of what matters to us undermines the colonizer’s imagineered innocence. The narrative of Hawai’i as “the Aloha State” is a perfect example — every non-Maoli living and vacationing here is able to do so because of the theft of our nationhood and the complete appropriation and subversion of our land and culture.
While there are certainly other oppressed groups, our oppressions aren’t any more equal than our successes. Hawaiian world—indigenous world is all buss up, and our narratives are convoluted. But the settler world isn’t, and neither is its story.
Our hopes, dreams and struggles are inconvenient to what Disney has chosen to produce about us. Worse yet, we’re expected to shut up and enjoy the ride everyone’s taking on our back. Yes, some of our own people, grateful for any acknowledgment, don’t recognize an insult or culture theft when they see it. Others will happily join in with the massive, commodifying monstrosity of “Moana” and buy Moana gear and computer games. (I heard that the Ala Moana Disney Store is already well-stocked.)
One Maori writer, who likes the Maui skin suit, said it’s like dressing up as Santa Claus. He’s not far off, seeing as how we’re the ones doing all the giving. He reminded me of something funny that Haunani-Kay Trask, one of our beloved sovereignty leaders, once said to me: “Yah, the haole, they stole everything we gave them.”
Being culturally poached and misrepresented isn’t flattering — it’s a threat. The historical fact is that colonization in the Pacific, and everywhere for that matter, has had catastrophic consequences for indigenous peoples in every conceivable way. And native collaboration, while highly problematic, doesn’t legitimize hijacking or pimping our knowledge, heritage and identity.
Having said that, not knowing who the members are of the Oceanic Story Trust, a group that was hand picked by Disney to shepherd the cultural content and merchandising, we can’t ask these Pacific Mouseketeers what the capital F they were thinking when they helped Disney strip mine our culture(s) for the sole purpose of making a profit.
Although bad publicity in the form of complaints that the skin suit is racist motivated Disney to take it off the shelf, they did it with a condescending, “We regret that the Maui costume has offended some,” version of an apology. I suppose that’s the best we can expect from an entity whose bottom line is protecting its investment.
But Hawaiians and other indigenous Pacific Islanders are the ones who need to think hard about what something of this magnitude will mean. Given that it’s shaping up to become this region’s cultural heist of the century (so far), we may want to try to make native sense of the intent and the processes at work here, especially us Hawaiians.
I say especially Hawaiians because so much is being done to us politically, materially, culturally and spiritually these past few years. From the mass desecration project of the Thirty Meter Telescope to the Obama administration’s determination to force feed us federal recognition against our will, ours is a never-ending struggle to simply survive in our homeland as who we are.
The cultural imperialism of Disney mirrors the military imperialism of the United States and the other industries it uses to erase our indigenous belonging: tourism and real estate. Disney’s Aulani Resort, and now its “Moana,” secures its place in the economically enforced ethnocide and culturcide that is steadily replacing us with settlers.
If the promotional trailer is anything like the film, Disney’s about to get even richer by exploiting and mocking us in deeply genealogical and spiritual ways—turning Tutu Pele into an ugly lava monster and Maui into a ridiculous, clowning sidekick. The noted psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer Frantz Fanon was so on the mark when he said, “… Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”
Disney has reduced us and our world to a cartoon at a time when our political future is hanging in the balance, when Hawaiians absolutely need to be heard and taken seriously, not distracted by or silenced for entertainment. Disney is trying to do to our culture and identity what America is doing to our land and nationhood: we are being carved up, sold off, and drained of our mana.
Since the Maui skin suit debacle, Disney’s 21st century iteration of the white supremacist ideology that informed people like British Major General Horatio Gordon Robley, a proud collector of Maori heads, and that guy who tried to sell a Hawaiian kupuna skull on E-Bay, I’ve been thinking in metaphors. I’m looking at what’s happening right now, but looking, too, at the horizon, at what’s coming toward us, imagining what might follow, hoping that whatever it is, Hawaiians and all Pacific Islanders can face it together instead of letting it further divide us.
I have no doubt that Disney’s “Moana” will materially and psychologically aid and abet the colonial project of indigenous erasure and removal. It’s a cultural tsunami and it will impact the entire region. However, unlike natural disasters, this man-made disaster will play out over many months and years and will continue for as long as Disney can suck the marrow from our spiritual and cultural bones.
Anne Keala Kelly is the award winning filmmaker of “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i,” and a journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation and Indian Country Today, and on the Pacifica Network and Al Jazeera.
