The indigenous of Europe, Africa, Oceania, the Americas tell me of meeting the civilized, welcoming them, feeding them, saving their lives, then learning too late that welcoming, helping, trusting, saving the civilized is a fatal error, and so people after people determine to fight them.443 Listen to the words of the Man-dan Mato Tope (The Four Bears), dying of introduced small-pox, “Ever since I can remember, I have loved the Whites. I have lived With them ever since I was a Boy, and to the best of my Knowledge, I have never wronged a White Man, on the Contrary, I have always Protected them from the insults of Others, Which they cannot deny. The 4 Bears never saw a White Man hungry, but what he gave him to eat, Drink, and a Buffaloe skin to sleep on, in time of Need. I was always ready to die for them, Which they cannot deny. I have done everything that a red Skin could do for them, and how have they repaid it! With ingratitude! I have Never Called a White Man a Dog, but to day, I do Pronounce them to be a set of Black hearted Dogs, they have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers have turned Out to be My Worst enemies. I have been in Many Battles, and often Wounded, but the Wounds of My enemies I exalt in. But to day I am Wounded, and by Whom, by those same White Dogs that I have always Considered, and treated as Brothers. I do not fear Death my friends. You Know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even the Wolves will shrink with horror at seeing Me, and say to themselves, that is The 4 Bears, the friend of the Whites—
“Listen well what I have to say, as it will be the last time you will hear Me. think of your Wives, Children, Brothers, Sisters, Friends, and in fact all that you hold dear, are all Dead, or Dying, with their faces all rotten, caused by those dogs the whites, think of all that My friends, and rise all together and Not leave one of them alive. The 4 Bears will act his part—”444
Voice after voice tells us the same story. In 1540, the Timucua Acuera stated, “Others of your accursed race have, in years past, disturbed our peaceful shores. They have taught me what you are. What is your employment? To wander about like vagabonds from land to land, to rob the poor, to betray the confiding, to murder in cold blood the defenseless. No! With such a people I want no peace,—no friendship. War, never-ending war, exterminating war, is all the boon I ask. . . . Keep on, robbers and traitors: in Acuera and Apalachee we will treat you as you deserve. Every captive will we quarter and hang up to the highest tree along the road.”445
In the 1640s the Narraganset Miantinomo said: “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, and our plains were full of deer and turkeys, and our coves and rivers were full of fish. But, brothers, since these English have seized upon our country, they cut down the grass with scythes, and the trees with axes. Their cows and horses eat up the grass, and their hogs spoil our beds of clams; and finally we shall starve to death! Therefore, stand not in your own light, I beseech you, but resolve with us to act like men. All the sachems both to the east and west have joined with us, and we are all resolved to fall upon them, at a day appointed. . . . And, when you see the three fires that will be made at the end of 40 days hence, in a clear night, then act as we act, and the next day fall on and kill men, women and children, but no cows; they must be killed as we need them for provisions, till the deer come again.”446
Yet another voice. It is the Hunkpapa Sioux Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull): “This land belongs to us, for the Great Spirit gave it to us when he put us here. We were free to come and go, and to live in our own way. But white men, who belong to another land, have come upon us, and are forcing us to live according to their ideas. That is an injustice; we have never dreamed of making white men live as we live.
“White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion. Why has our blood been shed by your soldiers? . . . The white men had many things that we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best,—freedom. I would rather live in a tepee and go without meat when game is scarce than give up my privileges as a free Indian, even though I could have all that white men have. We marched across the lines of our reservation, and the soldiers followed us. They attacked our village, and we killed them all. What would you do if your home was attacked? You would stand up like a brave man and defend it. That is our story. I have spoken.”447
Tecumseh’s elder brother Chiksika put the problem plainly: “When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight it is called honorable, but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called murder.448 When a white army battles Indians and wins it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre and bigger armies are raised. If the Indian flees before the advance of such armies, when he tries to return he finds that white men are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off such armies, he is killed and the land is taken anyway. When an Indian is killed, it is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and a sorrow in our heart; when a white is killed three or four others step up to take his place and there is no end to it. The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”449
As he lay dying from wounds suffered fighting the whites, Tecumseh’s father Pucksinwah made his son Chiksika promise that neither he nor Tecumseh would ever make peace with the whites. His last words were, “They only wish to devour us.”450
What would happen if we were to fully internalize his last words? What would happen if we were to abide by this same promise he extracted from his sons?
