We all descend from indigenous people and we’ve all been assimilated
In Sustainability Simplified, I clarify that a culture being indigenous doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. An indigenous Indian group that puts up a casino is pushing addiction. An African politician who finds oil and gets cozy with the global oil industry is too.
Any culture that doesn’t live sustainably will find itself running out of something, leading it to conflict with others or collapse. But indigenous cultures that endure tend to be sustainable.
People praise indigenous cultures with land acknowledgments and such.
Well, we all descend from indigenous cultures. Yes, even former colonists and slaveholders can trace their roots to someone indigenous. For that matter, we can probably all trace our roots to someone enslaved.
Likewise, everyone who isn’t living sustainably has been assimilated, so even people who are still living where they can trace their ancestry back as far as possible, maybe even to the first people who settled that space, have lost their original culture. They’ve been assimilated into mainstream global culture. In the book I call it PAID culture, for (if you don’t mind that I reordered the letters for the acronym): polluting, depleting, addicting, and imperialist.
Another term for assimilated into PAID culture is corrupted from its original values. We all descend from indigenous people and we’ve all been assimilated and corrupted, except the few hundred thousand sustainable indigenous people remaining in remote places PAID culture hasn’t yet figured out how to pave over or irrigate.
From one perspective, we’re not so special, nor is anyone else. From another perspective, we’ve lost an unimaginable amount of culture and ability to sustain life.
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