Watch “Seeing Wetiko” on YouTube

Published on Jul 22, 2016

Join us in #SeeingWetiko

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Adapted from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/video-seeing-wetiko/

By author and spoken word artist Alixa Garcia

Produced by Raynald Leconte and Even Blouin

Editor VFX John Bosch

Music by David Schommer

Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windingo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes it’s host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.

Creativity is the antidote for violence and destruction. Art is our most human expression, our voice to communicate our stories, to challenge injustice and the misrepresentations of mainstream media, to expose harsh realities and engender even more powerful hope, a force to bring diverse peoples together, a tool to rebuild our communities, and a weapon to win this struggle for universal liberation. –Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman

About Alixa Garcia, via the website Climbing PoeTree

Alixa Garcia is the co-founder of the spoken word poetry duo Climbing PoeTree.

Co-creators Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman are cultural architects committed to reframing the story through multi-voice spoken word, hip hop, world music, and multimedia theater.  Alixa and Naima have independently organized 30 national and international tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and throughout the U.S. including 11,000 miles toured on a bus converted to run on recycled vegetable oil. Climbing PoeTree has been experienced at diverse venues from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the United Nations, Harvard University to Rikers Island Prison.

They have been featured alongside powerhouses such as Alice Walker, Danny Glover, Cornel West, Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu, Little Dragon, Naomi Klein, and Angela Davis.

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Articles from kosmosjournal.org

Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition

Wetiko: Energy, Domination and Human Societies

The Cultural Sickness Needs to be Named

Seeing Wetiko: Through the Eyes of a Seventh Generation Algonquin

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Recommended Books

Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern “civilized” lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before.

Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes:

“Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all 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.”

This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.

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Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil

There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.

Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, author Paul Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko is its own antidote, which once recognized can help us wake up and bring sanity back to our society.

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