SWEAT LODGE FOR NATIVE HUNTERS

Sweat lodges used by Native American tribes were meant for spiritual renewal and purification, the same purpose that is en vogue in modern-day spiritual circles. But American tribes used sweat lodges also to ask for guidance and success in their hunting trip.

Hunters of the Susquehannock tribes at the American east coast dreamt up the prey animal that they would find next day. The prey animal, in turn, could experience its fate in advance, surrender to it and calmly await the hunters’ arrival.

For the hunters it was not about an alienated, random killing of animals. For them it was a careful selection of one animal, and go for it in a respectful, even divine way. They felt it was a divine experience for the animal as well.

Personal communication, Dancing Thunder, Susquehannock Chief

Peter van der Werff: DUTCH CULTURE: TRIBAL ORIGINS

Peter van der Werff: DUTCH CULTURE: TRIBAL ORIGINS: Because the coastal provinces of the Netherlands partly escaped from agrarian hierarchies, they could preserve the tribal features that are...

Peter van der Werff: MORE EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

Peter van der Werff: MORE EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS: This week’s storm in the Netherlands was the most extreme summer storm we have had since measuring of storms started a century ago. But it ...

MORE EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

This week’s storm in the Netherlands was the most extreme summer storm we have had since measuring of storms started a century ago. But it is just a prelude of what we can expect in the future if it comes to the growing magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events created by global warming.

Local and national governments do well to not only start a serious reduction of climate gas emissions but also have scenarios ready to physically, organizationally and financially deal with the effects of more and more intense storms, rainfall, hailstorms, cold waves and heat waves.

DUTCH CULTURE: TRIBAL ORIGINS

Because the coastal provinces of the Netherlands partly escaped from agrarian hierarchies, they could preserve the tribal features that are now called enlightened anarcho-socialist by some. But this world famous culture did not arise in the low-lying polders asking for collective defense works against flood risk.

Surely, this culture relates to water but is millennia older than polders. Polders are the result of a city culture that, in turn, derives from the culture of tribal groups canoeing around in the creeks and rivers here. They started to settle at dunes consisting of sand and pebbles transported from the mountains and deposited in the lowlands by those rivers.In their tiny dune villages, the tribal groups adjusted their typical culture of deliberation and cooperation to the new circumstances and some of them managed to survive by fishing in the water bodies and gathering and hunting at the seasonally drier lands. 

Gradually villages and towns developed on the higher sand dunes, while the marshlands were left uninhabited.In later stages, agrarian societies developed in mainland Europe, with kings and emperors fighting wars with each other and subduing societies at the outskirts of their domains, including the present-day coastal provinces in the Netherlands. But their heavy armies, trained to battle on dry lands, found it hard to enter the wetlands. They either left the area to itself or met with losses and defeat if they tried to subdue the tribal communities here.

Meanwhile, the tribals interacted with the agrarian societies for trade and transport and acquired parts of those cultures that they found useful, while preserving key tribal traits. Their villages developed into towns thriving on maritime and river transport which, in turn, reinforce their skills to defend themselves in military ways. The burgers of those towns also built the financial, technological and organizational capacities to turn the surrounding marshes and lakes into polders and start cultivating and inhabiting the new, fertile lands.

Unlike the European kingdoms and empires where hierarchy and intolerance was growing, in the towns of the Dutch coastal provinces tolerance, deliberation, cooperation, equality, freedom and independence were preserved. The group portraits of city guards and male and female regents of the seventeenth century, the Night Watch as the most famous one, tell the story of the relatively large equality and independence in the towns.

The uniqueness of Holland is that the original tribal culture could be preserved and adjusted to later needs without much of the penetrating hierarchical structure and culture that elsewhere crushed the tribal culture of equality, deliberation and cooperation.

Reconstruction of ancient settler homes on a river dune

HOW IMF THREATENS POOR AND ENVIRONMENT

Ten reasons to oppose the IMF

1. The IMF has created an immoral system of modern day colonialism that SAPs the poor
2. The IMF serves wealthy countries and Wall Street
3. The IMF is imposing a fundamentally flawed development model
4. The IMF is a secretive institution with no accountability
5. IMF policies promote corporate welfare
6. The IMF hurts workers
7. The IMF's policies hurt women the most
8. IMF policies hurt the environment
9. The IMF bails out rich bankers, creating a moral hazard and greater instability in the global economy
10. IMF bailouts deepen, rather than solve, economic crisis

http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/wbimf/oppose

THE FINANCIAL NETWORK AND GREECE

The real Greek crisis took place years ago. Large parts of the money borrowed went to the pockets of the powerful in Greece.

It's those people that should repay, but they belong to the same financial network and subculture as the Troika, Merkel and Dijsselbloem, and are largely left untouched. They jointly let the common Greek citizen bleed and the common European citizen pay taxes to compensate for the lack of loan repayments.

In Greece, privatization takes over, to the benefit of the very same financial network that created the crisis in the first place.

Even a leftist government in Greece is helpless when facing this international financial network.