Indigenous Governance: Coordination Around the Living World

From indigenous governance traditions across the world, Providence inherits perhaps its most important lesson, and one the modern world has been catastrophically slow to learn: that human beings can coordinate their relationship with a living place over very long horizons, through forms of decision-making that hold the interests of future generations and of the non-human world as present realities rather than externalities. Many such traditions encode, in their structures of deliberation, an explicit accountability to descendants generations away, and a relationship with land and water grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction.

This is the ancestor of Providence's deepest ecological and temporal commitments — the orientation toward those not yet born, the treatment of the living world as the first participant rather than the backdrop, the long-horizon stewardship that the Currency of Presence is meant to make economically coordinable. We name this inheritance with particular care and humility, because it is drawn from peoples whose knowledge was, in many cases, violently suppressed by the very institutions whose failures this book catalogues, and because the respectful learning from these traditions must never become another act of extraction from them.