Decolonize together: Indigenous activists send strong message at Occupy Toronto talk

By Vannina Sztainbok, Rabble.ca

(View videos from the talk here.)

“I’m hopeful to see you all here visioning a different future. A future based on equality, diversity and respect for the land. And I’m excited and I’m hopeful for the impact that you’re having on the world…. And so I say to you today…if you wish to align yourselves with the dispossessed and the marginalized, reject the language and ideology of colonialism, conquest and exploitation.” – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, January 23, 2012

Not long after protesters set up camp on Wall Street, indigenous activists began to question the use of colonial language to claim spaces that have been under occupation for over 500 years.

The unfortunate response, from some quarters, has been that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) should maintain a “united” front, disregarding the multiple hierarchies within the 99 per cent, as well as the rights and demands of indigenous peoples. Others, however, agree that there is a need to address this fundamental issue.

On Monday, January 23, Occupy Toronto sponsored a panel discussion, “Indigenous Perspectives on the Occupy Movement,” at Beit Zaitoun. The speakers provided a forceful yet constructive critique. They recognized the hopefulness of Occupy’s worldwide repudiation of capitalism, while also calling on activists to rethink the language and strategies of the movement so that it does not reinscribe colonialism by undermining Indigenous struggles. Furthermore, they proposed that a movement that seeks to seriously challenge economic inequality, environmental exploitation and other forms of oppression must stem from a commitment to decolonization.

Following a prayer by Daniel Beaton and a lively introduction by artist Tannis Nielson, the first speaker was writer, scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson of Alderville First Nation. Currently, Simpson is an Adjunct Professor in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and an instructor at the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge, Athabasca University. She began her talk by establishing a sense of the history of this land and ongoing Indigenous struggles to resist occupation.

For Simpson, her community and her ancestors “occupation” has meant “400 years surviving under a system that has brought countless waves of gendered violence, colonialism, conquest and dispossession.” She noted that Indigenous people make up the longest-standing anti-capitalist social movement on the continent.

Simpson called for a broader conception of resistance, than simply arguing it’s more than just direct action. Given hundreds of years of genocidal practices, survival itself is a form of resistance for Indigenous peoples. Simpson explained:

“Resistance isn’t just direct action and protest, sometimes just surviving is resistance. Sometimes having the will to live is resistance. Building a cultural and political resurgence based on Indigenous values, philosophies and traditions is resistance. Giving birth to and raising our children to know their responsibilities as Indigenous peoples, to have a connection to their homelands, to speak their languages and to tell their stories is resistance.”

It is important that the Occupy movement recognize this history of resistance, so as not to erase Indigenous presence on, and protection of, the land. Simpson ended with a powerful suggestion: “If you want to be really brave and radical, place the concerns and the issues of Indigenous women at the centre of your de-occupation.”

The second speaker was Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, in Northern Manitoba. Thomas-Muller is an Indigenous rights and environmental justice activist. Among the many hats he wears, he is the Tar Sands Campaign Director for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and was named “Climate Hero 2009″ by Yes Magazine.

Thomas-Muller urged Occupy activists to acknowledge and educate themselves about local and transnational grassroots activism to avoid sacrificing existing social organizations. To make his point, he told the audience about where he was when news of OWS emerged. He was attending the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Congress in Raleigh, North Carolina. This alliance is a network of 86 Indigenous and people of colour social justice organizations from across the United States. Their platform for 2012 is: “No war. No warming. Build a people’s economy!” As news of OWS grew, people at the Congress were shocked that none of them — important activists from all over North America — were in the loop about this pivotal event. They asked themselves, “Why aren’t we there?”

For Thomas-Muller, this pointed to a major problem with the Occupy movement. Many of the young, white, middle-class occupiers lack a sense of history and accountability. While his own organization takes direction from, and answers to, grassroots Indigenous groups across Canada and the U.S., Occupy does not have a clear base. As a result, he fears that OWS may grow at the expense of long-term activism that is based in anti-oppression and anti-colonial frameworks. His own organization, the IEN, relies on a network of activists in different cities. This past fall, support for IEN’s campaign against tar sands exploitation in Alberta was detrimentally affected by activists whose energies were sapped by Occupy.

Thomas-Muller urged that, as it grows, Occupy needs to think through how to support and build on existing organizations, rather than create scenarios that detract from their capacities. Thomas-Muller was hopeful about the possibility for the “convergence” of movements. But, he insists, decolonization is the way forward, rejecting the movement’s language: “Occupy’s offensive.” Indigenous peoples “can’t just forget about it.”

The final speaker was Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Executive Director of the IEN. He is also an author, filmmaker and a policy adviser on environmental protection, climate mitigation and adaptation. Goldtooth raised a number of questions about where Indigenous peoples fit within Occupy’s agenda, interrogating the strategic frame of the “99 per cent” slogan. If Occupy is taking back for the 99 per cent, he asked: “Who are they? Who are we? Take back from whom? Where are we [Indigenous people] in that 99 per cent?” By asking these questions, Goldtooth pointed to the insufficiency of a framework that views the majority as equally oppressed, erasing a colonial history.

At the same time, Goldtooth emphasized the urgency for collaboration and solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists who seek not to “fix the system,” but to get rid of it altogether. He proposed a protocol for collaboration. First, he called on Occupy activists to think about how they are reaching out to Indigenous people. He insisted that they must be approached as nations who have jurisdiction on this land:

“We are your older brothers and we are your older sisters… the ones who have immigrated here — by choice or not by choice. It’s very important to have opportunities like this to have dialogue….but we also have to take a moment to recognize that we have certain demands that we have put forward that are quite consistent.”

Furthermore, Goldtooth argued, Occupy activists should follow the protocols that all visitors to a village must follow. Visitors — those who are not Indigenous to the land — must enter the community gradually and respectfully. They must allow the hosts to address their own agenda first, before adding more items. When the time is right, the hosts will add the visitor’s items to the agenda. The ground is then set for dialogue and collaboration.

In Goldtooth’s view, collaboration is essential. Indigenous peoples have already had many casualties resisting capitalist exploitation and colonialism. They should not, Goldtooth concluded, have to take on the corporations on their own. “It’s going to take all of us to resist.”

Vannina Sztainbok is a lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She teaches in the areas of gender, race, social inequality and citizenship studies.

