THE END OF THE WORLD HAS ALREADY HAPPENED - PART ONE

ENDING THE WORLD IN PLACES WHERE THERE IS NO COSMIC WAR

What if I told you, as the ancient meme suggests, that the end of the world has already happened? We have had the lot – Armageddon, the destruction of much of the earth, the last judgment. It’s over. We are what’s left, and it’s time we got on with it.

I want to go right outside my lane and talk about Indigenous people. Because I have no sense. And comments welcome, although I am aware I have overstepped, I hope to be respectful at least.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

Many people have experienced the end of the world, or at least the part of it that mattered to them and theirs. In 1945, writer Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden slaughterhouse when the Allies firebombed the ancient city. Deep in the chill of the slaughterhouse, he survived when 25,000 human people were killed. He emerged to discover the city devastated, looking like Gaza does today. Kurt Vonnegut was one of many who sought bodies in the rubble; when the amount of bodies became unmanageable, they took to them with flamethrowers. Fire upon fire. It wasn’t the end of the world, like, the World, but it was the end of the world for Dresden. The experience influenced Vonnegurt’s attitude to life as well as his writing; what do you do when you have witnessed the end of the world? You write “Slaughterhouse 5”, named after the place that saved your life.

What if I told you, as the ancient meme suggests, that the end of the world has already happened? We have had the lot – Armageddon, the destruction of much of the earth, the last judgment. It’s over. We are what’s left, and it’s time we got on with it.

I want to go right outside my lane and talk about Indigenous people. Because I have no sense. And comments welcome, although I am aware I have overstepped, I hope to be respectful at least.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

Many people have experienced the end of the world, or at least the part of it that mattered to them and theirs. In 1945, writer Kurt Vonnegurt was working in a Dresden slaughterhouse when the Allies firebombed the ancient city. Deep in the chill of the slaughterhouse, he survived when 25,000 human people were killed. He emerged to discover the city devastated, looking like Gaza does today. Kurt Vonnegurt was one of many who sought bodies in the rubble; when the amount of bodies became unmanageable, they took to them with flamethrowers. Fire upon fire. It wasn’t the end of the world, like, the World, but it was the end of the world for Dresden. The experience influenced Vonnegurt’s attitude to life as well as his writing; what do you do when you have witnessed the end of the world? You write “Slaughterhouse 5”, named after the place that saved your life.

To the Genoese, in 1347, it must have seemed like the end of the world when the Black Plague first hit their city and people died and died and died. The “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 killed more people than World War One, and quickly and gruesomely, hard on the heels of war, when a young person could die while crossing the road. The Black Plague, the fire of London, so many apocalypses. For many of us, it has felt like the end of the world.

But I want to talk about genocide, that horribly common monstrosity, which has been around since Jericho in the Hebrew Bible. (Archaeological records show it never happened, whew, it was harrowing enough just to read about it).

“To be indigenous to North America is to be part of a postapocalyptic community and experience”, states Julian Brave Noisecat. And “knowledge of the apocalypse caused by colonialism helps make Indigenous peoples aware of ongoing tragedies”. Julian Brave Noisecat is not using apocalypse in its literary sense, meaning an unveiling or a revelation; he means that for his community the world ended, and this is what is left. He talks about “survivance”, an idea that Indigenous people have internalised survival, and that this with its attendant skills can help us face the climate crisis.

So, can it be the end of the world if there are any of us left? And if we know our history, and understand who we are, and thrive and learn?

In answer, I want to talk about the Pequot war. I mean the Pequot massacre. I mean the Pequot actual fucking genocide of 1637, in what is now called Connecticut.

