Tara Houska writes:

“This way of life is not primitive, it is not uncivilised,” I gestured to the image on the screen just above my head. It showed my longtime teacher, Dennis Jones, knocking manoomin (wild rice), the grain sacred to Anishinaabe people, into a canoe.

I snapped that photo of us harvesting wild rice years back, before a new pipeline called Line 3 threatened to carry a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta through some of the richest wild rice beds in the world, in Anishinaabe territory.

“It is life in balance, life that doesn’t depend on the unspoken, unseen suffering of others for profit,” I said.

A few of the corporate bankers sitting across the table from me shifted in their seats, one raised an eyebrow.

These were the representatives of financiers deeply invested in the expansion and continuing entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry.

We were 30 floors up in a New York skyscraper, the city stretched silently below. My eyes looked past the row of mostly interested faces, to the gleaming water past Manhattan.

“Disconnection is what Westernised society indoctrinates into our hearts, our minds, our bodies,” I told them. [Continue reading…]