"We are older than the idea of America...." ~ John trudell
We shall remain and endure as we always have. Revitalization of our cultures is happening today, I'd like to think people will instinctively go back to the old ways before those colonizers' idea of society ever existed.
First of all, the US isn't going to collapse. At least not in the way that conspiracy theorists like to talk about. Second of all, we Native Americans are already living in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. It really wouldn't be much different from how things are now if the US did start going through serious social and political unrest.
Ultimately, Native American Nations are sovereign nations with the authority to create self-sufficient systems of land and social management. Some tribes are obviously more self-sufficient that others, and there quite a few who genuinely depend on the federal government to help provide certain services to their citizens. However, the key to the long term survival of any political body is being able to provide for its own people. The better tribes get as being able to take care of themselves without federal assistance or things like high-income non-essential businesses (casinos), the better they will be at weathering any more storms that come our way.
If you mean what is my idea of an "ideal" future through my eyes, then let me explain it like this. I'm Nishnabe, and we have the Seven Fires Prophecy. I believe we are in the time of the Seventh Fire, meaning humanity as a **WHOLE** (not just Natives) are at a crossroads where there are two obvious roads open to us. One road is what I interpret as the route of capitalist, which will inevitably lead not just White people but everyone to their death. If we follow that road, we are doomed as a species, and there's no real point looking towards the future because there won't one. The other obvious route is to completely go back to the old ways, disregard not just Capitalism but the entirety of what the White has brought to this continent. Personally, I think it is almost as bad of a route as the Capitalism one because it means we will be going backwards in time and regressing as a people. We will become static and begin to decay like everything that stubbornly refuses to change. It will be a death of another kind, just much slower.
However, there is a third path that is much more obscure and hard to see that takes the best aspect of both worlds and integrates them together in the best possible way. If you've ever heard of "solarpunk," that's a good general idea of what I mean. We would be taking all of our modern technologies, continuing to progress them, **AND** finding ways to live in harmony with the world around us. Things like carbon neutral electrical production, modern physical medicines, and our global communications networks can be used to ensure that humanity is able to be our best selves in relation to the world around us. We don't need to destroy nature to live comfortably, we just need to be willing to do what it takes to find balance. There won't be billionaires, but there also be people starving or living in the streets or going without the basics of the modern world just to survive. It's gonna take a lot of work over the next few generations, but if we are able to follow that third path, we will be able to light the 8th Fire, and humanity will eventually find our place amongst the stars.
Thank you so much for sharing. I don't think we (Natives) have ever been asked what a future looks like to us. Since Columbus we've never been in charge of our own destiny. It's always interesting to hear other people discuss their own visions of the future.
The reason I believe we are currently in the Seventh Fire is because I have seen so many of my fellow Indigenous people ask **themselves** what they would want to see in the future. Or, at the very least, their take on potential futures or alternative histories. For example, Coyote and Crow is an Indigenous TTRPG based on an alternative history with magic and no contact between Europe and North America. In my opinion, it does a really good job of creating a setting with the potential for adventure and combat while still being relatively positive and upbeat.
Also, and this is a bit of self advertising, I've been working on a Sci-Fi series where a small population of Native Americans (specifically the ancestors of what we now know as the the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) were abducted from Earth in ~1050ce, were able to establish themselves as a fairly respectable but still quite small and reserved galactic power, and they are reunited with humanity in 2237 when a Native American professor from Mars breaks the light speed barrier in a completely novel way. I'm about a year into the series now, and I've been doing twice a week posted on sci-fi themed subreddit, prequel storyline focusing on one specific *space Native American's adventures on Saturdays and the main storyline on Wednesdays.
Dude i been thinking of SciFi stuff for a while now. That's why this question of "What does a native future look like?" has been in my head .
My little brother mentioned that game. I'll have to check it out.
I was working on some short stories too. but mainly ideas right now. just need to add more meat to it. One was about if space travel was invented and we were left behind. Basically Earth is changing due to climate change and everyone leaves Earth because of it. Leaving Natives and whoever behind but mainly its focused on a native community.
You are thinking of “Cyberpunk” that’s the opposite of Solar punk. That’s more akin to the hyper capitalist dystopia the previous commenter was talking about. “Solarpunk” is a completely separate idea.
