The Wandering Free Families
I watched the movie the New World the other day; it concerns the story of the woman we call ‘Pocahontas’, her people, and the Jamestown colony.
While watching the story unfold, something really hit me; something so fundamentally different between the two cultures, something so at the root of everything that matters to me, as a human on a path of cultural healing.
This ’something’ addresses the fundamental spiritual poverty of the modern world. I use the word ’spiritual’ because we have no better word (that I can think of right now) for the nourishment that comes from humans holding each other, telling each other stories, playing music together, attending to each other’s bumps and bruises, enriching lives by enjoying each other’s company. Other languages have a word for exactly this…but more on that later.
In the movie, I saw the colonists, all men; sailors, soldiers, an invasion force hungry for fabled gold.
I then saw Chief Powhatan’s people; brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, children, mothers and fathers.
We now call their descendents members of the Powhatan Nation. In this age, in order to honor what we can of their cultural sovereignty, we must call them a nation. To do otherwise would deny them the protection they need. Ironically though, this also masks the profound treasure of the Powhatan people, and indeed the vast majority of Native American peoples…their original freedom from the need for a political state.
Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions…instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land.
This stands in such stark contrast to the Jamestown colonists: prisoners of a culture they could not escape, compelled by their hollowed out hearts to chase wealth that will never satisfy, obedient to a power uninterested in the simple needs of a human…ease, affection, creativity, peace.
Before the Europeans, most Native American peoples lived as roaming Free Families, connected and rooted to their landscape. Wealthy beyond measure in human relationship. What would many of us give today for an extended family that supports without questioning, provides comfort and connection as often as we need it?
So often I’ve read and heard Native elders say what matters most to them: family and land. The Lakota say: “All my relations”, and when you call the earth your mother, the sky your father, the animals brothers and sisters, your sense of family does extend to the land your people walk on. Native Hawai’ians have a well-known word “‘ohana” that describes the importance and closeness of family.
In the modern world, we have some expressions that honor family connection…”blood is thicker than water”, for example. I know of none that get to the heart of the fundamental indigenous belief, that family holds all the roots of wealth (referring to its etymology): wholeness, wellness, health, and holiness.
Keep your eyes open, and you’ll observe where the modern world diverges, again and again, from the indigenous value of feeding family. Ancient initiations and vision quests served to show the seeker how they fit into their community, what role they would grow into, what unique gift their spirit would provide the tribe. In the modern world? The seeking adolescent hunts for a college in a distant land, a career in a distant city. Co-opting the vision quest and initiation for today’s children, the questors dream of apprenticing with a shaman in an Amazonian jungle, or studying leopards on a faraway continent. What happened to family, in the self-absorbed adolescent quest for a purpose? Will they receive postcards, perhaps? Will they someday get photos of their unknown grandchildren? When a native teenage “walkabout” ends, you return home, and find your place at last. When will we return home?
With hollowed-out hearts we keep the great gears of this modern world going. What have we given up in exchange for all its amusements? What misunderstood hungers rack our bodies, fed by false substitutes, bought by the fruits of our impersonal labors? What if a return to family sated these hungers, once and for all (though I don’t imply this a simple or obvious path…recovering from the loss of family, and returning to the heart of it, requires a substantial amount of work).
Thinking deeply on all of this, I dream of a return to a world of Wandering Free Families. A world where humans can finally come home again.
