Lately, the news has felt particularly doomy, dominated by fears of a looming apocalypse due to climate change or nuclear war or artificial intelligence. This is understandable — any of these existential threats could irrevocably change the world, and what would lie beyond is unknowable. Native people know a thing or two about that; the world as we knew it ended long ago, and it continued to end again and again and again. Yet we also know that there’s a future even after the apocalypse has come and gone. Rather than conceptualizing time as a linear march toward calamity (or, for optimists, toward the dream of utopia), it can be viewed as a wheel that we cycle through repeatedly, from creation to destruction to recreation.
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- [note::Never thought about this before - the colonizing of the Americans might as well have been an existential catastrophe to the Native Americans. The same way early European explorers introduced (small pox & malaria?) to (Mayan?) civilization and caused a "silent pandemic." (see annotations from Dan Carlin's BLITZ podcast called "Human Resources")]

The world we know today will eventually be destroyed, too, whether by our changing climate or some other world-altering force we can’t predict or imagine. But the problem with the doomerist streak that’s taken hold of so much of our zeitgeist is that it just stops there, creating a moral hazard that lets us stop imagining the future. Something new will always be rebuilt on top of what’s destroyed, and we can never abandon our obligation to keep creating it.
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In Anishinaabe tradition, as well as in many other Native cultures, the medicine wheel represents the ever-churning cycle of life. Broken into four equal segments of yellow, black, red, and white, it starts on the right-hand side, reflecting the east as the source of the rising sun and beginning of all things. The four segments represent, among other things, the four directions, the four seasons, the four sacred medicines (tobacco, cedar, sage, and sweetgrass), and the four stages of life (birth, youth, adulthood, and elder).
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- time, life, cyclical,

Our histories have been one never-ending turn of this wheel: We create, they destroy, and we create something new out of the ashes of what was left behind, saving what we can, and creating new things from the memories of the old. What’s re-created isn’t necessarily superior or inferior to what was destroyed. It is simply different.
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(highlight:: It’s taught a couple of ways: One is to consider how each decision you make will impact others and the Earth seven generations in the future. We’re also taught to consider the impact of decisions in the context of the three generations that came before you, your own generation, and the three generations ahead of you: Will it honor your past and lay the foundation for a good future?
In either case, you are taught to look beyond the horizon of what you can see and consider the kind of world your decisions will create. But we also recognize that the present is like smoke: visible and real, but ephemeral and impossible to hold on to. What we create lingers until either something replaces it or it is destroyed.)
- No location available
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- [note::"It's" = Seventh-generation perspective/principle
Reminds me of William MacAskill's argument that we have an obligation to future generations because we stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
Phrases that somewhat capture this idea: Intergenerational justice, intergenerational equity, intergenerational reciprocity, "The Golden Rule" extended across time]

Viewing the universe through cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation gives a wider, more expansive sense of time in which an individual life is a tiny part of a greater whole. Even human existence is just one blip in this greater scheme. Rather than viewing this as something tragic, there is some comfort in being able to see our impermanence and insignificance in the history of the world.
- No location available
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- [note::Reminds me of Carl Sagan's "the pale blue dot"]

Lately, the news has felt particularly doomy, dominated by fears of a looming apocalypse due to climate change or nuclear war or artificial intelligence. This is understandable — any of these existential threats could irrevocably change the world, and what would lie beyond is unknowable. Native people know a thing or two about that; the world as we knew it ended long ago, and it continued to end again and again and again. Yet we also know that there’s a future even after the apocalypse has come and gone. Rather than conceptualizing time as a linear march toward calamity (or, for optimists, toward the dream of utopia), it can be viewed as a wheel that we cycle through repeatedly, from creation to destruction to recreation.
- No location available
-
- [note::Never thought about this before - the colonizing of the Americans might as well have been an existential catastrophe to the Native Americans. The same way early European explorers introduced (small pox & malaria?) to (Mayan?) civilization and caused a "silent pandemic." (see annotations from Dan Carlin's BLITZ podcast called "Human Resources")]

The world we know today will eventually be destroyed, too, whether by our changing climate or some other world-altering force we can’t predict or imagine. But the problem with the doomerist streak that’s taken hold of so much of our zeitgeist is that it just stops there, creating a moral hazard that lets us stop imagining the future. Something new will always be rebuilt on top of what’s destroyed, and we can never abandon our obligation to keep creating it.
- No location available
-

In Anishinaabe tradition, as well as in many other Native cultures, the medicine wheel represents the ever-churning cycle of life. Broken into four equal segments of yellow, black, red, and white, it starts on the right-hand side, reflecting the east as the source of the rising sun and beginning of all things. The four segments represent, among other things, the four directions, the four seasons, the four sacred medicines (tobacco, cedar, sage, and sweetgrass), and the four stages of life (birth, youth, adulthood, and elder).
- No location available
- time, life, cyclical,

Our histories have been one never-ending turn of this wheel: We create, they destroy, and we create something new out of the ashes of what was left behind, saving what we can, and creating new things from the memories of the old. What’s re-created isn’t necessarily superior or inferior to what was destroyed. It is simply different.
- No location available
-

(highlight:: It’s taught a couple of ways: One is to consider how each decision you make will impact others and the Earth seven generations in the future. We’re also taught to consider the impact of decisions in the context of the three generations that came before you, your own generation, and the three generations ahead of you: Will it honor your past and lay the foundation for a good future?
In either case, you are taught to look beyond the horizon of what you can see and consider the kind of world your decisions will create. But we also recognize that the present is like smoke: visible and real, but ephemeral and impossible to hold on to. What we create lingers until either something replaces it or it is destroyed.)
- No location available
-
- [note::"It's" = Seventh-generation perspective/principle
Reminds me of William MacAskill's argument that we have an obligation to future generations because we stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
Phrases that somewhat capture this idea: Intergenerational justice, intergenerational equity, intergenerational reciprocity, "The Golden Rule" extended across time]

Viewing the universe through cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation gives a wider, more expansive sense of time in which an individual life is a tiny part of a greater whole. Even human existence is just one blip in this greater scheme. Rather than viewing this as something tragic, there is some comfort in being able to see our impermanence and insignificance in the history of the world.
- No location available
-
- [note::Reminds me of Carl Sagan's "the pale blue dot"]