James BlueWolf & Nathan Lupe'                                                                           approx. 120,581 words
3809 Scotts Creek Rd                                                                                            c 2003 James BlueWolf
Lakeport, Calif, 95453
707-263-1099
jbluewolf@access-4-free.com

 
 

Shirts N' Skins

 (Renegade Essays & Issues For A New Century)


Preface
         Our opinions are not intended to represent anyone other than ourselves, and we acknowledge that a significant amount of the information in this book has been gathered or plagiarized from other popular, and not so popular, authors.  We have made every attempt to identify them and give credit, where possible, both in the text and in the bibliography.  Still, the knowledgeable reader may find instances that lack quotation marks or identifying notations.  We hope that the entire stew will be tasty enough for such a reader to forego their justifiable criticisms.  Also since these essays have been composed over time, the discriminating reader will undoubtedly find some repetitions.  We hope these are not too distracting and that our affection and earnest enthusiasm to build a subjective theme into the entire work may be viewed more as a musical piece than a literary one, with movements and repetitive themes toward a single end.   
Natives do not need us to "educate" them in regards to the issues and concerns we all share, our intention is simply to contribute to the timely and important discussions being held within, and without, our individual Nations.
        Where we have erred, over-generalized, misrepresented, or misunderstood our subjects or the facts, the responsibility is ours alone.
        A final word—if any essay seems to be too much—skip it and go on to another. We tried to make each one stand alone.  Who says a book must progress from front to back?
James BlueWolf & Nathan Lupe'
 




Introduction

        One of the reasons we have taken undertaken this compilation of essays, ideas, and plagiarized writings is to put educational information from many places and authors into a central stewpot for general consumption. We agonized over whether some of our later ranting might detract from the book, being too controversial, too negative, or worse--off topic--but ultimately decided that there were good reasons for expressing our militancy.
        First in our minds was the simple importance of offering an alternative voice to the litany of educational textbook clones offered by our educational system to indoctrinate our children.
        Second was our observation that Native People are some of the most patriotic Americans we know.  Our history values the warrior, and the entrance of many of our loved ones, past and present, into the U.S. Armed Forces is a source of unity and pride for all of our Nations.  Our Veterans have served with dignity and honor (as will be described later) in every U.S. conflict during the last century.  But aside from that, we believe that many Native Peoples have been misinformed and, in some cases, intentionally misled about the history and motives of the United States Government, particularly as it relates to military engagements in the last fifty years.  It is our belief that many Native people, along with most other Americans, have been fed a conglomerate series of myths and morality plays that inaccurately represent the history, not only of the American Experiment in the past, but the part, place, and importance of Native Peoples in that history.  We believe that a clearer understanding of the successes and failures of the American Experiment will help Native Peoples make important decisions regarding our continued support and cooperation with American Foreign and Domestic Policies.
        It is not our intention to devalue the heroes and cherished beliefs of European descendants or global immigrant Americans, but we feel that Native peoples have the right to be educated to the true facts of history as we understand them, with the Native perspective taken into consideration.  Native people should feel empowered by what they learn, or re-learn, and should rightfully feel a great deal of pride in the accomplishments and sacrifices made by our ancestors, as well as the modern heroes of our time. One of the most valuable lessons that can be learned from history is that all the great leaders, spokesmen, healers, warriors, and artists of the past were common human beings, subject to all of our problems and vices.   None were so perfect or heroic that they did not experience moments of doubt, tragedy, or criticism.  In this we learn that each of us has the potential to be like them.      
        If one is not exposed to contradictory ideals and opinions, fundamentalism prevails.  Not that all fundamentalism is bad--it depends on the historical reality of the premises and events of the past.  Unfortunately much of what Indigenous Peoples have learned about their contemporary world is what they have been given by the conquering culture, its history, and world-view.  It's time for debunking the myths of America.  We're certain it'll make us plenty of enemies.  So be it. 
Many American Indigenous Peoples indulged in warfare.  Some did not.  It's up to the reader to explore the differences in Indigenous cultures and Nations to identify those differences.  But for those who prized bravery, courage, and heroism as it applied to conflicts between men, their defeat at the hands of a more callous, brutal, and heavily armed foe was debilitating and heart-wrenching.  Many individual Natives, searching for an extension of those traditions, have sought continuity in service to the United States of America and it's Armed Forces.  Successful integration into an armed force means that one must put aside personal attitudes and opinions, conform to the orders and expectations of superiors, and accept the values and necessity of those who direct ones actions.  In order to survive one must ultimately accept what one is told.  Questions will get you killed. 
        Even before the First World War, Natives were proudly serving in the Armed Forces.  We would not presume to speak for them or those who have served since, except to notice that, by and large, they are proud of their service, honor the flag and their officers, and generally exhibit the expected patriotic views one might expect from honorable veterans.   We want it to be crystal clear that we revere and honor all our Native Vets.  We also think that very few of them have received the education or historical background necessary to understand the behind-the-scenes reasons for the conflicts they were involved in and the real reasons many of the conflicts were enjoined.  By the late 1960's, some of them, in their hearts, probably wondered why they were killing other brown people in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. But myths and politricks, as well as the realities of survival, have kept them from questioning the larger American picture.
        While real historians argue about the reasons and the behind-the-scenes decisions of World War One and Two, the rest of us are reasonably comfortable with believing that it was a black and white struggle of good over evil, tyranny over freedom.  Of course that's what we were taught and told, so perhaps it's not that unreasonable for us to still believe it.  And certainly those veterans who saw the horrors of those wars have arguments aplenty for America's justifications.  But our interest here moves into the time when the general education of everyone in America was thought to be a given.  The 1960's were a time when TV, radio, and the print media reached into almost every single household (except Indigenous America).  Suddenly people were discovering that the Government was capable of lying to its citizens--and its veterans.  History began to get a lot more interesting as we began to discover discrepancies in what we had been told about events, decisions, and policies of the past.  It became evident that we knew a lot less about who we were, where we had come from, and what we represented than we had been led to believe.
        This book is an attempt at discovery, as well as an evaluation of where we have come from and where we are going.  If it can be a burr under a blanket, or provide one single fact that helps us move toward a clearer view of the future we would like to share, we'll be happy with our efforts.  


















BC--Before Columbus and Beyond

"Forked tongues hold an empty cup
dipped until all springs run dry;
a past of lies served on formal sterling
make the taste of our defeat
so much more bitter now
we know exactly what was lost."













BC/ One                                                                       BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

What Hollywood Forgot To Tell America About Indians  (Indigenous Americans)

        An entire book could probably be written about this subject--but we're going to restrain ourselves and just talk about a few of the things we wish Americans knew about "Indians"
We wish Americans knew...
…that all Natives did not come across the land bridge at the Bering Strait...
…that there were over 700 totally different Nations on this continent with a population of 100 million inhabitants (more than in Europe) before the arrival of Columbus. (The Mayan lowlands held at least 8 to 18 million people in one region alone)... that Indigenous civilizations before the coming of pestilence had raised cities larger (50,000--300,000) than the greatest cities of Europe with artisans, architects and impressive astronomers with advanced mathematical knowledge…
...that the longest continually operating democracy is still that of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (1000 years), not the US Republic (227 years)...
…that the largest pandemics of disease in the history of mankind occurred on the North American continent between 1492 and 1700, sweeping north and south and from ocean to ocean with a 90-95% fatality rate, continuing until the late 1800's...
…that North and South America were never vacant wild lands until after European diseases destroyed most of their Indigenous populations...
… that agriculturally, Indigenous Americans were light years ahead of Europe with entire continents of carefully managed agricultural acreage...
…that the first book in Europe extolling the virtues of New World Indigenous culture and government, Thomas More's "Utopia", was written in the 1500's...
…that most Native societies were matriarchal, where the women had as much (or more) to say about the daily social and political affairs of the People than the men ..
…that Indian personal habits of cleanliness and knowledge of medicine were considerably advanced compared to Europeans, who considered bathing dangerous and had little to no knowledge of herbs...
…that Indians lived at least as long and quite possibly significantly longer than their European counterparts and that there was plenty of leisure time in Indigenous cultures to devote to spirituality, culture, art, music, dance and entertainment...
…that American Indigenous people did not develop the wheel because there were no beasts of burden in the New World capable of drawing them...
…that one-half to four-fifths of the world's current vegetable staples were exported from the America's, including corn, potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, manioc, peppers, etc. and that those imports kept many European Nations from starving.... 
…that Christopher Columbus was preceded by a number of different peoples from other continents, notably Phoenicians, Norsemen, and possibly many more.  Also that he entered upon the voyage, not with any intent to find new trade routes, but for the express purpose of discovering gold in a "New World"…
…that thousands of Indians were captured and sent by Columbus as slaves to the Canary Islands, Europe and other locations and that the idea for the Black slave trade was proven profitable and possible by those practices...
…that the methods and crimes of Columbus and his men were not just normal behavior for the times and that numerous contemporaries, notably Bartolome' De Las Casas, defended Native rights to land, life, liberty. property, and sovereignty...
…that the Thanksgiving Gathering never took place as such, but was a treaty parley where a prayer was said thanking the Pilgrim God for saving the colonists from the "ravages of the savages" even though these were the same "savages" who had only recently rescued them from starvation...
… that Ben Franklin's first proposal of government to the Colonies, the Albany Plan Of Union, was strictly organized to utilize the principles of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the subsequent Constitutional Convention closely considered those same principles of government...
…that until the early-1800's, the word "Americans" was used to describe Indigenous Peoples and not Europeans immigrants or their descendants...
…that the U.S. has never honored a single treaty with Indigenous Nations even though the original United States Congress vigorously complained to England that there was never an excuse for treaties between Sovereign Nations to be ignored, become obsolete, or be arbitrarily abrogated...
…that more American Indians per capita have volunteered in every American military conflict since World War One (before Indians were legally declared US Citizens)... that the 1940 Nationalities Act, which established citizenship for all Indians, was not intended to dilute tribal authority…
… that if not for the CodeTalkers--Choctaw, Comanche, Navajo, Ojibway, Menominee, Lakota, Crow, Blackfeet and others--America could have lost World War One or Two, even though those same Code-talkers had been raised in boarding schools that denied them the right to speak the languages that eventually became America's most important weapons...
… that Indians still have the highest rates of infant mortality, rural poverty, and suicide in the US...
…that contemporary Indians don't wear feathers or live in tipis on a daily basis... that most of the government monies that go to Indians are not taxpayer monies but the result of land or resource leases, treaty settlements or trust agreements...
…that any sovereignty and rights allowed to Tribes that seem to give Natives an advantage or different status than other Americans by the U.S. Government are a product of constitutionally guaranteed treaties or good faith negotiations executed under the Constitution of the United States and not by any arbitrary state or federal decision... .
…and finally that, to this day, the U.S Government has never had a consistent legal policy recognizing and restoring the rights of Native Nations under the constitutionally guaranteed provisions of treaties and agreements negotiated in good faith by their ancestors, even though many of those treaties were signed with an acknowledged guarantee similar to the famous closer, "for as long as grass grows and waters flow".





BC/  Two                                                                      BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

What Is Civilized?

        Fundamental characteristics of "civilized" society that distinguish it from cultures: firmly organized states with definite boundaries and systematic political institutions; the distinction of social classes; the economic specialization of man as farmer, trader, or artisan, each dependent on the other; and the conscious development of the arts and intellectual attitudes-- specifically the rise of monumental architecture, sculpture that carefully represents man, the use of writing to commemorate accounts or deeds, and the elaboration of religious views about the nature of the gods, and their relation to men and the origin of the world.  Whenever civilization has appeared, most or all of these characteristics will have quickly sprung into existence and will have assumed a precise form and interlocking coherent view, easily distinguishable from other ways of life.  Chester Starr

        “What is civilization?  If its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original arts, stirring music, rich story and legend.  We had these.  Then we were not savages but a civilized race.”   Grand Council Of American Indians 1927

        Starting our history with this essay seemed a logical beginning.  One of the main tenants of the dominant western civilization has been their insistence on the elements that constitute civilization and their demands on a history that shows an orderly appearance of civilization descending from Mesopotamia.  They make a rigorous denial of the contention that Indigenous peoples ever independently developed civilizations, except for a brief credit to the Peruvian cultures.  Yet, taking the definition above, an honest historian might contend that there have been many civilizations on the American continents, and perhaps elsewhere around the world.  The coastlines and oceans have changed, flooded, and receded countless times.  Who knows what unknown civilizations wait to be discovered under the oceans of the world?  Archaeologists are just now determining that simply because no evidence remains, natural civilizations may have occurred--and been lost without a trace--in antiquity.
        This part of the essay could just as easily gone into our section “Ranting And Raving”, under the sections on mythology, but we think it best to get it out of the way early.
         The patronizing attitudes of science toward the assertions of Native Peoples that they either originated on, or came to these lands many millenia before the supposed land migrations over the Bering Strait in the Clovis period, (11-12,500BP), is one of the more exasperating irritations Natives endure.  Modern archaeology is well on the way to exploding the Bering Strait theories, yet mainstream scientists resist and our children are still taught this myth. The archaeological finds at Meadowcroft, in western Pennsylvania have now been confirmed at 16,000, almost 3500 years before the “migration”.
        Certainly there may have been Peoples passing back and forth over northern lands in ages past (the Bluefish Caves site in the Yukon is dated 24,000), but to insist that no other migrations occurred and that origination has been undeniably established is ridiculous.  The oceans have risen over 400 feet since those times. Any coastal routes which may have significantly preceded the Clovis dates have long been inundated. Yet none of the theories, even those who suppose coastal migrations, have been able to explain why South American digs pre-date North American ones.  Scientists are now hard-pressed to explain how early Americans could have established significant settlements at Monte Verde, Chile, centuries before they supposed to be making the arduous trip through the ice corridors of Canada.  Even more difficult for them to rationalize, are the recent carbon datings at Pedra Furada, in Brazil.  Archaeologist Guidon has confirmed, with the help of internationally respected Hans Mueller-Beck, that the dig dates at least to 30,000 and most probably to 48,000.
        This find is so substantial as to cause Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian to declare, “It’s becoming very clear that people have been in the New World for over 20,000 years.  How much older than 20,000 seems to be the key question right now, but the old argument— Clovis is the First Americans—I don’t think that’s a real valid argument anymore.
        Other disciplines agree.  Geneticist Rich Ward has been conducting DNA testing on a small Northwest Tribe that is supposed to have been in the 3rd , and latest migration (coastal) from the Bering regions.  Ward and others expected to find only three to ten lineages among the small number of test subjects.  He was overwhelmed by the evidence that these few people represented twenty-eight to thirty entirely different DNA lineages in four main clusters.  Ward estimates that a much longer time period than previously supposed must have elapsed for that number of changes in the genetic code to have occurred.
         Linguists are adding more fuel to the fire that is consuming the Bering Strait migration theory.  It has now been documented that as many as 2000 different language groups have existed on the American continents. Experts are convinced that that kind of linguistic diversity could only occur over a long period of development in situ—as much as 50,000 years!
        Of course Natives don’t need DNA, archaeology, and linguistics experts to tell us what we have always known.  As much as Europeans can say they originated in Europe, Indigenous Peoples in the Americas can make the same claims.

        As far as discussions of the properties that define civilization go, many of the pre-Columbian American civilizations had all the defining characteristics listed by Chester Starr in our earlier quotation.
        Their borders were well known and their political systems complex and advanced.  The distinction of social classes and separation of trades most probably occurred naturally within Native societies, though they may not have reached the levels of distinction and stratification as peasant or noble, slave or owner, eta (untouchable) or samurai.  Yet there were certainly levels of social distinction and success in even the most democratic of Native nations.  The creative trades in procurement of necessities have always ordered themselves toward the most efficient system, with the most capable and productive assuming their natural roles in sustaining local economies.  A simple attitude of superiority does not give one culture the ability to judge either the artistic or intellectual development of another culture.  Examples of monumental architecture abound in the Americas, as do representative sculpture, including some creations that could not be matched by today's architectural or artistic giants.
        We have gathered the information below from prominent archaeologists and anthropologists local to the regions described, however since we did not consult with the descendants of the peoples described directly we cannot be sure of the accuracy of any of the dates or opinions expressed about their ancestors.  We’ve found that it’s always good to take any scientific pronouncement about Native Peoples and their history with a few grains of salt. Our biggest contention with the status quo is their insistence that these civilizations ended.  While the monumental architecture and urban sprawl might no longer be in evidence, many of the descendants of these Peoples have long memories.  They still hold the knowledge, the wisdom and the spirit of their peoples.  They are not gone, they are simply harder to see.

Pre-Incan & Incan
        “Six earth-and-rock mounds rise out of the windswept desert of the Supe Valley near the coast of Peru. Dunelike and immense, they appear to be nature's handiwork, forlorn outposts in an arid region squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the folds of the Andean Cordillera. But looks deceive. These are human-made pyramids, and compelling new evidence indicates they are the remains of a city that flourished nearly 5,000 years ago. The ruins, which have been carbon dated to some 100 years before the Great
        Pyramid at Giza, make it one of the oldest urban center in the Americas and among the most ancient in all the world. What has amazed archaeologists is not just the age but the complexity and scope of Caral.  Pirámide Mayor alone covers an area nearly the size of four football fields and is 60 feet tall. Inside a large sunken amphitheater, which could have held many hundreds of people during civic or religious events.   Eventually Caral would spawn 17 other pyramid complexes scattered across the 35-square-mile area of the Supe Valley.” (AP Release)  Cotton appeared to be their main trade item, and nets of cotton fiber were discovered many many miles from Caral—evidence of a considerable commerce with distant peoples. “But based on Caral's size and scope, archaeologists believes that it is indeed the mother city of the Incan civilization.”

        “Around 200 AD, the highlands of South America witnessed the rise of the Tiahuanaco culture (200 AD), based in the Collao region (which covered parts of modern-day Bolivia and Chile). The Tiahuanaco were to bequeath a legacy of agricultural terracing and the management of a variety of ecological zones.”
        “The Nazca culture (300 AD) were able to tame the coastal desert by bringing water through underground aqueducts. They carved out vast geometric and animal figures on the desert floor, a series of symbols believed to form part of an agricultural calendar which even today baffles researchers.”
        Also in the highlands, “both the Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) culture, near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, and the Wari (Huari) culture, near the present-day city of Ayacucho, developed large urban settlements and wide-ranging state systems between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1000. The Wari culture (600 AD) introduced urban settlements in the Ayacucho area and expanded its influence across the Andes.”
        “Chimú were the great city-builders of pre-Inca civilization. As loose confederation of cities scattered along the coast of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, the Chimú flourished from about 1150 to 1450. Their capital was at Chan Chan outside of modern-day Trujillo. The largest pre-Hispanic city in South America at the time, Chan Chan had 100,000 inhabitants. Its twenty square kilometers of precisely symmetrical design was surrounded by a lush garden oasis intricately irrigated from the Río Moche several kilometers away.”

        The Mayan's are considered the “grandparents” of many Tribes, the Mayans were prominently established in 1000 BC.  Their civilization is said to have endured for 2000 years, reaching its Zenith in 7th to 10th Century AD in Copan in Honduras.  We’ll examine the advanced state of their civilization in another essay.

        There is a growing suspicion that the entire southwest was once part of a great Anastazi system that included the 25,000 square mile San Juan River drainage system.  Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the monuments, had 660 circular rooms. It contains more than 50 million finely cut blocks of sand stone. 150 other great houses were discovered in the San Juan Basin, covering four states: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico and encompass an area of 1000s of square miles. Even in the desolate Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico there is abundant evidence that as many as 6,000 to 10,000 ancient native Americans lived and worshiped there at one time. The remains of elaborate buildings--some as high as four stories and containing 800 rooms--indicate the location was used for rituals and ceremonies. Extensive villages were also built nearby.  NASA archaeologist Tom Seaver uncovered the huge Pueblo road system.  The roads are straight as an arrow and were built without beasts of burden or the wheel!
In the Americas, extensive cultural empires were established through the exchange of  “symbolic goods.”  The relationship between Meso-America and the Anastazi culture is well documented even considering the problem of monumental distances to transportation, communication, and the overall poverty of the societies involved. Nevertheless, relationships of contact between women, goods, knowledge, and the circulation of specialists proved that even symbolic goods may contribute to the establishment of extensive cultural empires.

        Cahokia, (Mississipian), in southwest Illinois, was, in its day, the largest and most influential settlement north of Mexico. Henry Brackenridge, speaking of Cahokia, 1810, found a great mound larger than the Pyramid at Giza, surrounded by more than one hundred smaller mounds covering a five square mile area.  Its influence extended from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, and from the Atlantic coast to Oklahoma.  About 4,000 of the roughly 20,000 individual mounds of this widespread Mississippian civilization have survived agriculture and construction in Wisconsin alone.  Other “great” mounds exist in Alabama, Mississippi, and other southeastern states. The textile industry in Mississippian culture was advanced, as were the social city-states, with high walled settlements, moats, and advanced soci-ceremonial structures, organizations, and governments.

        The knowledge that these great systems were present is not just a modern penomina.  Besides the recordings of the Priests and adventurers of Middle and Soouth America, we have what remains of the North American history in these  snips of an 1860 document about an area near the eastern Great Plains of the U.S. 
       
        The first section is entitled, "Unquestionable Antiquity of Many of the Mounds".
        "Although many of the mounds now found may be of comparatively modern date, there are some which, like those on the Ohio and the other western rivers, bear incontestable evidence of great antiquity in the immense trees that are found growing upon them. There are live-oaks standing upon some of these tumuli of such size that they are estimated to be six or seven hundred years old. This would carry back the date of the mound to a period two or three centuries anterior to the time of Columbus."
        "Ancient Fields"
        "There are also in certain parts of the prairies marks of ancient corn fields, of every great size, and extending over the country for a hundred and fifty miles. The land in these fields lies in ridges, like those always seen in a corn field that is left, after the corn is harvested, to grass itself over, without being leveled by the plough and harrow. These ridges are so regular, and confined so strictly to circumscribed and well defined fields--fields, too, occupying situations exactly suitable for the cultivation of corn--as to leave no room for doubt in respect to the nature of them. They are very ancient too, as is proved by the trees often found standing upon them. Some persons, in examining these fields, once caused an oak tree to be cut down which was growing in one of them, and on counting the layers of wood they found that the tree was three hundred and twenty-five years old. This carries the time when the fields were cultivated far beyond the settlement of the country by Europeans; and inasmuch as no Indian tribes have been known, since the coming of Europeans; to cultivate the ground so extensively, it is supposed that these fields denote that in ancient times there existed a more numerous and civilized population over all this region than exists at the present day.
        "The Copper Mines"
        "This opinion is confirmed by certain indications that are observed in the Lake Superior copper region. Ancient mines are found here with traces of former workings that are on a scale fare beyond the capacity of the Indians of the present day.  Accordingly, as might naturally be expected, copper implements and ornaments have been, from time immemorial, very much in use among all the Indian tribes. But at the period of the discovery of America, and since that time, the supply of copper for these purposes was obtained almost entirely from specimens found near the surface of the ground. There is no evidence of any systematic or extended workings of the mines within a period of several centuries; but there is abundant evidence that before that time, as is shown by the age of the trees growing over the old excavations, mining operations in this region were carried
on upon a very considerable scale.
        The miners of the present day frequently come to old trenches, half filled in and grassed over, and with immense trees growing in them, at the bottom of which, when they dig them out anew, they find remains of the ancient works. They come down, when digging in such places, to great masses of copper blocked up on skids of wood which have been preserved from decay by lying all the time in water, with marks of fire upon them, and broken tools lying all around. Trees have been found growing over ancient works in these mines with five hundred concentric layers of wood in them, proving that the excavations and the works carried on in them were finally abandoned at least five hundred years ago."
        "Conclusion"
        "On the whole, there is abundant evidence in these ancient remains that this continent has been inhabited by the ancestors of the present Indian races for a very long period. It is, moreover, generally supposed that in former times the population was far more numerous, and that the nations composing it were far more advanced in civilization than those found in possession of the country when the Europeans first visited these shores."

        The cxivilizations of the Americas, especially at the time of the "discovery", rivaled any to be found in Europe.  At the time of Columbus; London, Paris, and Cologne were towns of only 20,000-50,000 citizens.  These were roughly equivalent to the pre-plague size of many American Indigenous eastern coastal agricultural villages of the time, and equal to, or smaller, than many of the larger agricultural centers of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Anastasi cultures.  None of the European cities came anywhere near the sophistication and population of many Meso-American urban areas. 
        Writing did exist in the America's, but the most developed--the Mayan system--was almost totally wiped out by Spanish European colonization. (It was preserved enough to be making a comeback today.)  Most of our Nations made use of the discipline of exact recitation to commemorate events, convey important messages, and keep history.  Messages, still recited in their exact form, exist today that were carried coast to coast, east to west, north to south, over 500 years ago!  Few written documents exist for that long in a pristine state.  As for religious views, a rich tradition of Native theology integrated into the daily life of the Nations continues to inspire and support many of the Indigenous peoples on this continent.  Many of these ideals, symbols, and ceremonies have taken on new significance as modern men re-examine the supposed superiority of colonial traditions.
        Though neolithic civilization may or may not have occurred in Europe before the Americas, the Native ability to advance agriculturally far outstripped the European civilization with global implications.  Nineteenth century Central and Southern Europe became dependent on maize as a staple. That dramatic reduction in the European tradition of starvation led to a population explosion in Europe.  Peanuts, manioc, and maize also transformed African agriculture at the same time that disease was wiping out most of Native America.
        .In our minds, the definitions of civilization have been met time and time again by the developing Nations and Peoples of these great continents.  Not only did they exist in the past; they existed at the time of Columbus. Why do European-descendant historians continue to make light of those achievements and pretend that only they were party to the higher developments of men?  Part of the answer lies in how they define "higher developments" of both man and culture.  This goes directly to the crux of what Native People have been asking themselves for 500 years.  Why do white men think like that?









BC/  Three                                                                  BlueWolf & Lupe /Shirts N' Skins

The Origins Of Science And Technology

Something we always hear from enthusiastic Eurocentrists is their contention that one of the reasons this European civilization is so superior is because of the advances of sciences that originated there.  Here's our answer.  We put it here because most of it is BC.
Real historians are now exploding the myth that science is almost entirely Western in origin.  By western here, we mean Europe, Greece and Post Colombian North America.  The myth, originating in Germany, is just part of the Eurocentric glamorization of accomplishments which has consumed American society since the middle of the 19th century.
Generally it is believed that science originated in Greece about 600-146 BC, when the Greeks gave it over to the Romans and it hibernated until the Renaissance in Europe, circa 1500.  This is known as the “Greek Miracle”.
The belief that Peoples from India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa, China, The Americas, and elsewhere developed fire and then sat around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Greek magicians to conjure up modern science ranks up there with the tooth fairy.  Equally astonishing is the belief that no science was conducted from the Greek end to the time of Copernicus--a mere 1500 years.  The only concession to non-European cultures was a patronizing credit to Islam, which made them the scribes, translators, and caretakers who kept science alive until it was rediscovered by its rightful heirs.
Western science is what it is because it is built upon the best ideas, data, and equipment from other cultures.  The Greeks openly acknowledged that their culture had arisen from the result of Egyptian colonization.  Europeans, during the renaissance, accepted that Egypt was the cradle of civilization until the 18th century, when Christians began worrying about the influences of Egyptian pantheism.  The first Aryan racists--Locke, Hume, and others--created their Aryan model in the first half of the 19th century.  They rewrote history to deny the existence of the Egyptian settlements, and as anti-Semitism grew, further denied Phoenician cultural influences.  The passing of time refined the Aryan model to establish Greece as distinctly European. This myth has never been stronger than today.  Of the 96 most important scientific achievements in recorded history, noted Science magazine, (1-14-2000), only two were attributed to non-white, non-western scientists!  The first was the invention of zero in India, and the astronomical evaluations of the Maya and Hindus, AD 1000.   The Indians were only given credit for discerning the symbol, rather than the concept of zero.  The Mayans and Hindus were stripped of scientific status by the assertion that their find was for agricultural and religious purposes only. "Science" proclaimed that “Prior to 600 BC… phenomena were explained within the context of magic, religion and experiences", ignoring two thousand years of discovery. If one wishes to return to a truthful historical perspective, it is only necessary to read, in the Greek, Herodotus and other ancient Greeks.
Francis Bacon said that three inventions marked the beginning of the modern world.  All three; gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, came from China! Bacon himself wrote that inventions from China created the Modern World.  Aristotle credited Egypt with developing the mathematical sciences.
           At the time that Science gave Guttenberg credit for the invention of the printing press, Chinese and Korean publishers had been using their machines for two centuries and books had been published and printed for 500.  Some Chinese collectors had as many as 50,000 volumes in their collections. 
Western scholars, eager to preserve their pre-supposed scientific dominance have consistently changed the rules when faced with the tide of undeniable evidence.  Indian physics, they insist, is meaningless because, though accurate, it was abstract with no empirical data.  Then they turn right around and insist that the Babylonian and Egyptian scientists, who used their discoveries, were simply to be considered unsophisticated craftsmen.
     As time passes, the Western scientific establishment is forced to make acknowledgements of correction in its propaganda.  Western scholars once refused to accept that ancient Black Ethiopians had a number system, asserting they were too primitive and unsophisticated.  Closer examination using modern chemical techniques discovered that ancient letters to Greeks from Ethiopians used specific inks, as distinctly African in origin as the numbers.
To dispel the Eurocentricity of scientific discovery, mathematics and physics are an excellent place to start. Rather than providing a history of each name mentioned in this history, we refer the reader to Dick Teresi's book, "Lost Discoveries", the source of most of this chapter. Here are some of Teresi's miscellaneous facts: 
Indians, Babylonians, and Egyptians used Pythagorean triplets to establish right angles in their construction,
Babylonians developed a place value system and the Pythagorean Theorem fifteen hundred years before Pythagorus.
Mesopotamians kept extensive tables of squares in 2000 BC.
In China, Li Hui calculated the value for Pi in 200 AD.  Fu His’s diagrams correspond to Liebnix’s binary mode of arithmetic.
Algebra is an Arabic word meaning “compulsion”, compelling the unknown, “X”, to a numerical value.  They also developed decimal fractions.
The Egyptians were familiar with Pi and could calculate the volume of a cylinder long before the Greeks.  They also developed the concept of the lowest common denominator and a fraction table that required 28,000 calculations to compile.
The Hindu Rig-Veda asserted the law of gravity twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton.  The Gwailor Numerals 0-9 were invented in India 500 AD.  Indians had basic mathematics, algebra, indices, logarithms, trigonometry, and nascent forms of calculus centuries before Liebniz.  Indians calculated the Earth’s age as 4.3 billion years in 500 AD, a number that wasn’t arrived at in the modern world until the twentieth century.  Indians and Mayans developed zero and negative numbers a thousand years before Europeans.  Indians understood that the sun was at the center of the solar system and gravity held the solar system together two centuries before Pythagorus. Arabic numerals were first developed in India.
Ibn al Shartir (1350 AD) was responsible for writing down two important theorems discovered by other Muslims which allowed Copernicus to revolutionize astronomy by repairing the flawed mathematics of the Ptolemaic systems.  One theorem was devised by Nasir al Din al Tusi and the other by Muayyad al Din al Urdi.  Copernicus avoided crediting them because Muslims were not popular in 11th Century Europe.  The new math of the Copernicus Revolution began in Islamic, not Europeans minds.
Sumerians used sophisticated algebraic expressions to solve problems of food distribution and supplies in 1800 BC.
                   
No where is there more phony information than in the area of technology.  The wheel, the stirrup, moveable type and metallurgy all came from lands foreign to Europe.  Sumerians started a textile industry working wool into cloth, and flax into linen.  They had a modern canal irrigation system.  The first freestanding glass was produced around 2500 BC in both Mesopotamia and Egypt.  The Sumerians began writing around 3500 BC.  Their tablets record poetry, lullabies, records of property, animals, medicinal plants, astronomical events and account ledgers.  They devised a standard of weights for business and ran a huge import/export system by land and sea. In 300 BC their architecture was both sophisticated and enduring.  Some of their structures exist today.  The Hittites smelted iron and developed gear and axle military machines in 1600 BC.  Assyrians built roads and had an effective postal system in 700 BC.  Nebuchaneezer, the Babylonian King, built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  The roof had a base of lead covered with brick and asphalt.  The garden was watered by screwlike lifts, which brought up water from the Euphrates 700 years before Archimedes.  Floating water mills and turban wheels with mounted millstones were used throughout Eurasia.  Europe didn’t have anything similar until the mid-12th century.
One of the common criticisms of these types of accounts is that they were discoveries simply related to necessity, and did not reflect a purposeful attempt to advance civilization through scientific discovery.  Yet while Europe was in the Dark Ages, the Islamic Middle East had advanced engineering technologies and encouraged the pure science that was responsible for the development of mirrors, incremental weights, surveying, hydraulics, military technology and navigation.  Devises for providing hot and cold running water, dredging, oil lamps, elaborate fountains, suction pipes and the earliest use of a crank as part of a machine were all credited to the Banu Musa brothers.
Many of the basic building blocks of European technology originated in the Middle Eastern River valley civilizations.  Islam's central location between Europe, Africa, and Asia allowed it to acquire Indian and Chinese inventions as well as improve on Egyptian/Greek technology.
Much has been made of the fact that while the Native Americas had a number of advanced civilizations; Mississippian, Mayan, Olmec, Toltec, Incan and Azteca, none of them developed the wheel.  Of course it is hardly mentioned that there were no domestic animals capable of pulling such a vehicle!  Yet they were the worlds greatest crop cultivators and plant breeders. Meso-American agriculture was used to support huge populations. Between 450-650 AD, Teotihuacan had between 150,000-300,000 citizens and was among a handful of the largest cities in the world.  
The agricultural impact of the Americas on Europe was enormous and the crops were considered miraculous.  From 1/2 to 3/4ths of the world's agricultural crops were first cultivated in the Americas.  Europeans, used to famine and hunger, were overwhelmed by the variety of plants available to them.     
Accounts of Conquistadors in the early 16th century Americas described their amazement at the variety of types of spun and woven cloth, the indoor plumbing facilities, sewers, running water, individual housing, huge open markets (offering foods from a thousand miles distant), clean streets, botanical gardens, and the preponderance of free time the people seemed to have for family, music, artistry and craftsmanship, ceremony, dance, and gaming.
Among the Maya, writing and books complimented their complex calendar system of astronomical events and sophisticated mathematical computations. 
Cortes took Aztec ballplayers to Europe in 1528.  The Toltec-Maya Ball Court has walls 27 feet high.  The playing field is 181 yards long and 75 yards wide.  The acoustics of the stadium are so perfect that one can clearly hear a voice from one end to the other, almost two football fields away
The vulcanization of rubber was achieved by 1600, 239 years before Goodyear.  In analyzing the raw latex and vine juice used traditionally, nuclear magnetic resonance spectography revealed unidentified plasticizers had somehow been eliminated in the process allowing the natural polymers to link, a process exactly the same as the one utilized today.   This allowed rubber with specific elasticity's to be created by the Olmecs, Aztecs, and Mayans.  There was solid rubber, hollow rubber, and rubber bands of all sizes, shapes, widths and thickness.  They also had obsidian blades, which microscopic examinations reveal to have been the sharpest blades in the world, sharper than modern surgical steel.  Modern surgeons are just now beginning to experiment with obsidian scalpels.
The Incan road system is 12,000 miles long and comparable only to the Romans as a pre-modern transportation network. The Pueblo road system also covers hundreds of miles, as straight as an arrow. 
The Andes contain approximately 1.5 million acres of small terraced gardens. Also, Andean farmers were the first to freeze dry vegetables, freeze drying potatoes. Each June for at least the last four centuries, farmers in 12 mountain villages in Peru and Bolivia follow a ritual that Westerners might think odd, if not crazy. Late each night for about a week, the farmers observe the stars in the Pleiades constellation, which is low on the horizon to the northeast. If they appear big and bright, the farmers know to plant their potato crop at the usual time four months later. But if the stars are dim, the usual planting will be delayed for several weeks. Now Western researchers have applied the scientific method to this seeming madness. Poring over reams of satellite data on cloud cover and water vapor, Professor Benjamin Orlove, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis, and colleagues have discovered that these star-gazing farmers are accurate long-range weather forecasters. High wisps of cirrus clouds dim the stars in El Nino years, which brings reduced rainfall to that part of the Andes. In such drought conditions, it makes sense to plant potatoes as late as possible. Orlove's work, which was reported in January in the British journal Nature, is just the latest example of Indigenous or traditional knowledge that has been found to have a sound scientific basis. In agriculture, nutrition, medicine and other fields, modern research is showing why people maintain their traditions
At Windover Bog, in Florida, over 170 individuals were found--50 generations of the same family group. Glen Doren from Florida State University directed the dig.  Dated at 7,210 BP (Before Present), the Windover people lived in permanent settlements.  They had a fairly sophisticated understanding of healing techniques and they wore finely woven cloth just as we do today!  Four kinds of close twining, one kind of open twining, and one type of plaiting can be seen in the mats, bags, and basketry recovered from the site. Clothing woven by the inhabitants of Windover Bog on looms included hoods and burial shrouds, as well as some fitted clothing and many rectangular or squarish clothing articles.   Seven weaving techniques were discovered, all requiring a loom to accomplish the weave.  Children were buried lovingly with toys.  An atlatl hook was found, as well as a gourd or seed not found anywhere except in Central or South America.  The elderly were found to be at least 60 years old and there was significant evidence that they cared for their sick and infirm in an advanced and caring way.

Medicinal advancements were common to the Americas. Imagine the reaction of the Aztec’s, already familiar with the use of antibiotics, watching the Spaniards praying and pouring hot oil on their wounds!
Indigenous South America also recognized quinine as a cure for malaria. 
15% of the total plant life on earth exists in the Amazon Basin. 16,000 species have been identified as being used by the Indigenous Peoples for their healing properties.  Stimulants, purgatives, and even monoamine oxidase inhibitors were known.  Medicines were used as muscle relaxants, anesthetics, fever reducers, as well as for mental illness, fungal infections, nervousness, menstrual aids, and external healing. 
Even today’s search for medicines for AIDS has yielded greater results when searchers consulted knowledgeable Medicine People first.  It is now acknowledged that the state of Pre-Columbian medicine was significantly more advanced in the Americans than in Europe at the time and life expectancy was significantly longer.
            European Americans depended so heavily on Native medicinal knowledge and remedies that when bottled and prepared medicinal products were introduced as consumer products they invariably had Native names or pictures on their labels.  This continued until the mid-1800's, assuring consumers that they were indeed purchasing a useful and effective product.
        
