In recent months, it has become impossible to ignore the current rewriting of history going on in These United States, 2025. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on history as I was taught growing up in Oklahoma and Texas, then on to New York and Massachusetts. From my geographical history alone, there is a great deal of diverse thinking and cultural identity in The US. In Oklahoma, I dressed as an “Indian” at every Thanksgiving I could, though as a little girl, I was encouraged to be a good pilgrim lady, who would have historically been chattel to men, into the 20th century and beyond- check out where we left women in Afghanistan after 20 years of military occupation. Last, week, news headlines circulated Pete Hegseth‘s publicly spoken belief that women should not vote. I grew up learning how important my right to vote was in this country, and I was certainly not surprised to hear leadership in The US is still questioning a woman’s choice. Our Supreme Court recently voted to take away a woman’s right to her body, so why not her right to vote, or have any autonomy? It was so much easier when she was subservient and under the protection of a man- husband, father, or brother.
So back in Oklahoma, before age 9, there is a holiday called “land rush day“, in which our private Episcopal day school would reenact the occasion and students would dress as “cowboys” and Little House on The Prairie folks. Again, I was in buckskin with a feather in my hair running around whooping and dancing in protest. Mom would even dress up (including a black wig of long braids), renting us both very culturally insensitive outfits- but not traditional regalia taken from a tribe somewhere– that would have been even worse. I knew, even at that young age, we were protesting.
I was taught by my Mother, University of Oklahoma graduate with a BA in History, about tribal lands being taken. She sat me through Dances with Wolves and explained the abuse of Native People, including how we took their land. I didn’t feel guilty about it, I didn’t know my ancestors personally, and was so far removed from that truly violent land grab for resources, it was hard to fully imagine what took place. I felt like I could make a change now, protesting the absence of Native People from the colonial narrative, acting out a part of something where a place holder was needed. It was culturally inappropriate, meant in ally-ship, but not a fully understood truth. That’s the clunky language used today by colonial legacies like me, trying to grasp history and how we’re continuing to repeat it.
From a young age, I understood that most of the surface history we learn is a facade. It can be very helpful to keep history brief and simple for the masses, and trying to get a one track narrative for all to accept and understand is truly monumental when you start trying to narrate world history. I think that’s because of all the rich perspective, but for the sake of this writing and your precious time, I’m going to stick to an Historical narrative about Western greatness and its major flaws. What a topic for EEC Forest Stewardship. In short, I wanted to write this because of a personal quest I’ve been on to track what point in human development did we make a wrong turn and begin our climb to the bottom under the somewhat obfuscated truth around western greatness.
I’ll start with the whole white men and their love affair with ancient Rome. That’s what we model our thinking on, those classical Greek philosophies and literal foundations of Grecian white marble capitol architecture in so many public buildings. Meanwhile, Native Americans were not so quietly wiped from the map as interlopers in the way of some kind of progress lay down by conquering Caesars long ago. Rome declined because of lead poisoning. The mining operations released air pollution that deeply impacted Europe and The Mediterranean for generations. We don’t like to talk about the failures of Rome, but slavery would be another one. The United States is not the first democracy on earth. The Greeks hashed out early forms of voting in the ancient history of democracy, but the formation of The United States was a world’s first at its inception, with a constitution that named all people created equal (though at the time, only land owning white men were seen as such people). No wonder the idea of women not voting is resurfacing. Also, our current Commander in Chief wants us to think slavery was not that bad. Well, the Roman Empire would agree wholeheartedly. And don’t worry women, if you were married, and having children, you would eventually gain citizenship. Though still owned by your husband, and your father before that. Marriage has always been about property exchange.
Speaking of property, please read The Serviceberry, Abundance and Reciprocity in The Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is helping humanity understand concepts like Gift Economy and how to be a gift to the land, rather than an owner. Our minds are so stuck in ownership of things, rights to something, and our instant gratification cannot be met in current consumer addiction culture– Western Culture. In my deep dive into the roots of this culture, extraction economy has dominated our thinking for over two-thousand years. When Europeans finished extracting what they could from their own lands, they “explored” the world for more resources, wealth building, and found that they needed a lot of manpower to do that extracting, and so, they industrialized slavery and created international trade companies to control the sources of their wealth, in other lands. The Americas and Africa were the main pillaging points of European “Western” conquest. This dominion came in two waves. The first was biological, sickness washed over First Nations Peoples in literal plagues. Millions of people died, so by the time the second wave of Colonizers arrived, many of the cities of The Americas were empty, and the small populations ravaged by disease were more easily dominated through enslavement and genocide.
I’m sure a lot of you are getting tired of reading about the negatives, but this Colonial history is crucial to understanding the foundations of The United States and what we’re founded on. Colonialism was about taking natural resources to perpetuate wealth of a few back in Europe, then, as the white population exploded, more and more resources were needed, and too many people lived in the already stripped regions of Europe, so they were then exported to North America and other Colonies to be settlers, bringing a taxable group to the area who could implement better infrastructure and produce more economic growth for the invested wealthy owners of the land. The Land Rush of Oklahoma was so popular, because giving out free land was not the usual offer, but getting America settled for political and economic gain by a few investors had always been the plan of manifest destiny. It was, and still is, an idea of dominion pushed by a class of billionaires who, at least on a map of their own design, dominate the world economically.
