The White Man Says Walk

Gabor Mate, in his book In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts (Vintage, Canada, 2008) recounts how he happened to arrive at an intersection in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where he works, at the same time of as one of his aboriginal patients. When the light changed, she said with typical indigenous humor, "The white man says walk." She probably didn't realize how much one could read into that statement, especially when you match that with the red hand that first flashes a warning and then becomes solid, saying "Don't walk."

Our aboriginal hosts, when we as European settlers first came here, and now as our neighbors, our ancestors and ourselves having extensively settled what was their land, have often held up flashing red hands of warning. They told the new arrivals what was safe to eat and not. They told them what was good to use for medicine. They even advised our forefathers where not to travel and where not to settle, e.g. in the flood pains of our rivers. However, we did not heed them so now you have extensive floods threatening our cities and rural lands such as Winnipeg and the Red River Valley on a regular basis.

Today, the flashing red hands are more likely to refer to government and business plans to exploit natural resources such as with mining, or to build pipelines across their lands to transport oil. More recently, the hands have been held up to try to get government to reconsider legislation that no longer protects our water supply as it once did.

Our First Nations neighbors have always had a different understanding of their relationship to creation and the land then most of the rest of us who have come to this land have. They see themselves as an integral part of the web of creation. Europeans and their descendants who settled the Americas, coming from what was then regarded as a major bulwark of Christendom, inherited a worldview based on a certain interpretation of passages from the Bible that formed the basis of their beliefs of what it means to "subdue… and have dominion over" the earth and its other creatures (Genesis 1:26-28). Unfortunately, we have not done a very good job of taking care of what has been entrusted to us. It seems we have instead chosen to exploit the earth to its fullest and use up resources that are there as fast as we can, especially nowadays when our society seems to have become even more materialistic and greedy. As my colleague's patient said, "The white man says walk." In other words, the white man has chosen to understand "subdue and have dominion" as giving them free license to  "walk all over" the earth in the negative sense in which that phrase is often used in our vernacular these days. From the middle centuries of the first millennium of The Common Era, the white man has been "walking," exploring and pushing the limits around the world. Now, of course, some are even extending that into space.

Sometimes, the flashing red hand has become a solid red hand, and government and business plans and projects have been delayed or even stopped. My sense is that this is going to increasingly become the case if our governments and their business supporters do not change the way they view our relationship to the earth. My hope and prayer is that the open redhead that says stop, will not become the clenched red fist that we have already sometimes seen, including with arms, weapons, in it. Sometimes I fear that our government's policies towards our First Nations neighbors, who are in too many cases still being kept in Third World conditions in a country that is otherwise rated around the world as one of the most desirable to live in, will drive them in that direction out of sheer frustration. We have to be thankful that it is part of First Nations temperament to be patient and wait, but everything has its limits.