Elopement - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 46

The encounter between the Old and New Worlds was characterized
by dispossession, oppression and massacre, but in some places there
were periods of friendly engagement. As Crèvecoeur documents,
Native Americans were sometimes given the opportunity to join Euro-
pean households as equals; and in many cases Europeans were able to
join Native American communities on the same basis. It could be seen
as a social experiment. In both instances, people had a choice between
the relatively secure, but confined, settled and regulated life of the
Europeans, and the mobile, free and uncertain life of the Native
Americans. There was no mistaking the outcome. In every case, Crève-
coeur and Franklin tell us, the Europeans chose to stay with the
Native Americans, and the Native Americans returned, at the first
opportunity, to their own communities. This says more than is com-
fortable about our own lives.
So why did I not defect to Toronkei's community? It is a question
that still troubles me.
I was, as I had kept discovering, too soft for his life. I could not
quite keep up physically. More importantly, I could not cope with the
uncertainty: with the dislocation of not knowing whether I would eat
today or eat tomorrow, or still possess a living - or a life - in a month's
time. The Maasai accepted wild fluctuations in their fortunes with
equanimity. In one season, their cattle would darken the plains; in the
next, drought struck and they had nothing. To know what comes next
has been perhaps the dominant aim of materially complex societies.
Yet, having achieved it, or almost achieved it, we have been rewarded
with a new collection of unmet needs. We have privileged safety over
experience; gained much in doing so, and lost much.
But, perhaps overwhelmingly, I was aware that the old life was over.
The Kenyan government was breaking up the Maasai's lands. Power-
ful elders were seizing as much as they could lay hands on; now the
others scrambled to grab something for themselves. The community
was collapsing; there was no common land left on which manyattas
could be built and ceremonies held. As the power structures changed,
the age groups, around which the life of the Maasai had been con-
structed, became an anachronism. Toronkei's was the last generation
of warriors that would graduate in his community. The people were