Value Part Four: Decolonizing Value

Post Number Sixteen of The Movement We Need

BRM. Decolonizing Value: Becoming Human

On the Left today, we often talk about decolonizing. While the term originated with indigenous communities looking to recover aspects of their culture from before Contact, it has come to be used in a broader sense, to mean challenging European cultural and material supremacy. That is an important project, yet I don’t love the word. Linguist and political theorist George Lakoff, in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, (1) reminds us that our minds don’t handle negatives well. No one can not think of an elephant—because as soon as you say the word ‘elephant’, you’re thinking of it. In the same way, as long as we’re saying ‘decolonization’, our minds are full of ‘colonization.’

Yet it’s hard to find a positive alternative. ‘Reindiginization’ is almost impossible to say, and while all of us have indigenous ancestors somewhere in our lineage, they may be thousands of years in the past, and from a different land than where we live. “Re-villaging” has been suggested, but doesn’t completely capture the scope of what we’re talking about. I’ve been told by Kamimila Locke, one of our permaculture students, that in her Lakota language, the word used for ‘decolonization’, “Kilákȟota” actually means ‘becoming human again’, which feels closer to what we need.

(This series of writings is an experiment—I’m writing a book and releasing it a chapter at a time on Substack, accompanied with podcasts available on Substack, Apple, Spotify, etc. This is the fourth post in the section on Value, and the sixteenth post in the series. I have now numbered the posts that are part of the book, to make them easier to find in the Archives on my Substack site.)

Whenever word we use for it, the question might be ‘how do we do it and what does it really mean?’ Colonization identifies one group of people as the worthy ones deserving of all the benefits, resources and access to land an area might provide. Another group is made to be the unworthy ones, those who are deserving only of dispossession and exploitation. Decolonizing, then, means undoing these oppressive structures.

But colonization is more than the external structures. It weaves its way into our internal sense of value. If we come from a devalued people, how do we establish our own internal sense of pride and worth? And if our heritage is that of the colonizers, how do we undo the sense of entitlement and relinquish our unearned value? And in the process, how do release the guilt and shame that arise? Decolonization can be seen as, in part, an internal process of coming to take pride in our choices and actions more than what we inherit.

But really embracing indigeneity may require a more profound change in our very understanding of the self. The dominant culture view is that the self is a single, distinct thing. Each self exists with a boundary around it that represents a collection of rmemories, experiences, opinions, needs and desires. That self has rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—meaning the right to strive to fulfill those needs and realize those desires.

But a decolonized, a more indigenous view of the self would be very different. I'm always wary of saying ‘an indigenous view.’ because there are thousands of indigenous cultures, all of them different, with many different views. But there are some threads of understanding that seem common to cultures and societies that live in a close and relatively harmonious relationship with the earth. That includes a different understanding of the world itself, and of the self’s relationship to that world.

Last summer, I cotaught a permaculture course with Petrina Dezali, from the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Vancouver Island. She described how her elders had instructed her in her roles and responsibilities in the family and community. As we talked and shared throughout the two weeks of the course, I began to understand that in her culture the individual is not an atomized, free floating entity, but rather a thread in a web of relationships that include both the human and natural world, which are not seen as divided from each other. Every person comes with a set of roles, and those rules carry with them responsibilities. Being part of this society, part of the community, means showing up to fulfill those roles and take on those responsibilities, even when, at times, they might conflict with individual desires. The individual does not exist in oneself alone, but as a part of a larger whole, a representative of the family, a clan, a tribe, a people, embedded in a place and the animals, plants, and life-forms endemic to it. One’s actions reflect, not just on oneself, but on all of those larger networks of relationships.

Until very recently, Western culture also came with its set of restrictive roles and responsibilities. Hundreds of Victorian novels depict the spinster aunt, the one who was chosen to remain childless in order to care for the elders of the family at the expense of her own self development and life. Traditional religions were, and are, a source of restriction as well. Pious Christians kept the Sabbath strictly. My grandparents kept kosher, living a life bound by strict rules that determined what you could eat, wear, and do. My parents were the generation that rebelled.

We tend to romanticize indigenous cultures, and see them as havens of freedom and connection to nature. But many of us would find it irksome to truly decolonize, if it means decentering the self. There's something liberating about being an anonymous atom, to act and make choices that reflect on no one but yourself. We prize our individual freedom of action and decision making, and out liberation from the shackles of the past. Few of us want to take on the care of our aging relatives, or return to a world where nothing is open on Sunday except the Church.

We idealize the rebel, the breaker of restrictive conventions—whether that’s the artist pursuing a vision or the tech bro moving fast and breaking things. And in a capitalist culture, we especially admire those who succeed in fulfilling their individual desires: the successful businessman that Trump pretends to be, the ‘self-made’ billionaire, the ‘genius’ of the tech bros or an Elon Musk. We ignore the fortunes they inherited, and ask little collective responsibility in return—half the time, they don’t even pay their taxes!

In a potlatch culture, such as the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, value is determined not by how much you accumulate, but by how much you give away. An Elon Musk might be seen as someone to be pitied, a warped being plagued by some inner sickness that compels him to take more and more and more at others’ expense.

Yet the need to fulfill important social and family roles is not unique to indigenous or traditional cultures. It’s inherent in being an adult. Every parent, every grown-up who holds a responsible job or undertakes a creative project knows that sometimes we must put aside what we desire in order to care for someone or something else. The work, the mission or the relationship overrides your own immediate needs.

