The Seri Against Western Civilization.
It was a short sail over to Bahía Kino, past a rock formation the Seri call Ak Akeem and another, which looks like a sphinx from one side and like a turtle coming the other way. No wonder that both have a special place in Seri mythology, as the Seri’s most sacred relative is the sea turtle. A young Seri recently won Mexico’s National Prize for Indigenous Youth for his effort to protect sea turtles. He initiated a project in cooperation of the Seri community with local fishermen to monitor the local sea turtle population and has gained international attention for his work (more here)
The Seri lived and hunted on Ísla Tiburón, Tahejöc in Seri, for two millennia. A vast territory from Hermosillo to Guyamas to two islands in the Sea of Cortez sustained their tribe who were hunters and gatherers. The Mexican government decided in 1960 to make Ísla Tiburón a nature preserve for which nowadays hunting permits can be bought for 20.000 gringo dollars. The Seri were given two villages with small houses to settle in. It was suggested that they’d give up their ways and culture and farm instead. The Seri resisted, still not accepting their nationality as Mexican, although their culture was corrupted with Mexican catholic names and we even saw a cemetery with crosses in their village.
We arrived at the Seri village Punta Chueca, Socaaix in Seri, in the early morning. Kids were on their way to school, strolling along the dirt roads. The Seri have one school, but a Seri scholar, the only Seri so far with a doctorate degree, suggests to his people to educate their kids in good Mexican schools, so that they bring knowledge back to the tribe. Then, he suggests, they can better themselves collectively once they understand the ways to gain a voice within the forces governing them. The Seri numbered around 5.000 when they were first discovered. Relocation, disease from contact with whites and wars fought with the Mexican army decimated them to 500; today there are little less than double. Seri didn’t marry outside the tribe, the first inter marriage happened recently between a Seri man and Mexican woman and was highly controversial among the Seri.
The Seri are, as probably all native tribes, very skeptical of the European intruders, as those have only done well for themselves and have done nothing so that the Natives can continue their traditions. Without land the Seri cannot survive on their own. Now, the European culture impacted them even more as retirement communities start to encroach up to their land boundaries, effectively encircling them. Sugar, plastic, cars have overtaken these peoples, once fast runners, skilled hunters, fishermen and fierce warriors. Women used to weave baskets for ceremonial purposes, now make a living with them and produce so many, that the sheaths cut their teeth down over time. Men carve wood sculptures, fish and don’t have much else to do. It seems that governments support these communities, but have produced dependents by taking everything. It is a vicious cycle and expecting the Seri to assimilate to Mexican culture would mean that they as a people would vanish.
Today in the village, the women spoke very little Spanish, only the names of the items they were selling and the number of pesos they wanted for it. They asked also for warm clothes. A young women, we more gestured than spoke to, said that her dog’s name, wearing a cure sweater, was ‘Ryanna’. I fear satelite TV will make it happen faster and less gentle as needed. Their knowledge of the land, their way to tend to the land without depleting it, will be lost before we can learn from it. A people who thrived for centuries cannot survive in our so called ‘Western culture’. They live with outdoor kitchen, no plumbing, without fridges and little electricity. How is this possible? They lived for thousands of years in a parallel universe and left their landscape unchanged. Western culture overruns everything and the entire landscape changed. The only ancient forest where bears and wolves roam exists in Europe in the Carpetian mountains of Romania. In England agriculture has surrounded villages and towns and no original wild forests are still intact. Food chains of wild animals have been decimated so much so that wild animals don’t exist anymore, only pets and farm animals.
I challenge you to compare the two cultures, leaving western criteria like ‘comfort’, ‘culture’ and ‘profit’ aside, the native cultures preserve the earth while the western cultures deplete it. We believe, what capitalism has taught us, that there will be always more, that the earth has infinite resources, that profit is not finite. We don’t have to tend to the world and the earth, we can take and take and somehow there will be more. Maybe Christianity has something to do with it and the idea that ‘God will provide’? So, God will fix it all, as ‘Climate Change Deniers” and ‘Flat Earthers’ believe? Natives understand that this earth is all we have. Their lands were all they had and they took care if it until God’s helpers taught them how to farm the land and so change it forever.
I was a member of the SerCal (Society of Ecological Restoration, CA chapter) and heard at many seminars and workshops that it is impossible to restore a landscape and bring it back to it’s pre-western-human-contact stage. These good people have worked hard since this profession started to exist in the 1970’s, to find that they might achieve 30% optimistically speaking. Bottom line. Once gone, it will not come back. Developers liked the idea, that once something is ruined it can be fixed. Not so. An ecosystem is so complex and food chains have so many members, which is impossible to recreate.
What now, if there is no way back? Is there still hope? I don’t really care if someone doesn’t believe that the climate changes because of humans or an earth cycle like an ice age. Pollution is at the core of the problem. Plastics in fish and bird bellies and in creams on our skin, styrofoam and resins which will degrade. Even if the oceans won’t rise, because of the methane farted out by all the cows we farm to eat (yes, way more methane than all industries and cars combined) and because if an coming ice age or Go’s revenge, the oceans are full of trash. Beaches are full of trash. Harbors are full of trash. Even if all that trash gets collected and put in landfills, it will be still there. And we will drown in trash way before we will drown in rising ocean levels.
We only invented inorganic, non-degradable substances, like plastics, 70 years ago. Modern trash management in Sweden is so efficient that they recycle and reuse 100% of their trash. Sweden is trash neutral.
At the Seri village, I watched a girl pour out a carton with trash, paper and plastics in the open landscape next to the school, which is at the edge of the village. The Seri throw all their trash there. Concepts from Sweden could help this village to deal with their trash in a ‘western civilized’ way, because they cannot go back to their old ways of cultivating the land. So, this girl and the village show deep disrespect to the land by littering it. That must hurt. Clearly, something is very wrong with the world and the Seri have been conquered in this respect. The Seri youth woke up and brings hope back to the tribe, the region and us.
