Unknown

This early 1700s map gives us an idea of colonial vision in North America. The 13 Colonies are almost fully formed, with New England’s Boston, Cap Cod, Rhode Island, Long Island, and New Jersey mapped, though New York City is not marked, the colony of New York was present, along with The Iroquois Nation, with Philadelphia, Cherokee, and New Orleans marking more important landscapes of ownership in the European cartographers who showed their people The New World. It was, by now, a settled coast of immense proportion. New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida, and California were all country sizes in Europe, and areas only explored by conquistadors and priests, fur traders and mountaineers for the last hundred years. Rivers guided most early commercial ventures into the content’s interior, with tribes tolerating the new comers for their steel and textiles. Trading brought biological exchanges too, and the great First Nations suddenly took sick from the interactions; millions died. This sudden human removal form the landscape gave the impression that the land was empty, ready for new people to come and steward, to grow families and multiply in the abundance of free land- available for the willing.

Crowded conditions and feudal subservience remained abundant back in Europe. Most people were landless, working as cheap labor for wealth and power. The elite entrepreneurs quickly grasped that a new land of untold riches await settlement and submission across The Atlantic, and hurried ships of treasure seekers across to claim sovereignty. Slavery in the tropical islands of The Caribbean brought sugar, rum, tobacco, and other valued crops up from a year round growing environment and free slave labor from a dark continent just below the colonial European psychopaths. I use this label to assure my readers that the powers claiming land have and will always be mentally unstable, in that they shit where they sleep and just climb up on the backs of others who wallow in their filth. Extracting the earth’s finite resources simply for planned wealth gluttony kills us all. How do we move away from this ravaging? Day to day door to door delivery would be a major first.

But back to the colonists- yes, religious freedom, yes to vast land ready for settlement, yes to needing able bodies to build infrastructure and harvest the resources. No to free land, it was still owned by companies, titled white men, and countries. That’s all kinda the same person really, with a lot of bureaucratic go betweens. I love siting patroons up The Hudson River. Investors in The Dutch West Indies Co. could have 16 miles on one side, or 8 miles on each side of the great river, who’s mouth emptied at one of the deepest harbors on The East Coast. This is why New York is such a thriving business city even today. First Nation’s people were happy to make accommodations for the white traders, at least sometimes, but there was tension as more and more pale faces poured into the landscape. Tribes made successions after several battles and prolonged harassment from white colonist. The situation was white men taking land from people they saw as less than for not already squandering the natural world for profit. Ordained by some guy in the sky BS doubled down on the ethical questions, and settlement went on without a hitch in moral quandary.

What remained unknown on the map above is where I reside today- so the colonial settlement went all the way manifest destiny and here we are- descendants of people trying to make a better life for themselves at the cost of whatever, we pray and that makes it all ok. No, we have to reach around and take the hand of those behind us. What does that mean? Look back to start, think about who is standing there and why. If you are confused by my words, I’d recommend looking deeper into your family tree, some of those branches that first made the puddle jump and why. Come on! The DNA tests are fun, and you’ll be in a database that’s accessible to the FBI, CIA, and more. I should tell you the government got into our health records with that DOGE thing. The CDC is run by KGB, I mean RFK? Ok, enough said. Unknown remains to be seen. Washington State was not even a glimmer on the horizon, well, it was mapped as a place yet to go, so we went there. My ancestors came in at Savannah in Georgia, walked west through Alabama, Missouri, then Kansas and Oklahoma. Other’s made it from Red Hook NY to Arkansas. All were tenants in one form or another, so they could not stay put very long, the landscape was changing fast.

The US purchased Louisiana from The French in 1803. At that time, the area known as Washington today was not yet explored. Oklahoma had not been carved out as a state, but it was fixing to be the dumping ground for unwanted First Nation People still residing along The Eastern Seaboard. All the promises given to tribes during the struggles for independence in the 1700s went out the door as more and more Europeans came to seek a better life and free land for the taking. By the late 1800s, abusive corporate interests used the courts to steal what was left of tribal heritage and tradition still established in Colonial America. After The Revolutionary War, veterans were promised 100 acres of Indian land, including the west side of The Appalachian Mountains, which had been the final refuge of tribes pushed out from the colonial states. The North West Territory was firming up new state boundaries like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Tribes had to be relocated out of these new lands of settlement, so good old Andrew Jackson told his federal agents to remove all Indians to Oklahoma Territory, onto reservations where they could be civilized and consumed into European white man culture as a subservient. There were no equal rights being offered at that time. White slave owners were greedy, and took what was left of tribal lands in the southeast without hesitation. The trail of tears carried many more black slaves of tribal people into the central heartland of America to continue their labors under duress until 1866, nearly 3 years after The Emancipation Proclamation.