The Far East far outstripped the rest of the world in the development of technology. China was a treasure trove of invention.  In addition to those inventions and technologies previously mentioned, the Chinese first developed cast iron, porcelain, ship sternpost rudders, canal lock gates, horse stirrups and harnesses, fishing reels, hot air balloons, the seismograph, whiskey, gimbals, umbrellas, crank handles, kites, mechanical clocks, sprocket chains and chain drives, paper money, the iron plow and the seed drill.
In 1040, the first Chinese formulae for gunpowder were published and used in making incendiary arrows, bullets, catapult bombs, and hand grenades.  Later, the flame-thrower or fire-spear was developed.  In 1288, iron barrels utilizing high nitrate gunpowder and projectiles were developed.  The Chinese went on to make guns that shot lead balls the size of coins, led pellets, flames and poison.  36 barrel “cartwheel” guns, mortars and bombs followed soon thereafter.  By the mid-1200’s poison bombs, gas, and fire-oil were created and by 1277 they created land mines. 
These devices began to trickle into Europe by 1300.  The revolution of Knights, brought about by the European importation of the Chinese stirrup, were soon being blown to bits by gunpowder and its byproducts.    
Metallurgy and metal manufacturing were a major part of the Chinese military institution.  The Sung’s "million man army" almost literally ate up iron and steel.
William Kelly’s bringing four Chinese steel experts to Kentucky in 1845 preceded the Bessemer process of refining steel products.  They taught him the process they had used for 2000 years.  The Hau Nan Tzu, published in 120 BC, described the process of removing carbon from cast iron by blowing oxygen on it, a technique surprisingly similar to Bessemer’s “discovery”.  The Chinese also used the Siemens process in 500 AD--it was called the Ch’iwu Huai Wen process.
As early as the first century AD, the Chinese constructed suspension bridges, using chains of wrought iron.  It was 1809 before a similar one was created in the west.    
The first completely printed book was completed in China in 868 AD. The Chinese made large print runs for ordinary books, even calendars and horoscopes.  Having been writing since 2000 BC, the oldest Chinese paper is from Shensi Province and was made between 140 and 87 BC.  It was created from pounded hemp.  The Chinese used paper for clothing, shoes, and toilet paper (which amazed Europeans).  Paper reached India by 700 AD and Islamic Nations by 800 AD.  The Arabs jealously guarded the secret for a time, selling Europeans paper at a hefty profit.  It was the Italians who finally brought paper manufacturing to Europe in the 13th Century.
As previously mentioned, when Guttenberg first set his Bible to print, Chinese libraries already held editions of books over 550 years old.
The Chinese were also responsible for maritime advances, inventing fore and aft rigging, the lateen sail, the sternpost rudder, and watertight bulkheads.  While Columbus was trying to get support for his adventure, Chen Ho sent to India and East Africa fleets of Chinese vessels armed with cannons and manned by many thousands of sailors and passengers.  Were it not for the Eurocentric nature of our history, Chen Ho might be regarded as the first and greatest of the maritime explorers.
The Chinese had toothpaste at a time when Europeans barely had teeth!  Mathematics and astronomical calculations were also known in China.  Liu Hui calculated the value of Pi in 200 AD.  Eclipses were recorded and dated as far back as 1400-1200 BC.  4th Century Chinese (as well as 13th Century Arabs) recognized the use of fossils to study history while 17th Century Oxford faculty members taught that fossils were false clues left by the Devil to deceive man.  The K’ao Kung Chi, in 1100 BC, set down quantitative chemical analysis not more than 5% off from modern day analysis.  Mohist physicists set down the law of motion in 300 BC, 2000 years before Newton.  The Shu-Ching, 2700 BC, stated that matter was composed of distinct and separate elements 1700 years before Empedocles.  It also hypothesized that sunbeams were comprised of particles, a hypothesis later put forward by Einstein and Planc.  The creation stories of Egypt, India and China all began with a “Big Bang”.  In 500 BC, the Chinese developed their first antibiotic--from soybean curd.  Chinese alchemists were empirically familiar with the conservation of mass 1500 years before Lavoisier.  Wei Po Yang’s Unification Of Three Principles, written around 140 AD, describes an experiment similar to the cinnabar-mercury-sulfur reaction.  But it was the vessel described that was important.  It is used for melting and subliming different metals and is, at once, similar and more complex than Lavoisier’s pelican.          
Advanced technologies are not the sole property of today’s modern civilization.  Even in 3000 BC, a large technologically advanced civilization existed in India.  Well-organized cities utilized terra cotta ceramics and exhibited a huge trade industry.  Uniform buildings had hidden drains, toilets, sewers, bathing rooms in each house.  Municipal drainage systems featured earthenware drainpipes joined with asphalt. 

Advanced civilizations have occurred time and time again throughout recorded and unrecorded history.  As more and more exploration of the ocean floor is undertaken, we are certain many more civilizations will be discovered that may challenge our ideas of even our present state of advancement.  One fact should be obvious--the present state of scientific and technological advancement owes its successes, not to a few European Greeks, Italians, Germans, English, Spanish and French inventors, scientists, and mathematicians--but to a legion of minds that encompassed the Earth.
The utilization and plagiarizing of the worlds inventive and scientific disciplines has created a civilization that, above all else, prizes "ingenious devices" of every nature. These single-minded pursuits, particularly in the areas of weaponry, energy, medicine, industry, and technology have contributed to the world's knowledge.  But it is not the science, math, technology, industry, and invention that represent the significance of the European contribution.  Rather, it is the unintended consequences of colonialism, militarism, a huge slave trade and access to new areas of rich natural resources that allowed those disciplines to proceed so quickly.  The rush to progress and develop industrially and technologically has come, not from any altruistic desire to serve the interests of humanity, but to enhance and serve the goals of profit and power.  We have yet to travel far enough down the timeline of the future to know whether this fledgling civilization will survive its "ingenious devices".

 

















BC/ Four                                                                       BlueWolf & Lupe'/Shirts N' Skins

What We Know

"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so."     Felix Okaye

"What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors."      James Baldwin

“American Indians have been the most lied about subset of our population."  
  James Loewen

Historians, scholars and teachers are always amazed at how little knowledge Americans have of history.  Compounding the problem is the fact that high school history texts, a primary source for most Americans, are filled with myths, omissions, distortions, and outright lies.
National history texts indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of Eurocentric colonialism, while excusing its failings and excesses as acceptable or inevitable.  The basic tenant of colonialism--greed--and the horrific and tragic consequences visited on Indigenous populations are ignored, downplayed and skimmed over in favor of the myth of heroic discovery.   As Francis Jennings said, "The invaders anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise.  They therefore (prepared)...quantities of propaganda to overpower their own countrymen's scruples. The propaganda eventually took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics.  We live with it still."     
         There have been a number of good books about U.S. history published in the last few years, notably James Loewen’s book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me” (which we have utilized extensively in this section), and Howard Zinn’s,  “A Peoples History Of The United States”. 
           















 BC/ Five                                                                      BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

 One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

The first part of our historical journey toward understanding how White men think must begin on the European continent.
Modern archaeology has thrown a monkey wrench into popularly accepted myths regarding the Roman Empire and the economic stability of Europe.  By the beginning of the seventh century most of Western Europe was in a state of complete economic degeneration.  Even in formerly highly urbanized areas city life had shrunk dramatically.  This proves that the previous belief in a highly developed Western European society, characterized by wealth and sophistication emanating from the Roman Empire appears to have been significantly exaggerated.  Since a commercial unity had never been achieved, the fragile Roman unity of the west seems to have rapidly evaporated after AD 400.  This event has a similar parallel on the American continent.  Early fur traders brought advanced weapons to the northern Innuit and encouraged them to alter their economic patterns to participation in the fur trade.  When the demand for furs dropped precipitously after a few generations, the trading companies pulled out and the Natives were unable to procure shells for their rifles.  Having become dependent on this new hunting technology they were unable to return to traditional methods quickly enough to avert mass starvation.  Similarly, the Roman economic “pump” of large scale commerce and taxation drove the economy in Britain and other western European areas.  When that “pump” was withdrawn, the expanded economic map was unable to sustain itself, and localities were forced to draw into themselves and shut down their larger relationships.
Middle European Tribes were first Christianized en masse between the ninth and fourteenth centuries.  This provoked a violent reaction the like of which was not seen again in Europe for many centuries.  The political change from Tribalism to Monarchy, as well as the transformation from Earth-based spirituality to dogmatic Christianity, was vehemently resisted by the leaders and the common people.  As Leslie Tihany wrote, “The Chiefs resisted because they knew in their hearts that the substitution of a centralized monarchy for the old tribal order, of feudal fiefs for lands contractually divided among the Clans, would bring social and economic degradation.”  The Peoples were totally against assimilation because they realized it meant the end of volatile freedoms, and the coming of immobile subordination.  Though the resentment against foreigners pushing the new agenda was great, there was an even greater resentment against leaders who collaborated with the eastern or western emperors. These collaborations, which resulted in diminished sovereignty for the Tribes, precipitated quite a number of mass uprisings.  The focus of the resistance continued until the Traditional Leaders were wiped out, at which time the peasants only form of demonstrating took the form of open rejection of the established Church.  Gradually, the people accepted Christianity and the Old Ways were lost.
Nevertheless, generations later, the Tribal Peoples were still shaving their heads and wearing leggings.  On the Eurasian steppe, the horse retained its position of influence and mystic power.  Like the bison in America, the every part of the horse was utilized and venerated.  The Peoples  recognized the Spiritual Power inherent in the trees, rocks, water, fire, sun, moon, and stars. They carried amulets and talismans.  They remembered and venerated their ancestors.  Their Spiritual and medicinal leaders kept the natural world in balance with ceremonials, healings, and  cleansings.  Group singing was a common form of worship and social fellowship.  Indeed, at that time, Christians of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds believed that the “Saints” could be present on the Earth, and they gloried in a universe crowded with intermediary beings, invisible guides and protectors.  Theirs were not the empty skies of the Post Enlightenment modern European missionary Christian.
 In the ninth and tenth centuries, Bulgarian, Bohemian, and Serbian mass executions were the order of the day, as the newly baptised Christian Leadership struggled to gain control.  Even after the tribal leaders had been drowned in blood, the common peasantry revolted against the Greek Religion and its supporters, mainly due to desperate conditions brought about by war, famine, plague, and unusually severe winters.  The resistance continued in other areas even into the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Hungarian Christians made non-Christian worship punishable by decapitation. The uprisings in Poland during the thirteenth century were quelled by the Order of the Teutonic Knights, who went about establishing German colonies from Pomerania to Estonia.  Lithuanian resistance continued into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Some areas of Europe embraced a curious mixture of evangelical Christianity and Oriental dualism.  Though some scriptural justification for these beliefs undoubtedly descended from the Epistles of Paul, a significant amount of the early Persian Mystery Religions permeated the doctrine of the so-called Bogomil Heresy.  Bogomil preached that there were two worlds, one visible and temporary, one invisible and eternal.  The world was a battleground between good and evil, darkness and light.  The body was the creation of the Devil, while the soul an everlasting emanation of God.  Three Popes preached Crusades against the Bogomil Heresy, however we can see the lasting effects of those early Persian beliefs in the fundamental Christian Vision espoused by Modern American Christianity.   
The other major Heretical Movement spawned in Middle Europe was that of the Hussites, precurser to Luther’s reformation.  Their animosity to the foreign-sponsored religious establishment in fourteenth century Czechoslovakia would ultimately change the face of Europe and prepare the world for revolutions to come in Holland, England, America, France and Russia.  Bogomil and Hussite freedom fighters proved to be an inspiration to romantic nationalists four hundred years later. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
As the Germanic Tribes settled into the former Roman Empire, civilization fragmented.  From 900 to 1100 AD, tribes and city-states engaged in countless small wars.  For protection they began to band together into hierarchical feudal contracts, establishing fiefs of divided land supporting at least one armored mounted knight.  Knights swore oaths of loyalty to their liege, and fighting became a way of life for the upper class.  By the 12th century it was well established as a phenomenon in France, Spain, and England.  The first tournaments were bloodthirsty affairs with few of the civil constraints and protections of the sporting events of the 13th and 14th centuries.  These events even drew the ire of the Church.  
          In the 14th century, France and Italy, having regularly commissioned armies for their regular campaigns began to have problems with the decommissioned soldiers in between conflicts.  These out-of-work soldiers took to rampaging and plundering the countryside as an alternative occupation.  The Church threatened them with every punishment it could until, fearing for the safety of the whole Christian community, it ordered a Crusade against the marauders.  Almost immediately however, a viable alternative came to light, and a Holy War was suggested.  Veterans were enlisted to go to the Eastern Mediterranean, Hungary, and Spain to fight the advance of Muslims. 
Concurrently, between 1348 and 1350, plague killed fully one third of the population of Europe.  Medieval citizens were convinced that the plague was God's punishment for human sins.  Thinking the Day of Judgement was imminent they neglected to plant crops, gave themselves over to alcohol, and experienced almost complete civil and economic chaos.  The entire culture was affected with fear as death and guilt accumulated.  The artistic motifs of the time clearly indicate to what extent the populace was overwhelmed.  Milder accompanying plagues continued to ravage Europe until the seventeenth century.  Starvation, pestilence, and landless poverty deeply affected the minds and values of the European peasantry.
The Church saw the opportunity to further cement its iron-fisted control over the populace as each of the great European nations was inundated with crime following the plagues and relating to swordplay, duels, and general ruffians and criminals making use of their skills in a society of chaos.
Institutional conflicts between England, France, Spain, and Portugal significantly sapped the resources of the European continent.  During the reoccurring wars between England and France, large areas of land were salted to keep the peasantry starving.  After occupations, soldiers routinely destroyed every farm and household implement they could to keep the populace impoverished.   Poverty was extreme and contributed to what later became a European drive to obtain and increase holdings and wealth, even beyond reasonable standards.  Years of mistreatment at the hands of nobles, armies, and criminals, created a social terrorism that resulted in peoples maniacally driven to secure for themselves and their families every security and material wealth possible with little thought given to others not so fortunate.  The concept that wealth is achieved through divine intervention, nobility, and merit only strengthened during those times of deprivation.   
With the resources of Europe destroyed and depleted, the major European Powers increasingly looked at expanding their eastern trade. With evidence at hand that shortcuts or new lands might be available to them over the Eastern horizon, adventurers like Cristoforos Columbus proposed expeditions to the Spanish Crown.  In anticipation of encountering new pagan cultures, the first Papal Bull, Romanua Pontifex, Jan 8 1455 was issued. (Edited)
           " We bestow favors and special graces on those Catholic champions to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all pagans, to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to appropriate possessions to Christian use and profit."
People from other continents had reached America many times previous to 1492, notably the Norse Vikings and the Afro-Phoenicians.  Some of these contacts were just trade ventures and some were outright settlement attempts, but significant interaction occurred between the continents during these contacts.  Nevertheless, Columbus made his "discovery" (although many today believe he actually had charts in his possession from previous "discoverers"), and his accounts of riches and the immediate exportation of Native Indigenous slaves created an immediate demand for knowledge about the New World.
           The Renaissance was just over the horizon and a new player was about to emerge--Science.  In the early 1500's, Copernicus engendered a spiritual crisis in Europe with his revelation that the earth was not the center of the Universe.  At approximately the same time Thomas More created a furor with his book "Utopia" based on the Incan Civilization and suddenly the Dark Ages evaporated in an orgasm of discovery, change, and violence.
The Christian Church, which had been the source of much of the stability (and subjugation) of the western world during centuries of European chaos, entered a period of internal and violent upheaval. In time this upheaval came to be called the Protestant Reformation, but during the violence itself, it was referred to by many less attractive adjectives. The institution that called itself the Body of Christ, broke first into debate, then acrimony, then violence and counter-violence, and finally into open warfare between Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians. It produced the Hundred Years War and the conflict between England and Spain that came to a climax in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. That destruction was widely interpreted as a defeat for the Catholic God of Spain at the hands of the Protestant God of England.
As Columbus was rapidly depopulating the islands of Haiti and Jamaica, the Catholic Church, looking to rationalize the slaughter issued the "Requirement" of 1513.  This "appeal" was to be read to any Indigenous populations before any hostilities could commence. (edited)
" ...Wherefore we require you acknowledge the Church as the ruler of the world. If you do not do this we shall enter your country and make war against you and subject you to the yoke of the Church.  We shall take you, your wives, your children and shall make slaves of them, selling and disposing of them as Their Highnesses shall command; we shall take away your goods and do you all the mischief and damage we can and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault!"
Professor Peter deErrico believes these Papal Bulls form the underlying fabric of modern U.S. law as it relates to Native Americans.  He asserts that Supreme Court Justice (John) Marshall borrowed from the Papal Bulls the essential legalisms needed for State power over Indigenous Nations--Johnson Vs McIntosh.  Native Americans have been denied their rights under Federal Law from 1823 until today--because they were not originally Christian.  Since Johnson Vs McIntosh has never been overruled, the legal foundations for U.S. Sovereignty over Indigenous Nations has remained "Christian Discovery", concealed by the insertion of the word  "European" for the word "Christian" in subsequent history and law books.  The "age of discovery" became the "age of European expansion".  Even Marshall admitted the doctrine was an "extravagant...pretension", which "may be opposed to natural right" but "these claims have been established and maintained...by the sword."   (deErrico)
Our next essay should rightfully be about Columbus, but we will digress here to paint a short picture contrasting the history of the Americas with Europe during that same time period.
 

   



BC/ Six                                                                        BlueWolf &  Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Native Civilization BC


Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe.  New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rainforest may be a largely human artifact.”
Charles C. Mann

It is said that the bustle and noise of the market at Tenochtitlan could be heard fully four miles away.  Our "science" essay painted a fair picture of the advances in North America but we figured a few more wouldn't hurt.
It is often said by many American Indigneous Peoples that a significant number of the continental Tribes are originally descended from the Grandfather Quiche Maya Nation in Guatemala.  In our discussions of Civilization, we skirted the nature of how civilizations begin and then radiate outward.  Rome and Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia were undoubtedly centers that most completely represented the accepted characteristics of modern civilization.  To be sure, the characteristics that defined those civilizations radiated out from those centers to varying degrees, diminishing somewhat as they got further and further from their source.
 If we accept those definitions of civilization, we know that there were many highly developed societies and governments throughout the Americas at different times in the last 6000 years.  The fact that the whole continent was not civilized to the point of urbanization is easily understood by the vast distances and natural geo-physical boundaries found on the continents.  Nevertheless, civilizations were huge and their influences were felt far and wide.
The Maya deserve to be credited as one of the world’s great civilizations.  It fulfilled even the dubious characteristics of civilization demanded by Europeans attempting to justify their colonization by preaching the myth of pristine and unoccupied territories with only sporadic nomadic settlements.
The Mayan Civilization stretched from Guatemala to the western Honduras and El Salvador, to Chiapas and to Yucatan.  The Mayans had a written language, though they jealously guarded their books from early Spanish invaders, hiding them so well that it is only in the last century and one half that modern civilization has become aware of the extent of their literacy.  Recorded on smoothed, bleached, and folded bark and cloth, Bartolome De Las Cases reports that they formed “their large books with such keen and subtle skill that we might say our writing were not an improvement over theirs.”  Las Cases credited them with knowing “the origin of everything pertaining to their religion, the founding of villages and cities, how the kings and lords carried out their memorable deeds, how they governed and how they elected their successors; they knew about their great men and their courageous captains, of their wars, their ancient customs, and all that belonged to their history.”   They wrote in an elegant and exalted style, and the Mayan Popul Vuh, or Sacred Text is an epic of the most distinguished literary quality. (Morley)  The Popul Vuh, or Book Of The People, among other things, recounts the time before the days of the conquest, when the all the Tribes were united and had not yet dispersed across the region.  The modern Mayan civilization reached its height in the tenth century AD, and continued for a least four more centuries before it began to wind down in the late 15th century. 

Recently discovered roads, bridges, and plazas deep in the Brazilian rainforests belie the myth of a pristine Amazon.  Evidence has found a linked network of urban communities that may have supported thousands of inhabitants.  The roads appear to link together villages in a carefully organized grid-like pattern.  The evidence implies that the inhabitants dramatically changed the local landscape by digging enormous ditches around the villages, building bridges and moats in wetland areas, and cultivating large tracts of land.  Virtually no part of the large area was truly wild.  Even the forested areas appear to have been more akin to a large park than an untouched forest.  Flying over Beni, a Bolivian Province, Charles Mann reports seeing an archipelago of startlingly round islands, hundreds of acres across.  Each island rose ten, thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain.  Trees grew there that could never survive in the water.  These forests were linked by raise berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long.  University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, Clark Erickson believes that 30,000 square miles of forest mounds surround by raised fields and linked by causeways was constructed by a complex populous society. In addition to building up mounds for houses and gardens, these peoples trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grasslands with zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs.  They controlled their habit with fire.  The consistent burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species.
This coincides with evidence found on the East Coast of North America that implies that huge areas were actually landscaped and controlled Native environments.  Fire was an important landscaping tool.  The first settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—carriages could be driven through them.  The annual fall burning by Indians along the Hudson River lit up the banks for miles on end.  Dutch from New amsterdam boated upriver to gawk like tourists at the display.
John Smith, of Pocohontas fame, on visiting Massachussets in 1614 (before disease) remarked that the land was “so planted with gardens and corn fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong, and well-proportioned people…I would rather live here than anywhere.”
 Similar testaments to levels of development and sophistication have been gathered on the eastern Great Plains from west of the Mississippi to Canada and down to the Gulf of Mexico.  The plains were burned regularly and millenia of this kind of land management was a key element in the creation of huge bison farms. 
Yet in all these areas, more than a century later, these carefully managed areas had returned to a wild state due to the deaths of their gardeners.  Carefully managed animal populations exploded into huge herds and flocks.  We know it was not always so because the archaeological record shows no evidence of these huge populations of bison, elk, antelope, doves, etc. in pre-Columbian sites.  Nevertheless, as historians began to “forget” the level of sophistication and development the first Europeans found, history was rewritten to reflect the wild pristine myth of an entire continent empty of people.
As for the longevity of Native democracy, approximately 145 Todadahos have been recorded on the Cane of Enlistment (still in possession of the Haudenosaunee) since, only days following a total eclipse of the sun, the Seneca Nation was the last to ratify the Great Law Of Peace around 940 AD.  This Confederacy had been at peace with its neighbors for 552 years at the time Columbus was being rescued by the Tainos. 
We acknowledge that there have been cyclical periods of civilization and flowering cultures, not only in the America's, but all over the world.  All the efforts to achieve immortality in government or civilization have failed.  The idea that modern civilization is somehow different in its progress (or decline) will be realized (or not) generations from now.  One fact is certain. Native Indigenous peoples on the North and South American continents were significantly more advanced and "civilized" than any previous scholarship in the last two centuries ever dreamed of. 
 








BC/ Seven                                                                    BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

The Tragedy Of Cristoforos

"The Indies were discovered in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-two. In the following year a great many Spaniards went there with the intention of settling the land. And all the land so far discovered is a beehive of people...there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples."
Bartolome' De Las Casas

When Taino Indians saved Christopher Columbus from certain death on Oct. 12, 1492, what occurred next was neither beautiful nor heroic.  Columbus wrote, "I swear that there is not a better people in the world than these: more affectionate, affable, or mild.  They love their neighbors as themselves, and they always speak smilingly."
         His diaries indicated he was greeted with the most generous hospitality he had ever known; yet he immediately began the encomienda system tying Indian slaves to their stolen lands, and was personally responsible for their slaughter. Columbus wrote in his journals.  "I saw that they were very friendly to us... They are all of a good size and stature, and handsomely formed, their eyes were large and very beautiful...Weapons they have none, nor are acquainted with them. They are good to be Ordered about, to be made to Work, Plant, and do whatever is wanted, to build towns and be taught to go Clothed and accept our Customs.  The air is as soft as April in Seville." "Our Lord in his goodness guide me that I may find this gold".
In 1492 the big island of Hispanola was one of the most densely populated areas of the known world.  In January 1493, 39 men are left behind to guard the fort at La Navidad in the "New World" while a triumphant Columbus sails back to Spain with parrots, gold, and Indians.  In November, Columbus returns, this time with a fleet of 17 ships, 1500 men, as well as horses, dogs, armor, and cannons. The 39 men who had been left to guard the fort are found dead. The official Chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, writes that the "natives could not endure the excesses, for the Spaniards took their women and used them as they wished and committed other violence's and offenses..."  
Even before the ships arrived on Haiti, Columbus has begun the practice of rewarding his lieutenants with Native women to rape.  On Haiti, sexual slavery is common, including the abuse of pre-teen children.  Columbus writes, “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from 9 to 10 are now in demand”.  To ensure the cooperation of the Natives, Columbus orders disfigurement, removal of the ears or nose, as punishment for even the most minor offenses.  Oviedo writes that the Native women began killing their newborn children and mass suicides were common.  The honeymoon of the "discovery" was over.
In 1494, Columbus and company gather green wood to place under the feet of the same Tainos that saved him.  The conquistadors string them up in groups of thirteen, representing Jesus and the 12 apostles.  The burning is slow, methodical, and torturous.  Columbus notes in his journal, "The weather is like April in Andalusia."
Columbus "discovers" the island now called Jamaica.  Terrified Indians flee from soldiers and their crossbows. Dogs pursue the Indians.  In the Old World these dogs are trained to hunt wild game.  In the "New World" they learn to savor human flesh.  Columbus writes, "...so many vultures flocked there to scavenge on the bodies that they darkened the sky."
By 1496, after only four years, half the native population of Hispanola was dead.  In 1498 Columbus wrote, "From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many as 4000 slaves to be sold."  The "New World", once the mother of countless peaceful and happy Native peoples, had been literally transformed into Hell.  Eleven years after Columbus pronounced the Indians as "beautiful, loving, pliant and without knowledge of weapons or violence", he now described them as "unfriendly, cruel, and hostile savage savages."
Within 49 years, the 3 to 8 million people Native to the island of Hispanola were reduced by their new Christian neighbors to two hundred, and in a few more years--none.
In 1542, the great historian Bartoleme’ de Las Casas opposed the belief that Indians were inferior and stood up for their rights as sentient human beings.  De Las Casas' arguments were so powerful it caused Spain to enact laws forbidding slavery (in Spain only), even as slavery gained a stranglehold that lasted three and one-half centuries in the Americas.  Queen Isabella became so outraged by the practice that she actually sent back many of the slaves shipped to Spain by Columbus.  De Las Casas publicly denounced the murder, rape, pedophilia, forced labor, and slavery practiced by the Spaniards and Columbus.  He called it "one of the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and Mankind".  "More than thirty other islands in the vicinity of San Juan are for the most part and for the same reason depopulated, and the land laid waste. On these islands I estimate there are 2,100 leagues of land that have been ruined and depopulated, empty of people."  "Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies."
Columbus himself verified his motives when he wrote in his journal, “Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants to in the world, and can even lift souls up to paradise”. 
Michele de Cuneo confirmed this when writing about the 1494 expedition to Haiti.  “...It seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put into execution his desire to search for gold which was the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers.” 
Despite his murderous nature, Christoforos' "discovery" came to symbolize certain civilized truths; Manifest Destiny justified theft, assimilation or genocide was a reasonable choice for pagans.   A successful violent campaign to destroy Nations validated the superiority of European values and institutions.
Christopher Columbus, Ponce De Leon, and other Spaniards were primarily slave traders and treasure seekers in the “New World".  Hundreds of thousands of Natives of many Nations crossed the oceans heading east to the Canary Islands and Europe before the first Blacks were brought to American shores.  Racial slavery was begun with the practices of these early Spaniards. Indian slavery in America was heavily promoted and in many places one of every four slaves was Indian.
            Concurrently, European nations, bolstered by social organizations controlled and dependent on their burgeoning militaristic economies, were the first to consider enslaving a “race” of people.  After successfully proving it possible with the exportation of thousands of American Natives, they turned toward their African neighbors.  Before 1450, Europeans considered their African neighbors ‘exotic’ but equals.  Timbuctu held a renowned university and library, and was a repository for advanced knowledge of the time.  African Moors brought much of the learning that contributed to the Renaissance in Spain and Italy.  Just as the War of 1812 marked the onset of a plague of amnesia in Colonial minds--from a change in their perception of Natives as intelligent, capable, equals to regarding them as lazy, immoral, barbarous sub-humans--so the 1550’s enslavement of African Natives caused Europeans to forget African contributions and characterize them as stupid, backward, and uncivilized sub-humans.      

One cannot "discover" a hemisphere inhabited by 100 million people, yet the modern celebration of Columbus Day perpetuates the myth that the "New World" was a wilderness containing only a few hunter-gatherer savages awaiting the blessings of civilization.  Bartolome' De Las Casas says it plainly in one of his many letters challenging the public rants of Gines Sepulveda.  "...He falsely defames the larger part of the human race whom the providence of God has scattered abroad in the vast expanses of the Indies."  Hardly mentioned in our modern histories is the fact that the Western Hemisphere was a virtual paradise of ecology and health, that Native agricultural advances currently provide 60 percent of the world's daily diet and hundreds of medicinesl and medicinal techniques that are still used today. 
For us to continue to celebrate this abominable man and the lie of "discovery" is an affront to those who perished under his sword and truly justifies the use of words like "savage" and "uncivilized" to describe not only his actions, but those of the society that honors him.
On the other hand, honoring a man like Bartolome' De Las Casas would be appropriate.  Las Casas, a Dominican Priest, upheld the cause of Native rights to land, life, liberty and self -government in two hemispheres.  Any number of Aristotelian apologists spoke to assure the Crown and the Church that the actions of conquistadors were right and just.  The most foremost among them was Gine' Sepulveda, who composed significant rhetoric in defense of the actions of Columbus and those who followed.  "...The Indians are obliged by natural law to obey those who are outstanding in virtue and character in the same way that matter yields to form, body to soul, sense to reason, animals to human beings, women to men, children to adults, imperfect to more perfect, worse to better, cheapest to most precious and excellent, to the advantage of both.
    This is the natural order, which the eternal and divine law commands be observed, according to Augustine.  Therefore, if the Indians, once warned, refuse to obey this legitimate sovereignty, they can be forced to do so for their own welfare by recourse to the terrors of war.  And this war will be just by both civil and natural law, according to the second, third, and fifth chapters of the Politics of Aristotle." 
     Las Casas answered.."...I want to set forth...the frightful and disgraceful crimes that my own people, the Spaniards, have inflicted in violation of justice and right during these last few years on the Indians, who have been ruined by terrible butchery, and to wash away the shame brought upon that name among all the nations..."  "What good can come from these military campaigns...how will they become our friends when children see themselves deprived of parents, wives of husbands, and fathers of children and friends.  When they see those they love wounded, imprisoned, plundered, and reduced from an immense number to a few?  When they see their rulers stripped of authority, crushed, and afflicted with a wretched slavery?"  "For the Creator of every being has not so despised these peoples of the New World that he willed them to lack reason and made them like brute animals, so that they should be called barbarians, savages, wild men and brutes, as they (Sepulveda, et al) think or imagine.  On the contrary, they are of such gentleness and decency..."
           If any European of the time deserves a holiday in their honor, we think it should be Bartolome' De Las Casas.
 
A Short Biography of Bartolome’ De Las Casas
Las Casas first trip to the Americas was in 1502.  He was eighteen.  In 1512, he became the first ordained priest of the “new world”.  In 1514 he freed his Native slaves and began vigorously interceding on their behalf with local authorities.  Soon he was challenging the entire system of encomienda, started by Columbus.  Despite his powerful and influential enemies, in 1520 he was granted a hearing by Charles the First of Spain to defend his point of view.  He was supported by the public pronouncements of Antonio De Montesinos (the first Spanish Citizen to denounce the treatment of Native Indigenous Peoples in America), and the Bishop of Darien, Juan Quevedo.
Charles the First was swayed by Las Casas argument and agreed that the Indies should not be governed by force of arms.  Enforcing his decree was another matter.  Pope Paul III’s 1537 Papal Bull, Sublimis Deus, proclaimed that American Indians were rational beings with souls and their lives and property should be protected.  In 1542, the Neyes Nuevas (New Laws) forbade Native slavery and attempted to put forward a plan to squeeze out the encomienda system within a generation.
 Las Casas oral reading of his book, “The Devastation Of the Indies”, to the Royal Court was influential in getting the Neyes Nuevas.  The New Laws started a revolt in the Americas by angry encomenderos.  When Charles V revoked key statues of the New Laws, Las Casas went on the offensive and refused absolution to Spaniards who refused to free their slaves or pay restitution.  He issued a “confessor” manual for Priests that reiterated his refusal for absolution.  This created a public outrage.  De Las Casas claimed that all the wealth was ill-gotten and invalidated Spanish claims.  This struck at the very basis of Spain’s legitimacy in the New World and got Las Casas immediately recalled by the Council Of The Indies. This led to the 1550 showdown with Sepulveda.ordered by Charles V.  Las Casas once again proved his argument but the Court refused to publicly affirm his position.  In 1552, he published  “The Devastation Of The Indies” without prior approval of the Inquisition.   Its publication seriously undermined the Spanish moral claim to the Americas.  Immediately translated into other European languages, it became a weapon of those other nations against the Spanish Empires’ claims in the “Indies”.  His prestige protected him from official punishment even though he was accused of Treason on two continents. He later completed his two largest works; the anthropological Apologetica Historica, and his three volume, Historia de las Indias.  Both works sought to disprove the Spanish view of themselves as superior the Indigenous Americans.  He remained an advocate for Indian Rights until his death in 1566.


 
















BC/ Eight                                                                     BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

Invisible Warriors

"The Americans were able to conquer America not because of their military genious, or their ambition, or their greed.  They conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological warfare."      
Howard Simpson

"European settlers and invaders discovered an inhabited land.  Had it been pristine wilderness then it would possibly be so still, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home."  
 Francis Jennings

Previously we wrote about what Columbus and his men took from the Native Peoples.  Now we'll discuss what was "given" back to the Natives by the various intrepid explorers of the New World.  The first guests they brought were viral hepatitis, smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, and measles.  Cholera, malaria and scarlet fever came later.
Many diseases are passed back and forth between humans and livestock.  Before 1492, Indigenous America had no domesticated livestock at all, and had no experience with such diseases.   America had numerous places where social density was significant, but none that were as poorly maintained as the sewage strewn, filth encrusted streets of Europe.  Indigenous Americans were obsessed with basic hygiene and cleanliness, and bathed and sweated regularly.   Many of the Northern Europeans, and particularly the English, believed that bathing was unhealthy and utilized perfumes and scents to disguise personal odors.  They rarely removed their clothing more than a piece at a time.  According to the personal biographer of Squanto, Feenie Ziner, the Indian "tried, without success, to teach them to bathe."  These practices, however disgusting, and the general living conditions in urban Europe had caused the Europeans to acquire at least some defense against the plagues and diseases they carried, and the fatality rate.  
On the other hand, the Native practice of sweating together and the realities of communal living provided the perfect breeding ground for viral outbreaks within defenseless peoples.  Europeans had learned during the plague to isolate their sick and dying.  Native people’s practices usually included the entire family, with medicine people, gathering at the bedside in support of the sick or dying.
The Spaniards introduced many of the original diseases as early as the latter 1400's and early 1500's.  When they first marched into the capital of Tenochtitlan, they had to walk upon the disease-ridden bodies because there was no spaces of ground between them.  Records kept throughout the history of those early days, particularly those kept by early Missionaries and the Church, document the incredible loss of life that occurred throughout the North American continent.  American historians in the mid-1800s made numerous references to the huge original American and Meso-American civilizations that had disappeared, leaving only small remnants of their populations. Yet their estimates of the original populations were only a fraction of what is now known to have existed.  It wasn’t until insistent anthropologists consulted  16th and 17th century Church documents that the bulging bibles of Catholic friars divulged the names of the millions dead; recording, in many instances, the passing of entire villages.
On the East Coast of the U.S., Europeans had been making contact with the Natives for a century.  Because of the tremendous populations they encountered, and numerous failed attempts, they gave up trying to establish settlements and never anticipated an opportunity to colonize the region permanently. 
But in 1617  New England, the extermination began with the shipwreck of a French vessel.  Just four years prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims, and within three years, 90 to 96 percent of the Indigenous inhabitants of coastal New England were dead or dying.  Even before the Mayflower landed King James of England gave thanks to Almighty God for sending "this wonderful plague among the savages."
J.W. Barber published this description in 1829.  "A few years before the Plymouth settlers, a very mortal sickness raged with great violence among the Indians... Whole towns were depopulated...and their bodies were found lying above ground, many years after.  The Massachusetts Indians are said to have been reduced from 30,000 to 300 fighting men.  In 1633, (again) the small pox swept off great numbers."
Robert Cushman, a British eyewitness, wrote, "only the twentieth person is scare left alive."   Survivors, unable to cope with the huge numbers of corpses, fled their villages carrying the disease to other villages who had yet to come in contact with any Europeans at all.  The Pilgrim, Howard Simpson, described what those newly arrived settlers witnessed.  "Villages lay in ruins because there was no one left to tend them.  The ground was strewn with skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and no one was left to bury them."
Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, called the plague "miraculous".  He wrote, in 1634, "for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them."   Historians in the twentieth century have had a hard time envisioning such a severe death rate.  The black plague of Europe was mild compared to this.  But their bias is understandable.  The circumstances of the pandemics were unusual, especially as they compared to the European experience of only a 30% death rate.
Nevertheless, accounts like William Bradford's tell the tale compellingly.  "...It pleased God to afflict these Indians with such a deadly sickness that out of 1000, 950 of them died."
Missionaries were able to use the plague as a powerful tool of conversion.  As with the Europeans during their plague, Native societies were devastated and struggled to find a reason for these horrors.  Native spirituality had had no experience with these particular enemies and could find little explanation.  Christians, however, had a built in system to explain the whys and wherefores of the crisis.
As a geopolitical event, these epidemics constituted the most important circumstances of the early centuries of the European invasion.  In New England, the net result was that for the next 50 years the British colonists would not encounter any real Indian resistance to their settlements.  The continuing small pox epidemic insured that a consistent campaign could not be sustained.  In the words of the Puritan minister, Increase Mather, "God ended the controversy by sending the smallpox among the Indians.  Whole towns were swept away, in some of then not so much as one Soul escaping Destruction."
Historian Karen Kupperman writes, "The technology and culture of Indians on America's east coast were genuine rivals to those of the English... One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating.  If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly..."
Perhaps the High School history text, "Life And Liberty" says it best.  "If the Pilgrims had arrived at Plymouth a few years earlier they would have found a busy Indian village surrounded by farmland.  As it was, an epidemic had wiped out most of the Indians... Fortunately for the Pilgrims, the cleared fields remained..."
Everywhere in America, the very first European explorers found many more human beings than were found by subsequent generations.  In 1539, Hernando De Soto arrived in Tampa Bay, Florida with 600 soldiers, 200 horses and 300 pigs.  For four years his forces roamed through Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas wrecking havoc on everything and everybody they touched. One of his men wrote the lands were “very well peopled with large towns, two or three of which were to be seen from one town.”  Eventually they came to a cluster of small cities protected by earthen walls, moats, and deadeye archers.  Soto died on the journey of fever and no European ventured into those areas again for almost 100 years.   French explorers found the same areas deserted. La Salle did not find one village in two hundred miles, where De Soto’s men had found at least 50 settlements. Researchers believe that it was the pigs who ultimately did the most damage to the Native civilizations.
Quickly breeding and carrying viral microbes, the pigs could have contaminated not only people, but forest animals as well, particularly deer and turkeys. 
    The Coosa city-states in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization on the Texas–Arkansas border disappeared soon after De Soto.  The Caddos had monumental architecture, public plazas, ceremonial platforms, etc.  So did many other southeastern civilizations of the time.  After De Soto, they stopped building community centers and began building community cemetaries.
    In 1792, the Pacific Northwest was visited by the Brit, George Vancouver, who found a charnel house of bones scattered on the beaches of Puget Sound.  Similarly, Lewis and Clark encountered substantially more Natives in their 1806 expedition in Oregon than were found there a mere twenty years later--an indication of more than one cycle of pandemic.
Henry Dobyns has compiled a list of no less than 93 epidemics among Indigenous Americans between 1520 and 1918.  Almost half of these consisted of diseases deadly to Natives: bubonic plague, smallpox, measles and influenza.  Many of these outbreaks became pandemic in nature sweeping east and west until they reached the Atlantic and Pacific, and north and south until reaching the Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
Conservative contemporary estimates of pre-pandemic populations in the Americans are approximately one hundred million.  The population of Europe at the time of colonization stood at about seventy million.  Mid-1800 historians estimated the original population of the entire Americas at about sixteen million, but that had decreased to about two million by the time of their publishing.  (That figure eventually declined to about 300,000.)
Latter historians like James Mooney, eager to forget the pandemics and prove the mythical postulation of a wild unpopulated continent, estimated the original population at one million.  That these estimates could be revised downward one hundred times to "forget" these honorable dead, only demonstrates the lengths to which American educators and historians were (and are) willing to bend reality to justify and rationalize the past.  Did we say past?  As recently as 1991, miners and loggers in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela infected the Native population of Yanomamos, killing more than a fourth of their entire population.
One popular American High School history text still utilizes the myth when it reports that "The American Republic was from the outset uniquely favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they were able to be eliminated or shouldered aside." 
Though perhaps semi-correct in its final description, the land, as Loewen says, was "not a virgin, but recently widowed."
Yet the myth of wild and pristine lands beckoning to wide-eyed pilgrims yearning for freedom and adventure still pervades the average American's understanding of history.  It is hard to imagine this to be the case since a large number of white men succumbed to these illnesses as well, but the timelines of relationship have grown shorter and shorter over time, and the families of European descendants have forgotten.  That forgetting will prove to be a significant factor in the way White men think.        