Derrick Jensen: Civilization & Decolonization

Forward from Unsettling Ourselves

The Osage chief Big Soldier said of the dominant culture, “I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”

The essence of the dominant culture, of civilization, is slavery. It is based on slavery, and it requires slavery. It attempts to enslave the land, to enslave nonhumans, and to enslave humans. It attempts to get us all to believe that all relationships are based on slavery, based on domination, such that humans dominate the land and everyone who lives on it, men dominate women, whites dominate non-whites, the civilized dominate everyone. And overarching everyone is civilization, is the system itself. We are taught to believe that the system— civilization—is more important than life on earth.

If you don’t believe me, ask yourself, what do all of the mainstream so-called solutions to global warming have in common? The answer is that they’re all trying to save industrial capitalism, not the real world. They all take industrial capitalism as a given, as that which must be saved, as that which must be maintained at all costs (including the murder of the planet, the murder of all that is real), as the independent variable, as primary; and they take the real, physical world—filled with real physical beings who live, die, make the world more diverse—as secondary, as a dependent variable, as something (never someone, of course) which (never who) must conform to industrial capitalism or die. Even someone as smart and dedicated as Peter Montague, who used to run the indispensable Rachel’s Newsletter, can say, about an insane plan to “solve” global warming by burying carbon underground (which of course is where it was before some genius pumped it up and burned it), “What’s at stake: After trillions of tons of carbon dioxide have been buried in the deep earth, if even a tiny proportion of it leaks back out into the atmosphere, the planet could heat rapidly and civilization as we know it could be disrupted.”

No, Peter, it’s not civilization we should worry about. Disrupting civilization is a good thing for the planet, which means it’s a good thing. Far more problematical than the possibility that “civilization as we know it could be disrupted” is the very real possibility that the planet (both as we know it and as we have never bothered to learn about it) could die. Another example: in a speech in which he called for “urgent action to fight global warming,” and in which he called global warming “an emergency,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave the reason he wants urgent action to combat this emergency: “We must be actively engaged in confronting the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere.” Never mind it being a serious threat to the planet.

He’s worried about “development,” which is in this case code language for industrialization.

This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. In all physical truth to be civilized is to be insane, to be out of one’s mind, out of one’s body, and out of all realistic touch with the physical world.

Civilization is a disease, a highly contagious disease that kills the land, that kills those who live with or on the land, that attempts to kill all who do not accede to becoming its slaves.

Civilization is an addiction. My dictionary defines the verb addict as “to bind, devote, or attach oneself as a servant, disciple, or adherent.” In Roman Law, an addiction was “A formal giving over or delivery by sentence of court. Hence, A surrender, or dedication, of any one to a master.” It comes from the same root as diction: dicere, meaning to pronounce, as in a judge pronouncing a sentence upon someone. To be addicted is to be a slave. To be a slave is to be addicted. The heroin ceases to serve the addict, and the addict begins to serve the heroin. We can say the same for civilization: it does not serve us, but rather we serve it.

There’s something desperately wrong with that.

We must stop this addiction, this disease, from enslaving us, stop it from killing the planet. And while there are many actions we can and must take to protect the land and the human and non-human people we love from this culture, in many ways the first and most important step we must take is to decolonize our hearts and minds. That process of decolonization will look different for every person. It will look different for men than women. It will look different for those who are indigenous than for those who are not.

But there are some common features. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture—industrial capitalism, and more broadly civilization—and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re- examining premises and stories the dominant culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm the dominant culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. If you are a member of settler society, it means recognizing that you are living on stolen land and it means working to return that land to the humans whose blood has forever mixed with the soil. If you are an indigenous person it means never forgetting that your land was stolen, and it means working to repossess that land, and it means working to be repossessed by that land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of the dominant culture do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of that. It means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that the dominant culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that the dominant culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail. It means remembering that the real world is more important than this social system: without a real world you don’t have a social system, any social system. All of this is the barest beginnings of decolonizing. It is internal work that doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, but makes all further steps more likely, more feasible, and in many ways more strictly technical.

Another way to put this is what my friend the environmentalist and medical doctor John Osborn says: the first step toward cure is proper diagnosis. Decolonization means making that proper diagnosis.

There is an even more basic process common to all decolonization, no matter who you are. It is this. The Russian author Anton Chekhov once assigned a young writer to create a story in which someone squeezed every drop of slave’s blood out of his body.

This is what we must do.

Civilization cannot survive free men and women who think and feel and act from their own hearts and minds, free men and women who are willing to act in defense of those they love.

This sourcebook is about squeezing every last drop of slave’s blood out of your body. This sourcebook is about breaking your addiction to the dominant culture, and about remembering what it is to be a free woman or man, what it is to live with a land that lives with you, and how to protect and defend that land, and your freedom, as if your life depends on it.

Because in all physical truth it does.

Activist and philosopher Derrick Jensen is the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, and A Language Older than Words, among many other books; he lives in northern California. Jensen’s philosophy and rousing calls to action are debated amongst radicals, environmentalists and solidarity activists worldwide. His writings and other works can be found at www.derrickjensen.org.

Download the sourcebook: Unsettling Ourselves: Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality [PDF]

Jessica Yee: Marginalization Doesn’t Happen by Accident

Jessica Yee, Mohawk from Akwesasne, founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and first Chair of the National Aboriginal Youth Council, addresses Colonialism and Violence from the State.

From Redwire

On January 27, I had the privilege of attending a talk given by Jessica Yee. However talk cannot properly describe the event that took place. Jessica Yee challenged the lecture form as she coaxed the attendees from being a passive audience into active participants.  The energy in the room was definitely alive. She left no room for dispassion and her strength was infectious, asserting from the beginning that we must “learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable”. She didn’t ask, or bade us into this process gently, Yee commanded it of us and it was assumed we were naturally capable. With these sentiments she set forth exposing us to a series of very uncomfortable and painful truths.

It’s important to note that before she began she acknowledged the land she stood on and that she came as a visitor, as an ally, recognizing that the subject of violence against women in this territory in particular is of the utmost urgency. She paid tribute to the importance of recognizing the efforts of local women working towards their aims. “I bring the spirits of my ancestors here with me” were her words exactly, and she described a time when the Mohawk came to the aid of the people of this territory when they were in need, how she came with this same disposition, upholding the importance of Indigenous people standing in solidarity with one another’s communities.

“I’m not here to talk on some lofty theories on violence against women, I want to know what you plan on doing once you leave this room, because this isn’t about just going to a talk, I saw Jessica Yee speak and wasn’t that nice!”

