A Language older than Words

by Derrick Jensen

  "the races who rest..." was cited in Stannard. The citation for the awful incident where settlers kicked the heads of infants is the book Massacres to Mining: The Colonisation of Aboriginal Australia, by Janine E Roberts.

  The quotes regarding Africans are cited in Mostert.

  The quote concerning Hawai'ians is cited in Stannard.

  The political cartoon by my neighbor was in the now-defunct New Press of Spokane.

  "Some Christians encounter. . ."isfromTodorovs The Conquest of America. "At about 1:00 p.m...." is from Jonas' Battle for Guatemala. Stannard pointed me toward both of these books.

  Cranes

  "God does not send us . . ." is from Hesse's Reflections.

  The Safety of Metaphor

  "The most striking ..." is cited in Susan Griffin's Pornography and Silence:

  Cultures Revenge Against Nature. "no human bodies . . ." is from the Spokesman-Review, June 3, 1996.

  Claims to Virtue

  "Exploitation must not. .." is from Laing's Politics.

  "And seest among ..." is from Deuteronomy.

  "shall welcome [her] husband's . . ." is from Genesis.

  "I thank thee ..." is cited in Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father.

  John Perlin succinctly tells the story of the planet's deforestation in A Forest Journey.

  Many books describe the beauty and natural opulence of North America prior to the arrival of civilization. One of the best, and most heartbreaking, is Farley Mowat s Sea of Slaughter.

  The exchange described by Captain John Chester is from Quinn's The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

  "a rich heiress ..." is from Sobel's Wall Street.

  The TertuUian quote is from "On the Apparel of Women." The whole quotation is: "You are the devil's gateway. . . . You are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die." I guess what he's saying is that things would be okay for men—who are of course the images of God—if it weren't for those damned women.

  The story of Origen is not unique. Many early Christians castrated themselves, following Matthew 19.

  For explorations of the Christian hatred of the body, see Stannard, Daly, Turner, French (Beyond Power), Griffin (Woman and Nature), or many others. Specifically "What is seen . .." is from Origen, Selecta in Exodus xviii.17, Migne, Patrologia Graeca, volume 12, column 296. "I know nothing .. ." is from St. Augustine Basic Writings of St. Augustine.

  "They built a . . ." is from de Las Casas's Brief Account.

  "did no other . . ." is cited in Stannard.

  The story of the woman who was a role model for Spokane was in the Spokesman-Review on April 27.1997.

  “Act provocatively and ...” is from the Spokesman-Review, November 7, 1997.

  Seeking a Third Way

  "For those in . .." is from Campbells Masks of God, volume IV

  For accounts of prisoner exchanges between the Indians and whites, see

  especially Stannard and Turner. Demonic Males was written by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Information on the Semai is from Dentan's The Semai. One of many books to read as antidotes to Demonic Males might be Eleanor

  Burke Leacock's Myths of Male Dominance.

  Breaking Out

  "The world of..." is cited in Daly, Beyond God the Father.

  Richard Dawkins' quotes are from The Selfish Gene.

  The account of the trial for animal abuse was in the Spokesman-Review, June 27, 1997. The verdict, and the account of the judge's tongue-lashing, was in the paper on June 28.

  "I never knew ..." is from Hearne's Journals.

  There are many extraordinary books giving examples of interspecies communication. The stories I told here are a representative collage from many sources. But if you want to learn about interspecies communication, put the books away (including this one) and go ask a nonhu-man.

  The best general exploration of the history of civilization's assault on wolves is Rick Mclntyre's War Against the Wolf

  The economics textbook I reference is Froyen's Macroeconomics. The V symbol means "equals by definition."

  "There is not ..." is from an interview of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian.

  Economics

  "scarcely admit either ..." is in Raven-Hart, Cape of Good Hope, citing Ovington.

  "A woman must..." is cited in Daly's Beyond God the Father.

  The story of the extermination of the great auk is given in Mowat's Sea of Slaughter. Here is the destruction of the last egg: "As they clambered up they saw two Geirfugel [great auks] sitting among numberless other sea-birds, and at once gave chase. The Geirfugel showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along the high

  cliff, their heads erect, their little wings extended. They uttered no cry of alarm and moved, with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jon, with outstretched arms, drove one onto a corner, where he soon had it fast. Sigurder and Ketil pursued the second and seized it close to the edge of the rock. Ketil then returned to the sloping shelf whence the birds had started and saw an egg lying on the lava slab, which he knew to be a Geirfugel's. He took it up, and finding it was broken, dropped it again. All this took place in much less time than it took to tell." I really do hate this culture. The accounts of fecundity prior to the arrival of civilization are from Mowat's Sea of Slaughter.

  The Goal Is the Process

  "It's life that..." is from Dostoyevski's The Idiot.

  Heroes

  "If I were ..." is from a 1704 letter from Fletcher to the Marquise of

  Montrose. U.S. Crimes Against Humanity are described in Ramsey Clark's The Fire

  This Time.

