The space between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North and Central America, or Australia, or in many other places, might not seem that important to those of us who are not Indigenous to a particular place. As settlers who are in relative positions of occupation and power, we have the luxury of ignorance or indifference. Someone like me might argue that I too have a strong attachment to a specific place – “I’m a Canadian living in my own house on five acres of forest on the northern Sunshine Coast of British Columbia in the Pacific Northwest of North America”. Or I might claim an attachment to an ancestral homeland somewhere else – “I was born in Middleton, on the northeast coast of Nova Scotia” or “My ancestors come from northeastern Scotland (with some also from England, Ireland and Germany). But I definitely feel Scottish, maybe even Pictish!” Or we might say “we’re all human”, or these things are “universal” and their attachment to specific peoples and places “don’t matter”. Indigenous answers to the question “Where are you from?” usually identify someone who has a long history connected to a particular place, to somewhere whose stories reveal deep histories and geographies of “country” – sea, sky, water, ice, people, living creatures, plants, formations of the land, ancestors, spirits – from where they come from. Since many Indigenous peoples around the world have been displaced because of settlers moving onto and taking their land (which is as true of Scotland as it is of anywhere else) many of these stories have become buried or are now told by people who spend little or no time in the places where these stories come from. Or they are written down and read in solitude by unrelated people in strange places, what Thomas King calls “private stories”. But these stories are central to who we are, where we come from, and what we have lost. As the Elders and their languages die, these stories can also become lost.

Stories are the narrative structures that connect people and all life, over time, to specific places.

 As Thomas King retells in The Truth about Stories:

The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. The Okanagan storyteller Jeannette Armstrong tells us that “Through my language I understand I am being spoken to, I’m not the one speaking. The words are coming from many tongues and mouths of Okanagan people and the land around them. I am a listener to the language’s stories, and when my words form, I am merely retelling the same stories in different patterns.” (p.2) and

The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. On way or another, we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives. (p.153)

The stories we tell may either be stories from the place where we come from, and the people and living creatures who have lived there – “stories planted in us”; or they can be stories we tell ourselves that have no real place, no ancestors we really know, no relationships beyond the trivial, the casual, the imaginary, the temporary, or the neurotic. Meaningful stories take time and many tellings, from generations of tellers. They are by definition communal, not just individual. They can change with each teller, or with the passage of time, because everything changes. Stories connect us to the reality of time and space. Big stories, or very old stories, are almost always sacred because they are about the long-term relationships we all have with life, our lives, and the matter, energy, spirit, and consciousness from which life is created. I am not talking about religion, which is another kind of story.

The answer to the question “Where are you from?” is deeply revealing of who you are.

The answer may point to a very big place through which people traditionally moved throughout the year following animals to hunt, fish or plants to gather, or to reconnect with family and friends. Inuit used to travel hundreds of miles every year by dogsled or boat. They knew the land, the ice, the water, the weather of every place they traveled through or lived in. As Siila Watt-Cloutier introduces us to her life in The Right to Be Cold she begins:

For the first ten years of my life, I travelled only by dog team. As the youngest child of four on our family hunting and ice-fishing trips, I would be snuggled into warm blankets and fur in a box tied safely on top of the qamutiik, the dogsled. I would view the vast expanses of Arctic sky and feel the crunching of the snow and the ice below me as our dogs, led by my brothers, Charlie and Elijah, carried us safely across the frozen land. I remember just as vividly the Arctic summer scenes that slipped by as I sat in the canoe on the way to our hunting and fishing grounds. The world was blue and white and rocky, and defined by the things that had an immediate bearing on us – the people who helped and cared for us, the dogs that gave us their strength, the water and land that nurtured us. The Arctic may seem cold and dark to those who don’t know it well, but for us a day of hunting and fishing brought the most succulent, nutritious food. Then there would be the intense joy as we gathered together as family and friends, sharing and partaking of the same animal in a communal meal. To live in a boundless landscape and a close-knit culture in which everything matters and everything is connected is a kind of magic. Like generations of Inuit, I bonded with ice and snow. (pp.vii-viii).

Or, it can be a comparatively small place, like the land of the Tla’amin Nation, the Klahoose and Homalco peoples in and around what is now Powell River, British Columbia, and the K’omoks Nation on Vancouver Island. The places may seem small, but the land itself is still big – a rich world of forest, ocean, mountains, lakes, fiords, and rockbound islands. The stories help to connect people to specific places, but they can also resonate throughout a bigger landscape.

In the first part of Tla’amin Elder Elsie Paul’s book Written as I Remember It, in the chapter “Where I Come From”, she relates one of many “legends” or stories about the land and sea. This story is about how “Twins Are Gifted” in which a healer and his twin brother could “really reach each other so well, they could feel, they could sense what the other one was doing”. In this story the healer’s brother went to fish on the “other side of Texada Island” where he and his companion got trapped by a storm. They were gone for two or three nights when the twins’ mother became very worried. The healer, Felix, “lit his fire and called upon the energy, the spirits around him, and reached out to his brother.” When the brother came home, he said “his brother found him over there” in the shape of lightning from Blubber Bay at the north end of Texada Island towards the two fishermen. “So he said to his travelling companion, ‘That was my brother. He’s looking for me. Now he’s gone. He’s found us.’” “[T]he special way in which twins were regarded” is sometimes generalized by anthropologists across the Coast Salish peoples, but the story looks like it can be traced to Elsie Paul’s great-uncle. (pp.81-83). As Elsie herself says:

And to me I don’t doubt that that happened. That was the story that was always told in our family. So workin’ with things, like, workin’ with nature, that they were able to use the resources – that nature was the resources of the people. Whatever it was, the water, the lightning, the animals, the birds. Everything’s connected. And in that particular case it was the lightning that found a way for them. (p.83, italics from original).

An Indigenous person’s ancestors may have arrived on their land within the last thousand years (such as the Inuit in the Eastern Arctic), or they may have roots going back millennia, such as the peoples of the North American Pacific Coast. Archeological and genetic evidence indicate that many, perhaps all, peoples of the Tla’amin area where I now live are direct descendants of people who arrived here more than 3000 years ago, according to archaeological evidence found on Ahgykson Island, formerly Harwood Island, just off the coast of the Tla’amin Nation’s main village site, Sliammon. Just to north of the Sunshine Coast, on an island in Heiltsuk territory near Bella Bella, archaeologists have uncovered a village site 14,000 years old, confirming oral history of very long-term continuous settlement in the area.

The first Egyptian pyramids were built about 5000 years ago. Han Chinese civilization did not begin to coalesce into the “Celestial Kingdom” until about 3000 years ago. Rome rose and fell in the space of less than 1000 years, and the Western civilizations of Europe and its colonial offshoots are about 500 years old. Given the age of the Heiltsuk and other sites along the Pacific Coast, it is likely that the original settlement of Tla’amin is much older than 3000 years. Indigenous communities in southern Africa, such as the San peoples, have lived near what may have been their original settlements for as long as 170,000 years. The oldest known continuous Indigenous communities in the world are in Australia, going back perhaps as long as 80,000 to 120,000 years.

My own background is typical of most settlers. On my mother’s side my ancestors are Scottish and German. The Scottish half arrived in Canada from the fever-infected slums of Glasgow a little over a hundred years ago. They probably originated in the Northeastern Highlands but, like so many Scots, were forced off their land into menial work on the big estates or into the cities. My Scottish Canadian ancestors settled in Southern Ontario and most of my relatives on that side still live in and around Toronto. My maternal grandmother’s family originally came from Bavaria in southern Germany (with a touch of French thrown in later) and have lived in Southern Ontario since the late 18^th century. They moved to Williamsburg, Ontario from New York under the leadership of the Reverend Johann Wilhelm Samuel Schwerdtfeger, my great grandfather many times removed. He was the first Lutheran Minister in Ontario.  He was born in Burgbernheim, Bavaria but emigrated to the American colonies as a young man around 1745. I do not know for sure, but it might be the case that he had to flee because of religious difficulties, being a Lutheran minister in Catholic Bavaria. During the Revolutionary War he and his family remained loyal to the British Crown and, as a result, were forced to move to Upper Canada in 1790. Both my Scottish and German ancestors were refugees – from loss of their land and poverty in the one case, and religious and political persecution in the other.

I know considerably less about my father’s ancestors except that they came from Northern Ireland, were mostly Protestant, and probably originated in Northern England and the Scottish Border country from where they moved to Ireland sometime during or after the late 17^th century. After 1680 England consolidated its rule over Catholic Ireland and encouraged Protestant settlement. The Wrights and Gordons moved to Southern Ontario in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries, then scattered across Canada.

On both sides of my family my grandparents moved for better opportunities out West. My mother’s family moved to what is now Thunder Bay (Fort William), Ontario where my grandfather worked as an electrician. My paternal grandparents moved to northcentral Saskatchewan where my grandfather Wright worked as a grain elevator inspector for the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. Both my grandmothers gave up their jobs (secretarial work and teaching) after marriage. In the case of my father’s mother, married life included raising ten children. Both my grandmothers lost a child to sickness when they were still young. My father was born in Star City, Saskatchewan. Shortly afterwards the Wright family all moved to nearby Tisdale (I suspect I’m related to a very large number of Wright descendants in and from Saskatchewan). The family migrations did not stop in Northwestern Ontario or the Prairies. My father, like most of his brothers, joined the military and moved around North America all his working life. My parents eventually retired in Victoria, British Columbia and, after many years living and working outside of Canada, I have returned to the West Coast where most of my immediate family now also lives.

