It was religion and oppression, starvation, along with the greed for riches that started the mass migrations that would eventually displace millions of indigenous people all over the continents of North and South America. We of European blood came in waves of time each group seeking a better life some where else…. risking life, family and all that was left of dignity and self. To come here. To sail on ships, arrive and shuffled like cattle through the process of immigration. Forced name changes. Learning a new language. Working in inhuman conditions…. following that dream of a new life. A new beginning.
The strength to migrate is not easily decided by those in dire conditions and circumstances. It is a will to live… a deep and profound desire to find a way passed the pain of living in ways unimaginable. It is the spark of hope…. and maybe the God’s of Chance throwing you a good roll of the dice.
So many never make it. They become the dust and mud of dreams forgotten as they are trampled under the feet if others. The memories in stories left in the communities that made it or stayed put. Migration is made up of people who willed against Gods , governments , bleek odds and the dare to risk the things known against the unknown. They looked a death and said, ” Try me….”
We are facing a worldwide shift in peoples. The world’s boundaries are becoming less meaningful as resources, climate and governments fail. Every time this has happened in the past people moved carrying all they could manage. They left all they knew for anything that could give them a sense of safety and sustainability. Human displacement as well wars over water and land historically have been part of this process. Over time we develop these ideas of ownership when in fact it is a delusion. We own nothing but the person we are. Stuff comes and goes. Impermanence. Change. Sometimes in a life or not till many generations have tilled the soiled built the roads, squatted in the resources rich places. Long enough to forget the ancestors that came before.
It is this forgetting that makes us build futile walls against the inevitable migration of people with their things into places that provide hope for humanity.
Shaman @ Large 