It started as a war, the Puritan colonists and their Indigenous allies vs the powerful Pequot tribe, over lands and the fur trade. The precipitating incident was the attack of the Pequots on a Puritan village, where they killed adult non-combatants and took two children. This provided the excuse the Puritans needed to punish the Pequot nation and take the land. The massacre was surprising and thorough, and gory enough for a Cormac McCarthy novel. First, the Puritan soldiers put the Pequots to the sword, and then burned all who were left. Pequot people ran from the soldiers into the flames. Those who broke through the palisades were massacred. Numbers vary as to how many escaped further, but of them, the women and children were enslaved and the men killed. The Pequots themselves burned other villages and fled, pursued by colonial soldiers. A further attack ensued, and again the Puritans won. The remaining Pequots were scattered, and the land effectively abandoned.

The Puritans invoked God, of course. Captain John Underhill justified the killing of the elderly, women, children, and the infirm by stating that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents [...] We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” They prayed before they attacked. Manifest destiny indeed. For that, we go all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who was a firm believer in the Cosmic War. He believed that finding America would provide gold for the Spanish Emperor to conquer Jerusalem and bring on the end times.

The intent might have been genocidal, but there were survivors. I think it must be hard to destroy a cultural group completely. About a quarter of the Pequot nation died. The survivors were assimilated into other tribes and forbidden to call themselves Pequots. This has the feel of genocide: when you survive but are completely subjugated and are no longer allowed to say who you are. Only in the late twentieth century were Pequot descendants able to seek redress, and the tribe has been revived.

I think this is what Julian Brave Noisecat is talking about. Indigenous people have genocide in their histories. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whole Indian nation faced apocalypse. You don’t survive that without post-apocalypse trauma.

I said genocide was common. As the seventeenth century opened, The Dutch East India Company very forcibly conquered the Banda Islands. They massacred the people of the island of Lontor, torturing their elders to death and capturing women and children in order to enslave them. It took some months to eliminate the Bandanese. Many of them fled to the mountains where they died of hunger and a thing called “the sword”. The Dutch then replaced the population with enslaved people who could alter the land and harvest the mace and nutmeg so prized by Europe. That was the thing. The prize. The most expensive spice in the world.

They did it because they ran out of patience. For some years, they had tried to get a trade monopoly, with Indigenous people who were perfectly skilled traders, who wanted none of the goods the Dutch could offer, and who had no leader to negotiate with. And the English were nipping at their heels. Jan Coen, leader of the Dutch conquest, was known for his rigidity and his strong Calvinism. He believed his mission of conquest was divinely inspired. It seems he meant to bring the world of the Bandanese to an end, by killing people outright, starving them and disrupting their means of life and destroying their relationship with the land. When I studied the history of European seaborne empires at University back in the – well, a long time ago, I was encouraged to look at the economic impetus behind exploration and imperialism. I was not encouraged to consider what historical figures said and thought. But Coen, Columbus, Cortez, they believed in a divine mission against savage populations. They did. We can’t think of genocide as an anomaly. It has happened often.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand Māori have been through the same apocalyptic wringer. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, states:

“The Māori population continued its downward spiral in the wake of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, reaching a low of about 42,000 in 1896. Population decline and racist ideologies combined to fuel forewarnings about Māori extinction. In 1856 physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston said it was the duty of Europeans to ‘smooth down … [the] dying pillow’ of the Māori race.

The belief that Māori would eventually die out reflected colonial sentiment that indigenous peoples would not survive European conquest and disease. In 1881 the prominent scientist Alfred Newman pronounced that ‘the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.”