Projected on the wall behind her were a series of illustrations, all demonstrating oppression resulting from colonization. They were well done, in comic book style and one featured a woman on the phone with the words “I’ve been raped/ My boyfriend beat me” to which a police officer replied “Native, go figure…” All of the images were equally candid and forthright. Shortly after Yee began speaking she revealed that these drawings were in fact done by an 11 year old. There was a quiet yet strong reaction from the audience, impressed that an 11 year old possessed such strong social awareness, they also seemed filled with a kind of urgency. The hope of age creating a shield of ignorance and thus protecting younger generations from unfortunate realities did not apply here. Jessica Yee stressed that we needed to listen to what the voices of our children are saying, adding that “Often its not what we say, but what we listen to.”

With this Yee set the tone for the evening by keeping the voice of this young person in our minds.

Marginalization doesn’t happen by accident was precisely the subject at hand. She reminded us that we must start at the beginning to have the strength to go forward by reasserting “Mother Law”, with “woman as the first environment”; the values of womanhood as a source of power and strength are embedded in Indigenous society. She explained the tenants of Mother Law as the highest potential for social change, where we must come together to reassert this law, keeping in mind that we do not need permission to do so. Reasserting Mother Law is something fundamental to ending violence against women.

Click here to read the full article →

Related: Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples

Unsettling America’s recommended reading: Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide

Breaking the Chains of Modernity

Reimagining old ways of life and death

By Dustin Craun, Adbusters

The philosophical and spiritual problems of our age are so great that what our time calls for are new manifestos of knowledge and being. We need a kind of spiritual change that exceeds the political. Unfortunately most of us in the Westernized world spend more time trying to escape from ourselves (sex, shopping, addiction, fashion, entertainment, success), than we ever spend reflecting on the state of our existence, our heart or our soul. We are people driven by our desires: desires which destroy our hearts and any ability to have a connection to the greater spiritual realities that are all around us. As the Qur’an says, “God does not change the condition of a people, until they change their own condition.”

In the classic decolonial manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire described Western life as a poison infecting the planet. Césaire wrote that to understand our existence, “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” For Césaire, “a gangrene has set in … a center of infection has begun to spread …” The poison Cesaire warned of is a philosophical and spiritual poison that infects each of us today.

In the American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr’s final book, The World We Used to Live In, he writes: “The secularity of the society in which we live must share considerable blame in the erosion of spiritual powers of all traditions, since our society has become a parody of social interaction lacking even an aspect of civility. Believing in nothing, we have preempted the role of the higher spiritual forces by acknowledging no greater good than what we can feel and touch.” The de-sacralization of the self and our lifeworlds is leaving our spiritual hearts dead.

To save ourselves, to avert catastrophe, we need to make what Walter Mignolo calls an “epistemic geopolitical move.” That demands a form of critique that is deeply engaged in what is known in Arabic as muhasabah, or self-examination, on three levels: examination of the self and one’s spiritual state; an examination of the dominant hierarchies that we all interact with such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and religious domination; and finally an examination of one’s local knowledge and the place from which critique is emanating. In recentering on the sacred in this process of self-examination, we can learn from Chicana feminists and the emerging idea of “decolonial love.”

Laura Pérez, UC Berkeley Professor of Ethnic Studies, connects “decolonial love” to the Mayan principle of In’Laketch: tu eres mi otro yo (you are my other me). Pérez explains that “not only are we interwoven, we are one. I am you and you are me. To harm another is thus to literally harm one’s own being. This is a basic spiritual law in numerous traditions.” This shift in the geopolitics of knowledge involves a turn away from Descartes and Western modernity’s centering of human consciousness in the mind, to a recentering of consciousness in the spiritual heart (qalb). This idea of a heart centered knowledge is central to many spiritual traditions including Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, and is echoed by Subcommandate Marcos and the Zapatista adage to center politics below and to the left, where the heart is in Aztec and Mayan cosmology.

Similar to Gloria Anzaldua’s concept La Facultad, a form of inner knowledge, is the Islamic concept of Al Basira, the eye of the heart, which is the center of spiritual perception if properly developed. As the great Mystic philosopher Al-Ghazali put it in his masterwork of the inner sciences of Islam, Ihya’ ulum al-din, “Creation refers to the external, and character to the internal, form. Now, the human is composed of a body which perceives with ocular vision (basar) and a spirit (ruh) and a soul (nafs) which perceive with inner sight (basira). Each of these things has an aspect and a form which is either ugly or beautiful. Furthermore, the soul which perceives with inner sight (basira) is of greater worth than the body which sees with ocular vision.” In seeing with the eye of our heart we can begin to differentiate between form and meaning, as the outward forms of things are not always their internal and spiritual reality.

The vision of our hearts has become blinded by the poison of base materialism. In the verse poetry of the early female Sufi saint, Rabi’a al-Adawiyya: “O children of Nothing! Truth can’t come in through your eyes, Nor can speech go out through your mouth to find [God], Hearing leads the speaker down the road to anxiety, And if you follow your hands and feet you will arrive at confusion. The real work is in the Heart: Wake up your Heart! Because when the Heart is completely awake, Then it needs no Friend.”

To break from the chains of modernity, we must learn both from philosophers of decoloniality and the spiritual sciences. Ultimately, we must walk down the path of love, to see each other in the divine light we were born into. As the great mystic philosopher Ibn Arabi said, “I believe in the religion of love, whatever direction its caravans may take, for love is my religion and my faith.”

Dustin Craun is a writer, educator and community organizer who lives in Berkeley, California. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book titled Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World.

A Postcolonial reading of Chris Hedges

From Infoshop News

The sudden volte-face of famed Liberal destroyer Chris Hedges in his recent demonization of the Black Bloc, sinisterly entitled ‘The Cancer of Occupy’, is a wonderful introduction for North American activists to the field of Postcolonial Theory. Edward Said’s seminal text ‘Orientalism’ examines how Western study of ‘The Orient’ contributes to the functioning of colonial power. Representations of ‘The Orient” in Western texts purporting to offer knowledge and insight into ‘other’ countries actually perpetuates the dichotomy between the West and ‘Others’ – in so doing, reaffirming the colonial relationship, even long after postcolonialism has apparently been established following the decolonizing process. The role of former colonizer is adopted in the discourse by the white, educated Chris Hedges, who writes glowingly of Greece’s response to their economic crisis in an article from May 2010:

Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

The Greeks, here, take the liminal role of “other”. In Hedges’ terms, they mimic his intellectual, activist ideals, without ever becoming equal to him. They are the student: he the master, echoing Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minutes on Indian Education’ printed in 1835, which set out an agenda to train ‘natives’ who were ‘Indian in blood and colour’ to become ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect’. These mimics would constitute a class who could protect British interests and help them in exerting rule over the empire. They would emulate, but never initiate or fully embody the ruling class values, in so doing ensuring their subjection and reliance on the colonizer. Hedges exhorts his ideal Occupiers to do the same, to denounce Diversity of Tactics, and to hurl their anarchist and Black Bloc comrades beneath the bus, by handing them over to the police. Hedges quotes indignant former eco-terrorist Derrick Jensen struggling with the radical aversion to resorting to the representatives of militaristic rule, to deal with internal problems: “When I called the police after I received death threats, I became to Black Bloc anarchists ‘a pig lover.’”

