re:indigenous

During my second year of law school, I took a course called Law, Markets and Culture, taught by the only tenured female African-American professor on the faculty of the school. It was a ranging examination of the intersections of economy and jurisprudence, and the struggle for human thriving amidst these often-forbidding forces.

I wrote our 24-hour final exam in that class about Burning Man, analyzing the festival, in the context of Western culture, as an "alternative for structuring relations." I dug the paper out of my files as I thought about this blog post, and read through it with glee. I'd just returned from my first time out on the playa when school started, and suddenly I thought I had discovered the secret to fixing our poor, broken civilization. It was like I was in graduate school, or something: my Marxist-inspired critiques of the market economy flowed without pause into a discussion of race, gender, and morality. The final ingredient in this intellectual goulash was a statement on Burning Man's potential to revivify our humanity as we traded in goods and services:

". . . Burning Man participants bypass modes of market-based relations and their attendant alienation, and experience interpersonal interactions as holistic sites of creativity and growth. Festival participants spend each of the seven days of the festival in pursuit of joyful experience, creative self-expression, and basic survival needs; in these simultaneously common and radically divergent pursuits, participants interact not in service of the market, but in service of one another. This departure from traditionally limited, stifled and hurried relationships in the context of the market arguably allows participants to more fully reveal themselves and more fully witness one another, thus contributing to one another’s human flourishing."

(Yes -- yes, I did just quote myself in my own blog.) My main point, couched in all this clap-trap, though, was that Burning Man is a rare and valuable opportunity for urban-bound privileged folks to taste some form of indigeneity. How do we live on the earth together? This is the question that 50,000 people work to answer each year, albeit at the world's largest party, one utterly reliant on fossil fuel, from the gasoline in the cars to the plastic wrap on the Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels.

I've been reflecting a lot on that tension in recent weeks, since returning from my own pilgrimage to the playa. Looking at other people's pictures on Facebook and remembering my own experience of all that wildness, all that tribal chic, all that effort in one great undulating paean to unpredictability, dancing with the flames of chaos -- I recognize the seed of remembrance of who we are. We go out there to lose our minds and find our way again. So many of the most magnetic Burning Man stories are stories of hearts cracking open, greeting the dawn in the arms of a friend or a lover or the mother earth herself, sobbing and rejoicing at the truth of our connection and the ultimate truth of the love that is everything. It is so easy to forget, but out on the playa, even in the midst of all the noise and excess, people can be reminded.

And that is really the project of our time -- the remembering that all of us are indigenous to this earth. We all live here, we all belong here. Martin Prechtel writes, "every human being alive today, modern or tribal, primal or over-domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and above all, indigenous in one way or another. And like all indigenous peoples today, that indigenous soul of the modern person has been either banished to some far reaches of the dream world or is under attack by the modern mind."

If we are to survive, we must remember.

I spent much of today lying in my cozy treehouse apartment in the rain, spending time with my mother who is visiting from Los Angeles. I was reading magazine articles by Prechtel, by an Ojibwe woman who developed www.fourdirectionsteachings.com to make indigenous teachings accessible, by Jesse Wolf Hardin of the Anima Center in New Mexico. I oscillated between these reminders of the immediacy and immensity of the challenge -- how we must utterly transform our way of being on this planet, grieve the failure of our culture, learn how to return home to the earth and to one another -- and work on the internet, punctuated by visits to Facebook.

I started to notice the difference in my physical feeling, even my own self-awareness, when I was reading Sacred Fire magazine and when I was scouring the web or looking through my friends' photographs. Connection and distraction. Remembrance and forgetting. A continuous loop.

It is no longer a question, though, in my mind, that remembering is the great task of our time. And how does this work take place? Another article I read today suggested that it ultimately requires a releasing of all thought, all preconceived notions no matter how grand and carefully-wrought, and instead allowing for listening. Listen to the earth, watch what is going on around you, and be with the web of life that will emerge before your eyes. Find your place in that sacred web by witnessing the living points spanning around you and beyond you.

Maybe the world wide web teaches us, in some way, how to think in a web -- how to intuitively track the thread leading from one node to another, how to recognize interconnection. Maybe it is our unique position at this time in history to re-indigenize even that gift, so that we can again find sight of our link to the life that exists around us, inextricably connected to us, and remember how to be with it now and into the future.