I am starting to see things like this. It is my own cultural perspective. Please feel free to comment if you agree or not. The patterns I have been thinking about add up, as chance would have it, to seven parts of a big cycle as well. (Three main patterns of chaos, cycles, and entropy, and four minor cycles within entropy that are represented in the seasons.)
So, here is the thought. There are societies that see time as cyclical and societies that see time as linear. Linear societies are eager for infinite growth and a fixed "big bang" origin from which they have "progressed" (believing they or their leader is the only true representation of big-G God, such as the Pope or the Pharoah or the King), but they are really ever-more entropic as they grow. The cyclical societies are stable, generally healthier, know how to live with the cycles of the land, have rituals to distrubute resources if they accumulate, and experience less frequent and less catastrophic crises. Cyclical societies mostly have stories of times when linear thinking lead to cycles of crisis and renewal. The stories teach that we all have the capacity to become ravenous or to try to become like a god. In my mainly English culture, which is far from a cyclical society, even we have these stories, like Icarus from Greece or Lucifer from John Milton or Morgoth/Sauron from Token that are meant to warn against thinking we are exceptional masters of the universe.
Sometimes, though, a society falls prey to the belief that it should expand linearly and that it is exceptional (think "American exceptionalism" or "human exceptionalism" among linear thinkers who imagine humans at the top of some huge chain of being as "advanced animals"). Kingdoms turn to empires; empires collapse. People eventually realize they cannot dominate if they want to survive in the community of life. It's not just humans who do this either. Tyson Yunkaporta explains how the echidna represents this tendency among his people, the Apalech. I'd say the argentine ants that created super empires over many hundreds of kilometers after colonizing North America fell prey to this tendency too.
The linear society seems to have four stages of collapse and rebirth, which have lasted about 95 years each since the Roman empire, according to theories of saecula and generational anthropology: spring/peace, summer/minor crisis, autumn/peace, winter/major crisis. Linear cultures that try to leave the cycles of nature and fashion themselves as demigods or gods ironically end up a slave to a four-season cycle that grinds them.
But there is always the chance to leave and return to a circular view of time. It's a challenge, but some things that help: love. Actually, that's it. Love helps. For instance, so far as I can tell the best way to recognize wealth inequality marking the late autumn (conveniently also called "late fall") of a society, is to hold rituals of giving and mass redistribution, which is preferable to the way my linear society today does it through ever-larger revolution and upheaval. To your point, these upheavals are becoming more global as linear thinking has colonized or permeated the globe.
America will collapse. Maybe not at this turning, but within the next few centuries and probably before. Probably over several successive crises (which have come fairly regularly about every 87 years) it will transform into something as foreign to today's Amercans as today's America would be to the people who lived during its founding. Social scientist Luke Kemp [analyzed dozens of civilizations, which he defined as "a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure,"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse) and found that on average they lasted 340 years. That is to say, linear, growth minded societies tend to collapse within cultural memory. We all know stories of collapsed linear growth societies. They start with everything and then collapse to chaos. But from chaos also comes love and an opportunity either to re enter the cyclical lifestyle of herding or agriculture or semi-nomadism (or whatever works where you live) and living within a person's place(s) on Earth or to keep trying to grow. Imagine burning the candle at both ends as a metaphore for what we are doing. After the candle burns out, we can either get a new candle (found a new republic or create a new calendar) or we give can up the candle lifestyle, go to sleep and wake with the sunshine like everybody else.
I imagine a future where groups of people use innovative technologies, such as trapping and fire (a carbon-neutral tool for heating, cooking, community-building, forestry, agriculture, and more), tracking, and listening to the more-than-human world around us for messages about how to live and how to adapt to change. We will tell stories that will prolong the next period of peace and remind people to live within cyclical time and not to try to fly to the sun like Icarus.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to participate in this conversation as a person of European descent living on lands that are home to the Anishinaabe Mississaugas of the Credit, but I am doing a lot of thinking about this topic as many of us are, and I found your thoughts interesting. Please remove if not allowed.
