I'll be Home for Kwanzaa

Too often in our material society we propose material remedies for spiritual and emotional problems. Our solution to ecological alienation, for instance, is locally-grown food. Our solution to cultural pathologies is an abstract “sense of place”. I certainly affirm material remedies as necessary: Without looking at the real, empirical, physical conditions, you can end up with impotent ideology.

Unfortunately, material remedies are rarely sufficient to cure our emotional needs. Most of our alienation has multiple roots, including material, cultural, social, psychological and more.

As important as "sense of place" may be in Home-making, spiritual belonging is even bigger. African American culture knows a few things about creating a spiritual Home in the absence of a material Home.

This is something all Diaspora peoples - which ultimately includes all humans in the world, in one way or another, can learn from the African American peoples. Here is a group of people whose home was stolen from them in more ways than geographically, but who were able to find themselves a spiritual home. By creating a tender balance between being an ethnic club, a transcendent spiritual well, and a worldly activist tank, the black church has been able to foster the level of spiritual power that can turn a foreign land - a land of exile - into a home. It's a radical church, not an otherworldly church.

So while others may have gained greater sense of place in the cities where they live, African American churches have learned how to create community among the exiles. They create a social Home where others struggle to lay down roots. This Home is drawn on a tight canvas: a paradoxical here-but-not-yet-here duality. African Americans, especially African American Christians, teach their children that Home is beyond this place. At the same time, they teach a far deeper sense of community than mainstream America.

Kwanzaa is an invented holiday, Afro-centric and a little cheesy, but it's a holiday that attempts to systemetize these lessons. For the week after Christmas, Kwanzaa highlights a communal virtue each day:

These principles are umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith). Each day of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the principles and is organized around activities and discussion to emphasize that principle.

Together these values create a spiritual Home that all of us Homeless types can celebrate. It’s an invitation to neighbor-ness.

Abused, Alienated and About to be Wealthy

It appears that two Wisconsin tribes may be building casinos in New York State, as part of a settlement with the state over outstanding land claims dating to the 18th century. The Oneida (along with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans) were driven from their ancestral home in a bogus treaty, and eventually ended up in their current location in Wisconsin.

They’ve been in Wisconsin for 180 years, during which time they’ve had major struggles with their new neighbors (primarily Menominee); with federal, state and county governments and agencies; and with their old kin in New York.

In other words, the Oneida are homeless in several ways: robbed of their homelands, rejected in their new country, and alienated from half of their tribe. They’ve been in Wisconsin longer than most Whites, but they remain an in-between group – not fully “native”, but still suffering from all the injustice Wisconsin could muster against them (in addition to stonewalling by New York State).

This gets to the heart of what I want this blog to be about: a discussion of home and its implications for the soul: ethnically, spiritually, legally and beyond. When does a place become a home? And how? What can diaspora peoples offer the world, and what is the relationship between our eternal home and our temporal home?

Commons

Private land is the primary means of holding wealth in the United States; certainly the most stable. So I can understand people's reluctance to allow their land to be accessed by the public. But paranoia about the government, coupled with increasing individualism in our society, is the recipe for ecological disaster. When society no longer has the means of protecting its own health if that means limiting a land owner's absolute authority over his own land, we may be reaching a tipping point. Environmental problems are getting so biblical in scale, that absent timely land-use reform, we won't be able to adjust before some elements of society take away private land-ownership alltogether.

Both situations are lousy - absolute individualism and absolute socialism. But if climate change triggers drastic changes in our economy and ecology, socialist land reform might get shoved down our throuts unless we figure out how to reduce privacy's primacy in our culture first.

Boreal Species

Wisconsin's ecology is built around winter. The plants and animals know how to survive it; and there are countless potentially invasive species that can't survive. Those overland-crawling fish they've been fighting in Maryland have actually shown up in Wisconsin, but the DNR's not greatly concerned, because the winter will kill them off.

Not so the soy fungus that landed in the US this autumn. Fungal spores from South America hitched a ride on one of this fall's hurricanes, and spread rapidly across the South. These won't get killed off by the winter. May be a good year to plant something other than soy.

It's also a reminder of our North American ecological connection with the outside world. What goes on elsewhere affects us. And we are responsible not only to our own citizens, but to people around the world for the ecological decisions we make.