I took Jack D. Forbes’ essential text, Columbus and Other Cannibals off the shelf where I had gathered all the books I have assigned for my class, 19 WAYS to a Viable Future for All Beings, as I began to prepare for the coming session. It is the fundamental text for the class. On the back cover is an excerpt from Forbes’ Introduction; I marveled that it was written in 1979 and not in 2025.
“Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no frontiers. Deceit knows no edges…. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in…This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism.”
Foresightedness? Clairvoyance? As exactly as these words describe the Imperial and Colonial minds that have dominated the globe and terrorized the Americas since 1492, so they describe the essential qualities of the current administration in the US. Algonquin cultures warned against the Wétiko or Wendingo, monsters, once human beings, who succumbed to the ultimate taboo, cannibalism, evil spirits that devoured humankind. However, it took Forbes to recognize that this once rare but very dangerous phenomenon, which originally appeared during periods of mass starvation, had become a contemporary virus and that Euro-American culture is particularly susceptible to its increasingly virulent forms.
If Forbes were alive, he would probably associate these behaviors of brutality, perversion, arrogance, deceit and greed with the current Presidency and his cabal. The pervasiveness of such qualities underlying political actions in the last nine months are resulting in a malignant cultural cannibalism, in an army of hungry ghosts which seems never to be satisfied and which clearly desires to consume the world … and maybe the Moon and Mars as its next victims.
The question I have been asking for several years now, but increasingly since January 2025, is: How do we meet these times? Forbes phrases it this way: “How to live in this life? Is the real question we all face. All other subjects are insignificant when compared with this one.”
I wish I had answers to this question. But I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does although all the different wisdom traditions can advise us on paths to walk but none have been able to heal or transform the wétiko population, or keep it from its terrifying and tragic expansion.
In Columbus and other Cannibals, Forbes focuses on the myriad manifestations of wétiko behaviors, the evidence of its venomous nature and contagion. He says, “People concerned about violence, about the environment, about decency and about human authenticity, must have the means for analyzing the objective conditions which today surround us. It is my hope that… enlarging upon the concept of wétiko disease and discussing its origin, epidemiology and characteristics … can be of help.…” When one finishes the book one cannot doubt the grave nature and existence of this plague, but even without reading it, simply contemplating the qualities he isolated above, allows us some understanding of what we are in. Sadly though, knowing our circumstances does not necessarily give us the means to confront, meet or transform this illness.
Rereading the book for my class, writing this piece, it occurs to me that thinking individually rather than collectively, may be one approach. Such a response can alert us to the reality that we are all responsible and in danger of being subsumed by its influence, and therefore each one of us needs to be aware and to respond in our own way.
Having read Columbus and Other Cannibals – (Don’t you think by now, you should read it? www.bookshop.org) – and having met so many of the demon faces of wétiko, my reflex response was “Not that. I didn’t want to be that. Never that.” An energy of rejection and distaste built in me, and I understood that my path was to be utterly otherwise. A variation on Newton’s third law of motion can generate a healing direction: wétiko actions can inspire other actions in equal and entirely opposite, distinctly different directions.
Brutal, arrogant, mendacious, perverse actions inspiring equal and opposite actions, ways of living of utmost kindness, unimpeded generosity, instinctive equality and peerage, unassailable truthfulness and indomitable devotion to community and to the land.
Clearly, such homeopathic medicine cannot be the only remedy for wétiko, but it could be one by which the pernicious induces distinct and opposite ways of being, where honey emerges from the sting, and our now transformed and wildly dissimilar bodies, carrying a distinctive intelligence, become uniquely able to determine the next necessary steps to meet the plague.
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