Yeah. Yeah. It still has its own story. And even our species that have been either trafficked or traded elsewhere in the world, Indigenous peoples in other countries, they have their own story for our things. Their story for eucalyptus in Ecuador, for example, and they’ve made that part of their traditional medicine. So it’s been categorized that way. And also it has a lot to do with newborn babies. So there’s a special stone that they put in the navel of a newborn baby, and they use the eucalyptus bark as the belt to bind it there when they have a special ceremony for a baby.

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At a time when democracy is something that everybody has to actually gather collective eyes and fight for, this becomes apparent. It becomes apparent when you see places with settler-colonial sort of communities— if not the state, certainly not the state— if they’ve allowed themselves to have the land and the First Law of the place influence who they are and how they govern themselves, like outside of the state, how people do their governance together, like in mutual aid, or in gathering, negotiating disputes, all these sorts of things.

And I think a really fricking good example right now is Minnesota. You ask people in Minnesota, particularly people who are gathering and doing their activist work and defending their entire state in defiance of federal law right now— yeah, the people I talk to, they keep telling me that they’re motivated and they’re guided first by the Indigenous laws, that they have a history of being first caring for the land, like understanding that, and second, caring for each other, which mirrors what Auntie Mary Graham was saying before.

The first relation is to the land. And then the second relation is— so the first relation is between people and land. Second relation law is between people and people, and that comes out of the first. And I’ve heard heaps of Minnesotans say that: that they have blended that with a kind of particular Scandinavian— ’cause they have a large Scandinavian sort of influence in that state, and particularly around Minneapolis— around that sort of democratic, kind of egalitarian ethos that sort of comes outta Scandinavia.

You don’t think of Vikings being like that, but Vikings are really into Viking culture. And yeah, there are a lot of egalitarian, but also ideas of people all having their voices and being able to take the law in their own hands if they’re following it properly, et cetera, et cetera.

So you can see those two really complementary political, moral, ethical systems coming together. And you can hear it expressed whenever you hear the activists right now talking about what guides them, what drives them, what they hold in common, what gives them the moral certainty that resistance against the fascist narratives that are coming into their place and followed by kinetic violence— ’cause the story, the wrong story of that fascism, that’s setting up the scaffolding for the permission structure for more state violence to be done, or in the name of the state, against all laws and against the constitution as well.

And so the people feel very grounded in the Indigenous and Scandinavian story stories, and the story of those things together. Yeah. story is how you do your border work, how you negotiate the boundaries between different kinds of people with different cultures. And men and women have different cultural responsibilities, different stories, different ceremonies. And then there’s the sort of Venn diagram in the middle, the stuff we all do together. Yeah, there’s lots of sacred things associated with that.

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