134. Resilience

Resilience

 

I used to be a night person, but that’s all changed in the last dozen years. Now I go to bed about 9, fall asleep easily and sleep until 12 or 1:00 am. Then back to sleep, maybe with help from the radio or a podcast on my phone; but this sleep is more troubled, often interrupted by dreams. Not horrible dreams, though two nights ago there was a volcano pouring out of Bonneville Mountain at the head of Wallowa Lake, and I went to higher ground on the school hill. 

 

On good mornings I wake lazily sometime after 4, and turn on the BBC, which takes me sleepily into Morning Edition on PBS. This morning the BBC had “mixed” quests, young men and women whose parents came to England from China, Guinea, the West Indies and East, and then married White Britishers or one another. This crowd, this morning, exulted in their mixed heritages, and I came awake slowly with a good feeling about the world.

 

Volcanoes—and the Covid—rage on in the world. Vaccine deniers trouble my mind, but the world is so much bigger, has seen horrible pandemics in the past, and those of us on the earth now are descendants of survivors of all of the earth’s past horrors.

 

There is an odd comfort in this, in knowing that there have always been volcanoes and always been deniers of pandemics—and that there have always been survivors. 

 

All of this fits right into the book I just finished reading, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, by University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler. Ostler follows the inexorable westward movement of the Euro-settlers, and the displacement of the original Americans, by threat and force, treaty and missionizing, and incessant European diseases. 

 

Ostler’s story is the miracle of survival, explained by the ways in which tribes fought, adopted and adapted to the relentless pressures of colonialism. One of the tricks they often performed was to adopt members of other tribes or adopt themselves into other, stronger tribes, reestablishing diminished populations time and again. 

 

Which brings me to the mixing that is going on in England—and in our own country. Yes, it’s an old story, held at times quietly, erupting at other times dramatically and violently. But it seems as inexorable as the volcanoes, and it goes to explain the diversity we show today, and foretells greater diversity we can expect tomorrow. 

 

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