Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

You know that feeling when your heart soars at a sunset or a moonrise, or a mountain panorama or the ocean? That I-am-so-blessed/so-grateful/so-privileged-to-be living-this-life feeling, where for one brilliant moment it all makes sense and there is a logic and a system to the world and though we are small we are magical and we belong to everything? That feeling?

That’s a fragment of your inheritance.

I should be clear: I’m writing now for descendants of settlers like me. If you’re indigenous, you don’t need this post because it doesn’t refer to you unless you have been deeply alienated from your native culture.

This piece is about sifting for the bits of connection to place and right relationship with the planet that are all of our birthrights, being of the Earth, but which have been so lost in the light-complected Europeans who went conquering as soon as they were able.

No, I’m writing for the Anglish folks like me, the Anglo-Americans, who came from colonialism and whose indigeneity, whose connection, whose sense of place and kinship has been stripped from them by generations of inculcated suppression and brutality. Whose antecedents whipped enslaved people, subjugated and murdered native people because they had lost something precious in the course of conquering the world.

Because they didn’t understand what a horror Englishness had made of them.

Or Spanishness. Or Frenchness or Portugueseness or Dutchness. Because let’s be very frank: when this disease sprang from Western Europe, all the nations partook.

I speak for myself: I long for deep connection with place. I adore where I live and have for more than 40 years: the contours of the beautiful land, the waters, the trees and plants and creatures. I love them desperately.

And yet I know I am a stranger.

The people who have lived here for more than 10,000 years are the ones who know it. Coast Miwok people, Southern Pomo people. They know the medicines, the foods, the places. They remember the stories which are the history of prehistory.

Just because it wasn’t written down doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

And people who looked like me tried to exterminate them. Still discriminate against them. Now, lump them with other brown natives and seek to expel them from the current political reality I call “my country”.

Underneath all the convention lathered over me like shit plaster, there is a fire dancer. There is a man proud of…if not his people, at least himself and his species. Who will howl at the Moon. Who is living in a vital way that pale culture finds embarrassing and unnecessary.

Who knows the soil and the Sun and the wind in the trees here, in the little place that is my home.

But this goddamned ENGLISHNESS gets in the way.

I sift for my indigeneity. I know it’s strained, given that only a few generations ago my people came from a long history of kowtowing and subjugation to monstrous men deemed noble. 1620, not that long. 405 years. And they were dark-hearted religious fanatics and oppressors and exploiters brimming with entitlement. They didn’t know Place, nor Groundedness. They were drunk with a belief that made them monsters.

But I sift for it in the dirt under my fingernails. I mine for it in the pile of leaves behind my house. I weep for it when I hear the simple knowledge of those whose backgrounds, hard though they are,, are not so disconnected.

I have had moments in my life when I danced about the leaping fire, whooping my joy at being alive in this world with beloved kin.

Nearly no one I know has had that experience, and it makes me want to weep for all of them.

I sift this dust to find flakes of authenticity, of memory, of reciprocity. Not gold: gold is crass and meaningless.

But I will never know what it means to be indigenous. I can only long for glimpses of the sorrow, the anger, the loss, the pride, the tenaciousness.

If there is hope for us, it is in reconnecting with our planet and the systems that give rise to us and sustain us. The exploitation must stop.

Native people know this. Native elders shake their heads: how can they be so blind?

I don’t excuse myself from the blindness. I am poisoned with Englishness, and I know it.

But I’m trying. I’m listening. I’m studying.

I am watching the horizon for the Sun.