  Metamorphosis

  "Between living and....” is from Stephen Mitchell's The Enlightened Heart.

  Insatiability

  "We need to ..." is from the Anderson Valley Advertiser, December, 10,1997. If you want information about the fight to save Mount Graham, go to the people and organizations leading the fight. I would probably start with the Apache Survival Coalition. If you've got Internet access, you might look there.

  Violence

  "We kill when ..." is from Hesse's Reflections.

  "There are only . . ." is from an AP story in the Spokesman-Review on September 4, 1997. If you crave information about the MRTA—and about various other liberation struggles worldwide—you could do far worse than to check out the Arm The Spirit website. Other than that just pore over various news sources, recognizing of course the unreliability of the corporate press.

  The Parable of the Box

  Ruth Benedict wrote up her study for a series of lectures she gave at Bryn Mawr College in 1941. Her notes were lost. But her assistant, Abraham Maslow, was able to assemble fragments. These are presented in his The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Erich Fromm expanded on these for his necessary book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. LaChapelle also does a wonderful job of drawing crucial conclusions from Benedict's study in her Sacred Land, Sacred Sex.

  I discovered Janus s and Bess's book, A Sexual Profile of Men in Power, in J.C. Smith's Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy.

  "While Mexico does . . ." is from Riordan Rhett's January 13, 1995, Mexico-Political Update.

  Violence Revisited

  "What I fear .. ." is from Newsweek, December 19, 1988.

  "New York Stock . . ." and "It is probable . . ." are cited in Olday's March to Death.

  "done in such . . ." was, ironically, in Life. It was in the November 18, 1957, issue.

  "For what the . . ." is from Dunnigan and Nofi's fascinating book, Dirty Little Secrets: Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know. They've spent much of their lives working intimately with and for the military, yet they seem to understand how horrid it all is.

  Lethality of plutonium assembled from Gordon Edwards a
rticle "Plutonium Anyone?" and a number of other easily accessible sources.

  The biblical quotes in the paragraph beginning "There can be . .." are of course from Revelation.

  The story of the largest white pine in Idaho is from the Spokesman-Review, September 7, 1997.

  The story of injecting heart rot fungus is from the Eugene Register-Guard, September 10, 1997.

  The information about Cassini was assembled from many web sites, and with conversations with activists opposed to it. Activists all over the world worked against Cassini. The "Stop Cassini Website" is probably as good a place as any to start looking. For the relative lethality of plutonium-238 compared to plutonium-239, I spoke with Dr. Horst Poehler.

  "I feel no ..." is from Wenkam's The Great Pacific Ripoffi Corporate Rape in the Far East.

  Coercion

  "I have never ....” is from a letter from Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt deTracy in 1811.

  "Shell operations still..." from a May 12, 1994, memo obtained by the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People. It goes on to recommend that soldiers begin "wasting" Ogoni leaders who are "especially vocal individuals," and concludes by recommending pressure on oil companies for "prompt, regular" payments to support the cost of the military operation.

  "to protect the ..." is from Noam Chomsky's, "Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality," Z Magazine.

  "Civil government ..." is from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Book Five.

  "Government has no ..." is from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government.

  "The American national..." is from the Anderson Valley Advertiser, January 20, 1999.

  Honeybees

  "Happiness is love ..." is from Hesse's Reflections.

  A Turning Over

  "This country, with ..." is from Abraham Lincoln's first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

  "The tumors themselves ..." is from an Associated Press report in the Spokesman-Review, October 24, 1997.

  "melted ice caps ..." is from the Spokesman-Review, October 24, 1997. The editorial's title is "Chicken Littles running scared."

  "The first questions..." is from Marilyn Robinson's Mother Country. The story about the missing "suitcase bombs" is from a 60 Minutes broadcast on September 7, 1997.

  Breast cancer statistics are from Samuel Epstein's monumental The Politics of Cancer Revisited.

  A Life of My Own

  Nothing to cite.

  Interconnection

  "Our goal should ..." is cited in LaChapelle's Sacred Land, Sacred Sex.

  "On the terms..." is from Lewis Mumford's The Pentagon of Power. This is the second and final volume of his Myth of the Machine, an exploration that cannot be too-highly recommended.

  Where our dinner came from was derived mostly from George Draffans phenomenal Directory of Transnational Corporations. Find it on the internet. Or better give George a call. He's got lots more information in his head than in the directory.

  "1 have a ..." is from the "Zapatista Posters Series" put out by Resistant Strains. The posters creator is Nick Jehlen.

  "There are those .. ." is from the "Second Declaration of La Realidad: Words of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the closing act of the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism (read by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos)," August 3, 1996.

  If you want to help get Shell out of Ogoniland, probably the best place to start would be with the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People.

  A good place to get started on issues surrounding the U'wa is with the U'wa Defense Working Group. The following October 27,1997, open letter to the presidents of Occidental and Shell from U'wa traditional authority Roberto Cobaria is worth quoting in full for the straightforward wisdom it reveals, and for the sad story so often heard that it represents: "I write to you asking that you hear my peoples request and stop your oil project on U'wa ancestral lands. We hope that you will comply with the request that the U'wa send in this letter. At this point, there is nothing else for you to do.