Thing is, while there were fierce wars over land, and conquest was often decisive, there was no attempt at violent genocide. Aotearoa was colonised by the British in the latter days of empire, when imperial impetus had run out of puff (and money). The colonizers just expected the Māori to become extinguished out of sheer inferiority. Racist policies and settler overwhelm had nothing to do with it. But the result was the same. The world ended for the Māori. They have struggled through a post-apocalyptic landscape ever since. Even now, when Māori make up 20% of the population, and are increasingly influential culturally and politically, there is a vocal vanguard of absolute racism that blights everyday life. The new world is not being born easily. Nadine Hura, in her beautiful book of essays “Slowing the Sun” talks about her climate change work in the wake of the past. She states that Māori don’t talk about climate change, but they talk about whakapapa ( ancestry) and they talk about whenua (the land, and the placenta, we are the land). She knows how past colonial pressures bleed into the present:

“But we know from an intersectional view of climate change that for millions of people, from the Pacific to Palestine, the genocidal lust for land, fuelled by carbon-intensive economies, has already resulted in catastrophe and death. Climate change is the result of a system that incentivizes and profits from the disconnection between people and land, promising that the free marked can do a better job than the placenta. In Aotearoa, the storms and floods and landslides and fires are just an intensification of an already intimately known crisis. For Māori, climate change is the second blow in a one-two punch. Colonisation has left many communities living on the most vulnerable land, in the poorest conditions, relilant on the most precarious industries, and now the sea is rising to claim what remains”.

To wrap up, sort of, I am not saying “Indigenous people have the answers to the climate catastrophe because they have survived the apocalypse” because I can’t claim that, and I don’t think anyone else is. Nor do I want to put a further burden on Indigenous folk to go around saving everyone when they might be just trying to save themselves. I am suggesting that the end of the world comes in different ways. For people whose way of life has been destroyed so completely that they are reviving it from scant sources, and through a tangled psychosocial web of trauma and loss, their world ended. Our world is about to end too, and it already has done for those who have died of climate related problems, or have been driven from their homes, or are outright refugees. Where I stand, all of this is happening to someone else. Here, we still have seasons. Snow came early this winter. Sure, council authorities are considering abandoning South Dunedin, there is talk of managed retreat from the increasingly fractious sea, North Island ski fields are suffering commercially, unprecedented flooding destroys farmland in large parts of Canterbury. But I have power and water and food. Nobody I know talks about the climate catastrophe. When it does begin to bite us, which it will, I will want to talk to people who know their shit. Some of those will be people with a stronger sense of survival than I have. They might be able to say “We know what it is like to survive the end of the world. When we nearly got wiped out, we learned this about ourselves, we used these traditions to survive and understand, we adopted these new practices, we learned about loss and how to grieve, and if you are respectful and open, we can teach you”.

And… none of these Indigenous groups for whom the world has ended believe in the Cosmic War. This is a Cosmic War free zone! These peoples have had their world end without recourse to some big old story about ultimate good vs ultimate evil. Their spiritualities are bigger than that.

Thank you for being with me here, on the edge of things! Ma te wa.

Further: Julian Brave Noisecat has a website with links to his writings. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/11/james-mooney-recordings-ghost-dance-songs/ is the link for James Mooney’s 1894 recordings of Ghost Dance songs, and a useful article. Do read Amitav Ghosh, “The Nutmeg’s Curse”; it is an exquisite and humane work. You write best when you love the world!

The photo is “The view from the tower of the City Hall (Rathaus) southwards over the destroyed city of Dresden with the “Bonitas” sculpture (Allegory of Goodness)”. It is by Richard Peter.

The painting is Paul Nash “We Are Making a New World”, 1918.

To the Genoese, in 1347, it must have seemed like the end of the world when the Black Plague first hit their city and people died and died and died. The “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 killed more people than World War One, and quickly and gruesomely, hard on the heels of war, when a young person could die while crossing the road. The Black Plague, the fire of London, so many apocalypses. For many of us, it has felt like the end of the world.

But I want to talk about genocide, that horribly common monstrosity, which has been around since Jericho in the Hebrew Bible. (Archaeological records show it never happened, whew, it was harrowing enough just to read about it).

“To be indigenous to North America is to be part of a postapocalyptic community and experience”, states Julian Brave Noisecat. And “knowledge of the apocalypse caused by colonialism helps make Indigenous peoples aware of ongoing tragedies”. Julian Brave Noisecat is not using apocalypse in its literary sense, meaning an unveiling or a revelation; he means that for his community the world ended, and this is what is left. He talks about “survivance”, an idea that Indigenous people have internalised survival, and that this with its attendant skills can help us face the climate crisis.

