Rights Versus Responsibility

I love this one comedian named George Carlin.

A lot of you know him.

One of the teachings that I learned from his comedy was that rights don't really exist.

It's a fabrication.

And we understand

that "rights" comes from bodies like nation-states

and international law.

Bodies like the UN.

The idea of responsibilities supercedes that.

It goes back in time to ancestral times.

And in our language, we don't have a word for "rights." We have words for "responsibility."

Indigenous laws, responsibilities, are...

take what you need and leave the rest.

That means you only take what you need and you operate with your laws,

creating products that are built right the first time.

Foods that are acknowledged and consumed fully.

You don't take more than you need.

It's not new.

What's new is remembering what those protocols were and what they can be today.

Especially in the face of contemporary and future proposals by this capitalist society

to access what they call "resources."

These are not resources.

This is a life force. A life force that we have relationships to.

We don't own it.

We don't own the rivers. We don't own the salmon.

We have relationships with these worlds.

And our laws are our responsibilities.

In our language ******** means our responsibilities. Our ways.

So the way we harvest salmon is our living law.

The action of properly harvesting salmon to respect their world is the living law.

You know, an invading force does not bestow the rights on people when they keep them oppressed.

The rights are only a chance for them to, kind of, come out of that oppressive state once in a while

to kind of feel a little bit empowered then disappear back under that oppressive veil.

Responsibilities take us out of that veil.

They give us a chance to walk freely on our lands.

And we take our responsibilities very serious.

That's the freedom that we experience.

The air that we breathe isn't based on our rights,

it's based on our ancestral responsibilities, which go back thousands of years.

And the rights are something that only goes back to 1982 here, in Canada.

But the United Nations has declared it as "Rights for Indigenous Peoples."

And being a hierarchical body

upholding nation states

and nation states uphold capitalist ideals.

And capitalist ideals depends upon infinite resources

infinite growth in a finite world.

And that means all of us as human beings can protect that finite world

by asserting our responsibilities collectively around the world.

Going back to humble ways of living.