From: Ken Homer
Date: Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 11:51 AM
Subject: [OGM] An Indigenous Viewpoint
To: Open Global Mind
From Chief Ninawa Huni Kui -
“The climate catastrophe and biodiversity apocalypse are not technical, but relational problems created by a sense of separation from the land/planet imposed by colonialism. From this perspective, colonialism represents a cognitive, affective, relational and neuro-biological impairment based on illusions of separation and superiority that have damaged our relationships with our own selves, with each other, with other species and with the land/planet we are part of, with deadly consequences for all involved.
This neurobiological impairment creates a dis-ease in our collective body, with symptoms of human greed, vanity, arrogance and indifference. These symptoms are driving the destruction of ecosystems that are essential for our survival, like the Amazon rainforest, and placing humanity on a path of premature extinction. While Western society has developed advanced engineering sciences and technologies, which are often deployed for exploitation, extraction and expropriation, relational sciences and technologies of respect, reverence, reciprocity, and responsibility have been neglected in Western societies.
Indigenous Peoples have developed these relational sciences and technologies to an advanced state. We are now facing mass extinction in slow motion and the colonial ways of organizing, thinking, feeling, relating, hoping, imagining and being that have got us into this situation cannot alone get us out of it.
The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present. We will need to combine engineering and relational sciences and technologies if humanity is to have a future on this planet. Before we can do that, Western disciplines of science and technology will need to lose their ingrained ethnocentrism and universalism, and confront the harms they have caused and/or contributed to. Once that happens, Indigenous sciences and technologies can be integrated with Western sciences and technologies to coordinate efforts towards regeneration and the expansion of social-ecological accountabilities.”