July 5th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
[…] In the sense of the Wandering Free Families, and as I mentioned before, I have no political ambitions for Cascadia. My cultural ambitions for her, however, have no bounds. A great tribe-of-tribes, family-of-families, lies at the horizon of my consciousness. Someday, one living room at a time, one hearth at a time, I see a whole new world replacing a dying old one. Cascadia and her people; the Land and her children. […]
September 26th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Dysfunctional Culture…
I feel sorry for George Bush. It can’t be easy to grow up in the shadow of a president—particularly when your mother is one of the most vile bitches in American history. Barbara’s iconic image as “America’s grandmother” hid the reality of …
October 6th, 2006 at 11:27 am
[…] If we are expecting 6.5 billion people to become primitivists in a grand revolution, we are setting ourselves up for failure. That will never happen. But the future belongs to the primitive. Our task is not to convert the world, but to begin building a new world here and now, to forge the relationships to make our tribes—our wandering free families, our functional cultures—now, while it is still a luxury, and not yet a necessity. Our task is to learn the skills of a new world: hunting, gathering, permaculture, and most importantly, how to relate to the other people in our human community, and how to relate to the non-human communities that surround us. We can wait until these things are necessary, and many people will slide into the new world without any conscious direction whatsoever, but that will be a much more difficult, and much riskier, prospect. But we shouldn’t expect to ever be anything but a fringe of a fringe. We should never expect widespread acceptance. We must do all that we can to make sure as many people hear as are possible, but we must also accept that most people will simply choose not to hear. The future will be primitive, but it will not become so by revolution; it will be evolution. As Daniel Quinn said: If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be living the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on living the way we do, there won’t be any people here in 200 years. […]
November 15th, 2006 at 10:15 am
[…] In the modern world, we have some expressions that honor family connection … “blood is thicker than water,” for example. I know of none that get to the heart of the fundamental indigenous belief, that family holds all the roots of wealth (referring to its etymology): wholeness, wellness, health, and holiness.7 […]
February 13th, 2007 at 9:59 am
[…] You don’t see this kind of problem with tribes, but you also see a very different social dynamic with tribes than you do amongst permaculture communities or anarchist collectives. Daniel Quinn distinguished between tribes and communes by pointing out that people in communes shared an ideology, whereas people in a tribe are making a living. I tend to think that it’s more accurate to think of a tribe in terms of families. Either way, if you ask them the secret to their success, they’ll point to their rituals, their stories–their art. If we observe indigenous tribes—both human and non-human—we notice that people come together regularly and cyclically. Perhaps they gather around the campfire each evening, singing songs at sunrise or the full moon, celebrating, perhaps, the first day of the summer. We also notice that everybody in the tribe participates. There are no rows of chairs where people sit down, watch, applaud the “performers” and then leave. […]
May 10th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
[…] In oral societies, shamans exist to tend the boundaries between human and non-human communities, as ambassadors and negotiators with the non-human world. The “shamanic state of consciousness” that captivates Western imagination (as with the drug culture fascinated by the egregious hoax of Carlos Castenada) is merely a tool to this end. Michael Winkelman’s work has shown how deeply shamanism is tied into the structures of the human brain,39 and we can further understand shamanism’s effectiveness in terms of the kind of “thin slicing” Malcolm Gladwell discusses in Blink, if we bear in mind that shamanism actively cultivates such techniques, so that the gap that opens up is similar to someone tapping out a melody on his glass at a restaurant, compared to a world-class symphony. But most importantly, traditional shamanism exists only as part of a tribe, and as part of a larger relationship that binds family and land.40 The “plastic medicine men” of contemporary cultural appropriation, in a desperate search for something real and authentic, instead perform a final kind of cultural theft to follow the genocide and decimation of Native peoples by robbing them of what culture they have left. The Noble Savage provides a fantasy for Euro-Americans wishing to escape dilemmas of their own culture. Imitation of Native Americans and other appropriations of their identity have often accompanied this romanticization. In “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Cherokee scholar Rayna Green does an excellent job of tracing this historical phenomenon of “playing Indian” from the Boston Tea Party to YWCA sponsored “Indian princess” programs. … […]
June 20th, 2007 at 8:30 am
[…] Bioregionalism is by no means new, and if the sketchy connections to environmental determinism serve to cast a shadow on bioregionalism, its long-standing connections with nationalism in general, and the Nazi party specifically, are positively chilling. In the wild human mind, the two most important elements in life are family and land.8 Just as states have formed dysfunctional, abusive “families” that posit the state as some grandiose parent, so, too, has the natural biophilia9 (as E.O. Wilson calls it) or querencia (to use Kirkpatrick Sale’s favorite word) been perverted into “nationalism,” also known as, “patriotism.” Consider how easily this love of one’s ecology bleeds into nationalist jingoism, as exemplified in this Weimar-era pamphlet: In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty — it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German “League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest.”8 […]
July 30th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
[…] The basic social foundation of wild (and feral) life is the family—bands and tribes are simply fancy terms for those. Domesticated societies invariably try to cast themselves in a metaphor of family: Roman emperors justified their authoritarian rule as the Pater patriae, the father of the Roman people, and perpetuated a familial model of domination and coercion down to the cruel Roman Pater familias; more recently, George Lakoff’s work on “frames” has discussed the dividing line between “liberals” and “conservatives” between metaphors of government as a nurturing mother or a stern father, respectively; Derrick Jensen has drawn many haunting parallels between the dynamics of civilization and the dynamics found in abusive families. If civilizations are abusive, dysfunctional families, then rewilding is the process of creating healthy, well-adjusted, nourishing families. As Willem Larsen wrote so beautifully about “The Wandering Free Families“: Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions…instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land. … […]