Can whiteness be reindigenized?

A family wedding took me to Minnesota this past weekend. While there, I got to hang out with two of my favorite people: Laurel Armstrong, who has been developing a form of primal singing in which groups of people harmonize intuitively without words as a spiritual practice; and Micah Murray, who has started an ecovillage in northern Minnesota in which people live a communal agrarian life built around the “worship” of the sun and nature.

I see both of these projects as incredibly importing healing work that in my understanding supports the “reindigenization” of white people. I realize that could be a contentious thing for me to say since emigration back to Europe might be the only proper use of the word.

But here’s what I mean. The underlying spiritual malaise that makes white people toxic (to the degree that we are toxic) is our alienation from the land, the dead, and our bodies, which I see as the critically valuable forms of connection indigenous people have which white people lack.

In the absence of connection to the land, the dead, and our bodies, white people grab hold of an abstract racial identity that leaves us restless and fearful of the black, brown, and native people we dehumanize and defend ourselves against. I believe that the more white people are reconnected with the land, the dead, and our bodies, the less fragile our nervous systems become and the less susceptible we are to being manipulated by fascists and their lists of scapegoats for us to fear and hate.

I think this spiritual side of things tends to get neglected by highly educated woke whites who see political indoctrination as the only antidote to white supremacy. I’m not saying that political education is unnecessary. But a physiologically dysregulated woke white is still going to behave whitely under duress, and the solution isn’t just cancelation and more rigorous self-flagellation. We need the belonging that happens for indigenous people who are intimate with the land where they live, who commune regularly with the dead, and who know their bodies well.

The opposite of being indigenous is being chronically online, preoccupied with your career and personal brand, and defined by your sense of intellectual achievement and social popularity. I’m not saying only white people are this way, but whiteness describes the degree to which our identity is abstract because whiteness is the abstractification of identity that happened when European immigrant ethnicities were assimilated and melted down into a single racial category.

In my own life, I have received a more grounded sense of belonging that has mitigated the alienation of my whiteness by doing things like walking barefoot in the woods and engaging in ritual to build relationships with specific trees where I live. Through my use of sacred plants and other mystical practices, I have attuned my awareness of the presence of the dead. Because of my chronic illness, I have gained a much deeper awareness of my body’s needs for diet, play, emotional digestion, and sacred ritual.

My journey has not felt like an intentional pursuit of expertise. I have simply stumbled into belonging. The land has been indigenizing me. The dead have taken me under their wing, reconnecting me with older ways that preceded my people’s Christian colonization. My body has been teaching me how to rest and listen.

Since I’m a colonizer on stolen land, it’s never going to feel right to say I am being “indigenized” without air quotes. But I do think indigenization is something the land naturally does to those who are not resisting it. And I’m finding myself immersed in beautiful friendships with other white people who are seeking practices and ways of living that are more attuned to the land, the dead, and their bodies.

I’m hoping that white people are going to finally move beyond the stupidity of white supremacy which has reached its pinnacle climax in our election of the devil to be our president. If our world doesn’t completely collapse in an ecological Armageddon in the next decade, maybe white people will have a future in which we are much more grounded and connected with the land, the dead, and our bodies.