Can we re-indigenize?

John Trudell, born in 1946 in Omaha, Nebraska, is the son of a Santee Dakota father and a Mexican mother. He grew up near the Santee Reservation in northern Nebraska. He is an author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist.

“All human beings are descendants of tribal (indigenous) people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people (indigenous), we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind's attic, but it is accessible.” ― John Trudell

What does it mean to know who we were, where we were and what our purpose is? These are profound questions and something that I believe can take modern human beings living in a hyper-capitalistic culture decades to fully explore. We can only do a shallow exploration today.

Most of us today cannot survive in a forest for over a few days (including backpackers). John’s tribe, the Santee Tribe, was basically a woodlands tribe. I haven’t studied this tribe but I imagine the tribal youth knowing all the trees in their neighborhood like the back of their hand. I imagine them knowing which flowers produces which herbal medicine, which tree resin can be used as an adhesive and which will burn your tongue. I imagine them knowing how the river changes its flow in different seasons and across different years and which stars and constellations show up on the horizon at which time of the year. They knew who they were in relationship to other beings around them. Their forest was their grocery store, supermarket with pharmacy, their farm, playground and also a burial ground.

When empowered, Indigenous tribes act as genius keystone species in their local ecosystems, in that they take a systems approach to feel and think, and they act in ways that help all species thrive. Systems thinking is required for addressing polycrisis, for taking actions that simultaneously tackle climate, biodiversity loss, water, soil and air pollution, social injustices and inequalities or mental health crisis.

Can we reindigenize? Can we begin to know our ecosystems in such deep ways? Can we rediscover ourselves through relating to the forests and grasslands around us?