| To: Retort From: GS [Geoffrey sends this gloss on Naomi's invocation of the U'wa-Occidental conflict. IB] "In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn't as much oil as it had previously thought.)" In 1998 I had the honor of hosting Berito Kuwaru'wa, chief of the U'wa tribe, when he visited San Francisco for an interview that led to his receipt of the Goldman Environmental Prize. We had a chance to discuss U'wa cosmology, which is even more à propos the BP hemorrhage than Naomi Klein suggests. The U'wa did claim that oil drilling would constitute "matricide" but not because they believe in "Mother Earth," which was the common way of westernizing and quaintifying their sophisticated world view. Rather, like most Native Americans, they view the underworld and the heavens likewise as realms of spirits of the departed, populated by the ancestors. The fluids of that realm -- water and oil -- are therefore literally the blood of the ancestors, our forebears, which paleontology and geology now verify, of course. In the U'wa view, opening a massive artificial doorway to the underworld through drilling would disrupt the natural pathway of spirit transmigration, opening a portal through which the ancestral spirits might then spill, hopelessly confusing the realms of life and death. They had trouble communicating this insight to the executives at Occidental, but now, who can argue? The Oil Age Hemorrhage should be the catastrophe's name. -- Geoffrey Sea |