Steve Kirk

“Sridevi and her relatives collected nine types of Dioscorea tubers; some extended deep underground. The ease and flow of the work, and the general lack of rules governing the way spouses cooperated in doing this job, struck me.”

—Nurit Bird-David, Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World

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a review of

The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism, and the Death of a Healer by Kevin Tucker. Black and Green Press, Blackandgreenpress.org, 2019

For those familiar with Kevin Tucker’s essay writing since the start of Black and Green Review, now Wild Resistance, there is a familiar structure to the book, reading much like an expanded essay that might appear in those journals. Divided into six sections, Cull delivers colonial history through the lens of its contemporary manifestations.

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Climate change, global warming, the undeniable and irreversible global-scale reconfiguration of global chemistry, from the land, to the water, to the sky, we are awash in a multitude of changes. Each one compounds and codevelops with the other crises of civilization. Loss of ecosystems, extinction of species, obliteration of the land that runs in tandem with production weaves with the consequences of hydrocarbon use.

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Last July, the so-called United States celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing while another fascination with space was playing out badly. It was with zero irony that the supposed “giant leap for mankind” was recognized while the Kanaka Maoli people of Hawaii’s struggle to prevent a promised miracle of science from desecrating their land was ignored.

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