The 1860s was a time of many changes on the colonial maps of North America. Washington separated from The Oregon Territory, which was a whites only settlement-the legacy of which still clings to the state to this day, though Portlandia skewed that understanding a bit, ushering in a lot of trendy folk thinking Portland would be so cool, only to find out drugs are real and a lot of unemployed young people becomes a real problem. But you can always get a job in the lumber mill. Logging was in full swing in these areas of The Pacific Northwest in the 1800s, and America was forming her county liberties through railroad expansion and mining industry dividends. White people from Europe were still pouring in on The East Coast, and many inland families sent their children west, to find even more opportunity in the open lands of a post civil war third wave of dominion want. Cattlemen had begun taming the wild west, with beef to feed a growing East Coast full of cities ripe with enough extraction wealth now industrializing in cities were people wanted to eat out and be entertained. Sound familiar? It’s still the way our culture works, and we the people buy in frequently- at the cost of so many unknowns.

There was a Civil War (1861-65) in this decade, so the secession map below might make more sense in this context. Good old Washington Territory, and my home state of Oklahoma was hosting all those savage Indians. Slavery was a really big thing for the south- and the north really, because all the textile mills up north were supplied by the salve labor picking and baling cotton in the south. Triangle trade benefited the abolitionist states as much as the antebellum ones- and Europe filled it’s coffers with the profits of slavery through indirect purchase of slave made goods and materials, so don’t think anyone’s ancestors weren’t heavily tangled in this grisly treatment of our fellow human beings. That stench still hangs heavily in white guilt, but we have to see what we’re made from, and accept, before we can give condolences. This is the combing of the snakes out of our hair folks. I’ll point you to The Tree of Peace story from our Haudenosaunee teachers- the ones that told Benjamin Franklin that consensus was necessary for confederacy to stand.

After The Civil War, industry consolidated, and a lot of folks kept moving westward. Those North West Territory states formed, and Chicago Illinois became the happening midpoint of American prosperity. Middle America happened to be a breadbasket and pasture for some of our best commodity crops and cattle companies- to this day. All that came from kicking First Nation People off the land, tilling up millions of rich bottom land soil, and clearing wildlife like wolves, bison, and billions of birds from the sky. That’s right folks, commercial harvesting of wild animals was on an unchecked apocalyptic massacre of many species. Note the use of punt guns for bird harvesting. The passenger pigeon went extinct in a hunting frenzy, which saw the last bird killed around 1900. Washington had been a state for 11 years, but Oklahoma still had a long way to go. There had been a land rush in 1889, opening up a lot of what was Indian Reservation to white settlers in need of some good free soil to tend. Homesteads went up all over, and the last Native Peoples were consolidated together on small allotments, quickly snatched up as tribal numbers dwindled into State Run Boarding Schools. You should research this tragedy of American History to better understand what happened to so many First Nations People, what they had and did survive. That is held in living memory today. By 1907, Oklahoma was admitted to The United States and cattleman happily drove their beef along The Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas and beyond on railroads to the major Cities now cropping up in well established Union States.

While Chicago dined on red meat cattle from The Great Plains, the replacement species after the bison were eradicated to take away tribal food resources and force them onto reservations for government issued food rations, trains were connecting from The West Coast to aid in the transport of much needed goods like coal for power and timber for building. Now fully colonized, America was an open door for settlement from all sides. Up in Washington State, The Treaty of Point Elliott (1855 had been signed, allowing The City of Seattle to be established, but eventually, white settlers pushed further and further into the interiors of The Pacific Coast, claiming new townships in the seasonal village spaces of tribal people. The cities and townships full of white people still exist today, with little understanding or care of what was here before, or what could be with a little more understanding of unknowns. Ignorance is bliss, I understand how so many of us continue to rest in the comfort of our unknowns. How else could we sleep at night? How many of us don’t? What can you do to get better sleep if you are starting to think more about our troubled past? What would it look like to seek the unknown?

