This year, the Idle No More movement called for Earth Day rallies to focus attention on the links between Indigenous issues and the environmental movement
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something about this piece really sits wrongly with me -- something about the rooted/rootless : indigenous/whitness analogy, maybe. movement is a fundamental, universal condition of modernity. but i'm not sure.
i hope some smarter people read this, though, because i'd like to hear how it strikes others.
Yeah, I do feel that though the author's presented perspective is Indigenous vs. White settlers, that the feeling is is that it applies to all settlers
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I noticed that too. I was thinking, what about the people who moved about? What was their experience of culture and roots and homeland and home? How does it differ from that of modern-day "civilized" migrants, or from European immigrants 300 years ago?
One thing that stands out to me is that it would have been more connected, culture-wise and people-wise. The migrations of bands/groups/tribes/cultures, as opposed to the migrations of individuals/families/parts-of-families.
The movement of immigrants to the early US and Canada were a mass of individuals, a horde of singular entities who while often having culture in common, had left their previous homeland in search of a better means of survival, abandoning a homeland where they were for the most part poor or otherwise lacking some important ingredient of what makes people thrive. In other words, they were ex-pats of a culture/society/homeland which had failed them in some fashion, and they discarded it to sail off into the unknown and seek out prosperity on an individual basis
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I don't know how things worked in Canada, but amongst Australian Aborigines there was a fair amount of movement of people between tribes through marriage. Because of the habit in some tribes of having a a young man's first wife be an older woman and an old man's later wives be younger women, some people married many times if they lived a full human lifespan. Someone could end up two or three nations over from where they started, speaking a different language and telling different stories. The skin name system exists largely to allow this to happen, by keeping track of degrees of possible consanguinuity even if the degree of actual relationship has been lost to memory... and also to provide people who moved between tribes with a ready made system of support and justice just as if they'd managed to stay within their own part of their larger overall tribe
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That's interesting. I think this article is a mash-up of the environmentalist idea that settling down will ease the demand of resources AND why white people should support INM. I agree with both ideas but for different reasons. From the comments, his generalizations about indigenous people weakened rather than strengthened his argument.
i hope some smarter people read this, though, because i'd like to hear how it strikes others.
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One thing that stands out to me is that it would have been more connected, culture-wise and people-wise. The migrations of bands/groups/tribes/cultures, as opposed to the migrations of individuals/families/parts-of-families.
The movement of immigrants to the early US and Canada were a mass of individuals, a horde of singular entities who while often having culture in common, had left their previous homeland in search of a better means of survival, abandoning a homeland where they were for the most part poor or otherwise lacking some important ingredient of what makes people thrive. In other words, they were ex-pats of a culture/society/homeland which had failed them in some fashion, and they discarded it to sail off into the unknown and seek out prosperity on an individual basis ( ... )
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