Up, but Not in Arms

How well I remember the uprisings of the Iroquois Confederacy and other Native nations, when the people in solidarity resisted the Euro-American (i.e., from their perspective, the invaders’) government squeezing the Native people ever more tightly in encroachments on their sovereign land and freedoms. Where Europeans march at the orders of leaders, Native people rise up en masse, spontaneously, with the harmonized unity of a colony of bees or ants to say, “We have had enough!” At various times the Iroquois took over Alcatraz, blockaded the New York State Thruway (which crosses sovereign territory of one Iroquois nation, the Seneca) and international bridges into Canada.

And how much I have felt emotionally involved in the worldwide Occupy movement, despite living in a poor country far from the centers of plutocratic power. Ever since it began in Tunisia and Egypt, I have rejoiced to see a spontaneous movement of ordinary people – no leaders inciting them, simply an amorphous declaration of the same thing: “We have had enough!”

Still, living here in the Tierras Altas, I felt far removed from all that. Panamá, and this part of it in particular, usually seems so idyllic, so peaceful, that all the troubles elsewhere in the world are part of some other far more troubled world. Certainly not this one.

Until the same cry of “We have had enough!” came to the Tierras Altas.

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As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

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