Addressing Climate Change through Cultural Protection “My grandmother always told me, ‘We could not live our spiritual practices or traditions, or speak our language because it was life or death. We had to do that to survive. But that is no more. We needed to go back. But we never went back.’ ASSIMILATION SUCCESSFUL.” –Running Deer, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community “Funding goes to hospitals and treatment centers. Nothing preventative. Nothing culturally healing. Nothing addressing the TRAUMA of colonization on a population. This is the greatest wound.” –Running Deer, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
“A friend of mine once suggested that one of the things that Indian People have never really had is a kind of way to overcome the sorrow of conquest…the sorrow of being conquered.” –Jack Forbes, PhD “I think a lot of the alcoholism has to do with looking around in a world in which your people are still oppressed.” –Jack Forbes, PhD Forty percent of the American Indian population is obese, and 18% have diabetes. Among American Indian tribes, Pima Indians have the highest incidence rates of diabetes in the world. We owe it to our progeny to rise above the pervasive fog of societal and cultural malaise that pervades our conscious awareness. A genocide that was set ablaze on Turtle Island over 500 years ago is finally reaching its completion.
Some of my ancestors inhabited the island of Boriken, which you refer to as Puerto Rico. Bartolomé De Las Casas writes graphically about the Taino massacres in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. And some of my ancestors were kidnapped from the west coast of Africa, imprisoned, and enslaved on slave labor camps in the Caribbean. We are their descendants embodying the consequences and aftermath of the invasion, destruction, and savagery of colonization. How many of us are behaving, thinking, or eating as we would have had imperialism and colonialism not set its voracious appetite on our land and bodies? The capitalist system that exalted and rewarded such atrocities is the same system that governs us today. The quality of the food and medical treatment we receive today is reflective of a mutation and adaptation of the system that established itself in someone else’s stolen home over five centuries ago. Is this not the same system deciding what is considered food? When, where, and how much of it we get? Is this not the same system deciding what health looks like and who is worthy to access healthcare? Is this not the same system deciding who is worthy and why? So, what does this mean? Are we lost? How can we be lost when we have holders of wisdom and guardians of Earth living among us?
NM Vegan | 10