  "The U'wa have always had a law that existed before the sun and the moon. We have always taken good care of our land, because we have always followed this law. Our law is our culture, our song, and our dance. In this world there are many laws, but Mother Earth also has her laws. Before, these laws were respected. Are Occidental and Shell going to respect these laws or not? Occidental and Shell must hear these laws and leave U'wa territory please.

  "Today I speak for the first time in public of the threat and beating I have received by hooded men in the night, demanding I sign an authorization agreement or die. Can you see how the U'wa are already suffering from oil exploitation? The war that spreads throughout Colombia will spread to U'wa land if your oil project starts. Can you see how it is already arriving? Oil may be good to sell, but it causes war.

  "You speak of negotiation and consultation with the U'wa. My people say that they cannot negotiate. Our Father has not authorized it. We cannot sell oil, the blood of our Mother Earth. Mother Earth is sacred. It is not for negotiation, so please do not try to confuse us with offers. Please hear our request, a request that comes from our ancestral right by virtue of being born on our territory: Halt your oil project on U'wa ancestral land.

  "The U'wa people need your sign of respect."

  As this book goes to press, 5,000 U.S.-backed Columbian troops have invaded U'Wa territory to facilitate further drilling.

  The Plants Respond

  "The body's carbon ..." is from Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The full quote is: "The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. 'Lower down'—that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems—they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in the chemical bodies. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'"

  Death and Awakening

  "In the middle ..." is from Dante's Divine Comedy.

  "A man may ..." is cited in James Moore's Gurdjieff: A Biography.

  A Time of Sleeping

  "The part of. . ." is from Griffin's Pornography and Silence.

  Rollo May retells the story in The Cry For Myth.

  "They find it . . ." and "their contempt for . . ." and "the principle work ..." are all from Raven-Hart, Cape of Good Hope. The first is citing Boiling, the second de la Loubere, and the third Shreyer.

  I couldn't track down the original source for "the significant problems. ..." Either ol' Al Einstein, the aphorism king, said this one about thirty different ways, or the saying is twisted even more than most to fit locutional needs (neither of which is necessarily bad). Here are a few versions I've seen: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." "The problems of the world will not be solved with the level of thinking that created them." "The problems of the world cannot be solved with mechanisms, but only by changing the hearts and minds of man and speaking courageously." And, "We can't solve the problems of the world from the level of thinking we were at when we created them." Not being wildly anal-retentive, and because these all mean basically the same thing, the differences don't bother me. But I'll tell you what does: a good portion of the Internet sites where I found these were promoting seminars where corporate managers will learn how to better solve problems in their businesses. I doubt that these seminars will ask the managers to question corporate dominance of the world, the profit motive, private property, or human (read Euroamerican male) supremacy. That's a problem.

  "It seems to ..." is from Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person.

  Out of Mourning, Play

  "The Great Way ..." is from Mitchell's Enlightened Heart.

  Trauma and Recovery

  "I 'he struggle of. . ." is spoken by one of the characters in Milan Kundera's novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

  "It is wrong ..." is from Kahlil Gibran's
The Prophet.

  "For most cultures . . ." and "The universe is . . ." are from my book Listening to the Land.

  Connection and Cooperation

  "The future of. . ." is from Vine Deloria's God is Red.

  "After flogging him ..." is from Tom McHugh's The Time of the Buffalo.

  "The buffalo culture . . ." is from Richard Manning's Grassland.

  The story about the ancient tree calling the beetles is from Richard

  Manning's The Last Stand. "When you make . . ." is from a speech given on August 26, 1995. "Die while you're ..." is from Mitchell's Enlightened Heart. "Do you have . . ." is from Stephen Mitchell's translation.

  Bibliography

  Barsamian, David, "Expanding the Floor of the Cage, Part II," Z Magazine, April 1997.

  Casas, Bartholome' de Las, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

  Campbell, Joseph, Masks of God, Volume TV: Creative Mythology, Penguin,

  NY, 1968.

  Chomsky, Noam, "Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality," Z Magazine.

  Clark, Ramsey, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, Thunder's Mouth Press, Emeryville, 1994.

  Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy ofWomen's Liberation, Beacon, Boston, 1985.

  Dante, Divine Comedy

  Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, NY, 1990.

  Deloria, Vine, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Fulcrum, Golden, 1994.

  Dentan, Robert Knox, The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, NY, 1979.

  Dostoyevski, Fyodor, The Idiot, Dell, NY, 1959.

  Dunnigan, James E, and Nofi, Albert A., Dirty Little Secrets: Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know, Morrow, NY, 1990.

  Draffan, George, Directory of Transnational Corporations.

  Edwards, Gordon, "Plutonium Anyone?" From the Internet, reprinted from the spring 1995 issue of Ploughshares Monitor.