Ok, so what now?: Answers, solutions, advice

This is a response to the "Outdoor Recreation: Settler Destruction and Escapism, are you consuming or reciprocating?" post.

------------------

You may have noticed that I tend to offer critique and not much as for answers, solutions, and advice, beyond–ORGANIZE! and LANDBACK! 

You may notice that I take a hard line and leave little room to nuance your way out of these unsettling feelings held in these unsettling histories which shaped this existentially tenuous present.

I do this on purpose. Because I can’t offer answers, because I don't know you. Only you know when you are moving toward the fertile, non-innocent, messy, present and when you are escaping from that mess that in the end holds the way out. The only way out is through.

For example if you love “nature” I want to suggest that instead of spending time connecting with the homelands of a People who are currently surviving ongoing genocidal campaigns against them in the form of extractive-capitalism (cultural and material) and direct racialized violences like the attacks on ICWA, you work in solidarity with them as Indigenous Peoples are notably the best land stewards alive. 

BUUUUT, if you enter organizing spaces with the same kind of entitlement with which you feel to these “national parks” and “public lands” then please, do NOT join any Indigenous-led orgs. 

So for this reason I offer more questions than solutions. For most of us we wouldn’t understand the answer to these unsettling questions if we heard them. We have a LOT of disassimilating to do. And so I offer questions for you to be with, to hold, sit in the uncertainty of. Not questions to answer. 

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” 
- Rainer Maria Rilke 

My people are quick to want an answer. We don't sit in the uncertainty of a question. This avoidance / escapism often leads to justification / spiritual bypassing / toxic positivity. So I tend to take a hard line in order to build that tension. To offer questions that are not so easily answered. 

Escaping the “capitalist-colonial hell” to the outdoors ESPECIALLY as a “lifestyle” is adding to the collapse of the world—in that too many of us who claim to care about land are just playing in it with no relationality, reciprocity—what are you offering the land which needs land defenders more than ever! Connecting with lands who’s Indigenous peoples have been displaced from rather than joining Indigenous and Black-led struggles against environmental racism and destruction is contemporary settler-colonialism and contributing to our extinction. 

The open-pit mine and the National Park are both essential pieces of this settler colonial-capitalist project. Both were created to preserve and progress the character of the affluent Euro-settler colonist patriarchy.
This is what I mean by finding connection in the place you live. Don’t look for ways to escape the horrific realities we are living in, find a way to get closer to them where you already are. Find ways of developing and caring for the connections you already have to land. The connections to exploited migrant farm workers through the food you eat. To extractive capitalism and ancient mollusks in the gypsum in the drywall in the place you live and the concrete that surrounds that place.  

I am not telling everyone not to go camping ever again. But I would wager that there are people who've read this for whom I would suggest don't go camping for a year and spend that time and money in ways that actually do build connection to place rather than offer escapes from the fact that we are so isolated and displaced and lost and don't even know why. This is also why I don't usually offer much advice publicly. Even as we may share overlapping histories, the shifts we need - to be communal / connected / in right relation - are personal / diverse.

And in my experience my people are quick to want an answer. We don't sit in the uncertainty of a question. Which often leads to justification / spiritual bypass / toxic positivity. So I tend to take a hard line in order to create that tension. To create a question that is not so easily answerable.

Which is a long way to say: I can't answer that for you, only you know if your relationship to land is whole and includes your specific inherited cultural and historical relationships through which you are already connected to land — and holds a genuine and everyday reciprocal relationship that seeks to heal the wounds of that history and the betrayals of that relationship.

Which for me personally means staying in the question because I genuinely still don't know for myself and the question may be how I find that right relation

You’re the only one who knows if you are leaning into the hard parts. moving toward the healing water of bodhichitta -- where our grief, joy, and collective suffering pools.
all that said. growing is also fucking painful. Like I remember when I first got to grad school and had the bad idea of taking a class on extinction and a class in colonialism in the same semester. Everything hurt. The expansion was overwhelming and felt like it wanted to stretch me beyond my capacity. And with the help of a therapist, some meds, and support from my fellow students and the professors I survived that year and actually found a home in those places

I ask that “you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” 

In love and rage
❤️‍🔥 / nic