I was born in Middleton, Nova Scotia not far from the Royal Canadian Air Force Base in Greenwood where my father was stationed at the time. This is in Segepenegatig in the Annapolis Valley, one of the seven divisions of Mi’kmaq Territory. The question “where are you from?” in the language of where I was born is tami tleyawin kil? I have lived in many Indigenous territories while moving around North America with my family, and then on my own to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and then back to Canada by way of Nunavut in the Arctic, finally settling in the Pacific Northwest near Desolation Sound in Tla-amin country.

London, England is probably the only place I have lived where there is no apparent Indigenous presence, unless you count Roman Londinium and its ancient Celtic inhabitants. Celts and Romans are however relatively recent arrivals to Britain, with Anglo-Saxons, Norse and Normans (Norse peoples from Northern France) more recent still. Pre-Celtic hunter-gatherers seem to have occupied Britain as much as 40,000 years ago but were eventually driven out by the advance of ice sheets during the last glacial period. Others returned about 14,000 years ago but were mostly gone by about 3000 years ago, their cultures, languages and possibly their lives replaced by Indo-European Celts coming originally from the Eurasian steppes in what is now Russia. Although Mesolithic and Neolithic sites are common throughout the British Isles, it is not clear who these people were. There appears to be little trace of them now other than a small amount of genetic evidence in surviving British people, and the remains of their villages and magnificent stone rings or henges, as in Stonehenge. Indigenous cultures in Australia, Africa, the Americas, or elsewhere around the world are much older than almost any we can find still surviving in Europe.

European migrants usually have trouble tracking down their origins and have rarely taken the trouble to learn whose territory they were or are on. We may know generally where our ancestors come from, but often the details have gotten lost along the way. After arriving in North America records sometimes went missing, names got changed, relatives went their separate ways, and life usually required a close attention to survival. Attachment to the Old Country became romanticized by many miles and, eventually, years of separation. There may have been deep roots to a specific place somewhere, but those roots were severed by thousands of miles of ocean and no practical way of keeping in touch with relatives who remained at home other than through letters – which some may not have been able to write or read. Many, like my Scottish (or possibly Pictish) ancestors were separated from their land and original homes long before they boarded those ships to the New World. Colonialism existed in Europe well before it was exported to colonies overseas. Ireland and Scotland were both aggressively invaded and colonized by the English beginning in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, just as Anglo-Saxons were invaded and colonised by Norse and Norman invaders in the 8^th to the 11^th centuries. Both English and Normans were mostly Germanic peoples. Welsh, Cornish, Pictish and other Brythonic Celtic peoples, as the pre-Germanic inhabitants of Britain were, have been under siege since the Romans first invaded their lands about 2000 years ago. This is also true of Bretons and other minority ethnic groups across Europe. The Welsh managed to shelter themselves for a time in the west of Britain, as did the (Gaelic) Scots and Irish to the north and across the Irish Sea. This enabled them to survive and revive their cultures and languages in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Cornish and Breton hang on with a few speakers and the possibility of revival. But Pictish culture and language are gone, long since absorbed into Scots Gaelic, Scottish or English-speaking communities. There is however, a fourth language, or dialect of Scottish, called “Doric” spoken in Northeastern Scotland, and some of its grammar and vocabulary are different from the Scottish or English spoken in other parts of Scotland. Doric is not Scots Gaelic. It is a dialect of Scottish, which is derived from Old (Anglo-Saxon) and Middle English from before the Norman Invasion of England (1066), and is recognized as a separate language. It has been made famous by the poetry of Robert Burns. Doric, as a rural dialect of Scottish, is spoken in areas which used to be Pictish strongholds in the North and East of Scotland, with its base in Aberdeen. Is there an echo of an older Brythonic Celtic language there, that might have been Pictish? No one seems to know. There is a substantial body of stories and poetry told in Doric. In the meantime; “Come awa ben the hoose for a fly an a piece – Come in and I’ll make you a cup of tea and something to eat”.

No matter how hard life was, European migrants in North America and Australia, especially from Great Britain, were welcomed and had opportunities that other migrants and Indigenous peoples did not enjoy. After a generation or two even despised migrant communities such as the Irish, Eastern Europeans, Italians and Jews created much better lives for themselves than they had previously had in Europe. My ancestors were lucky in being English-speaking Britons, for the most part. Even Reverend Schwerdtfeger and his little loyalist flock had the essential requirements of education, the Protestant religion, an ethic of hard work, and white skin.

In Canada, European migrants were rarely subject to racist legislation such as The Chinese Immigration Act 1885, levying a “Head Tax” of $50 on any Chinese coming to Canada. After the 1885 legislation failed to deter Chinese immigration the government of Canada further increased the landing fees by 1903 to $500 per head. In 1923 the Chinese Exclusion Act replaced prohibitive fees with an outright ban on Chinese immigration to Canada (with some exceptions). The Exclusion Act went into effect on July 1, 1923 – Dominion Day, Canada’s National Holiday. Chinese at the time referred to this day as “Humiliation Day” and refused to celebrate it until after the Act was repealed in 1947. Sikhs from the Punjab in India came to Canada to work on the railroads and in other industries from the late 19th century, but were banned in 1908. In 1914 a chartered ship called the Komagata Maru entered Vancouver Harbour with more than 350 mostly Punjabi passengers. They were refused entry and, after many weeks of confrontation and hardship, were forced to sail back across the Pacific. They eventually docked in Kolkata (Calcutta) in India where 20 of them were killed by police and more than two dozen others were arrested and detained. Japanese Canadians started to come to Canada in the 1870’s settling in British Columbia where most Asian migrants lived. In 1942, the federal government under the War Measures Act, branded all Japanese Canadians enemy aliens and security threats. More than 20,000 Japanese were placed in internment camps in British Columbia or prisoner of war camps in Ontario. Families were also sent as forced labourers to farms across the Prairies, especially southern Alberta where a significant Japanese diaspora still lives. Three-quarters of them were Canadian citizens. Citizens of Asian descent were denied the right to vote (with some exceptions) until Japanese Canadians were the last to be enfranchised in 1948.

In the United States and Australia, very similar policies were adopted for Chinese migrants.  Japanese Americans and Australians were also interned during the Second World War. More recently, refugees from Southeast Asia struggled against discrimination after large numbers came to North America and Australia during and after the Vietnam War in the 1970’s. Pacific Islanders were also brought to Australia to work in the sugar plantations of Queensland, and they too have faced racial discrimination. Europeans could also face significant racism and discrimination (Irish, Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans) and some, such as Germans and Italians during the First and Second World Wars, did suffer significant restrictions on their freedoms. But there were no German or Italian internment camps where large numbers of civilians were held as security threats. Mexican and Central American refugees and migrants, and Asian refugees trying to get to Australia, are now facing high levels of government coercion, internment and violence similar to what previous waves of migrants have faced.

The worst treatment of migrants was directed towards the millions of Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas as slaves. Many died during the voyages on the slave ships, while others faced a future of hardship and violence in the sugar or cotton plantations of the New World. Indentured servants and exiled prisoners from the British Isles, in particular from Ireland, did suffer from difficult conditions when they arrived in North America and Australia. But their living conditions were never as horrific as those of African slaves, nor were they really slaves. Most were set free after seven years or less to make new lives for themselves. Indigenous peoples were also enslaved by the millions throughout the Americas. They were gradually replaced by African slaves who seemed to have greater resistance to the diseases brought by Europeans. The descendants of those African slaves continue to suffer acute levels of racial discrimination, police profiling, imprisonment, poverty, violence, murder, and abuse while Indigenous peoples around the world are still essentially prisoners and exiles on their own land.

European migrants were never subjected to the Indian Act in Canada, or the oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States, or the Aboriginal protection acts passed by states and territories in Australia. The Indian Act was first passed in 1876 and was part of the Canadian federal government’s efforts to push all “Indians” onto reservations, particularly in the West, in order to take their land for railroads and incoming settlers. The situation in the American West was similar but even more violent. “Indian” lives became completely regulated by federal officials. Their access to land, food, clean water, adequate housing, medical care, and other necessities of life was severely curtailed. It still is in both Canada and the United States. Indigenous peoples, including First Nations, Metis, Inuit, Hawaiians and Native Americans were and still are subject to heavy government oppression, ongoing poverty and intense racial discrimination. The situation has only begun to marginally improve in Canada since 1982 when the Canadian Constitution was amended to incorporate the recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights. In the United States some forms of Indigenous self-government and sovereignty are recognized. In Australia, where there are no treaties or constitutional protections as there are in North America, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are still subjected to heavy-handed government administration or neglect, or both. Policing and incarceration are major issues in all three of the big white settler countries.

Indigenous people could not be expelled overseas as some migrants were and still are. Rather, they were put into the equivalent of internment camps, otherwise known as reservations or reserves, which have lasted for generations. “Indians” with status under the Indian Act could not vote until 1960 unless they were willing to assimilate, or be “enfranchised”, thus losing any rights they had as “Indians” under the Act. Inuit were enfranchised in 1950 but had few opportunities to vote in federal elections. Again, the situation for Native Americans and Australian Aboriginal peoples was, and is, as bad or worse as in Canada.

