This week saw Patrick telling two versions of our story. At Melbourne Free University Patrick speaks about why we use the term neopeasant, and how this term found us and what it means in the context of conquest, dispossessions, stolen land and climate change.
The word peasant is from the Latin pagus meaning country or land.
Earlier in the week he was in conversation with Bushy, Adam and Ged on 3RRR's show Greening the Apocalypse.
Both these talks here are audio only.
Why harken to exploited peasant ancestors to describe your symbiotic localised lifestyle?
ReplyDelete‘Living Ecologically’ seems preferable, evoking the intimate and nourishing relationships you’re cultivating from bioregion to gut microbiome.
Kind humans making kin and humus :-)
Yes, it would be much more simple to use modernist terms such as ecology, and we certainly do. But there is a reason we're also going back: We're not denying we're living on stolen land, or that our own aboriginal lands were also stolen, which of course triggered the need for invasion and terra nullius in Australia. While it may seem appealing to disappear this fact, we can not. This is the discomfort and "unsettlement" (to draw on Michael Farrell) that dwells upon this grotesquely rich nation state today. If we don't work towards Aboriginal sovereignty we won't be able to work towards our own true sovereignty or 'claim' to live here. This is a black and white project. It is about all of us understanding our aboriginal heritages so as we can find common ground and work together to attend to sovereignty and proper land access to make the new or restore the old ecological cultures so needed again on this continent. This is a project of restoration as much as it is a contemporary story.
ReplyDeleteYes to all of this. I have been car free too for 25 years plus. Small is beautiful. Candles and all. Yes to community gardens
ReplyDelete"our own aboriginal lands were also stolen"
ReplyDeletePermapoesis, there is so much genius to be unpacked out of this one phrase.
It's not just Indigenous Australian land, culture and Tradition that has been stolen. It's Western European/Germanic, Chinese, Jewish as well.
What I feel you are saying is that the unusual ignorance and/or rapaciousness of WASP ways stems from their own scars as victims of the same. Same I would say in my experience as that of the modern (plastic) Chinese.
If you are right, that means attempts to leave behind our own cultures and identifications with our own peoples, as a way to atone for the sins committed towards Indigenous Australians for example, will never get anywhere. We are concerned about their intergenerational scars as a way to ignore our own - which is probably fine, as long as we eventually come to be able to embrace the full, terrifying pain of that.
Thank you!!!!