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.