Although the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America were not moved onto reservations, they were subject to caste restrictions under Spanish colonial rule. The casta system was abolished in 1821 in Mexico when it achieved independence from Spain, but discrimination based on race remained. More recently, neo-liberal policies have severely undermined Indigenous land rights. In the constitutional reforms of 2001, some basic Indigenous rights were reinstated, but poverty and abuse remain huge problems for the pueblos indígenas de México. Many Mexican and Central American refugees are fleeing their homelands because of North American political interference and natural resource extraction, as well as climate-change induced drought, intensifying tropical storms and hurricanes, poverty, and endemic violence. Most of these people are Indigenous. The reasons for their departure are often causally related to American political and military agendas that have included decades of violence in places like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Others are leaving the severe human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by mining and other resource extraction industries, most of which are Canadian-owned. Even in Mexico political and economic priorities set in Washington, Ottawa, Mexico City, and corporate head offices in North America, Europe and Asia have had a deep impact on Indigenous peoples’ lives.

At the same time as my German ancestors were fleeing American independence, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Six Nations) of upstate New York were also leaving their land on which they had lived in towns and farmlands and forests, not just for decades, but for thousands of years. The British provided them with a reserve in the south of Upper Canada along the Grand River. Some Kanien’kehá: ka (Mohawks – members of the Six Nations) had moved about 40 years before this to Ahkwesáhsne not far from Kahnawake and Kahnehsatake just outside of Montreal. My German relatives were granted land very close to Ahkwesáhsne. This is now a reserve straddling the border between Cornwall, Ontario and New York State, a border that the Mohawk do not recognize. History has been much less kind to the Kanien’kehá: ka on both sides of the various boundaries where they now live than it has been to myself and my European forebears. But both began their journeys as refugees from American revolutionary violence.

I spent some years as a feminist scholar navigating different “epistemologies” and critical thinking. I can certainly see how valuable it is to challenge existing male-centered paradigms that completely marginalize women and others who do not fit the dominant narrative – white, male, heterosexual, secular. This marginalization was and still is true of most of the social sciences including sociology, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies and studies in language. Feminists borrowed some of our ideas from male critical scholars, often without questioning the intensely androcentric perspectives that existed in those writings (Foucault being among the worst).

I certainly believe language or “discourse” can create a kind of “reality” that can dominate to the extent of denying objective reality altogether. Trans ideology is a good example. “Truth” can be a fuzzy concept, depending on whose truth is being spoken and by whom. I found “standpoint theory” to be especially useful. This is “a feminist theoretical perspective that argues that knowledge stems from social position. … The theory emerged from the Marxist argument that people from an oppressed class have special access to knowledge that is not available to those from a privileged class.” It’s often now confused with intersectionality and identity politics, which misinterpret the theory by transitioning it from a collective or a class analysis to an individual level. As I get older I am more and more attracted to ” feminist empiricism”, which is a practise of exploring dominant discourses in science, law, politics, etc and “feminizing” them, with some forms of discourse more resistant to such interpretation than others.

There are different kinds of reality glimpsed in different ways by many different knowledge systems. Some are realities created in human minds. They can be very convincing. We have story-telling written into our DNA (I mean this literally). Without narrative frameworks in which to interpret the world reality is simply chaos – random objects and events. So we create “reality”, or “realities” both collective and individual (insofar as any individual can exist outside of a collective). These can be verifiably false (the earth is flat, the sun rotates around the earth, the universe was created in six days, biological sex doesn’t exist). Or they can express some element of meaning that might well be true in some sense (conspiracy theories sometimes can be like this). There can be many different ways of explaining a deeper truth (history, myth, art, science, religion and spirituality). But, the question remains – is there an objective reality “out there” that we can ever really know?

Critical theorists (not including gender critical theorists), such as feminist, race and queer critical theorists, seem to be saying no. Reality, they say, is a human construct created by language or discourse – and can be changed by creating a new discursive framework. Critical race theorists insist this has to be a collective endeavour. But critical queer theorists and so-called “libfems” or critical feminist theorists seem to be insisting that this discursive change is individual, not collective. The idea seems to be, not so much in creating a new and more just collective framework for people on the margins of the current racist, colonialist regime (as critical race theory seems to be trying to do), but rather in breaking down or deconstructing language and existing social structures in order to return us to chaos, out of which new realities of individual sexual liberation and empowerment can be born – “queering” the world so to speak.

So, in this theory of meaning there is no objective reality, merely subjective “realities”. Prostitution becomes “sex work” the same as any other kind of work, pornography becomes empowering, sexual objectification of the female body is a form of liberation from patriarchy instead of surrender to patriarchy, and something as deeply biologically fundamental as sex (male and female) can be relabeled as “gender”, and is declared to be completely alterable at will. It’s not that this creates a new objective reality – there is no such thing according to this epistemological framework – but that dominant discourses of sex and sexuality are reversed and overthrown. As individuals increasingly embrace this new language of gender, the old language of sex binaries is overturned. People (like gender critical feminists, “radfems” and TERFs) who insist on clinging to the old discourse can be labelled and dismissed as conservative reactionaries similar to, or complicit with, white supremists, colonizers, misogynists, Nazis. Anything said in opposition to the new discursive “reality” becomes hate speech, transphobic. Misgendering pronouns and “deadnaming” become actual literal violence, because discourse is “real”. There is no actual reality – only words, performance, expression, individual identities. This seems to be the nub of critical theory.

There are many problems with this approach. It’s not that transsexuals, intersexuals, or cross-dressers don’t deserve human rights. Of course they do. It’s not even about how easy it has been for this new discursive “reality” to be highjacked by men’s rights activists, or the pharmaceutical and cosmetic surgery industries (neither of which gives a flying fuck about epistemology). It’s not just the resulting erosion of the rights of women, girls and the LGB community (although this is not an accidental by-product). It’s not only the confusion of susceptible minds, or the mutilation of human bodies, especially children’s bodies. It’s not simply the silencing of dissenting speech. All of these things are huge problems, but there is something even more fundamental.

The big problem is that these critical theorists propose that material reality, apart from discursive “realities”, does not exist. So everything from the differences between male and female (on which all sexual orientations, gendered practices, and much of human experience ultimately depends), to biological sexual reproduction (which is of course where babies come from), to biological diversity (which largely exists because of biological sexual reproduction); to ecological stability, planetary systems like evolution or climate, geology or the oceans; and our place as a species on this Earth, become simply another form of fantasy, another conspiracy theory (maybe the world is round, maybe it’s flat – someone is trying to fool you), just another lie (if “lies” are possible without some truth to compare them with). Or, in the words of critical theorists, another “hegemonic discursive practise”, as the jargon would have it. Try believing that the geology of plate tectonics is just another “hegemonic discursive practise” in the middle of an earthquake. You can do it, but it won’t be very helpful.

Ultimately, critical theory is about power, who has it, who controls it, and who doesn’t. But if all of reality is just a set of “hegemonic discursive practises” revolving around power, then “reality” can never exist outside of those man-made systems of power that are generating so many of our current existential crises. Not only does this create an ongoing power-struggle consisting of endless conflicts over who controls the discourse of power, it also creates the bedrock of totalitarian political systems both communist and fascist (Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, Nazi, Italian and Hispanic Fascist). It traps all of humanity, especially women and children, but also many men who are not in positions of power, in an inescapable endlessly recurring loop of violence from the bedroom to the UN Security Council.

But, thankfully, material reality does exist, and humans are part of it. There is no other rational way of explaining our universe or ourselves. Otherwise, we are simply lost in solipsism and narcissism, and any meaningful dialogue is nothing more than an endless argument about  power where we become powerless to change the real conditions of injustice because we don’t believe those conditions actually exist in any way we can interact with. Everything is just performance, “virtue signalling”. We believe ourselves to exist only because we think we do or say we do – as some people persist in saying the magic words “transwomen are women”. The words are indeed magical thinking, and the magic will never work. Critical thinking as currently practised is part of a lonely futile universe completely disconnected from the reality that is all around us, and inside us. It is being grounded in reality that allows us to lead genuinely meaningful lives.

“Cogito ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am – is one of the great mistakes of modern philosophy. The words are from one of the original masters of our existing “hegemonic discursive practises” – Rene Descartes (who might be described as the father of gender ideology). But we don’t exist because we think we do. We think, feel, act and observe because we exist. All living creatures do. And within that existence we, and other conscious life forms, create meaning – sacred, scientific, linguistic, cultural, gendered, embodied.  Our existence as part of reality is not ultimately a product of our minds. We don’t just make it up. It’s the reverse. We humans, male and female, including our crazy clever conscious minds, our living relations with the rest of this world, our universe, our bodies, our place on this Earth, are all products of Reality. We can understand some of it some of the time. We make many mistakes. But there are things that really are true, whatever we might think, including our ability to think at all. Why is the Great Mystery.