This indignity alone, it seems, is enough to fuel Jensen and Hedge’s disturbing anti-anarchist rant.

Frantz Fanon writes in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, that:

… it is not the colonialist self or the colonized other, but the disturbing difference in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness – the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body.

Fanon’s works examine the psychological affects of colonialism upon people of color in a predominantly white world. His work remains salient, particularly in the context of the Western desire to appropriate, claim and ‘orientalize’ the revolutionary activities in ‘other’ countries, in order to inscribe their name upon the successful results. Egypt under Mubharak is characterized as bad and anti-American, anti-democratic, inhumane…. Egypt revolting in order to embrace democracy is appropriated, through Western discourse, as a prodigal student of Western ideals. This can be seen clearly in Hedges’ ‘white man’s artifice’ – the approbation he gives to his students, the Greeks. “Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out”, Hedges’ exhorts Greece gloatingly. Compare this to his contradictory attitude to the “cancerous” anarchists of the Black Bloc, who, it seems, follow similar tactics to those Hedges admires in Greece – though the Black Bloc of Oakland have not yet come near to the violence and chaos of Greece. Despite this, Oakland’s Black Bloc has provoked the ire of a Master who finds himself discarded and bypassed – overtaken, unwanted, and left to struggle in their wake. Hedges does not recognize the autonomous discourse the Oakland Black Bloc utilize – or perhaps he feels slighted that they abandoned the “accepted” discourse, and appropriated another, before he, the patriarchal father, gave permission. The Oakland Black Bloc is not subject to Hedges, the colonizer, does not, therefore, have “the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body”, and so is rejected and penalized by Hedges:

Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism are justified, in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” These acts, the movement argues, can never be organized. Organization, in the thinking of the movement, implies hierarchy, which must always be opposed. There can be no restraints on “feral” or “spontaneous” acts of insurrection. Whoever gets hurt gets hurt. Whatever gets destroyed gets destroyed.

There is a word for this—“criminal.”

Greece: the underdogs of Europe, the European ‘other’, are allowed – even encouraged – to riot. Violence, looting and vandalism are approved when it is to cast out the Colonizer’s enemy, which could, perhaps, result in the strengthening of a new colonialist discourse, the ‘other’s’ continuing subjection to a new colonizer – that which Hedges represents.  Fanon notes that “The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality”.

We see this at play in Hedge’s dark fear-mongering of the consequences of diversity of tactics in Oakland and the “Black Bloc”:

…the Occupy movement, through its steadfast refusal to respond to police provocation, resonated across the country. Losing this moral authority, this ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement. It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want.

Yet these are the same tactics – less violent, less widespread – that Hedges applauded in Greece.

Hedges is not alone in reproducing paradoxical colonialist discourse when talking of ‘other’ countries. Frequently, self-proclaimed ‘nonviolent’ participants in the Occupy movement talk in adoring terms of those in Tahrir Square and Syria, invoking the misty-eyed myth that their struggles with state oppression and police brutality in America, are somehow comparable to their comrades’ battles in the Middle East. Again, Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is worth invoking with the central tenet that knowledge is never innocent. Knowledge is always profoundly connected with the operations of power. Holding up Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King as fuzzy and politically correct (because brown) proponents of nonviolence, Western nonviolent pacifists conveniently slide over the white lauding of both Gandhi and MLK precisely because both these figures failed to threaten the hegemony of the ruling classes by participating in the colonialist discourse in the language of the colonizer. Both Gandhi and MLK were, in a sense, “different” in blood and color, but “western” in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect, and in perpetuating the moral and ethical superiority of the nonviolence both individuals had appropriated from the western discourse itself. Gandhi’s notion of nonviolence was forged as a hybrid between Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy and ‘Ram Rajya’. King’s was formed predominantly by Gandhi’s influence, and a trip to postcolonial India in 1957.

The translation which occurs in Western colonial discourse mythologizes these Middle-Eastern struggles as somehow equal to North American struggles, and yet different to them. Such myths either promote the idea that the Egyptian revolution has been ‘nonviolent’ and ‘non-violent’, or that the violence on the side of the oppressed in, for example, Tahrir Square, is accepted and acceptable, without acknowledging or explaining the contradiction that it is never acceptable in North America. This promotes and sustains the idea that those in Western countries are, again, the same but different. They are different because they are better. North Americans and Europeans cannot expect revolutionaries in foreign lands to adhere to the same moral and ethical superiority as themselves, the true practitioners of nonviolence and pacifism. The Egyptian revolutionaries protesting in Tahrir Square get a free pass to throw stones because they are ‘less than’ North American protestors, and it sustains North American superiority to characterize our struggle in the West as a struggle which takes place on a higher moral and ethical plain. Despite the fact police brutality is a common and everyday occurrence for many Americans, particularly those living in poverty and homelessness, middle-class educated Occupiers such as Hedges decry the notion of violence as daily routine, because it occurs mainly to uneducated, socially, economically and racially ‘inferior’ sections of the American population. Revolutions on American soil must therefore adhere to a puritanical notion of nonviolence that brings the terminology under the Hegemonic control of those privileged few such as Hedges, who manipulate the discourse to give themselves the advantage, and discredit those who are ‘other’:

This is exactly what pacifists have done in phrasing the disagreement as violence vs. nonviolence. Critics of nonviolence typically use this dichotomy, with which most of us fundamentally disagree, and push to expand the boundaries of nonviolence so that tactics we support, such as property destruction, may be supported within a nonviolent framework, indicating how disempowered and delegitimized we are. – Peter Gelderloos

This emphasis on creating clear, defined dichotomies in order to “delegitimize” thinkers is another tool favored by the colonizer to oppress. The conflation between violence and diversity of tactics is thus another method of controlling and subjugating difference through language. The colonizer creates “the other” in order to define themselves by the perceived deficiency. Hedges’ draws the Black Bloc as the “other”, using colonizing language to create a fantastical, faceless bogeyman against which he can define himself and the “good” members of the Occupy movement, not these fakers, these hooligans, these “Black” bloc anarchists. The binary opposition of black/white good/bad is never explicitly stated, but played upon through Hedge’s powerful, derogatory language. Language is power. In deliberately misappropriating the tactical term ‘black bloc’ as an adjective, and in some cases even a noun, Hedges, perhaps intentionally, creates a mythical, frightening, all-powerful and wholly evil enemy… which does not actually exist:

The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant. They hear only their own voices. They heed only their own thoughts. They believe only their own clichés. And this makes them not only deeply intolerant but stupid.