BC/ Nine                                                                      BlueWolf & Lupe/ Shirts N' Skins

Giving Thanks And Thanksgiving

"The chief design of all parties concern'd was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming more at sudden Gain, than to form any regular Colony."    
One of the first Virginians


To Native Peoples, Thanksgiving is a daily event.  Every gathering or ceremony includes the concept of thanksgiving.  Events throughout the year have always had feasting and thanksgiving.  For thousands of years this has been so.        
           European American history actually began on the West Coast, but the mythic history of the United States is at Plymouth Rock, November 9, 1620.  In point of fact, the very first non-Native settlers in the country we now know as the United States were African slaves who revolted in 1526 and were left by the Spanish in South Carolina to become part of the Native Nations there.
           Nevertheless, The Thanksgiving Story, and the Story of Plymouth Rock have become a major part of the civil religion of America.  Whitewashed and filmed in Technicolor, Thanksgiving assures Americans that "God was on our side", and that our civilization was hacked out of the wilderness in an orderly way by decent, hardworking, idealistic Pilgrims.  Holiday greeting cards and school handouts go even further.  "I is for Indian, who we invited to share our feast" and "They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash.  The Indians had never seen such a feast!"
           Though it was actually the Pilgrims that had never seen such a feast, this type of history has infected Americans.  As James Loewen observes, "This notion that we "advanced" peoples provided for the Indians...is not benign.  It reemerges time and again through our history to complicate race relations."  He reminds us that our history would have us believe that white plantation owners provided everything necessary for their slaves, when the exact opposite is true.  It was the knowledge and labor of Black slaves that created the wealth, and insured the survival of the owners. 
           Even so, it was not the Pilgrims who founded America.  Nineteen years before their arrival the largest transnational corporation of that time, the East India Company, had already staked out lands from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.  The Pilgrims actually arrived on the fourth voyage of the Mayflower, a boat chartered from that corporation.   They arrived at Cape Cod, without supplies, only six weeks before winter.  They were forced to search an empty Native village for corn caches and grave stashes. Nearly a month later, they landed at Plymouth Rock and immediately invaded another village emptied of Natives by mortal illness in search of food and shelter.
           The first Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth and even cannibalism.  They spent much their early days digging holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops.  Starving, they invaded Indian homes and dug up Indian graves for corpses to eat, along with the dried corn, beans and other burial foods. Some of them rented themselves as servants into the few remaining Indian families.  Finally, they began kidnapping Indians to teach them how to farm.   Hardly the heroic picture provided to elementary students at Thanksgiving!  Especially since the entire areas had been previously burned and cleared for generations creating a park-like environment.  Fresh water was readily available and some of the fields had even been recently planted in corn.  Their "New Plimouth" was actually the Indian town of Patuxet.  Rather than starting from scratch in a wilderness, one 1622 colonist wrote, "In this bay wherein we live, in former time hath lived about two thousand Indians." The Pilgrims of 1620 were confirmed communists for at least a number of years after their arrival at Plymouth Rock.

            A paper prepared for the Tacoma School District by Ross, Robertson, Larson and Fernandez, gives us a closer look at the Puritans.
"The Puritans were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were political revolutionaries who not only intended to overthrow the Government of England, but who actually did so in 1649. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not simply refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a generation of Hollywood movies taught us.  In any culture, at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not fit into the mainstream of their society...  At any rate, mainstream Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation completely independent from non-Puritan England. 
            In 1643 the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent occurrence of Armageddon in Europe and hoped to establish here in the "New World" the "Kingdom of God" foretold in the book of Revelation...
            So they came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred others as well, with every intention of taking the land away from its native people to build their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."
            The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first themselves and then everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own interpretation of scripture. 
            Later, New England Puritans used any means, including deception, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end. They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. The Plymouth colonists transmitted this rigid fundamentalism to America, and it sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we have of them.
This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather, the Elder."  In it, Mather gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox, which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors.  He praised God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth".  (It is also important to note that much of this fundamentalism has survived the centuries and can be found, in a watered down state, among the privately expressed opinions of modern fundamentalist Christians--an important clue to a driving force, then and today, as to how some white men (and women) think. -- the authors)  
           "The Wampanoag were actually invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be noted that the Indians, possibly out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.   A generation later, after the balance of power had indeed shifted, the Indian and White children of that Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the genocidal conflict known as King Philip's War.  At the end of that conflict most of the New England Indians were either exterminated or refugees among the French in Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for black slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of the South, thus founding the American-based slave trade."
          The modern story of Thanksgiving is a conglomerate myth.  No one used the word "Pilgrims" until 1870 and they weren't even mentioned in history books until the 1890's.  It was never an early American tradition, except for the ceremonies of Indigenous Americans who had celebrated autumnal harvest feasts for hundreds of years.  Days of Thanksgiving differed within the colonies, and were held for different reasons.  Many celebrated the slaughter of Indians or particular "victories over the savages."  Even the specifics of Squanto's missionary-like work among the uncivilized and incapable whites have been twisted and turned beyond recognition.  It was in 1863, during the Civil War, that Lincoln, desperately looking for some spark of patriotism to inspire the Union, declared a national day of Thanksgiving.
          Our contemporary mix of myth and history about the "First" Thanksgiving at Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s. Our country was desperately trying to pull together its many diverse peoples into a common national identity. To many writers and educators at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, this also meant having a common national history. This was the era of the "melting pot" theory of social
progress, and public education was a major tool for social unity. It was with this in mind that the federal government declared the last Thursday in November, 1898, as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving.
            In consequence, what started as an inspirational bit of New England folklore, soon grew into the full-fledged American Thanksgiving we now know. It emerged complete with stereotyped Indians and stereotyped Whites, and a mythical significance as our "First Thanksgiving.  Since then, Thanksgiving has taken on an almost religious fervor.  In 1970, to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim's landing, the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked Wampanoag Elder, Frank James, to contribute to the festivities by making an address.  He was required to present the Department with a copy of his address before the event.  The Department, after reading James' eloquent and truthful remarks, withdrew its invitation.  Its intent was clear.  "Don't fool with our history, even if our history is only a fanciful invention."  In the textbooks of the twentieth century, American history is not intended to be a record of the facts and events of the past, it is intended to be a morality play of feel-good platitudes to engender patriotism and nationalistic fervor in the hearts of students and citizens.  This forgetting, rewriting, whitewashing and re-representing history has a great deal to do with how White men think.





















BC/ Ten                                                                       BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


 The Colonists And Their Elder Brothers


"The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent." 
Congress 1789

"No wrong will ever be done to you by our nation."
-Thomas Jefferson, 1804

"The greatest teachers of American democracy have gone to school with the Indian."
 Felix Cohen


In Thom Hartmann's book, Unequal Protection, he details the economic history of the Colonies just prior to the constitutional convention.  He writes that the economic history of the 1400's and 1500's had the primary European powers, Spain, France, and Holland, viewing England as an uncultured tribe of barbarians.   But the treasures Columbus sent to Spain, particularly slaves and gold, definitely got English attention.  Holland and France had already organized financial consortiums in the early 1500's, but in 1580 Queen Elizabeth licensed Sir Francis Drake to use the Golden Hind for piracy in the interests of the Crown.  She granted monopoly rights over industries and businesses that lasted until the 1624 Statute of Monopolies curbed that power.  Tax laws then became the primary vehicles for corporate monopolization.
In 1600, 218 merchants and noblemen formed the East India Trading Company.  Throughout the 16 and 1700's the Company's influence grew in the Americas and elsewhere.  It had its own private military and police forces.  By 1760 the Company's power had grown massive worldwide and had largely taken control of all international commerce to and from North America.  It stretched itself very thin in the process however and was almost bankrupt by 1770, having problems with colonial small businessmen and entrepreneurs who imported tea and other goods, bypassing the company.
The company responded in exactly the way modern companies do--it attempted to put the small competitors out of business by getting British stockholders to help pass a law requiring a license to import anything into America. The 1767 Townshend Acts and 1773 Tea Act were further examples of further legislation enacted to reduce competition...
The white American thirst for tea required millions of pounds per month, largely supplied at the cheap by Dutch trading companies and imported by American privateers (smugglers). The Tea Act gave the East India Company unlimited access to the American tea trade and exempted them from British taxation of tea exported to the colonies. It even gave them a tax refund on millions of pounds of excess tea they were holding in inventory.  This non-taxed tea was dumped on the American market to kill American small businesses....  Even small tea interests in England began to be killed off by the huge interests of the company.  600 chests of duty free tea were imported in 1773.  This led to the tax revolt and that year 150 Boston tea party goers dumped and destroyed 112 chests of tea in the waters of Boston Harbor.  The British immediately passed a law closing the Harbor down until the Company was reimbursed for the tea.  The Americans refused and only a year and one half later the first shots of the revolutionary war were fired.  It was a war triggered by a transnational corporation trying to deny local businessmen a fair and competitive marketplace.
          
On our historical timeline for human beings on the North American continent we are now past the first wave of disease and well into the second.  By the late 1600's, a greater part of the populations of Native Nations, north and south, had been decimated by small pox and other plagues.   
          Relationships with the colonists and their mother Nations had been going on now for almost 200 years.  Slavery was in full flower and Native Tribes were feeling the pressure of increased European immigration.  Despite the first stirring of the ideals of racial supremacy, the interaction of Europeans and Native Nations led to a phenomena that both intrigued and horrified the Colonists and Conquistadors.   European settlers and soldiers often abandoned their former lives, along with wives, children, and fortunes to--"go Native".   So many were attracted to the Native way of life that the Pilgrims made it a crime for men to wear long hair, and citizens who defected to Indian communities could be condemned to death.
         Hernando De Soto bitterly complained in letters that he had to post guards to keep both the men and women in his company from defecting to Native societies. 
          Sage old Benjamin Franklin said, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” 
         Michel Crevecoeur wrote, “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us, for thousands of Europeans are Indians and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.”
    Even modern anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians agree.  When Charles Mann polled a number of them to answer whether, given a choice at the time, they would have preferred to have been a European or Native, the consensus was unanimously Native.”
    Those interested in the “whys” of this phenomenon have only to examine some of the attributes of European society at the time.    
As with Natives, Hollywood has had more to do with the shaping of America's view of itself than people would imagine.  A whole culture of examination and discussion about the disintegration of the American family has resulted in many volumes detailing the study of this supposed phenomena.  The truth is that the American family has always been disfunctional, at least since Colonial times.
    Carl Degler effectively explodes the myths.  His research showed that the Colonial European family did not revere children as children.  They were regarded as young adults and were given serious responsibilities.   They were not given toys, nor were there school books or age appropriate reading materials.  In portraits, children's faces were always as serious as adults.  It wasn't until almost the middle 1800's that juvenile books began to be printed for children.  Puritan clergymen encouraged their adult flocks not to become too close to their children.  Teenage males were often sent to live with other families.  Child-rearing in colonial times was mostly the responsibility of the father.  It wasn't until the 19th century that parents began to show sentimentality for their offspring and children's birthdays began to be celebrated. 
    The elderly fared no better in colonial families.  Reverence for the elderly began to decline in the 1750's and children began openly defying their authority.  After the Revolutionary War, the language began to reflect this change and a whole slew of denigrating new terms for the elderly came into common use.  Geezer, Old Goat, and others began to be replace Granther, Grandame, Gramfer, and other early forms of Grandmother and Grandfather. 
    The myth of the extended family has been exploded by John Demos, who established that small and nuclear families in American society from the outset were the rule rather than the exception.  Only about 25% of 19th century families were composed of extended relatives, and many of these, we suppose, were recent immigrants.  Despite opinions to the contrary, it has also been established that marriages did not, on the average, occur between very young people.  Marriages between partners in their late twenties was common.  Divorce was so common that even in the 19th century the Government considered it a major sociological problem.  Single parent families are not a recent development either.  Degler shows that in the late 17th century in Virginia, almost all children lived at least part of their formative years with one parent due to the early death of the other.  At least a third suffered the loss of both parents.  Single parent families comprised approximately the same percentage they do today.
    Given these social conditions, we begin to see the reasons why so many Americans of the 19th century were apt to be morally bankrupt sociopaths at best.  Certainly the majority of Americans remained morally and ethically upright, but there was a percentage who were allowed, particularly on the geographical fringes of American society, to indulge their every evil fantasy, often at the expense of People of color.  We are just as certain that those generations of children, deprived of love and family, contributed to the regression in civilization that occurred in the late 18th century. 
   
 One of our favorite subjects in history has to do with early comparisons of societies written by European intellectuals, historians and colonists; particularly their view of Native Nations. 
           E.B. O'Callaghan wrote, "The dominant assumptions of the Enlightenment, near its height during the mid-eighteenth century, cast Indians as equals in intellectual abilities and moral sense to the progressive Euro-American minds of the time. It was not until the nineteenth century that expansionism brought into its service the full flower of systematic racism that defined Indians as children, or wards, in the eyes of Euro-American law, as well as popular discourse."
     Bruce Johansen writes "Now a lack of hierarchy in society, individual freedoms, status and power for women, and more democratic systems than existed in Spain, France, or England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, drew Europeans to the Native way of life. Thomas More's book, Utopia, astounded Europe in the 1500's. Native ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality had significant influence in the philosophies of Europeans like Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu,Voltaire and Rouesseau."  As Felix Cohen observed in 1952, "to John Locke, the champion of tolerance and the right of revolution, the state of nature and of natural equality to which men might appeal in rebellion against tyranny was set not in the remote dawn of history, but beyond the Atlantic sunset."
            Johansen continued, "Anticipating the arguments of Charles Sanford nine years later, Cohen implied that many of the doctrines that played so crucial a role in the American Revolution were fashioned by European savants from observation of the New World and its inhabitants. These observations, packaged into theories, were exported, like the finished products made from raw materials that also traveled the Atlantic Ocean, back to America. The communication among American Indian cultures, Europe, and Euro-America thus seemed to involve a sort of intellectual mercantilism. The product of this intellectual traffic, the theories that played a role in rationalizing rebellion against England, may have been fabricated in Europe, but the raw materials from which they were made were, to Cohen, substantially of indigenous American origin."
           The American Colonists had one hundred and fifty years to observe and contact with the democratic Iroquois Confederacy before beginning to formulate their own democratic ideals.
           O'Callaghan commented that "English and American writers remarked at the Iroquois' diplomatic and military power as early as 1687, when Governor Dongan of New York wrote that the Iroquois "go as far as the South Sea, the North West Passage and Florida to War."  The Iroquois did more than wage war; they were renowned in peacetime as traders, and as orators who traveled the paths that linked Indian nations together across most of eastern North America." 
           The  Nations of the Haudenosaunee confederacy were not the only Native Nations versed in democratic principles but they are the one we will use as an example of a truly democratic civilization.
           O'Callaghan writes: "The first systematic English-language account of the Iroquois' social and political system was published in 1727, and augmented in 1747, by Cadwallader Colden, who, in the words of Robert Waite, was regarded as "the best-informed man in the New World on the affairs of the British-American colonies."   Colden and Benjamin Franklin sat together in many treaty councils and other meetings with the Five Nations.  Both were extremely impressed by what they witnessed.  Colden's official career culminated in 1761 with an appointment as lieutenant governor of the colony. In addition to political duties, Colden carried on extensive research in natural science. He also became close to the Iroquois, and was adopted by the Mohawks.
            In a preface to his History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America, Colden wrote that his account was the first of its kind in English:
           Colden saw a "bright and noble genius" in these Indians' "love of their country," which he compared to that of "the greatest Roman Hero's." "When Life and Liberty came in competition, indeed, I think our Indians have outdone the Romans in this particular.  The Five Nations consisted of men whose Courage and Resolution could not be shaken."
            Colden recognized that contact with Euro-Americans would not improve the Iroquois: "Alas! We have reason to be ashamed that these Infidels, by our Conversation and Neighborhood, have become worse than they were before they knew us. Instead of Vertues, we have only taught them Vices, that they were entirely free of before that time. The narrow Views of private interest have occasioned this."
           Colden's was one of the first widely circulated observations...which compared Indians, especially the Iroquois, to the Romans and the Greeks, as well as other peoples such as the Celts and the Druids.  He wrote: "The present state of the Indian Nations exactly shows the most Ancient and Original Condition of almost every Nation; so, I believe that here we may with more certainty see the original form of all government..."
           Colden believed that the original form of human government was similar to the Iroquois' system, which he described in some detail. This federal union, which Colden said "has continued so long that the Christians know nothing of the original of it," used public opinion extensively:  "Each nation is an absolute Republick by itself, govern'd in all Publick affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems of Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gained by and consists wholly in the opinions of the rest of the Nation in their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force Upon any of their People. Honour and Esteem are their principal Rewards, as Shame and being Despised are their Punishments."
           The Iroquois' military leaders, like the civilian sachems, "obtain their authority . . . by the General Opinion of their Courage and Conduct, and lose it by a Failure in those Vertues," Colden wrote.
            He also observed that Iroquois leaders were generally regarded as servants of their people, unlike European kings, queens, and other members of a distinct hierarchy. It was customary, Colden observed, for Iroquois sachems to abstain from material things while serving their people, in so far as was possible: "Their Great Men, both Sachems [civil chiefs] and captains [war chiefs] are generally poorer than the common people, for they affect to give away and distribute all the Presents or Plunder they get in their Treaties or War, so as to leave nothing for themselves. If they should be once suspected of selfishness, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men, and would consequently lose their authority."
            Iroquois notions of personal liberty also drew exclamations from Colden, who wrote:  "The Five Nations have such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories. They never make any prisoner a slave, but it is customary among them to make a Compliment of Naturalization into the Five Nations; and, considering how highly they value themselves above all others, this must be no small compliment . . ."
           One unnamed writer, quoted by Johansen, sought to refute assumptions that Iroquois women were "slaves of their husbands." "The truth is that Women are treated in a much more respectful manner than in England & that they possess a very superior power; this is to be attributed in a very great measure to their system of Education." The women, in addition to their political power and control of allocation from the communal stores, acted as communicators of culture between generations. It was they who educated the young."
            Cohen expounded further: "It is out of a rich Indian democratic tradition that the distinctive political ideals of American life emerged Universal suffrage for women as well as for men, the pattern of states within a state we call federalism, the habit of treating chiefs as servants of the people instead of as their masters.  The insistence that the community must respect the diversity of men and the diversity of their dreams--all these things were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed.  Politically, there was nothing in the Empires and kingdoms of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to parallel the democratic constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, with its provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, and its suffrage for women as well as for men."

           Colonial interest in Six Nation treaty accounts was high enough by 1736 for a Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin, to begin publication and distribution of them. The tone of the treaty councils was that of a peer relationship.   During the next twenty-six years, Franklin's press produced thirteen treaty accounts.
            By the early 1750s, Franklin was not only printing treaties, but representing Pennsylvania as an Indian commissioner as well. It was his first diplomatic assignment. Franklin's attention to Indian affairs grew in tandem with his advocacy of a federal union of the colonies, an idea that was advanced by Canassatego and other Iroquois chiefs in treaty accounts published by Franklin's press as early as 1744.
            Franklin's writings indicate that as he became more deeply involved with the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, he picked up ideas from them concerning not only federalism, but concepts of natural rights, the nature of society and man's place in it, the role of property in society, and other intellectual constructs that would be called into service by Franklin as he and other American revolutionaries shaped an official ideology for the new United States.
            In 1775, Franklin wrote: "Having few artificial Wants, they [Indians] have abundance of Leisure for Improvement by Conversation. Our laborious Manner of Life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the Learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless. Having frequent Occasion to hold public Councils, they have acquired great Order and Decency in conducting them... The women ...are the Records of the Council...who take exact notice of what passes and imprint it in their Memories, to communicate it to their Children."  "They preserve traditions of Stipulations in Treaties 100 Years back; which, when we compare with our writings, we always find exact."
            Johansen writes, "Another matter that surprised many contemporary observers was the Iroquois' sophisticated use of oratory. Their excellence with the spoken word, among other attributes, often caused Colden and others to compare the Iroquois to the Romans and Greeks. The French use of the term Iroquois to describe the confederacy was itself related to this oral tradition; it came from the practice of ending their orations with the two words hiro and kone. The first meant "I say" or "I have said" and the second was an exclamation of joy or sorrow according to the circumstances of the speech. The two words, joined and made subject to French pronunciation, became Iroquois.
           The English were often exposed to the Iroquois' oratorical skills at eighteenth-century treaty councils. Wynn R. Reynolds in 1957 examined 258 speeches by Iroquois at treaty councils between 1678 and 1776 and found that the speakers resembled the ancient Greeks in their primary emphasis on ethical proof. Reynolds suggested that the rich oratorical tradition may have been further strengthened by the exposure of children at an early age to a life in which oratory was prized and often heard."
            Franklin observed, "To interrupt another, even in common Conversation, is reckon'd highly indecent. How different this is to the conduct of a polite British House of Commons, where scarce a day passes without some Confusion, that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling to Order.
           All their Government is by Counsel of the Sages; there is no Force, there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.
           The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success that has attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians...They visit us frequently and see the advantages that Arts, Science and compact Society procure us; they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts.
          When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. And that this is not natural [only to Indians], but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and fashionable Wants, the sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distress'd for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . the restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust them with what we call civil Society."
            Franklin's observations of the role of leaders in Native society caused him to have firm opinions about leadership for profit.  He wrote:  "In a democratic state there ought to be no offices of profit.  It may be imagined by some that this is a Utopian idea, and that we can never find Men to serve in the Executive Department without paying them well for their Services. I conceive this to be a mistake."

            In 1740, fully fourteen years before Ben Franklin’s Albany Plan Of Union, the Iroquois entreated the bickering English colonies to form a union similar to their own.  When Franklin introduced the Albany Plan he commented, “It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a Union and be able to execute it in such a manner as it has existed ages and appears insoluble; and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen English colonies.”  
           At the Treaty of 1744, On the English Colonial side of the table (or the council fire) sat such notables as Benjamin Franklin, his son William, William Johnson, Conrad Weiser, and Colden. The Iroquois' most eloquent sachems often spoke for the Six Nations, men such as Canassatego, Hendrick, and Shickallemy. These, and other lesser-known chiefs, were impressive speakers and adroit negotiators.
Canassatego was praised for his dignity and forcefulness of speech and his uncanny understanding of the whites. At the 1744 treaty council, Canassatego reportedly carried off "all honors in oratory, logical argument, and adroit negotiation," according to Witham Marshe, who observed the treaty council. Marshe wrote afterward that "Ye Indians seem superior to ye commissioners in point of sense and argument."
 31 years later, the 1775 Colonial Commissioners to the Iroquois Confederacy remembered Canassatego's words.  "Our business with you, besides rekindling the ancient council-fire, and renewing the covenant, and brightening up every link of the chain is, in the first place, to inform you of the advice that was given about thirty years ago, by your wise forefathers, in a great council which was held at Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, when Canassatego spoke to us, the white people, in these very words. "
             The commissioners then repeated, almost word for word, Canassatego's advice that the colonies form a federal union like that of the Iroquois, as it had appeared in the treaty account published by Franklin's press.
             The commissioners continued their speech: "These were the words of Canassatego. Brothers, Our forefathers rejoiced to hear Canassatego speak these words. They sunk deep into our hearts. The advice was good. It was kind. They said to one another: "The Six Nations are a wise people, Let us hearken to them, and take their counsel, and teach our children to follow it." Our old men have done so. They have frequently taken a single arrow and said, Children, see how easily it is broken. Then they have taken and tied twelve arrows together with a strong string or cord and our strongest men could not break them. See, said they, this is what the Six Nations mean. Divided, a single man may destroy you; united, you are a match for the whole world. We thank the great God that we are all united; that we have a strong confederacy, composed of twelve provinces... These provinces have lighted a great council fire at Philadelphia and sent sixty-five counsellors to speak and act in the name of the whole, and to consult for the common good of the people..."
Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention frequently mentioned Iroquois precepts and imagery.  In 1775, a Congressional Speech to the Confederacy signed by John Hancock quoted Iroquois advice and admitted, “The Six Nations are a wise people, let us hearken to their council and teach our children to follow it.” 
           For a hundred years after the Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as the source for their democratic institutions.  Revolutionary cartoonists used images of Indians to represent the Colonists in their fight against Britain.  Virginia Revolutionary militias adopted Indian clothing and moccasins.  The Boston Tea Party members dressed in Indian clothing not just so they would not be recognized but to make a statement about their independent nature.  Revolutionary Americans knew that while their heritage descended from aristocracies and monarchies, many of the Native Nations were products of long-lived democratic institutions.  The symbol of the Indian as a free man was used liberally until the early to mid 1800’s.
            Here are a list of quotes pertinent to this essay.
            James Adair wrote in his 1775 text, "History of the American Indians", "Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty; and when there is equality of condition, manners and privileges, and a constant familiarity in society, as prevails in every Indian nation, and through all our British colonies, there glows such a cheerfulness and warmth of courage in each of their breasts, as cannot be described."
            Thomas Jefferson wrote, November 17, 1787, "Every man, with them, is perfectly free to follow his own inclinations. But if, in doing this, he violates the rights of another, if the case be slight, he is punished by the disesteem of society or, as we say, public opinion; if serious, he is tomahawked as a serious enemy 
           "Their leaders influence them by their character alone; they follow, or not, as they please him whose character for wisdom or war they have the highest opinion." "Public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere."
           "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  A tractable people may be governed in large bodies but in proportion as they depart from this character, the extent of their government must be less. We see into what small divisions the Indians are obliged to reduce their societies."
            Thomas Paine recorded this in 1795: "To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets of Europe. "Poverty is a thing created by what is called civilization." "Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched than would ever have been the lot of either in a natural state,"
           Lewis Henry Morgan, in 1851, wrote  "Their whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals." "The government sat lightly upon the people who, in effect, were governed but little. It secured to each that individual independence which the Ho-de-no-sau-nee knew how to prize as well as the Saxon race; and which, amid all their political changes, they have continued to preserve."  "The People of the Longhouse commended to our forefathers a union of colonies similar to their own as early as 1755, they [the Iroquois] saw in the common interests and common speech of the colonies the elements for a confederation."
           Arthur C. Parker, commented in early 1900,  "Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of recall and of woman suffrage flourishing in the old America of the Red Man centuries before it became the clamor of the new America of the white invader. Who now shall call the Indians savages?"
            In 1902, Herbert M. Lloyd observed:  "Our nation gathers its people from many peoples of the Old World, its language and its free institutions it inherits from England, its civilization and art from Greece and Rome, its religion from Judea -- and even these red men of the forest have wrought some of the chief stones in our national temple."
            Arthur Pound said, in 1930,  "With the possible exception of the also unwritten British Constitution deriving from the Magna Charta, the Iroquois Constitution is the longest-going international constitution in the world." "...in this constitution of the Five Nations are found practically all of the safeguards which have been raised in historic parliaments to protect home affairs from centralized authority."
    
            The Founding Fathers never imagined a time during which the Native Nations of America would not be equally treated with, as sovereign Nations.  The immense size of the nation alone precluded any vision of the future.  Even though Presidents immediately set out to expand the U.S. land base through treaties, the treaties were thought to have been honorably made by all.
           Abrogation of those treaties only occurred as a result of the post-War Of 1812 disenfranchisement of Native Nations.  The Founding Fathers believed strongly in the sanctity of treaties, as evidenced by this statement to the British Crown from the Congress of the United States, April 13, 1787, and unanimously accepted:
           "  ...When therefore a treaty is constitutionally made, ratified and published by us, it immediately becomes binding on the whole nation, and superadded to the laws of the land... Treaties derive their obligation from being compacts between the sovereign of this and the sovereign of another nation; ... surely the treaties so formed are not afterwards to be subject to such alterations as this or that state legislature may think expedient to make. ... Were the legislatures to possess and to exercise such power, we should soon be involved as a nation, in anarchy and confusion at home  ...Contracts between nations, like contracts between individuals, should be faithfully executed, even though the sword in the one case, and the law in the other, did not compel it.   Honest nations, like honest men, require no constraint to do justice; and though impunity and the necessity of affairs may sometimes afford temptations to pare down contracts to the measure of convenience, yet it is never done but at the expense of that esteem, and confidence, and credit which are of infinitely more worth than all the momentary advantages which such expedients can extort. ... Be pleased, sir, to lay this letter before the legislature of your Nation. We flatter ourselves they will concur with us in opinion...that the most honorable way of delivering ourselves from the embarrassment of mistakes, is fairly to correct them!"



BC/ Eleven                                                                  BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Nations Lost, Peoples Scorned
 
              
"The invaders anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise.  They therefore (prepared)...quantities of propaganda to overpower their own countrymen's scruples. The propaganda eventually took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics.  We live with it still."    
 Francis Jennings


Almost as soon the words of the final quote of the preceding chapter left his mouth, Thomas Jefferson was breaking treaties and attempting to negotiate new ones with the Choctaw Nation and others.  The press of immigration was overwhelming.  Conflicts were too numerous to record. 
            George Washington’s administration spent 80 percent of its entire federal budget on military conflicts with Native Tribes.  Both France and England continued treating with the Tribes, and pressing them to oppose colonial expansion and trade.  Many Tribes were more inclined to deal with Monarchies whose interests were primarily in trade than the Colonists who coveted everything they had.
            Though Democracy was a general concept idealized by Founding Fathers, its practical application among men bred under dominant monarchies was difficult.   There were differences in the new Colonial government relating to foreign policy.  The French Revolution created a furor of divisiveness as Jefferson and his group supported the French People, in principle, while Adam's Federalists saw any attack of the status quo and disturbing of the upper classes of ownership as dangerous.
            When the people of Haiti, having witnessed the success of the Colonials and inspired by their ideals, attempted to claim their freedom from France, Washington loaned the French Colonials hundreds of thousands of dollars to suppress their "revolt".   The ideology of the upper class had become the ideology of the whole society.   In an interesting twist, Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, who are viewed today as the liberals and idealists of that time, still became the party of white racism and slavery for 100 years.
Ironically, John Adams, Federalist to the core, supported the Haitian revolution!  Jefferson’s Presidency pulled back from the idealism of earlier years when he demonstrated his true colors and reversed the policies of Adams, secretly encouraging the French to retake Haiti.  Our early official support of slavery in Cuba and South America led to policies of oppression and imperialism that have grown and matured even into the twentieth century.  From the days of the very first Presidency, The U.S. has resisted the democratic liberation of every state comprised of Black or Brown Indigenous populations.
           Despite Federal policy, the rest of America was settling in to the mixture of races and cultures. The eastern Mid-West Ohio of America in 1794 was amazingly multicultural, with at least six individual Native Nations mixing with British and French Traders, and both White and Black Americans.  For Holidays they observed Mardi Gras, St Patrick’s Day, the Queen’s Birthday, as well as Native Ceremonial Holidays.  Native life-ways and culture were openly adopted by the colonists, especially those in rural areas.  In the 19th century all Americans knew of the Native Nations contributions to medicine.  Fully 60 percent of all medicines patented in the US were marketed bearing Native images and/or names. 
           The War of 1812 must be understood as the turning point at which Native Nations began to lose the respect and admiration they had garnered during the first 300 years of contact with Europeans.  Driven by slaveholders who coveted Native lands and desired to move the refuge of Indian Nations out of reach of runaway slaves, most of the major conflicts of the war occurred between the US and Native Nations.  The British, in exchange for a United States guarantee to leave Canada to them, gave up all their alliances and aid to their former Indian allies and a major international conflict was reduced to local or regional struggles.  Without British aid, the Native Nations were no longer regarded by the American public as a bonafide conflict partner and Americans began the process of forgetting that Indians had ever been an important part of history as Sovereign Nations. 
           A writer named Karen Kupperman observed this process in Virginia after an Indian defeat at the hands of colonists in the 1640s. “ It was the ultimate powerlessness of the Indians, not their racial inferiority, which made it possible to see them as people without rights.”  A quick glance at the many historical figures starting with Columbus and including Washington and others, shows that while the Natives were strong and powerful, holding their lands and rights and living much as they had for centuries, opinions of them were well-formed, even admired.  However, once they lost this power and were rendered harmless, destitute, pressured, or oppressed-opinion flip-flopped and now they were described in less-than-human terms.
This was a turning point in the record-keeping of American history.  Historians began to toy with the myth that if Native peoples had only desired acculturation into the early American society, much of the bloodshed and social violence could have been avoided.  But early Colonists were not bound by the myths of the mid-1800’s regarding the Native people's innate abilities and general intelligence.  The Massachusetts Legislature passed a law in 1789 making it a capital offence to teach an Indigenous person to read and write because they recognized the Natives abilities and felt threatened by them!  Cherokee Tribal officials petitioned the Jefferson White House to make their Peoples citizens of the new Republic, to no avail.  Indians, though admirable in some regards, were too intelligent and dangerous to be members of the club.
One of the great myths taught in the twentieth century, echoing time and time again, was that if only Natives had been interested in farming everything would have been OK.  Textbooks told us that the western migration of Tribes occurred to enable white farmers to till the soil and cultivate crops.  Actually, whites had been burning Native cornfields since 1622, and we’ve already listed the contributions of Native agriculture to the world.   It was necessary to the rationalization of the conquest that Native Peoples be portrayed as largely nomadic, and the picture of large civilized agrarian based towns and villages did not fit the portrait historians intended to paint when depicting inferior and uncivilized races.
           From 1815 on, Americans lived, breathed, and exported the ideology of white supremacy.  Since that time, the first obsession of this Nation has been race.  The invention of the cotton gin made slavery infinitely more profitable, and the 1830’s saw the forced exodus of countless Native peoples to make way for the expansion of slave based white southern agriculture.  Racism began to develop its own ideology and justify its profits and practices from those ideals.
           Both the Seminole Uprisings, in 1816 and 1835, as well as the Texas War for Independence from Mexico were fought for, and against, slavery.  In Florida, slaveholders demanded the US annex Florida from Spain’s holdings, and the Seminole Wars were fought attempting to recover escaped slaves who had become members of the Creek and other Native Nations.
           The Texans fought for their independence so that they could pass the slavery law they wanted baring all free Blacks from Texas.  Even the war with Mexico was fought largely to satisfy slaveholders desires to create larger and larger buffer lands between themselves and the “free” areas slaves might be tempted to try and escape to.
           In 1830, an anti-Irish Catholic political party was formed and a period of intense hatred and violence ensued.  Adding fuel to the fire was the immigration of Germans, who managed to retain their language and keep to themselves while bringing their education and labor skills.  Their purchase of lands and business successes only served to further infuriate the "Original Americans" intent to preserve the purity of America from outsiders.
            The Irish Potato Blight and the resulting famine of 1845-49 caused the immigration of more than a million Irish Catholics over the next thirty years.  This only contributed to the anti-Catholic sentiments of the times.  Fired by centuries of oppression by Englishmen, they harbored an intense hatred of Protestantism.  The fact that they were also poor, illiterate, and unskilled did nothing to help their assimilation into protestant America. The Irish Catholics inhabited the first slums in the cities of America.
           For those few non-Indians who tried to take the time to understand, the larger myths and outright lies that were to become standard history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not yet been written.  Some of them spoke up; trying to stem the tide of racism and Eurocentric religion.  One of those was George Catlin.  It is immediately evident from his letters that knowledge of the great plagues of the 1500 and 1600's had already passed from mainstream history--a testament to how quickly great civilizations can pass away.
           From the Letters of George Catlin, circa 1832-1833
           "The Indians of North America were originally the undisputed owners of the soil, and got their title to their lands from the Great Spirit who created them on it, were once a happy and flourishing people, enjoying all the comforts and luxuries of life which they knew of, and consequently cared for: were sixteen million in numbers; and sent that number of daily prayers to the Almighty, and thanks for his goodness and protection.  Their country was entered by white men, but a few hundred years since; and thirty million of these are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life, over the bones and ashes of twelve million of red men; six millions of whom have fallen victims of the small-pox, and the remainder to the sword, the bayonet and whiskey; all of which means have been visited on them by acquisitive white men; and by white men, also, whose forefathers were welcomed and embraced in the land where the poor Indian met and fed them with "ears of green corn and with pemmican."
           "The reader, then... should forget many theories he has read in the books of Indian barbarities, of wanton butcheries and murders; and divest himself, as far as possible of the deadly prejudices which he has carried from childhood, against this most unfortunate and most abused part of his race of fellow-man."
            "So great and unfortunate are the disparities between savage and civil, in numbers, in weapons, and defenses, in enterprise, craft and education, that the former is almost universally the sufferer either in peace or in war; and not less so after his pipe and tomahawk have retired to the grave with him, and his character is left to be entered upon the pages of history, and that justice done to his memory... by his enemy."
           "The very use of the word savage, as it is applied in its general sense, I am inclined to believe is an abuse of the word and the people to whom it is applied.  The word, in its true definition, means no more than wild, or wild man; and a wild man may have been endowed by his Maker with all the humane and noble traits that inhabit the heart of a tame man. Our ignorance and dread or fear of these people, therefore, has given a new definition to the adjective; and nearly the whole civilized world apply the word savage, as expressive of the most ferocious, cruel, and murderous character than can be described."
           "As evidence of the hospitality of these people, and also of their honesty and honor, there will be found recorded many striking images in the following pages.  And also, as an offset to these, many evidences of the dark and cruel, as well as ignorant and disgusting excesses of American passions, unrestrained by the influences of laws and Christianity."
           "I have roamed about during seven or eight years, visiting and associating with some forty-eight Tribes, over two thirds of this Nation, and with some three or four hundred thousand souls under an almost infinite variety of circumstances; and from the very many and decided voluntary acts of their hospitality and kindness, I feel bound to pronounce them, by nature, a kind and hospitable people.  I have been welcomed in their country, and treated to the best they could give me, without any charges made for my board; they have often escorted me through their enemies' country at some hazard to their own lives, and aided me in passing mountains and rivers with awkward baggage; and under all of these circumstances of exposure, no Indian ever betrayed me, struck me a blow, or stole from me a shilling's worth of my property.  This is saying a great deal in favor of the virtues of these people when it is borne in mind that there is no law in their land to punish a man for theft, that locks and keys are not known, that no commandments have ever been divulged amongst them; nor can any human retribution fall upon the head of a thief, save the disgrace which attaches as a stigma to his character in the eyes of his people about him."
           "Thus, in all these little communities, in the absence of all systems of jurisprudence, I have beheld peace and happiness and quiet, reigning supreme, for which even kings and emperors might envy them.  I have seen rights and virtue protected, and wrongs redressed.  I have formed warm and enduring attachments to men which I do not wish to forget, who have brought me near to their hearts, and in our final separation have embraced me in their arms and commended me and my affairs to the keeping of the Great Spirit."
            "For the above reasons, the reader will forgive me for swelling so long on the justness of the claims of these people; and for my occasional expressions of sadness, when my heart bleeds for the fate that awaits the remainder of their unlucky race; which may be outlived by the rocks, by the beasts, and even birds and reptiles of the country they live in, --set upon by their fellow-man, whose cupidity may fix no bounds to the Indian's earthly calamity, short of the grave."
          "The traders, in addition to the terror they carry at the muzzles of their guns, as well as by whiskey and the small-pox, are continually arming tribe after tribe with firearms; who are able thereby, to bring their unsuspecting enemies into unequal combats, where they are slain by the thousands, and who have no way to heal the awful wound but by arming themselves in return, and reeking their vengeance on their defenseless enemies. In this wholesale way, and by whiskey and disease, tribe after tribe sink their heads and lose their better, proudest half, before the next wave of civilization flows on to see or learn anything definite about them.
          "In the Indian communities, where there is no law of the land or custom denominating it a vice to drink whiskey, and to get drunk; and where the poor Indian meets whiskey tendered to him by white men, he thinks it no harm to drink to excess, and will lie drunk as long as he can raise the means to pay for it.  He becomes a beggar for whiskey, and begs until he disgusts the honest pioneer who becomes his neighbor; and then, and not before, gets the name of the "poor, degraded, naked, and drunken Indian...."
           "This system of whiskey and (fur) trade, and the small-pox, have been the great and wholesale destroyers of these people, from the Atlantic Coast to where they are now found.  And no one but God knows where the voracity of the former will stop, short of the acquisition of everything that is desirable to money-making man in the Indian's country."   
           "I have found these people kind, honorable and endowed with every feeling of parental, filial, and conjugal affection that is met in our communities. I have found them moral and religious: and I am bound to give them credit for their zeal in their modes of worship.  I fearlessly assert to the world, (and I defy contradiction), that the North American Indian is everywhere, in his native state, a highly moral and religious being, endowed by his Maker, with an intuitive knowledge of some great Author of his being and the Universe...  The most striking fact amongst the North American Indians is that of their worshipping the Great Spirit instead of a plurality of gods, as ancient pagans and heathens did---they appeal to the Great Spirit and know of no mediator, either personal or symbolical.  I am bound to say that I never saw any other people of any colour, who spend so much of their lives in humbling themselves before, and worshipping, the Great Spirit."
           "For the Christian, there is enough, I am sure, in the character, condition and history of these unfortunate people to engage his sympathies,
            For the Nation, there is an unrequited account of sin and injustice that sooner or later will call for national retribution, and for the American citizens, who live, everywhere proud of their growing wealth and their luxuries, over the bones of these poor fellows, who have surrendered their hunting grounds and their lives to the enjoyment of their cruel dispossessors, there is a lingering terror to appear and stand with guilt's shivering conviction, amidst the myriad ranks of accusing spirits that are sure to rise in their own fields at the final day of resurrection!"
            
