@book{krenak2020ideas,
title={Ideas to Postpone the End of the World},
author={Krenak, A. and Doyle, A.},
isbn={9781487008529},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=HXXqDwAAQBAJ},
year={2020},
publisher={House of Anansi Press Incorporated}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
This involuntary confinement has given Indigenous people resilience, made us more resistant. I planted corn this morning. I planted a tree. This virus is discriminating against humanity. The virus, a natural organism, is attacking the unsustainable way of life we chose for ourselves — this fantastic freedom we so love to demand, but which comes at a cost no one thought to consider.
Governments think that the economy can’t stop, even though “people are going to die, there’s no avoiding it. What Jair Bolsonaro has been doing can only be called necropolitics. Once people stop producing, they become dispensable. For governments, the death of those who generate costs for the state is good for business. In other words: let the vulnerable die.
Humankind versus Earth.
At Krenak village have been mourning our Doce River for decades now, watching it defiled by industrial and agricultural pollution, deformed by hydroelectric stations, and, more recently, choked with toxic mud from a burst tailings dam.
I don’t see anything out there that is not nature. We have to abandon our anthropocentrism. Biodiversity doesn’t seem to be missing us at all. Mother Earth puts us to sleep and wakes us up again with the rising sun; she lets the birds sing, the currents and winds flow. She creates this wonderful world for us to share, and what have we done in return?
“Hush, now.” That is what the Earth is saying to humanity.
I hope things don’t go back to normal, because if they do, it will mean that the deaths of thousands of people around the world were in vain.
We have, over the last two or three thousand years, built the idea of humanity. That very idea of humanity might lie at the heart of our worst decisions, justifying a great deal of violence. This call to civilization was always justified by the idea that there is a right way of being in the world, one truth, or concept of truth, that has guided the choices made down through history.
How can we justify calling ourselves a humanity when 70 percent of us are totally alienated from even the minimal exercise of being — when the majority of us are denied any real agency because the world we are living in does not want or require our input, only our custom? Though excluded, we go on nourishing the dream of someday being admitted, of being inducted into the club, where the future is planned and meaning is produced. We legitimize the perpetuity of these institutions, and accept their often egregious and damaging decisions, because they are in the service of this singular humanity we think ourselves to be.
Modernization has herded people from the fields and the forests into sprawling favelas and outlying slums, where they serve as cheap labour for the urban centres. Why have we insisted so hard for so long on belonging to this club, which, most of the time, just limits our capacity for invention, creation, existence, and liberty?
The myth of sustainability, invented by corporations to justify their theft of our idea of nature. No company on this earth is sustainable, no matter what they say. It’s dishonest to use a term like sustainability when we’re on the verge of being expelled from Gaia. Not even the Indigenous communities are sustainable today, because we can’t provide for all our needs in a way that is fully integrated with the land. No community that is in debt to the land can call itself sustainable, because we take out more than we can put back in. Our deficit to Gaia is half an earth per year.
I can’t see anything on Earth that is not Earth. I learned that those mountains have a name — Takukrak — and a personality. Early in the morning, down in the village, the people look up at the mountain to see if it’s going to be a good day or whether it would be best to stay inside. If the mountain looks grumpy, they take extra care.
We, humanity, are going to end up living in artificial environments produced by the very same corporations that devoured all the forests, rivers, and mountains. It’s a steady stream of new toys and new pills to keep us entertained. What exactly do we need to sustain? Because we’re certainly not sustaining life on Earth.
Our reserve, the Krenak reserve, was created in the 1920s basically to function as a container, and they stuffed us inside it. It confines us. We’re shut in there and kept out of the way. We are refugees in our own land, and we can’t even use the water anymore, because the river is in a coma (since the mining dam catastrophe). They have to deliver our water to us in trucks.
People can live in the spirit of the forest — with the forest and in the forest.
The times we’re living in are expert at creating absences: sapping the meaning of life from society and the meaning of experience from life. This absence of meaning generates stringent intolerance toward anyone still capable of taking pleasure from simply being alive, from dancing, from singing. The kind of zombie humanity we’re being asked to join can’t bear so much pleasure, so much fruition in life. So they holler on about the end of the world in the hope of making us give up on our dreams. Civilization called them “savages” and waged endless war in a bid to transform them into fine, upstanding members of the Humanity Club.
There are hundreds of narratives told by Indigenous peoples who are still alive, who still tell tales, sing, travel, talk, and teach us more than this humanity cares to learn.
“The Indians have been holding out for over five hundred years now. I’m more worried about the whites, and what they’re going to do to get out of this one.”
We have been able to resist because we expanded our subjectivity, refusing to accept the idea that we’re all the same. Humans are not the only interesting creatures that have perspectives on existence. So many other animals do too.
My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so we’ve always got time for one more story.
