The Man from Katuah

I am a man from Katuah, the Blue Ridge bioregion of the southern Appalachians. I am the living soil. I am land incarnate. I am the vine, the flower, and the thorn. I am its airspace and water. I am its militia. I am its fingers, ears, and voice. During the great trance, this geography was called North Carolina. We don’t have states anymore. We live in a confederacy of bioregions. North Carolina dissolved into four parts and seceded from the union in the year 2020. It was the year of American independence. Maine led the charge on July 4th to a nationwide great awakening. This was not a revolution. It was an exodus from slavery.

The exodus was broadcast on social media. Millions of Americans withdrew their consent from the District of Columbia through a personal declaration of independence. Sovereignty pulled the sword from the stone and man became king. The declaration was simple:

“This is my Declaration of Independence. I, [Your Name], void all contracts made under the person, [BIRTH NAME IN ALL CAPS], with the corporation The United States of America. I am a natural born freeman of the land. I am not a corporate fiction. I am the living soil.”

The capital of my bioregion is Qualla, the former territory of the Eastern Cherokee Nation in western North Carolina. Katuah and the Cherokee Nation merged in 2021. This was how Katuah got its name. Katuah is a class III ecoregion of the United States. As a sovereign of Katuah, I attend the local council held each waxing moon on Grandfather Mountain. The larger regional pow wow in Qualla happens every summer on the solstice. We have no leaders – only agreements. Government is a tapestry of agreements.

I came to Qualla bearing five bushels of fresh apples and four hundred dollars. I set up camp and loaded my bicycle like a burro to transport them to the giving tent. Once there, my cash gift was converted into Ethereum, the digital currency of Katuah. I was told to take the apples to Sarah in the catering tent who gave them to Dave at the juice station. He mentioned he might turn them into pies. It brought me joy to see the value of my offering. It made me want to bring them more next time. Giving is uplifting. Taxation is a deflating. The energy we put into government is the energy that is returned.

I parked my bicycle near a hitching post of horses. I tipped my hat to them and sauntered through the fairgrounds to settle at a picnic table. I launched the Katuah app on my phone and saw my cash offering appear in my balance. Using my finger, I dragged most of my gift into capital improvements for the new water tower. The rest went to the new dock I wanted to see at Buckeye Lake. I clicked the filters tab and added a boycott rule for the asphalt plant. I scanned the onscreen map to find the natural resources tent. I planned to see the presentation on the great chestnut tree project. Last year, this program won funding. Enough people had voted with their fingers and the project was born. I might give more of my current this year depending on their progress. Current is what we call bioregional money. It makes it easy to distinguish from fiat cash. I can change who and what gets my current as often as I like. I can adjust it throughout the year as my position evolves. This is the beauty of bioregionalism on a blockchain. The entire government is an open-source white paper.

The rattle of dissonance falls limp when the tail is cut.

Before the rise of Katuah, our country was indentured under Admiralty law. Black wizards claimed our souls at berth and the people felt unworthy to stop them. We were born as meat contracts as 40% of our labor was extracted under the threat of violence. Taxation is theft but no one seemed to mind. We were sharecroppers for our time and delegated our morality to a crime syndicate. Our heritage was supplanted by a board of education that called us monkeys and jabbed us with needles because we were tainted. They told our children they were endlessly shrinking inside an ever-expanding explosion. They sold us stories of endless war and constricted our resources.

Since 1918, a citizen may not possess the feather of an eagle or a raptor. Society required the killing of all raccoons, skunks, opossums, coyotes, and foxes caught or orphaned. We blamed the deer for crossing the road when it was the roads that crossed the forest. We killed our totems mindlessly. We were suffering from wetiko or cannibal psychosis. Witiko were frozen-hearted, man-eating giants of Cree mythology coated in ice. They are the machine that fed on our soul before we awoke.

After the Great Awakening, we discovered the government can run on digital contracts. Ethereum is a blockchain technology that can support this endeavor. With digital contracts, voluntaryism can thrive inside a consent-based government. It replaces the coercive machine with a community-driven project incubator. This is the essence of natural law and government. Bioregionalism is water percolated from the soil. It’s a belief that government blooms naturally from the roots up.

America can be a nation of bioregions joined by a people’s Bill of Rights. Our nation’s militia belongs with the people again. Each bioregion can muster their own troops and decide individually on war. Each bioregion can have its own EPA. Each bioregion can have its own Supreme Court. Each bioregion is sovereign land. The District of Columbia has no claim to our consent. Consent is an extension of the will. When we reclaim our consent, we walk upright with the land. The land gives us resources so that we may give the land awareness.

We are the land. How do we sell our mother? How do we sell the stars? How do we sell the air? Crazy Horse. We hear what you say. – John Trudell

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