Browse Topics
Indigenous Culture
Speaking Of Tongues
Justin E.H. Smith On The Mysteries Of Language
This is an extremely creative and spontaneous moment for language. There are whole sociolects that you and I don’t even know about, because we’re too old or we don’t belong to the communities of people who have come up with them. Emoji are fascinating because they’re a return to the ideographic sources of a lot of writing.
April 2023
Defending The Roof Of The World
Jamyang Norbu’s Lifelong Quest For Tibetan Independence
The Chinese empire is fragile, because it is built upon oppression. . . . If the oppression is too great, it may all come apart. If the empire were to break up, I think democracy might be possible in the smaller entities that would remain. . . . This is where Tibetans must keep up the fight and prepare for the long haul. We can prevail if we are able to keep our culture intact.
May 2021
The Quiet Room
She read a brief passage in a small, clear voice that will live on in my memory. Fluent in sounding out words she didn’t know, she gleaned tones from everyday verbs that I’d never dreamed they possessed, and conferred a strange new life on faded old nouns, as one might draw a hidden thread of some brilliant color from an old rug.
April 2021
Salt Of The Earth
I was drawn to quite the opposite: curiosities, anachronisms, misfits, innocents, and angels. They quickly became my family. They gave me something my blood relatives could not, something fresh and immediate, accepting and nonjudgmental.
January 2021
January 2021
Featuring Bill McKibben, Rebecca McClanahan, Derrick Jensen, and more.
December 2020Tuvalu
Tuvalu is in danger of disappearing due to sea-level rise. The ocean around it is rising about one inch every five years, twice the global average. It’s estimated that an eight- to sixteen-inch increase will be enough to make the country uninhabitable.
November 2020
The Four Invasions
Nick Estes On Indigenous Resistance And The Vision Of A Better Future
Indigenous people are protecting the earth’s lungs and liver. Without us, civilization would be even farther down the road to its own destruction.
May 2020
May 2020
Featuring Medicine Story, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Julia Butterfly Hill, and more.
May 2020Sunbeams
May 2020There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavor and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbor in the end.
December 2019
Featuring Bill McKibben, M.C. Richards, Helena Norberg-Hodge, and more.
December 2019