The formation and implementation of international law on climate change, biological diversity, environmental protection, atmospheric and oceanic systems, and the cryosphere (ice) has evaded much of the feminist analysis in international law that began in the late 20th century. Treaties, organizations, conferences and international regulation have been dominated by the science of climate change, biodiversity and earth systems, which in turn depend on scientific specializations within geology, biology, atmospheric and oceanic molecular chemistry and physics. Much of the predictive quality of climate change science depends on sophisticated computer modelling and the mathematical analysis that goes with it. This has had the major advantage of giving us real data and sophisticated analysis to work with, and the credibility that the hard sciences have in producing conviction. It also has the disadvantage of being almost completely incomprehensible to policymakers, and the general public. So powerful is the language of “hard” science that corporate and political leaders, who would like to deny that climate change exists, or that environmental issues are a problem, have had to go out of their way to an extraordinary extent in dismissing individuals, institutions, and the entire collective community of climate scientists and specialists in the environment, as liars. The politics and economics of climate change and environmental issues has been dominated by the discourse of the market, technology, and political evasion in favour of corporate interests. This last problem seems to be giving way to a more nuanced approach in which the undeniable destructiveness of repeated climate-induced crises (hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, rises in sea levels, melting ice, unpredictable weather, and harsher living conditions in much of the world for humans and other species alike) and environmental disasters has induced politicians in most countries to start taking this seriously. The public is at last demanding some action on these issues, as are insurance companies, and even military and security officials around the world, who rightly see environmental collapse as an enormous financial and security risk. The disappearance of biodiversity and ecological habitats in many locations is also now starting to get some attention, particularly as the Covid crisis has made it very clear that habitat destruction is dangerous to human health.

Both national and international law, as well as climate science, tend to be dominated by male-centred issues with male policymakers and male experts dominating most discussions and decisions. Reliance on legal norm creation and “hard” science have also meant that issues surrounding human rights, cultural and Indigenous rights, social issues and even psychological effects have tended to be ignored as peripheral, “soft”, less urgent, at least until recently. Women’s participation in the science of climate change and the environment, and in policy formation, as well as leadership within Indigenous, environmental and other communities, has helped to mitigate this marginalization of the human side of what environmental justice as a whole might mean. As Inuit like to remind us – “it’s not just about polar bears”.  Siila Watt-Cloutier, a leading Inuit authority and activist on climate change, chemical pollutants, and environmental degradation makes it clear that climate change is a human rights issue. Her latest book is called The Right to be Cold. Municipal governments are also moving into the vacuum of political power created by inactive national and regional politics. Local governments are now often dominated by women who see climate change and the environment as not just technological or economic problems that need solving, but as human problems that need a commitment to both mitigation and adaptation within a more just social order.

The fields of science and law also tend to focus on how to “fix” climate change and the environment. So, we talk a lot about sustainable development; clean and renewable energy such as solar, wind or bio-fuel; carbon capture and sequestration; atmospheric technologies designed to shield the planet from the warming effect of the sun, or to induce rain in drought-afflicted areas; the manufacture of electric cars;  and so on. Law focuses on regulation and enforcement at the local, national and international level – setting targets for emissions, cap and trade systems, carbon taxation, rewards for “green” initiatives, and punishment for offenders. These approaches tend to be top-down, relying on existing political systems and corporate capitalist structures. More radical proposals demand at least a partial restructuring of the existing economic and political order, although how either science or law could achieve this is not explained. At the most extreme ends of the spectrum there is both a call for the destruction of capitalism and neo-liberalism altogether; or, the apotheosis of capitalist salvation through technology, geo-engineering, the colonization of other planets, or through the creation of artificial life to replace humans (“transhumanism”) and other living species.

As discussed briefly in Part I, we really need to start looking at other ways of thinking. This Part focuses on feminist approaches. Part III will look more at Indigenous perspectives.

Ecofeminism and the concept of an “ethic of care” is one way of rethinking our relationship with nature. As Carin Lesley Cross has noted:

The current relationship we have with nature is hierarchal and fragmented because it is rooted in a culture of separation created by a ‘masculine’ modernity. The patriarchal values of rationality and power have ‘othered’ the natural environment and women.  In order to prevent irreparable ecological destruction, we need to change the relationship between humanity and nature to one that is ecologically responsive. . . . ecofeminist literature enables us to challenge the hierarchical structure created by dualisms thereby uprooting the current patriarchal oppressive system. It reveals how an ethic of care approach can transcend the modern patriarchal structures that have promoted dominion over nature and contextually and narratively recreate the human and nature relationship. The value of this research lies in the fact that central to an ethic of care is the respect and care for all earthly beings, an ethic which listens to, and is responsive to the diversity of all ‘environmental voices.

Eco-feminism has also borrowed extensively from Marxist feminisms, but in a very much altered form. As Ariel Salleh has written, drawing on the work of Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva:

The ecofeminist lens . . . can be characterised as an ‘embodied materialism’. It is ‘materialist’ in endorsing the basic tools of a Marxist sociology, and ‘embodied’ in that it sets out to re-frame that discourse by giving equal weight to the organically interrelated entities – man, woman, nature. Historically, these have been unequally valorised. In particular, the interests of male-dominated societies have been served by managing women’s bodies as a ‘natural resource’. That meant positioning the female sex ‘somewhere between’ men and nature in the order of things. This masculinist practice points to a fundamental structural contradiction in capitalism. A node of crisis not yet included in the conversations of political economy . . .

. . . or in the modern discourses of environmental justice and international law.

There is a lot of value to this approach. It exposes the masculinist nature of concepts such as “rationality”, “nature”, “modernity” and looks at the mind/body dualism created by a Cartesian approach to what it means to be human. It gives some sociological context to the marginalization and “othering” of nature, women and the “Peoples of the Earth”.

Inuit lawyers and policymakers, many of them women, understand very well what an “ethic of care” might be, as it is central to Inuit relationships with the Arctic, but would emphasize the need for real permanent protection of the rights of Inuit and other Indigenous peoples to protect their own land and culture, not just as a matter of ethics, caring or respect, but of justice and of law. An Inuk woman once told me “we don’t want respect, we want social justice”. Eco-feminism sometimes seems to be dominated by European and Euro-American women who are not always very good at seeing beyond their own protected position within existing legal systems, or understanding how feminism, even eco-feminism, may look very different to a non-European woman or anyone from an Indigenous community.

In 2010 Dr. Sherilyn MacGregor of the University of Manchester commented on the lack of research into the masculinist nature of climate change, and began work on filling in the gaps:

In the light of frightening predictions, it might reasonably be asked, what is the point of suggesting that greater attention should be paid to gender? Feminist scholarship on environmental problems must always be ready for such questions, to defend the relevance of gender analysis in the face of dominant tendencies to see humanity as homogeneous, science as apolitical, and social justice as a luxury that cannot be chosen over survival. In this essay, I make the case for feminist social research on climate change with the following argument: shedding light on the gender dimensions of climate change will enable a more accurate diagnosis and a more promising ‘cure’ than is possible with a gender neutral approach. My argument is that any attempt to tackle climate change that excludes a gender analysis will be insufficient, unjust and therefore unsustainable.

Supporting this argument with evidence is challenging because there is a worrying lack of research on which to draw. Social research on climate change has been slow to develop; feminist research into the gender dimensions has been even slower.

In 2016 a special issue of Kungl Vetenskaps Akademien – Gender Perspectives in Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptation to Global Environmental Change included “a synthesis of convergent reflections, tensions and silences in linking gender and global environmental change research”.

The main theoretical contributions of this special issue are threefold: emphasizing the relevance of power relations in feminist political ecology, bringing the livelihood and intersectionality approaches into Global Environmental Change [GEC], and linking resilience theories and critical feminist research. Empirical insights on key debates in GEC studies are also highlighted from the nine cases analysed, from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific.

Intersectional analysis is seen as fundamentally important to any examination of global environmental research, of which climate change forms a part. Unlike eco-feminist perspectives, intersectionality tries to avoid the assumption that gender is a homogeneous concept. Issues of race, sexuality, class, age, ethnicity, caste and other identities have a major influence on the experiences of both women and men in relation to environmental change. (The term “intersectionality” in this research does not refer to identity politics, but to overlapping issues of race, class and other differences affecting women from different backgrounds and social conditions, as the term was originally defined by Kimberle Crenshawe and other legal theorists in the later 1980’s and 1990’s). This approach does not look specifically at climate change, however. It is possible to argue that climate change itself is so large, so global in scope and intensity, and the issues raised are so urgent, that it is unlike other forms of environmental change which tend to focus on specific locations and activities, such as farming or fishing within defined communities. Climate change is of course also important at the local level, and many forms of environmental degradation and alteration are at least influenced by changes in climate. In addition, biodiversity and habitat loss are now becoming so widespread and devastating that the effects are now global. Focusing on local intersectionalities can obscure major commonalities between, for example, climate change and environmental destruction induced migration from the Sahel to southern Europe, from Central America to North America, and from the Pacific region to Australia and New Zealand. The majority of these migrants are women and children.

Sara L. Seck in “Relational Law and the Reimagining of Tools for Environmental and Climate Justice” addresses both climate change and legal approaches from a different perspective.

It is well documented that environmental and climate justice problems are associated with local and global extractive industry operations and that concrete legal and policy reforms will be necessary if we might hope both to prevent and remedy harms.

I explore how a relational approach to legal analysis might contributes to the process of reimagining legal tools for environmental and climate justice. Thinking of environmental justice focuses our attention on sites of local harm, which are intertwined with histories of colonialism and racism. Climate justice, on the other hand, draws our attention to the international and the ‘global’, which, while equally intertwined with colonial and racist histories, present different challenges of the imagination.

Both environmental justice and climate justice are also intertwined with gender justice, whether the focus is upon those who are most vulnerable to harms or those whose voices are crucial as agents of change.  Attention to extractive industries (mining, oil, and gas) and gender justice leads us to the tools of international human rights law, including the recognition of the human rights of women and girls, the responsibilities of businesses to respect human rights, and the duty of states to protect human rights from irresponsible business conduct.

. . . “relational law” and “relational theory” . . . encompass diverse approaches to legal analysis that, in my view, share a desire to shine the spotlight away from the bounded autonomous individual of liberal thought and towards relationships among people and the material world, including relationships in the international sphere.

