Indigenous means a non-industrial, and non-agricultural mindset, which steps away from the Biblical notion of dominion to “learn to sit again in the community of the life web as an equal, in balance”.  That means coming to the land as a listener, to work in dialogue with all the creatures that are the expression of that land. In England we do not have first nation neighbours who have lived in that dialogue for thousands of years, so we must re-imagine the circle of community.

The Indigenous mindset means thinking with all parts of the mind, body, spirit and emotion; it means Being Nature. Indigenous knowledge is the intimate knowledge of all the strands of abundance in the ecosystem, how and when to be nourished by them, and how and when to honour and preserve them.

In the threadbare ecology of central England, to become indigenous is to use all our faculties to create enabling conditions for the re-weaving of an ecosystem capable of nourishing us and all our relations.

It does not matter where in the world we were born, grew to adulthood, or migrated from or to; if we open to the indigenous mindset we can open to a sense of place, and create community with all those who share that place in a similar sense. And as we enable the re-weaving of the ecosystem we enable the re-weaving of the human community which is a dependant part of it.

We are not consumers; we are participants

We are not extractors, we are regenerators

We are not exploiters, we are offerors of gifts.

We live in reciprocity with our place, across our Bioregion, and between our Bioregion and all those regions with which it interacts.

For our re-weaving we use with care and humility the tools of permaculture and agroecology, and our learning is a never-ending dialogue with the flow of the web of life in the place where we work and all the places with which it interacts.

For all my relations.

Antony Melville (c) 2023.