CONFRONTING THE POWER OF EMPIRE: A LESSON FROM THE GWAII HAANAS

Why do we put up with this? I’ve just been watching a program on the Haida Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Heritage Site, on the Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) in BC, which provides a remarkable cultural contrast to the problems that bedevil our culture. The park and the site are jointly protected by the Haida people and the Canadian government, and the number of visitors is strictly limited. An area of stunning beauty (depicted above and below) and astonishing wildness (some of the highest rains and winds on the planet), the site is of course seriously threatened by the oil cartel’s shoddily constructed and negligently managed oil tankers. And the Haida people, whose self-contained and rich culture is arguably one of the best models of how to live in human history, were ravaged by epidemics of the white man’s diseases, to which they had no immunity, brought by miners, loggers and whalers. The 9000 year-old matrilineal Haida culture had about 30,000 people living in total harmony in 800 communities scattered throughout its 4000 square mile, 200-island area. Between 1780 and 1915, disease, mainly smallpox, reduced their numbers to about 500, and children were forced into residential schools to indoctrinate them into the colonizers’ culture. Our culture clear-cut the Northern forests and drastically reduced the fish population on which the Haida culture had thrived.

The remaining Haida have been able to protect only the Southern third of the islands from logging and other development by our invasive and destructive culture. The area sports a staggering biological diversity, including, because of the islands’ remoteness, some species not found anywhere else on Earth.

These were a people who, for 9000 years, knew nothing of the learned helplessness that oppresses our culture. The word Haida means simply ‘People’. Their genesis legend is that Raven, the great spirit, coaxed the first humans out of a clamshell. Their relationship with the land, the sea, the forest and the air, and all their creatures, is a profoundly sacred one, one of complete interconnectedness.

Think of the problems that we are struggling with today: lack of adequate and affordable health care, housing, education, safe and healthy food, and security in old age. For 9000 years the Haida had none of these problems. They lived within their means. They had an egalitarian society where resources were shared. They learned what they needed to know (and what we would be wise to learn) from studying nature, from each other, and from the stories passed down from previous generations. They lived in a world of great abundance, and took only what they needed. They revered the community elders. Although they had the wherewithal to create an exploding population and imperial, urban society (they were the only ones skilled enough to cross the strait to the mainland, but did so rarely), they did not — their population was never more than 8 people per square mile, and women had an average of only 3-4 children, which kept population stable for millennia. In short, they managed their numbers and their consumption in a way that prevented any of the problems that plague us today from ever arising. They lived responsibly and sustainably. And very comfortably.

So my answer to Shoshana’s question is: Our culture is doomed, and we will not ‘confront the power of empire’ and overcome our learned helplessness. In our urban, horrifically overpopulated, rapacious and expansionist artificial world, we can no longer see that the ‘power of empire’ is an inevitable consequence of living beyond our means and of disconnection from the appreciation of nature as sacred. We cannot learn the lessons of the Haida because our culture’s constant noise and indoctrination, the ‘machine in our heads’, no longer lets us hear or understand these lessons intuitively, there is no natural context for us to see and hear and feel the truth that allowed previous cultures to thrive for millennia. We need people like Shoshana to stop wasting time trying to make a hopelessly damaged and self-destructive culture work, and instead help us design the next culture, after ours has destroyed itself. That next culture will be one that melds the best innovation and technology of our present dreadful culture, with the timeless and instinctive wisdom of all other cultures, successful and sustainable cultures, human and animal, that we have so tragically forgotten.