This approach allows Seck to look more closely at international Indigenous rights and Indigenous feminist perspectives in framing the issue of “climate justice” on a global scale. Moving the spotlight away from the individual allows for a better understanding of how relationships between or within communities and their position within and beyond nation-states effect human resilience and adaptability in relation to massive changes in climate systems. The inclusion of gender justice into this discussion moves us away from a liberal focus on the autonomous individual and towards an analysis of positions of vulnerability, empowerment and responses to regional relations, nation-states, the international community and, above all, global material systems – land, water, ice, oceans, weather (both “normal” and catastrophic) and the human-built environment.

Indigenous feminist perspectives are, in my view, central to any discussion of climate and environmental justice. Seck provides a short but valuable discussion of the differences between Indigenous perspectives on gender, and that of mainstream or intersectional feminisms. Joyce Green, the editor of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, . . . notes that “Indigenous feminism has been routinely denigrated [by Indigenous women] as untraditional, inauthentic, non-liberatory for Indigenous women and illegitimate as an ideological position, political analysis, and organizational process.” For Indigenous feminists, gender cannot be divorced from communal, ancestral and spiritual perspectives.

For example, protection of water is seen within many Indigenous communities as closely tied to women’s roles as mothers. Water is seen as alive and closely connected with biological aspects of motherhood and women’s bodies. There are spiritual connections between water and family, water and blood, water and childbirth, and water as life. Maori activists in New Zealand, Lakota Water Protectors in North Dakota, and Indigenous women in the Amazon River basin argue that rivers are alive, that they are “relatives”, and that they have rights. Women and water systems have reciprocal responsibilities of life-giving and protection. Oil and gas extraction is seen as destructive of these living systems and dangerous to the integrity of all life on “Mother Earth”. Indigenous peoples, especially women, see their responsibilities as guardians of the Earth not only as local, but also as global. Inuit discussions of climate change emphasize that their concerns are not just about melting ice in the Arctic, but what effect this has on global climate systems.

Citing Karen Knop’s work (among others) Seck then goes on to tackle these theoretical perspectives within the framework of feminist approaches to international law. Here we find valuable insights on questioning the centrality of the State and notions of sovereignty, which are clearly crucial to climate justice; focusing on the work of non-state actors in the creation of international law (of which the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a prime example); emphasizing a relational approach to questions of international law; and lessening the sharp distinction between the public and private sphere, also crucial to questions of climate and environmental justice.  This includes not only piercing the veil of State sovereignty to highlight the role states play in the affects of climate change on their own citizens and climate refugees (as in a human rights framework), but also on the role of non-state actors and international organizations on setting both environmental policy and law. It also means turning our gaze onto private non-state actors, especially extractive industries, multi-national corporations, and lending institutions such as banks and hedge funds, which are instrumental in creating environmental injustice. We are already seeing law suits at the national level in the US, Canada and Europe directed mainly by children against both national governments and private actors for their role in creating the climate crisis. This ideal of international accountability for environmental injustice by private entitles that cross international boundaries needs to become reality.

There is a deeper issue that deserves a much more extensive feminist analysis than I can give here. Modern industrial societies are not just the result of capitalist accumulation, extraction of resources, and the division of capital and labour into conflicting classes.  The success of these societies is also not just a question of Euro-American colonization of the rest of the world to feed metropolitan power-centres. It is also about the transformation of traditional, feudal and mercantilist economic systems into modern capitalist political democracies. The Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century was built on hundreds of years of what Karl Marx named “primitive accumulation” of capital assets like land (a simpler word is theft), class warfare, colonial policies both within and outside of Europe and America, and the transformation of Europe into competing nation-states – the foundation of modern political regimes and international law.  The 200 year old industrial experiment of changing the molecular chemical structure of the atmosphere and oceans, as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, threatens to bring down these same modern industrial societies, democratic institutions, and even international legal frameworks alike. The colonized, the marginalized, the already damaged communities of Indigenous peoples, the poor, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and peoples with brown or black skins – the “Peoples of the Earth” – are now and will continue to be on the frontlines of this massive change.

Modern industrial societies are also the result of centuries of the accumulation of patriarchal power at every level, from the privacy of the home to the Law of Nations. Our organizational structures, our institutions, our militaries, our education systems, our health systems, our laws, our religious bodies, our private enterprises both national and international, are deeply infused with patriarchal values of how power works, how authority structures are organized, and how individuals and groups interact.

“Patriarchy” literally means the “rule of the father”. Capitalism, as the modern form of patriarchy, is permeated with competitive scrambles to accumulate enormous levels of wealth, status, and influence for men. Within this patriarchal capitalist framework the default of what it is to be human is gendered as masculine within a very specific model of what it is to be a man. This, coupled with white supremacy, is a deeply unbalanced model of humanity at every level. Patriarchy is not however simply male supremacy or male dominance. It is an entire way of thinking so deeply engrained that one-half of humanity can be literally ignored or erased as irrelevant to almost any discussion, particularly in the public sphere. Women may be under continual surveillance by the “male gaze”, but not as fully human sovereign beings with our own histories and our own agency but, as Ariel Salleh says, as a “natural resource” like minerals or forests or fish. Only women’s usefulness as a resource is not just in our productive work, but in our sexual and reproductive labour, as many feminist theorists such as Carol Pateman have pointed out.

These gendered values have divorced almost every institution with any significance in our modern societies from both women’s lives and the natural world, as “nature” is equated with the feminine as another resource. This has successfully relegated almost everyone outside a small, privileged circle of mostly white men into a limbo of “otherness”. We regularly assume – even those of us attempting a feminist analysis of what is generating our human and environmental predicament – that women and girls are one of a range of categories or groups or classes or orientations that are the basis of discrimination, such as race, sexuality, disability, religion, nationality, or poverty. This is very misleading. Women and girls – female human beings – are one half of humanity. As the Chinese saying goes “women hold up half the sky.” We are not just another category of discrimination or identity. Our position as women intersects with all other orientations and identities, but they can never fully define us. Just as these intersections can never fully define who men are.

The result of this patriarchal blindness, structured into every aspect of human society, is that our planet is facing an extinction event of massive proportions, possibly endangering not only human civilization, but also life itself. The foundation of how these systems retain their power is violence – specifically male violence against women and girls from all backgrounds; male violence against other men and boys who, by reason of colour, race, class, nationality, “tribe”, sexuality, or gender identity are not “male” enough; male violence against children; against animals; male violence against the Earth itself. Women who are black, brown, poor or “other” suffer much greater rates of violence than do those who are more privileged. It is important to remember however that whiteness, comparative wealth, youth and beauty, or strict adherence to the norms of heterosexual “femininity” are never more than a contingent protection against male violence. The relative “privilege” of white, middle-class, heterosexual women is largely parasitic on the white, comparatively well-off, heterosexual men who provide some protection for “their” women – or who choose not to. The recent murder of Sarah Everard in the UK, and the mass killing of Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia both tell us a great deal about male violence, misogyny and race, and about how such violence can be disguised or dismissed as something other than male hatred of women. Even mass killings that appear to be random are almost always committed by a man with a background of misogyny.

There is a reason why Indigenous women in particular, who have taken up leadership roles in the struggle for environmental justice, are targeted for violence. There is a reason why sexual assault is used as a weapon of control both in the domestic sphere, in resource extraction, on the streets of our cities, and in war. There is a reason why women’s reproductive sovereignty, access to abortion and control of our own bodies, and even the very definition of what a woman is, are matters of central importance to the maintenance of patriarchal systems. There is a reason why extractive industries can go on raping and pillaging the very Earth itself.

Fossil fuels are not, however, the last frontier of industrial capitalism, and the wealthy who feed off this system are very well aware of this. The “Green Economy” will continue to fuel capitalist enterprises and will still rely upon extractive industries, such as the mining of “rare earth” metals necessary for the building and maintenance of solar and wind energy systems, and deforestation for bio-fuel, and even coal, oil and natural gas. But technology, and even the creation of artificial life and intelligence, are also very much a part of the new capitalism being born right now in front of our eyes. These developments of “techno-capitalism” are the very antithesis of natural systems, and are fundamentally male-centred.

Feminist approaches to climate change and environmental justice are not just about victimization, or participation and leadership, but also about alliances across political, racial, class, religious and cultural divides. Feminist approaches based on relational theories or an ethic of care could be really helpful, as might some aspects of a new Marxist perspective. But the fundamental problem is patriarchy. The tools are there, the theoretical perspectives are there and, increasingly, the will towards change is also finally there.

Sources for all three parts of “The Last Well” will be included at the end of Part III.

 The science is clear. Without rapid cuts in CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed.

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO₂ was 3 to 5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2 to 3 degrees warmer, and sea level was 10 to 20 meters [30 to 60 feet] higher than now,” said Mr Taalas of the World Meteorological Organization, (20 November 2018).*

In 2018 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported on the implications of failing to keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius. We are currently about 1 degree warmer than we were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.

*All temperatures are in Celsius.

Keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees is crucial to avoiding a “truly catastrophic unravelling” of our current climate system. Given the extreme weather events, droughts, sea rise, ocean warming, forest fires, and acidification, species extinction, and land degradation we are already seeing, achieving that will be extremely difficult. According to the UN World Meteorological Organization, we are on a path to warming the world by 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century. According to the UN IPCC we have less than ten years to reduce our global emissions enough to have any chance of avoiding this result. Meanwhile national governments from the United States to Brazil, Australia, Canada, Russia, China, India and elsewhere are pursuing industrial and economic development policies that are headed straight towards climate catastrophe within our lifetimes. Our industrial economy currently still relies so heavily on the production, export and import of oil, gas and coal that governments have chosen to put national economic interests ahead of the climate crisis. Brazil has indicated an intention to withdraw from the Paris Accord and shows no interest in climate change policy. The US, now under a new administration, has indicated it wishes to rejoin the Paris Accord. The Glasgow Conference of the Parties to the UN Agreement on Climate Change, rescheduled for later this year (November 2021), may well be our last chance to turn this juggernaut around.

But, climate change is not our only challenge. Biodiversity is collapsing around the world, eco-systems are being degraded or disappearing, and what appears to be a sixth great species extinction is now occurring. And this collapse is human-caused. Resource extraction, corporate agriculture, urbanization through suburban sprawl and the creation of giant shanty-towns, infrastructure projects such as dams, and the exploitation of land and water has created a global privatization of the Earth’s commons greater than any in human history. Along with this is a massive degradation of Earth’s systems due to pollution, desertification, salinization, soil depletion, deforestation, melting ice, over-population and over-consumption. Human beings have been interacting with Earth’s natural systems of growth, death, and regeneration for tens of thousands of years. This has now accelerated to the point where the human role is no longer that of partner or guardian, but of destroyer. But Earth’s systems are hitting us back.

There is a conspiracy theory making the rounds that the Covid-19 pandemic was manufactured by humans in a laboratory somewhere in China. The truth is, the pandemic was indeed caused by humans. Many people around the world rely on “wet markets” to buy food. Often these markets include wild animal meat as a cheap source of protein, as in the wet market in Wuhan. Much of this meat is harvested in areas where the natural habitat is already disturbed by humans. And some of it can be infected with pathogens humans have not encountered before, including viruses. HIV, Ebola, the Zika virus and Covid-19 were all transferred from animals to humans in this way. Viruses and bacteria can also spread from domestic animals such as chickens, pigs and cattle to humans. Many human diseases that used to be more common than they are now, such as small pox, originally jumped species from domesticated animals, and creatures who have accommodated themselves to humans such as mice and rats, to people. Annual mutations of the flu and the common cold still do this. From mosquitos, ticks, fleas, bats, monkeys, birds, poultry, cows and pigs to humans is not a big step for many pathogens.

There is a growing popular movement of outrage at what industry and governments have been doing – or not doing. Much of this is led by young people. The Extinction Rebellion in Europe, the Sunrise Movement in the United States, and other mass mobilizations around the world are demanding revolutionary change. School Strikes for Climate Change are bringing people onto the streets all over the world (or were before Covid locked us all up) insisting that we have to change course now, or there will be no future. The face and voice of these movements has been Greta Thunberg, a teenaged girl from Sweden who set about to change the world all by herself, beginning her own school strike in 2018. She became the catalyst of a global youth movement that is unprecedented in modern history. As she told the economic and political leaders meeting at Davos, Switzerland in 2018:

If everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame, and someone is to blame . . . Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular know exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people. . . . I don’t want your hope . . . I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is. . . .

There has also developed out of socialist, anti-colonial and international perspectives of the last fifty years, or longer, a somewhat deeper analysis of the climate crisis as a symptom of corporate capitalist, nationalist, and colonial agendas. One solution that has been proposed is a “Green New Deal” gaining significant traction in several First World countries. But, the focus in First World countries is often still on economic redistribution of the proceeds from resource extraction, and regulation of pollution, while attempting to reduce the power of large corporations through taxation, government and international regulation, carbon offsets and technological innovation. It has been described by some commentators as little more than capitalist “greenwashing” of the global economy. Socialist or so-called progressive governments have proven to be especially disappointing in their response to climate change and the environment given their stated commitment to human welfare, as opposed to the bottom line.

For example, our “progressive” social democratic government in the province of British Columbia, Canada gained power in 2017 (and an outright majority in 2020) over a previous conservative government by forming an alliance between the left-wing New Democratic Party and the Green Party of British Columbia. They promised to deal with climate change, environmental and Indigenous issues vigorously and effectively. But, four years later, mining licenses are still being issued for projects on Indigenous land without Indigenous consent. Old-growth logging has increased to feed the global bio-fuel market (wood pellets are a supposedly renewable energy source). Fish farms of imported salmon are still operating along the Coast spreading disease to wild stocks of salmon whose numbers have plummeted to fifty-year lows. A large hydroelectric dam project was approved and the LNG fracking and transport industry is now on fast-track. A supposedly liberal progressive federal government in Canada has approved and even purchased an oil pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific West Coast. Whether governments can be described as right-wing, centrist or even left-wing, the rhetoric and practice effectively ignores environmental concerns and the climate crisis for “business as usual” – profits and jobs always come first. A gradualist approach to change is emphasized, when what is needed is a mobilization of resources on the scale of the New Deal response to the Great Depression, World War II, or the reconstruction of Europe after the last war ended.

But perhaps we need to pay more attention to another set of intersecting perspectives. Indigenous peoples around the world have been leading a very different kind of activism based less on social, economic or political theories than on a struggle to maintain or return to Indigenous values and lifeways that see land, water, the environment and energy, not as property or manifestations of inanimate systems, but rather as living systems with spiritual and cultural significance. They have led radical and often dangerous strategies to circumvent or stop development projects and develop political power systems that draw on traditional knowledge and cultural ways of decision-making. The water protectors and land guardians of Standing Rock in North Dakota; the barricade builders blocking roads into Unis’tot’en land on the west coast of British Columbia; Mauna Kea protests in Hawaii; legal battles in South America to protect the Amazon; civil actions brought by Guatemalans in Canadian courts protesting the actions of Canadian mining interests; Sami efforts to protect reindeer habitat in Scandinavia; Inuit in the Arctic working towards protection of ice, land, water and animals, and the effects of an enormous iron mine expansion on Baffin Island; Australian Aboriginal efforts to stop coal and uranium mining and agricultural take-overs of their land – the list goes on and on. Subsistence farmers, often but not always Indigenous, have also been working to save their homes and build infrastructure that protects their land from resource extraction and agri-business. This can also have a big impact on environmental and climate systems.

Indigenous communities are not recognized as parties to the international agreement [on Biological Diversity, or any other international agreement]. They can come as observers to the talks, but can’t vote on the outcome. Practically though, success is impossible without their support.

One amazing example of this is the “Great Green Wall” project in which trees are being planted by local communities right across the breadth of Africa:

The Great Green Wall is taking root in Africa’s Sahel region, at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert – one of the poorest places on the planet. More than anywhere else on Earth, the Sahel is on the frontline of climate change and millions of locals are already facing its devastating impact. Persistent droughts, lack of food, conflicts over dwindling natural resources, and mass migration to Europe are just some of the many consequences. Yet, communities from Senegal in the West to Djibouti in the East are fighting back. Since the birth of the initiative in 2007, life has started coming back to the land, bringing improved food security, jobs and stability to people’s lives. The Great Green Wall isn’t just for the Sahel. It is a global symbol for humanity overcoming its biggest threat – our rapidly degrading environment. It shows that if we can work with nature, even in challenging places like the Sahel, we can overcome adversity, and build a better world for generations to come. More than just growing trees and plants, the Great Green Wall is transforming the lives of millions of people in the Sahel region.

There are similar projects in Asia including not only tree-planting, but also clean-up of land and water polluted by plastic, urban and industrial waste; rehabilitation of degraded habitats; and species conservation. Much of this work builds on cultural and religious systems of respect for nature and community, and is a rejection of modern industrial and agricultural development. It is also local, at least at first, until the problems are seen as shared across different communities and different environments. Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples often form significant alliances as part of these projects, allowing for interrelationships and community-building that can counteract colonial, nationalist, and racist agendas.

One common thread that links all of these approaches including children’s school strikes, progressive and environmental movements, Indigenous groups, and subsistence farmers – is who is providing much of the leadership. Participation in action or inaction on climate change and protecting the environment tend to be gendered as either male or female. Corporate and political leadership is overwhelmingly male. Organizational structures in business, government, trade unions and the military (a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction) are rigidly patriarchal and masculine in nature and behaviour. Movements of children, Indigenous groups, some progressive political movements, and environmental groups are often led by women and girls. Even where leadership is male, the decision-making processes tend to be less authoritarian and more cooperative, although this is not always true of course.

But a difference in leadership or participation within organizations is not a complete explanation of the issue of sex differences, although it is important. A disproportionately high number of Indigenous environmental activists who are killed are women. Sexual assault, torture, murder, disappearances and intimidation are tools used by male-dominated governments, corporations, military and police, and para-military forces, against both women and men, but women seem to be disproportionately targeted.  Central and South America are particularly dangerous for Indigenous rights advocates as well as for women’s rights.

Climate change and environmental degradation can also force families off the land and into the cities. There women struggle to make ends meet and raise their children in the face of increased family violence, gang violence, femicide, and sexual assault. The “golden triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where most asylum-seekers to Mexico and the United States come from, has been decimated by climate change induced drought, dislocation, paralyzed governments, repression, American-backed military take-overs, and an enormous increase in armed gangs who are the male leftovers of guerilla movements throughout the region. The impact of male violence in impeding efforts to deal with the effects of climate change and environmental damage should not be underestimated. Nor should the courage of individuals and groups of women within communities, especially Indigenous communities, be shrugged off. These women are adept at bringing often conflicting groups and interests together; they are much less prone to corruption and violence; and their approach tends to be much more holistic in terms of human rights, the environment, social and family needs, children and traditional teachings.