          Contrast these opinions with those recorded about three decades later by Jacob Abbott in his section on Aboriginal history for his American History series.  

           "The American Aborigines have been generally considered by mankind as a stern, taciturn, immovable, unfeeling, and yet shrewd and cunning people... The prevailing testimony, especially in respect to those tribes that dwelt on the Atlantic coast at the time of the first settlement of the country, represents them as exceedingly grave and stolid in all their deportment, and possessing very little sensibility of any kind."
          "The aboriginal inhabitants of the country were of races formed with constitutions, both physical and mental, adapting them to obtain their livelihood by fishing and the chase...The Caucasian race...is endowed with constitutions adapting them to gain their livelihood by agriculture, commerce, and the manufacturing arts...Under these circumstances it was an inevitable, and as much in fulfillment of the designs of divine Providence, that the old races should be supplanted by the new"
"We must suppose, then, that there is a great and permanent difference in the physical and intellectual constitution of the different races.  ...We may rightfully recognize and act upon our superiority to them in the social arrangements which we make, but we are bound in doing so to consider them as under our protection, and to guard their rights and provide for their welfare and happiness faithfully, honestly, and with feelings of sincere good will."
"The extreme taciturnity of the Indians was one of their most striking characteristics.  But talkativeness is the result of a peculiar mental organization, leading to a lively and rapid flow of ideas, ardent sensibilities, and a quick and ready action of the nerves and muscles are connected with the organs of speech.  It would seen that the Indian children manifest from their earliest infancy the same low degree of sensibility, giving them the power of bearing without inconvenience, or at least without pain, what would be intolerable to the children of another race, which characterizes their fathers and mothers. The children seldom cry. They remain patient, strapped upon their board, looking quietly about, and content apparently with existence alone; while a white child of the same age is endowed with powers of observation and with mental instincts and propensities so sensitive and active that it craves the incessant occupation of its faculties, and scarcely ever intermits his restless activity."
            "The Indians have been accused of treating their women as slaves, and there is no doubt that the women were always held by them in a state of very complete and absolute subordination to the men."  
            "But what ever we may think of the intellectual inferiority of the Indian race, the slowness of their progress in the arts of life was not due wholly to that cause. There are two great essential elements without which civilization can never make any rapid progress, or attain to any great height, in any nation. These two elements are iron, and the art of writing. With the possession of iron to make implements and tools, one man, it is found, can produce the food of ten, thus leaving the other four of the half of the community that we may suppose to be able-bodied, to be employed in other occupations.  It is in consequence of this release of so large a portion of the community from the labor of procuring food, through the aid afforded by iron, that arts and inventions arise. 
           Again, with the art of writing the progress made in each separate generation is recorded, and thus the goal attained in one age becomes the starting point in the next. It follows from this art a race that possesses the art of writing may be decisively progressive, but one which is without that art can only be so in a very limited degree. In this latter case the greatest part of what any one genius discovers or learns dies with him, and the next genius that arises must commence the work anew. Thus the nation, even if it is always rising, is always sinking back again to where it was before. Nothing but the art of writing, to provide each generation with the means of recording what it has discovered, will enable it to keep its hold and go on continually ascending."
           "With the coming of the Europeans...The result was that new and higher forms were introduced from the old world superseding and displacing the inferior and more imperfect ones which before had possession of the new... Changes corresponding to these have taken place on a vast scale in the vegetable kingdom. Multitudes of plants that were introduced into America by the European colonists, either accidentally or by design, 
            It is well that this should be so. Such changes are in fulfillment of the beneficent designs formed by the author of nature for the gradual improvement of the condition of the earth, and the advancement of it, in respect to its occupants, from lower to higher and nobler forms of life."
           " It might at first be supposed that when a superior and an inferior race were brought thus together upon the same territory, a process of amalgamation would have set in, by which, in the end, they would gradually be melted into one; but there are very deep-seated causes operating in all such cases to prevent such a union. In the first place, the mental and physical constitution of the Indian fits him specially for wandering as a hunter through the woods, and gaining his subsistence by the chase, and for no other mode of life. These qualities are innate and permanent.   The whole history of the Indian tribes and of the almost fruitless attempts which have been made to civilize them, and induce them to live like white men, proves this quite conclusively. Missions were established among the Indians of New England for the purpose of instructing them in the arts of European life and in the truths of Christianity, and though for a time very remarkable results were produced, no radical or lasting change was usually effected. As soon as the external support to this new state of things, and in a certain sense unnatural, was withdrawn, everything slowly but irresistibly sank back into its former condition, educating Indian Young men in the New England colleges, when their prescribed course was finished, and they were left at liberty, very soon turned away from the arts and refinements of life and have gone back into the woods, and relapsed hopelessly into their former condition.
           There are remnants of many of the ancient tribes existing at the present day in various parts of our country, but they live by themselves, a marked and separate race, with nothing changed except the external circumstances by which they are surrounded... and where they have every opportunity to observe the conveniences and the comforts which civilization affords, but no kindling desire is awakened in their minds to imitate or share them. Silent, patient, impassible, they witness the advance of the mighty wave which sweeps on so irresistibly over and around them, apparently without any regret for the past, or any emotion, either of hope or fear, in respect to the future."
            "There are descendants from Indians residing in certain portions of the Southern States that have adopted a settled mode of life, and have attained to a considerable degree of refinement and civilizations, but in general, even among these, the degree in which they manifest the capacities of the Caucasian race corresponds very nearly to the proportion of Caucasian blood that flows in their veins."
          "The Feeling of Repulsion That Exists Between the Different Races of Man Not Necessarily a Prejudice." "That peculiar feeling of repulsion which is seen universally in operation between the different races of men, and makes them mutually disinclined to live together in intimate domestic and social relations, is not, as is sometimes supposed, necessarily a prejudice. It results, as has already been intimated, from a wise and beneficent law of nature -- one in universal operation throughout the whole animal world -- the object of which is to preserve the distinction of species, and to maintain the purity, and secure the advancement, of the higher and nobler races of men. It is an instinctive principle implanted in the nature of every living being which draws him from those that are unlike himself in their physical conformation, and toward those that resemble him.  In the case of varieties, like those seen in the different races of men, the repulsive instinct by means of which nature intends to keep them separate from each other, in respect to the propagation of their kind, is less strong, but it is none the less real, and the design with which it has been implanted is beneficent in the highest degree. Thus the amalgamation of the Indian race with the Caucasian race coming to the new world from Europe, would have been against nature, and the instinctive principle, both in the heart of the Indian and of the white man, which leads each to love, and to seek domestic and social union with, those of their own race, and to avoid such union with those of the other, was one wisely implanted in the heart by the great author of nature, and one which both races were accordingly bound to obey. "        Jacob Abbott, 1860's Historian








BC/ Twelve                                                                 BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


“The Root”, Ingenious Contrivances


"But what ever we may think of the intellectual inferiority of the Indian race...The Caucasian race, which was introduced from Europe, is endowed with constitutions adapting them to gain their livelihood by agriculture, commerce, and the manufacturing arts..."  "There is doubtless more real invention exercised, and a greater number of new and ingenious contrivances originated and perfected every single year, in any one of ten thousand machine shops and manufactories now in operation in America, than the Indians can produce as the result of the accumulated efforts of all the generations of their race, from their earliest arrival upon these shores to the present time.  Under these circumstances it was an inevitable, and as much in fulfillment of the designs of divine Providence, that the old races should be supplanted by the new.  With the coming of the Europeans, the result was that new and higher forms were introduced from the Old World superseding and displacing the inferior and more imperfect ones which before had possession of the new.  It is well that this should be so. Such changes are in fulfillment of the beneficent designs formed by the author of nature for the gradual improvement of the condition of the earth, and the advancement of it, in respect to its occupants, from lower to higher and nobler forms of life."
Jacob Abbott

Old Jacob Abbott just about said it all.  His text contains a supposedly thorough examination of this Divine "natural phenomena" of the improvement of the New World due to the European invasion, but most of it simply proves the extent of the historical ignorance and racist philosophy of the "educated" Americans of his time.   Having conveniently misplaced the knowledge, experiences and history of more than three centuries of contact with Native Nations, one of the more interesting revelations of Abbott's work is that Americans of the mid 1800s knew significantly less about their own history and the history of Native Peoples than their ancestors of 100 years earlier.  They were actually becoming more ignorant by the decade!
     One of the contributing factors to the downward spiral of the American perception of Native Peoples, were the incredibly popular dime novels of the period.  Almost every literate person read them and for awhile the most lucrative and popular genre in America were the Captive series.  The plots always centered on the capture and abuse of white Americans, usually women or children, by savage Natives.  These stories were so widely read as to be compared to the romantic novelettes of our time, and did more to shape the 19th century public's impression of Indians than any other source of information.  Even the 20th century classic, "The Last Of The Mohicans", utilized it as a main ingredient to its plot.
Despite all the racial and cultural superiority bullshit to be found in Abbott's "definitive" work, in our minds the most telling refrain of all is the consistent return to one example as the relevant proof of the superiority of everything European.  That "proof" is a subjective value that interprets the rapid invention of great numbers of ingenious contrivances as a cornerstone ideal in their matrix of superiority.  Despite our admission that western civilization has indeed accomplished marvels with the ingenious contrivances of science and technology, we believe the jury is still out on whether or not the ultimate result of that progress will be for the greater good or ultimate destruction of mankind and the earth.
The second most interesting attitude espoused by Abbott is the condescending way he discusses everything Native, and his insistence in putting a "Divine" seal on its demise.  The Founding Fathers and ancestors of the 19th century Americans had significant respect for the Native peoples as Nations.  They were treated with the same equality and deference as European Nations.  It wasn't until the end of the War Of 1812, in 1815, that the opinions of the colonists began to take on the condescending attitudes of extreme white supremacy.  In fact, it was only then that the word American, previously used to describe only Native peoples, was usurped to describe the citizens of the United States.   Once the Native peoples were seen as "defeated" there was no reason to attribute their destitution and degradation to anything but a natural inclination toward bestial behavior.   Few, if any, of the 19th century "Americans" were aware that these remnant savages were themselves citizens of Nations that had not only out-populated Europe during the 1500's but saved countless European lives with an advanced agriculture.  
            Let's discuss the importance and necessity of the last great evidence of civilization touted by Abbott and western historians--the advancement of "writing".   Having a written language did nothing to preserve the integrity of history or enlighten the Americans of the 19th century--in fact writing may have done more damage to their society, except where it records the techniques of developing ingenious contrivances, than any other single element.  We argue that civilization has been more twisted and tormented by record keeping and writing than any other of its supposed "advancements."   It is entirely possible that more arguments and aggressive violence has been perpetrated upon the modern world due to disagreements about the written word, and its interpretation, than any other element of civilization. 
           Within Abbott's "history" are many of the precepts adopted by mainstream Americans as the basis of their social, racial, cultural, and religious prejudices for the next century.  Indeed, many of these ideals still exist in a significant proportion of the American citizenry.  Some of it was institutionalized in history texts, such as Abbott's--and later in textbooks. But the worst was yet to come.
 













BC/ Thirteen                                                               BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


The True Ugly American


"I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,
 but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian."
Theodore Roosevelt

"...The cold, hard fact remains that the Indians were ruthlessly destroyed in California.
This was accomplished, not only directly by the most brutal class of settler, but through
 the acquiescense (of) all the decent people who did not care enough to be outraged
 about what was taking place."
William B. Secrest   

    During the period, 1853-1856, the U.S. gained 174 million acres of land through 52 treaties—all of which were eventually broken.
At The Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876, there were "450 acres of newly cleared and asphalted grounds dedicated to the physical embodiment of American virtue and American progress, which in most people's minds were one and the same."  Roughly one-fifth of the entire American population visited the Exhibition to take in the mechanical wonders designed to display the country's industrial vigor.  Atlantic Monthly Editor William Dean Howells wrote, "It is in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks, for the present America is voluble in the strong metals and their infinite uses."  America was being shaped in a new image. The Panic of 1873 had caused the sharpest downturn in American financial history, leaving three million out of work and 18,000 failed businesses. Economic depression still lingered three years later, as Grant's presidency reeled from repeated Washington political scandals.  One of these (scandals) involved the wife of the Secretary of War receiving kickbacks from the operator of the Fort Sill Indian reservation supply post.  Such posts were highly lucrative and sought after.
           For a short time in 1876 it appeared that Samuel Tilden had been elected President of the United States.  It is certain that he won the popular vote, however in late night backroom negotiations the final decision was made by a specially appointed Republican-dominated Electoral Commission and when the final electoral results were presented before Congress, Rutherford B. Hayes emerged the victor.
            The Railroads pushed for corporate recognition as "persons" and the western population increased dramatically from less than a million non-Indians in 1870 to more than 2.5 million in 1880.
            Despite the fact that cooperation had been the rule rather than the exception during the westward migration of settlers, few Americans know that of the 250,000 white and black settlers that journeyed across the plains from 1840 to 1860-only 362 pioneers were killed in battles with Indians.  426 Indians lost their lives.   The exaggerations of the press and constant accounts of Native Tribes last ditch attempts to resist relocation and defeat, had led to countless small press editions detailing vicious and unpremeditated murders and attacks on defenseless frontier women and children.  As is the case today, these accounts, both in the private and public press, shaped public opinion to a degree never before anticipated.
The Frontier Violence Myth is well established in Hollywood lore.  The real statistics belie the myth.  During the most homicidal year in Dodge City’s history, 1878, only five people lost their lives.  In Deadwood, during its worst year—four people died.  In Tombstone—five people were killed.  In fact, during the whole period between 1870 and 1885, only 45 deaths occurred in all the cow towns of the West.   The rugged individualism of Hollywood’s western heroes was not encouraged in the Old West.  Conformity was the prized commodity.  Uniqueness or eccentricity was more likely to bring scorn, or worse, on the individual.  Many of the cherished institutions of the West were actually fly-by-night operations.  One example of this was the famous Pony Express, which lasted only nineteen months, from April 1860 to October 1861.  Despite the short-lived institutions we remember, the actual longevity of the Frontier lasted much longer than most Americans think.  More land was homesteaded in 1910 than at any other time in America’s history.

     By 1871, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis Walker described Indians as “beneath morality.”  “When dealing with savage men, as with savage beasts, no question of national honor can arise.”  Any action “is solely a question of expediency.” 
     It was at this point that James Loewen says “cognitive dissonance destroyed our national idealism."  Public opinion became vicious toward every ethnic group tainted by some imaginary inferiority. 
The ideas of boarding schools for Native children and teens were proposed. Haskell was one of the first Native boarding schools built in the 1880's (1884) to train Native children to become "productive members of a greater society".  The military school environment was utilized because it was believed that Indians had inherent discipline problems.  The strict system was supposed to redirect student loyalties from home to a new family--the school environment.  (One of the early boarding school signs read, "Tradition Is The Enemy Of Progress".) 
           Others put forward a different solution.  Newspaper editors openly called for
genocide.  Frank L. Baum, author of "The Wizard of Oz" wrote in his paper in 1891,
"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total
extermination of the Indians."  "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in
order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these
untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."  In California, the third
wave of disease had just swept through the communities in the 1860's and 1870's. 
The treaties the Tribes thought they had signed with the Federal government had not
been ratified by Congress and had been placed under a long-term Congressional Order
 of Secrecy.  The governor placed a bounty on Indian heads and scalps with over a
million dollars paid out.  Children were bartered and sold as sexual slaves.  Local
newspapers regularly called for the extermination of the Tribes.  William Secrest wrote,
(the)"Californians of the mid-1800's were conditioned to their attitudes the same way
that modern Americans are. They were accustomed to their elected leaders, particularly
the Governor, talking about the inevitable need to "exterminate" the Indians. Respected
officials of all kinds referred to them as the "degraded and filthy redskins" as if that were
their natural state rather the one that civilization had brought them to.  And finally, the
press completed the assault of indoctrination by continually using derogatory terms and
 racist remarks when writing about them in their articles and editorials.  This onslaught
by the leading citizens of the State, gave an aura of respectability and justification to the
small group of citizens indulging themselves in participating in the most horrific criminal
behaviors mankind can exhibit.
None can underestimate the effect of the word "exterminate" upon a populace generally lacking in morals.  The word was repeated endlessly and made its indelible mark on the psyche of Californians.  Its premise had been eagerly accepted by non-Indian immigrants to the North American continent from the beginning.  Charles Darwin and others encouraged and foisted the idea that it was simply predestined that the Indigenous Peoples of these lands should be doomed to extinction.  The ideal was accepted by some as a tragic and hopeless inevitability, and by all as a genuine and divine natural law."
           When the U.S. failed to guarantee the rights of Black Americans in 1877, a long dark night of racism for all Peoples of color was ushered in, culminating in the darkest period between 1890 and 1920.
           This was the period when the American Experiment created another unique phenomena-segregation.  The physical separation of Black (Indian, Asian, Mexican, etc.) people from society was accomplished at every level of contact.  Indeed, one of America’s most successful ideological exports has been our system of segregation.  Countries like South Africa, Bermuda, and colonial areas in Asia successfully instituted similar practices in the twentieth century. 
            Jackie Robinson was not the first Black player to play professional baseball.  Blacks played in the league regularly until they were forced out in 1889.  The Kentucky Derby eliminated Black jockeys in 1911 after they had won fifteen of the first twenty-eight derbies. Every aspect of American culture, from education to entertainment, media, music, textbooks, and politics were inundated with the ideals of white supremacy.  The legislature and Supreme Court were in support of these ideals as were Presidents like Grover Cleveland, who won by vowing not to support Black civil rights, Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the Federal Government, and Warren G. Harding who was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan at a White House Ceremony.
 The actions of heroic Nuns during the Civil War had provided a thirty-year respite for Catholics, until 1887, when the new immigrations of Italians and Eastern Europeans renewed the call for prejudice. America has never loved Immigrants.  In the latter 19th century, when immigrants from southern and eastern Europe emigrated to the U.S., the Old Boys of America reacted as if they had been invaded by criminals.  In 1910 more southern and eastern European emigres faced mass sterilization and a popular book of the time, endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt, actually suggested that the state had a moral imperative to put undesirable immigrants to death.  Of the twenty million immigrants between 1820 and 1900, as many as five million felt unwelcome enough to return to their homelands! manners and customs.”  This defied the actual demographic statistics which showed that other cultures had a significant influence in the country’s development.  In 1790, three out of five people in America were not of English origin and two of five were not English-speaking.  Nevertheless, Americans have held to this myth, even as they began espousing the theory of the melting pot.  They desire that every citizen conform to those precepts.  Indeed, these are the conditions of assimilation if you add a commitment to consumerism and amassing individual wealth.

The concept of an American Melting Pot of races is very recent.  The Founding Fathers and colonists through the middle 19th century self identified themselves as one unified people, as John Jay wrote, “descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their The American Protective Association created a national hysteria in 1893 when it announced that the Pope had called on Catholics to exterminate the Protestant population of America on St Ignatius Day.  Of course they were discredited when the day passed uneventfully, but the message had been heard by a new generation.  In the period of 1915-1925 the Ku Klux Klan took up their agenda and was revitalized by the more than two million Americans who joined their ranks on an anti-Catholic platform.
           From the last days of the civil war through the late 1800's, American leaders sought to unite those powerful individuals who could hold the political and economic reins of the country.  They understood that they needed a segment of the populace to feel united, in history, as well as common purpose.  It was at this zenith of racial hatred and bigotry that many of the enduring myths of American history were composed.
           To the average American in 1900, the Indian Nations were gone, exiled to worthless reservations or relocated to military encampments such as boarding schools. The issues of slavery had been decided, then resurrected to a degree of hatred far exceeding any previous bigotry.
            The textbooks designed to educate the white American student were created to paint a picture of the uninterrupted progress of a society continually progressing and getting better to engender a feeling of optimism and patriotism in the student body.  Since few people of color had access to education, this was a perfect opportunity to shape a few generations of minds.  
             The result for contemporary education has been to pander to a Eurocentric view of the past that pretends students are not intelligent enough to handle the “real history”.  It is also an unwillingness to admit that American social culture regressed during the 19th and 20th centuries when ignorance allowed the creation of false histories and myths built upon racism and prejudice.  
            Instead of looking to other societies or Nations that exist, or have existed, and how they handled or perceived racial relations, the history books condescendingly ignored the rest of the World.  In general, this is true of most American's education regarding most of the major issues and historical events of the past 500 years.  It has been a myopic, tunnel vision view of history, corrupted by ignorance and intentional amnesia, whitewashed and revised as necessary to put forward a nationalistic agenda that is morally ambiguous at best. 
           To tell the true story of this Nation, and to put it up beside all the other Nations and Civilizations of history, both modern and ancient, would empower our citizens with a valuable historical perspective, and show them that it is just as possible for a society to regress as progress.  Perhaps much of the apathy and disenfranchisement Americans feel today is a product of the conflicts and contradictions between the assurances of their high school history and government classes that we’re climbing higher and getting better every day while all around them they see evidence to the contrary.   As the media attempts to distract us with advertising and economic and political assurances coupled with new scientific discoveries, the average American finds themselves fearfully contemplating the future.  A true presentation of our history might better prepare our inheritors for the messes we surely will leave for them to solve.  On the other hand, they will know that it is possible; that each generation has its trials and tests, its advances and failings.  Knowing that, they may be more likely to try.   

 Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was only good in the rebellious states where Lincoln had no authority.  He was in no way an abolitionist and openly supported the execution of John Brown.  When the antislavery editor, Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, Lincoln joked about it in a speech in Worchester, Massachussets.  He told the audience, "I have heard you have abolitionists here.  We have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day."   Lincoln once said during a political debate, “I am not, nor have I ever been in favor of bringing about the social or political equality of the white and black races-that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes.”  He was also guilty of the hanging deaths of more than a few innocent Santee Sioux at Christmas to appease the families of a few murdered Americans
But to paraphrase James Loewen, one of the great lessons of history is that even exceptional individuals are torn and haunted by the issues of their time.  Despite Lincoln’s statements above, he did move forward on a resolution of the issue of slavery (though many believe that his ultimate concerns were economically motivated).  Nevertheless, generations later. the “historical view” of Lincoln inspired students on another continent to push for their own recognition of human rights in Tiananmen Square in China.  Ho Chi Minh died with a copy of the biography of John Brown on his desk.  Anti-Communists in East Germany sang “We Shall Overcome” at their secret meetings.  American heroes are plentiful, especially among those Peoples who have suffered the most.  Interestingly, many of these peoples who revere our heroes are themselves portrayed as the "enemy" of America! 
All the famous Native leaders who stood for their Nations should revered by American people as examples to be admired and looked up to.  All the slaves that revolted, and the Whites that helped them were heroes of their time. But they all were human beings, with human failings, in imperfect systems.  To tell the truth about their trials, failings, and doubts does not belittle their heroic efforts.
            If there is no other reason to tell the truth, it is this: To tell the truth about the Indigenous American Holocaust, or the tradition and realities of slavery, does not diminish the sacrifices and efforts of those who spoke against those horrors.  They were the true heroes of the time, not the Presidents or Generals, or even the common silent majority.  The truth emphasizes the reality that good and decent people can be misled, can be encouraged to be silent, and can stand by and let the worst be done--all in the name of high ideals and religious or patriotic fervor.  It is one of the main dangers presented by nationalism and patriotism in a modern world--and one of the most important lessons our history can teach us.


 

 
 The Nations


Since the beginning of the technological juggernaut, the only consistent opposition has come from land-based native peoples.  Rooted in an alternative view of the planet--Indians, Islanders, and Peoples of the North remain our most clear-minded critics.  They are also our most direct victims.  That technological society should ignore and suppress native voices is understandable, since to heed them would suggest we must fundamentally change our way of life. Instead, we say they must change.  They decline to do so.
Jerry Mander    











Nations/ One                                                                 BlueWolf & Lupe/ Shirts N' Skins


A History Of Isolation


             For some Indian Nations near the turn of the 20th Century, early days on the rez (reservation) weren't so bad.  A goodly number of Nations had long since had their lands divided and allotted and were in various stages of assimilation.  Eastern Tribes, having suffered a long relationship with various European ethnic colonial groups; notably the French, English, and Spanish, were farthest along in the process of interbreeding and accepting European ways.  The Six Nations managed to stay in control with their powerful confederacy and solid traditions of self-government, but the Southeastern Tribes had suffered the Removal to Indian Country.  California Tribes were still reeling from thinking they had treaties and then having their lands stolen from under them and bounties placed on their heads.  Plains Tribes were trying to get settled on new reservations as were Southwest and Northwest Indians.  Though still dealing with the after effects of starvation, disease, and shock, reservation Tribes settled into a routine of taking government supplied commodities, hunting game or fishing (where possible), growing vegetable gardens, raising stock animals and enjoying their remaining families, social ties and ceremonial life.   
Christian missionaries continued to consolidate their efforts to convert every Nation.  Reservations had been divided up among different Christian
denominations with the Roman Catholics and Episcopalians usually showing up first--and the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Mennonites, and Church Of God, following after.   In their rush to convert the reservation Peoples, they implemented the policy of sending Indian children to boarding schools to faster facilitate their "civilizing."  In March of 1891, Congress enacted a compulsory education law that was to, "...secure the attendance of Indian children of suitable age and health at schools established and maintained for their education." (read "brainwashing")  Often the churches were given control of these contract-schools.  Built by the government and supported by the Church, they put forward the concept that continuing to allow Indians their pagan ways and beliefs would corrupt the children and cause their socialization to be retarded.  For decades many relocated, orphaned, or stolen kids had already been encamped at similar schools.  In an 1893 editorial, Harpers Magazine wrote about the Sioux,  "...the churches and religious societies have certainly quenched the fires of barbarism in the Indian children.... The disappearance of blanket and breech-cloth, long hair and highly painted faces, is a sign that the Sioux has succumbed to a stronger civilization, and with his old customs have fallen his old gods." 
           Next came horrific government decrees (pushed by military and Christian leaders) that made many important tribal and ceremonial spiritual gatherings illegal for decades to come.  Many Traditionals ignored these laws, they were forced to conduct their activities in secret and this “renegade” or “hostile” activity caused some internal conflicts to arise within the Tribes, who still feared for their safety.
          As World War I began, on the isolated lands of their reservations (and former reservations), the Indian Nations found themselves carefully scrutinized on the one hand--to prevent participation in illegal spiritual activities--and thoroughly ignored on the other.
           Over 12,000 American Indians volunteered to serve in the United States military in World War I, nearly a decade before they became U.S. citizens.  Approximately 600 Oklahoma Indians, mostly Choctaw and Cherokee, saw action in France and these soldiers were widely recognized for their contributions in battle, and as the first of the fabled code-talkers.  Due to the secrecy that shrouded the code-talkers legacy, it is not commonly known that many Tribes were included in these operations, resulting in many Code-talking veterans of both the first and second World Wars.            
           These Indian men soon learned to blend into the landscape of the U.S. military machine and became accepted as valuable comrades-in-arms.  It is an interesting fact that throughout the military campaigns of this century, Natives, once identified, have been consistently given some of the more dangerous assignments as scouts and point-men because of an Anglo fantasy that they have some inherent gift for those type of missions.
           The Code-talker successes also provided a lesson to contemporary Natives about resistance to assimilation.  Code-talkers from the Choctaw, Commanche, Navajo, Creek, Hopi, Menominee, and Ojibwa nations contributed o the WW1 & 2 efforts.  Most of the Code-talkers of both wars were boarding school educated.  They were humiliated and physically punished for speaking their languages.  Many resisted and disobeyed, risking punishment by speaking together secretly.  Then, in an ultimate irony, the government came to them asking that they create a code from the very languages that they had been forbidden to speak! In the end, the fact that they resisted assimilation contributed significantly to an American victory.
           The training and natural comradery of combatants contributed to a sense of pride and patriotism in their service, and Native vets returned home, to once again be relegated to being nonessential third class non-citizens.
            If we jump ahead for a moment and discuss World War II vets as well, we find a callous abandonment by the very Government they sacrificed for. The treatment of the Code-talkers is a sore point with their contemporary relatives.  Forbidden by secrecy to discuss their roles in the war (even with family) for decades afterward, many of the Code-talkers of WWII were responsible for creating and developing the code themselves.  They are credited, by most military historians, of being directly responsible for the taking of Iwo Jima and the entire Pacific Theatre.  This resulted in the eventual launching of the military’s ultimate solution, Fat Man and Little Boy (the two nuclear weapons unleashed on the innocent populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Yet they are denied medical care and basic veteran’s benefits, even into the 21st century!
            Continuing hostility, racism, and resentment kept Indians from associating with most of their neighboring Anglo communities.  As the next few decades passed, alcoholism dependency increased and racism reinforced reservation stereotypes and isolation.  No one in American society was prepared to welcome our ancestors into the melting pot as long as they maintained their tribal affiliations and clung to their reservations.  Not much has been written about these times because it doesn't have the romance and color of the previous centuries of tribal history.  Many of the Tribes themselves have little collective memory of those days.  For eight decades or more, the Indian Nations lived as forgotten Peoples, isolated and alone.





















Nations/Two                                                                  BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N Skins


A Lost Generation
                 

            They were the in-betweens.  Too young to remember the free days and too oppressed to see hope.  Even into the late-20th century most grew up dirt poor, using outhouses, living without running water, electricity or jobs, and having little contact with the outside world--not even a radio or telephone.
Generations had passed since the Tribes had been able to live off the land.  Reservation Indians who had formerly cultivated large crop areas, or who had lived by foraging, hunting, fishing, and gathering, saw the abundance of necessities disappear and their local economies fall far below what we think of today as poverty.
            The blessings of citizenship and the reorganization of tribal governments in the 1920s and 1930s were only token gestures of conciliation, concealing a broader plan to complete the destruction of traditionally democratic Indian governments and to eliminate their land bases through allotment programs.
           Beloved children were forced to leave their families and homes to attend the military or religious run boarding schools.  Some were not allowed to leave for years. Original language was disallowed and punishments for speaking it were severe.  Strict military disciplines were observed.  The food provided was often poorly prepared and malnutrition and sickness were common.  Many children died.  Inadequate records were kept and families were denied visits to sick children or access to their graves.  Denied their language, clothing, natural foods, song, dance, and forms of worship, these young people were forced to alter their appearance and conform to new and unfamiliar standards. Reminded daily that they were ignorant heathens, and that old ways must be forsaken, many of them grew up confused and despondent, often turning to alcohol or converting to Christianity, (or both) when they returned to their Nations. Others Natives rebelled, secretly speaking in Traditional tongues, risking the certain punishment that resulted if they were discovered.  Some merely ran away and returned to their families, to be hidden or sent away to other relatives. 
           At most of these “training facilities”, the demand to accept and practice Christianity was non-negotiable, but for most it provided little comfort from the poverty and despair which filled their lives.  Most of these schools were actually military training establishments intended to “create productive members of a greater society.”  The military discipline was thought to be appropriate given the popular belief that Native children had inherent discipline problems. It was hoped that these strict systems, which sought to replace every aspect of Native life, would cause a shift in student loyalties leading to a disintegration of the old tribal ties when they finally went home.   The brainwashing succeeded not in a transfer of loyalty, but in a predictable confusion of identity. Burdened with an irrelevant and alien knowledge, many of these cultural refugees returned carrying the parasites of self-hatred and contempt for their own people.  A sign at one of these boarding schools, circa early 1900s, said it all.  “Tradition Is The Enemy Of Progress”.


           World War II saw a new generation of Indians enlisting.  It was viewed on reservations as merely the continuance of the warrior tradition.   44,000 American Indians, out of a total Native American population of less than 350,000, served with distinction between 1941 and 1945 in both European and Pacific theaters of war.  More than 40,000 Indian people left their reservations to work in ordnance depots, factories, and other war industries. American Indians also invested more than $50 million in war bonds, and contributed generously to the Red Cross and the Army and Navy Relief societies.  17 million of those bonds were purchased with lease and allocation monies.  The tribes also donated food, minerals, rangelands, resources, and reservation lands for bombing runs and artillery ranges.  Ironically, one fourth of the Japanese American citizens interred were held on reservation lands. This statistic is amazing considering Natives were among the poorest people in the Nation.  One third of all eligible Native men, 18 to 50, served.  The October 24, 1942 Saturday Evening Post put it in perspective when it proclaimed, “We would not need the selective service if all volunteered like Indians…”.
           As previously mentioned, these servicemen and women came into direct contact with mainstream America, and in that brief period of time many of our fathers returned home believing that they had finally become Americans.  Their hopes were again shattered as the stereotypes of Hollywood prevailed and they returned to life at home still considered  "ignorant” second class citizens, incapable of handling their own affairs.  These were the days of Ira Hayes, a Pima who gained at least a momentary fame for having been one of Marines who was photographed raising the flag on Iwo Jima .  Hayes died a lonely alcoholic.  Were it not for Johnny Cash’s song about him (The Ballad Of Ira Hayes, Bitter Tears) a decade or so later, the world might have forgotten him altogether.  But he was not the only one.
           Hollywood rushed to cash in on a new interest and nostalgia about the wild west, and Indians were, once and for all, stamped into the molds that still shape our image worldwide: romanticized savages, beads, feathers, horses, war-whoop, teepees, etc. 
           The Nations drew further into themselves.   Reverse racism and internal isolation developed to the point where anything that represented the outside world was viewed with suspicion and a guilt-ridden yearning. Yet we honored our Vets and flew the American Flag with a bitter pride.  Traditionals continued speaking their languages, performing the Ceremonies (in secret) and praying as they had for millennia, but many Indians were convinced the old ways and days were gone.  There was nothing left from those times they could recognize except for the racism that still controlled their lives from Washington.  They wanted what Americans had, flew the flag, and watched the world around them speed up and change, without being convinced they wanted to be Americans.
           Whole families turned to alcohol.  It became a new tradition along with ready-made cigarette smoking, jeans, and cowboy boots. 
           1950s America tried termination.  Tribal governments and Bands were officially disbanded and dissolved.  Tribal lands held in trust or in common were divided into allotment-like parcels between the families.  Tribal aide programs were dissolved and since it was recognized that few opportunities to find work existed in their poverty stricken communities, many Natives were offered the “opportunity” to relocate to urban areas where it was thought they would encounter greater success (and assimilation).  The relocation programs developed into a nation wide attempt to force Indians to leave the reservation to go to the cities.  Many of the young women found their way into government clinics where they signed papers they could not understand and were sterilized without their knowledge.  In the cities they did not find opportunity, they found what the blacks and other minorities already faced--more poverty and more racism.  Some returned to the rez, but many did not.  They huddled in Indin-town, frequenting their own bars and marking their territory.   The drive and ambition that most Anglo-Americans seemed born with was missing and they viewed the outside world with suspicion and hostility.  The off-rez world remained a foreign and inhospitable place. 
            It seemed that Indians, no matter where they were, lived in a bubble.  It was a vacuum that witnessed the everyday passing of old values, ethics, language, ceremony, and viewpoint--but allowed nothing to enter and replace what was being lost.  Only the sterile and unpleasant economic realities of poverty and suffering seemed real.  Families isolated together for generations developed the natural strains, feuds, and conflicts that too much familiarity and lack of freedom foment.  Another generation passed, and in some Tribes these difficulties festered until family members didn't speak to each other and the tribal circles were broken.   Dependency on alcohol swept through entire families.  Many of the smaller unchanging reservation or urban environments saw an almost complete loss of language, values, discipline, spirituality and knowledge of the past.  Dependence on the Tribe was replaced by dependence on the BIA and the US government.  Respect diminished between family members and generations grew apart, without common purpose, hope, or ideals.  They just wanted what most white people had--they wanted not to want.  
           Instead of viewing the elderly as the Keepers of Tradition and Wisdom, the Elders now began to be seen simply as used-up old people.  With Traditional forms of government dispersed, leaders began to be suspected of having ulterior motives, and of being untrustworthy and selfish.  Many of them had characters that justified these suspicions.  
            Progressives began looking down on their own people, especially those
Traditionals who stubbornly wanted to preserve everything they could of their remaining land bases, spiritual life, and culture.  Even in the poverty and squalor of the times these Progressives believed the Old Ways to be dead and tried to be like other Americans.  True tribal relationships were often broken, though every Nation had those enclaves of individual families whose strength of character and will were unconquerable. They maintained language and culture while many of their relatives tried to forget they were Indian.   Other Nations, with large or isolated reservations (or strongly organized Traditional governments), had managed to remain semi-protected from the encroachment of American values and progress.
            Denial of racial heritage was frequent.  Often those with lighter skin denied their Indian heritage, especially in the south and southwest.  Who wanted to admit they had a "colored" ancestor in the woodpile?  These who could pass as White began to deny their Red, considering that heritage ignorant and uncivilized.  Some assimilated southern Native families used to say, as recently as 1960, "at least our side of the family ain't colored Indians!"   In some states legislation allowed that it only took one eighth of Indian ancestry to place one in the non-white category.  This affected people’s voting eligibility, ability to own land, get married, serve as a juror, or even be a legal American citizen.  There were legal, economic and social advantages to being "White".
            The isolation, deprivation, and brainwashing of the preceding decades had almost reached its climax.  Spirituality was replaced with religion, and that religion offered little day-to-day comfort.  Most Traditional spirituality was inseparable from the actions and thought of everyday life. The power and “spirit” of life was inherent in every action and interaction, including a relationship to the earth and other life.  But European-American religion was centered around a book and specifically raised Humans above their surroundings with a forward looking myth of hope and deliverance.  It gave man dominion over the earth and all its creatures.  This seemed to justify the apparent power the white man had; from his weapons to his strong resistance to disease, his ability to tolerate alcohol, his endless populations and architectural monstrosities, etc.
            In the oratory of the time it is evident that many Traditionals recognized  the White way as a system of rationalization and justification for individual actions rather than a holistic system to facilitate balance and harmony common to most Native spiritual thought.  But it did feature a dramatic and appealing story with some familiar symbols for lost peoples to grab onto.  A significant number of families lost the social interaction, oral traditions, and parenting values which had been passed generation to generation within the circle of the family.  Christianity offered an appealing fable of hope but provided little concrete and understandably relevant guidance or solace for the daily problems Natives faced.  The refugee cycle of children growing up on their own, with little guidance or direction, began.  Beginning after World War One and accelerating after World War Two, many Natives joined the lost generations.  Deprived of their families, their culture, and their Spirit, they were able to teach the children--nothing.

           It is important to note that there were exceptions to this description. To generalize about the individual experiences of the Tribes is relatively impossible.  Each area of the country had its own experiences and realities, some profoundly different and extraordinary.  Many Tribes and individual families were able to keep their centers intact. Unfortunately, a significant number of our Peoples were affected by some, or all, of the policies which contributed to the scenario described above.  One need only travel from Rez to Rez, Rancheria to Rancheria, city to city to find the common denominators which have contributed to our tribal problems with drug and alcohol dependency, violence and abuse, incest and suicide, tribal corruption and nepotism, and the disruption of basic Traditional values.