It’s important to live the experience of our circulation in the world, not metaphorically, but as friction, and to be able to depend on one another. When you feel the sky is caving in on you, just give it a push and breathe. Hanging the sky broadens our horizons; not in a prospective sense, but existentially. It enriches our subjectivities (our dreams and imaginations), which are precisely what the times we live in want to consume, hijack, exploit as merchandise. Seeing as nature is being attacked in so indefensible a manner, at least let’s keep our subjectivities alive, our visions, our poetics of existence.
For decades now, we have been pressing the government to honour its constitutional pledge to protect the rights of our peoples over the ancestral territories that the prevailing legal framework calls “homelands.” We have to fight for the last remaining swaths of land where nature still prospers, where our needs for food and a home can be met, and where our societies, however small, can make their own way in the world, without excessive reliance on the state.
The Doce River, which we, the Krenak Nation, call Watu — our grandfather — is a person, not a resource, as the economists like to call him.
What lies at the root of the nation’s incapacity to embrace its Indigenous peoples — is the idea that the tribes ought to be contributing to the success of modernity’s nature-depleting project, just like everybody else.
In many places today we have become so uprooted from our homelands that we cross oceans as if we were merely popping across the street. This has also stripped our journeys of real significance. We have been cut adrift in a cosmos devoid of meaning and shorn of any shared ethic. We all need to wake up, because whereas before it was just us, the Indigenous peoples, who were facing a loss of meaning in our lives, today everyone is at risk, without exception.
We are excluding all local forms of organization that are not integrated into the world of merchandise, thus threatening with extinction all other ways of life. This humanity refuses to recognize that the river, now in a coma, is also our grandfather; that the mountains mined in Africa or South America and transformed into merchandise elsewhere are also the grandfather, grandmother, mother, brother of some other constellation of human beings that want to go on sharing the communal home we call Earth. This is the legacy of our forebears, the memory of our origins, which we identify as our “headland,” as a humanity that cannot understand itself without this connection, this deep-set communion with the earth.
This place that has always been sacred to us. When we depersonalize the river, the mountain, when we strip them of their meaning, we relegate these places to the level of mere resources for industry and extractivism. Deriving guidance for our actions in the waking world from the dreams that visit us in our slumber.
There is no meaning to life unless informed by dreams, the place we go in search of songs, cures, inspiration, and even solutions to practical problems that befuddle and elude us in the daytime, but which are laid out in all their possibilities in the realm of dream. We’re too conditioned to a certain idea of the human being and a single type of existence. Were we able to stand outside our own experience for a moment, we would probably realize that our perceptions of a great many things resemble more closely what we think about them than what they actually are. Our adherence to a fixed idea that the globe has always been this way and humanity has always related to it the way it does now is the deepest mark the Anthropocene has left.
The discomfort generated by modern science, technologies, and the migrations deriving from the so-called “mass revolutions” was never local, never pooled in any one region. On the contrary, it split the world down the middle. The end of the world is never so close as when you have worlds on either side of a divide, each trying to guess what the other’s doing. We feel insecure, paranoid even, because all the other outcomes we can see require the implosion of the house we inherited but live in fear of losing.
Let’s put our creative and critical capacity to use making some colourful parachutes to slow the fall, turn it into something exciting and edifying.
There are no more scientists. Everyone capable of innovating is swallowed up by the thing-making machine, turning out more merchandise. It’s as if all discoveries were preconditioned to make us distrust all discoveries, certain they’re out to deceive us.
Dreams as the transcendental experience in which the human chrysalis cracks open onto unlimited new visions of life. Some Shamans and magicians dwell in these realms, or can visit them—the world in another register, another potency.
You keep talking about another world, but have you asked the generations of tomorrow if the world you’re building is the world they want?
We ought to recognize nature as an immense multitude of forms, each and every piece of ourselves included, for we, too, are part of the whole. We created this abstract idea that humankind is the measure of things, and we go out into the world safe in the general assurance that we belong to one big humanity for whom the world was made, and that we are therefore entitled to stomp around taking whatever we want.
Engagement with any other possible mindset means hearing, feeling, smelling, inhaling, and exhaling layers of all the stuff that is not “us” and so must be “nature,” but which isn’t quite nature because it’s too much like us.
These quasi-humans are a motley crew in their thousands who insist on declining to join this dance of civilization, technology, and planetary control. And as their dance is a strange one, it has to be stopped, and the dancers eradicated through epidemics, poverty, starvation, and violence.
A European adventurer arriving on a tropical beach left a trail of death in his wake, and he did so without knowing he was a walking plague, a two-legged weapon of mass destruction, an angel of the apocalypse. He had no idea, nor did his victims. For most of us, however, that abyss goes by other names — social chaos, generalized misgovernment, loss of quality of life, degraded relationships — and it’s swallowing us whole.