There will be a time, in most of the world, when the last well goes dry. And this is because so much of the world lives already on the brink of a dreadful thirst, a life only made tolerable because women travel great distances to find the wells or the rivers or the ditches, scoop up the water, and bring it home. They carry it on their backs, or their heads, or on their hips, like a child. In Africa alone, women walk forty billion hours a year to bring this water home. In sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls are responsible for 72 percent of all the water collected. This means that women spend a significant proportion of their lives simply carrying water. And as the climate steadily gets warmer, droughts will become more frequent and water will become more salinized, harder to find, and farther away from habitation. As it now stands, clean water is already unavailable to over 633 million people—one in ten of the people of the earth. Diseases from contaminated water kill on the aggregate more people than any form of violence, including wars and acts of terror. Forty-three percent of these people are children under age five. Water is a large part of the embodied life of women who bear these infants. Without abundant water, it is hard to carry a pregnancy safely to term, to give birth, nurse, or bathe children, or to launder clothes and diapers—all details for which women, and women alone, are largely responsible.

For many women around the world, the last well has already gone dry. Drought has become a serious problem in environments as diverse as Guatemala, Yemen, Syria, the American Midwest, and Australia. Drought and water shortages fueled the war in Syria and the displacement of millions of people, the majority of whom are women and children. Women, children and men are dying in a modern genocide of famine and thirst in Yemen as a result of both climate change and savage warfare perpetrated by Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the US and Canada. People are fleeing their farms in Guatemala and Honduras because of drought and their inability to grow both corn and coffee. In the cities they face very high levels of violence by male gangs armed with weapons supplied by American military and arms manufacturers. Women face rape, violence and murder while their children are in danger of being recruited into these gangs. Many women and children have fled to the American border where families are separated, and children are locked up in internment camps in Texas and elsewhere. These camps are run by private prison companies who are making a fortune off the suffering of mothers and fathers turned back at the border after losing their children. In Australia towns and cities in the Murray/Darling River system face water shortages so severe that they will no longer be able to rely on tap water, while cotton farmers have sequestered huge amounts of water for irrigation upstream. Recurring heat and drought have made this form of agriculture unsustainable. It is families in small towns and big cities downstream who will suffer. Australian mothers, like their African counterparts, will have to fetch water from elsewhere, although with much less individual labour.

The key to turning our current planetary crises around is to look to those people who bear the greatest burden in dealing with these crises now, and in the future.

Sources for all three parts of “The Last Well” will be included at the end of Part III.

About 25 years ago I was lucky enough to attend the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva, Switzerland. I was there with a small delegation from the Aboriginal Law Centre of the University of Saskatchewan, College of Law (Canada) where I was visiting as the Ariel F. Sallows Professor of Human Rights. While in Saskatchewan I became very much involved in international and local Indigenous issues. In Geneva I was with a few colleagues and students from Saskatchewan, as well as many other Indigenous people from Canada and allies from all over the world. It was a very large gathering of over 1000 people, almost all Indigenous. During the session (which was mainly devoted to drafting a document that would eventually become the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) a group of white South Afrikaners stood up and demanded to be included as “Indigenous people” from South Africa. There is no definition of “Indigenous” in the Declaration, and never has been. As one Indigenous colleague had once told me “we know who we are”. The Afrikaners reckoned they could be included. “Diversity and inclusion” right?

Everyone in the room got up and walked out – quietly, no fuss, no yelling – just walked out. It was a very warm sunny day, and we all congregated in the plaza outside waiting for the Afrikaners to finish their statement, at which point they were very politely told “no”, and left. Then we all went back in and continued our discussions. White South Africans might be Indigenous to somewhere – Afrikaners or Boers are mostly Dutch, British are from the UK – and there are also many people whose families were brought as slaves from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and Madagascar, as well as from India, brought into South Africa by the British during the 19th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa#British_colonisation_and_the_Great_Trek) Mahatma Gandhi was originally an Indian South African. But he was not Indigenous to South Africa, nor are others descended from colonists, migrants and slaves from Europe, Asia or even possibly other parts of Africa. The idea of who is “indigenous” to Africa more generally is very complex. It’s true that at least parts of the Natal and Transvaal colonies in the northeast of South Africa appeared to be empty of African peoples when the Boers moved into them in the early 19th century. They were quickly challenged by Zulu and Xhosa coming from the north and east. The original inhabitants of South Africa are  the Khoikhoi and San peoples, who appear to be descendants of people who have lived in southern Africa for as long as 170,000 years. First arrived (so you claim, or even as it might appear) does not necessarily make you Indigenous to the land you appropriate.

Neither does a claim of genetic inheritance, or blood line. So-called “Métis” who live in Quebec or Atlantic Canada, and who claim an Indigenous ancestor from hundreds of years ago, are not recognized as genuinely Métis or Indigenous by other established nations in the region. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis) Same with Native American wannabes with a little bit of Cherokee somewhere in their bloodline. Indigenous is much, much more than bloodlines, however close or distant, although having recent and ongoing family relationships is obviously important as an aspect of being Indigenous. It’s not about occupation of land, although attachment to land is a big part of it. It’s not a “feeling” or an “idea” in your head – “I feel like being Indigenous” or “I think I really am Indigenous” doesn’t cut it. Nor is it about well-intentioned efforts to “learn” about being Indigenous by reading books and going “wow, that shamanism stuff looks incredible” and then making claims that this, or other aspects of Indigenous culture, are somehow universally human and therefore free to steal at will because we’re all kind of “indigenous” right? I don’t really know what being Indigenous is in any real sense, because I’m not one. (The closest I get is Pictish from northeastern Scotland).

What I do know is that being Indigenous is not an “identity”. It’s not a matter of individual choice. Neither is being Black, or Asian, or having brown skin. Neither is having a disability, or aging, or being a child, or (mostly) being gay, or (sometimes) being transsexual. You might gain abilities or find solutions to solve a disability issue. You might grow out of being young (hopefully). Eventually, everyone (if you’re lucky) gets old, and everyone definitely dies. If you have a severe case of “gender dysphoria” (a feeling of discomfort with your gender as it aligns with your physical body as determined by biological sex) altering your outward appearance and physical body to mirror the opposite sex might be the only way you can live a comfortable life. This might be characterized as a choice, but for a few people the discomfort is so severe that “choice” becomes less relevant. For the vast majority of people, including most “transgender” people, gender might be an “identity”. For most people claiming to be transgender, it really does seem to be a matter of personal choice. Most transgender people do not suffer from gender dysphoria, and the majority of those transitioning from male to “transwomen” (but not necessarily female to “transmen”) do not make many, or any, physical changes to conform to their “gender identity” or “gender expression”.

Gender, for most people, operates as a social constraint attached to biological sex that is extremely difficult to change or challenge. It is the social mechanism which differentiates between how biological males are treated differently, or what is expected of them, in any given culture from biological females. From a feminist perspective, gender is a social structure which is based on dominance (male) and subservience (female), although how all this works is very complex and can differ radically between cultures and over time. Gender non-conformity can be a choice, and can be a very good thing. Feminists have been challenging gender conformity for hundreds of years. Challenging gender stereotypes and restrictions is a necessary part of the struggle to overcome discrimination based on sex.

But, no one is “born in the wrong body”, just like no one is born with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong cultural ancestry. As for being male or female, your body develops in one of two directions from soon after conception by biological sex, not gender. So at birth, you are who you are – female or male. A tiny minority of people are born with, or develop as they mature, sexual characteristics that are slightly different from the usual. The percentage of “intersex” people is very small – about 0.015% of the human population. Even in these cases, individuals are still either male or female. The chromosomal irregularities can create infertility and other physical problems. It is perfectly normal for a dimorphic system, such as biological sex, to have a small percentage of differences among individuals. This does not mean biological sex is a “spectrum”, no more than the small percentage of people with more or less than 10 fingers and 10 toes means there is a digital “spectrum”.

Biological sex, and the gendered expectations attached to sex, can determine whether you are lucky enough to be born at all, which many female babies never get to be because of female sex selective abortion. Sex is not “assigned” at birth, like a “sorting hat” assigns which house you belong to in “Harry Potter”. It is not an arbitrary administrative choice made by the attending obstetrician or some bureaucratic functionary. Sex develops naturally from a few weeks after conception with the presence of testerone (male), or later, estrogen and progesterone (female). Gender kicks in the moment sex is detected, not before. Gender identity solidifies, and might (with difficulty) be changed after birth – usually long after. Mostly, not at all.

But sex is another one of those things that is not a choice. Absolutely and forever not a choice. It’s not an identity. It’s not the same as gender. We’re either male or female from soon after conception. A baby’s sex can be identified while still in the womb. You can wrap your little darling in a pink or a blue (or a yellow or a pastel lavender) blanket, and he will stay a he, and she will stay a she, for the rest of their lives regardless of gender, or sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality, or pretty much anything else, including medical intervention. Indeed, sex can be detected from DNA samples from humans and many other species thousands of years after the individual has died. Sex is not a class, or a preference, or an orientation, or a group. Its not on any spectrum. Sex defines which of two halves of the human race you will be a part of – the half that is female or the half that is male. Not all females can give birth to another human, but no male can give birth at all, ever. All humans born today, or born tens of thousands of years ago, entered this world out of a woman’s body, because nine or so months earlier, that woman had sex with a man, and one of his sperm successfully fertilized her egg. That’s it. Very simple.

