Sacha/Gayle,
While I do not question the accuracy of your description of gender roles in a traditional tribal social structure, and while I recognize those gender constructs as valid and healthy ways to organize a society, I take major issue with the idea that it is categorically advisable/wise for a group of people to rewild along similar gender constructs, and that anybody who rejects gender roles (in the manner of modern feminist thought) cannot know a tribal way of life.
I am not interested in modeling my behavior after the traditions of a culture that I do not identify with and have no experience living in, and for good reason. To do so would not only be racist and appropriative, it would also be untrue to myself. I have experienced firsthand the social and psychological damage that gendered behavioral expectations can do in a hierarchical society, and I desire to avoid gender constructs if at all possible. Many of my friends in Seattle strive to live without defined gender roles, and from their perspective (and my perspective) they are not “missing out†on anything because they don’t follow any precedent based on gender division. Many of the people I know in civilization are so deeply socially conditioned into a model of gender inequality that I believe the responsible way to avoid relapsing into that hierarchical conditioning is to consciously choose a non-gendered social organization. I would be extremely uncomfortable rewilding with anyone who has grown up in civ and who doesn’t reject gender roles.
A rewilding society (comprised of people who have lived most or all of their lives under the regime of civilization) looks very different from a traditionally intact indigenous society. People who rewild, who choose to move out from civilization, have to find a way to go forward, starting from the lasting imprint of their experiences (not to mention the lasting imprint an industrial society has left upon the world). So by default, rewilding looks very different in its material culture (as discussed in the section on transition tech, for example) as well as in its adaptation to the realities of a post-industrial world (such as the introduction of non-native plants into an ecosystem). The possibilities are more wide open to people who are totally new to an intentional lifestyle of tribalism. They are not obligated to follow any particular aspect of indigenous tradition if it doesn’t work for them or if they are prevented from doing so because of systemic changes that civilization has invoked. I understand that any rewilding culture I personally undertake will not look exactly like a traditional indigenous society that has already been done, and I wouldn’t want it to. I believe that for any rewilding culture to assume it can go back to a pre-industrial world, to pretend civilization never existed, is dangerous, ignorant thinking.
I can think of an analogy: Let’s compare the growth of civilization to the development of an alcohol addiction in an individual. If a person with alcohol addiction gets sober, they still can’t go back to the life they had before the addiction. Before the addiction, they may have gone out for drinks on the weekends without a problem. But now, after coming out the other end of addiction, they can’t drink a single drop. The addiction has changed them. They have gotten rid of the addiction, and, as in their past before the addiction, they are no longer abusing alcohol… but they haven’t gone back to the same life they had before the addiction.
So it is with people coming out of civilization. My worry is that by blindly and irresponsibly copying indigenous cultures, we will behave like the alcoholic in lifelong recovery who denies that ever-present reality and says one day, “I haven’t had a drink in five years, I can control myself, I don’t see why I can’t have a drink every once in a while like I used to do‖and then falls right back into full-time drinking. It would be a similar kind of tragedy for a rewilding culture to say, “We know what is wrong with civilization, we hate it and we have every intention not to repeat it, we don’t see why it should be so impossible to organize a tribe after indigenous models like our ancestors lived thousands of years ago‖and then fall right back into civilized pathological relationship patterns.
Some people (for example, people in your situation who can still remember and/or retain aspects of a traditional indigenous culture) may choose to follow traditional tribal gender models of the types you outlined. Some people may find it easier and more internally defensible to take what we’ve learned doesn’t work (civilized gender roles) and invent something new that escapes the notion of gender altogether (just as a recovering addict escapes alcohol altogether, even though other people may have a healthy relationship with alcohol). I have learned in the course of my discussions with people on this very forum that it is perfectly acceptable to bring what we have learned from living in civilization into a rewilding scenario… whether we’ve learned knowledge we want to keep, or whether we’ve learned simply what we want to avoid.
I am not out to deny the validity of gendered organization in traditional native societies or to suggest that they need to change, as you claim is a danger inherent to contemporary feminism. My brand of contemporary feminism is a response to the society that I live in and a guide for the society that I envision for my rewilding future, but as for the choices of societies outside of my own, I am content to leave them well enough alone as long as they pose no direct threat.
If you can prove that a society without gender roles will either A) fall apart or B) repeat the calamities of civilization (in other words, if you can prove that a society without gender roles is categorically in conflict with the principles of rewilding), then by all means I would like to hear about it. If you can’t prove it, then I would implore you not to be so quick to invalidate contemporary feminist theory & practice simply because some of its practitioners (with whom I personally do not identify) have applied their own standards onto another culture. I’m willing to bet money that most of the feminist activists who have criticized indigenous gender roles are not familiar, or in agreement, with rewilding thought and practice. As such, their actions do not concern me and have nothing to do with me. I share common ideological roots with modern feminists and a common goal of wanting to be rid of our society’s gender inequality, but I have chosen a different way to proceed from that foundation. If rewilding cannot give me the freedom to choose my own path as it may differ from the paths of other rewilding or indigenous cultures, then rewilding is of no use to me. I can’t believe that to be possible, rewilding as useless. Can you?