Nations/ Three                                                             BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


A New Beginning


“From a small island in the great western ocean , a wave swept back across the land, restoring the power and pride of the Indian Nations”
                                            

For many of us, renewal started at a most unlikely place--an abandoned federal maximum-security prison on an island in the San Francisco Bay, called Alcatraz.  An obscure statute allowing Natives to occupy abandoned military facilities for educational purposes was discovered and in 1970, a group calling themselves “Indians Of All Tribes” took the “Rock” intending to establish a Native educational facility.  The government was shocked and took a John Wayne-like position, causing other sympathetic Native groups around the country to reexamine their “rights” struggles.  Their defiant actions encouraged others to pursue Native agendas and initiatives.  That began a Movement which sparked a rebirth of pride and power for Indigenous Peoples who had suffered a continuing crisis of identity on reservations, rancherias, and in urban ghettos.
           The press called it “the occupation of Alcatraz”.  Traditional people called it a fulfillment of Prophecy, a public affirmation of survival, and a push for greater recognition for the rights of Indigenous Nations.  Young people called it Red Power and saw it as the beginning of an opportunity to recapture our identity and common purpose.  Certain place names developed symbolic importance to the Movement.  Alcatraz was about education and culture, Pit River was about land and legal issues, Frank’s Landing was about racism and fishing rights. Drawing on a long tradition of intertribal gatherings of leaders and elders for the discussion of important issues, a call went out to bring people to a Traditional Unity Convention held in the Tulalip Longhouse (Washington St., summer 1970).  It was there that many of us heard a call to action and unity expressed and affirmed by Elders from over thirty-four Native Nations.

           Red Pride swept across the land like a wave, pushed by the wind of youth, to begin a process of regeneration of Spirit and a renewal of purpose for all Indian Peoples.
           Richard Oakes, and others of the Indians of All-Tribes movement, suffered a number of personal tragedies and sacrifices there, ultimately making their efforts all the more heroic and meaningful to those who came after.  They should be remembered and honored for the part they played in the fulfillment of that prophecy of healing.  Their strength of commitment led others to stand for their lands and rights--at Puyallup, Pit River, Middletown, DQU--and later, all over North America.  Suddenly, we were warriors again, proud of our identity and our heritage, and willing to take risks for our beliefs. The Traditional Movement embodied a belief that the land was at the center of our strengths and should be protected and guarded from exploitation.  Language and cultural heritage were recognized as the primary source of unity available to struggling Tribes.  Spiritual belief and commitment were put forward as the source of our Power and the reason for our survival.  As warriors, we were asked to support the Traditional People in their local attempts to hold their own against assimilated tribal councils and groups who did not share a commitment to those values.
           At the same time, along with the All-Tribes Skins, there emerged a Minneapolis-based group calling themselves AIM, the American Indian Movement.  These new Warrior Societies proved completely loyal to the Traditional viewpoint, whether they understood what that meant or not.  Demonstrations, takeovers, and media blitzes highlighted the times culminating, but not ending, in AIM's leadership and participation at Wounded Knee Two and the Long Walk.  Wounded Knee was a local conflict between Progressives and Traditions, which progressed to a continual state of violence.  A short description of those events will be made later in this text.  The Long Walk and Trail Of Broken Treaties were attempts to draw attention to the legal and social inequities of Washington’s relationship with Native Nations and the Bureau Of Indian Affairs complicity in defrauding and disenfranchising tribal governments, as well as a general incompetence in handling the affairs of Native Tribes and citizens.
            There was plenty of violence, frustration, disharmony, and ignorance accompanying those turbulent times--but these problems always accompany the turning points of history.  There was also a sense of extended family, cooperation, common purpose, power, relationship, culture, and tradition that permeated our minds with hope.  Among the Elders were men and women who had grown up steeped in Tradition.  They had been prepared and taught in the old way by Elders who still remembered the free days and ways of their youth.  Some of them carried Power.   If you were lucky you got to know them, spend time with them, and see the effects of their Power on the natural world.
            The familiarity, unity, and respect that was shared in those times was exhilarating to those who had grown up surrounded by despair and dependency, or by denial and ignorance.  What fine examples they were!   
It was a time of wonder and awakening.  It was also a time for the Road.  We began to move about the land freely again.  Rediscovering our connection to the Earth, bodies were put into motion.  For the first time many young urban or dispossessed Natives were exposed to Tribal cultures, intact and relatively undisturbed.  Spokesmen for the Hopi and Six Nations traveled coast to coast to speak of their prophecies and the need for a return to traditional values and spiritual beliefs.  People began to consider the natural organization of the circle of the family, with its respect for the importance of Elders and children.  Landless Indians were given an opportunity to once again feel responsible as  keepers of the land.
           Naïve and innocent, many of those who were rediscovering their identity were thoroughly unprepared for the resistance they often experienced at the hands of their own People.  It was a shock for urban Indians to discover that their Tribes were divided over issues like leasing lands for mineral rights.   The vehemence of the divisions was disturbing and disconcerting.  It was a counterpoint to the feeling of unity encountered at Traditional gatherings.
            Despite the internal conflicts, everyone was realistic about how the Federal Government would respond to this new Pride.  Federal Law Enforcement considered us subversive and immediately descended on Indian gatherings en masse.  With guns slung low on their hips, they were all John Wayne, swaggering among the families of mothers and fathers, children and grandparents.  We realized then that they knew nothing about us except what they had seen in the movies and on TV.  And they were afraid!  Afraid of what they didn't know or couldn't understand about us.  Afraid of our "savage" potential.  We smelled their fear.  Our Red Power was real.
           Others have detailed the specific history of those days, so we will not.  Let it be said only that we are proud to have shared those times with our Elders, our brothers and sisters, and our families. 
           We say, “Alcatraz was NOT an island!”   It was a joining together--and a renewal.
















Nations/ Four                                                              BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

   
 Divided--Traditional Vs Progressive


After Alacatrz, the buzz of the "Movement" polarized communities.  The labels Traditional and Progressive were coined.  To understand what these two terms represent we need to understand, in a general way, the processes of original tribal leadership and government. 
            Traditional leadership was often based on service and the inherent qualities, talents, and character of those who most effectively provided that service.  So it was that the best hunters were often followed or depended on to lead the hunt.  The most daring and resourceful warriors were given the opportunity, by the power of their ability, to lead during battle.  The most visionary and spiritually oriented people were expected to oversee the spiritual welfare and ceremonial life of the Peoples.  The most proven and effective healers were expected to provide their Power and skills to care for the sick and injured.  Not only were abilities, talents, and superior character rewarded and encouraged, there also existed highly organized systems of government.
            As always, with human beings, the intricacies of social politics sometimes puts the wrong person in charge at the wrong time, but by and large, many true democracies existed in the pre-Columbus Americas.  An example of these might be the Councils that enforced the Great Law of the Six Nations, guided the Choctaw Confederacy, or sustained the Mississippian Civilization during its 5000 years.  Felix Cohen wrote, "It is out of a rich Indian democratic tradition that the distinctive political ideals of American life emerged.  Politically, there was nothing in the Empires and Kingdoms of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to parallel the democratic constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, with its provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, and its suffrage for women as well as for men."
           One of the unique characteristics common to many different Nations was the right of an individual to follow the leader of choice based on a "what have you done for me lately" approach to service.  Though leaders did have a certain status among the people--that status was never guaranteed to last.  Even though respect might endure, should a better and more effective leader demonstrate his or her abilities, the People could "change horses" at will. 
Often decisions were made by groups of leaders reaching consensus, rather than by one individual making a solitary choice.  This confused Europeans, who were used to appointing, electing, or being forced to accept one man as their spokesman or leader.   Most of the unintentional misunderstandings that occurred during treaty making happened because Americans were looking in vain for one "Chief," when in fact, the power resided in the hands of a group of leaders directly responsible to their People.  Of course as time went on the U.S. Government became aware of this and used it as a tool against the Peoples to illegally obtain treaty signatures to steal lands and resources they knew would never be given up intentionally by the Nations.
            After George Washington declared the first policy of "assimilating" Indians into the mainstream society through an inter-breeding of the races, the job of pushing assimilation was taken over by missionaries and organized religion. Nevertheless it was the reaction to the corruption of the Department of the Army's individual Indian Agencies that pushed for a reorganizing of the "savages" into more malleable political entities--that could be watched over (and controlled) more effectively. Though it took decades to introduce, in the early 1900s the American Government began looking for a way to introduce their own brand of "democracy" to the Tribes.
            The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 provided for the formation of tribal constitutions with governments comprised of general councils of the enrolled tribal memberships, quorums, parliamentary procedure, tribal chairmen, secretaries, treasurers, organized meetings, elections and voting.  In many state courts of the late 1700 to mid 1800s, the names of Tribal members had first been recorded to deter them from owning land, marrying, voting, becoming jurors, etc., but the push for a major enrollment of Indians was for the allotment rolls in the late 1800's.  The government was forcing Tribes to divide up their reservations or accept small parcels to be registered to individual families.  It was at this time that the naming and renaming of Indians was needed.  Except for those already assimilated, descended from, or married into white families, Natives did not have surnames that identified their lineages.  It was time to give Indians names that could be used to identify descendants down the line, ostensibly so property could be recorded and passed down to relatives.  This is where Natives got the names we live with today. 
The next push to enroll tribal members came with the Reorganization Act to establish official membership lists for voting purposes. During all of these registration attempts some people were left off these lists intentionally, some refused to register out of fear or as a sign of continuing resistance, but these lists became the basis of official tribal membership.  Knowing that the diehard Traditional peoples (and much of the common membership) would shun or ignore this foreign approach to governing themselves, the Federal Government sought to establish governing bodies more sympathetic to assimilation and Progressive thinking.  Smaller Tribal Councils came into being. We have come to see clearly, in the last few decades, how government employees and unscrupulous leaders would eventually misuse this formula for tribal re-organization. 
           As decades passed, some Indians were drawn to the Council positions offered by the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs).  It was gainful employment, close to home, and it had advantages beyond a paycheck.  These "leaders" often involved themselves for the same reasons many American political figures do, not because they have innate talents or special abilities to serve the People, but simply to gain influence, power, economic profit or special status for themselves and their families. 
            To be fair, those early Tribal Council pioneers probably did not enter into their positions with these questionable goals in mind, but to make an attempt to bring their families out of poverty.  Perhaps some of the old-time values for serving the people still remained.  Nevertheless, after the 1940s had passed, the 1950 and 1960s' Tribal Councils were often comprised of members or descendants of the lost generation. Lacking the values of a Traditional upbringing often resulted in fully assimilated Natives who were completely taken with the consumer ethic of mainstream America.  Primarily interested in success and security, Progressives lacked any commitment to Traditional values and even considered those values to be ignorant and outdated.  Thoroughly convinced that they should assimilate and share in the American dream, they took advantage of the Traditionals reluctance to become involved and became the federally recognized representatives of their Tribes.  This served the interests of the BIA perfectly, as well as the large corporations that were discovering vast quantities of valuable resources on heretofore "worthless" Indian lands.  Tribal leaders often held out their hands for payoffs.  These "leaders" despised the Traditionals for holding onto what their two-or-three-generation superficial boarding school Christian educations regarded as obsolete pagan religious and cultural practices. They relished their new voice and the power to be a VIP.
            The 1934 Reorganization Act precipitated these conflicts, though it was to be decades before the right conditions would exist for significant economic exploitation of the Tribes through these new "governments."  Rather than creating true democratic representation, it constructed a system that depended on government social and economic programs.   If the general memberships of the Tribes had fully understood the principles of the Indian Reorganization Act, and involved themselves in the process of General Council decision-making from the outset, the form might have been effective.  But Traditional suspicion and lack of participation (plus the missing checks and balances that attempt to make the American process equitable) accomplished a contradictory result.  Rather than encouraging tribal members to participate in the General Council process, it caused them to shun or ignore it, leaving the government-to-government interaction and decision-making solely to the small Tribal Councils or tribal Chairmen. 
           The U.S. Government and Corporations finally had those single "chiefs" they'd always been looking for to push and approve their programs and proposals regarding tribal lands and resources.  With so much money involved, fraud, corruption, graft, and nepotism within the Tribes was bound to occur.  The pie-in-the-sky promises of corporations like Peabody Coal sounded wonderful on paper.  Strip-mine Black Mesa in the Four Corners area, powder the coal, pump up water from the aquifers and send it all through a pipeline to make electricity for the west. The Tribes would make big bucks.  Traditionals foresaw the future water and political problems, but with the usual shortsightedness of American Progress, Progressive leaders with generations of poverty under their belts were easy targets.
            After Alcatraz, Traditional protests of proposed land leases and concessions to mineral and resource mega-corporations publicized one of the fundamental differences between the Progressives and the Traditionals.
           Traditionals believed the land to be Sacred.   Traditionals were for protecting their resources, not exploiting them.  They were for preserving language, ceremony and tradition--not discarding them.  But also since they refused to involve themselves in the "puppet" governments they despised, they had no real power to effect change except through public demonstration, civil disobedience, protest, and media publicity. 
          Progressives wanted "economic progress."   Their ideas about what they did, or did not, believe were obscured by their adamant acceptance of Government programs and "economic" issues.  Since the Government (i.e. federal law enforcement) stood behind the "recognized" Tribal Councils, bitter and often violent confrontations between Traditionals and Progressive tribal police and Federal Agents occurred.
          These conflicts led to deep divisions between the two groups.  Political and vindictive murder, rape, and assault were commonplace in the 70s; especially where morally bankrupt federally recognized "leaders" held total power over their Nations and their lands.  Even the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which centered around the alleged misconduct of a tribal chairmen and his Progressive government did not solve the poor system of government most Indian Nations endure, though quite a few people lost their lives in the effort.  
          Many Tribes today are often still in the grip of criminals or carpetbaggers who manipulate these obsolete and ineffective systems for their own gain.  A few Nations have managed, with educated and responsible leadership, to benefit their Peoples.  Other Tribes are ignorantly racing to diminish the power of their general memberships by rewriting their constitutions and placing that power in the hands of fewer and fewer, often unqualified, "leaders."
           The Dream that was born innocent at Alcatraz came into its adulthood during these times.  The Movement suffered the death, loss, and imprisonment of many of our brothers and sisters.  The repercussions of the killing of the two FBI Agents at the Jumping Bull's compound at Pine Ridge echo around the Nation even now, almost three decades later.  Leonard Peltier, though almost universally recognized as innocent of the charges he was convicted of, still sits in prison as of this writing; a victim of a corrupt law enforcement agency (the FBI) and the war that existed in those times.  This is the same agency that has only recently been given new broad powers to undermine the Constitution and infringe on the rights of citizens again.    
            The U. S. Government and the American people have never accepted that the various local conflicts of the 1970s were simply a continuation of the Indian Wars against the United States and not just isolated events perpetrated by activists and dissidents.  As evidenced by solemn Treaty agreements, we have never stopped believing in the Sovereignty of our Nations.
           At Pine Ridge, hostility and fear ran high.  Those who talk about how the Agents were executed, forget that the FBI had previously, and callously, ignored the violence on the Pine Ridge Rez.  No warfare conventions had ever applied to Federal/Indian conflicts of the past and none existed there.  Armed Federal Agents entered a Sovereign Nation, knowing that there was a similarly armed group of Indians near there (as well as a camp full of Elders, women, and children) purportedly to pursue an unknown person, in an unconfirmed vehicle, who had stolen a pair of cowboy boots! It was an ill-advised, if not foolhardy act to begin with.  The Feds were well aware of the fear they evoked in the people of this area.  Few remember that an Indian, Joe Stuntz, was also killed in the gunfire that followed, and that these Agents were not the only Federal Law Enforcement Agents on the reservation at the time.  Fifteen minutes after the firefight the area was literally swarming with agents, including helicopters.  Fear and violence were directing the actions of both sides. Eventually, even though his two "accomplices" were exonerated of any crime, and despite proven Government tampering and intimidation, Leonard was chosen to be the "sacrificial goat" to fulfill the FBI need for someone (guilty or not), to pay for the murders of their two comrades.   But no one was ever held accountable for the killing of Joe Stuntz.
           Similarly, though emotions regarding the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee still run deep and divided in the local Lakota population, Indians definitely sacrificed a greater number of lives in the conflict and no one has ever been prosecuted for those murders.
            The lines between Progressive and Traditional have blurred over time.  Many Nations still labor under the yoke of unresponsive or unrepresentative leadership.  Tribes continue to have their resources exploited and their trust monies unaccounted for. Whistleblower Dave Henry's revealing book, "Stealing From Indians," details his firing by the BIA after his discovery of a multitude of accounting errors and questionable practices resulting in billions of missing Indian trust fund dollars--a result of government mismanagement, fraud, and corruption involving both Tribal and Federal government employees.  Legal action to force the Secretary of the Interior and the Chief of the BIA to admit the mismanagement, if not the outright theft of billions of dollars of Indian trust monies continues today.  For awhile the government was "losing", contaminating, or destroying boxes of evidence and being threatened with contempt by the Federal Judge appointed to the case.  All this is a direct result of the Reorganization Act and the consolidating power of Progressive tribal councils who failed to demand accurate BIA accounting of funds because they were ignorant dupes, or active participants, in the theft.  Today the Government acknowledges the exact amounts missing may never be known, and a settlement offer is in the wind.
            Most of those who were once committed to Traditional ideals still hold  to that commitment.  AIM is still around, as are many of the Warrior Societies, but the focus and unity of the Traditional Movement has diminished nationally.  Fortunately, the awareness of the importance of what is being lost culturally within individual Nations has increased.  Even Progressives are spouting Traditional rhetoric.  Meanwhile some Traditionals, at least superficially, approve of the meager economic benefits being experienced by gaming Tribes. The viciousness of the struggle between Traditional values and Progressive economics has lessened, and in some places there is even a spirit of cooperation toward both ideals.  But as time counts forward, the Spirits of the missing in action, the murdered, and the imprisoned who paid with their lives or freedom, cry out--"Was it worth it?"   Because we loved them, we reply simply--"Yes".  As for tribal government, some of the essays ahead will speak specifically to that.




















Nations/ Five                                                              BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N Skins


Crossing Tribal Boundaries


In the 1970s, Alcatraz and the efforts of the All-Tribes Movement encouraged Indians all over the continent to come together and find common ground.  Traditional Elders agreed unity was a prerequisite to preparations of the Nations for the difficulties foreseen ahead. Unity Conventions and Gatherings were held.  At these Gatherings, representatives of the Hopi and Six Nations Peoples continued to reveal and compare the prophecies of their Nations.  These prophecies had common themes.  Indians should not become too dependent on the modern world.  We were encouraged to remember our original responsibilities and relationships to the land and each other.  We were told to always teach our coming generations that the world can change at any time, and that it is always purified when the misdeeds of men become too great for the Creator and Mother Earth to tolerate.  Today much of what was said then has been forgotten, but in our minds their call to unity has never diminished.
            Some call it Pan-Indianism.  We prefer to think of it as an expression of a visible and intentional attempt at Inter-Tribal Unity.  Once our spiritual life was to be found in everything we did.  A sense of magic and mystery filled our lives and we believed that anything was possible.  We did not separate the sacred from the mundane.  Power was everywhere.  We shared a love for our families and had a long time tradition of respect for the circle of the family and the role each member played within it.  Now, though alcohol, poverty, and grief weaken us, we recognize that the Creator has given each of our Peoples specific Ceremony and Ritual to keep our Balance.  We share the all-important ideal of "Respect."  Indeed we share many things.  Just as the Pipe of Red Stone crosses the boundaries of Nations as a Sacred symbol, as sign language once fostered international communication, and as the Ghost Dance brought Peoples together in Hope and Prayer, so do today's inter-tribal forms unite the vastly different Indigenous Nations that inhabit this land. At one time we were as different from one another as the Europeans were, English from Spanish, French from German, and Basque from Portuguese.  We had different languages, different stories, and different cultures. 
          It is first in our minds to acknowledge that those of us who still have the opportunity to learn our language and oral traditions are obligated to preserve those original and distinct qualities of our Nations.
         But for those Indians who cannot, there exists a desire to learn Traditional methods of dealing with the daily events of our lives, as well as a desire to pass to the children essences of what made our cultures and values different from the dominant society of today. The shared experiences of subjugation, imprisonment, isolation, poverty, dependence and survival have forged us into Nations that should be obsessed with preserving culture. Some Tribes still remember their languages and speak them, performing their ancient Ceremonies and Rituals to fulfill their obligations to the Creator.  Others have lost almost everything of what they once were. 
           Today, we believe everyone benefits from the All-Tribes Spirit.  And especially for the thousands of unenrolled, separated, or unknowns that live away from their Original Peoples.  Shared ways give them an opportunity to maintain their spiritual balance and harmony, to feel their Indian extended-family strength, and to help pass on Traditional values and culture to their children. They may not be active members of a specific tribe, but they are "in-support", and that is important.
           Despite the fears of some that this cross-cultural sharing will open the floodgates to wannabes and opportunists, we believe Indians are smarter than that.  They can easily recognize the genuine from the bogus.  And for those who slip by, unless they demonstrate the desire to profit, or gain recognition, what harm will they do? 
           A greater threat to our Peoples is that we will allow materialism and consumerism to usurp our values, causing us to slowly and surely give up speaking our languages, holding to our lands, supporting our families, dancing and singing, performing our ceremonial duties, honoring our older ones, introducing our newborn, caring for those who pass away, and teaching our youth the discipline and values of our Elders.
 
           We must qualify our endorsement of this "unity".  Just because ways may be shared does not mean we believe they may be adapted or altered indiscriminately.  In regard to spiritual form and ceremony for example; one does not simply decide to be a Ceremonial Leader or Instructor.  There is a protocol and a correct way for these things to come about.  This is one of the differences between Traditional Indians and those who have adopted more modern methods.   Not every Indian can carry a Pipe, instruct a Sun Dance, or pour water in a sweat lodge.  First you are prepared, then instructed, then authorized (And there may be limitations to your authorization.)   We're generalizing of course, but our family believes that it is primarily through oral tradition that our ceremonies and rituals are taught and preserved, not by reading, or writing, books.
          To realize that there is a bond between us that crosses Tribal  boundaries, you have only to visit large inter-tribal gatherings, spiritual  ceremonies, or unity conventions.  The feeling of extended family is ever present.  These gatherings have been occurring from times even before Anglo-Saxon Europeans came to our shores.  Our greatest victories against our opponents occur when we act together in unison for a common purpose. 
           There are still Indians who believe that their Tribe is the only one.  Similarly, there are those who judge each and every person by their color of  skin, or tribal affiliation.  While we agree that preserving specific tribal languages, identities, and culture is of paramount importance, we also believe that many of our old family prejudices must be discarded so that the unnecessary divisions between us will disappear.
           To share what we hold in common between our Nations is an important step toward the unity that will make us a Power that cannot be ignored.  Unlike those superficial symbols of Hollywood, to which we have been compared and subjected, we hope to fulfill the prayers of those Elders, now gone, who wished only that our Nations endure.








Nations/ Six                                                                   BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N Skins


Wannabes And Unrecognized Indians


During the 1970s there were many people attracted to the Movement.  Enrolled and federally recognized Indians, unenrolled and unrecognized Indians, "white" people who wanted to help and hang out, and "white" people who wanted to reverse assimilate and magically become Indian.  Both enrolled, and unenrolled, Indians came from all over.  Some had grown up on the Rez, some in the city, some entirely separated from their culture and Tribe.   Many mixed-bloods whose parents or grandparents had left their original Peoples began rediscovering their heritage with the publicity that Alcatraz and the Movement drew nationally.  Children, stolen at birth from their Indian parents and placed in Christian foster homes, sought their identity.  Everyone with a family story about an Indian in their background began the search.  Some were rewarded with verifiable ancestry, and some found the stories to be false or without proof.  It continues today.
            Many of these began believing they were Cherokee, the most familiar tribal name, with five hundred years of Indian-European interbreeding.  It was George Washington who ordered this policy of intentional interbreeding to weaken the strong Eastern Tribes.
             One could almost always expect that a mixed-blood, (in this case someone with Indian and European or Black heritage), who knew nothing about Indians but claimed some heritage, would find a Cherokee Princess or Grandmother in their "roots."  It became a joke among other Indians, much to the chagrin of those who really were descended from that great Nation.
            Many of the "stolen" ones discovered themselves, mixed-bloods and full-bloods alike.  They began their search not only for a personal ethnic identity, but for a cultural and spiritual one as well.
             Friendly "white" people who knew Traditionals joined the struggle intent on helping.  Often they failed to ask if their help was wanted.  Well-meaning, but in the way, they were generally tolerated and allowed to remain.
             Those who knew nothing of the Nations, but were continuing the hippie quest for new life-ways to fill up their dull, meaningless, and spiritually bankrupt lives, descended on the Movement hoping to find the romantic and noble people depicted by Hollywood.  Attracted by the warm, extended-Indian-family feeling, they stayed to help financially with transportation, gas, money, and supplies, often with a tenacious and fanatic support.   Some had to be told when it was time for them to go home.
            A few of these people, with a fabled Indian hiding in the woodpile of their past, made no attempt to verify their ancestry.  They simply gave themselves a colorful name, picked out a Tribe, and became instant Indians.  These people earned the label Wannabe or Wannabi.  They are not to be confused with mixed bloods of a known or verifiable lineage, no matter how ignorant of their Indian heritage these descendants might be.  Wannabes were, and are, people who have fraudulently attempted to infiltrate a Tribe or community, establishing an identity without a real relationship or attachment to their original people. 
            Typically their actions are defined by furthering their own cause.  They "become" Indians for money, prestige, novelty, attention, or just the simple dramatic fulfillment of play-acting out their childhood cowboy-and-indian fantasy. 
            At the bottom of the barrel we must not forget the "plants."  These are the despised ones who infiltrated the Movement to provide information or intelligence to those who opposed us.  Fortunately, the Doug Durhams of the past were, for the most part, quickly exposed. (Douglas Durham was a non-Indian FBI plant, who infiltrated AIM and was eventually exposed.) Today, they are not as easily identified but neither is the movement as structured and penetrable.
           Wannabes persist today, some with more than a decade of pretending under their belts.  Often they claim to carry Medicine, to be healers or teachers, craftsmen or artists, and continue to perform, lecture, or offer their wares for profit without participating in the life of their Original Peoples, or without having any real connection with local Indigenous Peoples. Occasionally one may find a real disenfranchised Indian in this group as well.
           Wannabes continue to be the subject of hot debate among Original Peoples, especially with the Federal Government getting deeper into the soup of who is, and who is not, federally recognized.  Add to this the rapid intermarriage of Indian and non-Indian, with the inevitable dilution of blood quantum, and the problem grows.  According to some estimates by the year 2070, less than one tenth of a percent of American Indians will be able to call themselves full-blood.  With the individual Tribes setting different standards for membership, excluding many "real" Indians from verifiable tribal affiliation, the guidelines to identify who is and who isn't, grow more and more confused.  Federal census figures indicate more and more Americans are identifying themselves as, at least part, Native American.   This causes some concern for those Tribes who are still significantly dependent on census figures to define government programs and allocation money.
           Who is, and who is not a Wannabe has always been a subject for argument.  Some Indians consider anyone of mixed-blood,  that doesn't look ethnically Indian enough for them, a Wannabe.  (Whatever “that picture” looks like!)  Some require a specific lack of blood quantum to qualify.  To others it is a lack of verifiable ancestry and familiarity with Indian culture.   Whatever the answer, it is of obvious concern to the Nations.  Certainly there have been cases where Wannabes have seriously offended Original Peoples, but so have descendant Indians.  Occasionally Wannabes have reaped economic benefits that might otherwise have gone to Indians, and in some cases they have been a downright embarrassment, but we wonder if they have ever contributed problematically to any of the more serious and important issues of tribal sovereignty, inter-tribal unity, economic and political self-determination.  Other than misrepresentation or being a general annoyance, we fail to see how they encourage government dependency, or affect the self-esteem of our youth, or inhibit our ability to preserve language, culture, spirituality, and traditional values.
            We think we'll always have Wannabes.  Our cultures, spiritual heritage, and histories are too rich not to be a magnet for the lost and unfulfilled in this Society.  Too many non-Indians today are searching, and with an Anglo- Roman heritage of borrowing gods and plagiarizing ideals it should not be surprising that they look our way.  There are bound to be those who believe they can simply pick and chose their ethnic identity.  Most of them are harmless.
            Fortunately we are always gathering new relatives among those Indians who have been lost, separated, or who are just now discovering their true heritage.  Too many of us in the past have come down one of those roads to judge them too harshly.  Providing they search quietly, respectfully, and with humility, their companionship can only make our Nations stronger.

         

   














Nations/ Seven                                                             BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N Skins


Blood Quantum
 

This is one of the most contentious issues being discussed in Indian Country.  All Tribes who participate in the government-to-government relationship with the U.S. must establish guidelines for tribal membership in order to define the limits of who is, or is not, eligible for the programs, benefits (real or imagined) and decision-making processes necessary to maintain that relationship.
          Blood quantum originated as a way to define who was Anglo-Saxon (white) and who was not.  As far back as the 1700s Anglos were setting up standards for ethnic membership in their exclusive club.  Sometimes a mere 1/8th mixture of some other racial group would disqualify you.  Belonging to the club meant you could vote, marry a "white" man or woman, own property, etc.  There were substantial economic benefits to being a recognized, and legal, "white" person.
          Though blood quantum and percentage of heritage was important from the first contacts with Anglo settlers.   Formal tribal enrollments generally began with the allotment programs in the 1800s.  Needing a system in which the title registration, transfer of property, and legal tribal lineage could be cleanly and easily recorded required first, a process of translation and renaming of individuals.  Tribal agencies and boarding schools were given the task of recording the names of tribal members.  These names, which are currently carried by Natives, reflect the different processes that were used to provide these records.   Blood quantum was not really an issue during the creation of these rolls, and the importance of becoming a “member” was never entirely and clearly explained to the Peoples. Many Indians resented and feared enrollment and refused to participate, even light-skinned ones.  But it soon became apparent that in order to share in the division of reservation properties into individual family allotments, enrollment was important. 
         When the decisions to break up tribal lands into allotments began, even non-Native Whites and Blacks, found their way onto tribal rolls.  Later, as  federal programs for Indians were allocated by Congress, the BIA decided that one-fourth was a sufficient percentage to render one an Indian.  Often that became a standard for enrollment, although today the amounts vary widely among "recognized" Tribes.  The official establishment dates of enrollment change from Tribe to Tribe.  Some of the rolls were established in the late 1800s, while others were determined in the 1920s, 30s, 50s, 60's and even 70s.  Tribes being recognized today are, at this very moment, establishing these "lists." 
         As long as Indians had lived in poverty and isolation, except for allotment, formal membership was a relatively unimportant issue.  Members and non-members living side-by-side were often relatives.  Treaty agreements included government responsibilities to administer Native Tribal resources, lands, lease agreements, and monies.  Tribes were not considered capable of handling their financial affairs, so the Army and the BIA administered payments and accounts.  As Indians started receiving the trickle down benefits of trust payments and claims settlements, and the Government began funding tribal social programs with grants and legislated monies, the issue heated up and enrollments took on greater and greater significance.  But it was not until Indian Gaming hit the scene in the 1990s that the fires surrounding membership began to blaze out of control, with new enrollment efforts and standards being set (to include or exclude people from the process).  Suddenly it worked both ways.  Natives who had never before taken an interest in their Tribe climbed out of the woodwork with their hands outstretched for their share of profits.  Enrollment numbers boomed as people "re-established" their relationships to their Tribes.  Often these "outsiders" were more educated and assimilated than their cousins who stayed on the rez, and in many places they have taken over as business and council leaders. 
     Today, bookstore owners and genealogy groups are besieged by people looking for that "lost" proof of verifiable heritage. Resentment and tribal family quarrels and divisions have increased.  Instead of focusing on the Tribe as a living entity, many Indians have copied the American anti-values of an individual or family group acting solely on its own behalf and for its own benefit.   Enrollment records are scrutinized and irregularities seized upon to exclude members or terminate their membership.  In some places records are doctored or forged to provide, or deny, proof of enrollment.  Blood quantum requirements have taken on an absolutism unseen before.  In some Tribes you have to be a full-blood, in others half.  In some you can have miniscule blood quantum as long as you can verify relationship to an originally enrolled member of the past. 
        Accepting the premise that it is a good thing to be enrolled, those hardest hit by blood quantum requirements are not the feared wannabes or low blood-percentage mixed-bloods, but those Indians who have mixed-Indian heritage.  Many fullbloods today are descended from more than one Tribe, yet they are unable to enroll because they are unable to fulfill the quantum requirements of either Tribe.  People who have more than two tribal heritages are in even more trouble.  We know of several fullbloods who've had to register with a Tribe whose quantum requirements are low, even though their quantum in that Tribe is insignificant compared with their quantum in their primary Tribe.  Within those Tribes they do not qualify for enrollment and tribal participation!
           Despite the extremely varied and confused requirements adopted by Federally Recognized Nations, we still support their right to make those decisions for themselves.  We are repulsed, however, by those who use them as a weapon against their own people and divide their Tribes and families into warring factions like dogs tearing at a carcass, each trying to get a bigger share.  In some places Indians who moved away during Termination, Relocation, boarding school, or out of economic necessity, are presently unable to return unless their names appear on some recent or newly reorganized enrollment list.  Many families are now divided by archaic restrictions or purposely constructed restraints to their enrollment.  In one highly publicized case, Indians from a particular Tribe who were not on the "approved" rolls were denied visiting rights to Tribal lands that contain the Tribal burial ground where their relatives lay!
          Of course some Indians warn that those Tribes who adopt higher quantum requirements will eventually quantum themselves into a situation where the Federal government has an excuse to declare them non-existent, (a situation that has already taken place).  Others complain that low requirements simply further dilute the ethnic and racial heritage of Indigenous People, encouraging those who have no ties to, or knowledge of, their peoples to "cash in" on membership.
          Whether a person who is one-three-hundred-and-sixty-second Indian can be considered along with someone of a quarter or half is one of the hottest and most contentious of our current debates.  The answer would seem to be apparent, but it is not.  The question of whether knowledge of culture, practice of original life-ways, involvement in spiritual ceremony or ritual, participation in social life, etc., should be considered as evidence of tribal participation, and whether that constitutes "belonging" is frequently asked.   Ultimately the answers will be determined by those who have the necessity to determine it, those Federally Recognized Tribes with money, federal grants, programs, and political issues at stake.
It is our hope that all the Federally Recognized Tribes will examine these issues closely and, over time, determine the best course for their Nations, keeping Sovereignty and Tribal relationships equally in mind.  One would hope that there will always be a place for those who do find themselves, for one reason or another, excluded, but who have the blood or the relationship to continue the fight to be a part of their Peoples.  It is not necessary for everyone to be enrolled, to share in the profits or decision-making that comes with federal recognition.  It is however, necessary for the Nations to continue to recognize social, spiritual and cultural involvement as an important and unifying force in the true (not federally determined) factors that construct, and perpetuate, tribal identity.  
                                          






Nations/ Eight                                                             BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N Skins


Leadership

 
In days past we looked first to our complete survival. We had to have hunters
and warriors and decision-makers and clowns--the elements of a society and culture.  In each of those honorable pursuits there were those who excelled, those with natural ability.  Indigenous People often utilized the merit concept of leadership. 
           Hunters, fighters, scouts, planners, speakers, or storytellers, were recognized by the People for their abilities, and were followed because of those abilities.  They were natural leaders. If they lost those abilities, or dishonored their positions, people simply refused to follow them anymore.   From earlier essays we remember that Thomas Jefferson observed, "Their leaders influence them by their character alone; they follow, or not, as they please him whose character for wisdom or war they have the highest opinion."  And there was always room for more than one leader. 
           This system of merit leadership did not always demand superior character or virtue.  Depending on the role to be performed, functional skills, as in hunting or war leadership, were to be considered first.  The Peoples recognized that different types of leadership demanded different qualities.  It was not a “one size fits all” requirement.  Spiritual or political leaders and healers with personal power, were often held to higher standards of character, determined by their social accomplishments and their abilities to uphold the People's trust and interests.  Those who possessed a charismatic personality, command of language, or uniquely persuasive ability could go far only if they were respected first for their integrity and honesty.
             Before the European occupation there was no need for leadership to be rigid and defined beyond the formal structures of Nations.   For many Tribes the concept of leadership was as fluid and as changeable as the People.   Benjamin Franklin recognized this when he wrote of Indigenous leadership, "The Persuasion of Men distinguished by Reputation of Wisdom is the only means by which others are govern'd or rather led." No one was locked into a relationship of leadership or constituency that could not be easily changed.
            Here is a quote from an unknown Native that adds to this observation.
"You talk of loyalty, but we are loyal--to our families, our Societies, and our People.  We have no loyalty to individual men as leaders, they lead because of their character and talents and power.  The General says our lack of loyalty weakens him, but if his leadership were true, all people would follow him naturally.  I think this is just another word the White Man uses to turn wolves into sheep.  The White Men claim loyalty to their Great Father, yet they fight among themselves and few of them have an equal voice.  Among us, every man has the same voice.  If we step in behind one of our own it is because of what they can achieve for the People. If someone with greater power arises we are free to follow them.  Loyalty follows from achievement and service, not because it is appointed or demanded.  We are not dogs whimpering at the feet of their masters, we are free men--we are wolves."
           Many of the Nations functioned in the truest democratic sense and governed themselves by unanimous consent in councils deciding as a group rather than as individuals. When pressed for time they knew who to look to, but no one was bound to follow, and each spoke for him or herself.  Spokesmen or representative councils were carefully chosen to represent the People in specific issues but few had permanently chosen people authorized to speak and decide on any issue.  Everyone had a choice to agree or disagree.   Certainly respected men and women carried a certain power in the deliberations and in final important decisions, but positions of leadership usually dealt mostly with serious or emergency issues related to the physical or social survival of the People as a group.  Individual problems always took a backseat to those faced by the Nation.  Everyone agreed that was the way it should be.  So we survived and thrived. 
            Europeans, accustomed to centuries of dealing with royalty and their appointed representatives, were unable to comprehend societies organized under an envelope of leadership that did not have specifically recognized individual spokesmen.  In their desire to manipulate the Nations, they consistently attempted to force Nations to put forth individuals to represent our "interests" in peace and treaty negotiations.  It took the Indigenous Nations many more years before Natives realized that their entire Nations were supposed to be bound by the promises of individuals chosen to negotiate for peace or treaty.  This realization ultimately brought about a change in the concepts of Native leadership and caused them to take on different qualities.  Even many of the so-called "chiefs", did not understand the concept of singular representative leadership the Europeans demanded.   Used to taking the time to talk things out, they were not prepared to make the quick decisions required of readily accessible spokesmen.
            Anglo-Americans had not been organized in a tribal way for centuries.  Their newly organized democratic principles belied a principal belief in a pursuit of individual success that superceded any true belief that the entire people's basic needs come before individual wealth.  This modern thinking pattern is analytical and not synergistic.  It does not consider the whole, but focuses only on its individual parts, with the human being the principle character around which all other life makes obeisance.  As John Trudell has pointed out in his lectures, the Patriarchal Societies of the Three Desert Tribes of the Middle East, and their fragmented descendants, have never had a cosmology that allowed for a unity and relationship between life-forms and the planet.  Instead they view the human species as the crowning achievement of Creation, the manifestation (albeit flawed) of the Creator.  These views are the antithesis of tribal thought and arrogantly seek to fragment, compartmentalize, and subjugate life rather than recognizing the universe as a single interrelated, interdependent entity.  Instead of relying on a context of relationship and co-dependence to find one’s place, civilized men place distinctions on separate events, and each of their thoughts exist independently and separate from the whole.  What has this to do with leadership?  Everything.   This tendency to focus on the “parts” of life result in an overstatement and lack of subtlety in dealing with day to day events. Out of this flagrant and analytically divided perception, an individual's economic status becomes his defining characteristic, and wealth defines the new royalty.  Those that put themselves up to be "chosen" as leaders are often not the most qualified, the most honorable, or even the most trustworthy.  Americans rarely investigate their potential leader's achievements thoroughly enough to effectively evaluate a potential candidate's qualifications, ability and philosophy.  They settle for his words and media hype.  But words cannot hold honor, nor demand loyalty, nor serve the needs of the People.  American standards for leadership have come to be judged by how well a person serves the personal enrichment of those supporting his election, and the individual fortunes of his immediate circle.  