To be a woman is to be an adult human female. It is also to grow up as female with all the gender stereotypes and restrictions and strengths and positive aspects, whatever those might be, that girls grow up with in every culture on Earth. All these aspects of gender, positive and negative, change over time and from place to place. Sex does not. To be a man is to be an adult human male who has grown up with all the gender stereotypes, positive and negative, that cultures over time allow him. We currently live in an intensely patriarchal society in which men reap many benefits not available to women. Feminists are trying to change that. Many men also see that their own situation is not so great, and some of those are also trying to change things for the better. Some men and women think changing their sexed appearance, or their “gender”, somehow solves these problems, for them at least. But it solves nothing for women and men more generally. Transgender ideology simply reinforces gender stereotypes and claims those stereotypes are a replacement for biological sex, which is impossible.

So, being Black, or brown, or Indigenous, like being a man or a woman, are not choices anyone gets to make. They’re not feelings or ideas. They’re collections of thousands of years of both biological and cultural development, specific to time and space. Of course people migrate, as Africans have done for hundreds of thousands of years or, more recently, were forced to do as slaves. But African migrants are not Indigenous to Canada, or the US, or the UK, or the Caribbean, nor do they claim to be. White Afrikaners are not Indigenous to South Africa. Their claim to be Indigenous is like transgender “women” claiming to be actual women, somehow on a par with or even superior to “cis” or “born” women. None of these claims are choices people get to make.

Men – you can wear whatever feminine gender costume or performance you want – you are still a man. You can alter your hormones and genitals to masquerade or pass as female – you are still a man. You are not “Indigenous” to the female sex. You do not get to speak for women. You do not get to identify as women. The same is true for women transitioning to male, although there the political, social and personal dynamics are very different. “Cis” is a made-up word to create a false equivalence between women and men who are biologically female or male, from those who call themselves “trans” – the tiny minority of people pretending to be, however sincerely or insincerely, to be something they are not.

Most “trans” know they are not who they claim to be. Some (and I salute you!) are honest about it. Many are not. Many “trans” allies and transgender activists appear to be disingenuous opportunists, riding the current fad, including far too many “feminists”. Just like white people do not get to speak for Black people whether male, female or even transsexual. Just like straight people do not get to speak for lesbians, gay men and bi-sexuals. Transwomen and men, claiming to be something they’re not (and most know they’re not) are in fact colonizers of the new frontier located in human bodies and minds; propagandists for billionaires in the medical, pharmaceutical, technology, and cosmetic surgery industries with a very capitalist agenda; cancel culture warriors and academics who think this is the cutting edge of critical thinking. Like those Afrikaners in Geneva putting on a show no one believed – not even them.

13Linda Beacham, Willow Aster and 11 others4 CommentsLikeCommentShare

Why have I started up this blog? Good question!

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time. In fact, I had a blog which I’ve long since abandoned to the blogosphere heaven. Lately, I’ve been on social media a lot, especially Facebook and Twitter. But social media has it’s downsides. Facebook is great for making lots of new friends, keeping up with what’s going on in your areas of interest, keeping in contact with people, posting photos, videos, memes and other visual information, reading and sharing links, and so on. It’s also argumentative, sometimes pretty hostile, tends to lock people into bubbles, and is subject to Facebook’s “community standards”. Twitter is the same only more so. This blog is to try and set up my own platform in order to write about the issues that are important to me without restrictions or fear of censorship.

The issues I want to explore involve, first of all, women and girls, including feminism and all that movement’s different aspects and permutations. I identify myself as a “radical” feminist, although this hasn’t always been so. But, at least since I was in my mid-teens, I’ve seen myself as a girl or woman in a world that doesn’t necessarily value me because of that. I became a “second wave” feminist, dropped out of it, came back in an international context, left again, and now I’m back. I’ve also spent many years as an international human rights teacher, writer and advocate, and especially a student and teacher of Indigenous issues. My interests extend to history, law, international relations, intellectual and cultural property, and the Earth’s environment, especially climate change.

Women and girls are the “other” half of the human race. The half that tends to get sidetracked and forgotten, “mansplained” and ignored, intimidated or silenced. With nearly four billion of us female humans on this planet, no one ideological, political or philosophical perspective is going to apply to all of us. I support a diversity of views within feminism, and outside of it where these are supportive and useful to women and girls. But I start with a basic premise:

Feminism is about the rights of women and girls. And women and girls are female human beings.

I respect the rights of all people, all living creatures, and our only home – Earth. This includes the rights of all living species; all cultures, races, nationalities and ethnicities; both sexes and all sexualities; all gender preferences that are not destructive of other human rights; all abilities and disabilities; all ages; all political perspectives that are not destructive of human rights or the Earth; all classes and castes that are not destructive of other humans or the Earth; all religious beliefs or lack of beliefs that are not destructive of human rights or the Earth. But in my view, writing about rights starts with respecting the female half of the human race.

I also believe there is a second starting point. In order to respect and protect our Earth and every living creature on it, we need to understand the land, water, air, ice, energy, different habitats, and how the Earth’s systems work together as a living whole, including us. Climate. Biodiversity. Geological systems. Ecological systems. Oceans. Atmosphere. Our place in our solar system, our galaxy and our universe. And to do this we must respect science -not blindly – but intelligently. Ask questions. Think critically. Respect the knowledge of those who have come before us, but without giving up our own ability to be inquisitive and creative. Remember the past, but look forward. Scientific knowledge includes disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology, geology and medicine. It also includes the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, farmers, craftspeople and all those who work with their heads and their hands. It can include (with some caution) the social sciences such as archeology, anthropology, language studies and cultural studies, sociology, and psychology. Above all, science is not just a body of knowledge, but a method of inquiry and discovery. So my second basic premise is:

Science and scientific inquiry are the bedrocks of how we think about the world, both as it is now, but also how we got here, and where we might be headed.

My third starting point is that Indigenous peoples everywhere, including our own ancestors from wherever we come from, developed systems of knowledge, science, ways of thinking and living – in particular places and at particular times – which speak directly to who we are as one of many living species living on this Earth. These ways of living do not separate science from the sacred. Knowledge is not compartmentalized into “out there” and “in here”. We as humans are not separate from the Earth – we are part of it. Other animals and plants, rocks, rivers, ice and oceans are part of us. The Earth is a living system and humans are essential to how that system works – or doesn’t work. I cannot speak on behalf of Indigenous peoples, or even my own ancestors (who came from Scotland for the most part). But I can write about what I’ve learned and am still learning from the “Peoples of the Earth”. So my third basic premise is:

The “Peoples of the Earth” – Indigenous, ancestral, rural people, the working poor – have developed ways of living on Earth that might show us how to find a way out of our current crises. Therefore Indigenous rights – like the rights of women and girls – are foundational.

Finally, I start always with history, including what we sometimes call “myth”. If we don’t understand how we’ve created the narratives of our present, we will not understand who we are or where we’re going. The history we’re usually taught is that in which the principle characters are men, in particular white Euro-colonial men. Western Europeans and Americans especially dominate how we look at history and our current political, economic and social systems. Anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote a book, first published in 1982, in which this Eurocentrism is highlighted. The title of the book is Europe and the People Without History (University of California Press; Second edition, 2010; see also Blaut, J.M. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, The Guilford Press; 1st edition, 1993 and Eight Eurocentric Historians The Guilford Press; 1st edition, 2000). The rest of us – women, children, poor people, working people, Indigenous people, people who are not white – are left on the peripheries of these histories, or are completely invisible. Some progress has been made to bring peripheral histories into the centre, and these are immensely valuable.

But, I also believe we need to expand what we think of as “history”. It doesn’t have to be a linear or chronological narrative of “events”, it doesn’t have to be in a written language, it doesn’t have to be “secular” as opposed to “sacred”. It can cover a range of different forms of communication. History is essentially stories, often presented as about the past, but not always. Oral history, women’s history, myths and origin stories are often dismissed or simply ignored by Euro-colonial authors as fictional, primitive, “fairy tales” and legends. I think this is a mistake. Human history long predates written texts. It can be found in art, stories told down through generations (some of which are astonishingly ancient), music, languages, “old wives tales” and children’s stories. History can be discovered through archeology, linguistics, genetics, radiation dating, physical relics of the past, even within the human body itself. So my fourth and final basic premise is:

History, however it can be discovered or deciphered, is a collection of all the stories that tell us who we are as humans on this planet. These stories can ground us in the Earth itself, or they can separate us from the planet and other living creatures, including other humans, in ways we are discovering can be alienating and dangerous. Understanding history, scientific knowledge and systems of inquiry, along with centering the basic rights of female human beings and all the peoples of the Earth, are the four basic premises we need moving forwards.

My writings in the posts that will follow are based on other writing and research I have done, the teachings I’ve learned from so many people, the exchanges and communication I’ve had on social media and elsewhere with others, many of whom I have never met, the experiences that have shaped me, and the knowledge-keepers of many different cultures and disciplines I have been privileged to come across.

As for me, I’m approaching my 70th year, I’m retired and have no more reasons to be afraid of what others might think or feel about what I say or write. You may or may not agree with me, but I hope you’ll at least respect that my words are meant in all honesty and good faith.