Hand to Hand is aligned with the Literature of Restoration

• The Literature of Restoration actively seeks through form and language, content and focus, to create and inspire a cultural shift, developing a body of literature that radically seeks the restoration and vitality of the natural world.  It is concerned with the climate crisis, environmental destruction, extinction, the factors creating global, social chaos and the ways that Western and other contemporary imperial cultures inadvertently promote these conditions even while the themes may be opposed. Close scrutiny of self, language, cultural and literary standards is required to help us avoid reinforcing the trajectories we are on toward the destruction of all life. When the natural world, the environment, ethics, spiritual awareness and regard for the vitality of the future for all beings are at the center, as with Native American and Indigenous literatures, any subject may be pursued because the embedded intrinsic values that support all life are fundamental.

• As English tends toward the combative and bellicose, we need to scrutinize our words to shift the subtle communications which may well undermine the text and the writers' basic principles. English considers conflict, combat, war, enemies, winning, victory, defeat and loss, competition, money, hierarchy, property, acquisitiveness, ownership as pervasive and inevitable.  A central conflict is deemed intrinsic to a story while for other cultures and the Literature of Restoration, relationship, resonance, inter-connections, are basic as are cooperation and alliances in lieu of war, council forms over competition, common use, as in the commons, rather than private ownership. Euro-American culture exudes Calvinist, capitalist assumptions where the Literature of Restoration is concerned with the eros of community and cooperation, what gathers together rather than sets apart.

• It is difficult for Indigenous speakers to convey their deepest thoughts or to translate them into English as it lacks many equivalents for what is most intrinsic to Indigenous wisdom, particularly the understanding of mitakuye oyasin, all my relations, and the spiritual reality of the universe; the Literature of Restoration suffers similarly and attempts to remedy this.

• The Literature of Restoration seeks ways that new forms, language and story can guide us to a world which is vital, diverse, interpenetrating, inclusive of the rational and the wondrous, science and dreaming, rigorously aware of the dangers we face and our complicity in creating them.  The Literature of Restoration bears witness, disconnects from the deadly forms of the Anthropocene and seeks vision for these times.