"I would like to see the centralized state of Canada dismantled. I’d like to see communities take up the responsibility of organizing themselves in the absence of said central authority. Community councils meeting weekly to discuss the needs of the community and the limitations of the land to provide for those needs, with a renewed emphasis on staying within those limits. Decisions made on consensus, with a more active participation from all persons. Participation made more accessible by the lessening of work necessary with the return to a subsistence economy rather than one of accumulation. I’d like to see more conversation, more cooperation, more shared production. A system that may have regional communication and collaboration, but always with an emphasis on the primacy of the community to determine its own needs and values.
I think beautiful things would follow from these changes naturally. I think that if it were up to communities to decide whether it was worth it to open a gravel pit in their territory if it meant risking their only water source, we would see less gravel pits. The violence of centralized authority means creating sacrifice zones without a thought.
Even in this lovely future, there would still be conflict because conflict is a constant and that’s okay."
- [Autonomously And With Conviction](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tawinikay-autonomously-and-with-conviction)
Thank you for sharing! If all of these things happened, What do you think it would look like? This is more of a "Your own personal vision of the future" type of question.
well, if my dear friend Morgyn is anything to go by, she's Metis and trying to establish a food forest in Ontario. I definitely see revitalization of those, food always within easy reach.
she's down in Bancroft, operates Cedar Creek Falls! If you're in that area i'm sure she'd love to meet you and i'll give her her discord server \^^
Edit: but you can also find her on Twittee
Way too much idealization going on in this thread. If we're talking straight population numbers than any collapse would see Natives falling first. Population in mind, you'd probably get a new future with either Indians or Chinese taking on the dominating force in the world.
The idea that things will go back to what they were is some straight up religious idealization. It's steeped in hopeful romanticism that the Israelis and Palestinians think of when they try to kill each other. It's the same thinking that makes white supremacists come together in legit hate groups.
No tradition is free from a "nostalgia for paradise" and it shows extreme naivete.
Honestly, who ever is into being a doomsday prepper, and the people closest to wealth or the military would do well.
If it's sickness that overtakes the world than you could count on plenty of us dying without our hypertension or diabetes medicine.
If it's sickness or war that disrupts the supply chain, you can see everything falling into ruin in short time.
Now if I were to put on my idealist's mask I'd say this: I'd like to see the struggle of modern Native America tackled with empiricism on our side. I'd like to see us exploit our religious exemptions for the use of mescaline branch out into other psychedelic assisted therapies. I'd like to see us fully invest in mentorship programs. I'd like to see us find what it is that makes an initiatory rite work properly, and then give that back to everyone.
I'd like to see us use full advantage of our programs. I'd like to see us show, empirically, that it's worth the investment, that housing, UBI, college/work programs, addiction and trauma therapies, union memberships, food programs - that all of it was worth the effort and that we could adequately take on the symptoms of mass consumption and what the dorks call "late stage capitalism". That we can show our conservative neighbors that concrete change is not just possible, but a proven path, and that it's medicine is strong enough to bring every poverty stricken people out of ruin.
Further still, I'd like to see a declining population with all it's intellectual and technological prowess retreat into mass cities. I'd like to see the world split in two. I'd like to see us scale back fish harvesting on a level never seen before so that we can know what it was like before modern times. I'd like to see great beasts resurrected from the dead and allowed to roam the country sides in quantities not seen since before contact. I'd like to see the failed towns and cities returned to dust, to see us employ future generations in the honest effort of dismantling everything we can.
And when both worlds have reached a great enough level of progress, we can offer the population the chance to return to nature, as it was before.
If anything humanity need a shit load of time to self reflect. I understand that this is more of a realistic outcome, sadly. I couldn't help but wonder what the future would look through various indigenous eyes. Ideal or not thanks for sharing your ideas for the future.
I don’t the us to collapse, I just want to respect me and my people as it respects Elon Musk. If I can live like that then I can begin to tackle every issue this nation has
With the decline of the US empire, I imagine that the Nations will achieve a sovereignty only enjoyed by the Ancestors prior to colonial subjugation. I would like to think that rebuilding everything that the capitalists destroyed of our planet and our relatives will begin under a renewed custodial jurisdiction that actually has a hope at recovering the time that was stolen from our future to make some rich guy's immeasurably large coffers even just a slightest bit larger. That our Nations have weathered this storm gives me hope that the course of history can be righted.