So, can it be the end of the world if there are any of us left? And if we know our history, and understand who we are, and thrive and learn?

In answer, I want to talk about the Pequot war. I mean the Pequot massacre. I mean the Pequot actual fucking genocide of 1637, in what is now called Connecticut.

It started as a war, the Puritan colonists and their Indigenous allies vs the powerful Pequot tribe, over lands and the fur trade. The precipitating incident was the attack of the Pequots on a Puritan village, where they killed adult non-combatants and took two children. This provided the excuse the Puritans needed to punish the Pequot nation and take the land. The massacre was surprising and thorough, and gory enough for a Cormac McCarthy novel. First, the Puritan soldiers put the Pequots to the sword, and then burned all who were left. Pequot people ran from the soldiers into the flames. Those who broke through the palisades were massacred. Numbers vary as to how many escaped further, but of them, the women and children were enslaved and the men killed. The Pequots themselves burned other villages and fled, pursued by colonial soldiers. A further attack ensued, and again the Puritans won. The remaining Pequots were scattered, and the land effectively abandoned.

The Puritans invoked God, of course. Captain John Underhill justified the killing of the elderly, women, children, and the infirm by stating that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents [...] We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” They prayed before they attacked. Manifest destiny indeed. For that, we go all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who was a firm believer in the Cosmic War. He believed that finding America would provide gold for the Spanish Emperor to conquer Jerusalem and bring on the end times.

The intent might have been genocidal, but there were survivors. I think it must be hard to destroy a cultural group completely. About a quarter of the Pequot nation died. The survivors were assimilated into other tribes and forbidden to call themselves Pequots. This has the feel of genocide: when you survive but are completely subjugated and are no longer allowed to say who you are. Only in the late twentieth century were Pequot descendants able to seek redress, and the tribe has been revived.

I think this is what Julian Brave Noisecat is talking about. Indigenous people have genocide in their histories. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whole Indian nation faced apocalypse. You don’t survive that without post-apocalypse trauma.

I said genocide was common. As the seventeenth century opened, The Dutch East India Company very forcibly conquered the Banda Islands. They massacred the people of the island of Lontor, torturing their elders to death and capturing women and children in order to enslave them. It took some months to eliminate the Bandanese. Many of them fled to the mountains where they died of hunger and a thing called “the sword”. The Dutch then replaced the population with enslaved people who could alter the land and harvest the mace and nutmeg so prized by Europe. That was the thing. The prize. The most expensive spice in the world.

They did it because they ran out of patience. For some years, they had tried to get a trade monopoly, with Indigenous people who were perfectly skilled traders, who wanted none of the goods the Dutch could offer, and who had no leader to negotiate with. And the English were nipping at their heels. Jan Coen, leader of the Dutch conquest, was known for his rigidity and his strong Calvinism. He believed his mission of conquest was divinely inspired. It seems he meant to bring the world of the Bandanese to an end, by killing people outright, starving them and disrupting their means of life and destroying their relationship with the land. When I studied the history of European seaborne empires at University back in the – well, a long time ago, I was encouraged to look at the economic impetus behind exploration and imperialism. I was not encouraged to consider what historical figures said and thought. But Coen, Columbus, Cortez, they believed in a divine mission against savage populations. They did. We can’t think of genocide as an anomaly. It has happened often.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand Māori have been through the same apocalyptic wringer. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, states:

“The Māori population continued its downward spiral in the wake of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, reaching a low of about 42,000 in 1896. Population decline and racist ideologies combined to fuel forewarnings about Māori extinction. In 1856 physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston said it was the duty of Europeans to ‘smooth down … [the] dying pillow’ of the Māori race.