            In some Nations, Native spiritual and political leaders, while respected and honored, were often expected to embrace poverty or hold themselves apart from others by observing a higher standard of morality and ethics. They held a position of sacrifice, which they fulfilled with a single-minded commitment to the Nation.  In the 1700s, the writer/statesman Cadwallader Colden commented on these ideals, which we think warrant repeating.  "Their Great Men, both Sachems [civil chiefs] and captains [warchiefs] are generally poorer than the common people, for they affect to give away and distribute all the Presents or Plunder they get in their Treaties or War, so as to leave nothing for themselves. If they should be once suspected of selfishness, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men, and would consequently lose their authority."
            The American leader is often paid for his service, is able to accept gifts, and is even expected to increase his personal wealth and stature, providing it be done discreetly.  Though it is publicly proclaimed that our leaders adhere to moral and ethical standards, the opposite is often the case. Despite flowery rhetoric and promises, their actions often speak more as a tribute to greed, self-aggrandizement, lust for power, and individual/corporate self-gratification, than to service, morality, and equitable decision-making.
            Here we come to a middle ground.  The old physical ways relating to our day-to-day survival have passed, but the challenge to survive as Nations is still with us.  There will always be Apaches, and Pomos, and Mohawks. There will always be people who can say they are racially Indian.  But there may not always be an Apache language, A Pomo culture, or a Mohawk Tribe on Mohawk lands.  These can be lost!
           We have faced generations of being told what to do.  Many of our "leaders" during the last ten decades were functionally powerless. Some were simply puppets of the Feds. When we were forced onto the Reservation with all our decisions being made by the Army or the BIA.   All the natural and meritorious things that our leaders used to do for the People faded away as they merged into the nondescript abstractions of American political gamery.  What was there left for a "leader'" to do?  This is not to say that no "leaders" survived during those difficult times, but the role and realities of leadership changed.       
            To steal a quote from a popular novel, (the title of which we do not know!),
"... when the entire surface of the earth is changed, there is nothing to do but live on it as it is. We cannot camp by the shore of a lake if it is now a creek. We cannot follow a trail the earth has swallowed up. We cannot eat buffalo that died in the time of our grandfathers."
           We must make for ourselves new trails, find new buffalo (or bring them back), and integrate the old with new.  Some of our People in the preceding generations became convinced that the Indian Way was dead and that to survive they had to become Americans.  For these People, the belief that "the Tribe comes first" died.  Many of their descendents today think only of themselves and of their immediate families.  That way of thinking is a threat to the survival of the Nations.  If the Tribal way of thinking dies, our Tribes will cease to be Tribes.
          Fortunately there were family leaders who did not give up the vision of the past.  They are the true survivors.  They pointed the way forward, looking to make connections between the Old Ways and the New.  They know that our Ceremonies and Dances are not just "performances" for tourists but are the "life" of the People.  Today's leaders work toward making the surviving “old ways” real and relevant so that young people can feel both a connection to the world they live in, and to the ancient world from which they are descended.
         Some of our Nations today are being governed fairly and effectively.  Others are not.  We think there are some crucial questions about leadership that must be asked.  Some Nations, having already answered the questions-- are already advancing or practicing their solutions.
       1.   Must we continue to use the obsolete forms of government almost all of us have been using?  Can we effectively govern through councils and consensus groups, without elected leaders, or are our social relationships too fragile?    Should the People choose their leaders by consensus or must prospective leaders continue to put themselves forward to be chosen by he divisive and easily corrupted majority vote, the way US politicians do? 
       3.   Should Nations separate their councils of leadership from their business councils so that conflicts of interest can be avoided and competent outside business people hired if they do not exist within the Tribe?      
       4.   Should Elders or Traditional councils be utilized and empowered to effectively safeguard tribal lands and resources, as well as the social, cultural and spiritual integrity of the people by holding the authority to advise tribal, or business councils, of decisions that are potentially destructive to that integrity?
            Despite the appearance of apathy on important issues, Indian People still expect to be involved in the decision-making of their Tribe or Band.  Hopefully, those who are not taking an active part can be re-involved through tribal acceptance of more traditional forms of government or just naturally through the development of a more comprehensive sovereign authority.  We think it is natural during peace, or in the absence of genuine necessity, for people to let their leaders govern without involving themselves too deeply in the process.  But it is the methods of communication we choose and the regular free flow of discussion between the people that will allow a true representation of the People's opinions to emerge.  In the end, however, great leaders have always taken risks and run at the fringe of the People's approval to innovate and bring about great and beneficial change.
           Many Indians today are still holding to so-called traditions of not putting oneself forward, or speaking up.   It is our opinion that these are fairly new post war traditions that have only become accepted since our warriors, male and female, lost confidence and feared government reprisals for straight talk. Where are the warrior days of publicly recounting one’s accomplishments so that they can be publicly honored and the entire people may take pride and credit for them?  This is in sharp contrast to the “hold ‘em down, keep them back” ethic publicly utilized on many reservations and in many communities by fearful, jealous relatives.  If sovereignty is to be preserved and augmented, leaders must not be afraid to suggest new ideas to the People.  They must risk criticism and believe that these ideas will be fairly examined and that priorities will be made of the most important issues.  Confidence in leaders will bring back the influence of the general council, and this will contribute to an increase in the pool of new leaders. With a healthy distrust for "the few leading the many", we are challenged to organize Councils that represent the People's Voice and put Tribal needs in front.  If we continue to value those who can transform words into deeds, with Vision and experience, then we will have leaders in the Traditional sense of the word. As ceremony is the soul of the People, and relationships are the heart of the People, so leadership is the mind of the People.  Without it, our Nations will continue mired in the sticky mud of ineffective and outmoded government.


















Nations/ Nine                                                               BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Twentieth Century Decision-Making
 

As described previously, the U.S. Government has always needed specific representatives of Indian Tribes, i.e. "chiefs", to act as formal representatives of their People.  If they could not find someone who seemed to fit that bill, they just picked someone who seemed to have some status or recognition.   In the early decades of the last century, when it became apparent that at least some of the Tribes would survive, and sensing that they would soon have to be made citizens, the government began looking at other methods of centralizing Indian political organization. 
           In order to further "civilize the savages", a sample constitution was drafted during the Indian Reorganization Act, featuring a General Council (the People), an elected tribal chairman as spokesperson, and a tribal secretary for keeping track of meetings and decisions.  Suggestions for determining who was eligible for membership, and what the guidelines for voting might be, were included.   Thirty percent of the eligible voters became the original guideline for a council quorum for decision-making. Suggestions for frequency of council meetings, elections, and other procedures were detailed.
          After the IRA ( Indian Reorganization Act) was enacted in 1934, these sample constitutions were given to virtually every Tribe recognized by the Federal Government.  In their simplistic form, these constitutions were as close to approximating Traditional governments as European thinking could get.  The People, or general council, retained almost complete autonomy and nowhere was the tribal chairman given any more than a spokesman-like position.  With the People in close proximity to each other, or in almost daily contact, the thirty percent figure for conducting business was reasonable. 
            But though most of the Nations adopted these constitutions (by majority vote of the general council with 30% present to form a quorum) the structure was still too formal and foreign for the Nations to accept. Besides, what power could any kind of government have when every economic, political and social aspect of tribal life was still under the direct scrutiny (and control) of the Dept of the Interior, the BIA, or the Army? Remember that at no time have the Nations had control of their decision-making processes or monies without the review and approval of one of those agencies until recently, at the turn of the 21st century.
             When it was determined that reservation lands and allotments held billions of dollars of mineral, water, and grazing rights, getting hands on those rights became a big business as the BIA and corrupt tribal governments schemed on how to enrich their own interests at the expense of the Nations.  The BIA had already found that the magic thirty-percent quorum for business decisions could be manipulated or even ignored to get decisions favorable to the government.  It was at this time that some Traditionals began to question how a government agency loyal first to the government could be given the responsibility to look after the interests of the Tribes without generating a conflict of interest.
            This legal question has never been adequately resolved by the Supreme Court.  Many times that United States has pretended to represent the interests of the Tribes against itself, but seldom has it upheld its obligation.  One of the more famous examples is where the US offered the Nevada Shoshone a monetary settlement for their lands.  When the Shoshone refused, the Government declared that since it was also representing the Tribe it could accept the money on their behalf and closed the case.  Recently, the Shoshones have filed suit again to regain their lands.
     A vital revision of tribal constitutions, instituting the safeguards that provide checks and balances to the power of Councils and Chairmen, was (and still is) desperately needed, but ignored, in Washington.   In some places constitutions are ignored, meetings are held and conducted illegally--ignoring designated quorums and procedures. Tribal membership rolls are manipulated, and illegal decisions enforced.  Even convicted criminals have held powerful tribal positions.  Members who buck the system within these types of governments are assaulted, intimidated, coerced, bought-off, even stripped of their tribal memberships, while Councils and Chairmen get fat off the new Mecca of gaming monies.  Additionally, tribal members are often offered money to attend and vote at important meetings, especially where constitutions are being rewritten, to legitimize and enforce this system of tribal council invulnerability.  Councils are declaring vital economic tribal records confidential, disallowing public view of enrollment lists, and protecting their interests under the guise of tribal "security" or "confidentiality".  The catchword of the 1990s, "sovereignty", is being used to keep government agencies from examining these problems, or interfering in tribal "self-determination".  The BIA and Department of the Interior decline to involve themselves in intra-tribal squabbles, and prefer to overlook local problems and disturbances.  Even though we hate to see sovereignty used this way, this policy of non-interference is probably for the best.  Especially since in the few places where the Government has been forced to intervene, the contradictory and convoluted status of Federal Indian Law almost always causes the BIA to support the criminal governments to the bitter end, denying Traditional constituents any proper or legal standing within the Nations.
            There are places where the system works due to a selfless or powerful leadership, cooperation, and larger tribal involvement, but the potential for abuse is still there.  Hopefully these Nations will continue to make the process work, even within these limited and outdated forms.  There are also a few places where Tribes have successfully replaced their systems with more traditional forms, or at the very least, new representative constitutions.  Whether or not they will achieve balance has yet to be seen.
          We do not mean to take issue with the need for a real and legally defined sovereignty, however we believe that the Federal Government must also allow Tribes to reorganize their governments to provide safeguards against corruption and criminal behavior.   Finding new ways to involve everyone that wants a say in representative government is also important.  Of course it has always been a conflict of interest for the U.S.  On the one hand they have envisioned themselves our guardian, at the same time representing the huge corporate interests that wish to profit from our resources or otherwise benefit from our special status.  We all believe that sovereignty should not be used as a weapon by Indians against Indians, but a solution will not come from outside interference or regulation.   Only by breaking down these outdated tribal council systems and establishing new  (old) forms and methods for decision-making will the Nations benefit from a more traditional, and functional, representation.

                    
Nations/ Ten                                                                 BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Consensus


Voting is an exercise that puts people in competition to accumulate a majority to authorize any decision.  This is inherently weak because it does not demand that the circle of voters do their best to serve the interests of everyone through conciliation and compromise to facilitate a decision. 
            Modern governments representing huge constituencies have difficulty feeling their relationships to each other and become individually self-serving.  But anytime we take the easy way out in our decision-making processes, allowing arbitrarily some voices more power than others, we diminish our ability to equitably serve the whole People.
           Voting works in a system where the individual's interests are considered paramount but the individual's powers are limited.
           In Traditional government, the service and interests of the People are paramount but the individual's power is exalted.
           One is a shadow of democracy, while the other stands full in the sun. The first calls individuals to find like minds to pit themselves against those who disagree to "defeat" them, while the second requires cooperation and genuine concern for everyone's voice to come to unanimous consensus so that a decision can be reached. One is a quick and final, fast-food approach to government, while the other takes time, effort, determination and genuine respect for opposing views to achieve a gourmet type representation.
            In today's world you can guess which type is the one most favored, especially by business.  Progress and the accumulation of wealth demand a quick and final decision-making process.  Unfortunately, quick and easy decisions are often the wrong ones.  Many Americans are not easily convinced that a slow and steady hand makes for a trustworthy mount, they'd rather break 'em quick, and if they don't ride easy, 'shoot em and get another.
But sacrifice, and well thought out decisions are the only way we will clean up this earth, reformulate our governments, an achieve real sovereignty.
The following paragraphs detail how hypothetical consensus governments might work.  They do not necessarily reflect the views or traditions of Indian people. Still, a number of Tribes who still have Traditional governments intact utilize many of these principles.
Consensus means unanimous decision.  Consensus can work for small or large Nations.  Here is an example of how it works.
For large Tribes, there must be smaller groups to begin. These may consist of individual bands, families, clans, councils, towns, or other natural organization.  These small groups meet on an issue.  They discuss it until their general consensus is known   This commitment to resolution limits contentious behavior and promotes a feeling of participatory decision-making that is amenable to compromise and equitable solutions.  Though some disagreement may still exist,  compromise and reconciliation is reached anyway.
Young adults have the same voice as Elders but allow Elders' views to carry opinion. Why?  Because Natives value the opinions of Elders, and because young people  know their time will come and are confident that their opinions are respected.
In large Nations, smaller councils may send a representative or spokesman to larger councils that consists of appointed, honored, and respected leaders.  If a Tribe is small, the council may consist of all the adult members.  If it is a serious issue that has involved a lot of criticisms, contentious accusations, or general disagreement, care is taken to represent all voices.  No decision is reached without consensus.  This is real democracy at work.               
           We think there must be at least four pre-existing conditions for consensus decision-making to be effective and representative:
        1. The People must share a commitment to similar spiritual principles that encourage everyone to be on their best behavior to ensure peace and respectful social interaction.
       2.  The People must show respect for their Elders and each voice that is represented in the council.
       3.  The People must believe that Tribal interests supercede any personal benefits gained by decision and they must have enough relationship to still be a viable Tribal organization.
       4.  The People must respect and stand by the decisions of the Council without undermining its decisions.

 
For crisis decision-making, each council has those people trusted to be the most honorable and knowledgeable about the nature of the crisis.  In certain cases they are pre-chosen to act in these times.  If it is an issue of threat, some Indigenous Peoples had pre-designated leaders to declare war, negotiate or mediate conflicts or decide on pressing issues related to the survival of the People.
Today, survival may be construed to apply to spiritual, cultural, social, or economic situations having a profound impact on the present or future wellbeing of the People as determined by the Elders and accepted natural leaders. 
The gathering of general councils, whether they be of appointed representatives or the entire Nation, is an important part of consensus.  It is much harder for people to lie or deceive each other face to face.  A sense of community is the only thing that can unify opposing forces.  This can only be achieved by humanizing the discussion and de-personalizing the conflicts.  Indians have become used to interpersonal conflicts, but deep down they don't want meetings with parliamentary process, and chairmen banging on podiums!
            Consensus can only become reality when People share in each others lives  .  When families eat together, children play together, people dance and sing together, powwow together, pray together, and giveaway--these people share the common bonds that allow them to make important decisions together.   It is through these kinds of gatherings that fractured and divided Peoples can be healed.  
So, coming to your rez today: The Traveling Indigenous Gourmet, NewTime-OldTime Dance-Time Prize Competition, Traditional Rock and Roll-Country-Rap-49er, Consensus Government, Spiritual Unity and Friendship PowWow.  Transportation can be arranged.
            It's an idea. 
           



















Nations/ Eleven                                                              BlueWolf & Lupe/ Shirts N' Skins


Resources And National Unity


Tribal governments are obsessed, and rightfully so, with the ideals and realities of tribal sovereignty under the watchful eye of the U.S. Government.  We should, by Constitutional rights, have almost unlimited sovereignty in a real sense.  Unfortunately the policies of Manifest Destiny allowed for changing the rules of Constitutional law at the whims of historical convenience.  So sovereignty, while a virtuous ideal, presents a two-edged sword.  Sovereignty can be misused.  It can be used as a political or personal weapon.  It can be used to abandon the principle of stewardship of the land and misuse or abuse natural resources for profit, and it can become tyrannical and arrogant if not used responsibly.  Our assertion is that the U.S. should no longer legislate the conditions of our sovereignty, except to expand our rights and powers, and any abuses of sovereignty should be handled by representatives of the Tribal Nations themselves.
             The kind of sovereignty we have today is a token sovereignty, overseen, but not legally defined, by a third party.  It is a most dangerous and tentative situation.  It allows for a third party (like the BIA) to control who it determines to be the legal and designated representatives of each Tribe, while excusing that same third party from acting when tyrannical or abusive forces manipulate tribal governments, or attack tribal members.
            Natives all know what I mean.  To clarify for others, let us describe a situation a very large tribe found itself in, in the last decade.
            A legally elected Tribal Chairman held an iron hand over the Tribe.  He accused of defrauding the Tribe of millions, of sexually assaulting women in the Tribal Office, etc.  He declared all Tribal records to be confidential including the Tribal Voting Rolls.  In subsequent elections he refused to disclose the names of tribal members eligible to vote to his competitors, arrested those who attempted to leaflet or promote their campaigns, etc.  Attempts were made to legally recall him but his control over the tribal courts and police was extensive.  Opposition leaders organized their own court supporters and took over the Tribal Offices.  Separate Tribal Court Officials issued conflicting decisions.  Opposition Leaders went to the BIA and were told that since he was still the federally recognized Chairman, and he had not requested their involvement, the BIA could not intervene.  Privately, they were told the BIA would not involve themselves in a political Tribal struggle, despite the fact that BIA law enforcement could be used by the existing Chairman to quell illegal disturbances.  Fortunately, the issue resolved itself without significant violence, but this is an example where a third party authorizes a governing body but refuses to intervene when that body is proven to be abusing its authority and serving its own interests.
            As long as the Tribes themselves do not have absolute control over their legal and recognized representatives we will continue to see violations of constitutions, individual rights, misuse of resources, etc.   Today the BIA can avoid involvement simply by pretending it does not want to involve itself in the "internal" and "sovereign" affairs of tribal government--or it can jump in with law enforcement personnel to "aide" the "legal tribal government."
 It is our opinion that we need a confederacy of some type, or at least a National Indian Supreme Court, to organize our Nations into a powerful and unified force.  First and foremost, it would tie Indians into something universal representing all the Indigenous People of this land.  It would add to our identity.  Though we define ourselves by Tribe or Band, this way we could have both a local and national identity.  This body could also represent those Indians who are not members of Tribes--urban Indians, relocated Indians, unenrolled Indians.  It would not give these people a voice in the affairs of Sovereign Nations but would allow them to participate in programs that would serve the Unified Nations.
            A Confederacy could develop national media programs to promote cultural awareness and encourage diversity within unity.  It could honor the accomplishments of our youth, statesmen, and artists, coordinate health and dependency programs, institute trade agreements between Nations, develop tribal resource guides, oversee trust accounts, represent the Nations in world organizations, and develop economic programs between Tribes.
           Of course there have been, and still are, organizations that exist to accomplish some of those ends, but some of today's smaller non-treaty gaming Tribes are often at odds with the larger land-based Tribes over priorities and issues of importance.  To the smaller Tribes, issues related to gaming and economics come first.  For the large land based Tribes, more immediate concerns may be about health care, roads, law enforcement, resources, or other land-based issues. 
           Often the small successful gaming Tribes have much more money to spend politically than the larger land based Tribes.  Naturally larger Tribes are concerned that money might buy a greater representation in any Confederacy or Court proposed.  But representation is crucial to the integrity of any decision-making body, and members--not money--should define the issues.   To insure equal representation would be a great    challenge.  Nevertheless, if it could be achieved equitably, the benefits for all Tribes would be enormous.
             This Confederacy, or Unified Court, could formulate responsible precepts regarding the use of natural resources in Tribal profit-making ventures, and protect and preserve undeveloped lands for future generations.  It could push for a process, separate from the BIA, to help Tribes with the purchase of additional tribal lands and applications to place these lands into Tribal trusts. It could oversee government accounts of the use, harvest, or withdrawal of Indian resources by outside parties for profit, and manage and keep private accounts of Indian trusts and settlements.  A National Indian Supreme Court could develop legal arguments supporting Indian causes specifically in rebuttal, or in compliment to U.S. Higher Courts.  This court could mediate inter-Tribal suits, disagreements, and disputes of sovereignty, individual rights, etc.  Most importantly, it would attempt to take all those previously mentioned topics out of government hands, once and for all.

     Indians must find ways to deal with our internal problems legally, outside of American courts.  We must decide now that sovereignty will not be used as a tool to allow corrupt or greedy Tribal Governments to ravage and pollute our environment and natural resources.  The resources of the Earth are not placed here for the profiteering of individual Tribes, families, or members--but to assure that the generations unborn will have the necessities of life.
            Hopefully Indian Nations will someday see a reason to look out from the limited boundaries of their lands and see a potential for larger organization.  We envision a time when we will have our own Land Management Councils to oversee the proper care of resources, and a national Supreme Court, or Council of Elders, who will stand for the Nation’s unborn children above the individual pursuits of Tribes and their members.  At that time our Confederacy may finally have the power to preserve our individual sovereignty against the fickle whims of the U.S. Government.














Nations/ Twelve                                                          BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins      


Materialism


Most human beings have some desire for material possessions, especially those with children or families to care for.  It's a natural instinct to provide for one's family: to be as comfortable as possible, and to live free of want.
           Indigenous Peoples did not develop agrarian communities or hunter/gatherer relationships that permanently stripped the resources of their immediate earth.  They had common limitations on how much they could acquire materially and still be able to function.  The reality of difficult and time-consuming labor necessary to creating any beautiful or valuable object placed another limitation on the number of those objects one might hope to acquire in a lifetime.  In most tribal societies, materialism was more a matter of possessing enough functional items to make the daily work life flow as smoothly as possible than it was acquiring an unnecessarily ponderous amount of extras.  We'd like to repeat Bruce Johansen's observation that, "Jefferson's writings made it evident that he, like Franklin, saw accumulation of property beyond that needed to satisfy one's natural requirements as an impediment to liberty.  To give "property" the same importance as life and liberty, against the backdrop of Jefferson's views regarding the social nature of property, would have been a contradiction."    Johansen continues. “(Ben) Franklin used examples from Indian societies rather explicitly to illustrate his conception of property and its role in society:  ‘All property, indeed, except the savage's temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public Convention.  Hence, the public has the rights of regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it.  All the property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it’.” 
            Of course there were items that were considered personal property and delineated status or wealth; planting acreage, horses, etc.  But often the concept of the giveaway or potlatch in these societies was a countering social influence to the attraction of selfish accumulation of wealth.  That's not to say that there were not cultures or societies that did amass material wealth, but by-and-large, most Northern American Tribes did not accumulate much more than they could carry away at any one time.  Franklin wrote, regarding the Indian view of the American distribution of wealth,  "The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distressed for Want,..all contrive to disgust them [Indians] with what we call civil Society."    
          Native Nations had concepts of wealth and power, but determined them differently than Europeans.  Since the invasion and holocaust, American Indians have had neither.  Poverty became a way of life for generations.  Some were able to escape, usually by leaving their Peoples and blending or assimilating with non-Indian communities, while the "darker" communities were trapped by racism and lack of opportunity.
            It is an interesting observation that while some poor people are able to keep their morals, ethics, and values--even when they have nothing else to sustain them--others give them up completely, seemingly without a fight.   Among our Nations, certain individuals of character were able to continue to pass on to succeeding generations their ideals of spirituality and morality, while others failed.  
           Today, many members of our communities suffer from loneliness and lack any belief that comforts them or gives them hope.  It is a crisis of values made even more serious by the sudden appearance of the gaming issue.  Instead of spiritual leaders rising up to give us back the power and mystery missing in our lives, we now have investors promising riches beyond our wildest dreams.  And for many Natives, the word "riches" doesn't mean much.  One Grandfather we know says that "too many of us don't really know the difference between the power of holding a thousand dollars and the power of holding one hundred thousand, or even a million."   
           While enormous sums slip from our mouths easily in council meetings, we are still poor people in our minds and cannot grasp the fact that there is a difference between enough, and too much, money.  Rather than settling for enough, and debating the best ways to serve the People's interests, many of our leaders get caught up in the business of enormous dreams and lose sight of the day to day functional use of the smaller sums that actually makes their way into our tribal coffers. 
           We do not think this situation will last long.  Many of our younger people have begun to educate themselves in business and law.  Before long we will be able to run our casinos and businesses professionally without the help of outsiders.  But the question of importance is not so much when will we make our way out of poverty, but what will we have become when we get there?  
            All poor people with sudden wealth are especially prone to the sad and divisive selfishness of greed.  You see examples of this disease everywhere.  Only a spiritual reawakening can save people from that sickness.
            We have not yet seen Indian Casino management, Business Councils, or Tribal Councils take a fully supportive role in the spiritual and social growth of the tribes they represent.  There may be some who have, and to them we offer apology.  Some may question whether that should be their role or responsibility, but it is our contention that they are in a position of power and are therefore required by Traditional ethics to provide that support.  
            Those who are in a position to lead, or to provide a focus and center, should do so.  The excitement of this new time should promulgate projects and gatherings that bring people together, encouraging them to attend spiritual, social, and cultural events.  We think Tribal leaders, even gaming leaders, should be responsible for more than money and jobs.  It is an idealistic point of view, but we think they have a unique opportunity to become a center and a fire that serves unity--not just the usual American demand for materialistic gratification.
            For those Indians who have lost their center, we do not pretend to understand how people can recapture values, ethics, and morals.  Either they are planted in youth and flower in adulthood, or they do not.  We do know that if we begin sharing again, and if we gather again to pray, it will be a good first step. 







Ranting And Raving


Some of our editors felt the tone in this section was entirely too militant.  Unfortunately that's exactly how we were described in our youth.  Though our muscles aren't as firm and at least one of us weighs as much as we both did in those days, our minds still carry much of the angst and anger we felt in the early 70's.  There have been changes in Indian country, some of them good--some not so good.  But many of our first complaints are still valid.  All of us who were active in the seventies know we're only a small step away from being classified and catalogued by the FBI again, this time as domestic terrorists.  We're OK with that.  We're certain that the American Founding Fathers and all of the Native Heroes and Heroines we cherish would be with us on that list.

        






Ranting/ One                                                                    BlueWolf/Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins

 
Science And Pandora's Box


 "It may seem dangerous to tinker with nature without knowing the long-term effects, but without the threat of environmental disaster caused by the short-sighted unbalancing of natural forces, how are we to bring about positive change in the world around us?  Modern science has a long, proven track record of correcting the mistakes it inadvertently unleashes on the world. I'm confident that if the worst ever came to pass, science would find some way to fix it. That's what science does.  People shouldn't see man-made global disasters as a bad thing. They should see them as scientific breakthroughs waiting to happen."
Texas A&M Mad Scientist

Be skeptical.  Question everything.  Search for someone who's been there.  If you don’t know it to be true personally--don’t form an opinion that affects others’ lives. This is especially true in politics, war, science, technology, economics, and religion.”
Amafo

           The Internet, cloning, gene-splicing, new viruses, robotics and nano-technology--this is the brave new world of the 21st century.  But despite its glossy sheen, our world civilization, and the exported ideologies of progress, industrialization, and technology only serve to hide evidence of a deeper social deterioration.
           We have all the earmarks of a disintegrating culture.  Aldous Huxley, in his book Brave New World Revisited wrote, "Sociologists and psychologists have written at length about the price that Western civilization has had to pay, and will go on paying, for technological progress."  Our entertainment focuses on violence, sex, and death, while our society demands that we attempt to legislate safety and civility, further and further eroding personal freedoms.  Drug testing, gun control, hate crime legislation and feeble environmental protection laws are superficial attempts to regulate a culture going mad--frantically trying to legislate morals, family stability, common values and purpose.
           This is especially irritating to the descendants of those Indigenous Peoples who were assured that the Anglo Saxon Christian "replacements" for Indian culture, spirituality, and social order were superior to our own!
It never fails to amaze us how easily we have gone from understanding our
dependence on and having a relationship with the natural world, to putting all our faith and support on the superficially constructed systems of civilization.  Much of this has to do with the short historical perspective people have today, and with the arrogant pride we humans tend to have in our creative ability.  There is also the Roman-influenced Judeo-Christian belief in the superiority of the human being as a species, evidenced by a continuing martial desire to conquer and control our environment.
            It is this childish fascination with being at the center of everything that causes science to imagine our world as a plaything, to be altered and manipulated at will.  Pure scientists play with their advanced technological toys, experimenting with the building blocks of life with an enthusiastic naivete towards discovery, showing no more concern about the result of their actions than a three year-old with Tinkertoys*.  Genetic engineering is the latest game.  In September, 2001, scientists discovered genetically engineered (GE) corn at 15 locations in the state of Oaxaca, deep in southern Mexico, a country that has outlawed the commercial use of all genetically engineered crops.  No one knows how it got there.
            In the U.S., genetically engineered corn has been grown commercially since 1996 and 26 percent of all U.S. corn acreage is now genetically engineered. The remote region of Oaxaca where the illegal GE corn was discovered is considered the heartland of corn diversity in the world. 
            Scientists had hoped to keep Oaxaca's rich diversity of corn uncontaminated by GE strains because Oaxaca retains the wealth of genetic varieties developed during 5500 years of Indigenous corn cultivation. Scientists now say that aggressive forms of GE corn, let loose in Oaxaca, may drive native species to extinction, causing the loss of irreplaceable cultivars.
            It is unclear whether the GE corn was carried deep into Mexico by birds, or was intentionally spread there by corporations or governments promoting GE crops.  All genetically engineered varieties of corn are owned and patented by transnational corporations. The only legal way to acquire such seeds is to purchase them from the corporation holding the patent. Such patents are called "intellectual property" and their enforcement under international law has been a major goal of "free trade" agreements in recent years. The World Trade Organization (WTO) contains strict protections for Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), and patented forms of life, such as GE crops, are explicitly covered by TRIPs.
            Under WTO rules, national governments are required to protect the intellectual property rights of corporations. In the U.S. and Canada, farmers have complained that they have become victims of gene drift, or genetic pollution, as GE crops have drifted across property lines, contaminating non-GE crops with patented GE varieties.
             Today's GE crops can't guarantee that farmers won't save seeds. Corporations intent on preventing seed-saving must hire agents.  Such monitoring is expensive. To avoid the need for monitoring, and to gain 100 percent control over farmers, the GE corporations have developed a new technology--terminator genes. Terminator genes prevent a crop from reproducing itself unless certain "protector" chemicals are applied to the crop. Any farmer using terminator seeds must buy the "protector" chemicals each year. As terminator technology spreads around the world, it will end Indigenous agriculture and much of our biodiversity as well. An estimated 1.4 billion Indigenous people currently grow their own crops for subsistence worldwide.  In many instances, their land is being eyed for corporate "development" and GE crop technology offers a legal way to separate Indigenous people from their land.
           Hunkering outside those science laboratories, human vultures enamored of wealth and power have continually played a game of Risk* with those same Tinkertoys* at the expense of the planet and its children. 
Genetic drift of GE crops to non-GE fields has, in fact, been well documented and even the GE corporations and their regulators in government acknowledge that it is a serious problem. Now, however, Monsanto, a leading supplier of GE seeds, has cleverly turned the tables on the alleged victims of genetic pollution by suing them for stealing
Monsanto's patented genes.   The first case that came to trial, in Canada in 2001, found Monsanto suing Percy Schmeiser, an organic farmer who had complained of genetic pollution.  Monsanto said that after 40 years of growing crops organically, Mr. Schmeiser had a change of heart and decided to raise a genetically-engineered crop by stealing Monsanto's patented genes.
Monsanto won and Schmeiser must pay. With this important victory in the bank, Monsanto now has similar lawsuits pending against farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, and Louisiana.  Thus farmers that fall victim to genetic pollution may find themselves sued for violating the intellectual property right of a corporation and be forced to compensate the genetic polluter.
Farmers who purchase GE seeds sign contracts requiring--under penalty of law--that they not save seed from one crop to the next. Thus farmers who employ GE seeds must purchase new seed year after year, making them dependent upon whatever transnational corporation owns the patent. Farmers who can't afford to buy seed each year will simply not be allowed to grow a crop. In free-market societies, such displaced farmers are free to move to a city where they are free to be unemployed.

There is an ongoing controversial debate as to whether modern techology and civilization is causing world temperatures to rise.   Scientists and politicians may argue about the cause, but not the effect.  Bruce Johansen wrote, in October 2001, that “the global climate change is severely impacting the Innuit of the Arctic.  Swallows, sandflies and robins now migrate into the Arctic.  The permafrost has begun to melt and mosquitoes and beetles, unknown a generation ago, are now a common sight.  Seals and bears are suffering noticeably.   Polar bears are 90 to 220 pounds lighter than they used to be thirty years ago.  Unpredictable storms and thinner ice make hunting conditions far more dangerous than they used to be.  Some villages are literally melting into the sea.  The University of Alaska has published data which shows recent summer mean temperatures to be five degrees warmer, and winter temperatures ten degrees higher than historical records show.
    Scientists believed, only a few years ago, that it would take hundreds or even thousands of years for pesticides to percolate into the ocean of pure water known as the Ogallala Aquifer that supplies drinking water to millions of Americans in eight states. They have already been detected.  Bill Andrews, chief of studies for the U.S. Geological Survey in Oklahoma City said, “The aquifer is more susceptible than we ever thought it was.”
How many more of these kinds of scientific errors can we afford?
    Take the basic computer chip.  Tokyo researchers have found that in order to produce each chip, 700 times its weight in waste must also be produced.  In comparison, the relationship for waste in production of an automobile is only 1 to 2.  The average computer is typically two to three years compared to the car.  Today, in the Far East, many computer manufacturers and governments contract for huge waste disposal sites for electronic wastes, dumping hazardous and non-biodegradeable materials.  Local environments have already had their health, water, and soil contaminated by those pollutants and waste products.

It is a mistaken view that these scientists, or at least those who fund them, do not have a clear idea of how new technologies may be used and misused.  Governments and corporations who invest millions, or billions, in a new technology have certainly examined all the possibilities, positive and negative, thoroughly.  Yet public debate is swept aside by rhetoric and hype, always putting forth the advantages, and never thoroughly discussing the potential problems.  The ensuing public silence lends a tacit approval to their endeavors.
            John Sulston wrote in his book, "The Common Thread", about the politics that entered the race to decode the human genome. "It was not," he said, "as I fondly imagined at the beginning, simply a matter of sequencing the human genome and making the data available.  This was naive. I'd thought of the Human Genome Project as being an uncluttered and altruistic activity, but found instead that others viewed it as a stepping stone on the route to commercial profit or political power."  "I was forced to realize that in our society one can get into trouble for giving away something that can make money.  I began to notice parallel tragedies unfolding..." "The commercial and competitive pressures on academics today are alarming.  And if academics are not independent, who will be society's impartial experts?" "The big transnational corporations are now more powerful than many governments.  Their strength is apparent everywhere we turn, and especially in their collective lobbying in the capitals of rich nations." 
 "This international fellowship (of science) is threatened when people try to walk both sides of the line, mingling scientific contribution with profit-making activity.  The two do not mix well."  "The truth is that companies don't have to behave ethically... In our overly PR-conscious society there is little questioning of a smooth presentation.  Half truth that is branded with a recognized name and laminated to cover the cracks is rated more highly than unvarnished fact."
Sulston continues, "In the commercial world this is absolutely necessary to maximize their profits.  Individual selfishness is held up as the best way to advance civilization.  Through the process of globalization these beliefs are being exported to the world as a whole, making it not only less just, but less safe.  Nations, too, are unable to take sensible collective decisions when the only rules we know for bargaining are those of competitive greed."
          "What I found...was that nobody knew what was going on--or didn't believe it.  And I reflected on the power of public relations.  Those who can afford expensive PR usually get their way--or at least, exert influence beyond what is justified.  Once a point of view has taken hold in the public imagination, it's extremely hard to offset it."
           "It brought home to me forcefully that the strength of the industrial lobby in Washington means that no public servant can make statements that imply criticism of a commercial company".
        
It's time we got real about this world full of experts, expert panels, scientists, studies, etc.  How much of our world-view is garnered third or fourth hand?  All we really know is what we have experienced personally in our lives.  We can "adopt" facts, information, ideas, theories, and scientific evidence-(gossip)- until the cows come home.  Some of it will prove true, the rest will lie in piles in the pastures.  This "age of information" could better be called the "age of commercial and intellectual promotions".  There are multi-national promotional firms who will put together a panel of experts to prove anything you want them to. You’ll read it in the newspaper or see it on the evening news--they guarantee it!  Scientists are as susceptible to payoffs for slanted studies as these PR firms.
 Sarah Boseley of The Guardian wrote a Feb. 2002 story exposing a scandal involving scientists taking large sums of money from pharmaceutical companies to sign their names to articles they haven’t written, endorsing new medicinal drugs.  Declines in State and Federal funding has left the scientists in a financial void which makes some of them susceptible to fraudulent offers from drug companies to fund or commission their work.  This has given the industry unprecedented control over data.  In many cases the doctors endorsing the products have not seen the raw data at all, only the compiled tables in papers drafted by employees or commercial agencies.  Two fields especially beset by this form of ghostwriting are psychiatry and cardiology.
The race to acquire a place in the limited budgets and grant processes at Universities and Foundations has eliminated the purity and impartiality of studies. 
           Corporate science poses a theory and then attempts to prove or disprove it according to an agenda.  "Junk Science" doesn't just exist in fringe environmental groups but permeates every field and issue today.  Why?  Because many years ago it was determined that the broadcast media could shape, alter, and determine public opinion.  If you have a reason to “prove” something, you can find an expert to support your cause. 
            That's why we all have such firm and unalterable opinions about everything.  And if your ideas don’t match mine it means your sources must be less reliable!
        
            Proponents for technological civilization have lied.  It has long been an American myth that we are leading the rest of the world toward a better life.  But our interests have served us in a way the third world can never expect.  With 5% of the population we use more than 30% of the available industrial resources.  To raise the standards of the world to our level we would have to speed up the harvest of these resources six times annually, or find six new planets to plunder. 
            Americans enjoy the most comfortable and convenient living standards worldwide--but we have achieved that success through the systematic pursuit of any technological resource without regard to the cost in human life or environmental balance. Progress is an insatiable monster that can never achieve fulfillment. Technologists assert that new discoveries will save us before the finite resources of Earth are exhausted.  These are the kind of people who buy lotto tickets expecting to win.
            The truth is that we have created a world of fantasy that pretends that we can continue this lifestyle indefinitely.  That is because western civilization does not think ahead beyond a generation or two. As we sit comfortably in a world of plenty, remember that 75 percent of the rest of the world is lacking nutritious food, shelter, or a safe place to sleep.  We could help them but our system of economics and corporate profit (which controls science), will never allow it to happen.  Indigenous people of the world are looking ahead toward seventh generations on end. Count your blessings.  Some future seventh generation will face the reality. What will be our legacy to them?
           To deny the impermanence of any civilization is to deny history, and to assume that ours will be an exception is pure arrogance.  But the multi-headed monster we have created from curiosity and avarice is not easily controlled.  Our civilization, and especially those who continue to profit by its development and expansion, rationalize the immoral and destructive by-products of technology under the pretense that our mono-culture of consumerism represents the ultimate expression of evolution: the final flowering of Man.  Conversely, they continue to represent Native or Indigenous societies as being on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder; obsolete and stubbornly in the way.  Though everyone seems to take their claims at face value, we know, through the words of our ancestors, that our "primitive" Peoples lived well, had little want and a significant amount of leisure time.
            At this point we'd like to interject a piece of humor and trivia that will, nevertheless, point out that progress is more of an organic monster than any planned one.  It has to do with the historical evolution of transportation.
 
