Savage Gods. Paul Kingsnorth

      The cultures of the Papuan Highlands developed in isolation for tens of thousands of years until the 20th century, when airplanes and empires began the unraveling. The Papuans have suffered decades of colonization, convincing claims of attempted genocide, aggressive Christian evangelism, the pollution, abuse, and theft of their land and all of the other horrors that settled civilizations always inflict on tribal people when they find them, as if they were ashamed of what they had become and wanted to wipe out the evidence that it was still possible to be something else. Patricide, matricide, slaughter of the ancestors. But the Papuans still sing to the forest. We grow out of that when we’re about 10. What are we missing that they can still see? What took the songs away?

      Leela and her six-year-old brother Jeevan have an area of our land they call Wildy. It’s a strip of undergrowth, trees, and chaotic unkempt hedgerow that separates our lane from the neighboring field and they live in it, sometimes, when the fancy takes them. Wildy is strewn with old upturned wooden chairs and plastic tubs and bent pans they have been using in some domestic drama. Adults are barred from Wildy; it’s a place where children talk to fairies and birds and trees and the spirits that inhabit them.