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Sharing one skin: native Canadian Jeanette Armstrong explains how the global economy robs us of our full humanity
New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 1997 by Jeannette C. Armstrong
In a healthy whole community, the people interact with each other in shared emotional response. They move together emotionally to respond to crisis or celebration. They `commune' in the everyday act of living. Being a part of such a communing is to be fully alive, fully human. To be without community in this way is to be alive only in the flesh, to be alone, to be lost to being human. It is then possible to violate and destroy others and their property without remorse.
The protectors of Earth
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With these things in mind, I see how a market economy subverts community to where whole cities are made up of total strangers on the move from one job to another. This is unimaginable to us. How can a person be a human while continuously living in isolation, fear and adversity? How can people 20 yards away from each other be total strangers? I do see that having to move continuously just to live is painful and that close emotional ties are best avoided in such an economy. I do not see how one remains human, for community to me is feeling the warm security of familiar people like a blanket wrapped around you, keeping out the frost.
The Okanagan word we have for `extended family' is translated as `sharing one skin'. The concept refers to blood ties within community and the instinct to protect our individual selves extended to all who share the same skin. I know how powerful the solidarity is of peoples bound together by land, blood and love. This is the largest threat to those interests wanting to secure control of lands and resources that have been passed on in a healthy condition from generation to generation of families.
Land bonding is not possible in the kind of economy surrounding us, because land must be seen as real estate to be `used' and parted with if necessary. I see the separation is accelerated by the concept that `wilderness' needs to be tamed by `development' and that this is used to justify displacement of peoples and unwanted species. I know what it feels like to be an endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is being torn, deforested and poisoned by `development'. Every fish, plant, insect, bird and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their names and I touch them with my spirit. I feel it every day, as my grandmother and my father did.
I do know that people must come to community on the land. The transience of peoples criss-crossing the land must halt, and people must commune together on the land to protect it and all our future generations. Self-sustaining indigenous peoples still on the land are already doing this and are the only ones now standing between society and total self-destruction. They present an opportunity to relearn and reinstitute the rights we all have as humans. Indigenous rights must be protected, for we are the protectors of Earth.
I know that being Okanagan helps me have the capacity to bond with everything and every person I encounter. I do not stand silently by. I stand with you against the disorder.