The struggle for the power to name oneself is enacted within words – to remove that power of naming is a specifically colonial, patriarchal act. No matter to Hedges that the diversity of tactics advocated by the anarchists he quotes and praises in the article on Greece, pushes not towards the replacement of hegemonic nonviolence with an “absolutist sect”, but rather towards a coalition of thought and action which represents the broadest spectrum of thinking and action by which to challenge the structures of oppression. To Hedges, preaching the exclusion of these faceless ‘black bloc’ individuals (which he later clarifies, somewhat disparagingly, given their impressive build up, as “a handful of hooligans”) there is no apparent contradiction. All who approve of violence in Egypt / Greece / Syria by the revolting masses, cannot ever hope to introduce it into their actions in North America. To do so is tantamount to a revolution – against the white, educated face of Hedges and his reformist sect. In a patriarchal twist of breathtaking hypocrisy, Hedges justifies his bigotry by claiming to be speaking “for” segments of the Oakland activist population who apparently cannot speak for themselves, presumably, in Hedges’ eyes, because of their race:

These anarchists represent no one but themselves. Those in Oakland, although most are white and many are not from the city, arrogantly dismiss Oakland’s African-American leaders, who, along with other local community organizers, should be determining the forms of resistance.

The contradictions of colonialism lie in its attempt to “civilize” its “other” – in this case, the Black Bloc anarchists – and simultaneously to fix them into perpetual otherness. We see this clearly in the apparent acceptable face of Diversity of Tactics in Syria, Greece and Egypt – but it’s abhorrence in North America and Europe.

In the process of decolonization, intellectuals and activists in the immediate political fall out of the deconstruction of empire, must still fight with its continuing legacy. In order to succeed in successfully destroying the dominant definitions of race, class, language and culture, they must offer an alternative to the old colonialist discourse, a new form which establishes itself as a formidale, powerful and distinct identity. This is what Oakland’s Black Bloc, the anarchists and the radicals of the Occupy movement are doing. The fact that they face resistance from the colonizer, represented by the white, educated face of Hedges, is only evidence that they are succeeding in challenging the old hegemonic ways of thinking. In the meantime, they leave Chris Hedges and his ilk struggling with the internal contradictions faced by their role as former colonizer, striving vainly to justify and sustain their old methods of control in the face of tumultuous revolution.

Like Sisyphus, we must imagine them happy.

Let’s Spread the Word: Wetiko

By Paul Levy, Reality Sandwich

In the first part of this series, we contemplated the idea of a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that has been wreaking havoc throughout human history that Native Americans call wetiko. In part two, we inquired into how the wetiko bug disrupts and deranges a living system, using the world financial system as our case study. The wetiko virus is like a parasite that literally feeds off, takes over and aberrates the curren(t)cy of the infected system. The wetiko pathogen originally manifests as a disturbance in the field of the collective unconscious of humanity itself, creating the psychic ley lines upon which world events are erected and energized. The origin of this virulent disease is to be discovered within the psyche (please see my article It’s All in the Psyche). Because of the psychic nature of wetiko, it serves us to understand the psychological underpinnings of the virus, which is to say, how it affects our day to day relationships and lives. We begin to ‘see’ the bug when we are able to get in focus and recognize ‘its’ psychological signature in both ourselves and others. The fact that the source of the wetiko germ is within the psyche means that the cure for this disease lies hidden within the psyche as well.

Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate with our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this ‘topic of topics’ before this virulent madness destroys us. Up until this point in our history we have been too easily distracted by the ruses of the wetiko bug itself. The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will kill us. Its cure is the most pressing and fundamental issue facing us today. Author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes in his foreword to Jack D. Forbes book about wetiko psychosis, “Columbus and other Cannibals is, I think, the most important book ever written on one of the most important topics ever faced by human beings: why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?”[i] Historian Arnold Toynbee points out that a civilization doesn’t die from being invaded from the outside, but unless it creates culture which nourishes the evolution of the creative spirit, a civilization invariably commits suicide. As if possessed, our civilization is, trance-like, sleepwalking in a death-march towards our own demise. The most pressing and inevitable question of our time is not just ‘why?’ but more urgently, how can we stop this seemingly out-of-control, self-destructive, hell-bent part of ourselves?

‘Psycho’-Analysis

The origin of wetiko is the human psyche. Psychologically speaking, shadow projection is at the very root of wetiko disease. Shadow projection is a process in which we split-off from and project out our own darkness onto others. It is our misguided attempt at a ‘final solution’ to the problem of the evil within ourselves which actually deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Projecting the shadow opens up the door and invites in the vampiric entity of wetiko to make itself at home in the most intimate spaces of our own psyche. It is through the dynamic of shadow projection that the wetiko bug digs in and entrenches itself within our psyches, where it is then able to commandeer the executive function of the psyche to its own ends. When we project the shadow, we unwittingly become a conduit for evil to possess us from behind, beneath our conscious awareness, and to act itself out through us. When there is mutual shadow projection between individuals, groups or nations, each side has an unconscious investment in the other playing out the projected evil so as to prove their own self-righteous innocence, a dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing and continually feeds the polarization in the field. Shadow projection, as it collectively plays out en masse on the world stage is an outer reflection of the initial process within ourselves of our be-night-ed effort to exterminate our own darkness (please see my article Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War). When shadow projection happens en masse, it is as if the archetype of evil emits its toxic radio-activity underground, through the shared unconscious of the collective, and manifests collectively as destructive psychic epidemics.

