The Indigenous Internet

How to find a sense of place?

I am in a tiny cloud-town nestled into the shadow of the Andes, filming our first project for Planet: Coordinate. We spend every morning walking through the mist, scrambling up to rivers, catching sight of rare birds, pinning microphones to the people here who love this land like a mother. And why wouldn’t you? She is verdant and abundant, generous and peaceful. Not ten feet from me, as I write this, a hummingbird drinks nectar from a pink, globulous flower.

Every day, on our return back to the cabin in which we are the first foreign visitors, my partner and I scan the news, and every day we reel back in repulsion after just a few minutes. The noise of the information displayed on the screen seems to scream at us, drowning out the sound of crickets who hum in delight in the evening. We are trying to keep on top of what is going on in the world because Planet: Critical is a symbiosis of current affairs and global systems; yet, nothing seems either current or global about the words we read. Rather, they seem untethered from any meaningful reality, the same few characters taking up too much space as they seek to undermine the beauty in which we bathe up here in the mountains. I struggle to know how to keep one foot in the digital “thereness” and one in the material “hereness”. Here is so magical; I don’t want to be anywhere else.

It makes me think about indigeneity. So many people we’re speaking to reference the necessity of belonging to a place in order to love it. They reference the town next door in which multinationals have moved in, pricing out the locals, weakening the soil and the history. Simone Weil wrote last century that the uprooting of peoples from their lands, and languages with them, was a violent strategy to smooth the process of colonisation. In response to a looming threat (the subject of our film), the “neo-peasants” as they call themselves are returning to the land to root themselves down, rapidly building networks underground with which they can hold themselves to the earth, with the earth, and to each other. Their relationships are like a circle of defenders enclosing their home, hands held in defiance; an unbroken chain of all that has been and all that could be, if they just manage to hold on.

It makes me wonder what we have to hold onto where I come from, and how the indigeneity they say is necessary to truly protect a place and its own sense of itself has been lost to so many. When they speak of Spanish conquistadors, I reference Weil’s The Need for Roots, an excoriating treatise against the Europeans who first settled in the hearts of their neighbours; the languages which were ripped out of throats and the bodies piled up in the name of centralising a territory. The word “territory” has a different sense here. Not that which belongs to a people, but that which we belong to.

On our very first day in the middle of the mountains, we watched a family walk into a cafe. The teenage girls had faces I have seen before millions of times: the homogenised construct of an internet ideal, blurring the foundations of their own identity. Look how far and how easily pollution travels, I thought to myself. Social pollution, travelling on the trail of CO2. As if to emphasise the point, another family walked in with a young girl who couldn’t have been more than 12. On seeing the older, perfectly made up girls in the cafe, the young one sat with her back to them and tore through her bag, pulling out tube after tube, making her face the same, forgetting to look at the extraordinary view of the mist clearing the mountains right in front of her. With each furious pad of the sponge against her face, I watched her try to seep her skin with belonging.

With so much digital “thereness” available to us, and so little land left, truly, to belong to, I wonder if our sense of indigeneity is now digitised.

If there is strength in numbers then belonging to the world online is the greatest numeric enveloping we can possibly know. Like the girls with their makeup, curating our highlight reel so that it fits within tightly defined constraints provides a homogeneity which both keeps us safe and marks us as belonging. The digital world becomes the one global landmark we all know how to inhabit and navigate; its eddies perfectly coded to help us stay current. In our multitudes, we create the flow to go with, our subjectivity sublimated into a stream of objectification. We observe each other in the “thereness” of it all, and the “hereness” of the material world becomes something else, something which loses its shape, something subject to whims and changeable natures: here becomes out there.

A few days after seeing the girls with the same faces, I sat having coffee with two of the organisers of the association we’re filming and one of their collaborators, an indigenous guardian of the territory. We talked about the contradiction of wealth, that it is the global north which is poor, seeking to extract resources it cannot excavate from within itself. We discussed the tension of a global north people being dependent, now, on violence, having been enclosed from their own land and customs many centuries before. We talked about needing and wanting and caring.

As we got up to go, I noticed my partner looking intently at a family enjoying their afternoon out. Leaving the cafe, he said: “Every single person in that family has been sitting on Instagram: the mum, dad, teenage girl, and the 8-year-old girl. And you know what’s on her feed? Endless photos of models with giant fake boobs. Imagine what that’s doing to her.”

Years ago, I interviewed Indra Adnan about soft power, the concept that political power can be derived from people wanting to be you or, in the case of a country, reach you. The USA coined and developed this strategy after losing the Vietnam war, for they were determined to win the cultural war, to be seen as undefeated by virtue of every single person’s longing to be American. It was a mighty strategy, and arguably they pulled it off. Today, the global north may be poor in material resources, but it is still verdant with soft power, flooding its culture through the digital sphere like an oil spill. We are polluted by longing, by this engineered envy which makes us blind to all that is beautiful around us. There is so much worth saving. Yet, how much land is ripped up to create silicon cones for photo optimisation?

Being in a place like this heightens one’s sensitivities to beauty, and I cannot help but reckon with the truth that where I come from is not nearly as beautiful: depleted, devoured, excreted. Industrialism turns Life into scar tissue; a post-industrialist world is one of long, shining ribbons of pain. How do we come back to that which is broken? How do we learn to imagine its beauty to help regenerate it? How do we become indigenous in a place which has no more sense of itself? How do we venture out there and swim against the current when, inside, there is a ready-made world to float through? How do we choose to be here when we could be everywhere: there, there and there?

I asked the indigenous guardian if we could all become indigenous guardians. “Yes,” he said. “It is easier to live well than not.”

My partner tells me the 8-year-old girl took three minutes to choose a filter for the photograph of her chocolate cake, which she then uploaded to the internet. Then she waited for someone else’s dessert to arrive before eating, so they could all take a photo of the table, resplendent in its sugar glory. As she waited, her mother showed her photos of herself in a bikini at a recent resort so the young girl could choose which ones she wanted. So small, and already an expert curator. Would it not have been easier to just be 8 years old?

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