Cultural Restoration:
Re-Forging the Circle of Knowledge
By Meagan DeGaia
Place Based Cultures
What comprises a place? A place is born from land underfoot, the waterways and their bodies, the weather, climate and the community of life that dwells.
Indigenous cultures are place-based. The foundation, function, fabric and flair of these people are informed by the place in which they are based. The place itself is what directs and influences the language of the people.
Weather patterns, topographical landmarks, food, plants, animals, dangers, smells, resources necessary for survival and specific places within the place all have a necessity to be named through language. Even the name bestowed upon your people, the names given to your ancestors, the names you were given, and the names you give to your children, were breathed through you, whispered into you, from your place.
The place is what grows the food that will be gathered, hunted and cultivated. It is the place that offers the best idea as to how the food is prepared and how to eat it. After all, it’s unlikely that the desert would invite you to drink hot chocolate.
It is the place who provides the stones, bones, sinew, bark, fibers and dyes that can be made into all types of tools and creative arts. The weather, the climate and landscape of a place determines the best types of shelter, clothing and even transportation. If your place is surrounded by water or flowing with rivers and canals, your place might not call you to round a wheel, but would instead encourage you to hollow out a canoe. It is the place who shows us.
Perhaps most beautifully, a place will even give rise to certain scents through the flowers that are in bloom, the plants and fruits that are in season, the animals that roam and their scat, the fungi underfoot, streams of sunlight, streams of water and the very smell of the earth itself, depending on how wet or dry it might be at any given moment. All of these things will mix and marry with the songs of birds to perfume the air of a place, inviting the inhabitants to fall in love with the Divine Spirit that dwells there.
Being born from this place, this earth, we all intuitively know that a place is more than a mere collection of rock, soil and the mixing biotic and abiotic forces set upon it. A place has a Spirit. Place-based people know this, feel this, sense and seek to understand the secrets and mysteries of the Divine Spirit of a place, through both their time, care and observation. The Divine Spirit of each place can then show the people how to live a good life, in harmony with one another and in harmony with the community of life that we belong.
Place-based people know we cannot harness or fully tame the Spirit of a place, and do not seek to do so. Instead, they themselves are captivated and tamed by the Spirit of the place they find themselves. They know it is not for them to claim, own, sell, buy or subdivide. Place-based people recognize the natural boundaries that the place has drawn for them, which they do not seek to interfere with by drawing their own borders around. It is the place that delineates where one watershed begins and another ends. It is the place that reveals which great swaths of land will produce which types of food in abundance and with what degree of biodiversity present.
No matter the place that they live, place-based people value life above all else. Their cultural practices, given to them by their place, support , perpetuate and celebrate life: the life of the people, the community of other life, and the life and vitality of the place itself.
Cultures that value life:
Learn about the community of life.
Take care of the community of life.
Live in harmony with one another.
Economy-Driven Cultures
Economy-driven cultures are not place-based and care little about where they take place.
Economy-driven cultures do not look to the place they find themselves in for guidance and direction. Economy-driven cultures root themselves in something other than place. Cultural practices derived from economy-driven cultures often destroys place. Cultural practices derived from economy driven cultures dredge out, pave over, flattens, contours, mines, drills, fracks and pollutes place. Economy-driven cultures claim, own, buy, sell, divide, subdivide and build places of their own making.
Economy-driven cultures objectify and commodify all things secular and spiritual.
This is because economy driven cultures value money above all else. The cultural practices derived from cultures who value money above all else, take their direction from a different type of spirit, distinctly different from the Divine Spirit that inhabits place. Even within democratic forms of governance, money commands the most power and often carries more currency than democratic ideals. Without the Spirit of a place, without the place itself intact, the community of life suffers and is destroyed.
A New Era
People now travel across continents and even oceans in the course of a single day.
In addition to living in an economy-driven culture with economy driven cultural practices, many of us find ourselves living in a new era where many people on the planet, for one reason or another, have had the necessity and the ability to travel from place to place, state to state, country to country. Whether for a lengthy vacation, to live long term or to relocate for the rest of your life, it is not uncommon if the place you currently call home is quite far from the place you were originally born. The trees that grew up around you, their names and uses may or may not also live in your current place. And while you might know them now, your family or school might have never taught you their many names or their uses to begin with.
We have come a long way from being a place-based people as we now live within an economy-driven society.
We have come to see ourselves as limitless people, able and entitled to travel anywhere and consume anything from anywhere: the quality of our lives is determined by how much money we have. With the exception of how our jobs and families anchor us somewhere, many of us are bound to no place, having lost our connection to any concept of place outside of the four walls within which we sleep, the concrete places we drive and walk and the strip malls where we do our shopping.
As the global family that we are, how now within an economy-driven society, can we re-weave place-based practices that value and perpetuate life into a new tapestry for our lives?
No matter where you were born, no matter where you live now, no matter where you happen to be at this moment, no matter the unnatural lines that have been drawn dividing the landscape, the lines that divide states and nations, each person within the global family has a place. Each person within the global family has, through their own time, care and observation, the opportunity to know and fall in love with a place. No matter the color of our skin, how much money we have, our beliefs, our past, our choices, our religion, who we choose to love or anything else that could possibly be perceived to divide us, we are unified as one family by this one place. This place is the Earth.
The spirit of nature persists. Ready to show us the way.
Even as we live in an economy driven culture, it is time that we learn again how to live in harmony as people, among the community of life that we are all apart. It is time that we learn again the cultural practices that perpetuate life. We can learn all of this through the natural places where we live now, the sprig of life springing up from the sidewalk, the flight of waterfowl suspending us in an otherwise passing moment, the movement of the clouds, the miracle that is life.