     The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.  That's a exceedingly odd number.  Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.  Why did the English build them like that?  Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.  Why did "they" use that gauge then?  Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.  Okay!  Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?  Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
            So who built those old rutted roads?  Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions.  The roads have been used ever since.  And the ruts in the roads?  Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.  Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
           The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.  And bureaucracies live forever!
           So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
         Now the twist to the story...  There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds.  When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank.  These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.  The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.  The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains.  The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.  The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
            So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. 
Courtesy of Robert B. Pickering Collier---Read Deputy Director for Collections and Education,  Buffalo Bill Historical Center 
        
            Every new discovery and advancement is publicized as evidence of the superiority of the present civilization.   The media have become complicit in the struggle to convince everyone that technology is always good and that each new discovery that aids healing, decreases labor, improves safety, or drives the engine of economic growth is simply another step toward a world of complete safety, comfort, ease, luxury, and eventual immortality.  Just as the world at the beginning of the previous century prophesized a technological and scientific utopia without hunger, sickness, or want--today's corporate or governmental giants will everyone to believe that science will solve every problem, especially those it creates along the way.  The final myth put forward regarding technology is that it is the Switzerland of progress, where the agenda is apolitical and in-service to mankind.  In reality, those who pay for the research and development of technological advances (and this includes many of the research scientists themselves) do have personal or corporate agendas-social, political, economic, and otherwise.  They know exactly which direction their "developments" will push society at large, and individuals in particular.
           The complexities of greater technological advancement will demand that society and civilization contract and centralize.  To "protect" public safety and potentially harmful use of new technologies (and investments), police and military control must become more invasive and nationally, or internationally, controlled.
            Indigenous People never talked a lot about freedom but our inherently democratic forms of government, centered around community controlled economics and environmental harmony, supported, without reservation, individual freedoms.   By contrast, those that speak for progress and technology propagandize about freedoms while actually promoting a consumer driven mono-cultural sterility.  That sterility will eventually allow those who direct the consumer culture to require an autocratic centralization of every aspect of culture, society, and politics.
            Until the mistakes and miscalculations of our culture of waste and irresponsible technological growth compound to take new and horrendous tolls on our species or our world, science will continue to delve recklessly into projects civilization is ill-prepared to utilize or control.  And those who live for no other reason than to horde wealth and power will continue to take those projects and loose them upon us.  
            Here is an all-too-real example.  In July of 2000, scientists tinkering with a newly developed soy hybrid found that they had created a by-product fungus which had the potential to wipe out ninety-eight percent of the world's soybean crop and potentially devastate the entire world's plant life and ecological balance. Then, only ten months later, they created a solution.  Zovirex-10 kills the fungus dead!  Unfortunately some scientists claim that if Zovirex-10 were to seep into the groundwater, it would kill off seventy percent of fish and aquatic plant life, poison thirty-five percent of the human population, and raise the temperature of the sea by seven degrees.  That’s some solution!
Dr. Nathan Oberst, Texas A&M Mad Scientist responsible for the cure, made these enlightening comments.  "It may seem dangerous to tinker with nature without knowing the long-term effects, but without the threat of environmental disaster caused by the short-sighted unbalancing of natural forces, how are we to bring about positive change in the world around us?"
Oberst downplayed the dangers of Zovirex-10 saying, "If this is true, it shouldn't be thought of as a disaster," he said. "Modern science has a long, proven track record of correcting the mistakes it inadvertently unleashes on the world. I'm confident that if the worst ever came to pass, science would find some way to fix it. That's what science does."
According to Oberst, flawed and dangerous technological advances have helped broaden understanding in all fields of science.  "Just think about the hydrogen bomb, not only was it a tremendous breakthrough in physics, it broadened our knowledge of everything from radiation containment to bomb-shelter construction to hair loss. Science has been coming up with breakthrough after breakthrough to fix the problems that the H-bomb has created. (Except for radioactive waste by-products) Without the H-bomb, we would know significantly less about the potential problems associated with the H-bomb." 
He finished with this bolt of lightning.
 "People shouldn't see man-made global disasters as a bad thing. They should see them as scientific breakthroughs waiting to happen."
We have to find a way to make our objections public, and to challenge the belief that technology is a roller-coaster that cannot be stopped.  We know there are alternatives to the insanity of the point of view expressed above.  The average human being has a better grasp of reality than many of our most creative scientists.  But the average man-on-the-street, and certainly the average Indian, does not believe that voicing their opinion will do much good.  It will require a significant amount of political power to restrain science from its headlong rush toward oblivion, as it might also require a significant amount of individual sacrifice and discomfort for us to learn to live again in a world shifting gears toward a more natural way of life.  
          




















Ranting/ Two                                                                 BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N Skins


Pathology of A Diseased Civilization


We could start our discussion examining controversial topics: global warming, political tyranny, religious fanaticism, etc., but there are more pressing issues at hand. The current industrial civilization considers itself an elegant experiment in progress and stability.  In reality, it is a lunatic who defecates in its bed and demands the obedience of its subjects in a headlong rush toward global suicide.
Let's begin with water.
Much of the world is already experiencing a crisis obtaining potable water.  Human beings are essentially animalized water.  If we pour water into ourselves it immediately becomes us.  It moves, it thinks, and it forgets that it is water.  98.25 percent of the world's water is saline.  Of the remaining 1.75 %, eighty percent is frozen.  That means that less than 1/3 of 1 percent of all the drinking water in the world is available to all the life that needs fresh water to survive.  No new water is being produced.  Supplies are finite.  Currently, human toxins and practices have poisoned a significant amount of that available water.  In the U.S., 50 % of our drinking water is from underground aquifers that are being pumped dry or poisoned from waste seepage.  Those aquifers took 100,000 years to create.  They cannot be replaced.    
Technocrats insist that science will find a way to de-salinize the oceans for our use, meanwhile local governments can't afford to fill the potholes in our streets, let alone balance the federal, state and local budgets.  It's estimated that by 2015 many countries will face severe water shortages and in fifty years whole countries may be completely depopulated by the total absence of drinkable water. The glacier that provides all of the drinking water to Peru has shrunk by one quarter in the last decade.  When it is gone, there will be no water for that Nation.  
In response to this crisis, what are the clearly defined goals of the technological leaders, their governments and financial institutions?  There are none.  While global corporations move to privatize water in the poorest nations of the earth to profit from the crisis, there is a purposeful turning away from the shared responsibility of insuring adequate basic resources for humanity.
How about soil?
It has taken about 100,000 years to build the world's topsoil.  Due to the giant shift in agriculture and population growth over the last 5000 years, fifty percent of the world's topsoil is gone.  In twenty years, 30% more will have blown away.  That's eighty percent of the world's arable soil, gone forever.  There have been positive discoveries that could redevelop soils.  Pre-Columbian Indigenous Americans in Boliva have been found to have engineered a soil composite that may accelerate the development of arable soil and regenerate overused or abused soil.  But, so far, no one has come forward showing the slightest interest in actually paying for it, and usable results are not to be gained overnight..
North and South America have been devastated.  Six billion tons of soil is lost per year in the U.S.  During the Cold War, a Soviet scientist once recommended that the Soviets stop the arms race because he estimated that in 100 years the U.S. could no longer grow enough food to survive.  In Asia, 20 billion tons are now being lost annually.  Millions of children starve to death annually in reach of this great and modern industrial civilization.  Third world countries are encouraged to grow cash crops, harvest resources, or develop industrially so as to pay back their international debts rather than grow food to feed their peoples.  In the face of deforestation, development, progress and lack of necessities (like water), 10,000 distinct and irreplaceable species are lost every year.  The loss is permanent.   What could be a better indicator of the sanity of a civilization than its desire and commitment to protect the very resources essential to its survival?
Still not convinced?  Let's talk DNA.
The architectural elegance of DNA, the genetic material of the planet, is evidence of the vulnerable quality of creation.  All of the DNA molecules of all the humans who have ever lived would fit into one teardrop. That is, 80 billion molecules in a teardrop.  Everything that will happen to the future of human beings on this planet depends on the quality and protection of that teardrop.
War on Terror?  Here is the real Terror!
           There are 264 million tons of hazardous waste spread liberally around the U.S. each year in the form of 70,000 (mostly untested) chemicals and their by-products. To these, add 1000 more untested chemicals each year.
             DNA contains the information and intelligence at the root of an Organism.  It is known that chemicals can enter the body, and go straight to the cells, attaching themselves and disrupting, modifying, mutating or destroying that information and intelligence.  This is damage that cannot be altered and will be part of the human species forever.  Some defects can be carried, only to show up in later generations. Serious birth defects in humans alone have doubled in the last 25 years.  The worst effects are not expected to appear for another 10 to 20 years.  We will spend billions to fight a war on terror yet to come, and only pennies to fight the daily poisoning of our children and the chemical threat to the DNA of our species. Where is the responsibility to be found in the freedoms that guarantee the capitalistic fervor that drives these companies to gamble with the future of our species?
The economic systems developed on the principle of an endless compulsion to growth are obsolete and must be abandoned immediately for systems which demand society be outfitted with artifacts that last centuries not days or months. Systems that judge their success by GNP must be outlawed and replaced with systems that operate on renewable resources; recycling non-renewables at 100%, and producing no more waste than a local region can dispose of naturally.  The U.S., in order to survive, must cut production and use of resources at a minimum of 50%.
 Third world debt must be forgiven outright or traded for the establishment of wilderness systems. The present economic structures are based on a process that begins with the depletion of finite resources, proceeds to the manufacturing of disposable products which immediately begin to depreciate in value and quality, ending with their disposal as non-renewable wastes which are beyond the natural capacity of the earth to dissipate.  Sanity?  No.  Common sense?  Negative.
Each instant, one million new faces appear on the earth--representing many species and forms. The vanity and arrogance of human beings in creating and expanding the role of potentially deadly toxins and weapons points not to a healthy society, culture, or civilization but to a scorched psyche that has become resistant and maladaptive, even sinister.  Primary human bonds, which connect families and provide roles that incorporate citizens of all ages into familial relationships, have been replaced with the secondary commercial bonds of consumerism. 
The new revelations of quantum science and universal cosmologies demand that those who believe in technology commit to a new understanding of the Universe as one entity; inter-connected, inter-reliant, and inter-related in every way.  To separate humanity from this cosmology will result in a continued insanity that will bring about nothing less than the suicide of our species.
Scholars have long lamented the destruction of the library at Alexandria at the hands of barbarians who burned the manuscripts to heat their bath water because they were unable to grasp the beauty they cast into the flame. Those who discount these warnings have only to examine themselves in a mirror to see the faces of those same barbarians.   
Much of this material was gathered from a book by Dr. Brian Swimme.  See bibliography.









Ranting/ Three                                                             BlueWolf & Lupe'/Shirts N' Skins


Genocide By TV   (The Murder Of Minds)


If there is one threat to American Indian culture, spirituality, and social life that we have the power to control in our lives, it is the overwhelmingly destructive influence of television.
           Forget for a moment the fact that there is almost no socially redeeming programming that supports, directly or indirectly, Indigenous mores, values, family relationships, or spiritual responsibility.  Forget that Corporate America commercials demand our complete attention and submission to their parasitic consumerism.  Forget that the glossing over of issues that threaten our survival as a species is accomplished through glitz and glamour, and that technology is deified as an unstoppable tsunami carrying us toward a brave new world of peace, plenty, and fun.  Forget all that and just look at the medium, which is the message.
           The power of television to create as commonly accepted soup of thought, culture, and lifestyle has evidenced itself in only a few decades.  The dreams of television's "potential" were overwhelmed by the power of the corporate and Federal governments (big business and defense), who immediately commandeered the medium into the service of their needs and whims.
Jerry Mander, our major source for much of the information in the opinions
expressed in this, as well as the last essay, makes these points in his book, Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. 
            TV isolates people in an artificial information environment.  The process of moving edited images through a passive human brain is significantly different than the process of active information gathering.  We become, in essence, non-cognitive receivers.  But television is not static.  It is an aggressive and parasitic mechanism which enters the mind as an external environment and is assimilated to create an internal mental environment.  It is a technological drug, a mechanical methamphetamine that accelerates the nervous system.  With quick changing images, sound effects, and music to enhance emotional involvement, it stimulates an impulse to react to the artificial visual stimulus presented on the small screen.  Since the body and mind recognize that any actual reaction would be inappropriate, the impulse to react is suppressed.  A repetition of this reaction-impulse-suppression results in stored energy.  If the television is turned off, children will often exhibit frantic or disorganized behavior as their nervous systems begin to try to adapt to a slower, less stimulating environment.  Anyone who watches TV regularly experiences an altered reality where time speeds up, dramatization increases emotional reaction, and a return to non-TV environment causes anxiety and/or nervousness.   We become used to these aberrant feelings and find it difficult to remain calm, to read or be taught, to relate to others, or to feel comfortable with nature.  On the other hand, we feel perfectly at ease with forms of advanced technology which encourage speed and provide large amounts of audio or visual stimulus.
To feel a part of the natural world requires calm, patience, and an acceptance of the pace at which natural events occur.  It is no wonder that TV-raised children sometimes show no interest in oral tradition, in walks, gardening, doing chores, or just playing outside.  Those types of activities do not offer the same immediate and continually changing sensory gratification that TV, video games, and other forms of visual media offer.

            Non-TV kids are forced into creating activity.  They usually go through a cycle of boredom that demands a creative response, to which they find an acceptable outlet.  TV is a mood-altering drug that provides early training in the acceptance of other kinds of escape-oriented drugs.  We believe it is a building block for drug dependency and consumerism.
           TV also homogenizes those who watch it.  Viewers begin to exhibit the same types of thought processes, imagine the same imagery, and experience the same contextual reality.  It represents a type of cultural cloning mechanism that reorganizes family and community life around its own mono-cultural messages and advertising strategies.
           Market researchers conduct surveys on children in shopping malls--organizing focus groups for children 2-3 years old.  These studies are translated into television advertising.  Artwork is analyzed.  Children and cultural anthropologists are hired and sent into home, schools, restaurants, and stores to observe and talk to children.  They study children's dreams and fantasy lives.  Children's clubs are heavily utilized in information gathering and research to better facilitate more effective media advertising.  The internet has become a huge source of information to help companies design media strategies to encourage children to become active consumers.  In 1978, the FCC attempted to ban children's advertising directed at children ages 7 and under.  When the lobbies for the Association of Broadcasters, Toy Manufacturers, and National Advertisers objected, Reagan's administration killed the ban.
            In Indigenous communities, television's effects are devastating.  The glamorization of values and behaviors poisonous to Indian morals and ethics is inevitable, as is the constant rhetoric and hype of consumerism.  Cooperation, sharing, and non-materialism are foreign to the corporations that run the networks. 
            Here are some of the more visible effects (as outlined by Mander) that occurred in Northern Indigenous communities only a few months after their first exposure to television.
            People lost interest in hearing and telling the stories of oral tradition that teach the People how to live. 
            They were less inclined to speak their own languages, replacing them with English slang. 
            Elders lost their position and status due to youth oriented programming and advertising. 
            Self-esteem was diminished due to formulas that define beauty in appearance, shape, and form.
            Habits like drinking and smoking were reinforced as romantic and acceptable.
            People visited each other less, and were less communicative. 
            Kids didn't play as much, either alone or together. 
            Young people began to resent having to do menial and time-consuming chores. 
           Children were not as creative and tended to think in TV-like images or relate to TV characters. 
           Children became used to sit-and-absorb learning and were not as interested in Native forms of teaching that required repetition to acquire proficiency and retention. 
            People began to use the programs they watched as discussion items, especially as it became a central force in their lives.
            People begin imagining that they had the same problems and desires portrayed by the characters they saw on TV.  Eventually that became true.
                    
One of the most important things we can do for our youth is to  eliminate, or severely curtail, their access to TV.  Indoors--reading, music, artwork, or crafts are the most creative and stimulating physically semi-passive activities we can participate in.  But any activity that causes youths to stimulate their imagination, or create their own outlets for expression, are superior to passive receptive stimulation. Activity is the most desirable state we would hope for our children, be it inside or out.
Oral tradition is incredibly powerful.  The environment and context of oral tradition stimulates all the senses.  Our old people were our TV, reflecting and presenting the past, present, and future--in an entertaining, disciplined way.   Through oral tradition we attained intimacy, affection, and respect.  Children developed their imaginations, their self-identity, and their sense of worth listening to their Ancient Ones relate stories that conveyed the People's Ways in a natural teaching environment.
            In the absence of television we could see significant results in only a few years.  For those of us who cry about solutions being too complex, here's a relatively simple idea.  It is also one that is easy to envision, but difficult to achieve.  Aldous Huxley observed generations ago, "A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot--not here and now and in the calculable future but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sports and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy--will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who manipulate and control it."

 Can we live without TV?   If not, how can we live with it?


















Ranting/ Four                                                                BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Blood And Balance


The issue of whether or not traditional life-ways (such as the Makah hunting of whale) should be allowed to be continued and maintained in a "civilized" world is important to all Indigenous Peoples.
            The Makah Nation is aware of the binding thread between the whale, the ocean, and themselves.  They know that civilization has damaged the balance, and that the number of whales has been significantly reduced.  That is why they are not attempting to harvest as many as they can--beyond what can be used in a given season.  That is why their hunt is acceptable, it is within the boundaries of traditional thought, balance and harmony.
           The individual and group skills, attributes, and unity necessary to become proficient at preserving and utilizing any First Nation's traditional methods of providing necessities for its People are of incalculable value. Beyond the skills and techniques, the shared preparations, creation of tools, concentration and disciplines, are the nurturing social and communal relationships that facilitate the art, music, dance and culture that accompany and support these physical acts of survival.
          The entire ritual of the hunt is a much more important event than what is often perceived to be (in today's world) an unnecessary killing. 
            For the Makah, the special relationship and bond achieved between whale, water, and human--and the lessons derived from the recognition and understanding of sacrifice, death, and purpose in a world of blood and beating hearts--are not to be found in any modern social or educational institution.  These traditional forms emphasize relationship, balance, and a blending of life and death into a complex and richly intertwined reality of the natural world. 
            It is an Old Way, but not an outdated or valueless way.  It is still true to the Peoples who were given it by the Creator, tying the physical and spiritual world together where formulae religions fail.  It preserves an essence of the greatness of Nations who clearly understand the role of human beings in the natural world--and of the inter-reliant relationships we share with all our relatives on this Grandmother Earth. 
            It is these acts of taking life for our survival that teach us the precious sacrifices all mortal beings ultimately make toward the preservation of our world.  Life on this earth is not lived without experiencing pain and death. From this we learn why we have the obligation to always be grateful, and respectful, of Life.
 For those Safeway Indians and Eco-freaks intent on their narrow views regarding the balance and harmony of life and death, these ways have no meaning.  They do not understand the reason for such a bloody kind of life because they have been closeted from the natural world.   By being brought up in a media society that uses violence to entertain but not educate, these people have been convinced that the tenuous and fragile systems that provide modern civilization with necessities, are guaranteed us forever.  They relegate these life-ways to a dead past, believing in the superiority and endurance of modern systems.  Should those tenuous threads of civilization ever be broken, those who have maintained some connection to original life-ways will be glad they did.
            Western civilization has always casually discounted the social organizations of the animal and plant nations.  Naturally connected observation led Indigenous Peoples to have no doubt that these other Relative Nations were to be honored and respected as having an equal role in the balance necessary to ecological harmony.  We are blood beings, relatives to the other Nations who share eating and being eaten.  It is a wholesome circle.  But modern culture has gone to great lengths to insulate its citizens from the smells, sights and sounds that remind us our relatives are suffering and sacrificing themselves for us.  None of these sacrifices are willingly endured.  The Creator does not ask that from any of us.  But this does not mean that taking life for food is unnatural, simply because we fight to survive.  We have been taught that if we have the correct spirit in our minds and hearts, being grateful and mindful of our relatives' sacrifices, we fulfill our responsibility to the Creator and to our Relations.  Our children learn the first reality of this world--everything passes away.  In this way, at our ending--when it is our time to feed the grass--we understand the balance and are comforted.            







Ranting/ Five                                                                 BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Abortion--A Natural View


"When the (buffalo) cows sense we're gonna have a real hard winter, they'll often abort their calves.  It's just their way to make sure they survive to be able to bear new calves the next year."
Fred F, Canadian Buffalo Rancher

In the natural world, animals abort their babies not because they do not have feelings for their young, but because they intuitively know that to keep the child endangers not only the child’s future but also the mother and larger family.  
             Human beings, absorbed in this temporary but overwhelming fantasy called civilization--argue, demonstrate, legislate and commit murder to celebrate the sanctity of an unborn child. Separated from the natural and spiritual worlds, these people usually live in well fed, comfortable Nations with plenty of spare time for armchair philosophy and media bytes.  They naturally take the survival of the species for granted, because they have accepted that human beings have successfully achieved "dominion over nature."
            If they understood the fragile position we hold as a species on a changing planet, they might be a bit more grounded in reality.  Also, if they truly believed the religions of their historical fathers, they would admit to the everlasting nature of spirit and accept that there is no death.  An unborn child, denied life today, will, just like the buffalo calf, surely find a time to be born.  Those who cry for the sacred but deny the transitory nature of the universe actually expose the real nature of their discontent.  They are afraid of death, unsure of their spiritual immortality, and resent the pain of loss that juxtaposes the joy of gain.
 In their haste to find a scapegoat for their fear, they forget the 40,000 children who die each day of hunger and ignore the cries of children suffering abject poverty, illness, abuse, and degradation.  Unable, or unwilling, to demand that their technological masters solve the efforts to sustain life for future generations without sacrificing finite resources or depleting the natural systems beyond their natural limits, they contribute to the very real threat to all life unborn.  Safe in their mythical righteousness, they callously disregard modern science's discovery that the universe is indeed one interrelated and interdependent organism and continue to embrace the barbaric, wasteful, and destructive blind beast of progress.
            Stories of women subjecting themselves to multiple abortions out of irresponsibility or amoral character are fabricated.  Each mother mourns the loss of a conceived child beyond the understanding of an unrelated bystander. Indigenous Nations recognize that it is the mothers, not the children, who are the guardians and repositories of our future. The children are our beloved, but the Mothers are Sacred. 
            Spirit is eternal--in rock, water, tree, star, animal, human.  Death, like life, is necessary to Creation and is filled with motion and transition.  The building blocks of the Universe rearrange themselves constantly.  No fear, no blame, no loss.  Birth and death are twins that will not be denied their time.
            Now that we two men have expounded on a subject that should only be discussed and decided on by our women, we'll take our medicine, shut up, and wait for our punishment!




















Ranting/ Seven                                                               BlueWolf & Lupe'/Shirts N' Skins


Turning The Tide?


"American is the only idealistic nation in the world."  
 Woodrow Wilson

"Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aide, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States."     
 James Loewen

          
The superficial bright and shiny skin of our progressive technological civilization cracked under the harsh reality of these times to expose its true festering underbelly on Sept 11, 2001.  America, a country supposedly founded under the grace of a supreme deity and seemingly protected by His divine power, fell victim to a force of terror utilizing and attacking the very symbols of the supposedly great accomplishments of the twentieth century. 
            For many Americans, September 11th was proof that the 21st Century ushered in a new and terrifying time where nothing is sacrosanct and no one is safe.  In reality, the rest of the world has been living under those conditions for quite some time.  The United States, assured of its supremacy both politically and ideologically, has carried the policies of manifest destiny forward on the global economic front for decades, assuming the mantle of judge and jury on every matter of individual freedoms, perceived injustice, and supposed tyranny.  Every Traditional religious, political and socio/ethnic national group abroad is fearful that we will find some element or resource that we desire in their region and subvert them to obtain it.
Our 18th century descendant Roman-Anglo-Christian perceptions of the outside world have led us into taking on the role of world policeman, confidant, banker, confessor, and professor to every undeveloped struggling third world country within our reach with resources deemed important to our interests.  Recently, we have extended that to any country we can militarily push around.  Our strategy of keeping a strong military for defense has now turned into a strategy of using our military to aggressively protect any American interest deemed appropriate around the world.   And while we may decry the horrific consequences of the immoral acts of the recent past we must accept the responsibility for having done our part to teach the rest of the world just how to perform such acts.
For 50 years the American government and corporate America has held hands in supporting countless terrorists and insurrections to promote our own international interests.  Under the guise of political and economic idealism we have assassinated leaders, supplied monies, weapons, and advisors to train “ thugs” to pursue their goals while furthering our own.  The death and destruction of these acts has accumulated far more victims than recent days but attracts less attention because we have utilized less sophisticated methods, no less brutal in their results than airplanes and jet fuel.  We provide cash, weapons, and training to soldiers of fortune in Mexico to murder and terrorize Indians who initially wanted nothing more than the right to plant communal plots of corn.  Then we bristle when those Indians organize and begin to retaliate, labeling them insurgents in their own land.  Always we view those helping to further our interests as patriots, and those opposing us as terrorists.  We stay out of struggles between European whites, as in Ireland, yet involve ourselves immediately if non-Christian peoples are involved--as in Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia, or non-Europeans--as in South/Middle Americas, Africa, or the Far and Middle East.
Only a week before the World Trade Center's destruction, we offered our former allies against the Soviets in Afghanistan (the vehemently anti-American Taliban) forty three million dollars to declare opium farms (one of the few remaining cash crops available to devastated Afghani farmers) to be “against the will of God”.  Ostensibly this was in support of anti-drug efforts, when in reality we were desperately trying to pave the way for our large corporate interests in the Chechen oilfields, and the pipeline that must eventually pass through Afghanistan.  When they refused the pipeline. We declared them terrorists and took over the country without any thought as to how the country would be governed or developed.  We didn’t care—we had the pipeline.  Iraq was simply the next domino to fall in a game created before Bush was even elected President.
We have dedicated ourselves to the political positions of the Israelis against every other regime in the area, right or wrong—allowing them many of the same atrocities and abuses against the Palestinians that once caused them to seek the creation of a Nation of their own.
We have stationed troops in the lands considered Holy to Islam (supporting the ruthless dictatorship of the Royal Family of Saud), then act surprised when Osama bin Laden (who began fighting the Soviets at age 21 with U.S. training, supplies and support)  is harbored and supported by the Tribal Chieftains he fought beside, utilizing his fortune and risking his life on their behalf.  Where once we considered him a valuable ally and patriot, he now has become a malignant, evil, cancer of a terrorist.  That transformation is easily explained away as being a simple product of misguided fanaticism.
To blame September 11th and world terrorism solely on fatalistic fundamental fanatic Islamists is too expedient and convenient to be acceptable.  And though it may turn out to be partly true, it is also the most hoped for answer to the question of responsibility.  Americans love having an evil enemy or empire to war against almost as much as fanatic Arabs love to teach their children about the “Great Satan” America, the Babylon of the modern world.
For those Americans naive enough to wonder what we have done to engender such hatred and labels, we must remind them that while our purposes may or may not be altruistic, we are the great “meddler”.  Our economic favors are usually only bestowed on that small segment of the population in a direct position to help us control or access the resources we desire.  In the Middle East, our development of their petroleum makes a few vulgarly rich while giving the remaining populations--wallowing in poverty and envy or attempting to hold on to traditional way--a genuine reason for despising us.  
 Globally, we are known to do “whatever it takes”, utilizing our vast resources of economic power and military might, overtly or covertly, to support our interests.  The US has bases in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Britain.  We have significant military presence in Japan, the Philippines, Bermuda, Egypt, Iceland, Korea, Panama, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This does not include our many contingents of advisers in South America, our two bases in Australia, the bases in our Territories, nor our covert operations worldwide. Neither does it include allies like Canada. 
            The US has fought over 100 undeclared wars, overt and covert since 1950.  Over two hundred and fifty distinctly named unilateral military operations have been mounted in Second and Third World countries since 1947, occurring in almost every area of the globe. These are military operations only and do not include covert operations (like the CIA operations in Chile) or "adviser assisted" operations. 
“In 1973 the people of Chile watched in a horror similar to our own, as their capitol building was bombed, their elected President assassinated, and their friends and family herded into the National Stadium and other detention centers, then battered and killed by the thousands. U.S. Agency files more than establish the deep involvement and responsibility of the CIA for the Pinochet coup and its violent aftermath.
The CIA is also responsible for the bloody 1954 coup in Guatemala and the frightening repression that followed. The United Nations Truth Commission report of 1999 severely criticized our intelligence community for its close collaboration with and support for the Guatemalan military throughout its counter-insurgency campaign. The army was found responsible for some 93% of the war crimes, which included the torture, murder and “disappearance” of some 200,000 civilians and the massacre of some 660 Mayan villages.  The U.N. also ruled that the army was guilty of genocide; the same army the CIA had chosen as its close friend and partner. These actions were not taken to protect American lives from terrorists, but rather, to coldly guard our cash flow.”(*J. Harbury)
 The late 1950s CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and our support of the swindling despot Joseph Mobutu represent two more horrific involvements  resulting in whole Nations suffering as a direct result of our covert policies.
 The “War On Drugs” is by far the largest international conspiracy to affect the policies of foreign nations for purposes other than the one so obviously stated.
 Another far-reaching conglomerate goal, the pursuit of intensely profitable and heretofore unavailable fossil fuels utilizes much of the covert support offered by US intelligence agencies and black ops groups, often without the knowledge or consent of those who we suppose to be representing the “People” of the United States.  It has been well documented by former military and government personnel as to how far covert national groups are willing to go in their support of terrorists and thugs to further “our” economic or political agendas abroad.
We proudly put forward the concept of free enterprise while aiding economic and political terrorism the world over.  As a result, the common foreign citizen is often left hating our comparatively wealthy guts for supporting tyrannical forces of terror and coercion; pouring money and military resources into the pockets of their  well-to-do, self-serving, upper class leaders in exchange for corporate-friendly policies and laws.  Meanwhile, their citizens are getting pumped full of the same TV commercial propaganda for consumerism and cultural homogenization that we are.
The question “what do we do about terrorists” should lead us first to the mirror--to examine the dirty laundry not only of our distant but our recent past.  Our commitment to this technological and economic homogenization of the world (that so many traditional peoples object to) is what engenders so much resentment.  Traditional people do not automatically assume that the world is a better place for this technological, consumerist, and predominantly Christian-led civilization.  It is arguable whether the supposed advances we have created have increased the quality of our lives.  It is certain that it has not led, for a greater part of the world, to a safer, more comfortable life.
Only people who lead relatively safe and ‘civilized’ lives of plenty have the time and energy to intellectually debate the finer points of our condition.  In the wealthy areas of the world, there is always talk of the social, political, and spiritual evolution of our species.  Elsewhere, the world is consumed by the realities of a dangerous and insecure future, compounded by the lack of peace and necessities in their daily life.  There are many whole cities that resemble the aftermath in New York, where people live in daily fear, and have for many years.
            We have been led down this dangerous path of elitism and supposed security by wealthy conglomerate corporations and entities selling consumerism as the God of the 21st century.  Aided by the premeditated utilization of world television to further the willynilly global expansion of an international commerce wholly dependant on finite, and therefore extremely profitable resources, they pursue their goals ruthlessly, using covert entities to maintain their powerful grip on the throat of the world.
           The civilization is sick at its very center.  We have only begun to see the tip of this iceberg.  Technology has far more terrible weapons waiting on the near horizon than airplanes.  And there are many more bin Ladens waiting in the wings.
              If  the People of America want immediate solutions--here are our proposals.

1) end the international war on drugs and coincidentally, the U.S Prison Industry, and put the
      money into compassionate treatment and rehabilitation;
2)  end our commitment to further develop fossil fuels and put the monies toward research and development of renewable energy;
3)    support commercial-free public broadcasting forums as an immediate alternative to commercial media outlets (especially TV and radio);
4)    demand that all overseas corporate interests be responsive first to the interests of Native Indigenous National Peoples, before they can go forward with the exploitation of natural resources.
5) demand that corporations legal identities be returned to the status of artificial entities, do not allow them the rights of personhood, as they are not natural persons.
6) immediately forgive the foreign debt of every Nation, and jumpstart the world economy .
            
For those who insist this is not feasible, we suggest they learn to live with events like the World Trade Center catastrophe, as the rest of the world has, and expect these kind of events to touch each of us (who haven’t been already) in a very personal way.
            It is a tide that cannot be turned without embracing the responsibility to endure sacrifice and make radical changes in our world economic view.  Additionally, there must be an accounting of the covert political strategies that offend our moral and ethnic values.  Finally, we must come to a common perception of where we are heading as a world community.  As the tsunami of terrorism rises higher above us, the necessity of common goals becomes absolute.





















Ranting/ Eight                                                                BlueWolf & Lupe'/Shirts N' Skins


Blacks, Indians, And Black Indians


We've read a number of writers who like to lump together the Black and  Indian experiences with regard to similar experiences with captivity, racism, and poverty--to make a point about the futility of resisting assimilation in today's world.  Their point makes much of supposed African American successes in overcoming the obstacles that kept them from becoming modern Black "White" people.  This has always been the standard by which progress toward civilization is judged.  History books are quick to point favorably to Indian tribes that made early conversions to Anglo Saxon culture, government, religion and other "civilized" behaviors while pointedly ignoring or romanticizing the "wild" or patriotic "savages" that resisted any such acceptance of civilized ways. 
Most people don't even know that there were still "free" Apaches in the 1960s. It is the same on the African continent where English and Dutch colonialism caused many Indigenous Africans to lose their ties to the land and assimilate.  Of course economic issues, overpopulation, and the destruction of natural resources has effectively destroyed many African people’s ability to utilize natural systems for survival, as it has here in the U.S. 
            But any comparison of the Black and Indian experience in the Americas is misguided and pointless.  Here we distinguish between Black Indians and Black White People.  Black Indians are proud of their mixed-ancestry, as they should be.  Their loyalties include their tribal affiliation. But except where Blacks and Indians intermarried, or have been adopted into Tribes, Black People have had a different experience than Indians in the Americas. 
     The history of Black slavery in America is full of myth and distortion. Everyone thinks the Colonists waited until the Civil War to address the issue. But the Colony of Georgia was the first to outlaw the institution of slavery in 1735. In 1777, the British Crown ordered “an end to the immigration of all Blacks, free and slave.” The second Continental Congress in 1776 resolved that “no slaves be imported into any of the Thirteen United Colonies”, but later reaffirmed slavery as national policy by refusing to outlaw it as an institution.
Opposition to slavery was not confined to the North.  More anti-slavery groups existed in the South than in the North.  The Virginia Abolitionists lost their bid to outlaw slavery in the Virginia Legislature in 1832 by only 11 votes.  Blacks did not endure their slavery without protest.  At least three times, in 1800, 1822, and 1831, Blacks conspired to overthrow their oppressors in imaginative large-scale rebellions.
     Both Blacks and Indians were enslaved at the beginning, and both revolted when the opportunity presented itself.   But a major difference was that most Blacks were separated from similar tribal members, while most Indians (held on the continent) still had some contact with their lands and peoples.  Despite the fact that, after the Civil War, freed Blacks dropped into the same levels of poverty and isolation into which Indians eventually languished, they had already had over 100 years of living as an integral, albeit unwilling, part of the dominant culture.  By being separated from their lands and any contact with their former culture and tribes, after the passing of the first few generations, Black slaves had no choice but to assimilate or perish. 
           The Mexican Indian was faced with much the same choice under the Spaniards and their Papal Bulls.  No bones were made about the results of their choices.  Convert, and do not resist, or die.  Fortunately, a few of them still resisted and survived. They still had the land. 
           Despite the American Black insistence that they have a distinct culture within the dominant culture, like the Mexican-American population, only a little of their lifestyle or culture shows Native roots.  Though they might wish it otherwise, they are culturally predominantly European
           For African Americans, after a few generations of separation from their homelands, the old knowledge derived from that contact seemed irrelevant and was discarded in the face of their new reality.  Loss of language was another big factor in the loss of identity and culture.  Losing contact with their lands and languages was instrumental in the loss of oral tradition, and ultimately, African culture.       
            After many generations of captivity, the Civil War caught Blacks severely unprepared for freedom. Black families had been divided up, or came over from their homelands as separated individuals from the start.  They had no recourse but to utilize the values, economics, and ideals of their owners and peers as they attempted to reorganized their families and bring the social ties of slave life into a “free” life.
            Indians knew where they stood from the beginning. Those who survived were often placed together on poor, but nevertheless natural, soil. While there were instances of relocation and forced marches away from natural lands for certain Tribes, many eventually returned to their lands or general areas, and all were aware that it was, at the very least, the same continent!  This is not to make light of the connection each Nation felt with their specific Creator-endowed lands, but it was not the same as being removed to another hemisphere.  We previously made much of these relocations as being a turning point in the temporary dissolution of Tribes, but the socializing factors of blood relationship still remained and the circle of the most Indian family culture survived, semi-intact. 
A significant difference in the two experiences was that while the U.S. Government instituted very direct policies to force Natives to give up their languages and culture, the isolation of Black Americans, many from different African Tribes or Nations, caused language and social customs to disappear within only a few generations.  The U.S. government made a colonizing error in allowing most of our families and Tribes to remain together on the land.  Believing that a military victory and boarding school education were all that was necessary to destroy our ties to the Earth and each other, they assumed that eventually we would recognize their "superior" culture for what it was, and become like them.  After all, it was destiny and God's will.  What we have of our past has survived because of their arrogance. 
           Slightly off-topic to this essay, but important, is our observation that one of the many vices we inherited from the Americans, was bigotry and racism directed specifically at Black People.  Many Tribes originally utilized war captives as slaves, but it was not a racial issue.  Eventually those slaves were adopted.  Unfortunately as many of our People's adopted Anglo ways, they incorporated the institutions of Black slavery into their changing lifestyles.  The Civil War severely affected southern Native peoples.  All across America, on almost every reservation we have observed continuing racism toward Black people.  Typically, we believe these kinds of prejudices can only be eliminated by time, through the passing of generations. 
But contemporary issues affecting Black Indians have forced us to include our opinions on this issue.  Our view is that we should, at every opportunity, value the decisions made by our ancestors.  If they thought it right and proper to adopt or include members of other races into the nations, it is not our place to drag new (or old) prejudices into the issues.  To strip members of membership today, who are descendants of those who were once accepted and participated fully, and loyally, in their Nations, is wrong.  The individual Nations must decide, but if they arbitrarily exclude the descendants of those their honored ancestors once called brother and sister, we hope those ancestors will forgive them.
           As for Black White people, they have every right to be proud of their accomplishments and survival.  To compare their experiences with that of Indians, however, is not of any value.  Except for Black Indians, or recent immigrants, for all intent and purpose, most Black Americans have willingly assimilated.








Ranting/ Nine                                                                BlueWolf &Lupe’/ Shirts N' Skins


Mexica, South Of An Imaginary Line


"I had a Comanche mother and an Irish father.  But I'm Comanche. I'm not Irish....
 Blood runs the heart.  The heart knows what it is.
LaDonna Harris, Comanche.
             

