Re: Native American land rights

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, December 22, 1997 at 10:19:28 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes:
>
>What positive aspects? Antibiotics, mass literacy, births that don't kill
>mother or infant, air travel, Baudelaire, telephones, astrophysics. Stuff
>like that. But whatever you think of capitalist modernization, it's a fact
>of life, part of our social inheritance, those unchosen tools we make
>history with. So the question is what we do with them. What's the better
>use for antibiotics - so Frank Purdue can crowd chickens closer together,
>or so a sick kid in Nairobi doesn't have to die?

And, according to Baudelaire, "La Nature est un temple, ou de vivants
piliers laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles" (quoting from
memory, but I think that's right, tr: "Nature is a temple, from whose
living pillars are loosed mingled voices").  So, we carry on with the
tools we have, discarding those we don't see fit for a just society of
course, and recognize that nature is a living temple of sorts, that
we must preserve it so that we may thrive, and that human dignity
demands an end to exploitation and subjection, rooted in concentrated
power of all sorts...

Note that when I say "preserve", that doesn't mean "we" --- as in
western white dudes --- "preserve" the land of indigenous peoples by
telling them to keep their dirty little hands off of "our" forests,
which by accident of nature happen to be located in their backyard.
As in any human effort, it must be a shared one, and any shared human
effort must be undertaken under conditions of equal participation.


Bill