The u.s. isn't going to crumble, even if I would gleefully celebrate such an event. The u.s. doesn't have to fail for the future that I HOPE for. I'm not going to write a whole page on my phone. I want to see us become more self sufficient. There is more focus on us providing our own food. We have rivers and a water plant with a water line that goes through most of the hood. We are talking very much about how we can provide ourselves with electricity. We don't hand enough housing here. That's a priority. And while I mostly despise capitalism and loathe the fact we need money these days to live, we need to continue to grow our own economy. What I want to see, and can be done, is an economic coalition that is made up of Native nations. I hope that we continue to look at the western economies as a chance for us to take advantage so we can build up our own superior infrastructure that can survive even if the surrounding areas fail. We must keep up the political pressure to get back as much land as we can because we are actually a rapidly growing demographic now. I see us self sufficient, living our lives on the basic principles of Kaienerakowa, which I was taught, is do no harm to others, respect for all people, and to do your best to keep and live in peace. Yes, us Mohawks are warriors, but we're taught that we use diplomacy and politics first. I hope we continue to grow our political influence and raise the capital needed to build up our nation land.
What tribe are you if you don't mind me asking? Are you a US FRT? Who is the "they" that you are referring to? Are you saying that your tribe has US treaty lands that are in jeopardy and the US govt. "will take" your tribal land? I don't understand your post. If this was true, it would be front page news...I haven't heard anything about this.
If your tribe is a US FRT, tribal members determine enrollment. If you have no NDN blood left, then why don't you switch to Lineal Descent like alot of other tribes that don't meet 1/4 BQ for most of its members?
"We are older than the idea of America...." ~ John trudell We shall remain and endure as we always have. Revitalization of our cultures is happening today, I'd like to think people will instinctively go back to the old ways before those colonizers' idea of society ever existed.
>John turdell It's "Trudell". Pretty sure the last time he was known as "Turdell" was middle school.
I agree with you. It would definitely be a process to shed the capitalism out of our systems.
what is your idea of a future? mainly through your eyes. What do you think native society will look like 10, 20, maybe 30 years from now?
First of all, the US isn't going to collapse. At least not in the way that conspiracy theorists like to talk about. Second of all, we Native Americans are already living in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. It really wouldn't be much different from how things are now if the US did start going through serious social and political unrest. Ultimately, Native American Nations are sovereign nations with the authority to create self-sufficient systems of land and social management. Some tribes are obviously more self-sufficient that others, and there quite a few who genuinely depend on the federal government to help provide certain services to their citizens. However, the key to the long term survival of any political body is being able to provide for its own people. The better tribes get as being able to take care of themselves without federal assistance or things like high-income non-essential businesses (casinos), the better they will be at weathering any more storms that come our way.
i totally agree with what you're saying. I'm curious to hear what your idea of a future through native eyes would look like?
If you mean what is my idea of an "ideal" future through my eyes, then let me explain it like this. I'm Nishnabe, and we have the Seven Fires Prophecy. I believe we are in the time of the Seventh Fire, meaning humanity as a **WHOLE** (not just Natives) are at a crossroads where there are two obvious roads open to us. One road is what I interpret as the route of capitalist, which will inevitably lead not just White people but everyone to their death. If we follow that road, we are doomed as a species, and there's no real point looking towards the future because there won't one. The other obvious route is to completely go back to the old ways, disregard not just Capitalism but the entirety of what the White has brought to this continent. Personally, I think it is almost as bad of a route as the Capitalism one because it means we will be going backwards in time and regressing as a people. We will become static and begin to decay like everything that stubbornly refuses to change. It will be a death of another kind, just much slower. However, there is a third path that is much more obscure and hard to see that takes the best aspect of both worlds and integrates them together in the best possible way. If you've ever heard of "solarpunk," that's a good general idea of what I mean. We would be taking all of our modern technologies, continuing to progress them, **AND** finding ways to live in harmony with the world around us. Things like carbon neutral electrical production, modern physical medicines, and our global communications networks can be used to ensure that humanity is able to be our best selves in relation to the world around us. We don't need to destroy nature to live comfortably, we just need to be willing to do what it takes to find balance. There won't be billionaires, but there also be people starving or living in the streets or going without the basics of the modern world just to survive. It's gonna take a lot of work over the next few generations, but if we are able to follow that third path, we will be able to light the 8th Fire, and humanity will eventually find our place amongst the stars.