           La Raza Cosmica is a conqueror's myth.  Unless Mexican descendants are pureblood Spanish European, to call themselves Hispanic or Latino is to make a mockery of the original Indigenous Peoples who were murdered resisting the Spaniards, and all those since who have been killed, enslaved, or assimilated.
           Hispanic people are from Spain, or have Spanish ancestors.  A Latino is a descendant of Europeans (Portuguese, Spaniards, and French) in Latin America.  They are generally racist against Indigenous People.  If you are a Mexican national, or descended from them but not pure European, had you traveled anywhere in Europe, America, or Mexico one hundred years ago, your "mixed" ancestry would have marked you clearly as "inferior" and you would not have been accepted as an equal.  Your identity is either Euro-Spanish or Indigenous Mexica (Meh-shee-cah).   Hispanic and Latino are media terms that manipulate the truth to further separate you from your Indigenous heritage.   Some choose to be both, which North of the border, would be tantamount to choose the conqueror's side.  The drive to become "white" and deny or diminish Mexica or Indigenous heritage was even more important in Mexico and South America than it was in the U.S.  There were no Indian-brown-skinned Spaniards.  Racism still hangs on in many "mixed-blood" Mexican families in the United States, and certainly below the border.  Until recently, to be identified as Indio/Mexica is to be inferior.  Yet those Original Peoples built pyramids, cities, and performed great feats of engineering.  They developed an agriculture that gave the world chocolate, chili, tomatoes, vanilla, and many other foods.  They developed the mathematical concept of zero and the decimal point.  They invented the most accurate calendar in the world.  They had great cities that were, at that time, the largest cities in the world. That their people have forgotten four thousand years of Anahuac civilization, culture, and accomplishments due to an insignificant five hundred years of subjugation is a testament to the cruelty and thoroughly destructive effects of Spanish colonization.     
          We hear of the proud identity of the Hispanic Community.  But this is largely a creation of politicians looking for an edge with the more than twenty American groups that speak Spanish, many of which are unrelated culturally.
           Like many other North American Indians, there's not much left to set Indigenous descendant Mexicans apart from Anglo-American communities, except for language and a few holidays or celebrations.  Where are the original and authentic traits passed down from their Indigenous ancestors?  
           The adoption of Spanish culture is no different than the adoption of an Anglo Saxon one.  Today most American Chicanos accept their Spanish-Indian duality as a unique mestizaje  that defines their identity. This is a phenomenon of successful colonization.  Even those Mexicans who are of  "mixed-blood" are no different racially than a similarly mixed Scotch-Irish/ Choctaw American Indian.  They are actually just a Spanish/ Mexica (Tribal name) Indian. Do they choose to search for, or follow their Indigenous identity or do they accept only the language, religion, customs and culture of their conqueror?
           To clarify even more, let's look at Filipinos. They have Spanish surnames and some have some Spanish blood, but they don't call themselves Hispanic. They speak English but that doesn't make them English or British. Where do the actual differences exhibit themselves?  In their minds.  They are committed to being Filipino first.
           Mexica Heritage.  It can't be escaped.  It can be denied, ignored, or downplayed, but Indigenous heritage is the single factor which separates Mexican people of color from Europeans--above or below the border. 
           The conquerors brought an entirely new culture and forced it down the throats of a People who resisted for decades, until the Church fabricated the legend of the Brown Virgin of Guadalupe.   The conversion of millions of Mexica Indians into Roman Catholics was aided by a story, widely circulated by the Spanish Catholics.  It was said that an Aztec Indian Franciscan neophyte named Juan Diego witnessed the appearance of the Virgin Mary in December 1531.  The Virgin left her image on his cloak.  However, surprisingly enough, the Virgin had the exact features and skin-color--not of a Hebrew woman--but of a Mexica one!  And the Church just happened to be built on the exact spot of ground Sacred to Teotenantzin, the Traditional "Mother of Gods".  Convenient.   
This event is at the root of Mexico's national identity and contemporary faith, and was the final blow of Colonialism.  Now the only "spirituality" many will accept today is an institutionalized and organized European-descended faith.  
You see the efforts to preserve the Vision of a predominantly European culture all over Mexican and "Latin" TV.  People of European descent control the Spanish and English language media.  Sometimes you can watch for hours without seeing a "brown" Hispanic.  It is still not completely acceptable to be Indian (although today, certain strides forward are being taken).  Above the border, in the United States, the media and government herd those with Mexican heritage into an acceptance of Hispanic/Latino labels.  Perhaps among the older people these old ways of thinking cannot be changed.  But the young can be educated to new realities.   The fact that their Indigenous identity and old ways are unknown, and their heritage obscured, should not keep them from searching, and finding it again.
          The names Tarasco, Azteca, Maya, Otomi, Tarahumara, Olmeca, etc., need to be heard once more, spoken with dignity and pride.   The Spaniards were excellent conquerors but they did not fully succeed.  Our brother spends much of the year traveling among Indigenous Mexica representing our Society. Many of these peoples still have their language and customs.  Some of the groups of Indians from even further south have done a much better job of keeping their identity seperate from their colonizers.  Even when they come to this country they still identify themselves as Indians in census accountings. 
          The mixing and inter-marriage of Indigenous Mexican immigrants and American Indians is raising the understanding that to be Indian is a "good" thing.   Also recent political events in Mexico give us hope that the previous policies of enforced assimilation will be corrected by Constitutional Amendments designed to protect Indigenous cultures and Peoples from similar attacks.   So if you are from Mexican, Central or South American heritage, with brown skin or "mixed-blood", remember:: First, you are Indigenous. Neither the English nor Spanish language is your original language.  Unless you know your people and their language is still vital, the common language today is Nahuatl.  Your relatives need your support.  Anahuac y Axtlan: Libre y Mexica! 
(We acknowledge Olin Tezcatlipoca as the source of much of this chapter's material.)      
















Ranting/ Ten                                                                  BlueWolf &Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


The Far North


We don't want to go too far in trying to tell the stories of every regional Indigenous People.  We recognize that the Hawaiian Native People continue their struggles to retain their lands, practice their forms of spirituality, and engage in their own cultural and social practices, etc.  We know that Indians in Central and South America are currently facing situations of attempted genocide similar to what occurred on the Northern continent over a century ago.  Yet we will leave it to others to tell the details of these struggles. 
We will talk some about the Alaskan Peoples, however, do to the re-emergence of the Progressive Vs Traditional conflict. 
The Peoples of the Far North (with the exception of the Aleut Island Peoples) have not had to deal with a large influx of citizens and technology like that which swept the southernmost provinces of Canada and the mainland U.S.  Harsh climate, environmental conditions, and great distances from "civilization" allowed them to retain much of their culture and original life-ways deep into the 20th century.  But for those who think that the outright stealing of Indian land ended in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, the discovery of Alaskan oil in the late 1960s continues a dismal chapter in American history.
           The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1973 had some new twists to its otherwise predictable provisions.  Of course it had the usual term of permanently extinguishing Native rights to title for the land, paying out $962.5 million dollars in compensation, with the qualification that not one dollar went to any Indian individual.  Instead the government forced them to create twelve large native-corporations.  The settlement monies were then tied up in shares which could only bring them monies through profits created by developing their own natural resources, (mining, timber, oil, etc.) in their allotted region.
Additionally each Traditional tribal government was replaced by village corporate structures which held surface rights to the immediate village lands, but gave up all rights below the surface (and surrounding lands), to the regional corporations.  People who did not reside in the villages held no share in the local corporations (only regional), and their descendants get nothing.  Until 1991, the Native shares were non-transferable.  After that, a loophole was opened which still makes it possible, but difficult, for non-Indians to obtain shares.
            Corporate goals have at their core the incentive to profit, a substantially foreign concept compared to Traditional values.  By forcing a corporate structure on the Peoples it effectively destroyed previous forms of decision-making by rendering their Traditional objectives incompatible with corporate goals.  Certain imperative conditions arise.  If resources are not developed, stock value decreases.   Temptations to sell the rights to the land increase.  Leadership must have competitive business skills, so non-Native consultants must be hired to train Native managers to run the show, a situation similar to those faced by new Indian gaming interests to the south.
            Enter the new Progressive.  No longer interested in the Traditional life-ways of whaling or trapping (and viewing those ways as obsolete), these progressive Native Regional managers, like their Tribal Council cousins, became converts to the gods of profit, materialism and development. 
            The local village corporations took on the role of the new Traditionals, and the struggle between local and regional began.  With the regional Progressives in control of lands surrounding the villages (including all subsurface rights), the local Traditionals were at an immediate disadvantage.  Additionally, they faced the daunting task of familiarizing themselves with Alaskan corporate legalities and tax laws, often paying huge five-figure sums to lawyers and accountants.  If they didn't produce the income to pay these taxes and satisfy their legal requirements, they were confronted with yet another way to lose their land. 
            Jerry Mander; whose book, In The Absence Of The Sacred, is a source for most of the information included in the last three pages, comments: "The corporation, a technology far more subtle than guns, did the job just as well and with far greater public-relations potential."  
            One attorney we know, though decrying the sometimes inflexible nature of the corporation, felt that its effects on villages had less to do with their survival than the circumstances of their former decimation by disease, and their geographic location and proximity to numbers of non-Indians.  Some villages have lost almost every vestige of Traditional life and language, while other more remote locations continue to enjoy life in a fairly Traditional way.  Most of their contact with the outside world comes from satellite TV.  Perhaps the effects of the Corporation on isolated lives has been less destructive than previously predicted.           
           With the present energy crisis and the talk of "opening up" the oil-rich lands to new exploration and pipelines, we fear again for our Cousins up North.  We pray that the American Congress (People) will resist these efforts to further rape the northern environments in a fanatic attempt to use up the last of a finite resource that will exhaust itself in only a few generations.  The logical answer to energy problems requires that we utilize greater vision than seeing only to our immediate gratification for energy and look to more natural, and renewable, resources.  That's not the American Way we know, but perhaps it is time for a new way.  To care for the needs of the next seven generations should be the watermark which measures our commitment to morals, ethics, and progress.  Anything less is hypocritical and self-serving.













Ranting/ Eleven                                                             BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Indian Money


Many Americans believe that every year the government gives enormous chunks of (taxpayer's) money to each tribal member in the U.S. for no other reason than that they're an enrolled Indian.  It is a misunderstanding that stands in the way of Americans recognizing and accepting responsibility for our holocaust.  They are unaware that circumstances everywhere in Indian country are remarkably different.  Some Tribes own their lands in concert. Some have each parcel deeded individually, and some are a mixture of the two.  Some live on checkerboards of Indian land, government land, and property owned by private non-Indian citizens.
            In many places, monies and programs are part of treaty agreements that may be in perpetuity, or they may be settlements for lands or resources ceded in the past or present.  They may be use-payments for grazing, timber rights, agricultural use, water, or mineral rights.  They may be trust payments held in trust by the government for individuals or Tribes. 
            It must be pointed out that most American Indian Tribes never held the right, or opportunity, to prove they could manage their own monies until the gaming compacts began.  In a few cases the BIA has previously allowed sufficiently organized Tribes to attempt business ventures, but always under the careful eyes of the Department of the Interior.  If Indians did have money, they had to apply to the government and go through bureaucratic gymnastics to get it.
           We explain to people that much of our long standing distrust for the BIA stems from the legacy of corrupt Indian Agents leasing allotment parcels to cattle barons, stealing rations from starving peoples, and bootlegging alcohol.   Indian trust monies have existed since the early days, but the Departments of the Army and the Interior determined that Indians were incapable of handling or managing their monies.  Knowing they had trust money yet never being able to get their hands on it has frustrated dirt-poor Indians for decades.  And then there are the hundreds, maybe thousands, who have trust accounts and don't even know it!
           Recently, a suit by Indians against the BIA for the loss and mismanagement of billions of dollars of Indian Trust Monies has vindicated Dave Henry, the accountant hired by the government to provide a general accounting of the trust fund situation at a Montana Agency years ago.  He was the first to expose the mismanagement, poor handling of accounts, and outright theft by BIA officials and others.  In his book, "Stealing From Indians", Henry goes into specific detail to show how this monumental swindle took place.  He was subsequently fired as a whistleblower and to this day maintains his hopes that he will be reinstated with back-pay under whistleblower protection statutes, and that the billions of dollars will be repaid.  Unfortunately he has found out that when it comes to Indian matters, laws can be ignored, rules broken, and issues of trust and integrity disregarded. 
As we mentioned before, the suit to find the money determined by the United States Office of General Accounting to be missing from Bureau of Indian Affairs fund accounts continues.  The new multi-million dollar computer tracking system built to streamline the process has been determined to be monumental failure (at taxpayers expense), and legal battles drag on.  But this suit represents only a drop in the bucket of monies, lost, swindled, fraudulently used, stolen, or mismanaged over the last 150 years.  Some put the actual figure close to a hundred billion dollars--a considerable sum for people who, in many places, still don't have telephone service or indoor plumbing!  Dave Henry estimates the figure to be 50 billion.
            There are places where Indians have received large sums for settlements or disbursements, but they were not always U.S. taxpayer monies.  Despite the beliefs of many Americans, the Government is not paying out "guilt money".  The U.S. government has never spent a dime on Indians that it did not have to.  Any social programs that are currently paid for by the American public are a direct result of the legal responsibility assumed by the government pursuant to treaty rights, settlement dispensations, resource trusts, or moral necessity.
           The latter is especially true in California, where by 1850 the State Government had learned that federal treaties need not be ratified and the lands of peaceful Peoples could be easily taken without much loss of life.  The policy was to first make the treaties, so the local Indians thought they were protected, then Congress (under pressure from the States) would fail to ratify them.  Of course no one would inform the Indians of this and the decisions would be place under a Congressional Act of Secrecy for more than 50 years.  Remaining Indian lands were obtained (stolen) during the 1950s policy of Termination.  Whatever the State of California and the Federal Government does for these Indians can never be enough to pay for the suffering they endured and the sacrifices they were forced to make.
            In fact, the benefits Americans have received from the illegal and immoral confiscation of our rights, lands, and lives can never be measured or compensated for in economic ways. 
           Happily, we can report that some small progress toward self-sufficiency is being made.  Two eastern Tribes, made vulgarly rich through gaming, recently returned all Federal monies asking that they be redistributed to poorer Tribes.  Other Tribes have successfully spread out into legitimate businesses other than gaming and are finally able to provide many good services for their People.  Some claim that Traditional spirituality, culture, and values are being sacrificed for such advances, but the minds of people who are formed from generations of poverty and suffering rarely turn first toward philosophical issues.  We are beginning to find Indian money, hopefully we will not lose what is even more important along with that discovery.









Ranting/ Twelve                                                            Bluewolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins  


Outside Help


Many people want to help Native Peoples.   While we may have given our readers the impression that America is, and always has been, against Natives--this impression is certainly false.  Many non-Indians, almost from the first day that Anglo-Europeans landed on these shores, have seen a value in our Ways and have wanted to help.  The problem is that they almost always want to help on their own terms and by their own methods.  This approach never works with Indians.  Even if they get by a natural distrust of their motives, they are handicapped by a complete lack of understanding of how things get done in Indian Country. 
           Granted, times are changing, and in many places Indians are becoming more and more familiar (and open) to historically European systems of organization and decision-making, but in just as many places you will still find a slower-time, word of mouth, get-there-when-we-get-there way of life. 
           Rather than trying to explain to anyone the impossible task of what Indians think, we think it better to simply caution anyone who wants to "help out", to ask themselves first whether or not they have been asked for that help. To jump in uninvited, with preconceived ideas about the relevance and effect of that “help”, with an expectation to be a part of the decision-making process is not only guaranteed to cause problems, it is disrespectful.  Indians are not looking for outsiders to solve their problems.  The real problems in Indian Country must be solved from within.
            Generally, Indians are in need of the same things poor people around the world are in need of: firewood, propane or natural gas, housing, food, blankets and new clothing, transportation, gasoline, money for necessities, etc.  We are not in need of outside guidance or leadership, organizational strategists, group leaders, spiritual advisors, rags, or remnants.  We are occasionally in need of laborers, truck drivers (with trucks), grant writers, teachers, doctors, health professionals, lawyers, etc., if we can't get our own. 
            The first  rule when offering anyone help is to ask--have they asked for it?  The second rule is to find out exactly what is needed, and when. There are Indian organizations and media people who keep track of such things, or one could always call specific Tribal Council/Business Offices to inquire about what is needed.   Please don't go uninvited with brainstorms about how to make Native lives better or casual inquiries about helping out with expectations of being enthusiastically received.  If Indians think they need your help--they'll ask you.  And if you show up and no one actually tells you to leave, but you find yourself being ignored--take the hint.  These are times when Indians must step up and help themselves.  Your economic support may or may not be requested.  Don't be afraid to ask, just don't be offended if you are politely refused.





Ranting/ Thirteen                                                         BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


Cracking Our Bones
(Cultural Appropriation and Exploitation)         

Culture's like building the perfect soup.  First you start with the water and dog-- excuse us--meat, then you add the other ingredients.
            The water and meat are your heritage, your economic status, social status, personal freedom, education, as well as your grasp of language and ability to use it effectively.  These are the base ingredients to the soup of your life. The spices and flavorings are the ritual forms, culture, spiritual life and philosophies that bring the soup into balance and harmony.
           In past times, the base and flavorings were not always a matter of choice, but of necessity.  Life provided you the base and flavorings according to the continent, race, religion, and social order you were born into.
           On this continent, the flavor was Tribal.  It exhalted the freedom of the individual in service to the People.  It enforced its precepts by the power of social pride.  Its sense of beauty, art, oratory, language and personal freedom was unsurpassed.  It was not perfect, but it was perfectly suited to this Land. 
           In the late 1960s, many modern youth were looking to escape what they perceived as a materialistic, hypocritical, exploitive, authoritative, and repressive approach to life, as evidenced by the obvious disintegration of their parents' dreams.  While spouting the wondrous qualities of the "democratic system", three major contemporary leaders had been assassinated within a decade, and a number of controversial and costly wars begun.
           Americans.  These are the children of plenty.  They are not afraid of deprivation, lack of education, homeless nights, or even temporary violence.  One does not fear what one does not know.  Those of the 1960's feared sterility, stagnation, closed-mindedness, rigid authority, and rich bastards who didn't mind that there were neighbors starving only a few miles away.
           Some of them took to the road to see if they could make it alone.  They lived with hunger and homelessness and found they could stand both with a little company and some good weed.  The Beatles had publicized an attitude of looking outside one's own heritage and upbringing with their adoption and practice of East Indian Philosophy.   The eyes of American youth began restlessly searching the horizon for "another way".
            It was about this time that the American Indian Movement members began building their first fires in Minneapolis and the Indians of All-Tribes Movement began.  Alcatraz Island became a national headline along with Pit River, Franks Landing, and the Traditional Hopi dispute with Peabody Coal.  Suddenly Indians were in the news!  Those questing for answers began to look our way.
           Americans are always amazed when they hear Indians are uncomfortable with more than a casual outside interest in our cultures, particularly our Sacred Life and Ritual.  Non-Indians often perceive their personal interests to be harmless, and are surprised that their motives are questioned.
           To begin to understand, you have to look at the meat American culture has beneath its flavorings.  American tradition has always pretended to exalt the freedom of the individual, but the pretense of their being in service to one another exists only so long as their personal interests are not affected.  These "interests" may not only be financial, they may have just as much to do with gaining community status or recognition, personal development, or spiritual growth.  And they want it now!  They deeply resent anyone who tells them something they do not want to hear.  Deep down they harbor the same feeling of superiority and arrogance in these matters as did their Puritan relatives.  And, of course, they can always find a slippery-tongue way to convince themselves of their own arguments.  This is a part of their "soup".   As a group, the present generations are well educated and spoiled, having not recently suffered any war on their own soil, violent social upheaval, or disruption in basic necessities or services.  They usually have a good grasp of language and sincerely believe in their quest for whatever "Holy Grail" they seek.
            Some Indians object outright to non-Indian participation in Sacred Ceremonials.  Most feel the decision should be left to the particular Ceremonial Leader or Elder.  But all object to those who appropriate these forms for profit or spiritual trophy hunting. 
            It is not about skin color.  It is about identity, and maintaining the purity and validity of very private and personal social, cultural, and spiritual mores.  The first threat is from those who would exploit and exhibit rituals and ceremonies for monetary gain, or a desire for recognition or status.  It is not so much a threat as an insult--and Indians are deeply offended.  However we do understand that it is very, very American. 
            New Age concepts and books have further stripped original Indigenous spirituality of its humanity, dehumanizing and reconstructing it to become part of a homogenous world view.   This reconstruction sanitizes any "offensive" smell, taste, sound, or sight from the message by lifting it from the environments of remnant Indigenous peoples, and rendering it safe, deodorized, and easy to understand.  
            Eager, full-bellied "searchers", with time on their hands and a penchant for the comfortable study and effortless absorption of supposed "ancient knowledge, are drawn to these texts.  But the average uninformed reader may be drawn in as well.  People who consider fraudulent narratives harmless, embracing "the message", are like “hunters” who prefer to buy their meat from the counter.  They prefer to remain aloof from the realities of the environment of the message, and ignorant of the responsibilities carried by the butcher who must inevitably wash the blood and guts from his hands.
           To go to the actual present day environments of Indigenous peoples involves an element of danger, of risk, and certainly--of discomfort.   Potential students would have to become part of the Nations to be taught in a traditional way.  That infers commitment, patience, and a substantial amount of time.  It is so much more convenient to skip all that and sit in an easy chair with a book, imagining one’s self to be "studying" the authentic ways, vicariously soaking up the knowledge and spirituality of Indigenous Heritage.
            Indigenous spirituality cannot be separated from culture. It cannot be removed from its environment.  It is a part of the People.  To understand it, one must be part of the People.  This is why unrelated spiritual hunters always come away with only misunderstood pieces of a puzzle.  There are no individual truths to be found in Indigenous Tribal knowledge, the truths are social, shared, and intimately part of the whole animate body of the People.
           Western civilization has done its best to isolate modern man from his environment, his culture, his social relationships, and shared secrets.  For this reason, the truths of Indigenous knowledge and spirit will remain inaccessible to him unless he, or she, approaches it with "respect".
            Many new-age authors rationalize modern "learning" by implying that the true Indigenous peoples have vanished and are now represented by only a few wandering "teachers”.
            This present day western concept, i.e. that experience can be gained without actually having an experience, comes from a belief that the written word can endow men with an experience of truth--a concept that is entirely alien to Indigenous Peoples around the world.  Indigenous knowledge, and oral tradition, is effective because it utilizes concepts which are familiar in the day-to-day life of the People, and because it occurs in the environment of its foundation. To be taught ancient ways around a night fire, with stars overhead, sparks flirting with the wind, the smell of smoke and sweat and earth, the sound of familiar voices, and the feel of relationship and belonging--is a portion of the message which can not be experienced through text or imagination.  Of course that was the romantic version.  It may be daylight, hot as a pistol or cold as an iceberg.  No air conditioning, maybe just a woodstove for heat.   No matter, without the environment of the teaching, what is recorded of the message is only a shadow of itself. 
           Western civilization takes its knowledge from what it thinks it understands about the world. Its perceptions are formed not from its own experiences but from someone else's perceptions of someone else's perceptions of someone else's experiences and on and on....
          With a continuing colonial spirit--arrogant, greedy, lazy, contemptuous and impersonal--many present day authors attempt to imply that they have been privy to these experiences. By pretending authenticity and relationship, they ravage, plunder, and disrespect the true perspective while incorrectly glorifying what they what they perceive to be the essence of Indigenous spiritual life and culture, all the while adapting it to their own purposes of profit.
           Western pundits point to all the accomplishments that civilization has achieved for its subjects, ascribing the successes in great part to the accumulation of written knowledge and wisdom.  If that is so, why then is there a new age movement at all?  Why was this great civilized experiment unable to convey, through its accumulated published works, a message of truth that is spiritually satisfying to its children? Why is there such a great exodus from Christian movements toward Indigenous and otherwise "uncivilized" ancient understanding, if the methods and accumulated wisdom of civilization is superior?  Why do school children murder their fellows?  Why do millions starve in a world capable of feeding them?  Where is this supposed superiority? 
           Could it be that the whole pyramid of civilization has gotten so high, that the crumbling fraud of its foundation can only be seen by those who are not looking up, but down?  It is as if all of mankind is on a ladder with the leaders daily constructing rungs that reach higher and higher into the firmament, while the lower rungs are rotting.  They constantly exhort us not to look down but to look to technology and the future as they furiously struggle to draw our attention away from the crumbling structure beneath us.  
           Why would anyone do this?  Because many of them suppose that by climbing higher and higher we will someday eliminate the need for those original foundations, and reach a level of achievement where man will evolve beyond the ladder.  Others, with their accumulated wealth, count on their private jets to whisk them away should the ladder begin to fall.
            It is the last way in which Indigenous peoples can be exploited.  Everything else is familiar. 
            Our foods, natural resources, and lands have been taken or altered so they will no longer support the ancient ways of life.  Our names have been appropriated for usable nouns. Our images have been used for entertainment, our arts copied and sold as novelties or antiquities, even our bones dug up as objects of study or curiosity. Why should our most sacred ceremonies and spiritual concepts be free from this continued onslaught from the children of Colonialism, Manifest Destiny and progress?  And who says they must be represented accurately or respectfully?  After all, this is the final frontier of colonization. The scavengers have picked over our bones long enough.  Now their children are intent on devouring our minds and spirits-because, as the price of their ancestor’s conquest, they have lost their own.
             There is another threat to our culture that is less offensive but more insidious.  Indians are very shy when confronted by non-Indians.  Many mixed-bloods have learned to walk carefully if they want to participate fully and be influential in their Tribes.  So for those non-Indians looking to adopt or participate in ceremony or ritual, the questions and problems are complex.  Primarily it is an issue of respect.  If one respects a culture enough to want to adopt its most sacred forms, then one should also have enough respect to support age-old methods of teaching and learning these forms.  The treasure of Traditional forms of passing on (and authorizing) Ritual and Ceremony protect the integrity of these rituals within an oral tradition.
            In many places, first among the "rules" of ceremonial life is that a candidate for teaching does not choose it for himself but is instead chosen.  These people have characteristics and endowments recognized by Elders, or have had some special power bestowed on them by the Creator.  Some are born to it.  For some, it is hereditary.  Others grow into it.  But unlike many of the Christian ministers of the world, few Indians personally recognize and accept a "call" based simply on their own isolated initiative.
            In Traditional education, the method and environment of the presentation are important attributes of the message.  The simple memorization of chants, the physical preparations or gestures of ceremony, etc., are only forms that constitute a part of the discipline of commitment.   The entire experience and environment of the teaching provides a greater understanding of the purpose of ceremony beyond the disciplined mastery of ritual.  And that experience does not end, as it does in a classroom, but continues throughout the life of the person.
           To show this kind of respect for our forms of learning, requires an element of time and commitment that is certainly a stumbling block in the way of an outsider learning and using our rituals and ceremony for their personal spiritual benefit. 
            It is our opinion that a number of conditions should exist for those who would take on these responsibilities. 
            First, they should have a People to serve.  Then they should travel to the "Teachers" who will help them gather this knowledge and Power.  This will probably be a place of poverty and violence.  Certainly it will be a considerably different environment than the preferred New-Age routine of sitting quietly on a comfortable rock with a book about shamanism or American Indian ceremonies.  These persons should be able to answer the question of how they determined they were ready for this knowledge or why they should possess it at all!  Ultimately they might have to suffer the disappointment of learning they are not suitable for this role, something that a book will never tell you.  
            Finally, these persons should be warned.  Those who carry, or participate in these powerful forms are in constant danger that the consequences of abuse will be visible in their lives.  These students should be suitably awed by their responsibility.  They should understand the implications of the word "Sacred" and understand our concern that the Power of these forms, misunderstood, misapplied, or misused, can cause more harm than good.  Most modern people know little of this Power, except for faith-healers and what is conjured up in Hollywood and horror novels.
            Lastly, our potential candidates should consider the most controversial and volatile question.  Why should they even consider it in the first place?  What gives them the right and authority knowing that many Indians resent it?
          Why do we resent it?  We hate the idea that the descendants of those who turned our "soup" into a mixture of mud and blood and shit, should be so empty and free as to want from us now what was once taken away, and even made illegal!  Our generations have been asked (or forced) for a century, even up to recent days, to turn away from these ways as inferior and ungodly.  Now that some of us have finally acquiesced, here come latter-day Americans wishing to learn those same inferior and paganistic spiritual forms! 
           This is the "soup" that we have left in our bowl.  Today it is easier for the descendants of former enemies to consider our ancient ways spiritually and culturally valid than it is for some of our own peoples.  The opportunity to appropriate or exploit our sacred ways, no matter how well intentioned, creates a violent resentment among peoples who have trouble getting their own relatives to embrace their original cultural and spiritual heritages
            So what's the answer for the non-Indian looking for personal meaning and spiritual growth, with a specific interest in Indian ways?  Unless they have been brought into a circle of Indians and included in their life, we say, "stick with a book."  They should adapt it to their own uses.  But they should not advertise, or represent it, as Indian.   They should use it carefully, praying always for their protection, and for those they love. And they should not be deluded, the knowledge is not Indian. 
           There is only one way to be authorized to learn, teach, or practice Ceremony and Ritual.  That is by being one of the People.  And there is only one reason to learn or teach Ceremony or Ritual: to be committed in service to a People for a lifetime.  Not for status, recognition, profit, or individual spiritual enlightenment, but because Power has chosen them, and it is their responsibility--with all that that entails.
            If these words stick in their craw of those who are looking to crack our bones for the marrow they are missing, we ask them to reconsider.  Their motives may have less to do with Spirituality and Respect, the fundamental principles of American Indian life and culture, and more to do with furthering their own individual purposes, however altruistic they may insist them to be.
 




Ranting/ Fourteen                                                     BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins 


A Debt To The Land


"Written history is always a sweet dream to the victor,
a nightmare to the vanquished!"
         
The idea that this Nation was founded by a group of intellectually and morally superior Founding Fathers has been a cornerstone of public education since Americans began attending schools.  Though they were wealthy and successful men of strong character who envisioned a need for change, they were also a product of their times.  And the majority of their compatriots represented the dregs of European society.  Criminals, outcasts, and people of the lowest (or strangest) moral and ethical standards made up much of the flood that swept into this country from abroad. 
Those Fathers were certainly aware of the public sentiment that swept the Colonies identifying the King (and the English) as the Anti-Christ, and viewing this new "promised" land and times as the biblical fulfillment of Revelation. 
While not necessarily subscribing to this view themselves, the Founding Fathers used the concept of Divine Will and the Holy Elect to push forward their convictions and ideals with all the prejudices of the times and an unwavering belief in their own cultural, racial, and spiritual superiority.  Even Jefferson, who expressed doubts and fears in his
private journals, was a stalwart believer in what was to become the foundation of Manifest Destiny. 
But was it the system of government they created that has produced such a great and powerful Nation?   Certainly that is what we are educated to believe. We are taught that these "visionaries" were so forward thinking that they put together a "cannot fail" order of government (supported by God Himself), responsible for the wealth and comforts many Americans enjoy today. 
Actually the real reasons have nothing to do with men, social order, politics, government, or ideals.
            The land carried America on her back.  All the successes of this Nation are due, not to the greatness of the character of its peoples, but to the rich and abundant natural resources and varied geographies of the land.  All the necessities of life were to be found so abundantly that the efforts and organizations of any people would have been successful, for a time.  Nowhere on earth were to be found richer qualities than this land possessed.  Its soil, game, natural shrubs, forests, medicinal herbs, grasslands, pure and abundant waters, oceans and harbors, rivers, and minerals were its treasure.  If not for these, America's future greatness, perceived as a product of men's ideals, would never have been achieved. (If greatness can be measured by wealth and technological development.)
            Take those same Founding Fathers and send them across the ocean to discover Ireland, Vietnam, India or any other land that lacked the climate, topography, geography, geology, and abundant natural resources of the Americas, and their experiment in martial power, material wealth, and consumerism (with its by-product freedoms), would find itself only as developed as the resources available for exploitation.
            Historians point to a freedom of choice and action, to the spirit of industry, to free enterprise and capitalistic fervor, but how could any of these "ideals" feed, clothe, house, or enrich their peoples if the essential natural resources and necessities were not immediately available to be procured--leaving those men with sufficient time to pursue more profitable endeavors?  America exploded as a power because, for almost two centuries, it was able to grow and expand without taxing its huge base of resources.  In support of these arguments we present a list of the Land's contribution, not only to America, but the World.
          We think Bruce Johansen's quotes bear repeating.  "Almost half (to two-thirds) of the world's domesticated crops, including the staples corn and white potatoes, were first cultivated by American Indians.  Aside from corn, and white potatoes, Indians also contributed manioc, sweet potatoes, squash, peanuts, peppers, pumpkins, tomatoes, pineapples, the avocado, cacao (chocolate), chicle (a constituent of chewing gum), several varieties of beans, and at least seventy other domesticated food plants." 
North and South American Indians utilized over 260 wild herbs, cultivated almost 400 additional cooking ingredients, 300 different varieties of corn, and over 200 varieties of peppers.  Almost all the cotton grown in the United States was derived from varieties originally cultivated by Indians.  Rubber was another resource contributed by Indigenous Americans. Several American Indian medicines became popular additions to Euro-American Medicine. These included quinine, laxatives, as well as several dozen other drugs and herbal medicines.  Quinine remains the most effective medicine with which to combat the effects of malaria worldwide.
           
           Only now (after 500 years of occupation), with artificial systems for delivering necessities having almost completely replaced the original natural ones, have some of the resources begun to fail and years of abuse contaminated the water, air, and soil.  Only in the last few generations has the common U.S. citizenry begun to notice that these resources might be limited and non-renewable.
           Look deeper into American society and you will find that the result of having such enormous natural resources not only provided a significant portion of the population with the necessities basic to a comfortable life, it contributed to a reputation for “generosity”.  When normal, balanced people have what they need, and perhaps even a little more, they are more apt to be generous and more likely extend themselves in the aid of others.  This cannot be attributed to any moral superiority but is simply what the Creator's children naturally and responsibly feel compelled to do for one another. 
           As average Americans became more wealthy and comfortable, the supposed "guiding" precepts of Christian generosity caused them to begin to re-examine the plight of their more unfortunate neighbors, usually foreign.  But as James Loewen observed, "Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aide, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States."       
           The commitment of Roman-Christian Europeans to anything beyond their personal families' wealth and comfort has long been suspect. They have an almost genetic fear that they better get what they can because whatever it is, it’ll be gone soon.  Of course, that was true for the peasants of Europe for centuries.  So today, with resources running dry, some Americans are more concerned with finding (and controlling) what remains of those limited resources on our continent to maintain the status quo for the present generation, than making any significant commitment to developing new and renewable resources for generations to come. They are also content to remain ignorant as to how globalization, from which they benefit directly, is ravaging the resources of other Nations while impoverishing or keeping those People's poor.
            North American First Nations valued the land, accepting it as a relative, a living being with identity.  With the belief that the Earth is alive, comes the knowledge that it is the land that gives us our Power, not human institutions or ideals.  The concept that natural resources represent elements that are intended be exploited is a common currently held belief.  What sense does having metal in the ground make, if it cannot be dug up and used?  What sense is it to allow natural elements to lie fallow and unused?  The answer was in the first few sentences of this paragraph.  To modern man, the earth is a non-living being.  It has processes that interact and relate, but they are perceived to be without consciousness, so they are, in effect, building blocks for man to use indescriminantly.  Indians see the metals, and other elements of the natural world, as a part of the body of a cognizant living being. So, just as corpuscles are elements of our blood, and bones and organs necessary components of our bodies, the elements of the earth are not to be irresponsibly utilized   It is no mystery why we are so far apart in our philosophies that neither can see any reality the others point of view.  
            A popular author, Richard Preston, in his book “The Hot Zone”, has hypothesized that many of the dangerous new viruses, as well as HIV, may be the Rain Forest's way of fighting back against an overpopulating and unresponsive natural enemy--Human Beings.  We think he may be right.
           Only a return to the balanced principles of stewardship and harmonious relationship to Earth and her resources will give the human race an opportunity to survive another millennium.     




















Ranting/ Fifteen                                                             BlueWolf & Lupe'/ Shirts N' Skins


A House Built Of Myths (Recognizing The Prison)


"Every society...involves contradictions between precepts and practices. This is obvious in predominantly Christian countries such as the United States, where Jesus injunction to divest oneself of riches has been perverted into an imperative for the accumulation of wealth, and where the central precept of nonviolence has been twisted into jingoistic militarism..."
Patrick Colm Hogan

Whether the Wachowski Brothers intentionally intended for the convoluted message of their hugely successful Matrix movies to be deciphered is not known, but certainly the mass of interpreters ready to lend the movie their philosophical bent has added to the confusion as to the real intent of its ideal.
            The first movie clearly presents us with a reasonable corollary to the situation of our time--namely that western civilization is party to a mass manipulation of perceptual reality intentionally skewed to keep the energy and purpose of that society serving the interests of a calculating few.  The fact that the few are not machines, but Huxley's Power Elite, is irrelevant.
           At first viewing, the original Matrix is a traditional sci-fi thriller that promises an adventure of breaking free from the constraints of runaway technology (in the form of artificial intelligence) and returning to a real, albeit sometimes unpleasant, perceptual reality.  Unfortunately, there is at least one scene in the movie where the true and underlying theme of the Matrix is revealed.  In that scene, the leader of the rebellion, Morpheus, reveals to Neo the truth of what had occurred to bring about the catastrophe that had decimated the planet.  In the midst of his soliloquy he makes the astounding statement, "Since the beginning of time man has depended on machines for his survival." 
            Say what!  Long before western civilization brought its supposed advantages to these shores, Indigenous Peoples, without even the benefit of the wheel, created pyramids and road systems, had continental trade and communication systems, and extensively farmed and landscaped the continents.  Only two or three hours of labor per day was necessary to provide the daily necessities for most families.  The rest of the time was for leisure and the arts. Modern social scientists are beginning to postulate that specialization, once considered one of the defining attributes of advanced civilization, may actually be a step backward in the evolution of societies, especially as it relates to the time necessary to procure necessities, and the general happiness of the People.
            The second movie expounds further on this ideal, especially during the conversation between Neo and the Elder beneath Zion, where the machines that produce the atmosphere and life-support are found.  Their discussion about the feasibility of humans surviving without machines would be ludicrous if it wasn't treated with so much serious deliberation by the characters.
            Unfortunately their philosophies and conclusions are reflective of western civilization's preoccupation with the concepts of technological progress as an inescapable roller-coaster on which man is blessed (or doomed) to ride on the rest of his universal journey.
            One is allowed to criticize western civilization's (now modern global civilization's) failings, even predict potential dangers to come but not to suggest that its sacrosanct growth be constrained.  The discussion is framed within the context of an acknowledgement of, and resignation to, its existence.  Little discussion is allowed that refers to any attempt to alter it at a fundamental level or present alternatives to its underlying philosophies.
            The Native poet/activist John Trudell says it best in his inspirational spoken-word CD, Descendant Now Ancestor, when he describes the current world view as a twisted perceptual reality that allows a few to utilize the global consumer society as fuel in their dominant quest for world power. 
The response of a contemporary newspaper journalist to seeing the second movie probably represents the normal citizen's jaded and self-serving view of that manipulation.  He wrote that though he was stimulated by the initial promise of the series, its failure to deliver the punch of idealism necessary to be convincing caused him, in the end, to identify more with the traitor who ratted on his friends--in order to be replaced into the Matrix where he could at least have the benefit of a pretend steak.
            The nightmare of the real, that Morpheus promises, has come true.  If we can't tell the difference between real and imaginary, who cares?  After all, if the Matrix can provide news, entertainment, and experiences that gratify the individual human being, why worry whether they are real or contrived? Where is the value of the real?  
Having convinced the citizenry that technological civilization is inescapable (at least for the small segment of the world's population enjoying its supposed benefits), we are further promised sensory delights, entertainment, conveniences, and comforts unavailable outside the "Matrix" of consumerism and global imperialism.  Since the fantasy of our "superiority" is evident, and any alternative has been described to us as a "thin gruel" existence, most people are willing to overlook the terrifying realities of how we obtain our wealth and comfort, preferring to "close their eyes and savor the taste of their steak".  The sacrifices and changes in living standards necessary to change the systems so that exploitation of the planet and its peoples can be avoided require a change in the perceptual reality of western civilization.      
            To be awakened to the real world is as much a shock as the original movie portrays it.  The horrors are so many, and so real, that it is difficult to resist re-immersing oneself in the distractions and sensory delights of the technological age.  For some freed men and women, being faced with the full brunt of the terrifying wave of reality is too much.  Suicide and violence are the only responses they can imagine.  Others of us have been activists all of our lives.  By whatever means, we have grown up outside the real matrix of the twentieth century.  Our hatred and loathing for the myths and lies that persuade so many, drives us to write and speak for an new perceptual reality.  As John Trudell says, if we use our collective intelligence consciously and coherently--as often as possible--we may, in the long run of time, make a difference.      

            We're here to offer you a choice between perspectives.  Take the blue pill and reject our premise and conclusions and you can return to your life undisturbed.  Take the red pill and we will provide you with the impetus to create a "new perceptual reality".  
             Erich Fromm described the problems contemporary citizens have balancing their modern reality with their natural sense of what is real.  He said, "They are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.  Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.  These millions of abnormally normal people still cherish "the illusion of individuality but their conformity is developing into uniformity.  Uniformity and freedom are incompatible, as are uniformity and mental health.  The difficulty with ordering large civilizations is that there are no strict guidelines as to how much organization is necessary.  Too little--and unrelated citizens, lacking powerful unifying ethics and purpose, become lawless and anarchistic.  Too much--and individual creativity is suppressed or inhibited, leading to stagnation or despotism.  Liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals, but the demands of economics and order in large populations often co-opt the values of the people so that they settle for comfort and distractions instead of freedom.  The press, radio, (television), and cinema are an indifferent power, serving as often as a weapon for dictators as it does an indispensable tool in the survival of democracy.  Outlets for the free expression of opinion must also bear the costs of competition and profitability in democratic environments, coming under an economic censorship that is, in effect, as limiting as the political censorship endured under totalitarian regimes.”
            There is a group of Americans who make it a point to constantly criticize any attempt to preserve Indigenous language, culture, identity and social customs, believing that everyone should simply uniformly homogenize themselves with the pride and accomplishments of western civilization.  More often than not, these people are Euro-centric and extremely nationalistic. They continue, even in the face of new evidence, to describe the continents of the Americas, before the arrival of Christoforos, as having been predominantly wild and empty, occupied mostly by savage, hunter-gatherer societies, with little or no cultural development.  They point to the identifying characteristics that make up what they consider a superior civilization; utilization of the wheel, development of writing, technological advancement in weapons and machines, scientific advances in the alteration and domination of the natural environment, and utilization of resources to create economic stratification and specialization, etc.
           As young men, we spent a number of years in exile from the modern social and technological environment, (enough of an exile that we did not know what year it wa