Annael
Immortal
Apr 19, 3:52pm
Views: 5522
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this has always been a favorite idea with me
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that the land shapes the people and the culture. I picked that idea up from James Michener after reading The Source, where he posits that religions which came out of the desert tend to be harsher than religions that arose in other areas. But mostly I think about it in relation to colonization. Colonizers oppress indigenous people and cultures when they first arrive, but the longer they live on that new land, the more--I think and hope--the land itself works on them, until they start to become open to and even adopt some of the ways of the local natives. We call it cultural appropriation but perhaps it goes deeper than that. Here in the Pacific Northwest of the US, awareness of and interest in local tribal customs has been steadily growing, more and more people are using native names for local features, and the tribes are having more and more influence on state environmental practices. My feeling is that this is all because most people just can't live in this beautiful place for long without coming to love it and wanting to tend to it with respect. Even the hardest-hearted respond with rejoicing any time the clouds part and "the Mountain" - Rainier, or to use its original name, Tahoma - can be seen, and most of the people I know go so far as to say "that's my mountain." We feel a personal relationship.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words.
-- Gaston Bachelard
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NARF and member of Deplorable Cultus since 1967
(This post was edited by Annael on Apr 19, 3:53pm)
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