In shadow projection, we attempt to master and experience power over the internal condition that originally proclaimed our powerlessness to ourselves not by becoming conscious, but by unconsciously identifying with, becoming, and then acting out the power to externally destroy. Unconsciously acting out unbound power without restraint is our perverse way of defending against the internal breakthrough of feelings of helplessness. Evacuating and relocating our inner darkness outside of ourselves by demonizing the ‘other’ seemingly protects us from feeling our vulnerability and pain. Our inner anxiety about our existential ‘power to be’ attempts to resolve itself in the power to act free from restraint. In an unmediated expression of our disempowered inner condition, our unconscious acting out does not surmount the need for compulsive repetition, however, but rather, assures it. Wetikos’ modus operandi, their ‘M.O.,’ becomes to root out and kill everything that feels tender, vulnerable and alive within themselves, thus systematically murdering anything and everything within them that could possibly melt or produce a crack in the ice that encases their heart.

Because full-blown wetikos are soul murderers who continually recreate the on-going process of killing their own soul, they are reflexively compelled to do this to others; for what the soul does to itself, it can’t help but to do to others. In a perverse inversion of the golden rule, instead of treating others how they would like to be treated, wetikos do unto others what was done unto them. The wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless, vampiric lineage of abuse. Full-blown wetikos induce and dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have split off from and denied, and are thus not able to consciously experience – the part of themselves that has been abused and vampirized. In playing this out, wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness to others in a perverse form of trying to deal with their own suffering. Paradoxically, wetikos both try to destroy others’ light, as it reminds them of what they’ve killed in themselves, while simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves.

Wetiko disease is an expression of the convincing illusion of the separate self gone wild. Bewitched by the intrinsic projective tendencies of their own mind, full-blown wetikos are unconsciously doing the very thing they are reacting to and accusing other people of doing. Projecting the shadow onto others, they will accuse others of projecting the shadow onto them. To use an extreme, but prototypical example, it is like someone screaming that you’re killing them as they kill you. If their insanity is reflected back to them, they think it is the mirror that is insane. Suffering from a form of psychic blindness that believes itself to be sightedness, full-blown wetikos project out their own unconscious blindness and imagine that others, instead of themselves, are the ones who are not seeing. Governed by the insane, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia, those taken over by the disease fear that if they don’t attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves. In their convoluted, upside-down, flawless illogic, wetikos re-act to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are other than themselves, thinking that they themselves have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting (please see Aparticipatory Delusional Syndrome (ADS)). Someone fully taken over by the wetiko bug is like a kitten endlessly reacting to her reflection in a mirror as if it is another kitten separate from and other than herself. The evil we see in the full-blown wetikos is a reflection of our own evil; if we don’t recognize this, we will just be projecting our shadow onto them. We are then guilty of the very same thing (shadow projecting) we are essentially reacting to and of which we are accusing them.

The term wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which, to quote Forbes, refers to “an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts.”[ii] Wetikos are the human instruments for the transpersonal ‘spirit of evil’ to terrorize the world. In wetiko disease, we unwittingly become drafted into being foot-soldiers in the war not ‘on,’ but ‘of’ and ‘for’ terror. The wetiko parasite feeds on and harvests the emotions of fear and terror. Terror is the essence of its insidious ‘ill-usory ill-logic.’ In wetiko disease, the psyche takes the ‘terror’ that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, unwittingly becomes taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world. We have then become the thing we most feared, ‘creatures of the European nightmare world,’ as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large. Wetiko is the bug which feeds the experience of terror within our mind and out in the world, fueling one of its more prominent manifestations in our world today: the ‘Global War on Terror.’

Vampire Squid Economics: A Case Study in Full-Blown Wetiko Disease

By Paul Levy, Reality Sandwich

The following is Part Two of a series. Read Part One here.

In Part One of this article, I contemplated a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.

Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy‘), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.

The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the “Big Wetikos,” who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race’ in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,’ as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook’ through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash’ and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the “Big Wetikos,” who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.

Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy’s fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement’ resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn’t bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.

The over-leveraged wetiko economy is a ‘phantom menace,’ in that there is hardly any real substantial value changing hands except in appearance. Unlike a real economy that is based on, backed by and generates genuine wealth, the wetikonomy, because it has no conventional solid, objective, substantial reality, has only a phantom-like, apparent existence. It is as if authors of a fantasy novel or a fairy tale are trying to ‘market’ and ‘sell’ their creation as nonfiction, and we, as consumers, are ‘buying’ it, believing it to be true. Collectively pretending the fiction is real, we have forgotten that we are playing a mass game of ‘make believe.’ The bubble economy of wetiko is a con-fidence game (a ‘con’ game), a con-struct of our mind maintained in each moment by the belief that the system is real, solvent and legitimate.

A virtual, synthetic economy such as ours is a product cooked up by the fevered imagination of the wetiko financiers. Like a collective dream, or a mass spell, it is a concoction based upon mutually shared agreements among its participating members. The wetikonomy in which we live, unlike a free market economy, is subject to the intervention of and manipulation by the central bank, an entity which has interposed itself between us and the market. The agency of the central bank, in its attempts to interfere with and control a natural, self-regulating marketplace, is a living symbol of the wetiko pathogen and how it disrupts a living system.

Just as a vampire can’t stand to be seen and thus avoids the light of day at all costs, as it is only able to operate by the deceptive cover of darkness, so the very nature of the institutions and operations by which the phantom wetikonomy functions must be kept hidden from the light of public awareness. The financial instruments of the wetikonomy are purposely crafted to be incredibly complex and hard to understand so as to hide and obfuscate the theft that is happening. Hiding the reality of what they are doing is one of the ‘chief features’ of wetiko finance. Replacing transparency with opacity, it has become standard account-ing practice in the wetikonomy to ‘cook the books’ so as to avoid being held account-able. If clearly illuminated and exposed to the light of collective disclosure and transparency, the shell-game and Ponzi scheme that IS the global financial system will be revealed to be the staggering and unlawful deception that it is. In a vast computerized web of electronic transfers and accounting shenanigans, the global economic system has become an insanely desperate pyramid scheme, a high-tech casino-like scam. A monstrous, planet-wide Madoff-like rip-off done with smoke and mirrors, the wetikonomy is like a massive optical illusion that is projected by the Big Wetikos, a cadre of master spell-casting wizards, who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal to make their illusion seem real. The wetikonomy, like apparitions of majestic castles in the sky, is a magical display that captivates and holds spell-bound the credulous, semi-conscious masses, who are more than willing, based on their childlike need to hope and believe in an authority outside of themselves, to give away their power so as to quell their fear. This is a regressed form of magical thinking writ large on the world stage.