Trigger warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of sexual and colonial violence.
Hatred is one of the most misunderstood processes at work in the world today. Cops are killing young people of color while simultaneously maintaining they’re not racists and do not hate the people they’re killing. A growing number of men watch pornography claiming they do not hate women. Millions of tourists visit Hawai’i annually – despite pleas from native Hawaiians to stop – and feel they are so far from hating Hawai’i, it’s their favorite place to visit.
While the real, physical world is burning at an ever faster pace, I could care less what those responsible feel in their hearts while they destroy. Maybe it’s true that a cop holds no hatred in his heart as he releases a flurry of bullets into another unarmed black person’s body. Maybe it’s true that a man feels no contempt as he orgasms to images of women being beaten in simulated rape scenes. Despite boarding giant fossil-fuel burning jets to see Hawai’i, despite supporting an invasive government responsible for genocide in order to keep Hawai’i’s borders open, despite paying money to industries that desecrate Hawaiian ancestors, maybe tourists to Hawai’i really do think they love the land they’re helping to destroy.
Then, again, maybe individual members of the dominant culture are more like the Nazi Eichmann who claimed no personal hatred for the Jews he was responsible for loading on cattle cars before they were exterminated in gas chambers.
Make no mistake, the dominant culture hates Hawai’i. If it didn’t, why is it killing species at a faster rate in Hawai’i than anywhere else in the world? If it didn’t, why is it dropping bombs on her islands? If it didn’t, why does it maintain an illegal occupation over the objections of her people?
What counts isn’t how a person feels, it’s what a person does. Settlers may feel an affinity for Hawaii, but when Hawaii is under attack as it has been for a century and a half, what counts is the material reality actions produce. When the planet’s life support systems are under attack, when, in other words, life itself is threatened to within inches of existence, material consequences are much more important than an emotional state.
***
In this Protecting Mauna Kea series, I want to encourage tangible support for native Hawaiian sovereignty in settler communities. In order to do that, I think it is necessary to understand the hatred expressed towards Hawai’i by the dominant American culture.
Before arriving in Hawai’i, I read and heard from several native Hawaiian scholars about the pornification of Hawaiian culture. I’ve learned right away how true this is. Just like men are conditioned to overlook hatred of women early in their lives through pornography’s propaganda, settlers are conditioned to hate Hawai’i through the pornification of Hawaiian culture.
I flew Hawaiian Airlines to Hawai’i, for example, and the complimentary in-flight snack included a candy called “Aloha-macs.” This product, by a company called “Hawaiian Host,” is self-labelled as “creamy milk chocolate covered macadamias – the original gift of aloha.” Hawaiian Host and the dominant culture seek to transform an ancient indigenous wisdom – aloha – into a candy, sugary trash, something to consume.
As soon as we boarded the plane, I noticed the video monitors displaying clips of beautiful, dancing Hawaiian women. I thought immediately of Haunani-Kay Trask’s brilliant essay “‘Lovely Hula Hands’: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture” where she explains how tourism converts cultural attributes into pure profit.
Trask writes, “…a woman must be transformed to look like a prostitute – that is someone who is complicitous in her own commodification. Thus hula dancers wear clownlike makeup, don costumes from a mix of Polynesian cultures, and behave in a manner that is smutty and salacious rather than powerfully erotic. The distance between the smutty and the erotic is precisely the difference between Western culture and Hawaiian culture.”
Of course, before the pornification of Hawaiian culture the hula dance was a sacred expression. Again, Trask is enlightening, “In the hotel version of the hula, the sacredness of the dance has completely evaporated, while the athleticism and sexual expression have been packaged like ornaments. The purpose is entertainment for profit rather than a joyful and truly Hawaiian celebration of human and divine nature. The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai’i can be yours, that is, you the tourists’, the Non-Natives’, the visitors’.”
***
Pornography is an expression of hatred. A simple search of any popular porn website shows women being labelled “bitch,” “slut,” “cunt,” and “pussy.” Videos and images are arranged into categories like “blonde,” “brunette,” “Asian” on one end all the way down to “teens” “gang bangs” and “fisting” on the other end. “Fisting” involves inserting a fist or fists into vaginas and anal cavities. The production of pornography destroys the bodies of women, poisons truly mutual sexuality, and adds to a toxic masculinity that is killing the planet.