Find out if you can drink the water out of the nearest stream to your home, or well, or even a shallow dug hole in your backyard, or a bucket collecting rain water. Find out what’s in that water, and why you would be advised not to drink it, just start there. Then find the nearest soil to your home and see what’s growing in it- or not. How many domestic dogs pee and poop on it? How many vehicles, admitting air born chemical poisons that do compound over time, drive by each day and cover that soil with pollutants? What kind of air filtration do you have in your home? Climate control? Sealed windows and doors? Is your home carpeted? Dry walled? Painted? What kind of chemicals are off-gassing in the place you spend most of your time? How about the place your children go? Spooky yet? Sure thing, because we’re living in a world of petroleum products, bid to worship screen time and buying addiction. I see the trucks driving around, coming to all the neighborhoods, and we’re still going to the store, driving every day, spending way too much time on screens, even to answer communication related to work and family, instead of being face to face.

When was your last contact with the outside world? Even in New York City, I found quiet places to sit, watch, reflect. Without your phone, you do look around, so put it away for a little bit, leave it inside and go out. Make plans with others, in person. Meet new people at a community space, hear an opinion that differs from yours. This is rewilding 101. It does not take too much effort, just a change in priorities for a few days, then weeks, then you’ll find others doing the same and connect. We’ve lost a lot of community, or only share space with an echo of ourselves in thought and belief. Stagnation causes putrification, which is unhealthy. When we open our eyes to the natural world, include ourselves in it, and encourage others to join us there, the mind, body, and spirit have a healthy reconnect to what sustains us. If you are having trouble finding this connection, change needs to happen in your life. The air, water, and soil are all necessary for human survival. Our other major need- energy, has taken over, disrupting the balance of our other resources to suit its own leviathan. People now flock to money as a savior, worshiping wealth in coin, rather than celebrating the wealth of ecological diversity around us that was The Garden of Eden, borrowing from my own cultural cannon.

Reaching back almost 400 years into the start of global colonial ambition, we can chart the deviation of humanity from our place as graspable cultures, into global maniacs of industrial consumption, and where it brings us today. Through exploitation, fortunes were amassed, money that came through the direct taking of our natural resources, at the cost of many millions of people already living in harmony with the earth, understanding her limitations for the sake of all people really need to survive and thrive in our short existence. Ask what your ambition in the world is today, and hope that it remains within the finite abundance of our world. This is the vision we could all walk towards in making a better planet for the future generations. I would like to see our humanity carry on through the evolution of this planet, but the way we are headed now, that does not seem likely. May the living earth continue to teach us with every breath that we are here in this moment. May her abundance continue to thrive, to ensure our human survival, and the survival of all living things to sustain life on this great earth, which we all share. May scarcity, the fear bringer, be overcome by our love and compassion. Sounding a little too hippy for you? Well, mind your direction of wander and ask what you believe in.

If you continue consumer addiction, take a seat on the crazy train and we’re all in together none the less. I’m typing on a high consumption ticket item, and sit in front of this screen about 3-4 hours a day. That’s about even with my continued outside time, unless I’m on an outing, in which case I’ve driven almost an hour each way. That’s some consumption for ya. Plastic truck parts, computer parts, any tech really, containers, safety equipment, paint, acrylic, most of the things you spend your time holding- steering wheels, phone, even a pen if you still write something. Plastics make it possible, and we’re all full of them anyway, so hip hip hooray on that one folks. Tin foil hats aside, we really are drowning in the petroleum we’ve been worshiping for the past 100 years. In less time then that, we’ve put poison in all the wells, our atmosphere, and the brain barrier. By now some of you are AI searching my words- or should be. I’m not linking in this writing, not today, because it’s been repeated time and time again through these pages. Now, go read the labels on all your detergents and get the heck off industrial chemicals. Biodegradable soap is the first change to make a huge difference in our world. Love!