Colonial-capitalist modernity has brought us to a catastrophic point: we are facing global collapse, perhaps the most disturbing expression of which is the collapse of the planet’s ecosystems. In the face of this situation, critical minds in the West are looking to indigenous civilizations that have been marginalized and displaced by colonial-capitalist expansionism, and that have cultivated ways of organizing life and economies that are far more symbiotic and sustainable with nature. And, as Rubelise da Cunha does in her contribution, they ask how these ‘alternative civilizations’ can serve as existential sources of inspiration for us today.
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A growing awareness of climate change and the danger of reaching a point of no return for the survival of living species on our planet has marked the first decades of the 21st century. This scientific and social concern coincides with the turn to theories and studies in the human sciences that recognize ways of life that could promote the survival of humans and non-humans on Earth.
Thus, studies dedicated to indigenous knowledge and ancestral ways of life become strategic in order to learn from those who have lived in balance with the cosmos since time immemorial and who have resisted colonial violence, genocide, and epistemicide for centuries. At this point, however, there is an urgent question: Is the Western world actually open to learning and changing ways of thinking and living, or are we simply revisiting the myth of the ‘noble savage’ and expecting those who have been excluded from their territories and languages to save our corrupt and failing civilization?
Alternative cosmovisions
This is the challenge we face today, because as climate change and the escalating destruction caused by ‘natural’ disasters (caused by colonial capitalist expansionism) have taught us, we do not have much time to make the drastic changes necessary to avoid reaching the ‘point of no return.’ The problem is that the required action requires a paradigm shift that should reach political, economic, and social dimensions. It represents the shaking of the foundations of anthropocentrism that have guided the myth of modernity and have been the basis of the economic system that governs the world and global capitalism today, and a call for new ways of living that recognize cosmovisions that are more sustainable for the whole planet.
Indigenous Canadian writer Lee Maracle destabilizes our Eurocentric and anthropocentric paradigms when she connects the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City to the tragic incident of salmon suicide that affected her people in Salish territory. In her essay “Salmon is the Hub of Salish Memory” (2015), she mentions that while people in Canada and the United States were still reeling from that horror, thousands of mating pairs of sockeye swam to their deaths too soon, leaving no offspring, in effect killing themselves and the future of their species. Maracle tells us that at the time, compared to the attack on the World Trade Center, the sockeye suicide was considered a minor event, not worthy of study.
However, she connects the two events because at the time the salmon were committing social suicide, Afghanistan was the object of international invasion, explaining that Salish people know that the salmon’s homeland has been the object of chronic invasion by fishing, pulp, and paper mills, forestry, and all manner of toxic dumping. According to the Salish cultural worldview, salmon and humans are not separate, and both events are linked to a single social and economic system that shares the same history of social and physical degradation of human and salmon habitat.
Dreams and shamans
In Brazil, indigenous thinkers such as Ailton Krenak, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa have used their knowledge to draw our attention to the need for a paradigm shift so that we can stop destroying the planet. For Krenak, in “Ideas to Postpone the End of the World” (2020), such a shift involves drawing our attention to other forms of ancestral knowledge so that we can still dream of possible futures. According to his cosmovision, dreaming is a transcendental experience in which the human chrysalis cracks open to unlimited new visions of life. Dreams are places of connection with the common world. It is not a parallel world, but the world in a different register, a different potency.
Shamans are central figures in indigenous cultures because they have access to a special kind of knowledge and are intermediaries between humans and non-humans. They are also initiated into a tradition of dreaming and have taken a prominent place in discussions of indigenous knowledge, verbal arts, dystopian prophecy, and imagining possible future worlds. In “The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman” (2013), Davi Kopenawa tells us that, according to a prophecy, the destruction of our planet will be signaled by the death of the last shaman, since they are the guardians of the forests. The increasing deforestation in Brazil and the danger of the destruction of the indigenous shamans makes Kopenawa see the falling sky. It is through the image of a blind sky, blurred by the smoke of the fires and the falling of the trees, that Kopenawa sees the end. In his words: “But if there are no more shamans in the forest, it will soon burn until it is blind. Finally, it will suffocate and, becoming a ghost, it will suddenly begin to fall to the earth. Then we will all be carried away into the darkness of the underworld, both the White Men and the rest of us.”
In “De-Universalizing the Decolonial: Between Partentheses and Falling Skies” (2021), Lynn Mario de Souza and Ana Paula Duboc insert the book co-authored by Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert into discussions of climate change and capitalist exploitation as a dystopian threat. As Kopenawa points out in his narratives, the forest is being destroyed (hence the falling sky) by capitalist development, which incessantly sees the Amazon as an untouched resource (mining, agriculture, timber) to be exploited for profit. It is by communicating with the Xapiri, the spirits of the forest, that the shaman gains access to knowledge; and by telling his stories to Bruce Albert to write on the ‘paper skin’ (book), he warns the white men of the threat of a future of devastation.
“There is a flower”
Last August, I had the opportunity to participate in the V International Congress of Indigenous Worlds (COIMI), organized by the Federal University of Roraima in the capital city of Boa Vista. One of the most remarkable moments of the event was the closing conference in Tabalascada, an indigenous territory near Boa Vista inhabited by the Wapichana and Macuxi peoples. The keynote speaker for this final meeting was Davi Kopenawa, because he is one of the most prominent leaders against illegal mining and deforestation, and the Amazon region in the state of Roraima is also Yanomami territory. I was surprised to see him arrive in a special vehicle under the protection of the National Police. The most shocking thing was to realize, while attending his talk, that there were security guards with rifles behind him and all around us. At that moment, the threat of death to shamans and the challenges we face in changing our western paradigms became painfully clear to me.
Although recent decades have witnessed the demise of the myth of human autonomy and self-sufficiency represented by anthropocentrism and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, our political and economic systems are still programmed and operate according to a Eurocentric, predatory capitalist paradigm. Worse, the demands that emanate from social organizations urging action for a more sustainable future seem to die when they reach inefficient and/or deaf political governments and institutions.
In the midst of this terrible crisis, where disbelief haunts us every day, allying ourselves with Indigenous people and learning with them about the potential of dreams becomes a powerful weapon of resistance. For as Anishinaabe writer and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor tells us in “Me Tomorrow: Indigenous Views on the Future” (2021), Indigenous people have already lived and survived an apocalyptic experience with the European invasions, which he calls “the first alien invasion” or “the original War of the Worlds.”
A beautiful metaphor for this dream of possible futures is found in Lee Maracle’s 1996 poem Perseverance, published in her book “I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism” (1998), in which a dandelion resists and grows on Bay Street, one of the busiest streets in downtown Toronto. We might find such strength if we ally ourselves with non-humans to dream of other ways of being.
There’s a dandelion on the roadside in Toronto.
Its leaves a dishevelled mix of green and brown.
A dandelion scraggling ‘n’ limping along.
There’s a flower beside a concrete stump
on Bay Street, in Toronto. Perpetually rebellin’
against spiked heels and blue serge suits.
The monetary march-past of 5 o’clock Bay Street
(deaf to the cries of this thing aging lion)
sneers: “Chicken-yellow flower…”
My leaves, my face… my skin… I feel like
my skin is being scraped off me. There is
a flower in Toronto. On the roadside
It takes jackhammers and brutish machines to rip
the concrete from the sidewalks in Toronto
to beautify the city of blue serge suits
But for this dandy lion, it takes but a seed,
a little acid rain, a whole lot of fight and a
Black desire to limp along and scraggle forward
There is a flower.