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Brian Mowrey's avatar

Although it (necessarily) hazards presenting fiction as nonfiction, and (necessarily) merely synthesizes the work of others (including Deloria Jr.), I feel that James Wilson's 'The Earth Shall Weep' is an insightful portrait of pre and post-colonial Indian life and therefore the likely default for pre-societal (ie tribal) human experience in general. It provides a lot of very good meta analysis, imo.

He quotes Alfonso Ortiz's "The Tewa World:"

"A Tewa is interested in our own story of our origins, for it holds all that we need to know about our people, and how one should live as a human. The story defines our society. It tells me who I am, where I came from, the boundaries of my world, what kind of order exists within it; how suffering, evil and death came into this world; and what is likely to happen to me when I die...

Our ancestors came from the north. Theirs was not a journey to be measured in centuries, for it was as much a journey of the spirit as it was a migration of a people. The Tewa know not when the journey southward began or when it ended. We are unconcerned about time in its historical dimensions, but we will recall in endless detail the features of the 12 places our ancestors stopped.

We point to these places to show that the journey did indeed take place. This is the only proof a Tewa requires. And each time a Tewa recalls a place where they paused, for whatever length of time, every feature of the earth and sky comes vividly to life, and the journey itself lives again."

This is in the context of Wilson debating the Western / Christian viewpoint that migration is intrinsically and always displacement: In the tribal perspective, it is precisely what makes location meaningful.

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Brian Mowrey's avatar

"Most concerningly, though, it sets up a psychological barrier of guilt to beginning the personal process of becoming rooted in place."

It doesn't improve upon your analysis and description, but the language that came to my mine was that land acknowledgements are a modern "spell of alienation" from body and place. There are probably loads of such "spells" one could find in both sjw rituals and the social media landscape (with the exception of the heavy promotion of geotagging in the case of the former).

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