"I Stand With You Against Disorder"

Jeannette Armstrong on Land-Speaking, Family, and Community

Yes Magazine: November 8, 2005

Click: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/spiritual-uprising/i-stand-with-you-against-the-disorder

Value in Long-Term Relationships - Native Perspectives

Our Role as Humans - Native Perspectives

From the Essay:

Let Us Begin With Courage

Jeannette Armstrong

The word En'owkin comes from the high language of the Okanagan people and has its origin in a philosophy perfected to nurture voluntary cooperation, an essential foundation for everyday living.

The term is based on a metaphorical image created by the three syllables that make up the Okanagan word. The image is of liquid being absorbed drop by single drop through the head (mind). It refers to coming to understanding through a gentle integrative process.

En'owkin is also the name given our education center by elders of the Okanagan; it is meant to assist and guide us in restoring to wholeness a community fragmented by colonization.

To the Okanagan People, as to all peoples practicing bio-regionally self-sufficient economies, the knowledge that the total community must be engaged in order to attain sustainability is the result of a natural process of survival. The practical aspects of willing teamwork within a whole-community system clearly emerged from experience delineated by necessity. However, the word cooperation is insufficient to describe the organic nature by which members continue to cultivate the principles basic to care-taking one another and other life forms, well beyond necessity...

Real democracy is not about power in numbers, it is about collaboration as an organizational system. Real democracy includes the right of the minority to a remedy, one that is unhampered by the tyranny of a complacent or aggressive majority. The En’owkin process is a mediation process especially designed for community. It is a process that seeks to build solidarity and develop remediated outcomes that will be acceptable, by informed choice, to all who will be affected. Its collaborative decision-making engages everyone in the process; decisions are not handed down by leaders "empowered" to decide for everyone. It is a negotiated process that creates trust and consensus because the solution belongs to everyone for all their own reasons. The process empowers the community, creating unity and strength for the long term. Because land is seen as a fundamental part of the self, along with family and community, it requires and insures sustainable practice in its practice...

Our original communities have disintegrated; the long-term condition of the human species, and other life forms, has become secondary to short-term profit for the few, allowing for poor choices that have altered the health and lives of millions. I have come to understand that unless change occurs in the ways in which communities use the land, the well being and survival of us all is at risk. We can change this. For these reasons, I choose to assist in changing the paradigm by joining in a collaborative process to devise a better future...

Jeannette C. Armstrong, Blowing Drifts Moon, February 1999.

Above excerpts from the publication Ecoliteracy: Mapping the Terrain. © CEL. Available online at:.

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/let-us-begin-courage

For More on Jeannette Armstrong and Indigeneity, visit:

Bioneers Radio at Public Radio Exchange ( PRX )

Go to link: http://www.prx.org/pieces/56889-indigeneity-becoming-native-staying-native

Native Perspectives You Tube Channel

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