At first glance, an optical illusion looks one way, but when we investigate further, we can see the illusion for what it really is. If this grand financial illusion were to be unmasked and collectively seen through, the underlying and pervasive ‘fraud as a business model’ approach to running the global economy would reveal itself to be the spectral phantasm that it is. Once the seemingly rock-solid, concrete skyscrapers of the wetikonomy reveal themselves to be a stage set with nothing behind it, built on ever-shifting sand, it is not enough just to realize this and do nothing. It is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other. This sets the stage to re-engineer the system of wetiko-ized control mechanisms that, through locked-in contractual relationships, freezes the economy in a corporate, and wetiko-ized trajectory. The power structure in a wetiko-ized society is inherently fiscal instead of political, which is why political change doesn’t result in economic change. It is the banks that control the government, not the other way around. As our collective realization gathers momentum, however, such a process of waking up en masse could dissolve the wetikonomy to its empty core, bursting the bubble economy and collapsing the whole artificial edifice – the artifice – of fake finance, like the house of cards that it is. This realization lays the groundwork for a more enlightened financial and investment system grounded in real economics, a healthy environment and the cultivation of a humane human civilization.

The unsustainable illusion that is the wetikonomy, however, is based on and supported by violence or the threat of violence, from a personal level up to the capacity to collectively wage war, both visible and invisible. The ability and willingness to kill is not an illusion. This is why many people collude in supporting and perpetuating the illusion, for to not do so inevitably leads to some form of coercion, which is a subtle (or not so subtle) form of violence. In the highly uncivilized world of the wetikonomy, ‘might makes right.’ The nature of the beast that we are dealing with needs to be factored into the equation of how we creatively and strategically respond.

The wetikonomy, to use journalist Matt Taibbi’s infamous phrase describing the major global investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a “vampire squid” that is sucking, draining off and redistributing more and more wealth from the poor, and the formerly middle class, into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. This “great vampire squid,” to quote Taibbi, is “wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Unlike a real economy that creates wealth, the vampire squid wetikonomy, a global, organized crime syndicate, extracts and extorts wealth from the real economy and from real people like you and me. There is an actual creature called Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which literally translates as Vampire Squid from Hell, a living symbol and perfect description of wetikonomics.

The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity

By Paul Levy, Reality Sandwich

The following is Part One in a series. Read Part Two here.

In the book Columbus and other Cannibals, indigenous author Jack D. Forbes lucidly explores a psychological disease that has been informing human self-destructive behavior that Native American people have known about for years. After reading his book, it was clear to me that he was describing the same psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I wrote about in my book, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis. I introduce the idea that from the dawn of human history our species has fallen prey to a collective psychosis which I call malignant egophrenia. Speaking about this very same psychic epidemic, Forbes writes, “For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.”[i] Indigenous people have been tracking the same “psychic”[ii] virus that I call malignant egophrenia for many centuries and calling it “wetiko,” a Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others. Professor Forbes, who was one of the founders of the Native American movement during the early sixties, says, “Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.”[iii] Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a “psychosis” in the true sense of the word as being a “sickness of the soul or spirit.” Though calling it by different names, Forbes and I are both pointing at the same illness of the psyche, soul and spirit that has been at the root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself.

As if performing a magic ritual, in exploring the entity of wetiko, we first have to invoke its spirit and enter into relationship with it. We must contemplate and engage wetiko as objectively as we are able, as if it exists outside of ourselves, lest we get too “mixed up” with the object of our contemplation. Due to its unique psychic origin, the epidemiology of wetiko is different than any other disease. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko virus is that it is incarnating in the very psyche which itself is the means of our investigation. Aware of this conundrum, Forbes explains that he is attempting to examine the disease, “from a perspective as free as possible from assumptions created by the very disease being studied.”[iv] If we are not aware of the frame of reference through which we are examining the wetiko virus, our investigation will be tainted by the disease, obscuring the clear vision needed to start the healing process. Studying how wetiko disease manifests in others, as well as in the “other” part of ourselves, will help us to see “it” more objectively. Seeing this psychological disease manifesting in the world is the looking glass through which we can potentially recognize this same illness as it arises subjectively within our own minds.

After evoking an entity like wetiko, in order to study it as objectively as possible, we have to hermetically seal it within an alchemical container. This ensures that its mercurial spirit doesn’t vaporize back into the invisibility of the unconscious, where it would act itself out through us. Jung continually emphasized the importance of developing a container or vessel in which to catch troublesome spirits like wetiko. He writes, “Therefore, if anything is wrong, take it out of its place and put it in the vessel that is between your neighbor and yourself…For love of mankind, create a vessel into which you can catch all that damned poison. For it must be somewhere — it is always somewhere — and not to catch it, to say it doesn’t exist, gives the best chance to any germ.”[v] Wetiko is an elusive spirit that is challenging to pin down and say it is “this” or “that.” At the same time, it is critical that we attempt to delineate its properties. Unlike a physical virus, the wetiko bug can not be isolated materially, but its characteristic signature can be detected and seen in the peculiar operations of a psyche that is under its spell. To not recognize the existence of the wetiko germ — “to say it doesn’t exist” — allows the psychic infection to act itself out unrestrained. Being “always somewhere” is to be nonlocal, which means that it is always around, even potentially, or especially, within ourselves. In calling forth the wetiko spirit, we are simultaneously creating, through our inquiry itself, the container in which we can study this bug so as to understand what in fact we are dealing with, see how it operates out in the world, in others, and subjectively, within ourselves. In order to come full circle in our contemplative exercise/exorcise, we have to homeopathically take our contemplation back within ourselves. As if in a dream where the inner is the outer, we can recognize that the wetiko virus that we have been tracking “out there,” outside of ourselves, is a reflection of and co-related to the same process within ourselves. Encoded in wetiko’s symptomology is a revelation, something that is most important for us to know.

A Disease of Civilization

Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a disease of civilization, or lack thereof. To quote Forbes, “To a considerable degree, the development of the wetiko disease corresponds to the rise of what Europeans choose to call civilization. This is no mere coincidence.”[vi] The unsustainable nature of industrial civilization is based on, and increasingly requires violence to maintain itself. Genuine “civilization,” in essence, means not killing people. Referring to the lack of “civility” in modern society, Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization and responded by saying, “I think it would be a good idea.” It makes sense that native people would know about malignant egophrenia, as they were both oppressed by, but weren’t, at least initially, under the “curse” of modern civilization. Being under the sway of modern civilization can feel like something foreign to our nature is being imposed upon us, as if we are living in an occupied land. Modern civilization suffers from the overly one-sided dominance of the rational, intellectual mind, a one-sidedness that seemingly dis-connects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. Due to its disassociation from the whole, wetiko is a disturber of the peace of humanity and the natural world, a sickness which spawns aggression and is capable of inciting violence amongst living beings. The wetiko virus is the root cause of the inhumanity in human nature, or shall we say, our seemingly inhuman nature. This “psychic virus,” a “bug” in “the system,” in-forms and animates the madness of so-called civilization, which, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop feeds the madness within ourselves.