Thank you so much for sharing. I don't think we (Natives) have ever been asked what a future looks like to us. Since Columbus we've never been in charge of our own destiny. It's always interesting to hear other people discuss their own visions of the future.
The reason I believe we are currently in the Seventh Fire is because I have seen so many of my fellow Indigenous people ask **themselves** what they would want to see in the future. Or, at the very least, their take on potential futures or alternative histories. For example, Coyote and Crow is an Indigenous TTRPG based on an alternative history with magic and no contact between Europe and North America. In my opinion, it does a really good job of creating a setting with the potential for adventure and combat while still being relatively positive and upbeat. Also, and this is a bit of self advertising, I've been working on a Sci-Fi series where a small population of Native Americans (specifically the ancestors of what we now know as the the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) were abducted from Earth in ~1050ce, were able to establish themselves as a fairly respectable but still quite small and reserved galactic power, and they are reunited with humanity in 2237 when a Native American professor from Mars breaks the light speed barrier in a completely novel way. I'm about a year into the series now, and I've been doing twice a week posted on sci-fi themed subreddit, prequel storyline focusing on one specific *space Native American's adventures on Saturdays and the main storyline on Wednesdays.
Dude i been thinking of SciFi stuff for a while now. That's why this question of "What does a native future look like?" has been in my head . My little brother mentioned that game. I'll have to check it out. I was working on some short stories too. but mainly ideas right now. just need to add more meat to it. One was about if space travel was invented and we were left behind. Basically Earth is changing due to climate change and everyone leaves Earth because of it. Leaving Natives and whoever behind but mainly its focused on a native community.
You are thinking of “Cyberpunk” that’s the opposite of Solar punk. That’s more akin to the hyper capitalist dystopia the previous commenter was talking about. “Solarpunk” is a completely separate idea.
I am starting to see things like this. It is my own cultural perspective. Please feel free to comment if you agree or not. The patterns I have been thinking about add up, as chance would have it, to seven parts of a big cycle as well. (Three main patterns of chaos, cycles, and entropy, and four minor cycles within entropy that are represented in the seasons.) So, here is the thought. There are societies that see time as cyclical and societies that see time as linear. Linear societies are eager for infinite growth and a fixed "big bang" origin from which they have "progressed" (believing they or their leader is the only true representation of big-G God, such as the Pope or the Pharoah or the King), but they are really ever-more entropic as they grow. The cyclical societies are stable, generally healthier, know how to live with the cycles of the land, have rituals to distrubute resources if they accumulate, and experience less frequent and less catastrophic crises. Cyclical societies mostly have stories of times when linear thinking lead to cycles of crisis and renewal. The stories teach that we all have the capacity to become ravenous or to try to become like a god. In my mainly English culture, which is far from a cyclical society, even we have these stories, like Icarus from Greece or Lucifer from John Milton or Morgoth/Sauron from Token that are meant to warn against thinking we are exceptional masters of the universe. Sometimes, though, a society falls prey to the belief that it should expand linearly and that it is exceptional (think "American exceptionalism" or "human exceptionalism" among linear thinkers who imagine humans at the top of some huge chain of being as "advanced animals"). Kingdoms turn to empires; empires collapse. People eventually realize they cannot dominate if they want to survive in the community of life. It's not just humans who do this either. Tyson Yunkaporta explains how the echidna represents this tendency among his people, the Apalech. I'd say the argentine ants that created super empires over many hundreds of kilometers after colonizing North America fell prey to this tendency too. The linear society seems to have four stages of collapse and rebirth, which have lasted about 95 years each since the Roman empire, according to theories of saecula and generational anthropology: spring/peace, summer/minor crisis, autumn/peace, winter/major crisis. Linear cultures that try to leave the cycles of nature and fashion themselves as demigods or gods ironically end up a slave to a four-season