We don’t use the planet’s own biorhythms to judge our success or worth, we add up figures related to material things. The guy with the most stuff makes the rules, and it’s been disenfranchising humanity since the inception of ownership. Once we were owned by the land and what it gave us, now we dig up the earth and dam the rivers for ourselves. Sure, we create a stable production line for profit, but slowly, like the mines of long ago, we’re releasing poisons into the air that will kill us all in the end. Today, it’s not only heavy metals, but now toxic ash and smoke from fires rampaging through overbuilt neighborhoods, and from the exhaust of our combustion technology, which still powers everything, including the screens and developing AI we’re all told to count on for redemption. Computer AI can’t possibly create the environmental needs for humanity, it does the exact opposite, consuming more combustion energy and exuding more pollution than we know, because there is nothing regulating it. But microplastics have us no matter what, along with the melting of our planet’s ice. These time-bombs are going off, but, like that frog in warming water, we just sit back and order or stream another pleasure online.
This is the decline of our “Western Greatness”. It’s all down hill from here. Much like The Roman Empire, we will fall to “barbarian” raiders. What? Yes, barbarians in the modern sense of rude, warlike, brutal, cruel, insensitive, and particularly dimwitted people. I won’t go into the history of education in this country, but the trend has been to dismantle public education and the internet scrolling has not helped. Woe to this nation for embracing conspiracies over competence, and now there is a despot leading the charge from our White House.
Montesquieu, the French philosopher who also came up with separation of power in governing, coined the phrase despot. He’s the guy to check out if you want to take your own deep dive into the classical development of governing- from a white, land owning, European male perspective, which also greatly influenced our own founding fathers when they drew up The Constitution. The barbarians of ancient Rome were much like the perceived immigration “invasion” of today. I can see why the white right is demanding immigrant expulsion from America. Though if we take a few steps back in our own county’s founding, we’ll discover that all of our ancestors are immigrants. What do we say to The Native People who were here thousands of years before us? We sweep them out of the way like Israel is doing to what’s left of Palestine today. Oh, and we’re also still sweeping Native Americans out of the way when Colonial legacies want something. Don’t think it stopped in North American.
The United States has a long history of invading, co-opting, abusing, threatening, and warmongering to get what it perceives it needs. Just ask the fruit companies invested in Central and South America. We continue to destabilize the governments of our southern neighbors to aid in our corporate control of world resources, in much the same way our ancestors did during Europe’s colonization of the world. I’m still trying to fully comprehend this tyrannical history that set the global trade stage of the 21st century. Most colonial legacies living in the USA today cannot backtrack far enough into ancestry to see how directly their families benefited, but we’re only living here now because of early successful takeovers through mostly violent means. More have lost in this battle than won, yet there is a feeling amongst many white people today that they are some how the victims. The topic of Land Back is a perfect example. White people in America love to talk about family heritage and ownership. “My family has been farming this land for generations, I have a right to be here.” The formation of said properties still holds a deeper legacy of stolen land.
This concept is not new in America, land has been fought over, taken, owned, burned, invaded, and claimed all over the planet, that’s true, but it does not make it right, or a successful way to live as one world. When we look at people who have remained connected to the land, living with it, rather than dominating it, we see a more balances possibility for a more holistic relationship with the earth. Material wealth tricked us all into thinking we have something, but it’s as empty as the plastic shells we’re all starting into for entertainment and cultural understanding. We don’t go to a community center to learn what’s going on, we check our feed. Well, we are being fed indeed, by an old narrative of dominion in the guise of patriotic freedom. The Christian Nationalist movement is a great example of this in action here in The US. As an atheist, I take great offense to other people telling me what beliefs are legitimate and which ones aren’t. I’ll say I think religion is a great form of control over the masses, and it’s driving hatred of the other on a mass scale here in The United States, as well as unraveling our Democratic process. . I know the teaching of Jesus, I was raised as a Christian. Love thy god and love thy neighbor. Top two rules, all else hangs on these two beliefs. Yet people can’t help splitting hairs and making an enemy of a neighbor somewhere to perpetuate dominion- that’s the devil folks, if you need a boogieman.
This is the narrative dominating The America of today. It’s so threatened by the idea that some of the past choices made by the powerful might not have been the best way for humanity, as a whole, to thrive. In a world of a few rich ruling the rest through whatever power-structure- religious, private global corporations, etc.- the living world, including humanity, continues to founder under such oppression. Without a new global political strategy, our abuse of the planet will ultimately cause a mass extinction, which will include the human race. I guarantee you this will happen before any White South African Apartheid despot can settle Mars, much less The Moon. Humanity has to stay grounded in the current world our population resides in. We must reweave ourselves into restorative change for all, not just a god head or your own family. The world is one family, the human family, the human race. We are bound to our finite planet and all it possesses. What a gift of responsibility, one we white people have squander in our quest for that dominion thing. Perhaps rather than forcing ownership, we look at our personal relationship to the natural world and how we are repairing it. This could be the turn in thinking that begins the restoration of our connection to our planet and each other.
If however, we continue to cling to myths of an outdated Colonial narrative, as some kind of hero worship, we’ll continue to be at odds with our own survival. It’s scary to confront change and evolve. We humans like patterns and predictability, but that’s not how the world works, really, the only constant is change. Embrace the entropy model and figure out how you actually thrive within it. How can you shift the power dynamic? How might you change one or two small things in your life to step towards a more global way of thinking in your local activity? For me, it’s about continued learning, looking at broader narratives, like The United Nations. That’s a pretty good global temperature read based on broad multi-country data. America does not really like The UN, even know we host it in New York City. Though it comes out of the old colonial narrative, it’s also working to grasp global trends and actions that affect the most people on earth. If you’re repelled by this notion, finding it at odds with your America first notions, just remember that Rome fell eventually, and so will our own democracy if we continue to stick our heads in the sand and let dominion run our worldview.
EEC Forest Stewardship 