Journal of Indigenous Social Development

The world news is flooded with articles about self-serving and compromised political leaders, inveterate files of human trafficking, wanton killing and torture of innocent citizens in the Middle East, the apprehension and deportation of legal US residents, environmental ruination, unbridled corporate greed causing unprecedented disparity, religious zealots encouraging the onslaught of Armageddon; death to science, rationality, and empathy. Many people have made these topics a large part of life, and other than commiserate with members of their social circle, are at a loss of what to do. Cultural cessation and death of normalcy are not woven into their ancestral memory.

We bear witness to culminating effects that began when spirituality was institutionalized and used as a forerunner for invasion, when nature was commodified and people became disenfranchised from ancestral lands, when laws of sustainability were broken and consciousness and quiescence dissolved into a ferment of status and possession. At every fork in the road to social development the business model of profit maximization and peak extraction was picked over economic collectivism. We now face the karmic consequences amassed across centuries of exploitation of `aina (Hawaiian word for land that feeds us) and fellow humans.

The long trajectory of dystopic capitalism is now cresting and the suffering we see all around signals the finale of a global empire founded on colonization. This moment of great turning poses both crisis and opportunity to replace a paradigm that’s run its course and carried us to the threshold of doom.  Indigenous societies were the first victims of audacious imposition and after centuries of censorship, managed to survive and adapt without forsaking ancestral ways and reverence for Earth Mother. Against the chronic threat of erasure, we grew resilient by the power of beloved community and ethereal energy of land and sea. Indigenous formulae for existing in harmony, paired with the post-traumatic intelligence gained from outlasting genocide, positions us to lead the world through this tumultuous passage and reset our existence in ways that pose a greater chance of realizing human possibility.

- Journal of Indigenous Social Development Editorial Board