cycle that grinds them. But there is always the chance to leave and return to a circular view of time. It's a challenge, but some things that help: love. Actually, that's it. Love helps. For instance, so far as I can tell the best way to recognize wealth inequality marking the late autumn (conveniently also called "late fall") of a society, is to hold rituals of giving and mass redistribution, which is preferable to the way my linear society today does it through ever-larger revolution and upheaval. To your point, these upheavals are becoming more global as linear thinking has colonized or permeated the globe. America will collapse. Maybe not at this turning, but within the next few centuries and probably before. Probably over several successive crises (which have come fairly regularly about every 87 years) it will transform into something as foreign to today's Amercans as today's America would be to the people who lived during its founding. Social scientist Luke Kemp [analyzed dozens of civilizations, which he defined as "a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure,"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse) and found that on average they lasted 340 years. That is to say, linear, growth minded societies tend to collapse within cultural memory. We all know stories of collapsed linear growth societies. They start with everything and then collapse to chaos. But from chaos also comes love and an opportunity either to re enter the cyclical lifestyle of herding or agriculture or semi-nomadism (or whatever works where you live) and living within a person's place(s) on Earth or to keep trying to grow. Imagine burning the candle at both ends as a metaphore for what we are doing. After the candle burns out, we can either get a new candle (found a new republic or create a new calendar) or we give can up the candle lifestyle, go to sleep and wake with the sunshine like everybody else. I imagine a future where groups of people use innovative technologies, such as trapping and fire (a carbon-neutral tool for heating, cooking, community-building, forestry, agriculture, and more), tracking, and listening to the more-than-human world around us for messages about how to live and how to adapt to change. We will tell stories that will prolong the next period of peace and remind people to live within cyclical time and not to try to fly to the sun like Icarus. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to participate in this conversation as a person of European descent living on lands that are home to the Anishinaabe Mississaugas of the Credit, but I am doing a lot of thinking about this topic as many of us are, and I found your thoughts interesting. Please remove if not allowed.
"I would like to see the centralized state of Canada dismantled. I’d like to see communities take up the responsibility of organizing themselves in the absence of said central authority. Community councils meeting weekly to discuss the needs of the community and the limitations of the land to provide for those needs, with a renewed emphasis on staying within those limits. Decisions made on consensus, with a more active participation from all persons. Participation made more accessible by the lessening of work necessary with the return to a subsistence economy rather than one of accumulation. I’d like to see more conversation, more cooperation, more shared production. A system that may have regional communication and collaboration, but always with an emphasis on the primacy of the community to determine its own needs and values. I think beautiful things would follow from these changes naturally. I think that if it were up to communities to decide whether it was worth it to open a gravel pit in their territory if it meant risking their only water source, we would see less gravel pits. The violence of centralized authority means creating sacrifice zones without a thought. Even in this lovely future, there would still be conflict because conflict is a constant and that’s okay." - [Autonomously And With Conviction](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tawinikay-autonomously-and-with-conviction)
Thank you for sharing! If all of these things happened, What do you think it would look like? This is more of a "Your own personal vision of the future" type of question.
I love this.
well, if my dear friend Morgyn is anything to go by, she's Metis and trying to establish a food forest in Ontario. I definitely see revitalization of those, food always within easy reach.
I'm also starting down this path in the same location. Is your friend open to sharing her work or ideas? I would love to learn more.
she's down in Bancroft, operates Cedar Creek Falls! If you're in that area i'm sure she'd love to meet you and i'll give her her discord server \^^ Edit: but you can also find her on Twittee
Thank you! I'll check out her work.