Notice that I said the arguments in the Derrick Jensen discussion group were somewhat similar to those I imagine have been held by countless of the indigenous. There are several significant differences.
The first of course is that the conversations among the indigenous took (and take) place within functioning communities of the uncivilized, that is, people who are free, that is, people who are not slaves. There is a world of difference between free men and women—free creatures of any sort—deciding whether to fight to defend their freedom, whether to fight to not be forced into slavery; and slaves deciding whether to fight to gain a freedom they’ve never known at all. The latter are less likely to fight, because their default, their experience, the state by which all others will be judged, is that of submission. They breathe it in from childhood, and drink it in their mother’s milk, consume it at the table, and learn it from their fathers. Gaining freedom in this case requires a long and arduous series of conscious and willful acts, many of which will be opposed not only by their owners but perhaps more effectively by all of their training as slaves, by the myriad ways they’ve internalized the needs and desires (and psychoses) of their owners, and more effectively still by all of the ways they’ve come to accept the status quo, the default, the existence of the system of slavery as anything other than what it is: a system of slavery.
Far less likely to fight back even than slaves are those so deeply and thoroughly enslaved that they no longer perceive their own slavery. This is what we today would call normal. As Frank Garvey wrote, “In this country people are rarely imprisoned for their ideas because they’re already imprisoned by their ideas. The wage-slaves of today aren’t ripe for revolt because they don’t know that they’re slaves and no more free than the slaves of yore, despite the fact that they think so. . . . You can’t get rid of slave culture until the slaves know that they are slaves, and are proud of the historical responsibility it gives them to be the agent of social change.”451
It’s not too much to say that most of us ha
ve essentially no understanding of what it would be like to live free. A few years ago I interviewed Vine Deloria, American Indian author of such books as God Is Red, Custer Died For Your Sins, and Red Earth, White Lies. He commented that we all—and most especially American Indians—are now living at a very hazardous time, because most of the current Indian elders “probably reached adulthood in the 1930s. This means their grandfathers were the guys who fought Custer and Miles, and who in the ’30s were sitting on their reservations getting ready to die. Those people had been brought up in freedom. They had not had reservation experiences in their early years. We’re now losing the last people who ever spoke to the last people who were free.”452
Black Hawk’s fears have come true: “They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterers, lazy drones, all talkers, and no workers.”
If many Indians have become civilized, how much tighter, then, are civilization’s chains on those of us who are further removed from freedom? I know parts of my genealogy back several hundred years, and though I count a U.S. Secretary of State (William Seward) and Danish royalty among my relatives, there is not a free man or woman as far back as I can see. Far from freedom flowing through my veins and permeating every cell and informing every step and breath I take, if I wish to be free I must endeavor to squeeze out every drop of slave’s blood as I find it, straining and pushing hard against everything the culture taught me: how to submit, how to not make waves, how to fear authority, how to fear perceiving my submission as submission, how to fear my feelings, how to fear perceiving the killing of those I love as the killing of those I love (or perhaps I should say the killing of those I would love had I not been taught to fear love, too), how to fear stopping by any means necessary those who are killing those I love, how to fear and loathe freedom, how to cherish and rely on insane moral structures stamped into me since birth. It’s a lot of work to try to cleanse oneself of several thousand years of inculcation, even when this inculcation is into a society so obviously self- and other-destructive as this one, which is one reason so many people fail to make this effort.