If we are unwilling to ever set aside our personal desires, we accomplish nothing much with our lives and they become empty and deeply unfulfilling. The ultra-liberated self, unrestricted by commitments and unbound by caring, is a lonely self. We pay for unbridled freedom with a profound sense of dislocation, unconnected to others, lacking a sense of belonging, one of our deepest human needs. We never truly grow up.

And if we ignore our responsibility to the natural world, if we take without giving back, if we never internalize the sense of reciprocity inherent in many indigenous cultures, we end up destroying the very life support systems that sustain us.

We might also look at these issues through a feminist lens. Responsibility, in our patriarchal culture, is identified with the traditional roles assigned to women: caring for children, caring for the elderly or the sick, keeping the home fires burning. Freedom is identified with men and the roles assigned to them: aggression, innovation, exploration. Responsibility is the boring, nagging Mom making you do your homework; freedom is the weekend Dad letting you stay up late and taking you to Disneyland. For those of us who grew up on the Little House on the Prairie books, on the myths of the frontier, freedom is Pa wanting to stride out into the wilderness, responsibility is Ma, holding him back, wanting to live in town where there are boring things like neighbors and schools for the children.

The feminist movement was, in part, a rebellion of women refusing to be locked into traditional roles, burdened with all the responsibilities of care and locked out of arenas for agency and self-fulfillment. We don’t want to go back to a world where men do all the innovating and women do all the nose-wiping, and gender-diverse folks don’t come into the picture at all. We want a world where all of us are free to strive, to create, to follow our desires, and at the same time, undertake the burdens of adulthood to care for others.

The Covid pandemic exacerbated the tension that every culture must negotiate between individual freedom and communal responsibility. To protect vulnerable others, we were asked to curtail our individual freedom, to submit to home confinement, social distancing, masking, getting vaccinated. When freedom is defined as a purely individual right to do as we please, and in a culture that depreciates collective care, how easy to resent those expectations, to see them as violations of the sacred, atomized self!

Is it any wonder that we are now stuck in a political moment where the tech bros and the billionaires align themselves with the right-wing forces that defend their freedom to accumulate wealth without reciprocity, power without responsibility? That they align with a masculinist culture that devalues all forms of care, whether for other human beings or for the earth?

The Left, the Democrats, the ‘woke’ are all identified with that fussy, nagging, restrictive Mom, and today we literally see the dismantling of all the structures of care, from USAID to the National Institute of Health to the Department of Education. Wokeness has its flaws, and I’ve written extensively about many of them, but at its heart it is calling us to be aware of the needs of others, to care about those who might look different or worship differently or come from a different background than yourself. How outrageous! What an assault on individual sovereignty! And how dare we ask men—those striding, tiger-fighting warriors designed by nature to build tech empires and break things—to stay home and do their fair share of the dishes?

The Left is not immune to this focus on the individual self. When we talk about decolonization, what we often actually mean is that our atomized self will adopt a new set of beliefs, new language and jargon that will aid us in dismantling structures of oppression. That’s an admirable aim, but the danger is that decolonization then becomes a matter of personal betterment, refining and perfecting that individual self. Instead of organizing on a collective level, we may spend our time berating others for their lack of perfection.

What if we looked at decolonization in a deeper way, if we were to honestly grapple with the profound shift in world-view that truly becoming human might represent? Do we really want to fit ourselves into a new structure of obligation and roles? Can we shift to seeing the world as a web of relationships, rather than an assemblage of isolated objects? What would that actually mean in our lives?

To counter the harsh cruelty of the misogynist, MAGA world, we need to revalue those qualities that have been feminized, to see caring and nurturing as forms of strength, greed and callousness as symptoms of profound weakness and disease. We cannot instantly transform ourselves into indigenous people if we have not been raised that way, but we can honestly wrestle with the tension between our desires and obligations, our autonomy and our responsibilities. And we can learn to see the world as relational.

That shift is happening in many disciplines, from quantum theory in physics to family systems theory in psychology. For twenty years or more, I’ve been practicing and teaching an approach to ecological design known as permaculture. Originally formulated by two Australian ecologists, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture draws on indigenous and traditional practices as well as environmental science and systems theory. It employs a set of ethics and principles for designing systems, from gardens to organizations, in alignment with nature, meeting our human needs while regenerating the environment around us. The core understanding of permaculture is that we are designing, not single elements, but sets of relationships, looking at connections and flows, movements of energy, and complex interactions. Practicing permaculture is one way in to making that shift from seeing the world as a set of things to understanding it as a web of interconnections.

Can we find a better balance between freedom and responsibility? Can we learn to see the world, not as a set of billiard balls bouncing off one another, but as a set of relationships in which we are all embedded? Then we might let go of the quest for self-perfection, stop endlessly polishing those balls or berating others for their dust and scratches, and find solutions that are far more creative, welcoming, and nourishing.

The movement we need would be held in a web of relationships that provide mutual support and mutual aid. It would cherish everyone’s freedom to think, act, innovate and create, but also place a high value on caring, nurturing, and taking up our responsibilities as vital strands in the web of community that encompasses both the human and natural worlds. It will not return us to indigeneity, but instead call us to find our way to becoming fully human again.

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