The belief that Māori would eventually die out reflected colonial sentiment that indigenous peoples would not survive European conquest and disease. In 1881 the prominent scientist Alfred Newman pronounced that ‘the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.”

Thing is, while there were fierce wars over land, and conquest was often decisive, there was no attempt at violent genocide. Aotearoa was colonised by the British in the latter days of empire, when imperial impetus had run out of puff (and money). The colonizers just expected the Māori to become extinguished out of sheer inferiority. Racist policies and settler overwhelm had nothing to do with it. But the result was the same. The world ended for the Māori. They have struggled through a post-apocalyptic landscape ever since. Even now, when Māori make up 20% of the population, and are increasingly influential culturally and politically, there is a vocal vanguard of absolute racism that blights everyday life. The new world is not being born easily. Nadine Hura, in her beautiful book of essays “Slowing the Sun” talks about her climate change work in the wake of the past. She states that Māori don’t talk about climate change, but they talk about whakapapa ( ancestry) and they talk about whenua (the land, and the placenta, we are the land). She knows how past colonial pressures bleed into the present:

“But we know from an intersectional view of climate change that for millions of people, from the Pacific to Palestine, the genocidal lust for land, fuelled by carbon-intensive economies, has already resulted in catastrophe and death. Climate change is the result of a system that incentivizes and profits from the disconnection between people and land, promising that the free marked can do a better job than the placenta. In Aotearoa, the storms and floods and landslides and fires are just an intensification of an already intimately known crisis. For Māori, climate change is the second blow in a one-two punch. Colonisation has left many communities living on the most vulnerable land, in the poorest conditions, relilant on the most precarious industries, and now the sea is rising to claim what remains”.

To wrap up, sort of, I am not saying “Indigenous people have the answers to the climate catastrophe because they have survived the apocalypse” because I can’t claim that, and I don’t think anyone else is. Nor do I want to put a further burden on Indigenous folk to go around saving everyone when they might be just trying to save themselves. I am suggesting that the end of the world comes in different ways. For people whose way of life has been destroyed so completely that they are reviving it from scant sources, and through a tangled psychosocial web of trauma and loss, their world ended. Our world is about to end too, and it already has done for those who have died of climate related problems, or have been driven from their homes, or are outright refugees. Where I stand, all of this is happening to someone else. Here, we still have seasons. Snow came early this winter. Sure, council authorities are considering abandoning South Dunedin, there is talk of managed retreat from the increasingly fractious sea, North Island ski fields are suffering commercially, unprecedented flooding destroys farmland in large parts of Canterbury. But I have power and water and food. Nobody I know talks about the climate catastrophe. When it does begin to bite us, which it will, I will want to talk to people who know their shit. Some of those will be people with a stronger sense of survival than I have. They might be able to say “We know what it is like to survive the end of the world. When we nearly got wiped out, we learned this about ourselves, we used these traditions to survive and understand, we adopted these new practices, we learned about loss and how to grieve, and if you are respectful and open, we can teach you”.

And… none of these Indigenous groups for whom the world has ended believe in the Cosmic War. This is a Cosmic War free zone! These peoples have had their world end without recourse to some big old story about ultimate good vs ultimate evil. Their spiritualities are bigger than that.

Thank you for being with me here, on the edge of things! Ma te wa.

Further: Julian Brave Noisecat has a website with links to his writings. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/11/james-mooney-recordings-ghost-dance-songs/ is the link for James Mooney’s 1894 recordings of Ghost Dance songs, and a useful article. Do read Amitav Ghosh, “The Nutmeg’s Curse”; it is an exquisite and humane work. You write best when you love the world!

The photo is “The view from the tower of the City Hall (Rathaus) southwards over the destroyed city of Dresden with the “Bonitas” sculpture (Allegory of Goodness)”. It is by Richard Peter.

The painting is Paul Nash “We Are Making a New World”, 1918.