#intergenerational knowledge

In the heart of Brazil’s Xingu National Park, the Waurá people have shaped clay into vessels of memory for over a thousand years. Their pottery—crafted from riverbed clay and bound with a freshwater sponge called cauxi—is more than utility. It’s ritual, identity, and intergenerational storytelling. But today, this ancient art is under threat, not from cultural erosion, but from the climate crisis…

What the boomer generation had was being told they were going to die in a nuclear war every day, and nearly experienced it during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Can you imagine feeing so powerless to protect the people you love as wealthy men with twitchy trigger fingers are in charge of you and everybody else's lives around you?

They saw and experienced their nation force it's male citizens to be sentenced to death and to be sentenced to kill in Vietnam. Can you imagine either sitting in the room with your family and hoping that a certain set of numbers aren't called? Or, perhaps, hoping that they would be, because many men back then hurt women in severe and immeasurable ways without nearly as many laws to protect abuse victims as there are today?

They were also the generation that observed homosexuality becoming recognized as legal in 1967 (different from gay marriage being passed), and this was promptly followed by the AIDs epidemic. Can you imagine being a gay or lesbian boomer back then? Can you imagine holding your dying loved one's hand as they are essentially killed after they contracted a common cold due to a disease that destroys their immune system? Can you imagine getting this disease and understanding you're going to die slowly and painfully and are scared, and then nobody wants to touch you?

This is also the generation that received the news of a black teenager refusing to move to the back of the bus. They watched or even participated in marches on DC spearheaded from Martin Luther King Jr. and then observed their own government assassinate him years later. Many people in this generation and their protests were why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. This was also the generation that was sent to the last American Indian boarding/residential schools, and the generation of Natives who endured the events at Wounded Knee in 1973 by the bloodied hands of the feds.

When we drag down this entire generation, we're also dragging down the boomer women who were beat in the streets by their husbands because domestic violence laws were not yet passed, and even after they were men were still en masse violent in public. We're dragging down the women who were involved in the hippie movement, protesting the Vietnam war, and the women who put their lives at risk marching for their rights in the civil rights movement. We're dragging down the women who established the first rape crisis centers and domestic violence organizations.

We're dragging down the generation that looked to the stars and sent us to the moon.

And this generation also is going through the same events we are. They saw the rise of security cameras being placed into parking lots and the slow erasure of privacy. They went through the #MeToo movement. They experienced (and some died from) COVID-19. They were more resourced, but many also suffered through the two recessions with us. They want us to help them understand this confusing technology that they did their best to parent us through even though it was some new magic they didn't quite understand. They're getting cancer alongside us because of the water contamination and environmental pollution. They went through the same story we are going through: the greater population being oppressed by the rich, and the greater population being divided by politics and social issues.

My intention isn't to say that sexism, homophobia, racism, etc. needs to be accepted or given a pass when it's done by someone from the boomer population - how we handle these situations in our every day lives is nuanced and sometimes its best to cut our parents out of our lives because their unresolved trauma is now hurting us. My message is that it is heartbreaking to know that there is a relationship wound between our generations, because our elders know and have experienced so much, and they have little time left on this earth with us. Their most treasured moments with their parents were probably the exchange of intergenerational knowledge, and even this isn't happening between us because instead Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z look to the internet for answers instead. And because of this we don't get stories straight out of human history from them.