The danger of longing to go back to a past
Who we are as individuals, as a culture, and as the world is not the same from moment to moment. Our biology, the context of our existence, is forever changing.
We simply cannot step into the same river twice. There is no guarantee that the person who wakes in the morning is the person who went to sleep the night before.
Yet so many long to go backwards in time, as if this will offer a solution to our problems.
In a world where we have dismissed and eliminated Indigenous wisdom almost universally, the current movement to go back to an Indigenous past is reckless. It eliminates the whole by only seeing a part. And it creates a narcissistic trap for our indigenous peoples, placing them in that very position that their wisdom did so well to curtail – that of the superior being with the one right way.
Instead we might welcome indigenous wisdom into a new future, to transcend and include. This is a conversation of deep collective respect and recognition of a whole story and not one seen through a single, possibly rose-coloured lens.
This type of new future invites synergy, where the collective wisdom of our Indigenous elders and the open-hearted and open-minded threading of Western culture into that story might create a way that is both present and focused around a better future for Earth and all of her creatures.
The single greatest reason to look to the past is to learn from it, to take these learnings into our future, to become wiser for the experience of the past.
Photo taken January 6th 2021