In the outside world, today is a day to honor the tools and the fodder of colonialism, of empire, of genocide.
We don’t do that here.
Our peoples have their own warrior traditions, ones that were perforce diverted and sublimated into the larger colonial one. the fact that our peoples volunteer in greater numbers than any other demographic neither contradicts nor changes that. indeed, the two are intimately intertwined, and the ribbon that binds them is still one of genocide. In this country, where do you go to try to survive when society has stripped every other option and opportunity from you and your people?
Resisting the call of colonial empire is more urgent than ever now, but in a place where such power dynamics are so mundane as to become both habit and reflex — merely what one does, without question or even thought — merely ceasing those habits is never enough. Humanity does not handle empty space well, and when one practice is removed, it immediately casts about for another to replace it.
And so we miss the opportunity to move from resistance to transformation.
We are caught in the gears of the current cycle: If we are not to fight for our oppressors, for whom do we fight? The logical answer would seem to be “For ourselves,” but it’s an answer to the wrong question. Don’t get me wrong; we must do that, yes, and that burden will increasingly be forced upon us in the days and years to come. But our world has come to a pass where resistance is not enough. It keeps the fight in the same frame, one that by definition legitimizes our opponents as opponents.
We need to step outside the colonial circle that keeps us trapped in constant battle.
If we are going to fight, it’s not enough to be against those who harm us; we must fight for a world in which such harms are no longer countenanced. Such a world is impossible without a return to Indigenous ways . . . and without a healthy earth to host them.
And this is not a fight, not a battle, but a war, that longest of long-term processes that requires brave hearts and warrior spirits of us all. The last 500 years-plus will be as nothing compared to the scope and scale of what is to come. Because, now we are fighting the inevitability of entropy, of fracture and fragmentation, dissolution and degeneration, of the inexorable decay of the living organism that birthed and holds us all — a slow death at human hands, one we might be able to prevent, but not without loss of limbs and living tissue.
War wounds of the most elemental kind.
This day falls on the calendar in the middle of autumn here: a season of clear skies and the purest of light, the sort that illumines that which is invisible to us the rest of the year — a time when earth and sky collaborate to show us new ways of seeing, and of being.
Here, the oldest sentries are the mountains, but compared to our short human lives, the trees outpace us, too. And the trees hold other lessons for us, as well, sometimes harder ones: a reminder that even when the opportunity to fulfill our essential purpose is stripped away, there is still work to be done that keeps us true to ourselves and our ways. We see it here daily in trees that the outside world calls “dead,” even as they foster abundant life that keeps the broader habitat healthy, hosting colonies of insects, sheltering rodents and other small spirits, providing a perch from which the raptors may hunt.
And then there are the trees felled by time, weather, or human hands.
They, too, continue to serve an essential purpose here. Pine and other evergreens, even aspen, too, provide the poles that support the roofs of traditional homes, form the arbors in use year-round, and aggregate into the latilla fences that help keep the most dangerous of the predators at bay. The best, perhaps, are those felled naturally, with plenty of time to dry on forest floor and mountain slope. But however they meet this transitional moment, dried thoroughly, stripped or unstripped, they become an essential element of place here, and its people, too. And they conspire with the light to bring us long shadows that point the way, cast by poles and posts shaded in purest gold.
And this is important, for the shadows direct our eyes, and out thoughts, back to the earth. Back to our mother, the one who births and holds us all, the one without whom no battle matters, for there will be no winners and nothing to resist.
The latillas, like the trees they once were, are sentries of the earth, scouts of the light. They will point us in the right direction, if only we divest ourselves of the battle long enough to see the real fight, that for a world healthy and whole.
~ Aji
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