25 Comments
Oct 6, 2021Liked by Thom Hartmann

Wow! Incredibly enlightening! I have been in a book club reading the histories of Native American ways and slavery from Africa to America. We have all been searching for an answer as to how and why our white culture is in such disconnect of every living being compared to the tribal ways of the Natives. Your article is the answers to our question! It’s like you knew we were searching! I can’t wait to share this at our next meeting! I will be sure to to tell them this came from you! Thank you so much!

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Oct 6, 2021Liked by Thom Hartmann

Beautifully written truth-telling. When we construct a thing - be it a building, a thought, or a society - the most crucial element of its longevity is the integrity of its foundation. All that follows is dependent upon this fundamental grounding.

In this regard, Thom has earned the honor of bomoh. He has brought us truth, compassion, and wisdom. His writing is a brilliant translation of the complex into the parlance of everyday-speak. I thank you, Thom, for remaining a humble and imperative guide amidst an ocean of untruths and great-forgettings.

For those looking for a definition of "bomoh", you can find its essence in Robert Wolff's "Original Wisdom" - a book which so deeply illustrates the foundations of our humanness.

Further understanding of Thom's post can be attained from "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" (Thom Hartmann) and "Ishmael" (Daniel Quinn). Though not formally recognized as companion writings, these two books are most certainly such.

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founding
Oct 6, 2021Liked by Thom Hartmann

Another Hartmann mind-bender. Yes, this explains almost every contemporary conflict. Let's lobby for "critical human theory" to be in every public school curriculum. (Parochial and "Christian" schools will not appreciate what Thom has to say.)

But a query: the indiginous cultures Thom describes might be called "spontaneous" cultures, developing intramurally and slowly without the external imposition of ideology. They got right the relationship to the earth, but they were tribal, and tribalism bred conflict. (Cf. Trumpers and the rest of us.) Not to the degree that Dominator cultures engage in conflict, but history tells us inter-tribal warfare was common, and some Native American tribes enslaved members of others.

But thanks, Tom, for an insightful article. If the first step in solving a problem is defining it, this is huge. I'll forward it to some people working hard on climate change, and this will be of great value to them.

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Oct 6, 2021Liked by Thom Hartmann

Thom, this understanding is hugely important to help all peoples realize that each culture has journeyed a very long and difficult road. With this understanding and acknowledgement of the past the healing can begin leading to an age of reunion...for all humanity. I look forward to our conversation on Front and Center with Steve Bhaerman.

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Off Sicily are the Aeolian Islands of which Lipardi is the main one. Here is a fine museum showing the pre-Roman history of the group. Over 3000 years there were 10 invasions of the islands; each time another people conquered and mixed with the old, creating a new culture that was in turn overthrown. There is nothing new here and I doubt if there's a square meter of habitable land on Earth that hasn't been taken by one group from another. The real difference is that the Europeans did it on such a massive and arrogant scale, refusing to learn very much from those they conquered and insisting they were the only ones with "the truth". While Europe was mired in poverty and filth there were glittering civilizations around the world, yet even today one would barely know that from any introductory history taught in the West. Using the poison of racism, their technology, capitalism and a militant faith were equated with progress. While material levels increased and many people ultimately lived better and longer the Earth paid the price for the reckless damage inflicted on it. Those caught in the way, including the powerless in developed economies were treated barely any better than those in foreign places where the harm could be hidden. In fact Americans workers today are seeing their standard of living go down as this process comes home. Clearly changes will have to occur, if only because the planet can't take this system much longer. How that can be done without slipping into general poverty and dictatorship is perhaps the most important challenge facing the human race.

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In someways I think culture starts with family and the bonds we make. It doesn't matter what a family looks like but if they are present. Strong family makes a strong society. In these native cultures it seems there is always a connection to every generation in the family. Something we have lost in our me culture.

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For a long time, I have joked (mostly to myself, because now we are in education desolation): Don't make me mad, because I am still P'...d-off over the Cathars, and that was 900 years ago! Simon de Montfort sent to the Pope: "How shall I know which to burn?" and the Pope sent back: "Burn them all; God will know his own." Apocryphal? Certainly true to type. It's hardly news that what is handed down to us from the god of the Old Testament is heavy on holy hell. So inexpressibly sad that such massive effort has been put into extinguishing the glimmers of revolutionary kindness that yet show up in hints in the New T. But your diatribe, Thom, connects the eradication of culture to the eradication of some instinctive harmony with the necessary source of life itself: the fantastically unlikely planet, hanging by a thread in a goldilocks zone rationality would decree impossible, functioning according to rules that homo NOT sapiens seems to have a primary drive to barely comprehend only with a goal to exploit.

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I'm a long-time "student" of the feminist histories of ancient beliefs that the earth was our "mother" and powers of life-and-death originated with female energies. This explanation to Native Americans of White/European inclinations to appropriate their practices is a wonderful "path" if you will on that road. Among the critical queries, in my humble opinion: what happened when the ice-age proximate human groups that were surviving by domesticating herd animals migrated southward? It's proposed that the western hemisphere's First People were some of those people. Another suggestion has been that some domesticators of herds moved south to where "the cradle of civilization" may have included people who had learned how to gather vegetation and, then, how to plant and harvest. Was Gilgamesh the first of the male sacred figures? Didn't that parallel the addition of male consorts to the assorted great goddesses: Isis, Astarte, Hera, Persephone, Diana, Hecate, Kali, Demeter and Inana?

You've made clear the urgency of humanity's grasp of the histories of our varied cultures. For instance, one newer query might be, " what happened among the tribes of Africa that resulted in wars among those who were captured by their enemies and sold to the British East India Company in the early 17th century to be sold to the early colonists of the western hemisphere, including Jamestown."

Quite a response to the purveyors of the notion that we humans are rightly the masters of our beloved, sacred planet.

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Quite a paradigm shift!

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Can individual cultures survive in a global world? Should they?

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