No. 5 The Divided Brain: Indigenous ways of seeing and the pipeline blockade

The last days have seen actions being led by hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en Nation in the west and the Mohawks in the east of Canada. To tell the truth, I’ve been waiting a long time for this and I know Harriet Natalee’s spirit is smiling all around both Canadian coasts. Harriet Nahanee carried the Mohawk flag into what proved to be her last blockade at Eagle Ridge Bluffs (2017) and a prison sentence that hastened her death. 

The judges who give out the injunctions that led to Harriet’s demise are still giving them out, the same injunctions that protect corporate interests. These judges only see the world with the left hemisphere of their brains. This is the hemisphere that according to some currently studying the human brain, sees only what is directly in front of itself, unconnected to the whole.  The judges have spent so many years thinking this way their right brains have become dormant.

But given the chance their brains could become unified again. This would enable their right brains to insist that their left hemispheres must consider all of the subtle and obvious interconnections of the natural world before the left brain acts, including the human role as caretakers of the land and waters of the earth. But how to make the judiciary, who acts for immediate corporate interests instead of long-term environment and the people start valuing their right brains?  Good question.   

Before the scientific revolution (roughly the 16^th and 17^th centuries) most people used both sides of their brains when considering their relationship with the earth. The earth was understood as one whole interconnecting being who gave life to all. When the earth was injured, they were also injured. We have recently seen how the whole world is trying to shake off a capitalist system that transforms all that is truly beautiful and life giving into only salable commodities. But this is difficult. Because there are these social mechanisms that are built by left brain technocrats that gives rise to certain outside rules and regulations that favour this way of seeing. These mechanisms tell us what to eat, drive, and think, and if we resist there are the laws backed up by a police force built into the systems to keep us from actually acting.

When the scientific method – in order to uncover nature’s ‘secrets’ – began to divide bits and pieces of nature from its surrounding connections, this way of seeing began to change how nature itself was to be considered. Now nature is now seen as a conglomeration of exploitable parts that could bring big money.  Nature was now for sale.

This newfound left brained ability to isolate micro entities without consulting with the right hemisphere (which sees the whole) has resulted in entire societies being colonized. A few indigenous peoples are standing and showing us how to see with both sides of our brains. They are fighting for their land and waters, the preservation of wild life, preservation of their own ways of being, of believing. In the process, are also showing the rest of us that our left brain’s desires for getting, buying, consuming, competitive showing off, individualist preening, indifference to the suffering of others, are not the only ways to live. 

Let us not only celebrate these few who are willing to risk the social repercussions of this way of seeing, but also actively follow in their footsteps. Our right brain is still there, sitting in the right hemisphere, waiting for us to rediscover it. 

 Next time.