Forbes continues, “this disease, this wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.”[vii] We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s psyche from the beginning of time. Like a fractal, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously — intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (between ourselves), as well as collectively (as a species). “Cannibalism,” in Forbes’s words, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”[viii] Those afflicted with wetiko, like a cannibal, consume the life-force of others — human and nonhuman — for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives. One example that symbolizes our self-destructive, collective madness is the oil companies’ destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, the lungs of our planet. This is literally a full-bodied revelation showing us what we are doing to ourselves. Another literal example that is symbolically illustrating the wetiko complex in action is Monsanto genetically engineering terminator seeds that do not reproduce a second generation, thus forcing farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto for each year’s new crop. This makes survival for many poor farmers impossible, which has triggered a wave of suicides among farmers, as Monsanto grows richer from the process.

Forbes writes, “The overriding characteristic of the wetiko is that he consumes other human beings, that is, he is a predator and a cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease.”[ix] Predators, “full-blown” wetikos are not in touch with their own humanity, and therefore can’t see the humanity in others. Instead, they relate to others either as potential prey or as a threat to their dominance. As if a different breed who is more animal-like predator than ordinary human being, someone fully taken over by the wetiko psychosis consumes others’ lives, physically, emotionally, psychically and meta-physically, beyond just the material body and physical possessions to the level of meaning itself. Wetikos are the “anti-artists” of our culture, embodying the opposite of what creative artists do. Unlike an artist (please see my article “The Artist as Healer of the World”), who creates life-enhancing meaning and enriches the world without robbing others, a wetiko takes and consumes without giving anything back, continually draining and impoverishing the planet of resources.

We are currently in the midst of “the greatest epidemic sickness known to man” (please see my article “Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic”). Many of us don’t even realize this, as our collective insanity is so pervasive that it has become normalized. Our collective madness has become transparent to us, as we see and interpret the world through it, rendering our madness invisible, thereby unwittingly colluding with the collective psychosis that is wreaking incredible death and destruction on our planet. Being “trans-parent,” our madness is beyond its mere appearance, which is to say, “beyond being apparent,” i.e., not visible. Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, as it expresses itself both in the very way we are looking, as well as all of the unspoken ways we have been conditioned not to perceive. Due to its cloak of invisibility, we don’t see our madness, a psychic blindness which makes us complicit in the creation of our madness.

Many of us can’t fathom the level of evil to which full-blown wetikos have fallen prey, and of which they are capable. Our lack of imagination of the evil existing in potential in humanity is a direct reflection of a lack of intimacy with our own potential evil, which enables the malevolence of wetiko to have nearly free rein in our world (please see my article “Shedding Light on Evil”). In our psychic blindness we are complicit in the spreading of the evil of the wetiko psychosis, a systematic evil whose depth is beyond the capacity of words to fully describe. Evil paralyzes the ability to language our experience, creating a seemingly unbridgeable gap between language and the event it is supposed to describe. Finding that place of no words, we simultaneously discover and create a new language, a language which is universal and transcends language itself, a language known as art.

Occupy Talks: Indigenous Perspectives on the Occupy Movement

Occupy Talks took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at Beit Zatoun, January, 23rd, 2012.  It was sponsored by the Canadian Auto Workers, Canadian Labour Congress, CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy Ryerson University, Environmental Justice Toronto. Below are several videos of speakers at the event.

Tom B.K. Goldtooth is the Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), headquartered at Bemidji, Minnesota. A social change activist within the Native American community for over 30 years, he has become an environmental and economic justice leader, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Tom co-produced an award winning documentary film, Drumbeat For Mother Earth, which addresses the affects of bio-accumulative chemicals on indigenous peoples, and is active with many environmental and social justice organizations besides IEN. Tom is a policy advisor on environmental protection, climate mitigation, and adaptation. Tom co-authored the REDD Booklet on the risks of REDD within indigenous territories and a member of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change — the indigenous caucus within the UNFCCC.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation also known as Pukatawagan in Northern Manitoba, Canada, is an activist for Indigenous rights and environmental justice. With his roots in the inner city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Clayton began his work as a community organizer, working with Aboriginal youth. Over the years Clayton’s work has taken him to five continents across our Mother Earth. Based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Clayton is involved in many initiatives to support the building of an inclusive movement for energy and climate justice. He serves on the board of the Global Justice Ecology Project and Canadian based Raven Trust. Recognized by Utne Magazine as one of the top 30 under 30 activists in the United States and as a “Climate Hero 2009” by Yes Magazine, Clayton is the Tar Sands Campaign Director for the Indigenous Environmental Network. He works across Canada, Alaska and the lower 48 states with grassroots indigenous communities to defend against the sprawling infrastructure that includes pipelines, refineries and extraction associated with the tar sands, the largest and most destructive industrial project in the history of mankind.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a writer, activist, and scholar of Michi Saagiik Nishnaabeg ancestry and is a band member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba, is an Adjunct Professor in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and an instructor at the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge, Athabasca University. She has also lectured at Ryerson University, the University of Victoria, the University of Manitoba, and the University of Winnipeg. Leanne has worked with Indigenous communities and organizations across Canada and internationally over the past 15 years on environmental, governance and political issues. She has published three edited volumes including Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence and Protection of Indigenous Nations (2008, Arbeiter Ring), and This is An Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Barricades (with Kiera Ladner, 2010, Arbeiter Ring). Leanne has published over thirty scholarly articles and raised over one million dollars for community-based research projects over her career. She has written fiction and non-fiction pieces for Now Magazine, Spirit Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Anishinabek News, the Link, and Canadian Art Magazine.

Headdress

Headdress was created to expose the negative and offensive ways in which Native American imagery is appropriated in “fashion” and “trendy” photographs on popular internet sites. The zine is composed entirely of found images from blogs, juxtaposed with critical quotes from theorists and bloggers examining the effects of cultural appropriation.

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