I know that many men will be angry with me for trashing their favorite pastime. I know, too, that many tourists will be angry with me for trashing their favorite fantasy. The truth is porn is killing our (men’s) sexuality and the tourist industry is killing the possibility that visitors will ever have a mutual relationship – free from oppression and subordination – with Hawaiians. Worse than this, however, pornography and the pornification of Hawaiian culture normalizes hatred and contributes to a violation imperative that is destroying Hawai’i along with indigenous lands around the world.
There are those who argue that porn is empowering for women, just like there are those who argue the tourism industry is empowering for Hawaiians. I do not believe this is true. This logic is the same logic that placed the phrase “Work will make you free” to greet prisoners over the gate at Auschwitz. No one – besides capitalists and coal mine owners – argues that coal mining is empowering to the miners. No one – besides capitalists and factory owners – argues that sweat shops empower sweat shop workers.
Proponents of porn and the tourism industry will say, “If porn and tourism are so bad, why do so many work in these industries?” But, when the war against women rages on, when native Hawaiians are still systematically dispossessed of their own homeland, survival often demands they take whatever work they can find. I can hold this position and hold no contempt for individuals working in the porn or tourist industry. I’m not interested in blaming individuals, but identifying root processes at work, so we can better work for the liberation of all.
***
I remember the first time I was shown pornography. I was ten. An older, male distant family member was flipping through the channels and stopped on an adult film. It was the first time I saw a naked adult female body – or, I guess I should say, mostly naked body. I remember clearly that she was dressed in a strange belt-like garment that wrapped around her breasts and opened over her vagina. Looking back, I understand the garment was clearly designed to highlight the only body parts valued in pornography.
My relative looked over and said, “Don’t tell your parents about this,” and continued watching.
The next time I was shown pornography was only a year or so later. I was at a family friend’s house and this time the person showing me porn was a boy only a few years older than me. Where in the first instance, all my ten-year-old eyes had seen was a highly sexualized representation of a woman’s body, in the second instance I saw the entire act of penetration. This was the first time I had ever seen or imagined sexual intercourse.
Speaking of hatred, I hate that my first experience with sexual intercourse of any kind was through a camera lens, showing a woman who couldn’t possibly have consented to my personal viewing of her, in a voyeuristic experience mediated by a patriarchal perspective. Even now, 17 years later, I remember the way the actor’s bodies were arranged. The woman was pushed over the armrest of a couch, splayed out, open for display while the man withheld every part of his body for contact except for his penis which was thrust forward. There was no love, no passion in the physical contact. The man never reached to embrace his partner. The two never kissed, never caressed each other, never even looked at each other.
The camera lens zoomed in to feature penetration. This, of course, was the whole point – penetration, invasion, domination. Or, to recycle Trask’s line and to apply it to porn, everything in a woman could be mine, a viewer’s, a man’s.
In those moments, my sexuality was poisoned. In each case, older males I knew and respected, showed me pornography. The question,”What does it mean to be a man?” was being answered with porn scenes. In sexual education classes in junior high school, these were the only references I had. In fact, pornography was shown to me a full ten years before I first had sex. Fantasy was imprinted in my mind well before reality ever had a chance.
This is happening to Hawai’i, too. Americans are bombarded with propaganda encouraging an entitlement to Hawai’i. Postcards with picturesque Hawaiian beaches are on refrigerators around the country while Americans fail to remember the atrocities committed to cripple Hawaiian resistance. Movies are made about Pearl Harbor glorifying the doomed bravery of white sailors while Americans forget the native Hawaiian dead who never consented to an American naval presence in the first place. Resorts are filled with American tourists while these tourists fail to consider the Hawaiian homeless those resorts created.
And now, in the latest effort to humiliate Hawaiian culture, corporations want to build a massive telescope on Mauna Kea. The connections to pornography are too clear to be overlooked. Mauna Kea – the most sacred place in Hawaii – is being penetrated, invaded, desecrated by the Thirty Meter Telescope project. The only way for proponents of the TMT to complete this project over the resistance in Hawai’i is to believe in the propaganda spread through the pornification of Hawai’i. To invade Mauna Kea is to demonstrate the belief that everything in Hawai’i is theirs, the scientists, the Non-Natives, the invaders.
The TMT is an expression of a hateful fantasy. They want to build a means to watch other planets far, far away while this planet is burning. They want to fantasize about homes light years away, when the home we love is being destroyed.
Of course, that’s really the point, isn’t it? They don’t love their home. They hate it. That’s why they want to build this telescope.
