A-Infos (en) Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth (1/2)

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No apologies for republishing this one. We were going to put it in
The Raven but in the end there was no room. Shame. But we will use it
in the future edition we are planning on Ideology and Culture. This
one deals with the problems of the last 500 years. The Conquest
Continues.

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Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth


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The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I
detest writing. The process itself epitomises the European concept of
"legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is
denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral
tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white
world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the
imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I've written. It's what I've said
and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems
that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the
dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach
whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history
that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course,
there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I'm
more concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who
have begun to be absorbed into the white domination concern. It's very
possible to grow into a red face but I have no use for them. This is
part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans
against American Indian peoples today. My concern is with those
American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but who may be
confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American
or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people.
There has been some controversy about such terms, an frankly, at this
point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is
being rejected as European in origin - which is true. But all the
above terms are European in origin - the only non-European way is to
speak of Lakota - or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brulé, etc.- and of
the Dine, the Miccosukee and all the rest of the several hundred
correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief
that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up
on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called
India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it
up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio",
from the Italian in dio, meaning "in God" .)

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to
become Europeanised. The strength for this effort can only come from
the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain.
It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations; it
cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European
can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's
degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else
cannot make a person into a human being to provide knowledge into the
traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an
outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some
confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm
not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one
hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal,
reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on
the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual
development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called
theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't
believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the European
intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example "revolutionised"
physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical
universe to a linear mathematical equation Descartes did the same
thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith
did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of
the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an
abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended; they
"secularised" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say - and
in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an
expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to
abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful
complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a
logical sequence: one, two, three, Answer!

This is what has come to be termed ''efficiency'' in the European
mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the
moment - that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one-is
considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why
"truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result
from such a process are only stop-gaps, only temporary, and must be
continuously discarded in favour of new stop-gaps which support the
mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke
and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularising theology - and
that is put in his own terms - he secularised the religious thinking
through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's
philosophy in terms of "materialism", which is to say that Marx
despiritualised Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx's own
terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of
Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians
see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between
being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of
European imperialism lie in Marx's-and his followers'- links to the
tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act.
Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best
people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give
away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is
an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is
"proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two
completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over
to the other side from the American Indian view. But let's look at a
major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualising the universe is
very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanising
another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanising other
people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do
this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it
before going out to commit murder. Nazi guards did it to concentration
camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers
they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to
everyone in sight And what the process has in common for each group
doing the dehumanising is that it makes it all right to kill and
otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says
"Thou shalt not kill", at least not humans, so the trick is to
mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim
violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

In terms of the despiritualisation of the universe, the mental process
works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like
progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory
and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanisation
process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to
"developing" a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry;
development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth
itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel
with which more land can be "developed" through the construction of
road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open-in the European
view-to this sort of insanity.

Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense
of loss in all this. After all, their philosophers have
despiritualised reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be
gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a
people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining
material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant
for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through
the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools.

But each new piece of that "progress" ups the ante out in the real
world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more
than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood - a replenishable,
natural item - as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying
warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the
dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe.
Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was
ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been
gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later,
oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was
perfected through a series of scientific "revolutions". Pollution
increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental
costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the
long run. Now there's an "energy crisis", and uranium is becoming the
dominant fuel.

Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel
only at the rate at which they can show a good profit. That's the
ethic, and maybe that will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand,
can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly possible simply
because it's the most ''efficient'' production fuel available. That's
their ethic, and I fail to see where it's preferable. Like I said,
Marxism is right smack in the middle of the European tradition. It's
the same old song.

There's a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge
the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of
the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure
and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on
non-European peoples. This is because every revolution European
history has served to reinforce Europe's tendencies and abilities to
export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the
environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example when this is
not true.

So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that "new"
European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism reverses the negative
effects of European history on us. Europe's power relations are to be
adjusted once again, and that's supposed to make things better for all
of us. But what does this really mean.

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation a living
in what white society has designated a "National Sacrifice Area". What
this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white
culture, (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material.
The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with
the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right
here at the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is
radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever.
This is considered by industry, and by the white society that created
this industry, to be an "acceptable price to pay for energy resource
development". Along the way the also plan to drain the water table
under this part of South Dakota a part of the industrial process, so
the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is
happening down in the lands of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of
the Northern Cheyenn and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the
coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the US have been
found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be
called a minor issue . We are resisting being turned into a National
Sacrifice Area. We are resisting being turned into a national
sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not
acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium here and drain the
water table - no more, no less.




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