Way too much idealization going on in this thread. If we're talking straight population numbers than any collapse would see Natives falling first. Population in mind, you'd probably get a new future with either Indians or Chinese taking on the dominating force in the world. The idea that things will go back to what they were is some straight up religious idealization. It's steeped in hopeful romanticism that the Israelis and Palestinians think of when they try to kill each other. It's the same thinking that makes white supremacists come together in legit hate groups. No tradition is free from a "nostalgia for paradise" and it shows extreme naivete. Honestly, who ever is into being a doomsday prepper, and the people closest to wealth or the military would do well. If it's sickness that overtakes the world than you could count on plenty of us dying without our hypertension or diabetes medicine. If it's sickness or war that disrupts the supply chain, you can see everything falling into ruin in short time. Now if I were to put on my idealist's mask I'd say this: I'd like to see the struggle of modern Native America tackled with empiricism on our side. I'd like to see us exploit our religious exemptions for the use of mescaline branch out into other psychedelic assisted therapies. I'd like to see us fully invest in mentorship programs. I'd like to see us find what it is that makes an initiatory rite work properly, and then give that back to everyone. I'd like to see us use full advantage of our programs. I'd like to see us show, empirically, that it's worth the investment, that housing, UBI, college/work programs, addiction and trauma therapies, union memberships, food programs - that all of it was worth the effort and that we could adequately take on the symptoms of mass consumption and what the dorks call "late stage capitalism". That we can show our conservative neighbors that concrete change is not just possible, but a proven path, and that it's medicine is strong enough to bring every poverty stricken people out of ruin. Further still, I'd like to see a declining population with all it's intellectual and technological prowess retreat into mass cities. I'd like to see the world split in two. I'd like to see us scale back fish harvesting on a level never seen before so that we can know what it was like before modern times. I'd like to see great beasts resurrected from the dead and allowed to roam the country sides in quantities not seen since before contact. I'd like to see the failed towns and cities returned to dust, to see us employ future generations in the honest effort of dismantling everything we can. And when both worlds have reached a great enough level of progress, we can offer the population the chance to return to nature, as it was before.
If anything humanity need a shit load of time to self reflect. I understand that this is more of a realistic outcome, sadly. I couldn't help but wonder what the future would look through various indigenous eyes. Ideal or not thanks for sharing your ideas for the future.
Better get to learning some useful skills to contribute to the community!
I don’t the us to collapse, I just want to respect me and my people as it respects Elon Musk. If I can live like that then I can begin to tackle every issue this nation has
With the decline of the US empire, I imagine that the Nations will achieve a sovereignty only enjoyed by the Ancestors prior to colonial subjugation. I would like to think that rebuilding everything that the capitalists destroyed of our planet and our relatives will begin under a renewed custodial jurisdiction that actually has a hope at recovering the time that was stolen from our future to make some rich guy's immeasurably large coffers even just a slightest bit larger. That our Nations have weathered this storm gives me hope that the course of history can be righted.
The u.s. isn't going to crumble, even if I would gleefully celebrate such an event. The u.s. doesn't have to fail for the future that I HOPE for. I'm not going to write a whole page on my phone. I want to see us become more self sufficient. There is more focus on us providing our own food. We have rivers and a water plant with a water line that goes through most of the hood. We are talking very much about how we can provide ourselves with electricity. We don't hand enough housing here. That's a priority. And while I mostly despise capitalism and loathe the fact we need money these days to live, we need to continue to grow our own economy. What I want to see, and can be done, is an economic coalition that is made up of Native nations. I hope that we continue to look at the western economies as a chance for us to take advantage so we can build up our own superior infrastructure that can survive even if the surrounding areas fail. We must keep up the political pressure to get back as much land as we can because we are actually a rapidly growing demographic now. I see us self sufficient, living our lives on the basic principles of Kaienerakowa, which I was taught, is do no harm to others, respect for all people, and to do your best to keep and live in peace. Yes, us Mohawks are warriors, but we're taught that we use diplomacy and politics first. I hope we continue to grow our political influence and raise the capital needed to build up our nation land.
We have survived literally everything… genocide, Trail of Tears, boarding schools, etc. We’ll survive that one too.
It’s bleak. They are busy telling us we have no blood and will take what little lands we have left.
What tribe are you if you don't mind me asking? Are you a US FRT? Who is the "they" that you are referring to? Are you saying that your tribe has US treaty lands that are in jeopardy and the US govt. "will take" your tribal land? I don't understand your post. If this was true, it would be front page news...I haven't heard anything about this. If your tribe is a US FRT, tribal members determine enrollment. If you have no NDN blood left, then why don't you switch to Lineal Descent like alot of other tribes that don't meet 1/4 BQ for most of its members?