Tags
Documentary Film From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning (BBC 1990), Environmental Crisis, Hopi Elder Thomas Banyacya (1909-1999), Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp-Tekaronianeken (1940-2010), Mother Earth, Muskogee-Creek Elder Phillip Deere (1929-1985), North American Indigenous Voices
Published by The New Press, New York, USA, 2022
During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Dahr Jamail – an American award-winning journalist and environmental advocate – and Stan Rushworth – an elder and retired teacher of Cherokee descent living in Northern California – interviewed several people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic. Their featured collection of interviews offers us a wide variety of perspectives on a much more integrated relationship to Earth and all human and non-human beings.
Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily those in North America, to refer to the continent. This name stems from various Indigenous creation stories which describe the landmass as being formed on the back of a giant turtle. The concept of Turtle Island is deeply significant in many Native American cultures as it reflects their spiritual beliefs and relationship with Mother earth.
As inhabitants of these lands for thousands of generations before the arrival of European conquistadores and colonizers, Native Americans carry in their ancestral memories the rise and fall of great civilizations before ours. They have much to teach us about surviving collapse and healing our broken relationship with Mother Earth.
While ExxonMobil led the charge and narrative in denying global warming by the burning of fossil fuels, Indigenous leaders alerted political leaders of this new threat to Mother Earth. The following quotations are taken from the chapter “Early Warnings” in the featured book We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (USA, 2022, pp. xi-xxi).
In 1976, perturbed by the continued destruction on Mother Earth, threatening humanity’s existence, Hopi Elder Thomas Banyacya (1909-1999) addressed the United Nations Habitat Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:
The time has come to join in meaningful action. Destruction of all land and life is taking place and accelerating at a rapid pace. Our Native land is continuing to be torn apart and raped of its sacredness by the corporate powers of this nation…. We do have an alternative to this. Mankind has a chance to change the direction of this movement, do a roundabout turn, and move in the direction of peace, harmony, and respect for land and life. The time is right now. Later will be too late.
In 1977, Muskogee-Creek Elder Phillip Deere (1929-1985) went to the United Nations in Geneva to deliver his message about the right relationship towards Mother Earth and the consequences of violating that relationship. In his 1978 speech, called “An Understood Law,” he said that the lack of respect for the natural world and its peoples could not work, either for itself, its constituents, or its habitats.
I see, in the future, perhaps this civilization is coming near to the end. For that reason, we have continued with the instructions of our ancestors…. This society is confused. I can see that as a bystander…. A confused society cannot exist forever. The first people who came here were lost. They are still yet lost!
In 1982, Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp-Tekaronianeken (1940-2010) founded the Tree of Peace Society, choosing the white pine tree as a symbol of the Haudenosaunee people. His message was one of healing. He often spoke of the grief carried by almost all people of the First Nations here and worldwide, a grief born in all the destruction that has ensued and their separation from each other and the natural world.
In 1990, the Kogi people of highland Colombia reached out to the BBC to produce a documentary film to share with the world, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning. Their vision of the adverse effects of colonization made them break self-imposed isolation long enough to sound their warning.
The Great Mother created the world in water. She makes the future in it. This is how she speaks to us. We look after Nature. We are the mamas [seers/leaders of the community] and do this here. And we mamas see that you are killing it by what you do. We can no longer repair the world. You must. You are uprooting the Earth. And we are divining to discover how to teach you to stop.
We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The twenty interviews in this collection are presented in the order of their occurrence, not by theme: strength, a sense of permanence, living from the heart, awareness, trust, and more. In the coming months, I will feature the insights and ancestral wisdom shared by each participant for consideration.
On January 7, 2026, our current leadership issued a Presidential Memorandum withdrawing the United States from sixty-six international organizations, conventions, and treaties that are contrary to the interests of our nation. All organizations dealing with climate change, the environment, and related issues are on the list:
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
- International Renewable Energy Agency
- UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UFCCC).
When you sell your soul to Big Oil, you’ve got to deliver.
Faced with yet another setback in global collaboration and cooperation, we the People of Earth cannot afford to flounder. Our children, grandchildren, and future generations are counting on us to repair our abusive and broken relationship with Mother Earth. As the Kogi people repeatedly admonished in their 1990 documentary film:
Think, think, think of the Great Mother. At night before you sleep…think what you’re going to do the next day. What things need to be done and how you’re going to do them. Think it through.
Three Worlds One Vision 
How different the world might have turned out if these Indigenous leaders had been listened to.
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Powerful quotations. We’re more than 8 billion people. We live in different environments, social contexts, and individual circumstances. Our frames of reference are as wide apart as our geographies and our realities. This is why the quotations will not automatically resonate across peoples and nations and why those words will have been forgotten practically the minute after they were spoken. Most of us do not have a Native land, or a sense of it. Many of us live in densely populated areas, overcrowded cities, ganglands, warzones. Others live in sheltered wealth, allowing a similar sense of freedom and unencumberedness as experienced by people living in harmony with the land to whom the fulfilment of more than basic needs is largely meaningless to the quality of their lives. Many of us works with or for the corporate powers that pursue growth and profitability and all else be damned, and we try and scramble up the corporate ladder until we’re Peter-principled out, fall off, retire, or are let go. Some of us have talent for the one thing or the other, many for little more than doing their life from birth to death. I guess all I’m saying is I’m trying to make sense of it. The quotations move me deeply (even if I don’t care for tradition and ancestral truths per se). But I’d be at a loss when having to operate them in the world I find myself in– a world, that, fundamentally, humankind has always found itself in, except that, since the dawn of mechanization we are on an exponential curve in developing the equipment, tools, processes, systems, and mass culture to turn it into place that only selected parts of the human (and no other) species will find comfortable from their limited perspective (capitalize, amass, bequeath).
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Rosaliene, this is a timely and powerful introduction to your new series. The way you bring together the voices of Banyacya, Deere, Jake Swamp, and the Kogi mamas shows how long these warnings have been with us, even as our governments double down on serving Big Oil and withdrawing from climate cooperation.
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A series that needs to be written. Sad that those who are only focused on money and power think climate change is all a big hoax. Future generations will pay the price for their actions and inactions. What we need less of is artificial intelligence. What we need more of is real intelligence. Have a good Sunday Rosaliene. Allan
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Thank you for your wonderful contribution, Rosaliene, as always, however sad it may be!
In ancient China, the tortoise was one of the most important symbols and was considered a representation of the cosmos, with its domed shell representing the heavens and its flat underside the earth. There, it still embodies longevity, wisdom, and the stability of the world order. It also held great significance in Hinduism.
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Trump and his advisers are incredible fools. They refuse to see reality. Or maybe they see reality but just don’t care. For them, money talks.
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The resiliency and wisdom of the First Peoples are remarkable, in spite of centuries of colonization and suffering. May we heed their voices even in this late hour.
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sounds like an amazing book. I would love to read it. Thank you, Rosaliene
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They don’t ship to UK unfortunately.
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Looks like a necessary and very wise book for our times, Rosaliene. Thanks for sharing it. I love the last paragraph. Imagine what the world would be like if we all thought every day about our Great Mother and what we can do.
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