featured image | ‘Attack of the Drones’ by Gerardo Gomez

By Joe Brewer

‘This culture tells us that humans are selfish and greedy. It says that we are nothing more than individual islands of ego floating in a sea of chaos. It is the Great Myth of Separation that takes many forms. We’ve seen it as humans apart from nature, reason divided against emotion, body separate from mind, one tribe distinct from another. This mental tendency to categorize the world according to its separations is the root cause of illness in the world today.

And it has a name. It’s name is Wetiko.’

An exploration of wetiko by author and spoken-word artist Alixa Garcia
Produced by Raynald Leconte and Even Blouin

Wetiko deludes it’s host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.

“Creativity is the antidote for violence and destruction. Art is our most human expression, our voice to communicate our stories, to challenge injustice and the misrepresentations of mainstream media, to expose harsh realities and engender even more powerful hope, a force to bring diverse peoples together, a tool to rebuild our communities, and a weapon to win this struggle for universal liberation.” –Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman

featured image | ‘Ghosts’ by KagLoos

By Martin Kirk

‘Wetiko short-circuits an entity’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. The false separation it creates between humans and the rest of nature means those infected cannot see what is inherently cannibalistic about certain types and levels of consumption. It numbs them from being able to sense the ultimately self-consuming nature of its actions, and commands them to consume far more than they need in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement.’

By Marcus Grignon

Posoh mawaw niwak. Nekataw manawich kikitem. (Hello everyone. I am going to speak.)

The injustice we witness every day, whether it be environmental, societal, and even economic, has a root cause. Nobody sees it because it has been invisible since the genocide committed against the cultures who lost their voice to speak its name. This being is not one sole individual, but a metaphysical entity bent on destruction. Wetiko in the Cree language, Wendigo in other Algonquin speaking tribes scattered throughout the Great Lakes region is what they call this evil spirit who represents environmental destruction, greed and ego in human beings

Kamukunji Youth Congress | Seeing Wetiko from a Grassroots Point of View

Kamukunji Youth Congress (KYC) is an open and voluntary membership youth social movement founded in 2007 by agitated youth leaders. Situated and with a physical community office in Pumwani slums, Kamukunji Sub-County, Nairobi County-Kenya. The founding mission of the youth congress was and still remains “to provide a shared platform for youth to ensure the improvement of their position and condition and address the socio, economic political disorders that continue to subject them to desperation, injustices and inhumane living conditions through a social justice lens”.

The Sea Choir
by Charlotte Baldwin

Art | Molly Crawford

Blogger, via Conscious Use of Technology

Our media environment has become toxic. I don’t mean by this, simply, that the content of the media has become toxic (has become superficial, petty, mean-spirited, over-stimulating, unthoughtful, pandering, or divisive, though it trends these ways). I mean that technological change in the media – the rise of social media and the smart phone most prominently – have produced an environment that is poisoning us mentally and emotionally.

By Myk Estrada,

My grandmother grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1940s, a time when xenophobia induced redlining & segregation of the city’s neighborhoods set the stage for the Watts Riots taking place some 20 years later. My grandmother’s grandmother was technically from Texas, although her parents knew the land as Mexico prior to the Mexican-American War in 1846. My grandmother’s mother & grandmother only spoke Spanish, so she learned English the same way many Mexican-American’s around the time did – in classrooms under the threat of physical punishment for speaking Spanish. At the time, as it is in many instances today, being of Mexican dissent conjured images of hurtful stereotypes; lazy, dirty, stupid, all things my grandmother remembers being called as a child.

By Martin Winiecki
for Kosmos Online

In the 1990s an unusual encounter took place in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In plant rituals, shamans of the Achuar, a tribe living in pristine forest that had never been in touch with Western civilization, received the warning that the “white man” would try to invade their lands, cut down the forest and exploit the resources. Deeply shaken, they called out to the Spirits for help. Soon after white people did approach them, coming to them however with supportive intentions – a group of activists from the United States, searching for ways to protect Indigenous Peoples from the oil industry. The Westerners found a deeply interconnected tribal society living in profound symbiosis with the Earth. Seeing the bulldozers coming closer and closer, they asked the Elders of the tribe how they could survive. Their answer was surprising and straightforward: “Don’t try to help us here. Go back to your own culture and change the dream of the modern world! It is because of this dream that we are perishing.”