Another way to say all of this is that a difference between the conversation on the discussion group and those around the campfires is that most of the participants around the campfires probably weren’t insane. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the rest of us. (In related news, the front page of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle carried the first installment of a thirty-nine part series. The subject of this in-depth coverage? Global warming? The biodiversity crisis? The murder of the oceans? Sorry, no. The series is on wine. But in the interests of full disclosure I must mention that the paper did cover something environmental that day: a buried article stated that since albacore tuna have less mercury in them, conscientious consumers may wish to choose to purchase them over other species. No mention was made of why any tuna have mercury in them at all.)
The good news is that, beyond and beneath that several thousand years of inculcation into this culture of slavery, our bodies carry deep inside them memories of the freedom that is the birthright of all of us, whether we are animal, plant, rock, river, or anything else.
Another difference between the conversations in the discussion group and those held by the indigenous is that the former were held in “cyberspace,” which means in no place at all, but were instead entirely abstracted from place, from our bodies, from each other.
Further, most of us today have never experienced a healthy natural community. We have all been born into a world of wounds, a world being murdered, and we simply don’t know what it would be like to be beneficial and welcome partners in the ongoing creation that is the daily life of a forest, river, mountain, desert, and so on. Recall the person who wrote to me stressing the need for us to remember, who said, “I’ve realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I’ve met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we’ll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life?” When Tecumseh warned that “Soon your mighty forest trees, under the shade of whose wide spreading branches you have played in infancy, sported in boyhood, and now rest your wearied limb after the fatigue of the chase, will be cut down to fence in the land which the white intruders dare to call their own,” he could presume that most of the people he addressed had not only seen “mighty forest trees” but had formed intimate personal relationships with them and with the other parts of the landbases they were being called upon to defend. They knew the cycles of the insects and the cycles of the birds. They knew the places where elk bedded down and the paths where panthers pass across. They learned from and loved the big woodpeckers and the tiny voles. These were their relations. Now, rare indeed are the people who have seen “mighty forest trees,” much less participated in long-term relationships with them. This is not only because Tecumseh’s warning has come true and the forests have been cut down, but because for the most part we humans have been metabolized fully enough into this narcissistic culture that by now we spend far more time with machines and other human creations than with wild beings of any sort. Years ago John A. Livingston, author of The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation and One Cosmic Instant: Man’s Fleeting Supremacy, told me, “Nowadays most of us live in cities. That means most of us live in an insulated cell, completely cut off from any kind of sensory information or sensory experience that is not of our own manufacture. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, is a human artifact. All the sensory information we receive is fabricated, and most of it is mediated by machines. I think the only thing that makes it bearable is the fact that our sensory capacities are so terribly diminished—just as they are in all domesticates—that we no longer know what we’re missing. The wild animal is receiving information for all of the senses, from an uncountable number of sources, every moment of its life. We get it from one only—ourselves. It’s like doing solitary in an echo chamber. People doing solitary do strange things. And the common experience of victims of sensory deprivation is hallucination. I believe that our received cultural wisdom, our anthropocentric beliefs and ideologies, can easily be seen as institutionalized hallucinations.”453
(In related news, the stock market rose sharply today in heavy trading.)
Put another way, having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed.
Another difference between conversations now about stopping the culture versus those happening before is that civilization’s stranglehold over life has grown stronger. It’s always easier to stop invaders before they establish a beachhead, and it would have been a good thing had someone been able to warn the Indians not to trust and help the civilized. Maybe the Atlantic Ocean would have held them at bay for a lot longer, and without the resources from the Americas civilization might not have been able to keep expanding, and so might have collapsed. In any case, many of the pleas by Indians trying to get other Indians to join them in the fight stressed the need to strike soon, before the civilized became even more numerous and the world and its people so much
weaker.
Well, we all know by now that the civilized have pretty much insinuated themselves into all the nooks and crannies. We’ve already discussed the number of soldiers and cops at the disposal of the rulers. And we can’t forget the technologies such as video cameras, DNA banks, predator drones, RFID chips, all of which increase the control by those in power. In some ways we’ll need a far bigger lever to stop civilization than we would have needed a couple of hundred years ago.
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