Orphan Wisdom

Orphans are not people who have no parents. They are people who don’t know their parents, who cannot go to them from here. Mine is a culture built upon the ruthless foundation of mass migration. It is now a culture of people unable to say who their people are, a culture of sorts, a culture in spite of itself. In that way we are, relentlessly, orphans. Being an orphan culture is not disqualification. It does not mean that we have no wisdom. But wisdom is being confused in our time with information, with opinion, with personal experience.

Not knowing where you are from is not the same thing as being from nowhere. But it does mean that there is work of all kinds to be done. It could be that the only way for successful refugees to make a culture from their flight is to first be faithful witnesses to the poverty of their origins, to what their ancestry now asks of them, instead of what it might have fated them to be. Our culture, if a culture it can be called, or all those things we have instead of a culture, has come to a time of savage despair, it seems. We’ve surrounded ourselves with the debris of refugeehood, to fill the hollow of orphanhood. We have become a danger to ourselves, and a menace to all who will come after us, and to the world. We abandon our dead to make our way, and we are mostly singular people. We might now be artificially intelligent, the twilight of our ancestors’ dream.

An orphan wisdom might be the only culture-making thing we can rightly, honourably or faithfully claim. There is immense grief in knowing this well and going towards it anyway. That grief could be our way of working now, our labour. It could be our beauty, too.

In an information-drunk culture like our own, knowledge must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed, truly needed, without killing life by getting what we want. Wisdom is endorsed by the ages, yes, but it is crafted, curated and called to account by the travails and torments and temper of this very time.

Orphan Wisdom is located on the present and ancestral homeland and unceded territory of the Omàmìwininì: Algonquin People.